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Comment by ta8645 | Hacker News Reader

While this appears to be a positive outcome... this:

  "our studies highlight the need for more research to determine this platform's true impact on human health."

Is a terrifying admission about the gamble that was taken. The truth is, we didn't know for sure if things would be this positive or not.

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"Please keep funding us, we're doing important work!" is a pretty standard sentence you see in some variation or other in most medical studies.

I never understood how people bought into the whole "we assure you it's safe*" narrative. Unless, there's a secret time machine, there's no data (read: no science) to support such hyperbole. And yet, such statements were quickly followed by "...trust the science..." as well as attemps to marginalize those who asked to see that data from the future.

Such shenanigans doesn't build trust. It undermines it. As if gov and science need less trust at this point.

*effectively an untested type of vax technology is somehow miraculously free of any/all possible short and long term side effects? The comparisons to say the Polio vax were embarrassingly naive, at best. I don't get it.

The anti-vaccination / bashing of anti-vaxx people was a pretty big and one sided internet niche pre-2020. In a way that you did have some tinfoil hat people, you had some whistleblowers, and you had an army of people bashing them left and right. And we're not even talking polio, but with stuff like chicken pox, where there was a vaccine introduced, but the folk solution (locking up the sick kids with the healthy kids so everybody gets over it) were at conflict that turned super, super vicious.

In a sense it was an already ongoing battle with every argument already deployed and pre-determined, but all of a sudden everybody and their grandma were involved in the conversation against their will. The perma-online people predictably took up the positions they did, while a plethora of other opinions / skepticism emerged but were all summarily heaped in the tinfoil hat. Now it seems to be unwinding, and it feels just as surreal as the last few hours of a rave where everybody is kind of sobering up and looking at a very bothersome way home.

Question: What do you call the pro-jab'ers that used lies and hyperbole to "scientifically" justify their position?

Not being troll-y or snarky. It's a legit question: Why was the self-proclaimed high road given a free pass on taking the low road?

There's been a clear and obvious double standard. Why has that lede been buried?

“safe and effective” has a technical definition. This fact was abused by people in power.

I always said that the public health official must be absolutely certain they that all of the vaccines they were pushing are as safe and effective as they claimed before even considering mandating them. We now know they were wrong about at least one of them: the J&J vaccine is no longer being offered in my health system both because it's questionable safety profile and the fact that it is not as effective. Once we start preventing children from entering schools and removing people from their jobs (some with decades of experience) for not wanting to take a vaccine, the burden of proof is on the health officials to prove they are right. We also must remember that these measures have second order effects. I fear by abusing the trust the public had in physicians, public health officials have cause possibly permanent damage to the trust the average citizen has for the health community (this is especially pronounced among the underserved community).

> and the fact that it is not as effective.

Well, none delivered as promised. We went from "this will do it..." to "...get your booster boosted...and boosted..."

I get it. It's difficult to say. That's the true nature of science. The problem is, that level of honesty and transparency was completely abandoned. Instead we got "it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated" which was yet another hyperbolic lie. Instead we got Fauci suggesting "wear two masks" instead of coming clean (i.e., those disposable masks didn't have any science to support their effectiveness. That is, they're useless*).

These are not opinions. These are facts. Yet we're in collective mass denial??

*Why didn't we already know this? And why isn't anyone asking why that was?

public health is about trade offs.

a fast spreading pandemic vs. this or that public health measure.

the damage to the public health community is done not because of things like operation warpspeed, but because of the realpolitik of WHO, China, Trump, etc.

responsible participants have to take the time and effort to communicate with the correct framing: as new data comes in the best course of action can change, the current best is X, based on data D1, D2, ...

of course what ended up happening was random factoids sprinkled all over various media channels linked to local/state/federal/global decisions/recommendations.

government agencies are absolutely not up to the task of doing responsible communication to the public in this day and age.

> Is a terrifying admission about the gamble that was taken.

Right, but according to Reddit, the Australian/New Zealand governments and other places people who didn't want to expose themselves to this stuff where all ignorant selfish assholes.

I think you might have been browsing an alternate-reality Reddit. The one I read was constantly bemoaning that no one in America was taking it seriously, "why aren't we locking down like China and New Zealand", etc.

New Zealand locked down early, but they vaccinated relatively late.

It's strange to me how so often you will see people bemoaning Reddit for some opinion that goes against the grain, when in reality Reddit is composed of a sampling of millions of humans and therefore is fully aligned with mainstream thought. Some people see a few comments or threads that disagree with them and they use that to say "All of Reddit has lost its mind", always forgetting the vast numbers of comments and threads where people generally agree with them. Funny how people do that..

Reddit is a sampling of roughly 20% of 18-29 year old men who use the Internet. That’s not exactly “mainstream thought”, it’s a self selected demographic and what is popular on Reddit reflects that.

> and therefore is fully aligned with mainstream thought

It's obviously not fully aligned with 'mainstream thought', when the expression of many widely help positions will get individuals and whole subreddits banned

Almost every single biomedical paper includes a line that says "more research is needed" because one of the main goals of research is to figure out what research to do next.

Why is everyone voluntarily practicing amnesia? We had a lot of trial data showing safety and efficacy before the vaccines were rolled out.

It is standard practice with influenza to update the stains. 0 reason to think that updating the mRNA for COVID vaccines from one strain to another is dangerous. None. Zap. Zero. Zilch.

mRNA vaccine research has been going on since 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine

with lots of money and research going into the technology, I don't understand where folks are coming from.

