Iceland stops using Moderna Covid-19 vaccine
www-visir-is.translate.goog
www-visir-is.translate.goog
Assuming the translation is correct, this could be a problem in itself. I'm unaware of a single study on the safety or efficacy of mixing vaccine types like this.
It seems like halting the use of a flu vaccine because of the flu vaccine causing flu-like symptoms.
[1]https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
The evidence for negative vaccine side effects also suggests they're most prevalent in the younger, healthier population least at risk from COVID, who are also the vast majority of the few remaining Icelanders not fully vaccinated.
Given all that, when considering the potential risk/benefit of offering Pfizer and Moderna or just Pfizer, the expected upside of continuing to offer Moderna if they have any reason for concern is very small indeed.
The difference in this case is much higher rates of peri/myo, and also, a larger amount of individuals receiving vaccinations, and, at younger ages.
-Iceland has high vaccination rates, including many people who already got both doses of Moderna vaccines several months ago
-It is too early for standard booster shots with Moderna based on medical guidelines
-Many people were originally vaccinated with other brands (J&J/Jannsen, Pfizer) which have been shown to be less effective than Moderna long-term
-Therefore, many people are "cross-vaccinating" by trying to supplement their existing vaccination with Moderna, which they view as superior
-Because of this, most/all Moderna vaccination shots performed in the last 2 months are from people with other vaccines originally -- in other words, they are only being given in ways that are not within current medical guidelines, and in a manner that has not been sufficiently studied for safety and efficacy.
If this is close enough to represent the situation, then I can see why they might decide the best move overall for public health is to halt use of Moderna, at least for now. Maybe with tighter controls, or over the coming months when there will be higher demand for prescribed Moderna boosters, then it will make sense to bring it back.
There is a definite connection between pericarditis & myocarditis with the 2 shot vaccines. It is most pronounced with 2nd shots, with the ages of 13-23, particularly for young me, according to VAERS data [1]. Now, I don't know that they know why yet though.
This is similar to the AZN/J&J thrombotic thrombocytopenia syndrome seen in a fairly small group of young women in Europe. While the data on that did indicate it is sometimes not related to a known issue, it is also worsens pre-existing platelet issues, meaning it should likely be contraindicated for a select group of PTs already on thinners or coagulants.
The Com-Cov study:
A confusing passage:
> According to the [Chief Epidemiologist], the Moderna vaccine has for the past two months been used almost exclusively here for stimulation vaccinations after the Janssen vaccine and after two-dose vaccinations for the elderly and immunocompromised. Very few individuals are said to have received the second dose of the basic vaccine that started with Moderna.
Any Icelandic readers here? Is my reading correct that they were using Moderna as a booster after a vaccination with either Janssen or a two shot series of Phizer?
In this way should a break out occur in the vaccinated, those with natural immunity would buffer it from spreading quickly. Natural immunity is longer lasting and more robust at offering protection from the infection.
I worry right now with a scenario where all the vaccinated start getting a breakthrough variant that targets the vaccinated and all get sick at the same time. Really overwhelming the hospitals, in countries with high vaccination rates and no sub population with natural immunity to buffer the spread.
Imagine two forests.
1) a forest where all of the trees were sprayed with water.
2) a forest where the most at risk trees were sprayed with water. And a control burn allowed in the rest.
The first forest will appear safer at first, but short term while the trees are still wet.
But the second forest will be much more protected from future fires, since there will be large patches of burnt forest that will not readily catch fire for a long time. Buffering spread.
And yet, our political class did not stop
Then Delta emerged, and vaccine efficacy dropped wholesale. Work was made conditional based on jabs. Science became a mantra, but in actuality it was ignored as the strong evidence for natural immunity was silenced. Bigtech previcated, and floundered, attaching notes to obituaries and criticism. Disinformation replaced information, as vaxxes were pushed on those with de minimis risk of covid, the 18 year olds without co-morbidities with 1 in 5 million chances of dying.
And yet, our political class did not stop.
Now, other democracies with medical systems in many cases matching our own are halting some of the vaccine distribution. It looks like the Chinese with their attenuated vaccines definitely had a better approach. But there is still an active mandate in several sectors of the economy, and an unconstituional campaign to deny religious exemptions that will likely eviscerate employment. Nurses are leaving in droves rather than vaccinate, having seen the side effects up close and personal.
When will our political class stop?
