In rare cases, coronavirus vaccines may cause Long Covid–like symptoms
science.org
science.org
No, you just tell the truth, every time, all the time. This foolish gymnastics where government and public health authorities are putting themselves through because they're scared of potential negative outcomes has resulted in a catastrophic collapse in trust by the public. This itself will have huge implications for any future society-wide initiatives that we may need for the public good.
For reference, here is one counter example from Japan[0][1], where the benefits and risks are communicated clearly. Will crackpots still behave like crackpots? Sure, but crackpots are like that now any way. This "paper over the truth" has damaged credibility amongst a lot of moderates.
[0]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_mrZXEAYUuLq?format=jpg&name=...
[1]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_meqX0AUH6jh?format=jpg&name=...
Do you imagine that you can't find a nearly identical blurb about myocarditis risk from the CDC? Or what point are you trying to make with the link?
It's disappointing, because being forthright about, for example, how many people have died from the vaccines vs. how many lives have likely been saved by them could help the public to assess the overall benefit without discounting the risks. And this should also be sliced by risk groups, such as young or old or people with secondary conditions.
Moreover, vaccine mandates should include compensation for lost work (or school) time not just due to rare side effects but also due to feeling ill after getting the vaccine (or booster, which seems even more likely to make you feel unwell for multiple days.)
It's not like not getting the vaccine would prevent getting long covid in that case though. It does not however explain why getting the vaccine would get rid of long covid though?
If it's because of latent infection, a vaccine that helps stop infection would reduce the amount of spike protein to zero, which would help.
If it's an autoimmune reaction, vaccines generally provide a different immune reaction than infection, and subsequent immune reaction to infection would be different, so it could improve immune reaction.
Do you have a source for this claim? Last time I tried to research this and get a figure for the difference, there was just no way to directly compare dosages. But it turned out that antibody titer is much higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated-and-infected, which implies the effect of the vaccine is stronger.
The general rule seems to be that whatever you assume about COVID vaccines, regardless of how basic it may appear to be, will turn out to be riven with conflicting facts when trying to find support for it.
If you want to estimate the amount of spike produced by the vaccine, we can take the fact that we know the amount of mRNA in the Pfizer vaccine is 30mcg. The mRNA is ~4000 nucleotides long, which gives us a molar mass of 2000kg/mol. So the vaccine actually has 0.015 nanomoles of mRNA which turns out to be around 10^11 mRNA molecules.
Now we know COVID infection produces around 10^12 virions each of which has ~30 spikes, and there are certainly at least 3x more spike protein made that doesn't end up in a virion, so we have ~10^14 spikes from natural infection.
You would thus need each mRNA particle to enter a cell and be transcribed (impossible) and for each mRNA strand to produce 1000 spike proteins, which is very improbable.
So it is very likely that indeed vaccines produce much fewer s proteins than natural infection.
You literally just described how mRNA vaccines work.
The mRNA goes into the cells and your cells manufacturer spikes using it.
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/therapy/mrnav...
That said, this type of mass analysis is deeply flawed. It ignores the difference between mRNA weight and spike protein weight. I believe this lowers the ratio as the mRNA is more massive than the spike protein encoded. On the other side, it ignores the number of of times each mRNA strand is transcribed to protein. It also ignores the adjuvant effect of the lipid nanoparticle, which amplifies the immunogenicity of the protein mass.
That said, I think the entire discussion of mass is a gross oversimplification to the question of comparing possible long covid autoimmune conditions between vaccination and natural infection. There is soo much more going on: rates of immune response, differences in intensity, differences in immunogen proteins, ectara.
Overall, I think it is an open question. It seems plausible that vaccination could cause long covid in some cases, especially given that it has been show capable of causing autoimmune multisystem inflammatory syndrome. It is also plausible that it could be used to address long covid, by attenuating the immune response or some other mechanism.
> It also ignores the adjuvant effect of the lipid nanoparticle, which amplifies the immunogenicity of the protein mass.
If you think long covid is caused by the immune reaction, this is all moot, as I said in the original post. It's very possible longcovid is autoimmune, but it's possible it's not.
Also for the sake of curiosity, what are the non immunogenic theories? Some sort of persistent damage from the spike count?
But yes, persistent damage from spikes is a non immunogenic theory. There are also theories of persistent infection and viral damage to various organs, as well as exhaustion of the immune system, etc..., and of course it could be a sum of any.
I have some questions though.
Firstly, I think your analysis would only be true for Pfizer. Moderna has a dose 3x stronger (90mcg equivalent).
Secondly, what exactly is the virus' immune evasion mechanism that the mRNA lacks? I thought it was the other way around - the mRNA is coded with pseudo-uridyl specifically to evade the immune system, but normal viral RNA doesn't use that trick. It would seem to be much more likely that the virus is detected by the immune system than the mRNA particles, specifically designed to evade it.
For a novel argument like this one some citations would really be helpful. Where did you get the number of virions per infection, exactly? Surely this number will vary wildly between patients? What's the CI on that? Where did the 3x number come from?
You say:
"for each mRNA strand to produce 1000 spike proteins, which is very improbable."
Why? From [1] we can read that each dose "consists of around 13,000 billion repetitions of the same 4284 characters". This seems like a huge number of repetitions of the spike protein sequence and this is a highly optimized sequence. They appeared to make great efforts to optimize it well beyond what nature would achieve. I'm not sure how to convert "strand" to "dose" here, but all your numbers and probabilities seem rather hypothetical.
