Trends in menstrual bleeding changes after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination
science.org
science.org
I was disappointed to see how little research there was into menstruation at the time. We were told that the vaccine was perfectly safe, and even questioning the vaccine made you ‘anti-vax.’ Now over a full year later the scientific community is confirming what random message boards have been saying all along. It may be safe, but nobody really cared to look at the impact on menstruation or pregnancy beyond confirming that the rate of miscarriage is unchanged.
Presuming that the amount of time spent was necessary to thoroughly gather, review and document the findings, what would you have wanted done differently?
[1] https://youtu.be/TWk2Z6mzZUU?t=60 (Good Morning America and ABC News talking about menstruation side effects 5 months ago and basically saying the opposite of this study)
Public concessions exactly to your point that long term testing takes time, and assertions to the contrary that tere are no risks of x, y, z were blatant sophistry intended to silence legitimate criticism. These vaccines were mandated at threat of loss of careers for crying out loud...people are still getting fired for not taking them long after covid is any sort threat whatsoever or where there can be plausible deniability about claims the vaccines actually prevent contracting covid etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003019
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004097
(lot of "trust the experts", "you sound like one of the ignorant rubes" type of replies at those links, devoid of any sort of critical thinking, blindly trusting authorities without any acknowledgement to potential downsides outweighing limited upside of vax for many cohorts)
I have to attest and show my vax cards to keep my job or get a new one and - of all things - we had to show vax cards to go to a behind the scene animal encounter at a zoo. Does the vaccinne stop us from catching it or from giving it to others? There is no evidence, yet, that it does.
Am I having to weasel word my post here in the concern that my account will be banned from hacker news even though this is literally what I do for a living? Yes. Yes I am.
Healthcare is a huge field, an orthopedic surgeon’s opinion for example should hardly matter over that of a virologist.
That's not easy, though. The temptation to lash out at users representing the majority view is really high (edit: especially when one notices them posting aggressively or with lazy arguments, which is always easy to do when speaking for a majority view). It looks to me like you're succumbing to that a bit—though not so much that we would moderate or ban you.
It's a hard problem. When people feel surrounded and picked on (and may be surrounded and picked on), they have a tendency to lose it (I'm not talking about you here) and go into fulmination, wake-up-sheeple rants, and so on. Then we moderate or ban them, because protecting the container is more important than rightness or wrongness on $topic. Inevitably they conclude that we banned them because of their views, which is usually not so. (I say 'usually' because nothing is 100% true about moderation and because there exist genuinely extreme cases, which have to be handled differently.)
Past explanations about this if anyone wants to read more:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
edit - I read through the links you posted. My publicly stated concern was likely unfair and I apologize. I will be better.
The fact that it comes out now tells you something went very wrong in the trials. In a functioning science, a careful postmortem of the vaccine trials would be in order.
1. It prevents birth defects from occurring with trial participants, because this product has not yet been fully studied and approved.
2. It reduces the initial knowledge of any female-specific issues with the product, and particularly limits knowledge around pregnancy issues.
https://www.path.org/articles/why-are-pregnant-people-left-o...
Then of course, menstruation age and pregnant women should not be told the vaccine is safe for them, as it was never tested on them. Similar to other pharmaceuticals, it should only be recommend after very careful consideration.
For example, the Tick-Borne Encephalitis Vaccine has a track record of decades, but still, the recommendation in pregnancy is [1] "The vaccine appears to be safe during pregnancy, but because of insufficient data the vaccine is only recommended during pregnancy and breastfeeding when it is considered urgent to achieve protection against TBE infection and after careful consideration of risks versus benefits."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis_vaccin...
that's false.
When these problems were first reported, resolve to stick with the principle of informed consent rather than impose mandates.
There was a huge segment of society angrily screaming at everyone that everything was perfectly safe, if you didn't take it you were anti-vax and wanted to kill grandma. It was absolutely insanity on every social media channel. I'm sure some nuanced bits were lost in the noise, but it was virtually impossible to openly discuss even hesitation to vaccinate, much less complications.
We've heard from 2 local people in our small community who had family members die within 24 hours of vaccination. They were afraid to talk about it because of the blow back that came from anyone mentioning complications. A scary side of a lot of people came out and it's permanently affected my perception of a great many.
Maybe there was a male bias in the clinical trials, but I have a hard time believing any information about complications would have been released or accepted at that time.
Except when it came to people who were pregnant or hoping to get pregnant. There was relatively open discussion of the potential health impacts in those situations because those were not well understood due to the previously mentioned bias.
The general consensus at the time was to get the vaccine, because the thought was that any side effects would be less severe than potentially getting Covid without that extra protection. But those recommendations usually came with a lot more “discuss it with your doctor” disclaimers than the overall “just get it” recommendations for the rest of the population who wasn’t thinking about pregnancies.
That slight reservation shows that it wasn’t just a huge coverup to get people vaxxed. It was a genuine lack of knowledge because of how these medicines are almost always tested.
It was still the correct choice of action for you to get the vaccine and potentially delay conception. It is safer for you and the baby if you are vaccinated.
This study is just providing confirmation to something that all medical professionals likely assumed is true, based on the common knowledge that the flu and cold and other illnesses can also affect fertility.
Correct? To… delay conception? According to… you?
I am not comfortable leaving decisions like that to others.
