While many African countries need more vaccines, South Africa was in the process of throttling shipments because less and less people were getting vaccinated.
So the other big challenge is raising acceptance of the vaccines and fighting denialism.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/12/di...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/opinion/31washington.html
We have, in the wealthy west, millions of vaccine-hesistant and vaccine-denialist people.
I'm not just talking about poor or uneducated people, either.
I personally know wealthy, educated, analytical people who have bought into the fearmongering and propaganda. I was shocked to find how deeply skeptical they were. I was even more shocked to be linked to propaganda with hard-to-miss flaws, like the fact that the promoter is not talking on behalf of the AMA, but on behalf of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic... ... and I'm not even in America.
I also know people who got a dose of vaccine, read propaganda, became skeptical and delayed their second dose for a long time.
It's not just the poor, the ignorant, or people we've betrayed. It's bigger than that. I don't think anyone fully understands it yet.
Watching the people around me has stirred in me many new questions.
A looooot of voices.
https://thevaultproject.org/ron-johnson-holds-expert-panel-o...
It might have tighter correlations with economic and education status, but that’s not all of it.
Whatever skill allows some to see the signal through the noise while others descend down rabbit holes that lead to delusion is hard to teach.
The best community I’ve found that works towards it is the less wrong rationality community, but none of us are immune from cognitive bias or motivated reasoning. It’s all about recognizing it and trying to correct for it in order to struggle closer to the truth.
Even so, I worry most people continually exposed to false ideas will eventually get infected by them - even if you have really good tools, it’s hard.
Make no mistake, they don't care about you or right/left wing. It might be right wing this time around, but only because they are still looking for a message that will appeal to the left wing as strongly.
The biggest spreaders seem to have a supplement store. Follow the money often works very well.
However, that's also a long process that involves many people, as most modern scientific endeavors are. He might have played a role, but he certainly didn't single-handedly invent the field.
> The first Marek's disease vaccine was introduced in 1970. The disease would cause mild paralysis, with the only identifiable lesions being in neural tissue. Mortality of chickens infected with Marek's disease was quite low. Current strains of Marek virus, decades after the first vaccine was introduced, cause lymphoma formation throughout the chicken's body and mortality rates have reached 100% in unvaccinated chickens. The Marek's disease vaccine is a "leaky vaccine", which means that only the symptoms of the disease are prevented.
Same, including medical professionals who fit this description.
It's clearly an emotional and tribal issue at this point. The animating factor of nearly all of this denialism is a narrative of distrust and outright animus for the "establishment" and the organizations that represent it.
I'm going to place a few cases here, but you're going to have to accept that there is a cherry-picking-esque effect here, there isn't really solid data on this, unfortunately, only surveys and general opinion. A decent chunk of my social circle are academics in the state though anecdotal as that is. I'm also going to try to contrast the clash of opinion on both sides.
>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/health/jama-bauchner-race...
Dr Livingstone claims that medicine is not structurally racist, gets placed on administrative leave by journal.
While the endemicity of structural racism is generally accepted on the left, it's very much not so on the right, and in a sizable chunk of the center.
>https://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2021/03/16/u...
Professor Kindsvatter made a video about how he felt that the way "whiteness" was applied to him like "some kind of disease" was dehumanizing. This gets him an immediate attempt to get him to step down.
The concept of "whiteness" as a clear negative is pretty common in left and progressive aligned media. See [1], and imagine the fireball would be if "white" was replaced with "black". This definition of "whiteness" is certainly not the mainstay outside of said circles.
>https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/georgetown-law-profes...
“I hate to say this. I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks, happens almost every semester." This results in David Batson's resignation and the firing of his colleague.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-...
The problem here is as that "The Science" is being claimed as a source of authority with the same blind reverence that the church used to claim God or "The Bible" rather then being presented in all it's messy and inconclusive glory.