So what we're left with is still something much simpler and easier to measure (antibody levels), which are higher for vaccines, suggesting the body perceived it as a more aggressive invasion. And that's a problem: more antibodies = higher chance of autoimmune disease, at the very least.
[1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
Yes, each repetition is an mRNA strand, so what I wrote is in agreement with that quote. You would need each "repetition" to be translated to 1000+ spike proteins. Of course, the sequence is highly optimized, but it has to be optimized for many things - speed of translation and immunogenicity are much more important than persistence, and persistence is what would allow it to be translated many times. Least of which is because if you produce too many too fast the cell is just going to explode or form syncytiae.
> Secondly, what exactly is the virus' immune evasion mechanism that the mRNA lacks? I thought it was the other way around - the mRNA is coded with pseudo-uridyl specifically to evade the immune system, but normal viral RNA doesn't use that trick. It would seem to be much more likely that the virus is detected by the immune system than the mRNA particles, specifically designed to evade it.
Normal viral RNA is encapsulated in a virus. There is no need for pseudouridine because there won't be RNA in the open for the immune system to react until after infection. The vaccines need it because they want to create immune response to the spike instead of the mRNA and to lead to higher delivery. This, instead of leading to immune evasion, prevents the immune system from reacting to the wrong thing, which makes the vaccine more effective.
See: (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcell.2021.7894...)
The immune evasion capability of the virus is completely different from pseudouridiliation, and are actually detrimental. It interferes with many signaling molecules necessary to the immune system, and induces the immune system to act as if it wasn't a virus but instead a parasite to some extent. This causes the immune system to react very inefficiently and erratically, causing responses that are damaging to the body, and also affects antibody formation. It can also induce T-cell exhaustion
The virus also has more proteins than simply the S protein, which means that the immune system may initially focus on other parts of the virus.
Then there is the fact that the lipid carrier as well as mRNA itself is highly immunogenic, even with pseudouridine. This means that for the same amount of spike protein, the vaccine will create a very strong and immediate immune reaction.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8457632/
The source for the number of virions is : https://www.pnas.org/content/118/25/e2024815118
I went with the higher estimates because Delta (and thus Omicron) have much higher viral loads. This is on the order of 1000x, but I only took 100x more than the lowe bound to be very conservative. If you want to be accurate, you can multiply the number of spike protein from the virus that I wrote by 100x : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8375250/
As you can see, it is normal that we would see a higher number of antibodies from the vaccine.
> more antibodies = higher chance of autoimmune disease, at the very least.
Absolutely not. What matters for autoimmune diseases isn't the amount of antibodies, but the type of antibodies. Vaccines only have one out of a dozen proteins in the vaccine and in only one conformation and one form, while the virus has all of those proteins in many conformations and will accumulate hundreds of mutations leading to even more antigens. So at the same amount of antibodies we expect a higher chance of autoantibodies from natural infection.
As for why they didn't send this to regulators, why would they? They have empirical data from trials that show this didn't happen, and the regulators didn't ask for it.
As for the 3x, viral assembly is a haphazard process. Virus proteins very often don't come together right - for some viruses the vast majority of virions are incomplete. I'm not aware of data on it for COVID except that the vast majority of virions that do have RNA (and not all do) are incomplete and can't infect, (see the number of virions paper), so for every RNA containing virion there is almost certainly much more than 3x as many spike proteins as if it was a complete virus. 3x is just a very conservative estimate.
I hope you will appreciate this response!
> Other researchers note the scientific community is uneasy about studying such effects. “Everyone is tiptoeing around it,” Pretorius says. “I’ve talked to a lot of clinicians and researchers at various universities, and they don’t want to touch it.”
The minute we are no longer allowed to ask questions either through external censorship or pressure to internally censor, is the day we start declining to our demise as a species.
Also the latest cia report on the Havana syndrome was that only a few dozen are unexplainable and could be an attack, all the hundreds of others reporting symptoms later were explainable by preexisting conditions, stress, and anxiety.
Whether or not there are actual side effects to the vaccine like the story here, there will be hundreds or thousands of people who are like the ones from the Havana syndrome report. It’s a stressful anxiety filled time. Their symptoms are real, but the cause they attribute them to is misplaced.
>” Probing possible side effects presents a dilemma to researchers: They risk fomenting rejection of vaccines that are generally safe, effective, and crucial to saving lives. “You have to be very careful” before tying COVID-19 vaccines to complications, Nath cautions. “You can make the wrong conclusion. … The implications are huge.” ”
Doubt it. Scientists are not afraid of making mistakes, that happens all the time. They are afraid of losing funding and the fastest way in 2022 to lose funding is to suggest something outside the political and social acceptability narrative.
> >” Probing possible side effects presents a dilemma to researchers: They risk fomenting rejection of vaccines that are generally safe, effective, and crucial to saving lives. “You have to be very careful” before tying COVID-19 vaccines to complications, Nath cautions. “You can make the wrong conclusion. … The implications are huge.” ”
This isn’t to imply acceptance or meant to minimize the seriousness, but some perspective is also required.
Wake up.
1. This is an article proving that people still have a voice.
2. The article shows a tiny fraction of those who got vaccines are experiencing major adverse side effects that are not yet explained.
3. If you told someone that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance this could make their life worse they rationally would still take the vaccine. The only people this affects are the irrational.
Should people have informed consent? Yes. Does that mean you have to outline in excruciating detail every single rare chance that there is the remotest possibility of happening to them? Maybe, but I'd argue humans are terrible with statistics and worse with action: it's better for everyone and for each individual to know there are infinitesimal risks and huge, immediate benefits.