The prevailing theory, at least at the time, was that widespread vaccination would reduce spread and protect everyone including the unvaccinated.
In that case, it could make sense to force people to delay if it means everyone ends up better off overall.
I know you didn't mean this the way it sounded. I know you are probably well educated and think your choices are obvious. I will only state that I have very strong feelings towards someone who tries to force a decision like this on someone else.
I did - nothing personal obviously, but the problem is that ultimately no matter which side you pick you will have tradeoffs that some people will agree with and some who'd suffer disastrously as a result - just like the flip-side (assuming the initial theory is correct) could potentially involve a lot more deaths and cause just as much grief to families/etc.
Of course in retrospect the point is moot because in practice the majority of countries mismanaged their Covid response and we ended up with the worst of both worlds - the negative effects of lockdowns/mandates/etc without them being followed/enforced enough to actually have any significant effect at eradicating the disease.
Again, no offense intended (and you have the right to be angry), just trying to explain the other side of the debate; there's a tradeoff to be made and either side will have downsides (though IMO in retrospect neither was enforced well enough and as a result we ended up with the worst of both sides without any of the benefits). Ideally there would just never have been a virus and then we wouldn't have to think about these trade-offs at all, but now that it appeared, those decisions had to be made, rightly or wrongly.
Do you actually know this to be true?
But then, they probably thinks it's true regardless.
Turns out the public really doesn't like it when you treat them as idiots and the former group reaped what they sowed.
1. the sci/med establishment seems to have some ongoing ~bias issues that I don't fully understand when it comes to listening to and taking lay people seriously (especially women)
2. it's hard to do complex synthesis of relative risks and rewards across different studies measuring different things for different reasons
3. we've had a lot of uninformed and malicious actors splashing about in the information ecosystem
It's a two-way street. Researchers and public health officials both need to take women seriously and they need to have faith that they can research or discuss details like this frankly through their normal semi-public publication channels without people who don't grok or don't care about the nuance of their research using it as an info-cudgel to induce FUD that ruins lives.
To toss in the requisite anecdata, my sister got pregnant this past fall. She was due for a booster but FUD about it hurting the baby swayed her mind. She got omicron in late December, post-covid complications nearly took her and the baby in late February, and she had to live in the hospital until she delivered in June.
The tricky thing with this though is that, what if there is an unknown side effect due to lack of research that could have hurt the baby (how many years of research have boosters had?), and she didn't experience that side effect but unwittingly chose a different evil?
Until the vaccine kills more pregnant women than covid, it's not tricky. (Spoken, as before, as a selfish older brother who almost lost one of the few people who'll ever think I hung the stars.)
I wrote a little about this @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31208231
That is to say that your sister may have experienced the same effects even if she had taken the booster.
The problem with your view about "uninformed and malicious actors" is that this is how public health describes anyone who points out their mistakes. It's a cliché they use to shut down debate and opposition. I've read a lot of material about vaccines now from non-public health sources and never seen any that could be described as malicious or uninformed. Indeed, they are usually way more informed than those who simply "follow the science". And the idea they're malicious is pure Hollywood fiction. None of them ever are. They just want to know what's true about the disease and vaccines. You could though, argue that about the public health officials who constantly lie to the public about scientific topics in order to generate compliance.
"But human bodies are not anything like software dev" I hear you say. You're right. Biology is way more complicated and we know less about the mechanics of our own bodies than the computers we designed.
If we go forward assuming everything we do is infallible and silencing anybody with concerns, someday we will have a real disaster.
We don’t know much about that either, to be fair.
And if we go down this road hopefully it's sooner rather than later. The people responsible should have to live (or not) through the suck rather than having some yet unknown future generation be saddled with cleaning up the mess.
Without trying to inflame the rhetoric in this discussion (I feel like HN is one of the few places that this is possible) – will this be your stance on new vaccines and medicines going forward?
"Potential unknown side effects" is a critique that can be levied against almost any medical approval process, but the FDA has had an excellent track record with vaccine safety over the last ~70 years.
Yeah, and they did this by going through a lot of detailed processes, study, and trial. Not by doing what was done in this case.
Reproductive toxicity was not studied. At vaccine rollouts, reproductive toxicity was only studied on rats, then about a year later there was finally a single very narrow study of a few dozen women, after billions of doses were administered.
More generally, the control group was lost during the trials (they vaccinated the control group).
I don’t have time at the moment to dig up my sources again (I posted all the relevant studies in my previous comments over the past year), but I assume you won’t mind too much since you also didn’t provide evidence for your claim that corners weren’t cut.
Happily Pfizer and Biontech have had extensive clinical trials ongoing for pregnant women since February 2021[2][3], and there was a preliminary analysis done across 35,691 recipients that had good findings[4]. It's something that regulators have paid a lot of attention to, with tens of thousands enrolled in the V-safe COVID-19 Vaccine Pregnancy Registry.[5]
[0] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-voices/global-regulators...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3547525/
[2] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
[3] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04754594
[4] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2104983
[5] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/vs...
1. More people in the vaccinated arm died than in the unvaccinated arm.
Effectiveness against death = negative. This was ignored because, they said, the difference was too small to be statistically significant. That's not a logical way to use the concept of statistical significance. What these results meant is that the vaccines might kill more people than they save, or it might be a statistical fluke. A normal person would expect such a result to drive demand for more data to resolve the question definitively, but that didn't happen and now heavily vaccinated countries have non-COVID excess death that started at the time of the rollout. The goal of the vaccines was to save lives but now people are dying of non-COVID causes at a greater rate than expected.