Have you ever considered they might have a point? More and more data is coming out, like https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.107..., in the highest-impact cardiology journal, showing that the mRNA vaccines are not particularly "safe" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
Sadly I can't dig too much into that paper because the page is being really buggy.
But having had three shots now and no symptoms I've stopped really caring much to hear any fear mongering. I'm a lot more concerned by new variants.
The side effects of the vaccines, while generally not that severe, are very real. Discounting them just because you were lucky isn't the best way to go about it imo.
I'm not looking forward to the mandatory booster.
Also, and this is something I'm not clear on, but is this just an abstract? It doesn't seem like there's an associated paper or any data beyond what's mentioned there.
There's a few other issues, too; like, for example, they don't compare mRNA vaccine recipients to people who have recovered from COVID-19 (one would expect that a test that measures inflammation would see increased inflammation in both populations); or that, frankly, the PULS test the publishing doctor developed doesn't seem to explain how it turns a set of arbitrary biological markers into a score that correlates to risk of heart issues.
I would, at best, say that this abstract could be used to establish a hypothesis for a future study. On its own, it tells me basically nothing.
It's from a report presented at the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions 2021; https://www.thecardiologyadvisor.com/home/topics/acs/acute-c... . Presumably the actual paper is upcoming.
>"...there is no data in the abstract regarding myocardial T-cell infiltration, there are no statistical analyses for significance provided, and the author is not clear that only anecdotal data was used."
Presumably deeper analysis will be presented in the actual paper. The author claims the data is from 566 people at a preventative cardiology practice, so unless the PULS measurements have an incredibly high degree of variance, it'd be quite unlikely to see such a large increase in the underlying factors measured purely by chance when there are 500+ samples.
>they don't compare mRNA vaccine recipients to people who have recovered from COVID-19
This would be useful for comparing the relative safety of the mRNA vaccines vs getting covid. Such comparison is however not necessary to assess the safety of mRNA vaccines; an mRNA vaccine does not become safe just because covid is more dangerous. The absolute, not relative, risk is important to know as even if the risk of covid is greater, the chance of getting covid is not 100%. And with regular boosters, one might be exposed to the risk of the mRNA vaccine more often than one is exposed to the risk of covid.
> the PULS test the publishing doctor developed doesn't seem to explain how it turns a set of arbitrary biological markers into a score that correlates to risk of heart issues
https://pulstest.com/articles/analytical-performance the PULS test "measures the most clinically-significant protein biomarkers that measure the body's immune system response to arterial injury". There's peer-reviewed research demonstrating its effectiveness: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23530883/.
"The original studies for the PULS Cardiac Test were initiated at Stanford University and Kaiser Permanente. Researchers analyzed gene expression profiles in the lesions of mouse models of ACS (mice do not form hard plaque) . Over 250 candidate proteins were identified in mice lesions and many of them were shown to be conserved in humans by analysis of soft lesions during CABG. The number of biomarker candidates was narrowed from 50 to 9 pathways during additional studies. Various permutations of these biomarkers with existing biomarkers like LP-PLA2 and hsCRP, and global risk factors were tested by 3 software systems (Akaike, Bayesian, and Drop-inDeviance) to predict a 5 year risk of ACS. This process resulted in all three systems identifying the same 9 biomarkers and 4 global risk factors (age, sex, diabetic status, and family history). These biomarkers and global risk factors were then incorporated into a benchmark algorithm format with performance superior to gold standard measures of risk such as Framingham, Reynolds, etc. The resulting algorithm yielded a clinical net reclassification index of 43% (this index penalizes an algorithm for falsely up-classifying and down-classifying patients; values above 10% when compared to Framingham are considered good). The algorithm (PULS) was then independently validated by the NIH NHLBI group in MESA which confirmed the findings. These clinical trials were all longitudinal outcome-based studies."
mRNA vaccines have been administered to millions of people around the world. A sizable percentage had the first shot six months ago or longer.