I sincerely believe we are ahead of the curve on a wave of class action lawsuits the likes of which this country has never seen. Tobacco, Asbestos, and every other toxic substances could pale in comparison to the potential payouts from the deaths, injuries, and reduced longevity coming from these leaky, toxic vaccines.
I'm not aware of an experimental vaccine being forced on anyone, can you provide an example?
Back when all vaccines were operating under an EUA and were experimental, there were zero vaccine mandates.
After a vaccine was fully approved and shown to be unequivocally safe and effective, it was then no longer experimental. Mandating vaccines that are shown to be effective and safe is as old as the USA is as a country, and this is no outlier.
Most working people now need one to work or they face termination as loss of livelihood
Stop pretending it's not required. We're not all trust finders.
Comirnaty (Pfizer-BioNTech) is fully approved for those 16 and over, and has been since late August.
AFAIK, any different liability profile between an EUA and approved product is moot in the case of COVID vaccines, because they are out of both normal liability regimes and standard vaccine liability regimes and covered by the PREP Act pandemic countermeasures regime which does not make a distinction.
I never claimed it wasn't required, just that what was required was not experimental.
Independently of that, I think there is good reason to doubt the quality of data gathered during this “open beta” of a phase 3 trial. Two people I know are suffering long lasting adverse reactions after being vaccinated. In both cases the doctors do not want to explore the possibility that the effects were caused by the vaccine.
It’s not hard to imagine that this is a pretty common situation. Doctors have had their licenses revoked for questioning the safety of the vaccines.
Isn’t it obvious this taints the data? If doctors feel the need to stop-crime when they see adverse reactions in order to be able to continue in their profession?
You have to come up with a definition of “experimental” that suits you, and “emergency authorization” doesn’t sound like very well tested and understood.
People don’t understand risks very well nor can they compare risks very well and that has been demonstrated over and over again.
Covid vs vaccine risks vary quite a lot depending on what kind of person you are.
If you are quite old or have significant health problems, it is pretty easy to demonstrate with high confidence that the vaccine risk is way smaller than the Covid risk (many orders of magnitude).
If you are very young (say a healthy teenager) the Covid risk is very low and the uncertainties of the vaccine risks start to compete where it is much harder to have confidence that for a population vaccinating is a better idea. People also can have different appetites for risk and different appetites for the good of the individual vs the good of the many.
The problems with vaccination are many people pretend they are perfect or evil who are either knowingly distorting the truth or repeating lies or dogma. Also many people desire authoritarian solutions for everyone to agree with them.
What is actually needed are attempts to accurately represent risks and unknowns, and comparisons of those risks and unknowns which update over time as the unknowns get smaller. There also needs to be the ability to acknowledge that a crossover point may exist where on one side one decision may be better than on the other.
People though are being used to turn any contentious issue into political dogma and opportunities to signal morality.
The situation is not as simple as you and many people make it.
I think you may have misread my comment. I agree that "emergency authorization" constitutes "experimental". My point is that there is now a vaccine that is no longer experimental, i.e. is as fully FDA approved as any other, and the mandates in place were put there after that approval.
To the rest of your comment, when dealing with a contagious disease which spreads throughout society, I think that the people participating in a society should be able to set prerequisites for participating in that society. One person's rights end where another's begin, and with contagious diseases, a given person's low risk of death does not prevent them from spreading it to someone with much higher risk.
Presently the uncertainty margins are higher for this than other things in the past and other things available. Different standards of uncertainty seem to be used for this, and that’s not necessarily bad considering the scale of the problem being addressed. BUT the uncertainty is not being appropriately represented by the people acting as information authorities.
This is exactly what I’m saying with a different emphasis.
Some societies will want to lean more towards conformity and collective good, other societies will want to lean more on individual choice and individual good. In America there’s a tendency to split into 50:50 camps between each (and each camp seems to alternate between individual freedom and conformity depending on the topic)
Why is it that the way one camp thinks needs to dominate the other? How do you decide between individual choice and authoritarianism?
I.e. Abortions? Individual choice. Vaccines? Authoritarianism. (Reverse for opposite political allegiance)
There isn’t just one political philosophy for all societies and there seems to be pretty big disagreements (and self contradictions) all around. Most people though act like their opinions are the only possible opinions, and have no respect for different ideas and little concept of the actual issues at hand.
I think these examples are really interesting, because on both political sides, the exact same values are being applied, to a different set of definitions.
In both cases, the "authoritarian" option is supported by for the topic that a group believes impacts more than one person, and the "individual choice" option supported by the group that believes that topic affects only one person.