2. At least one of the deaths in the Pfizer trial was advertised as non-vaccine related even though it was.
Anonymized study subject C4591001 1162 11621327 was found dead in his apartment several days after taking the first dose, likely time of death was only one or two days after the first dose given that police were called due to a welfare check and his body was found cold. The coroner didn't know he was in a vaccine trial and ruled the death cardiac/arteriosclerosis related, no autopsy was done and this report was then presented as evidence that the death wasn't vaccine related despite the obvious temporal association.
3. No studies of the effects on pregnancy at all. This is normal and to protect babies.
Now we have the birthrate figures for the first quarter 9 months after the vaxx rollout reached mothers of childbearing age and they are down 15%-25% which is a huge difference, quite unprecedented. In Taiwan births are down 27%! So it looks a lot like the vaccines have trashed our already low fertility rates, which is a catastrophic outcome especially as they should never have been administered to women of that age to begin with (look at excess mortality by age for before the vaxx rollout, there's none under 45 for all of Europe and in some places like Sweden, none under 75).
3. The placebo arm received another vaccine, not saline as you would expect.
This is because the bad reactions would unblind people otherwise, so you have to give people something that will give them equally bad reactions. There are two problems with this: (a) the counter-factual in reality is not some random other vaccine but rather no vaccine at all, so they weren't testing against what would actually happen in the real world, and (b) although the trials are advertised as the pinnacle of scientific rationality there is absolutely nothing rational about the placebo effect. Think about it.
4. Cases of severe cardiac damage were fraudulently recorded.
Study subject C4591001 12312982, now known to be a 35 year old Argentinian lawyer named Augusto Roux, started to immediately feel unwell and developed a high fever on his way home after taking his second dose. A couple of days later he fainted and went to hospital where a CAT scan revealed heart inflammation; the doctor concluded vaccine damage. Augusto was told by nurses that there had been a huge influx of patients coming to the hospital from the trial. One nurse estimated maybe 300 people which would have been 10% of the patients from that part of the trial alone, which is why they were able to quickly identify the likely cause.
When he contacted the trial operators to inform them of his hospital visit they wrote down that it was not vaccine related, in contradiction to the diagnosis by the hospital, and that he'd been admitted for "bilateral pneumonia". Later on they updated the diagnosis to be COVID-19, which wasn't even then counted against vaccine effectiveness because he had a negative test.
Even worse, Roux appealed through the regulator to get the trial operators to unblind him (which they falsely claimed they could not do). Immediately before the appeal was due to be heard, the lead trial doctor (a pediatrician!) put in his trial record around the time of the regulatory appeal that Augusto was mentally ill, due to supposed "anxiety". No actual medical work was done to establish this fake diagnosis. It simply appeared.
https://jackanapes.substack.com/p/is-subject-12312982-the-ke...
> about a year later there was finally a single very narrow study of a few dozen women
This one from January covered >2000 women: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35051292/
> These findings indicate that male SARS-CoV-2 infection may be associated with a short-term decline in fertility and that COVID-19 vaccination does not impair fertility in either partner.
Still not a good analogy, but perhaps closer to the case.
Real disasters always happen, but it happens to 'other' individuals, so no one is bothered.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/aug/02/highereduc...
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1949/moniz/articl...
I'm actually working (as a computational mathematician) with an OBGYN and a few other doctors on a paper on this topic right now. We're using real data and a control and doing real Bayesian stats and all of that. But the tragic thing is, we don't need to get fancy. There's so much signal that the vaccine is bad for women's reproductive health that it really is obvious. I hope we can find an uncaptured journal to get it published in.
This paper is pure propaganda that's toeing the line about vaccine safety. It's idea laundering so they can later point to an article in "Science" showing that it's safe.
I'm so sad that Science (the journal) as fallen so far and is so captured.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/10/ten-thousand-report-me...
[Dutch Reference]: https://www.lareb.nl/news/veel-meldingen-menstruatiestoornis...
It seems so many commenters here miss that sentence, and live in a mental world where viruses are mostly benign but healthcare is mostly deadly.
Therefore, a statistical control group for such a trial as you describe doing is not an unvaccinated cohort for the same time period, but rather for infinite time. Thus your results will require substantial adjustment for the eventual rates of encountering COVID (and the estimated rates of equivalent adverse effects), since your trial will presumably be of finite duration.
https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2022/01/placebo-effec...
It seems very unintuitive but when you have these studies without a control they are shockingly biased… not due to anybody’s fault, just human nature.
Also consider that it wasn't until the late 90's that the flu vaccine was approved for pregnant women and they were still worried about it. So we have the original adverse event studies post flu vaccine and compare them to post covid vaccine.
You are right, there are lots of confounds and interactions, we are careful to handle that properly. We're a bunch of nerds who don't have a dog in the political fight, we just want to show the data.
Viruses are indeed mostly benign. Medical malpractice is a leading cause of death. In any case, it is not an either or. This vaccine does not prevent infection, the risk reduction for an otherwise healthy person, especially with the new variants and boosters, has never been established in a scientifically rigorous fashion. Yet, it is being recommended even to healthy children. You can hope and speculate that it has a benefit, but “the science” does not say so.
