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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

That’s a straw man argument, when you take this drug you already have 100% covid19. Presumably that means you’ll have that risk, plus additional unknown risk. Perhaps the drug works like advertised, but we’ve seen better and more successful studies for things like ivermectin and anti-body treatments. Which have a known risk profile.

It’s the same for the vaccine. You still have the risk of what ever the vaccine risk is, PLUS covid19. Supposedly it reduces the covid19 symptoms, but doesn’t reduce risk of infection (or at least unclear), it just improves the immune response.

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The long term risks for either is not knowable.

Hospitalisation is an acute scenario that can lead to death, negating any concerns about the long-term in the first place. The short term risk of hospitalisation in the unvaccinated versus the vaccinated is well-known. Given what we know, it still makes sense to get vaccinated, and it may make sense for those at risk of hospitalisation (vaccinated or otherwise) to take an antiviral proven to cut the risk of hospitalisation.

Actually the long term risk of the covid-19 vaccines is well understood. You will not get a side effect from the vaccines in a year from now. For all of the vaccines created for any disease, the longest recorded period between taking the vaccine and side effects presenting is 6 weeks. 3.1 billion people are fully vaccinated for covid-19, many of them have been for longer than 6 weeks.

In Norway, some children developed narcolepsy after being vaccinated with Pandemrix. The average time from vaccine (or influensa) until developing narcolepsy was 8 months.

https://www.fhi.no/nyheter/2017/pandemi/ (in norwegian)

> You will not get a side effect from the vaccines in a year from now

There are possible severe negative effects due to vaccination, even if there are zero medical side effects. Herd vulnerability could cause widespread harm - there is a monoculture of immune responses and monocultures have vulnerabilities. I agree it's unlikely to have severe long term downsides, and the short-term gains are very significant. Note that I'm mostly pro vaccination.

I understand what well understood means but typically that also involves long term human clinical trials, and for a good reason.

This is a strange additive error to make: proactive or reactive treatments for COVID-19 don't produce additive unknowns in the presence of a COVID-19 infection, since their entire purpose is to improve healthcare outcomes (whether by reducing infection severity or incidence altogether).

Data shows that being vaccinated divides your odds of dying and being hospitalized from covid by about 10. There's no evidence I'm aware of showing that the vaccines create additional risk anywhere close to outweighing that benefit.

There is. Because kids (basically) don’t die from COVID. The side effect risk, while small, is material in a risk calculation for them, since their entire risk from the disease is small. At a minimum, mandating it for kids (as is openly stated to be the plan in CA) is unethical.

This argument makes no sense.

Even if we completely ignore that some children do in fact die (being rare doesn't stop it being terrible when it happens and worth avoiding), and that even if they don't, suffering while ill is bad: when we are talking about risks of completely unknown side effects, the side effect risk of the vaccine is obviously lower than the side effect risk of COVID itself.

The vaccine is relatively simple thing specifically designed to do one task. While there is always a chance there is something we didn't understand or see coming, the chance of a virus, a hugely complex and mutating thing with broad and varied effects, having some long-term side-effect is far, far higher.

> Even if we completely ignore that some children do in fact die ... the side effect risk of the vaccine is obviously lower than the side effect risk of COVID itself.

Why COVID-19 Vaccines Should Not Be Required for All Americans https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/why-covid-19-vacci...

> Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and editor in chief of MedPage Today, argues that mandating vaccines for "every living, walking American" is, as of now, not well-supported by science. ... The risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 in kids ages 5 to 17 is 0.3 per million for the week ending July 24, 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We also know that the risk of hospitalization after the second vaccine dose due to myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, is about 50 per million in that same age group.

You elided my qualifier from your quote: "when we are talking about risks of completely unknown side effects"—the argument being made was that we can't possibly know the risks of the vaccine because we can't ever know with certainty until we've tested it for a long time, and therefore we should avoid it. My point is that the virus has far more "unknowns" to it, so that argument sucks.

