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Comment by timintheglades | Hacker News Reader

> an experimental vaccine

The technology for this vaccine is over 20 years old. Just because it's the first authorized one of its kind doesn't make it "experimental"

> with no long term studies

There are also no long term studies on the effects of COVID. There are no modern vaccines that have ever had and significant long term effects that didn't manifest within the first month or so after vaccination. (Dr. Offit goes over this in an episode of Oh No! With Ross and Carrie: https://maximumfun.org/episodes/oh-no-ross-and-carrie/ross-a...).

> questionable efficacy

In fact, we know the efficacy to be quite high. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't make it worthless. It's still the best way to prevent infection.

> A lower mortality than the flu

We're talking about a difference in mortality for children of around .01%. Even if true, it's an irrelevant fact. The main personal argument is to protect others in the family, including possible immunocompromised individuals. I've personally lost a mother and two grandparents during this pandemic. You really think, if given the choice between killing their grandparents (with a high likelihood) and a 1/80,000 chance of serious side effects (and no reported deaths) from a vaccine, that most people should opt not to get the vaccine? You fucking psychopath.

> You really think, if given the choice between killing their grandparents (with a high likelihood) and a 1/80,000 chance of serious side effects (and no reported deaths) from a vaccine, that most people should opt not to get the vaccine?

That is not the choice. Despite vaccination, there is a high likelyhood they will get infected, especially with Omikron. The residual risk posed to the parents and grandparents, who are expected to be vaccinated, is not mitigable by vaccination to a significant degree.

Of course it is, because those parents and grandparents can also be vaccinated unless there is a severe contraindication that would upset the risk/benefit equation.

What's the incremental risk reduction of vaccinating the child? With Omicron?

Is there even any proposed mechanism that would give rise to long term effects (that show up months or years later) from this vaccine? I’ve never encountered any credible hypotheses, whereas we have plenty of preliminary evidence and proposed mechanisms for long term health effects arising from Covid.

The vaccines have held up very well at reducing risk of severe Covid, and it’s becoming clear that with appropriate dosing the side effect profile is lower than the risk from infection, even if that risk is relatively low for some demographics.

Also, consider the early reports from South Africa and New York that omicron is resulting in more severe disease in children.

> Is there even any proposed mechanism that would give rise to long term effects (that show up months or years later) from this vaccine?

The whole goal of a vaccine is to induce a long term effect (a change in your immune system). Should we just assume it can only have desireable long term effects?

If some treatment caused (for example) a tiny cancer to form internally, and only be diagnosable years later, what are the odds that we would ever understand the connection (let alone in the first couple years of that treatments use)? And that's for something obvious like cancer. What about weird new ailments, like strange allergies, or anything mental health related? This is why I've never been able to buy the argument that "no vaccines cause long term adverse effects". I can buy that we've never succeeded at linking the two, but that doesn't give me the same warm fuzzies.

Other than that, do things only go wrong in ways that we can predict? How many of us have seen our own (or our colleagues) code changes lead to unexpected results that we would only understand after the fact? Even in codebases that we wrote ourselves, let alone in an enormous legacy codebase.

My own prediction is that most things that do go wrong weren't something that we envisioned happening beforehand, otherwise we wouldn't have done them in the first place. Of course there are high profile counterexamples of this, but I would expect them to be the exception.

I don't have the same faith in the speed of our collective knowledge building abilities that some people do. We accomplish amazing things eventually, but the road there is strewn with the wreckage of prior attempts.

This isn't to say I think people shouldn't get vaccinated, just that they should beware of hubris in attempting to force everyone else to.

I agree with your point about epistemological hubris, but this isn’t about mandates, it’s about clear-eyed risk assessment.

Without a specific hypothesis, it’s all a big game of “what if”. The scenarios you mention aren’t physically impossible or anything, but there’s just as much reason to speculate that the virus itself could have those kinds of emergent long term effects. For example it’s well known that HPV infection increases the risk of certain cancers.

Anyway I can appreciate your point of view, but I don’t think it has much bearing on the people asserting that the vaccine is definitely worse than the virus

I actually missed that you were responding to another comment, my bad. I just saw yours as a top level.

I tend to focus on the already infected case, since that's my (and by now many other peoples) situation. The risk assessment for me already includes the unknown long term effects of covid, so adding the vaccine feels unnecessarily risky to me.

Original antigenic sin could be considered a side effect of getting immunized. Whether it ends up being helpful or harmful won't be known until we've moved our way through multiple waves of different variants (i.e. months years). The die is cast but the result unknown.

Yeah, that is interesting.

It does look like a large fraction of the population is going to get omicron regardless of vaccination. I’m not sure what the implications of a breakthrough infection are for this scenario, but I would imagine it would have a mitigating effect

Here is something interesting with regard to the flu vaccine and the apparent impacts of vaccines year after year:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/11/study-ad...

I don't get the impression this is anything earth imploding but its like come'on man, mandates?

You know, if you really must insult me, at least write „moron“ correctly.

People like you forget:

* Vaccination are meant to prevent the spread of the virus

* we don't know anything about long term effects of an Covid infection

* Covid could mutate into a super deadly virus if it stays around

People forget:

* Vaccines don't prevent the spread of the virus

* We don't know anything about the long term effects of the vaccine

* Covid could mutate into a super mild virus. In line with the science, and the current mutation trajectory

> * Covid could mutate into a super deadly virus if it stays around

If the virus mutates so drastically as to become super deadly to children, how likely is it that current vaccines will make a difference?

They might not make a difference. The point is to stop it spreading now, so it hopefully never gets a chance to mutate into something much much worse.

That sounds like a calculation by poetic metaphors. There's always been a concern that mutations that cause greater virulence could shift death to younger people via a metabolism paradox like swine flu seemed to have. Death sounding drastic doesn't mean a more drastic genetic difference than the mutations so far.

You can wait for thirty years. This will also give you time to learn about long-term effects of the disease. Read this, for example, and then think about what you think is most risky in the long term, the virus or the vaccines:

https://www.alz.org/aaic/releases_2021/covid-19-cognitive-im...

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