It doesn't exist, nor does anyone "in charge" want it to exist, or so it appears. The FDA waved through a trial for children with a sample size of about 1000, almost guaranteeing that a rare side effect like Myocarditis would not show up. That's a clear signal of regulatory capture, if you ask me.
The data that does show a benefit generally does not stratify across factors like age and risk factors, or if it does, extremely coarsely. That's, of course, misleading - perhaps intentionally so. In general, the paucity of meaningful data is just staggering.
Over 50s effect of vaccination on hospitalization. If it is protecting older people against hospitalization then we can expect it to protect younger people from severe effects too. Unless you think the over 50s are some sort of frog vs the younger tadpole.
Plenty more everywhere.
So why would some of us be so vehemently anti-vax?
1) Belief in 'natural'. This has been a common marketing ploy since 'green' became a thing if not before. Of course the world we actually live in is entirely artificial - just as well as our 'natural' lives were nasty, brutish, and short.
2) Attempting to assert 'independence' or 'agency'. Again another marketing ploy, really we have very little agency or independence - however it is useful to make us believe we do and we should exercise it with our credit cards.
3) Attempting to be contrarian or a 'free thinker' in order to impress (ourselves? others?). Much much more humility is required before starting down that path.
4) Ideological/political propaganda/pressure from our peers. Belief systems have a tendency to become pathological when contained within a tightly delimited group. Probably this is a very great danger to our social discourse at present - though whether worse than before is unclear.
This sort of population-level data is bogus. The data is usually fudged in some way, for example by making it difficult to get counted as "vaccinated" after infection.
The source you quoted (at the end of '21) claimed a factor of 18x to 52x difference in hospitalization rate, but the current data has that down to a factor of 2.7x to 3.8x:
https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiMTgwMzZlZWYtN2E0Ny0...
Did the vaccine really lose that much in potency? Do the boosters work at all? That data can't tell us and this is why we need trials.
> Over 50s effect of vaccination on hospitalization. If it is protecting older people against hospitalization then we can expect it to protect younger people from severe effects too.
We may expect that, but we can't know. We do know that the infection risk is massively lower in the younger age groups. We also know the risk for Myocarditis after vaccination is massively higher in the younger age groups, particularly in males. We don't know why that is, however. Remember, we're not just looking for a risk reduction for one particular disease that many people already had anyway, we're looking for a net benefit of further administrations.
> So why would some of us be so vehemently anti-vax?
All irrelevant to the lack of scientific data. For you to cough up some "business insider" article tells me you haven't exactly followed the relevant publications (or lack thereof) either.
The effects of COVID are so extraordinarily age skewed that this inference doesn't hold.
Edit: it’s pretty sad that there are people who have such an ingrained agenda that they have convinced themselves that, yes, this IS how a professional involved in a scientific public health study behaves.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/sweden-birthrate-update-m...
https://pasteboard.co/uhkdWFvhCf9c.png
edit: this showed up in my inbox during dinner - more evidence https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/new-data-from-germany-birt...
But yes, one way to answer that question definitively would be to do a cohort study on conception rates. Split the data by vaccine status. This can't be done because public health agencies systematically refuse to do this sort of study, nor do they expose the necessary raw data. They don't want anyone being able to answer these sorts of questions. Most data that is available has to be forced out via FOIA requests and the courts.
Long in the future, when people can admit they are wrong, we will look back on this period with disgust. But, for now, carry on everyone - just a few more people banned and finally we can stop the spread.
I'm no anti-vaxxer, but that trips my BS alert bigtime. All I hear is "duck and cover".
Stress, eating different food, eating foods at different times, gaining a couple pounds, losing a couple pounds, getting sick, not sleeping enough, sleeping too much, etc etc etc.
The menstrual cycle is often a very sensitive system, and one I would argue most people are very unfamiliar with.
I get that it's a sensitive system and it can be affected by a lot of benign factors. But if you don't know why your car is misfiring, how can you say with 100% certainty that there's not an issue with the engine?
I (a male) have always been super horny ever since I hit puberty. I woke up nearly every morning with an erection as long as I can remember. I’ve never had problems with erections with my wife.
I got the first Pfizer vaccine last year when it became available. The next time I was intimate with my wife, I lost my erection during sex - the first time it has ever happened in my life. “Normal” side effect they said.
Things got a little better so I was encouraged. I got the second vaccine as scheduled. The next two times we had sex I completely lost my erection during sex.
I’ve been searching to see if other men have had the same problem but either I am the only one, or everyone just sweeps it under the rug.
It’s been almost a year and I rarely have random erections. I thankfully don’t lose erections during sex, but I am no longer horny. I used to be the one to initiate sex through our marriage but now my wife usually does. My sex life has taken a huge hit since getting the vaccines. Of course I can’t blame the vaccines, but you will not be able to convince me that this is a coincidence.
The reason I am writing this is in case there are other men like me who think they are the only ones, because anyone who even thinks the vaccine could cause problems gets labeled an anti-vaxxer nut job. I was pro vaccine (I got my series right away) and still think the vaccine is important, but I think it’s a shame that no one is “allowed” to talk about side effects.
This is my anecdotal story.