Which is exactly what has been said. Long covid from vaccines is a new tiny risk that needs to be studied. But if you don't want long covid the best way to avoid it is still to take a vaccine. It's not a choice here: it's just mathematically provable.
I could give you background info on me (age, health, covid status etc) but you said you could prove it for all possible hn commenters so I'd keep my privacy.
In my experience (and this is anecdotal) there’s no rhyme or reason as to why this virus affects some people more than others. You can try to tell me why, but it would ask me to betray what i’ve witnessed (or lack thereof) over the past two years.
The data isn’t reliable nor convincing, so i’m not sure how you’re in the definitive “experimental jab better than nothing” camp.
PS - Two doses here.
Unvaxxed people have 75x more hospitalization, 48x more death. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-brea...)
"Compared with the unvaccinated, fully vaccinated people overall had a much lower chance of testing positive for the virus or dying from it, even through the summer’s Delta surge and the relaxation of pandemic restrictions in many parts of the country." (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-brea...)
Vaccination definitely mitigates hospitalization and death.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm
'By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.'
You're looking at a fundamentally different group of people.
If you didn't consider the vaccinated people who then died of covid, you'd see a lot less hospitalizations there too
Should the current group who have recovered take the side-effect risks, or is the CDC note about reduced susceptibility to infection something to consider when making a decision about the first vaccine shot?
https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...
https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/vi...
https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...
tell me that you're completely uninformed without telling me that you're completely uninformed.
* How much does the vaccination status reduce the chance of death/hospitalization?
* How does it differ among age groups?
* How does it change over time (not 2 doses vs. booster, but by time since the last dose)?
* How does it affect the transmission rates? Given how many people are critical to masks/vaccines, you can easily find volunteers to do transmissibility tests in 2 buildings of comparable layout.
* What about comorbidities? How does the benefit of losing extra weight compare to an extra vaccine dose?
* What about suicides and the mental health in general?
* How often are new variants expected to appear and what is the estimated vaccine efficiency against them?
* What about the treatments? Can they be scaled up to be more affordable?
Considering and openly discussing these factors could help our society find a reasonable compromise, but we are not doing that. We are pushing a single solution that benefits a small economic group at the expense of everyone else, and are recruiting the general population to wage a holy war against the dissenters. I don't like this at all.
And given the spread of omicron, odds are that almost everyone will get exposed. I've had two near misses this week alone...
Even at the anecdotal level everyone I know is vaccinated and no one is long term ill from it.
I suspect the incessant querying from bad faith actors is more of an ideology than a true wish to seek an actual answer.
Without breaking that down by age group, we are no better informed. Emotive words like "staggering" without mentioning the data, is unhelpful.
It's common knowledge that elderly and unhealthy/vulnerable represent most ICU beds. I think it was Italy or Greece who have mandated the jab for over 60's. This sounds like an expert has formulated a policy that matches the challenge: that the 60+ age group are filling the hospital beds. If only more countries could formulate measured, level-headed responses to match the reality of the pandemic.
It's not commonly known whether younger unvaccinated people who end up in ICU, are there because they're unvaccinated vs existing health condition. That comes down to individual hospitals and doctors reporting efforts. What we hear in media reports is a broad mashing of data, reduced down to an oversimplified message that unvaccinated people are filling the hospitals. When in fact, it's more likely that unvaccinated people from a specific age and health status group, are filling hospital beds.
Age group impacts illness and hospitalization but not tremendously so. Deaths under 65 weren't tracked b/c signal to noise ratio didn't meet their criteria.
From what I can hear in Canada, unvaccinated make about 10% of population and about 50% hospitalizations, that makes the vaccine reduce your chances by about 5x. But they are already vanishingly low for young healthy people. So what if we vaccinated the older folks, promoted healthy BMI, and created 20% more hospital beds? Or how does a vaccine 1 year ago compare to natural immunity from 1 year go? Or how much exactly of the taxpayer money is going to the Big Pharma as opposed to building new hospitals and training new staff?
<< From what I can hear in Canada, unvaccinated make about 10% of population and about 50% hospitalizations, that makes the vaccine reduce your chances by about 5x
When 50 % of the total hospitalizations are 10 % of the entire population(unvaccinated pop.), the vaccinated 90 % need to be reduced to an equal 10 % too(1/9 * 90 % = 10 %), which means it reduces your chance by 9x not 5x
So, in my mind, the amount of guesswork that's currently on the table warrants a tax-paid advertising campaign, but all censorship and forced vaccination measures do much more harm than good.
> Or how much exactly of the taxpayer money is going to the Big Pharma as opposed to building new hospitals and training new staff?
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your overall premise, but the idea that politicians in countries round the world can/will just snap their fingers and magic new hospitals, staff, and infrastructure into existence seems idealistic in the extreme.
We’re living in a world where the opposite is true: for a variety of reasons (depending on the country you examine) hospitals are run close to capacity during normal times - which is why they struggle so much when there’s a new wave of COVID infection. This seems to be the economic reality of healthcare, whether you’re talking about successful ‘socialised’ models, successful privatised models, or failing examples of any kind.
Many staff are exhausted, demoralised, and underpaid, and there’s a trend to people leaving the profession - and there’s a 3 to ~7-10 year lead time to deliver a new meaningfully-trained healthcare professional.
Choosing to change this trend around the world, versus a few bucks spent per person on a vaccine every year or so…?
I think we need numbers, no anectotes :)
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
> * How much does the vaccination status reduce the chance of death/hospitalization?