This already-tired argument again.

Vaccines for influenza have been around for decades. The first covid shot was the first ever mRNA technology ever approved for human use.

Now the booster doesn’t simply swap out strains. It moves from a monovalent to a bivalent (original formula plus the Omicron Ba4/Ba5 formula) and we shouldn’t test it? The first ever bivalent mRNA vaccine. Deployed to everyone on the planet. With absolutely no human testing done.

If you’re okay with it, that’s great… that’s your personal choice to trust corrupt health authorities and for-profit vaccine manufacturers. Let me know how it goes.

You are demonstrating a failure of Bayesian reasoning. Just because something is new doesn't mean we know nothing about it.

This. (biochemist)

The ba.4/ba.5 is not the first bivalent mRNA vaccine. The ba.1 bivalent vaccine was the first, which has been studied in a larger population than the ba.4/5 bivalent vaccine.

The FDA instructed Pfizer and moderna to reformulate based on the changing variant landscape as ba.4/5 overtook ba.1

The ba.4/5 bivalent vaccine was an extremely incremental change from the ba.1 booster

> It is standard practice with influenza to update the stains.

A questionable one. Depending on the year, getting the influenza shot has been shown to give you negative efficacy. How nice would that be if we saw a -50% efficacy this year, wouldn't that be problematic for our strapped healthcare systems.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2017/02/studies-...

> In the 2014-15 season (when, as mentioned, the vaccine was unchanged from the year before and a drifted H3N2 strain was circulating), "negative effects of prior vaccination were pronounced and statistically significant," the researchers found. VE in those who received only the 2014-15 vaccine was estimated at 65% (95% CI, 25% to 83%), whereas VE for patients vaccinated two seasons in a row was -33% (95% CI, –78% to 1%).

Good thing we have data on the bivalent vaccine that gives us confidence that won't happen.

It's good to ask questions but you should probably ask them of someone who knows what they are talking about instead of spreading conspiracies.

How am I spreading conspiracy theories? You suggest to grandfather the covid shots on the coattails of the flu shots but are not concerned about the combined potential for negative effectiveness on future variants as seen happens some years with the flu shot and the increased infectiousness of sars-cov2 as compared to flu?

The data has already been collected and that's not the case. You aren't paying attention, you are just re-stating your debunked questions.

Are you thinking that the 2014 flu vaccines were released with the understanding that they would have negative efficacy for those who'd had the prior years vaccines? Why would they have done that?

I can't recall seeing any human studies on mRNA vaccines before the Pfizer one, which was unblinded and the control group vaccinated after six months. I also don't understand why this was done, since there will never exist any long term high quality data because of this.

That’s true of all medical intervention

“Real world data”

People in the western societies will do anything to avoid wearing masks. That includes pushing and taking vaccines that weren’t fully tested. Unlike the latest flavor of mRNA vaccine, masks do not lose efficacy against new variants within a few months. If you wear an n95 rated mask or higher, you will have 95% efficacy or higher

masks work, but their end-to-end efficacy is very low, because people would have to wear them perfectly.

there's no point to wearing masks if you go to places where you take it off. people did exactly that and everyone was pikachu surprised that the pandemic was still alive and well.

Or touch them at all. People say "I always wear N95 for maximum effect"

But then they were the same mask for a week and play with it/adjust it 100 times a day.

That’s not true. Even an imperfectly worn N95 is more effective than a cloth mask or nothing at all. The n95 mask is high intuitive unless you have a large beard (ie. you just have to ensure it fits your nose bridge area and chin area properly). I would wager that it still has better efficacy than an mRNA vaccine even when improperly worn

Thank you for helping making my point

good wager (though a but underspecified, efficacy of preventing spread, illness, hospitalization, or death?)

as far as I know the numbers are here and show otherwise

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/in-the-era-of-omicron...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/briefing/masks-mandates-u...

of course for personal health choices it's best to go for a P100 respirator and getting the vaccine

Mask mandates don’t work for several reasons:

1. People don’t obey them

2. People use garbage cloth or surgical masks that have poor efficacy. Those masks at best are only effective in partially protecting others if you’re sick, but not vice versa.

3. For the reasons stated above, these studies don’t disprove the efficacy of n95 or higher rated masks

Unlike cloth masks, n95s and higher rated masks have much better efficacy and I have yet to see a study that either focuses on them or differentiates them from near useless masks. A better study would focus on hospitals and their workers’ use of different types of masks. The current studies just help prove my point. Hating masks is something people on both sides of the political spectrum can agree on in the West

I had masks at home well before COVID stuck, mostly for protection against dust and whatnot. Saw how HongKong took desinfection quite seriously, saw how SARS went down.

And still, as long as we don't magically come up with a way to educate millions of people effectively about masks, mask mandates are a wash. (Their best benefit is that anyone who gives a shit does not look like an outlier.)

For the record, I’m not pushing for mandates. They will fail.

I’m just saying that n95 masks are highly effective at preventing the transmission of airborne illnesses such as COVID regardless of whether anyone else wears a mask, along with my observation that the West detests masks ie. I’m not recommending a solution. I’m lamenting the stupid and illogical behavior of people, even educated ones

However, I hope that lessons about human nature have been learned, now that we have all lived through the pandemic. Whenever we look at history and ask "how could people buy such a flimsy story, and abandon all that they previously held dear?", the answer is "willingly, enthusiastically, and they will turn in previously good friends and family to further the supposed moral ends".

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