It's hard to blame them for not spending a ton of time before approving the vaccine considering safe changes to menstruation when they were working to do something about the dead bodies which were piling up so quickly they had to be stacked into semi trailers and dumped into mass graves. People were dying in vast numbers and we needed something safe and effective at preventing those deaths and the vaccines were exactly that. Safe and effective.
Obviously, they were very much concerned with pregnancy and miscarriage. A vaccine that makes people infertile or causes them to miscarry would never have been approved, but it's pretty reasonable that every possible impact wouldn't be noticed and deeply studied before getting it out to people.
Especially those side effects that only impact women since women (especially pregnant women) tend to be underrepresented since they're much more hesitant to enter drug trials in the first place leading to limited data. You can't blame the women for that. If it's unknown if a drug has a negative impact on fertility signing up to try it out on your body or your baby is taking a huge risk. The FDA's policy used to be to exclude women from the earliest trials to protect them for this reason, but that too caused problems to be missed. Adding women in early means it's more likely that a problem that affects only a small percentage of women will be caught, but there are no certainties.
For what it's worth, the menstruation issue wasn't ignored by science either. Covid infection also causes changes to menstruation and there was some evidence and concerns that infections may impact fertility in some cases. All of this has been looked into as reports came in. That's the process working. Vaccines are shown to be likely safe so they go out to the public, then doctors and patients continue to report issues that arise to gather data on side effects.
Some early papers about the impact of the vaccines on women (and pregnancies) include:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S102845592...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7522626/
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.11.21264863v...
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2211
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6....
https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/9900/Severe_A...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.17.21257337v...
My informed guess would be that the nanoparticles combine with HDL/LDL in the blood stream, and end up in the cells that consume these, but this is speculation.
This would end up disrupting the ovarian endocrine cells (cholesterol is the chemical precursor of sex hormones), which can regenerate once the RNA and its product has been eliminated. The future egg cells should not be affected (and AFAIK the ovarian reserve is not damaged by the COVID vaccines), and neither is sperm production.
I am stunned by this. Seven days? Is there really no reason to think that a vaccine candidate might have adverse effects more than a week later?
That's exactly what the parent commenter said. Your children are affected, but your first grandchildren should be safe.
The poster implies that there could be unknown long term effects of a vaccine, and conflates long term effects with birth defects, which, of course, appear only after a fetus has developed enough to spot defects in a sonogram or other imaging. It's a scare tactic.
Remember when it was claimed the spike protein is out of your body in 48 hours? This study found the spike protein persists in the body for at least 16 days and the antigen can be found for at least 60 days.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00076-9
Thats longer than if you actually contract COVID.
So now knowing this, would you monitor for safety longer?
> More than half of the clinical trial participants were followed for safety outcomes for at least four months after the second dose. Overall, approximately 12,000 recipients have been followed for at least 6 months.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
But also "Phase 4" clinical trials are where the study of long-term effects occur. Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J are all doing those today. Here's a Jan 2022 paper that has some information on current-ish specifics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8665991/
The only symptom that I have yet to hear from the vaccination is loss of smell/taste.
If you define “side effects the virus can cause” (a term that usually is meaningless, “side effects” are unintended effects of a therapy, and thus deoebd on both the therapy and what it is intentionally used for) to mean “effects associated with the immune response to the virus” this is true by definition, but if you mean “symptoms of infection” it seems improbable.
> The only symptom that I have yet to hear from the vaccination is loss of smell/taste.
A lot of what you hear is reports of events after vaccination that have very little effective filtering for whether they are caused by the vaccination or some other cause (including COVID infection.)
> The nature of this survey means that we cannot compare the incidence of different experiences here with the general population (meaning, 40% of this sample having an experience does not mean that is the rate of that experience out in the world). The associations described here are not causal but provide evidence to better study these trends further. We emphasize that menstrual bleeding changes of this nature are generally not indicative of changes to fertility.
“Nearly half of the participants of a recent study who were menstruating regularly at the time of the survey reported heavier bleeding during their periods after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/well/live/covid-vaccines-...
Of course people when you ask them to reflect on something when there are news reports floating around about the issue are going to over report.
In Ontario the politicians said they are following the advice of chief medical officer in implementing the lockdowns. But there's a moment of dark political satire, when on hot mic one of the chief medical officers before a press conference say's "I just read what they tell me to".
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-health-official-responds-...
"The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments in ethics and psychology, involving stylized ethical dilemmas of whether to sacrifice one person to save a larger number. The series usually begins with a scenario in which a runaway tram or trolley is on course to collide with and kill a number of people (traditionally five) down the track, but a driver or bystander can intervene and divert the vehicle to kill just one person on a different track." -Wikipedia
Isn't it possible they're just talking about what their media advisers wrote for them? It doesn't mean they didn't set the agenda.
If we registered and correlated every cold we catch there might be same kind of signal.
The weird insistence on anti-body levels is another weird thing, just plainly ignoring immune memory.
I suspect that we are not seeing grave illness anymore in most of the population due to the immune naive population being very low and the few people dying now are in the traditional old age and immune compromised categories that also die by other respiratory viruses under similar circumstances.
Reading the science so much is fumbling in the blind (over 2 years into this). They are still pushing for under 5s to be vaccinated in some countries even though at the efficacy of the vaccine is less than 40% something that would be considered a failure in any other vaccine development and knowing the groups it he lowest risk group there is.