> * How does it differ among age groups?
> * How does it change over time (not 2 doses vs. booster, but by time since the last dose)?
> * What about comorbidities?
> * What about the treatments? Can they be scaled up to be more affordable?
Addressed extensively in the scientific literature. I don't know how you can seriously claim otherwise unless you've been out of the loop for over a year.
> * How does it affect the transmission rates?
How would you go about testing it though? The difficulty is that the viral load is lower (which should reduce transmission probability) but the probability that the person will quarantine also is lower (which should have the opposite effect), and how these things balance in the real world is like guessing.
> * How often are new variants expected to appear
Nobody knows but yes there is open discussion about how new variants come about.
> * What about suicides and the mental health in general?
Don't know what this is getting at regarding vaccines.
Suppose 100% of old people and 0% of young people are vaccinated. Even if the vaccines are moderately effective, most of the deaths would be in old people, giving the false impression that they don't work.
> I would appreciate some links.
UK Surveillance Report. Most of the bigger countries have published data.
Suppose there's 0 Covid cases over the study period. Then this is exactly the result we expect to see. Approximately half the deaths being among the vaccinated, and half the deaths being among the unvaccinated. Because there's going to be heart attacks and so on in the two cohorts over the study window.
Suppose someone offered you a pill. They say with certainty that you can trust that it will prevent you from dying of Covid but increase your likelihood of dying of something else by so much that your overall likelihood of dying actually increases. Is that some pill you'd want to take?
edit: I just finally got your point about a period with zero covid cases. Kind of makes sense, but how could you ever use that to make a claim about a vaccines effectiveness if there is known zero challenge?
~50% of the time, the vaccinated group will have more deaths by chance, even if the vaccine is safe - assuming either little to no community spread during the study, or a small study of young people.
All this result shows is that the vaccine isn't effective at preventing car crashes, which is something we already knew.
If the car crashes in the treated group are high enough, you have to start asking if there is a mechanism where vaccination side effects are the cause.
This is why you don't drive or operate heavily machinery with certain drugs.
There are 4 deaths from cardiac arrest in the vaccine arm, vs. 1 in the placebo; and 1 death from covid vs. 2 in the placebo.
Taken altogether, especially with what we now know about myocarditis/pericarditis risk from the vaccine, non trivial input. And I don't know if you're aware, but the original (dec 2020) approval basically rested on 4:1 placebo:vaccine severe cases. It was approved based on statistically insignificant data, but somehow the same counts of death is not even interesting.
Depending on your model, 21:17 may or may not be statistically significant. I didn't see any "official" modeling of that, especially given that "no deaths were attributed to the vaccine" - if your model says something can't happen, it obviously can't statistically happen .....
There is one "death" (which might as well be a car crash) out of the 29=(15+14) causes listed. All others are medical.
##
>>> import numpy
>>> import random
>>> N_vaccine_deaths = []
>>> for j in range(500):
... x = []
... x = [0 for i in range(46000)] + [1 for i in range(38)] # 38 deaths, ~46000 non-deaths
... random.shuffle(x)
... N_vaccine_deaths += [np.sum(x[0:int(len(x)/2)])]
>>> N_vaccine_deaths = np.array(N_vaccine_deaths)
>>> p = np.sum(N_vaccine_deaths >= 21)/len(N_vaccine_deaths )
>>> p
0.296
>>> x = []
>>> for i in range(5000):
... x += [sum([random.random() < (38/46000) for i in range(int(46000/2))])]
>>> p = np.sum(np.array(x) >= 21)/len(x)
>>> p
0.3446
> And I don't know if you're aware, but the original (dec 2020) approval basically rested on 4:1 placebo:vaccine severe cases. It was approved based on statistically insignificant data, but somehow the same counts of death is not even interesting.
I don't see how this is relevant. That was a long time ago and we didn't have much data, hence low statistical power, and the need to make a decision with an incomplete picture. We now have much more data from over 20 countries, and are able to draw more conclusive and confident conclusions about efficacy.
We do not have efficacy data from 20 countries. E.g. israeli data which I am intimately familiar with is incredibly biased to show vaccine efficiency. Official data touted based on observational data showed 95% efficiency, while at the same time airport data which is the only place with unbiased testing showed about 60%.
(That data is biased by demographics, but not by sampling).
As you said, there’s no statistically significant RCT data showing vaccines are dangerous, but also no RCT data showing they are effective in preventing severe disease. Statistical significance cuts both ways.
Can you expand on this? Why is the data biased by demographics? Is this data biased in the same way as the other countries that show a 90% effectiveness?
As I argued above, there is a bias that's working against vaccines, given that a larger proportion of old people are vaccinated which leads to an understatement of their effectiveness.
> while at the same time airport data which is the only place with unbiased testing showed about 60%
Link?
> [there's] no RCT data showing they are effective in preventing severe disease
Only because they haven't done an RCT that could possibly pick that up, probably because of some ethical argument that giving people a placebo may cause them to behave more recklessly (which I would disagree with).
Well, Israeli MOH rules are basically that unvaccinated people must test at least twice a week to continue normal life, whereas vaccinated people need not test even while showing symptoms, even when being admitted to a hospital ; This had variation over time (e.g., since Jan 2021, approx 8 months only unvaccinated had to test on hospital admission, and 4 months everyone), but that's the gist.
Furthermore, upon exposure to a verified case, the vaccinated can do a home test, and self report that they are negative, and not quarantine - whereas the unvaccinated must quarantine, and test in an offical supervised test, twice in a 7-day period in order to finish quarantine after 7 days, or spend 14 days in quarantine if they do not want to test. (This was shortened to 5 days last week, and also had some variations over time, but same gist).
