The Moderna vaccine can cause immune-mediated hepatitis
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Whatever it is: a paper like this doesn't demonstrate anything like that. It's a case observation with n=1 and it actually shows nothing of the sort. It's as close to nonscientific as a doctor can get and still publish in the literature.
Perhaps its just interesting and they want to see what people say.
Interesting things are worth posting even when you may not agree with it or even know anything about it.
Posting is like asking, "what do HNers think about this?"
BUT will say again, I am pro vaccines and vaccinated, but I still think the possible side effects are being downplayed in the media/state. I posted in another thread, but after one month, I am still having issues that are for sure linked to my booster shot. No-one told me about any of these possible side effects, but after suffering from them, and talking openly about it with many peopkle, I found others had exactly the same issues as I have after their shots (Pfizer if it helps anyone).
The media and public health leadership has to work on a very thin "knife's edge" when communicating with the public. They have to do 10X the work to debunk garbage than the people have to work to dissemination garbage. And then, a reasonable set of people who do have vaccines problems end up in the middle. The symptoms I had when I had combined Flu/Pneumonia were: could not use left arm for a week, felt super-sick and couldn'tr work for a week. I know that's probably better than getitng a bad flu or pneumonia, but my doctor couldn't even care. She was just happy I got vaccinated. i do think that is a problem.
But it's a different problem and raising that and having a rational discussion about it is not something that can happen in a venue like hacker news, or really any social media.
That's your personal belief that may or may not be representative of reality.
Another possible belief that one might have, that you can find evidence for in reality, is that side effects are being downplayed in order to push vaccine mandates through as a way of exerting political control and/or profits for certain organizations (e.g. Pfizer, which has done a lot of extremely questionable things in the past, like a lot of large pharma companies).
> the reasoning being most people need to hear a simple, straightforward and consistent message to be compliant.
...and this line only adds more evidence to the second belief, as it's exactly what entities wanting control want - people to be "compliant" for its own sake, regardless of reality, ethics, or reason.
In any case, downplaying the side effects is unethical and obviously wrong.
Nothing is truly obviously wrong. In fact many things we think are obviously wrong, aren't. The ethics of these sorts of things are truly nontrivial.
If you're suggesting we have hte vaccine policies we do so that pfizer etc profit, well I doubt I am going to convince you otherwise. I work in pharma, have a pretty good understanding of our leadership's thought patterns, and I think the vast majority of them would more than happily take a business loss if it meant the world became healthier, but they'd rather keep doing their research and development in the meantime.
Well, lets say that I will have the side effects for the rest of my life, or my kid (9y) will. So lying or hiding about the side effects is better for the big picture, and then fuck me/my kid? This is how you breed anti-vaxx and other people against goverment. 'We lied, but it was from your own good, sure, some suffered the consequenses of our lies, but hey, bars are open now, yay'
Mind you, I'm not claiming that they are justified. Just that pro-vax side of the question is a lot more than "but bars are now open".
Let's say (as an experiment) we know that 10% of people will have life-long problems if they take the vaccine, BUT hiding this fact means that 90% of the population will probably take the vaccine and thus, 'saving' a lot of people. Is it ok to 'sacrifice' 10% for the remaining 90%? (I know the values are less, but the questions is, where we draw the line where we should 'hide' things or not). I still hope the side effects will go away, but after one month, this has serious implications in my life, and I feel betrayed for not being informed on the side effects correctly. And for sure, I will not have any other boosters, no matter what mandates or what else they will come up with, and right now, I am recommending others not to get the booster after my experience (maybe wrong, but my experience and suffering trumps any 'greater good' that may put my close friends/family at risk)
My general belief is that the US's inability to address its public health costs in a utilitarian manner will ultimately bankrupt the country. Just today I was reading about how stanford spent millions of dollars to speed up a genomic sequencing pipeline to more rapidly identify rare diseases in infants (ostensibly, so they can be sent to the NICU). Problem is, those millions could also have been spent on covid patients, or covid reasearch, or heart disease research and cancer research (those are the two things that kill the most people in the US) and likely had a greater total outcome! Babies who survive and make it to the NICU bear tremendous costs on the health system, both in the NICU and throughout their lives. But, people love babies so we're willing to spend enormous, illogically enormous amounts of money to save them.