As to vaccinating children more generally and assessing known risks, there is no simple answer. What are the risk levels for different age groups? What is the damage to kids if they pass COVID onto their parents or grandparents and they die? I'm not saying that we should just blanket give it to everyone, but I don't think that one stat is enough to say don't give it to any child, or that no mandate could be justified.

It's obvious to you because you are following a logical train of thought. These antivax people always do the same nonsense argument. It goes, COVID has risks and vaccines have risks, therefore it's impossible to know which is worse. It's literally the dril drunk driving tweet[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762?lang=en

I'm not anti-vax, the logical train of thought you are incapable of yourself is based on the very factual reality that COVID presents highly variable risk to people based on their age. This, in combination with the known risks of the vaccine, in combination with the extremely early stage of wide-scale deployment of the vaccine in children, in combination with Hippocratic principles, in combination with risk-adjusted thinking, leads to the conclusions that no, it is not completely obvious if a parent should make an appointment for their 5 year old to get a medicine EUA authorized a week ago.

Besides, if you're so smart, and it's so obvious, why do you think you're smart enough to state that Sweden, a modern country, is objectively wrong for banning mRNA vaccines for children?

In any case, my primary point was that it should be up to parents if they give their kids this vaccine, and when. Not the government mandating it.

I mostly agree with you. I think the nuance that is missing here is that the degree of risk is different.

We know the degree of risk from vaccines is low, both in the short and long term. The side effects harm few people, and are not catastrophic.

With viruses, we know that side effects in the long term are real, and can be catastrophic. It is the reason that girl are vaccinated against HPV - HPV is the leading cause of cervical cancer. This is a very big problem down the line, even though HPV itself is mostly asymptomatic.

So, it does not follow that avoiding Covid vaccine for children because the immediate likelihood of death from acute covid is the only issue. We are aware that the long term risk of viral infection can be very great with viruses. Avoiding infection is much better if the alternative is the possibility of cancer.

> So, it does not follow that avoiding Covid vaccine for children because the immediate likelihood of death from acute covid is the only issue.

I never said it was the only issue. But neither is the only choice to give your kids the current approved vaccines ASAP or never give the vaccine to them ever.

Avoiding infection is much better if the alternative is the possibility of cancer. But of course, we don't know or plausibly think something like cancer is a long term risk of a COVID infection in children. Maybe one day we will realize such outcomes happen and then it would become much more sane to rush your kids to get the vaccine that day.

I think it's important to stick to what we know, about this virus, and these vaccines: we know that it is extremely rare for children to be hospitalized from COVID, and we know that it is extremely rare for diagnosed myocarditis. But what we also know is that as time goes on, we learn more. And especially for things where are very new, like using these vaccines have on children, we stand to learn a lot, quickly. So I think it's a bad frame to presume parents are pro- or anti- vax. Hesitancy is sane on this specific issue, and that's not to mean that other positions are insane, but what is insane is to impose this on parents who are hesitant at this present time, until we understand what, exactly, is going on with heart tissue.

Can you point me in the direction of studies comparing side effect risks for young children against COVID-19 risks for children? Presumably there's such a thing that you're basing your opinion on. I would find that useful, given that I have an 8 y/o who is now vaccine-eligible and her mother and I are discussing.

CDC admits that there has been severe cardiac damage to young people from the mRNA vaccines.

This leads to an obvious series of questions: just how dangerous is COVID for children? What mechanism is causing this heart damage? Could heart damage be happening without diagnosis, and manifest later? In a year, will we be able to fix this problem with the vaccines, or have protocols to prevent it? Are the vaccines more likely to cause permanent damage in children, than COVID, as opposed to temporary health problems? Are the non-mRNA vaccines completely de-risked from the proposition from causing permanent harm to children? Will CDC guidance in a year guide parents away from mRNA vaccines and towards different ones? Is there a correlating variable we will discover so we know which specific population of children would get heart damage from this? Etc.

https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1306689138612203520

More recent paper I found: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.0...