There are many other biases. It's kind of ridiculous.
I don't know exactly how other countries run these things, but I suspect it's similar in other places, though the details differ.
>> while at the same time airport data which is the only place with unbiased testing showed about 60% > Link?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3963606
It's biased by economical demographic traits, because the people who actually fly are not a representative sample; But since everyone who lands gets tested, there is no bias such as the ones I described above. (Well ... there is; a vaccinated person tests once on arrival and that's it; an unvaccinated person must test again in 10 days, and if positive in the 10-days after arrival is considered to have been postiive on arrival -- but compared to the above, this is a "small" bias).
> Only because they haven't done an RCT that could possibly pick that up,
Well, yes, but there isn't one. As I said, it cuts both ways - they haven't done a test that's powered enough to show vaccine ACM is worse than placebo ACM. Is that the only reason it doesn't exist? Maybe yes, maybe not. Cuts both ways.
Are you familiar with Fenton & Neil's work?
https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-vaccine-ef...
https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-impact-of...
They also have academic level papers, but the blog posts are short and concise.
Well there's no such bias in Australia, AFAIK. Everyone has the same testing requirements.
Let's forget vaccine effectiveness (VE) against hospitalization, because as far as Israel is concerned you may be right.
What about VE against mortality? How could this data be biased? I always focus on VE against mortality, since it's the least prone to bias. (EDIT: I see your link to Fenton & Neil, I will discuss below)
> [Airport testing]
That's interesting, but there are other explanations for this.
For example, natural immunity in a large % of the 'unvaccinated' population by the time that this study was done.
Another explanation could be old people self-selecting into the vaccinated population. That will again make vaccines seem weaker than they are in reality, especially in their ability to prevent infection.
I also note that the RCT which you like showed strong VE against infection (against an old variant).
> Is that the only reason it doesn't exist?
Probably yes? And if not, it's probably some other basic explanation, such as Pfizer not wanting to waste their own money on a trial if the FDA didn't require it. They are for profit, after all. Is there a need for some deeper reason? Occam's Razor.
> Fenton & Neil's work
Interesting.
Maybe this bias existed in that ONS report at a particular time period, I didn't read the full report, it's quite long. Maybe this bias exists in all the data sets being reported by different countries. It's possible.
But what about the VE against mortality in countries that have plateued vaccination rates, where such a bias is going to be minimal? Wouldn't we find evidence of a sharp drop in VE over a rolling 4-8 week window? Can anyone show me this happening to any of the big countries?
If someone can show me that - and the data public in a number of countries, so it should be possible to show - I will probably change my mind.
At least two ways:
(a) Fenton & Neil trick in the blog posts I linked - it applies to any measure. Note that people who died in the first 28 days post original shot are considered unvaccinated, despite all tests showing very significant antibody response in 12 days.
(b) Ignoring all cause mortality. Taken ad absurdum: Inject cyanide. 100% efficiency against corona death. Step back from absurdum: it's possible the vaccine induces "silent covid" by generating the spike but failing the PCR tests -- so that, in fact, as far as mortality goes, it is equivalent to getting sick, but as far as testing goes, it's never attributed to covid.
> That's interesting, but there are other explanations for this.
Yes, there's always other explanations for everything. You reach your conclusions because of your prior, which is "the vaccine is effective, let's see how and why". Which is fine, but you should acknowledge your prior rather then assume it is universal. I have a less informative prior, and the data is much less convincing under that prior.
> They are for profit
And have already paid billions of dollars in fines for past "for profit against health" actions. BMJ editor Peter Doshi has shown -- as soon as they've published -- that equally valid interpretations of Pfizer's own data can show 29% effectiveness. Now, there are two ways to interpret the data - one shows 95% effectiveness against mild disease (and no information about severe disease), and one shows 29% against mild disease (and no information about severe disease). Which one do you expect a for-profit company to champion?
> But what about the VE against mortality in countries that have plateued vaccination rates, where such a bias is going to be minimal? Wouldn't we find evidence of a sharp drop in VE over a rolling 4-8 week window? Can anyone show me this happening to any of the big countries?
It is, in fact, the current narrative, that vaccine efficiency drops significantly after 4 months or so, and that's why a booster shot is needed (Israel has already been administering the 4th shot for a month, Fauci is talking about doing same in the US). It is strictly in the negative territory for mild disease now, still positive (but dropping) for severe disease and mortalitly. Some of it is blamed on immune escaping variants, but the dropping VE is seen everywhere. Don't have the links handy, but that's why they are boosting, officially.
But the RCT showed that vaccine safety isn't a big part of the picture, so all-cause mortality won't be relevant. The difference in non-Covid deaths was statistically insignificant. Yes the mRNA vaccines are more likely to cause myocarditis than Covid itself, but so far I haven't seen evidence that it has translated into a big source of mortality. (It may have, I guess?)
> [rest]
Let's ignore VE against mild disease for now. I just want to nail down VE against death, which is less susceptible to sampling bias, manipulation, and so on.
We should be able to easily answer this question conclusively by finding 1 or 2 countries where vaccine administration has plateued (which is actually most countries now), and simply measuring the VE against death over the last 8 weeks. Has anyone something like that?
My guess is that the VE is still very high, which is fairly conclusive evidence that the vaccines work at preventing death from Covid and that VE against death can't all be explained by the Fenton & Neil trick. And since the vaccines were shown to be safe in the RCT, that is proof that they work at preventing death itself - especially in older populations where the risk of Covid is higher and the risk of myocarditis is lower.