And I think that the last sentence of your first paragraph is critical: They had accumulated trust over decades, and they set all of that on fire. Was Covid a big enough emergency to make that worth it? I think not, even if you buy the "it's for the greater good that we mislead people" idea (which I don't). I think what they did was short-sighted, even within that moral framework.
All I was saying is that, if you are in that moral framework, it's not killing people with vaccines in order to open the pubs. It's killing people with vaccines in order to save more people. I still think it's immoral, and I think that because they destroyed their credibility they're killing more people in the long run, but I think you significantly mis-stated their actual moral calculus.
On pharma, they are obviously a business, and profits are of course a major consideration. I'm sure many people who work in pharma have other incentives too (like making world a healthier place, as you suggested). However, that certainly doesn't mean the correct framing is to see pharma companies as entirely altruistic.
I agree with your assertion about the medical industry otherwise. Still, dynamics of vaccines propose that their customers buy a minimum amount of dosages for the venture to be profitable. You create countless incentives to apply as much of them as possible and medical reasons slip into the background.
I notice the word "accurate" wasn't included in what people need to hear from their public health professionals.
I think that's the problem.
I agree its important for public health organizations to be consistent in their messaging. It creates a lot of confusion if they are sending mixed messages about the pros/cons of vaccines, especially if there is some urgency. Where I am, there is information provided about the type and relative frequency of reactions, but it's not the main message and that makes sense.
For governments that are forcing people to be vaccinated (either directly or de-facto through restrictions on what you can otherwise do), it's purely a political thing. How could they admit that the thing they are forcing on you could cause reaction, even if it's rare. So they pretend that anyone who talks about it is a threat to society and whip up anger against them.
People are regularly willing to voluntarily take medicine with higher risks (birth control, travel vaccines, etc) and generally would make the same choice faced with covid. But take the choice away and the government has to carefully control the message about it (plus the whole opportunity to create division and an out-group to improve their political footing)
I went and found your post.
Your symptoms could just as easily be explained by a viral infection (not necessarily COVID). That happens to people periodically, conservatively say once every 5 years. 2 weeks / 5 years is 0.7% of time. After billions of vaccine doses administered, that's millions of people that will attribute a random viral infection to a vaccine side effect...
I think the "official" side effects are a true best estimate of what the side effects really are, and tracking side effects like you are trying to do is very prone to various biases. You can't possibly understand vaccine side effects without looking at data from large numbers of people. That's why these random anecdotal stories of "vaccine -> ailment" are problematic. The question is if those ailments are happening more frequently after vaccination than before, and no individual can possibly answer that question.
The classic example of this is the vaccines -> autism issue. Thousands of parents were convinced that vaccines caused autism because autism appeared immediately after getting vaccinated. But now we know, decades later after massive population scale study, that this was just statistical noise.
Here's a good reason: because there's no obvious reason why the vaccine should result in immune-mediated hepatitis (unlike, say, an immune response after receiving it, which is both explainable and (somewhat) desirable). HN is about curiosity and novelty, and this is curious indeed.
And, of course, as a truly honest scientist, I will say: it's entirely possible they did find a situation where it occurred. It may be that all my complaining is actually against a legitimate problem. But, to be honest, when all the data is evaluated holistically, it is unlikely that this is a major concern. And the real problem is that somebody is going to go share this with some website that publishes "COVID vaccine causes hepatitus" and then a whole bunch of people won't get vaccinated.
The vast majority of people aren't capable of that. They're usually taking secondary or tertiary sources, as collected by their favorite aggregators. That's not informed consent, regardless of the conclusion they come to.
Intelligent people recognize that they're not surveying the primary literature. They instead have to trust some informed source. That source must, among other things, pick things that inform rather than mislead. It can't feature every scrap of data -- you might as well just go to the primary sources.
So what makes me suspicious is people claiming "censorship", because most of the time it means "here is a thing that confirms my biases, and I'll ignore all of the things that contradict my biases even though I'm not as expert as I imagine I am".
If you want the facts, they're out there on the NIH web site. If you want HN to pick and choose facts for you, then you're welcome to, but do not fool yourself into believing that it informs consent.
I looked into this when I saw that many people were having covid-like adverse reactions to the vaccines. The only thing I found was that when the immune system is activated that collateral damage is possible.