The effects the author is warning against also occur supposedly with high probability and across age groups and sex. (He makes no mentions about pre-existing conditions, which would probably be important: usually, you visit a cardiologist for a reason)
If there was actually an increased risk of e.g. ACS, shouldn't we have seen a significant increase in actual ACS cases among vaccinated by now? Wouldn't this have been detected during the clinical trials?
But I'll add one thing, it's not only ignorance, it's straight up spite and sadism from the anti-vax crowd
Because they will take any BS and try to run it as far as they can with it. Including a 2001 paper like the one it was posted yesterday
Though I agree that recommendation to wait is not great.
A professional cardiologist with decades of experience who now runs his own cardiology practice. Do you feel you're more qualified to assess his qualifications than the editors of Circulation just because you read a wikipedia article?
>psudoscience plant-based debunked theories
He has published papers demonstrating health improvements in patients after treatment, which is more than can be said of most supplements. The absence of large RCTs for something does not mean it's been "debunked".
> If there's something to this wait for a real research group to come out and say it - if there's a chance of world-changing science that will happen (would have already happened).
You understand doctors have been fired for questioning the safety of coronavirus vaccines? You understand that publically-funded research groups risk having their funding withdrawn if they question the safety of the coronavirus vaccine?
Ironically, if only they were lucky enough to not get infected meanwhile and managed to eventually change their mind, that may actually turn out for the better since additional vaccine doses seem to produce stronger antibody response when delayed.
None of them argued the vaccines they're receiving are an experimental vaccines, or that the vaccines are a trick. They seem to mostly seem to have concerns about the actual vaccines similar to western anti-vaxxers.
You mean the western anti-vaxxers who say it is an experimental vaccine tricking the world into steralizing itself?
America's inability to curb its own propaganda machines and its capitalism uber alles rhetoric and group-think boomerangs right back. This pandemic has certainly shaken a lot of nuts out of the rug, but where did those nuts came from ?
I really am tried to seeing capitalism blamed on all the worlds problem when it has been capitalism more than anything else that has brought both peace and prosperity to the world
Cuba, which is as far away from capitalism as you can get these days, has created five different vaccines. And in any case it wasn't capitalism that created the popular vaccines... the mRNA vaccines build up on decades of public-funded research, the Oxford/AZ vaccine was funded by the university endowment IIRC.
According to Wikipedia, that vaccine was developed with Venture Capital money from Oxford Sciences Innovation, Google Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, among others. However even if it was "public funding", that public funding is only possible due to the tax base created by the capital system the governments of the world tax to get their funding.
As to Cuba, I believe only 2 has passed Phase II Trials, and none are approved for international use by the World Health Organization. Time will tell if they are effective as they claim.
Moderna and Pfizer both had their vaccines ready almost as soon as Chinese scientists unveiled the genetic sequence.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/03/how-moderna-made-its-mrna-co...
They were released earlier, though I got the impression they were released really without very much phase 2/3 testing at all. If you think the anti-vax folks are having a field day with the current western vaccines being given special accelerated roll-out...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01813-2
Not being approved could very well be a political move on Europe's part - they have plenty of motives not to approve it, and equally they have plenty of reasons not to trust Russia's claims. In my country it was a running joke that if it's ever available here, the viles would be laced with novichok.
The paper is somewhat questionable though as it shows a 100% effectiveness against severe infection.
Most likely it is a similar effectiveness to other adenovirus based vaccines, which is less than mRNA vaccines, but still better than no vaccine. It has been reported that some countries are paying close to $20 per dose, so it's not any cheaper than mRNA vaccines.
I don't know if you can blame FDA's risk adverse views on capitalism.
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1353330538292121602?lan...
It never fails to surprise me how little thinking technolibertarians do outside of their professional domains. I so wish we trained more generalists capable of recognising at a glance how ludicrous an argument like that is. People who's only qualification is that they're good with computers should really just stop thinking their opinions are useful on topics outside of their domains of expertise.