> [vaccine immunity is in the] negative territory for mild disease now
IIRC, this was just a 5000 sample study in one European country, and the result was inconsistent between Delta and Omicron. Or has this finding been replicated? (I don't want to get into the weeds on this question, though, since I want to talk about VE against death).
> vaccine efficiency drops significantly after 4 months or so
Sure, I don't dispute this.
I disagree we should look at Covid death exclusively - that IS subject to attribution bias. I look (and have, in the last two years) only at all cause mortality.
Israel and the US have both experienced increase in all cause death in 2021 that is not attributed to either Covid or vaccines. What is it then? No one seems to know (cdc classifies it under “not sure”). Very significant excess (40% or so) in young ages in Israel, only in 2021, at times that correlate to big vaccine drives with a 1-2 months shift. No cause data yet.
The RCT was not powered enough to show safety or extreme lack of it. The celebrated safety paper (based on biased Israeli data), Balicer, Lifsitz et al is statistical garbage with a predetermined result (lumps 16-60 age group when it was already known 16-24 myocarditis risk is 1:4000 and at 50 assumed to be 1:100000, for example)
My interpretation is that the rushed approval missed some safety issues. The vaccine is likely worth it for >60 or people with comorbidities. For young healthy people …. The data doesn’t say that, and does say “something is weird”
We're now discussing the extent to which vaccines are killing lots of people. Your data in support of this is unexplained excess deaths in the US and Israel in 2021.
I remember seeing something here on HN about Israel's excess deaths implying vaccines caused deaths and thinking it was bogus. Please send me the link again.
As for US excess deaths, why can't this just be Covid? Does every state test every death?
Also, the RCT wasn't underpowered. On what basis do you make that assertion? If the vaccines were killing a large number of people, it should've shown up in the RCT. The only way the RCT could have been underpowered is if the vaccines only kill so few people, that you need a gigantic sample size in order to tease out that small effect. That's what underpowered means. Unless you think the vaccine is only killing people after a long period of time (but that would be a separate issue to being underpowered)?
Not exactly. What I'm saying is that the vaccine surely reduces the number of people whose death is attributed to covid, but I see no reason to believe it reduces any death _at all_, and it might even increase death. E.g., you seem to care if covid death is replaced by a flu death (reducing covid death, but not changing all cause), whereas I don't, regardless of vaccine safety.
> I remember seeing something here on HN about Israel's excess deaths implying vaccines caused deaths and thinking it was bogus. Please send me the link again.
I have no idea which link you are referring to. But data here is well summarised here https://twitter.com/OS51388957/status/1485609513428398081 - note the rise in 2021 in ages 20-39, which is not attributed to covid (and Israel has a crazy amount of testing, about 4% of the population each day at this point, averaging 1.5% all year long in 2021). The rise in 0-19 is only compared to 2020 (which is unusually low - quarantines&lockdowns did not save anyone in that age group from covid death, but they did significantly reduce traffic deaths, which a significant percentage of deaths in that age group). I don't have a handy reference for the per-month breakdown, but there is 30-40% excess in months following vaccine drives, and 0-10% in others.
> As for US excess deaths, why can't this just be Covid? Does every state test every death?
There are huge financial incentives to report covid deaths and hospitalizations, the point many people suspect _over_ reporting of covid deaths. States are not even required to test for covid to consider something covid, it's enough for the case to be "likely covid". What this section mostly includes is sudden deaths, where you didn't have any warning -- if you have warning, you usually have an idea for the cause. So you are claiming it's "sudden covid death", where people die from covid without any signs ahead of time, and which only happens starting mid 2021 or so -- does that make any sense to you?
> Also, the RCT wasn't underpowered. On what basis do you make that assertion?
On the basis of the proof you gave above yourself. 24% more deaths within 6 months of the vaccine, for a group of (essentially) healthy 18-50 year olds. Your calculation showed that if it increases death by 24% in that group, you wouldn't see it.
Let's say the vaccine saves 1% of the people over 60 that get it from covid death, but kills 0.01% of all people that get it at any age with "random" cause. What you would see in the general population is ... exactly what you see. Population all cause mortality within statistical variation, mostly; But significant acm increase in groups that tend not to die, such as 20-39.
I'm intimately familiar with Israeli data, residing here now (and .. Israel has some of the best population level tracking, so it's useful to look at). 2020 had lower all cause mortality per 100K than 2015, despite now vaccines. 2021 has higher all cause mortality per 100K than any year since 2010, with vaccines (pending final revisions, but they almost always go up' not down). Corona attributed death do not explain the difference.
Something is weird, and the main thing that changed is ... the vaccine drive.
IIRC, you have provided no explanation for a high VE against Covid-death post vaccination plateau. The only remaining explanation is that the vaccines are effective at preventing death from Covid.
The point you are making here is a separate one which is that the vaccine is actively killing people, unrelated to Covid, and that this downside probably offsets the upside of VE against Covid-death for people below 60.
> On the basis of the proof you gave above yourself. 24% more deaths within 6 months of the vaccine, for a group of (essentially) healthy 18-50 year olds. Your calculation showed that if it increases death by 24% in that group, you wouldn't see it.
No, if there were more people that were dying in both groups, a 24% difference would be highly statistically significant. Given that so few people were dying in both groups, a 24% difference is not statistically significant.
