There is no science if doubts aren’t allowed.
There is no science if reasonable doubts aren't allowed.
The thing with this pandemic is, that the time where you could have a reasonable doubt in the vaccines are over for a while now. We vaccinated half of earths population. If there would have been horrible side effects they would have shown. The more data we gather the clearer the picture becomes and the less reasonable certain doubts become.
The thing about doubt is that one can always doubt anything. You can doubt that a stone in your hand falls to the ground if you let it go, but no amount of doubt will change the outcome if you actually do it. Physical reality for the most part doesn't care for our feelings. If you are a brilliant physicist you could doubt is the explainations why the stone falls to the ground, but you cannot reasonably doubt the fact that it does accelerate towards the ground, because this is what is observed.
You could have the feeling the universe is holographic and all this falling does not occur, however if you cannot create an experiment that would falsify existing, simpler explainations it remains just a interesting feeling and not a reasonable doubt.
Every piece of available evidence points to the same conclusions, over and over again: the general safety of vaccines, the risks of long COVID, the contagiousness of the Omicron variant, and so on and so forth.
Those things are clearly not up for the discussion given the absolute garbage quality of the proposed counterevidence offered by these "skeptics".
Another example is the recommendation for AstraZeneca which was first not offered to older people because of unclear efficiency data, and then not offered to younger people because of the risk of blood clots.
Yet another example is the recommendation for boosters against Omicron. Israel's backing off from recommending a fourth to the general population because among other things the faster loss of protection.
"authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy"
This is coming from someone who was deeply concerned by the erosion of precedents under President Trump. I didn't turn off my skepticism when the man I voted for actually got to office. It feels like I'm on the receiving end of my own political retribution and its really made me pause.
I know several mothers squeamish on risking their children to continual rolling of the dice w.r.t the mRNA vector vaccines. Also, I can unequivocally state that no other vaccine have I ever seen that has to be continually boosted to maintain it's efficacy, which sounds to me like a deficiency in memory cell formation. The bigger issue there, is that in spite of that being an interesting quirk of these vaccines to do research on, no one will, because having "this year's model" of vaccine is a jackpot to Pharmaceutical companies. Dat Annual Recurring Revenue producing nothing but upsides for them.
-New repeatably, and reliably recurring business -Relaxed or increasingly streamlined approval processes to be lobbied for the next time they want to sneak something through
And the downsides being safely (to them) externalizable
-increased attrition of horseshoe crab populations and concomitant environmental knock-on effects -accumulating social costs in the damage done by implementing the infrastructure for implementing things like vaccine passports, which can be adapted to non-public health use cases.
I mean, I get where you're coming from. However, I've researched the supply chains, and the stuff that is relied upon for QC'ing this stuff (horseshoe crab blood) is not inexhaustible, and the incentives we're manufacturing are not at all ideal. Just because you've stopped analyzing the problem at the physiological effects on the patient does not mean there isn't reason for concern. Everything is interconnected.
The mRNA vaccines don't produce IgA-mediated sterilizing mucosal immunity and they would not have been expected to, and they should never have really been expected to or promoted as providing sterilizing immunity.
The point, though, is to prevent severe disease and death which is mediated through memory cells, which are doing just fine and not waning, and mostly likely responsible for the bulk of the headlines that Omicron is less virulent -- because the vaccines are actually working for their intended purpose (turning severe COVID into a bad cold).
The vaccine misinformation on HN is really crazy. Conflating lack of protection against infection to failure to form memory cells is not a remotely well informed take.
The DYOR crowd does the absolute worst research. I don't have a problem with the policy in the title article because you all don't know what you're talking about.
And a multiple shot series of a vaccine is common, most of them are. The initial interval with the mRNA vaccines was probably too short for hypermutation/maturation to happen (but was necessary to get people protected as fast as possible, and to keep the trials as short as possible) so the "boosters" are the really the second shot of a two shot series.
You still haven't addressed the anti-pattern of cranking out "vaccines of the month", the environmental impact of utilizing a protein from a natural source in a QC process intended to track pharma batches for multiple doses for every human on earth, the incentive problem that emerges from vaccinations not designed for long lasting, sterilizing immunity in that it's already been acknowledged by Goldman Sachs analysts that cures are not a good business model and that this approach to vaccine making seems eerily in that vein of taking this advice to heart.
Condescend on the DYOR folks all you want. If someone didn't, none would ever get done. I, for one, will continue to learn as much as I can, and will encourage people to do as much thinking for themselves as I can. Funny thing I noticed is half the people who say "leave it to the experts" tend to own stock in said experts.
We're still using the same OG strain vaccine that we started with and we're not doing this.
The ancestral mRNA vaccines still protect against death and hospitalization even with Omicron.
If you're doing your own research, then watch a course on virology and try to learn something:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3MhWWi6n4&list=PLGhmZX2NKi...
I probably do way more research than you do, but it all reinforces what the experts actually say because I don't spend all my time trolling blogs for counter intuitive takes so I can feel intellectually special.
There’s a new flu vaccine every year.
If they actually protected you against the virus that would have shown too, though.
Anti-vaxer's love to play up that meme.
A better analogy would be the body armor that Marines wear in combat zones. No Marine is stupid enough to believe that wearing body armor will make him completely immune to bullets. And certainly no Marine is stupid enough to say "I won't wear it, because it doesn't make me completely immune to bullets".
Definition before late-2020:
"a product that stimulates a person's immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, thereby protecting against that disease",
To
"a preparation used to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific disease".
Now, we are realising that the Covid vaccines are helpless against the new variants, so I guess the definition will be changed even further.
Compared to something like the Smallpox vaccine (lifelong/multi-decade immunity), the Covid vaccine is mostly useless.
The same principle works in medicine. Instead of one institute doing 10 trials over 5 years you can also have 10 institutes doing 10 trials in a year (Note: these are not actual numbers, just a show of peinciple).
The trials for the corona vaccines have not been done at a worse quality, as far as I can tell the opposite is actually the case. No vaccine ever had this many critical eyes on it.
Granted, RNA vaccines are quite new (although a lot older than the pandemic), but the mechanisms behind RNA are older still. Out cells produce RNA all the time. What you propose is, that RNA produced by our cells today, will somehow miraculously show an effect a decade after it is gone. What is true for the RNA triggered by the vaccine must be true for our own RNA as well. That means our body would have to remember every piece of RNA produced in every cell for a decade.
I am not a medical expert, but I think this is highly unlikely. That would be like drinking a bottle of Schnaps today and being drunk 10 years after it left your body.
I don't know enough to judge by myself and agree that it's highly unlikely, but I've noticed that we've been surprised before by these new vaccines: the AZ blood clots came out of the blue and it took about a year for the cause to be discovered - I remember reading that the culprit was accidental injection in the bloodstream after all. Myocarditis is still a mystery.
I call this the "vaccines will turn us into zombies" theory. Quite laughable, but we'll have to wait and see. :-)
> The world was able to develop COVID-19 vaccines so quickly because of years of previous research on related viruses and faster ways to manufacture vaccines, enormous funding that allowed firms to run multiple trials in parallel, and regulators moving more quickly than normal.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
The only way you can actually ask this is by trying maliciously move the conversation to a nonsensical point. Neither myself nor anyone else has ever made the point that vaccines protect you completely, which is the entire point why even with vaccination there is still an objective to reduce case counts.
We both know that vaccine , in general, is intended to “greatly minimize risk”.
Every mainstream medium is telling it loud and clear: 20-fold reduction in ICU admissions and deaths. There is nothing to debate here.