A person who believes that a society should protect its vulnerable from contagious disease, while also believing that lie begins at conception, is likely to support the "authoritarian" option for both topics.
There is not a lot of “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” or in general supporting freedom to do things one doesn’t like.
Nothing developed 15 months ago can be shown to be "unequivocally safe". No matter what your position on COVID vaccines, its simply a matter of fact that there's no way to know the long term effects of something that hasn't been around for long.
But that's a fair point, "unequivocally" is a strong word. Would you be okay with "safe and unequivocally effective"?
Unless, the vaccine causes a "reprogramming" of the immune system, like some viruses do.
Have you considered this vector in your analysis?
A Conditional Marketing Authorization is not an Emergency Use Authorization. The European Medicines Agency even explain this.
Please provide a citation for this claim. My reading of the EMA page for Conditional Marketing Authorization states: "Its use is also intended for a public health emergency (e.g. a pandemic). _For these medicines, less comprehensive pharmaceutical and non-clinical data may also be accepted_".
The fact that less comprehensive farmaceutical data is accepted for CMA leads me to believe they are experimental.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_... (this is from the EC, not as I remembered the EMA)
It explains amongst other things that a Conditional Marketing Authorisation (CMA) is a real, controlled and robust, authorisation of the vaccine; this is unlike the Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA), which is really an authorisation of the use of an unauthorised vaccine.
A CMA requires data on safety and efficacy, showing the benefits outweigh the risks. An EUA has no such requirement.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-educa...
This is bollocks.
Pre-Delta, if double vaccinated the vaccines are about 95% effective against severe illness and death. Post Delta, about 92%.
That's still incredible, and actually pretty high as vaccines go.
Breakthrough infection and breakthrough disease are entirely different things.
Ask any ICU nurse what percentage of their COVID patients are unvaccinated. Every article I've seen reports at least 90% are unvaccinated, and of the remaining 10% that were, they were either very old or had a severe immune deficiency.
My grandfather was vaccinated, but is immuno-deficient, and just caught it from a visit to the hospital. Between his age, and the state of his immune system, he was at death's door for two weeks.
If the hospital weren't full of unvaccinated COVID patients to begin with, it's far less likely he would have picked it up there (He doesn't exactly leave the house, except to go the doctor.)
As it turns out, the prevalence of the former leads to the latter.
Evidence:
"New data was released by the CDC showing that vaccinated people infected with the delta variant can carry detectable viral loads similar to those of people who are unvaccinated, though in the vaccinated, these levels rapidly diminish. There is also some question about how cultivatable—or viable—this virus retrieved from vaccinated people actually is. " [1]
"Breakthrough Delta variant infections are associated with high viral loads, prolonged PCR positivity, and low levels of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies, explaining the transmission between the vaccinated people. Physical distancing measures remain critical to reduce SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant transmission." [2]
[1] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-trans...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3897733
NHS numbers has vaccinated dying at >~60%
Listen to the dog that is not barking.
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/08/25/significant-proportions...
Mostly frail and obese ofcourse but that is pretty much the same as the unvaccinated account. We had to go back to our modest restrictions even with a very high vaccination rate because of this.
On a side note, I am on of the 20000 Icelanders that got full double moderna inocculation and I suffered through the absolute worst nights of my life after the second dose. Took about one month to recover. But I digress.
I have to admit that I am nervous about the winter surge. Our hospital system is full to the brink with non covid patients. Its now in a much worse state than it was during the entire past 18 panic months of lockdown and masks.
Mostly frail elderly that we do not have any other beds in nursing homes for. Not a single fucking mention og hospital collapse though. We have patiens in staff breakrooms becuse the hospital is so full.
The fancy reporting of the fantastic vaccine efficacy actually translated to about half of what the medical companies promised. We are potentially looking at yet another lockdown winter because we have almost no natural immunity ( which is recognized in Iceland as far superiour to vaccine immunity) and our shit healthcare system is already in deep trouble.
The mainstream medias, blatant lies, are easy to verify in Iceland because we are such a tiny homogenous population with very good concise records.
Look at our actual data on covid.is.
No, it's better than you think. According to my favourite immunologist, Iceland reports vaccine effectiveness of 60% against ANY infection and 90% against severe disease. See thread at https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/142761414521455002....
> and our emergency ICU filled up with plenty of fully vaccinated persons
Yes, because sadly lots of people caught COVID, not because vaccines don't work.
It's worth remembering, also, that vaccination reduces transmission, in turn reducing severe cases.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...