Imagine if there were 2 car crashes in a group of 30,000 and 1 car crash in another group of 30,000. That's a 100% difference. Massive, right? It should be statistically significant because it's 100%? No, it is indistinguishable from noise. An attempt to read signal into the 2 vs 1 car crashes here is not good statistics, despite a 100% difference in deaths.
The only valid conclusion from the RCT is that the vaccines seem safe over the 6 month window. (Technically speaking, we have failed to reject the null of vaccine safety).
> [US data]
I guess, for this, I will need to really dig into the data in order to give your case a fair go. Let's focus on the Israel data for now.
> [Israel data]
Why cant [1] for 20-29 year old males just be noise?
That bump is similar in magnitude to the 2017-2018 dip. What caused the 2017-2018 dip?
[1] https://twitter.com/OS51388957/status/1485609530612400136/ph...
Israeli data does not show a high VE as such, and in fact there is no vaccination plateau in many places thanks to boosting and stuff. I'm not familiar with the data in every country, if you want to bring a specific case, we can discuss. And no, that is not the only explanation - while death is never disputed, covid attribution often is.
> No, if there were more people that were dying in both groups, a 24% difference would be highly statistically significant. Given that so few people were dying in both groups, a 24% difference is not statistically significant.
I guess we have a misunderstanding. You have shown that if there was a 24% increase in death, it would not appear to be statistically significant. Ergo, this test (at n=44,000, with p_death=~1/1000) is not powerful enough to detect a 24% increase in death. In order to detect 24% increase in death, you would need a much larger n. Therefore, you cannot rule out a 24% increase in death based on the only RCT ever done. Your prior says it is therefore rejected. But again, that's your prior taking precedence, it is NOT the test powerful enough to show safety.
> No, it is indistinguishable from noise. An attempt to read signal into the 2 vs 1 car crashes here is not good statistics, despite a 100% difference in deaths.
Exactly. The RCT shows neither that the intervention is effective or safe. It doesn't show it is ineffective or unsafe. At the rate of 1/30K, it is underpowered, which is what I said.
> The only valid conclusion from the RCT is that the vaccines seem safe over the 6 month window. (Technically speaking, we have failed to reject the null of vaccine safety).
No, that is your prior. The only valid conclusion is that the test is not powerful enough to show 24% increase (or 40% increase) in death, even if it is there. You have a test, that, given n=44,000 and p_death=1/1000, will only show an increase in death if it tops 100% or so.
> I guess, for this, I will need to really dig into the data in order to give your case a fair go. Let's focus on the Israel data for now.
https://data.cdc.gov/d/9dzk-mvmi/visualization ; choose "start date" as dimension and "symptoms, signs .. not otherwise" (one before last) as measure.
> Why cant [1] for 20-29 year old males just be noise? That bump is similar in magnitude to the 2017-2018 dip. What caused the 2017-2018 dip?
Note these are cumulative graphs. the 2017-2018 dip was "repaid" later (some people call it "the dry tinder" hypotheses, a version of "reversion to the mean" - won't go into this), whereas 2021 isn't. It is different. The reason I do not believe it is noise is that I looked at the monthly data on the Israeli central bureau of statistics, and it concentrates in the months following the vaccine drive for that age group. I don't have the latest data in a handy form, but look at these graphs mid year:
https://twitter.com/RanIsraeli/status/1403798079699144706/ph... - title says "Mortality in Israel, ages 20-29, feb-01 to april-29, 2016-2021" (The reason apr-30 was excluded is because of an unrelated disaster that would have bumped 2021 higher by ~40 deaths[1])
https://twitter.com/RanIsraeli/status/1422674509535064070/ph... - this also reflects june data. Israel did vaccination by age bands, with 16-29 mostly feb-apr. (But not in the order you'd expect - a big chunk of 18-22 went first through the army, then rest of 20-29, then rest of 16-19)
> Why cant [1] for 20-29 year old males just be noise?
It could. But ... that's your prior speaking, not the data. If your prior is not "vaccines are safe and effective", but rather "I don't know if they are safe or effective", the data can be read either way, and if your prior is "vaccines are unsafe and ineffective", you can also support it with the data. I try to always use the most uninformative prior.
Moreover, the way he's set up the example exaggerates the effect. He's assuming that 78% of the population gets vaccinated between weeks 6 and 11! Not even Israel is that quick. This is a moot point, anyway, given the above.
Given Fenton & Neil can't explain it, what other explanation is there for a high VE against death, when that VE is calculated using 6-12 months of data?
> Exactly. The RCT shows neither that the intervention is effective or safe.
- The RCT shows that the vaccine is highly effective at preventing infection itself in a previous strain.
- The RCT can't possibly show that the vaccine is effective at preventing Covid mortality (due to lack of Covid circulation over study window).
- The RCT can't possibly show that the vaccine is safe within the bounds of a 20-50% death rate increase.
- The RCT shows that the vaccine isn't so dangerous as to be massively increasing the death rate (within the limitations of N=44,000 power).
> Israel's 20-29 mortality
It could still be noise. You dismiss the 2017-2018 dip because it was "repaid". However there's no mechanism for repayment. The 2017-2018 data is i.i.d. barring some understanding of what's driving it (e.g. knowledge of a war or something). The existence of the repayment is really further evidence that the bump in 2021 could be noise. That dip & repayment both show that this level of random variance is to be expected in this data - we've seen it twice.
BUT! Given that these are largely cardiac deaths, and we see it in 3 different age bands at the same time, and we know the mRNA vaccines cause myocarditis, I think you could be right about the interpretation.