And before you call me anti-vaxer I had two doses of Pfizer and have had covid 3 times.
Flu vaccine has historically also been around 25-50% effective, and is still recommended and paid for by insurance, since the benefit is measured positively to you. So there is some precedent for disappointing numbers still being promoted for their small estimated benefits in net.
The reason they had to do this is because the vaccines cause fixation. The body can't tell the different spikes apart, so injection with mRNA coding for Omicron spike leads the body to create (not very effective) antibodies against the original spike from the first round of vaccines. Immune memory seems to lack resolution, or possibly Omicron evolved specifically to confuse it in that way, but whatever the cause is, the body just says "a spike! i know what to do!" and doesn't learn from the new round of adjusted vaccines.
Unfortunately this type of so-called biomarker study is now becoming commonplace. They are confusing the means for the end.
I suspect part of the reason is hospitals are no longer killing their patients through ineffective protocols.
Remember the big shortage of ventilators, and how the government is going to get GM to build them. Then it quietly went away because ventilators were killing patients.
“gender-affirming hormone treatments” - How did we get to a point where double-speak was acceptable?
when was it ever not?
People dying and people with - and still getting- long COVID would probably disagree with that statement.
But you do you, is the point. I'm perfectly fine with my choice of not taking it: I'm not overweight, I lift weights and exercise regularly, have low bodyfat percent, I get plenty of sunlight for Vitamin D and immune support. I do not need the vaccine.
This mentality of extreme safetyism applied indiscriminately even now is insane. Are you going to take covid boosters for the rest of your life? The disease is going to be continually weakened and become just another coronavirus. The rest of us will move on with our lives. Quite simply, I'm not worried about Covid at all. Can you say the same about the long term prospects of endless boosters on your body? I sure couldn't.
Tell me now how 100% confident you are there are no side effects because the propaganda experts and drug companies told you so, so we can come back to it in 6 months when more side effects start being discovered and posted here on HN...
Mostly the very old, at this point; though I'm in my 40s where the rate starts to tick up. But beyond that, there's the risk of long term morbidity. My niece was early 20's, active, in good health, with no comorbidities and is now pseudo-disabled. The vaccine only removes about 30% of the risk of this type of outcome, but still that alone is worth it.
> What is the vax status of those that are dying, presumably many have taken the vaccine anyways yes?
Looks like people who have taken the vaccine have about 6-10% of the risk of death of those who haven't, controlling for comorbidities.
> Are you going to take covid boosters for the rest of your life?
A lot of us might-- though I've got a fair bit of hope that we come up with something better in the next couple of years. I will do my best to avoid infection in the meantime.
> The disease is going to be continually weakened and become just another coronavirus.
Viral selection is complicated. Yes, in the very long term, many viruses end up becoming less virulent, but others go in the other direction.
> Can you say the same about the long term prospects of endless boosters on your body? I sure couldn't.
I'm pretty dang confident that I can bound the risk from the vaccine to be much lower than the risk from COVID infection.
I've never understood this type of selfishness. If you get sick you will, on average, infect another 2-3 people. It's not just about you.
2. Since Delta, both vaxxed and unvaxxed cases have the same viral load.
3. Since December at least, boosted and vaxxed have higher RATE per 100k of covid infections.
So whatever benefit one gets is individual benefit only and not getting others sick in any different way as the vaxxed folks do.
It does look like there's about a 20-30% reduction of infection from random surveys of the population and from nucleocapsid seroprevalence assays; transmission-once-infected is very difficult to measure, but it would be surprising if it did not have some effect.
> 2. Since Delta, both vaxxed and unvaxxed cases have the same viral load.
There's a key fallacy here: we're looking at a population of cases detected by similar means and then found that they have similar viral loads. Not too surprising of a finding (survivorship bias, basically).
There's some data indicating that viral copy assays are not good proxies for finding true infectious shedding -- and that vaccinated individuals can be much better in this regard despite having higher loads. e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01816-0
> 3. Since December at least, boosted and vaxxed have higher RATE per 100k of covid infections.
This is absolutely and completely untrue. There's been a couple of times where the vaxxed have been higher in the data series, but the overwhelming trend in the data has been the opposite. e.g. right now in Santa Clara County, where I am, the unvaccinated case rate is approximately 268 per 100,000 per week; the fully vaccinated case rate is about 46 per 100,000.
Of course, people who elect vaccination don't behave exactly the same as those who don't... and so many people in S.C.C. are vaccinated that the exact number of unvaccinated has some uncertainty (but it's not off by a factor of 5).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
3. It is true and the government admits that boosted and vaxxed have higher rates. Ontario source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220228051509/http://covid-19.o...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220331081902/http://covid-19.o...
Here's how it looks:
Posting a disputed study that I criticized to try and refute me, when I posted important 2022 followup data to viral shedding based on actual infectivity rather than just RNA copies indicates you either didn't read my comment or didn't understand it.
> 3. It is true and the government admits that boosted and vaxxed have higher rates. Ontario source:
I just knew you were going to point to the Ontario data from Mar-Apr. This is why I said in a couple places they popped above for a couple data points. Are you deliberately being obtuse?
Compare to basically any other data series from any other time; e.g. my locale:
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-case-rates-vaccination-...