More questions: given this known to manifest in younger people, could it imply that age is inversely correlated with frequency? Will young children be less likely to report or articulate symptoms, even if they have increased risk? Given it seems sex coupled, is there an underlying variable correlated with sex that is a root cause we will soon understand, resulting in a vast risk reduction for parents who will be able to know if their children apply?

People claiming you can know if vaccination is a good idea or not for your kids have primitive mental models: the choice isn't to vaccinate or not vaccinate, but vaccinate now or (maybe) vaccinate later. When something is risk laden on both sides and is a dynamic system, the smart choice may be to wait if the marginal de-risking per unit time is high.

My personal view is that wrt children taking mRNA vaccines, there's basically close to free "money on the table" - wait a few months. If you've avoided COVID until now, its pretty unlikely your kids will catch it, nevermind be unlucky enough to get a severe case, which is extremely unlikely. On the other hand, it could turn out in a few months we identify the root cause of the heart issues of the vaccines, or alternative vaccines become available that de-risk it entirely. In any case, personal views aside, it's incredibly immoral to mandate this for schools, and it wouldn't surprise me if CA does this before we fully understand what is going on.

So that link you sent says there is 12.6 instances per million doses. So that is 0.00126% chance of happening. This article from March mentions around 22 per 100,000 chance from getting COVID. Much larger incidence rate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7988375/ Now obviously might not be the same age ranges or such, but I do know last year the Big-10 almost cancelled it's football season due to myocarditis risk from COVID so clearly it has been an issue for a while. Might need to weigh that in the decision you make for your children. Too many people look for one side and use that to prove their point otherwise know as confirmation bias. I would study the incidence of both sides of this before making the decision. Although my children are less than 5 so they can't get it yet anyway.

Here's the problem with those stats.

First, if this has a mechanism which is damaging heart tissue, the diagnosed cases may just be the ones which are manifesting severely enough to the point of getting to through the entire funnel of a diagnosis. The actual blast radius may be much larger, and only result in problems later in life. Especially for children whose hearts are developing, it is extremely risky to administer a drug which we know has the capacity to damage heart muscle and we do not yet understand why and have a handle on the expected distribution of that damage across the whole population.

Second, the stat you mention on COVID is misleading, because a) it is a broad age group, my concern is primarily in the very young, many of whom are now being vaccinated in the US, and b) it is conditional on a positive COVID test. Many, many young children are contracting COVID and not developing symptoms or are not getting severe enough infections to get through the funnel of being determined to be a positive case. So the incidence rate you mention is effectively a meaningless number if you account for these two elements.

Based on our current understanding, it could very well turn out that the data we have now is consistent with a situation where eg, the vaccine administered to 5-6 year olds is in fact damaging their hearts with a sizable % liklihood, and their risk of having such kinds of permanent damage to their bodies from COVID (across the entire funnel, beginning at a non-infection) is much lower. I'm not sure of the liklihood of this reality, but it's not zero. We just don't know yet.

The abstract from your linked paper seems to indicate the risk is minimal.

>According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, myocarditis/pericarditis rates are ≈12.6 cases per million doses of second-dose mRNA vaccine among individuals 12 to 39 years of age

That's a 0.0013% chance of getting something that "almost all" patients had resolution of with or without treatment:

>Almost all patients had resolution of symptoms and signs and improvement in diagnostic markers and imaging with or without treatment. Despite rare cases of myocarditis, the benefit-risk assessment for COVID-19 vaccination shows a favorable balance for all age and sex groups; therefore, COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for everyone ≥12 years of age.

There is one in the Pfizer application for FDA authorization in 5-11 age group, see Table 14, page 34. It is not a direct study, it's an extrapolation based on antigen titers in a 2000 kid 2 months clinical trial, but it's the only one I am aware of.

https://www.fda.gov/media/153447/download

Considering they then become the primary host and spreader to all others there definitely is ethics involved in giving it to them.