I just want to see it in other countries. If it's really driving mortality in this way, we should be able to find it elsewhere.
Did you check the cdc link? Do you have a theory for the rising curve?
Re:the “repayment” - every single person can be modeled I.I.d, but the event of death of each person is an increasing failure rate function. Someone who is in bad condition will (a) die at a significant challenge, be it flu, Covid, or other reasons; and (b) will only die once. In that sense there’s repayment - a weak flu season gives some people 6-12 until the next bad season, but usually not much more if a bad flu year would have killed them. This is known as “dry tinder” hypothesis in epidemiology. It’s not a law of nature, or a certainty, but has been observed in the past in some cases.
Thank you very much for an enriching, respectful conversation. Really uncommon on this subject these days.
- vaccines are killing people
- undiagnosed covid / long covid is killing people
- something innocuous like the reporting methodology has changed and this category is acting like a residual
What makes me think it probably isn't vaccines is that the "Diseases of Heart" category didn't spike. The working hypothesis is that the mRNA vaccines are killing people primarily via myocarditis and heart attacks. I would've thought that this category would therefore have spiked if that was the case?
I'd like to see how many of these are young men, I think that that would be revealing.
I don't think it's that simple to make such a blanket statement anymore. In much/most of the developed world, over half the population has already received 2 doses of vaccine and the conversation is moving from "What about the people who choose to remain unvaccinated?" to "Are you fully vaccinated with just 2 doses?" and "How many boosters do we give and how frequently do we give them?" We've gone from thinking that we might need a booster a year to advising people to get boosters just months after a previous jab.
In light of omicron, the cost/benefit analysis is not anywhere near as clear anymore, especially when it comes to these boosters. There's also the issue that risk varies by magnitudes of order between age and comorbidity risk groups, and overall risk of severe outcomes is lower for all groups with omicron.
From the article:
> She says she has preliminary evidence that vaccination can lead to microclots, although in most cases they go unnoticed and quickly disappear—an effect she and a colleague saw in their own blood and that of eight other healthy volunteers, which they sampled after their vaccinations.
This highlights the fact that there's a ton we still don't know. What if there are subclinical effects of vaccination that have the potential to affect people's health in negative ways, either in the near term or long term? Even small changes in uncommonly tested biomarkers can be clinically meaningful over longer time periods.
Perhaps it's reasonable to argue that made the right decision early on by accepting these unknown risks in light of the efficacy of the vaccines at preventing hospitalization and death pre-omicron. But is it reasonable to do that with never-ending boosters when the currently dominant strain is proving to be far less virulent in all groups? Is it still reasonable to push for vaccination and boosting of children and younger and middle-aged adults who are otherwise healthy and at significantly less risk than older, unhealthy groups?
If we just blindly accept that the cost/benefit analysis of vaccination always favors vaccination, how would we ever know that we've crossed a line where that is no longer the case?
As far as the evolving science on what has to happen, well, it’s a rapidly changing situation. If someone had said at the start of the vaccine schedule, “hey, there’s going to be an incredibly infectious strain in late 2021 that will render vaccines much less effective”, maybe they would have mandated three shots up front. But they didn’t know that, and so when the first round of vaccine trial results came back with a 90%+ efficacy rates, I remember there were people arguing that those numbers were TOO effective, and we should reduce the volume of the second dose or remove it entirely in order to vaccinate more people. Good thing we didn’t do that.
As far as the whatabouts - great, yes, therapeutics are great. More therapeutics. But focusing on omicron’s reduced level of severe cases misses the point of vaccination, which is that we don’t only vaccinate for ourselves, we do it to try to reduce spread in the community. We vaccinate to try to make it less likely that new variants that are better at escaping immune response arise. Maybe if everyone had embraced vaccination we wouldn’t be close to 2k dead/day.
But then governments and businesses started to mandate the vaccines, even though they had no clear vision of the future, while there already were signs of lowered efficacy and side effects. It's all cool as long as it is voluntary with a focus on risk/benefit ratios, but as of now, people are demonizing others who want to wait for a clearer picture. Since all that new science regarding efficacy, side effects and natural immunization is bubbling up now, I am sure that anyone who tried to force the vaccine on others will be deemed pretty reckless soon.
Who would support Rwanda-style forced vaccinations for example?
https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-aga...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
Exposed, not infected, though even if they did say infected, a 10 year timespan is better than a 2 year timespan.
Hypermutation and affinity maturation take at last 3 months following the initial dose.
There's nothing abnormal about taking a booster shot 6 months later.
The Israelis have also found little advantage to a 4th shot.
https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-cov...
That simply shouldn't be happening. The death rate gets 4x higher over last summer, it's an enormous difference. Even if you think there's some statistical or other problem causing this it cannot be said things are "clear" when such basic data has gone in the wrong direction.
Not just totalitarian policy only.
How can we possibly hope to resolve the pandemic in a way that benefits the ordinary people, if any discussion or questioning of the party line is not allowed anymore? Have I suddenly woken up back in the USSR?
You know, the studies can show anything other than the party line only if there is a culture of questioning the party line. Otherwise, the scholars are publishing praises to planned economy and condemning the "rotting West" while the plebs are queueing for bread. That was the fucking state of affairs in the USSR for decades, and the only reason the West didn't sink that low is that it had the culture of questioning the narrative, that so many people today are trying to destroy.
I think i prefer the mystery of human consciousness, but it would be interesting to snapshot the mind of a person that votes up or down on this story and explore the root system of that action.
Maybe people are understanding now?
Real science doesn’t have to censor other opinions.