That study is not alone either. NEJM has similar studies too.
Your link seems to be an outlier. Denmark, UK, Scotland, and other provinces in Canada also show the same higher rates in boosted and fully vaxxed than unvaxxed. Walgreens data for US also shows this. Look at page 3 of:
https://www.walgreens.com/businesssolutions/covid-19-index.j...
Canadian government seroprevalence data also shows that between December 2021 and May 2022, there were at least 17.5 million infections. This is in a population of 38 million. This was despite extremely high vax rates.
So, how exactly did the vaccine prevent infection and transmission? Vaxxed folks were allowed to enjoy services with a false sense of security and spread Covid to others while unvaxxed folks were denied from society.
Please don’t resolve to ad hominem attacks on hacker news.
You are responding to a practical concern with a theoretical counter. But practically speaking the vaccine doesn't change the picture at all. The situation pre-vaccine was COVID was going to spread like wildfire after any lockdown attempt ended and everyone was going to be exposed to it. The situation post-vaccine, even with that reduction in infection rates, was the same.
Ditto speed, since this is an exponential process that reduction won't have an especially material effect on when everyone gets COVID.
We ran a natural experiment on this in Australia [0] - having a highly vaccinated population didn't appear to have any impact at all on COVID transmission rate or reach in who gets infected. The numbers are not convincing that the vaccine did anything for transmissions. The effect of personal protection seems to explain all the benefits of the vaccine.
The people who don’t mask up, regardless of having taken the vaccine or not, are actually the biggest problem. I wouldn’t call them selfish because it is their ignorance of how disease works that is to blame. I wouldn’t even blame most of them in light of all the propaganda and confused public servants that say otherwise. I would reserve the selfish tag for the people who know they are carriers and continue to go maskless anyway.
So, we can shrug this one off, because in the end it _only_ kills a percent or so of people, overwhelmingly already infirm or elderly.
We may not be so lucky the next time, and this attitude _will_ get us in trouble when that happens.
Not sure why that is hard to understand. If this virus killed 95% of people would you be arguing against lockdowns?
I think most people can agree that its one of those to little to late situations in china and they need to reconsider at this point, but that doesn't make what they are trying to do wrong.
Lets say another virus is discovered tomorrow, how high would the mortality have to be before you were to accept all those effects you list?
And lastly, how high would it have to be before you would accept actually shooting people who violated quarantine procedures? With the understanding that a statement like never, could mean the extinction of humanity (a valid choice I guess).
Especially something that is so drastically over represented in the sick, old, and obese but not the young and healthy. Why is it justified to shoot healthy strong young people, privileging the interests of the comorbid group? In a situation where again, they're going to get sick anyways? What if we just shot the old and fat people and then everyone could stop worrying about covid?
To answer you, who knows, but much much much higher than 0.2% death rate for under 50's etc.
I think what China's doing is wrong and foolish, but maybe their citizens like being locked in their apartments for such a trivial disease, who knows?
In the actual circumstance in the real world, animals would need to be culled because it passes between deer and cats and humans. Maybe we start shooting cats and deer now? No more pet cats.
This is the dumbest argument I've ever seen made on here. If it killed 95% of people, no sane person would be arguing because it becomes obvious that you are in danger. If 1.1% of the population dies and you don't have any of the health risks coinciding with mortality from the virus, then you have little reason to put your life on hold, unless you're unlucky and don't realize you have some unidentified health issue, which at that point, is a rounding error.
I guess if you're on the side doing the coercing then, yeah, at that point you probably think you're saving everyone from themselves.
Comorbidities are tricky - and triathletes are a weird body type to build and maintain.
I would advise a balance between weightlifting, moderate cardio, lots of sunlight exposure for Vitamin D and testosterone support, and a balanced diet.
And yes there are instances of young, non co-morbid people dying from covid. Statistically, not that many, so I'm not worried about it.
That is exactly what I do, and I never get sick.
hearing unhealthy people threaten me with disease just doesn't carry water.
also i dont go anywhere except back and forth from jobsite to house, i dont interact with many people, and i live in a rural area.
Maybe your next thought is the vaccine makes the conference safer. Let's play Choose your own Adventure. You have to sit next to someone on a crowded airplane in economy class for 3 hours and this person loves to talk. You get to choose that this person is either a) vaccinated, or b) tested negative for covid every day for the past 3 days. Which do you choose?
It's fascinating and scary that fear has led our society to let segregation creep in under the guise of public health.
From a public health perspective, universal (or near-universal) vaccination is an unequivocal good. Given the sum of what we know about both COVID and any side effects of vaccination, this remains the case.
Is it a vaccine, or a therapy? Why does the supposed efficacy of the vaccines ability to prevent spread of covid wane so quickly? At best the vax is novel therapy that temporarily boosts immune system to fight the current strain. But whatever the side effects of this mechanism, they can accumulate with each successive round of boosters. Is it safe to keep taking these shots every 6 to 12 months? Who knows... but if they have to be repeatedly taken, they clearly do not effectively stop the spread of covid which the evidence shows.
I'll take my chances as having good enough genetics and lifestyle, and being young enough, in aggregate to tip the scales well past the point where getting covid and whatever natural immunity that it provides is just fine.