Don’t mistake relative risk for absolute risk. Not everyone who is vaccinated gets Covid, but everyone vaccinated is at risk of vaccine side effects.

If a 30 year old has a 0.08% chance of hospitalization, the risk drops to 0.008%. But they might stand a 1 in 5 chance of getting infected so now it’s 0.016% to 0.0016%.

But if they get injected with a vaccine, the risk of a rare side effect might be 1 in 100,000 or 0.001% which is pretty similar to Covid.

It’s the same analysis the UK did that caused them to recommend against the AZ vaccine for certain age groups.

Your numbers are way off. The CDC estimated the hospitalization rate in the 18-49 age group at 3%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Super skewed by the cohort they cobbled together. Look at the COVIDNet data for the decile age bands of hospitalization at peak waves: [0]

>18-29: 5/100000 = 0.05%

>30-39: 10/100000 = 0.1%

>40-49: 14/100000 = 0.14%

I would ask why our agencies keep doing things like this and burning trust, but it's rhetorical.

[0] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html

You're comparing completely different statistics. The 3% is the infection hospitalization rate; in other words, the odds of being hospitalized once infected. The rates from your source are the total number of people per 100k who are hospitalized for covid in a given week; it does not mean they only have a .05% chance of being hospitalized once infected, it means .05% of the entire age cohort are hospitalized from covid that week.

edit2: actually, I see the denominator there is total population not cases but I still don't follow.

There have been 19,850,744 cases in 18-49 year olds [0] and 63,207 hospitalizations [1] which suggests at 0.3% infection hospitalization rate..

[0] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics

[1] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_5.html#virusTypeD...

18-49...could that age gap be any wider. A 20 year old is going to deal with Covid quite a bit differently than a 40 year old.

Dying, not hospitalization.

Nope. Look at the data again. The risk of dying from an infection in the 18-49 age group is 0.06%. The risk of hospitalization from an infection in that age group is 3%; you claimed 0.08% which is wrong by two orders of magnitude.

Huh? 0.06% and 0.08% are 2 orders of magnitude different?

Are you being intentionally dense? Your original comment claimed a 0.08% hospitalization rate. The actual hospitalization rate is closer to 3%.

Typo. Meant death.

I think 1 in 5 is very optimistic. Unless you intend to remove yourself from society, you are very likely to catch Sars-Cov-2 in the upcoming years. Probably more than once. It's endemic and easily transmittable.

In the long run, everyone will get Covid (though many may be asymptomatic). It's not going away.

> Presumably that means you’ll have that risk,

But greatly improves the odds of not dying, which is pretty important for a lot of people.

> Presumably that means you’ll have that risk, plus additional unknown risk.

That's a bad argument. This makes COVID less severe, which in turn makes the long-term affects less severe. Things in medicine are rarely binary.

We don’t actually know if it makes the long term risk less severe or more severe. We don’t have the data.

Sure. We also don't know if it will give you superpowers. I mean, we have logic and the history of similar things that gives us good ideas. And the fact that the risks grow because the immune response means a shorter immune response is likely to be less severe long term. But yeah, technically there is no study there yet.

We have not seen better and more successful studies for ivermectin, we have seen a lot of studies that find it does next to nothing, and a few deeply fraudulent studies that finds that it solves world hunger.

It's a strange day when people argue against evaluating a new medicine, in favour of snake oil that doesn't work.

Given that you think that it's unclear that vaccines reduce the rate and seriousness of COVID, I am not sure that your have a good enough understanding of the ground facts to have an informed opinion on this subject.

Wow. I always wonder when I hear comments this.

Check out https://c19early.com (specifically, https://c19ivermectin.com/).

This drug might actually save the patient from the risk of dying from covid. It would be the same for the vaccine: the vaccines reduce the risk from dying.

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