I'm sorry you had that experience. I have a friend who had a similar experience (4 agonizing days) after his second Moderna dose and swore the he will not get a third one. Based on that I have to believe it was truly awful.
One the other hand I have several other friends who were quite fine afer Moderna. I wish we had the means to distinguish between the two groups, so nobody else has to endure what you did.
Imagine there are 100 vaccinated and 5 unvaccinated vulnerable people, and all of them are exposed to covid. At 95% effectiveness against hospitalization, you'd have 5 vaccinated and 5 unvaccinated, i.e 50-50. The OP is referring to places with lower percentages of vaccinated than Iceland.
Maybe you should reconsider the biases of your sources, and ask if they are conflating correlation with causation: Israel[1], Ireland [2], The UK [3]
I recognize that it is most probable that the most vulnerable are likely getting vaxxed, and likely to get a breakthrough also.
[1] https://www.spectator.com.au/2021/08/most-covid-patients-at-...
[2] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/covid-54-of-hospital-...
[3] https://www.visiontimes.com/2021/07/04/deaths-hospital-vacci...
This is the CDC study that confirmed this (plus summarization): https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1436389153533464597?la... This cross validates the finding from the MN DPH and Israel MOH report on pfizer from June.
Moderna came on top with a VE of 95% under delta.
If you didn't read this: You should still be vaccinated. If you're under Pfizer wear KN95s, KF94s, and N95s. This not an arguement against vaccination.
Pfizer might drop with Delta, true, but then the decrease is reversed. https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/143849966572136858...
Other credible studies don't even show such a drop. https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/143995143783290061...
Frankly I wonder if the drop is just a statistical blip, corrected with a reversion to the mean.
> You should still be vaccinated. [...] This not an arguement against vaccination
Agreed. Nice to have a nuanced discussion with people who understand the importance of vaccination.
"pandemic of the vaccinated" or ADE, you tell me which.
[1] https://rightsfreedoms.wordpress.com/2021/09/08/pandemic-of-...
This is false. There are treatments available, like monoclonal antibodies, they just have not been publicized as much.
Somebody, somewhere made a choice to push the vaccines and not the monoclonal antibodies. As an interesting fact, before the pandemic the knowledge to produce the nanolipid capsule existed in only 2 small companies worldwide. Big scale facilities for producing the nanolipid particles necessary for the mRNA vaccines were non-existent, they had to be built. Just as well, facilities for producing monoclonal antibodies en-masse could have been built, but were not.
Prevention always makes more sense than trying to patch a problem later on.
This is not correct. See my other comment in the thread.
We are not going to make the pandemic manageable with monoclonal antibodies. The reason governments made the choice to push vaccines over them is because vaccines are actually in the range of economic possibility.
Their cost, as well as the cost of monoclonal antibodies, depends on the economies of scale.
Monoclonal antibodies are easier to produce than mRNA vaccines, so at similar production scale should be cheaper.
Even if we were interested in using monoclonal antibodies as a prophylactic, the current monoclonal antibody treatments that we have available are delivered via IV infusion. That's much more time-consuming and resource intensive than two vaccine shots imo.
Monoclonal antibodies are, as you say, a treatment. They are not used to prevent infection in the first place. They lessen the severity of the disease but do essentially nothing to avoid its transmission.
You cannot end a pandemic without stopping the disease from spreading. For one, monoclonal antibodies do nothing to stop transmission. Second, their supply is constrained and availability is limited. Third, it cannot be used in all cases, most notably for folks whose symptoms have already become severe.
You, fundamentally, do not understand how antibodies work.
Just as with the antibodies from a vaccine, if the monoclonal antibodies are in your blood before contact with an infected person you will not get sick. So, monoclonal antibodies can be used profilactically, if so desired.
So now you are advocating vaccination by another name.
Why don't we? Because they're many orders of magnitude more expensive than the actual vaccines which are designed to be used prophylactically and do not provide the immunity.
We (the US) decided for political points that it's time to stop with masks.
Monoclonal antibodies have been investigated at the same time as vaccines. Companies could have offered low cost production at large scale, but they didn't. What makes you think monoclonal antibodies can be produced and sold for $5-20 per dose like the vaccine?
Vaccines with continual boosters mandated by law and required for travel or normal business entrance are a perpetual goldmine. Basically the exact opposite of what Gilead did with the Hepatitis C cure.
The giant bigpharma companies have the lobbyists to influence legislators & government executives, as well as controlling the social media "fact checkers" [1]