>latent comorbidity
Yea and I can get hit by a bus tomorrow. The main comorbidities that dominate the stats as present in over 80% of deaths are obesity and age. I have neither. We have to be realistic here.
Look at Haiti vs New Zealand regarding vax rates vs death rates. It is not unequivocally good.
The COVID vaccines are prophylactic and therapeutic. So far, they seem to be mostly attenuating with respect to their immunity, not unlike flu vaccines (in two regards: both weak cross-strain protection and much milder illness when infected with the targeted strain). Additionally, there's decent empirical evidence that "breakthrough" cases are generally less contagious.
"Being realistic here" means getting a free, readily available vaccine that reduces the risk of serious illness or death. Separately, it means doing your civic duty to reduce load on our medical institutions and lessen the latent risk to those around you (who may have comorbidities that you are not privy to and are not entitled to be privy to).
That’s just a logical fallacy.
Aspirin cures my headache, but I will still get headaches - does that mean aspirin is useless?
Furthermore, it is pretty obvious that a non-replicating fragment of a pathogen given even every 6 months is going to cause less damage than the real thing (also available every 6 months the way things are going). Luckily we've done extensive trials to back that up.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/25/long-covid-...
2. Healthy young people under 50 or even 60 were not dying or getting hospitalized. Whatever risk they want to take, they should be able to take it without mandates. Since the vax does not prevent infection or transmission, one is only taking individual risk and not affecting others.
Compassionate grounds such as taking care of sick family member, funeral etc were also not exempted.
Everyone who were COVID+ despite being vaxxed were allowed to fly, go to gym, restaurant etc. Meanwhile, an unvaxxed person wasn't allowed to do the same even if they could show a negative PCR test.
This isn't true at all, plenty of businesses have a no-symptoms policy. On the flip side, I don't think they could effectively screen everyone anyway.
We still have them actually in July 2022. Kids aren't allowed to go to summer camp without being 2 dose vaxxed. Travellers who are unvaxxed need to show a negative test at airport, another negative test on 8th day and quarantine for 14 days.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-case...
By 35 and again by 50 your risk of death's increased. By 60 you're already seeing a disproportionately large amount of deaths.
What you said only applies to Latinos
No. What I said applies to all cohorts. Take a look at the bar chart entitled "Percentage of deaths vs. population". That's not broken out by race or gender, only by age.
Below 35 deaths are underrepresented. When you hit 35+ the inner bar (percentage of deaths) becomes a larger part of the outer bar (percentage of total population), by 50 it's nearly equal, and for 60+ deaths are overrepresented.
https://i.imgur.com/dlDhdix.png
Source:
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/
Here's how the Ontario's hospitalization and death rate looks based on age and vax status in the 4 month period:
Source:
https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ep...
Even before the vaccinations, the pre-vaccine infection fatality rate in anyone under 50 or even 60 was absolutely tiny. Look at page 1475 of this which shows the IFR pre-vaccine based on each age year:
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821...
and that's with 3 shots. i'm almost sure i would be in an ICU if i didn't get any shots.
How could we prove this hypothesis?
It's a meme really.
In any case, I never had any shots, got Covid last December, was sick for 3 days with a bad sore throat and recovered just fine shortly after.
Many people are rightly not so obsessed with irrational safetyism and have no problems avoiding the vaccine and getting on with life.
I have chosen not to receive any Covid19 vaccinations and so I am "unvaccinated". I thought it was never going to happen, but eventually I contracted covid19, over Easter period this year. I too experienced myalgia, a mild fever. I also had a sore throat for about 2 days. I didn't completely lose my sense of smell, but coffee (for example) didn't taste great. Same with wine. That anosmia, such as it was, persisted for a week or two.
But that's it really. It was all over in about 2.5 days. I would not describe what I experienced as "harsh". I've had Influenza, and that was harsh. Sat me on my arse for a solid week. But not this. By day 4, I was doing household chores and more or less back to normal (mild anosmia not withstanding).
So, YMMV. :-)
My girlfriend got vaccinated and boosted, caught COVID, was bed ridden for several days and then general malaise and tiredness for two weeks.
I got vaccinated and boosted, went to the same party my girlfriend was infected at, stood next to the same people that infected her, took her to the hospital to get tested because we didn't think it was COVID, and I never even got infected.
Anecdotes are literally useless when discussing these things. There's so many individual variations about how you respond to COVID, to the point where your experience is likely affected by how stressed you have been the month you caught it.
This is why the people who actually care about understanding the issue collect large amounts of data, and that data largely shows getting a vaccine to significantly reduce your chance of getting it, and your chance of dying from it.
What exactly are they suggesting. That the vaccine was engineered to have a more negative effect on non-white women?
Yes, a persons race does have an impact on outcomes regardless of economic factors.
Recently, a few conferences talked about us trying to ignore race and instead move to genetic haplogroups as (in essence) race was used just to get at these genetic conditions (from their haplogroup). Its too early to say if that will happen. I am guessing eventually yes but not in our lifetime.
Hope this helps.
I certainly wouldn't.
I hate to be so cynical, but it's hard not to be.
I quote from their abstract: "...among a convenience sample...39% of people on gender-affirming hormones"
convenience sample means "I asked my friends on social media"
And 39% on gender-affirming hormones! Yes, I know trans is all the rage now, but it's not 39% of the population! It's a highly biased sample.