Flu shots don't require human trials either, should covid be all that different (genuine question) if so why?
Even as an atheist, I'd be getting the religious exemption for sure! Mandating boosters for healthy young students doesn't make a lot of sense. We know now that vaccination is not the way transmission of the virus is managed.
https://www.harvard.edu/coronavirus/covid-19-vaccine-informa...
Yale students will be required to get an updated, bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster by the start of the spring semester.
https://yalecollege.yale.edu/get-know-yale-college/office-de...
Tufts University followed suit on Sept. 16, announcing it would require students, staff, and faculty to get the omicron vaccine booster by Dec. 2.
https://coronavirus.tufts.edu/healthy-at-tufts/covid-19-vacc...
"With this recommendation, the UC Vaccine policy now requires all staff and students to get the bivalent booster, when eligible"
[Edit] For anyone that wants to downvote this, please explain what I said that was untrue. Flu shots in the US have never been mRNA based. Covid shots in the US are mRNA based. Before covid, there was never at any point in history an mRNA based vaccine rolled out to the public.
No one is seriously tracking the adverse reactions, we've handed that off to the companies that produced the vaccines. And doctors are afraid to or don't care to raise concerns either. The vaccines are as statistically safe for me as COVID is for my age and health profile. And the vaccine makes no guarantee that I won't still catch COVID. Why would I double my risk when I've caught COVID, and it was nothing for me.
I didn't say there are no risks but those risks must necessarily be very low, as otherwise with a sample size of billions of doses issued even effects in the 1 in a million would be readily identifiable.
it's by no means easy to identify trends that are worth pursuing for a medical investigation in a varied cohort of a billion people, and poll size is only a single attribute -- this is made even harder during a vacination campaign that is trying to effectively drive the un-vaccinated rates to as close to 0% as possible, making comparative studies even more difficult to establish.
Time/race/status/age/health all matter. You can't just take a look at what conditions that the billions of vaccinated share, that's ineffective for any kind of impact study.
It's my opinion that any 'precise' data is going to come about in years and years once we can establish a generational gap between this event and others so that we can effectively create a cross-generational comparative study.
However, at the same time we have people in sibling comments claiming to know multiple people with conditions ranging from changes to their menstrual cycle to death. This can't possibly be related to the vaccine at anything like the rate people are for some reason inclined to believe.
Personally I found the effects from the 3rd booster almost as bad as COVID itself so I'm unlikely to get another unless there is a compelling reason.
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346
What you posted was condescending and demonstrative of a large blindspot as to the degree of adverse event surveillance actually being carried out.
Hope that helps you achieve the tone of discussion you're aiming for, in the future.
Indeed there is no point in communicating further, you made up your mind years ago and you will probably never progress beyond repeating the old talking points. Luckily most of the rest of the world has started to see reality is a bit more nuanced than ‘COVID is doom, vaccine is good’.
Finally also the danger of immunological imprinting[1] possibly resulting in less than optimal immune response. The fact these vaccines have little impact on transmissibility means basic evolutional biology theory is at play, driving selective pressures for antigens humans are less capable of mounting defenses against thanks to an already primed imuno response of the original virus' antigens. This is evident with the proliferation of variants and sub variants.
It may have been influenced by the bias for action, but the trade off was the death and disruption we saw in 2020-21, compared to a future risk that scientists projected as minimal.
It still seems like a solid decision to me. But if this research shows that millions die from increased myocarditis rates, I think it would have been a bad outcome. Still not sure if that would influence my perception to the process.
Making decisions under uncertainty is hard.
I don't blame rushing the vaccines at all. In fact, maybe we should have skipped more steps to get the vaccine to 70+ year olds or people who are obese faster. But let's just be honest, the risk profile for younger people just wasn't high. The data was clear very early on. That was even with underreported numbers. It should have never been mandated and if you were at a decent weight and under 40 you were never at that much of a risk, especially to say something like the flu.
The decision didn't have a great result because the assumptions didn't hold. Good process, bad outcome.
(Not to mention that if everyone had actually just gotten the shot, we might have stalled the viral evolution into the delta + subsequent variants. My understanding is those mutations reduced vaccine transmission efficacy. If people hadn't turned public health into politics, we could have possibly avoided the endemic nature of the virus, which I think we can all agree would have been a far superior outcome versus where we are today.)
And that is where I vehemently disagree. Bad process, bad outcome. Many people lied to make the information appear as you said. The incentives they had to lie should have a lot more scrutiny, rather than being shrugged off, and many of these people should be in jail.
I believed at the time (and still believe) the risk/reward ratio still favoured offering the vaccines to at-risk groups. Making it mandatory or de-facto mandatory for all was a colossal clusterfuck. It worked out well for big pharma though, but at what long-term cost?
I didn't mean to suggest you had any special ability. I was just wondering how you reached that conclusion. Internet text boards are bad at tone, I apologize if it sounded attacking. But I think it's a wide gap between officials lied and someone had a different interpretation and did not exhibit as much caution as I prefer in my p.h. officials.
I am certain people lied about covid. I'm not certain that was the ph officials.
Can you explain how this standard of rigueur leads to anything less than a complete halting of medical research?
The original trials for the Pfizer vaccine were conducted on 46k people (half of which necessary recieved a placebo). At the time of those trials there was no shortage of willing volunteers to take part in the trial, no limit on the amounts of funding available and a considerable appetite to do something. Other trials have to make to with much fewer participants with hundreds to low thousands seemingly typical.
~10 yrs of trials and safety data collecting (Including long term studies) is the historical norm. We've certainly not had a complete halting of medical research from doing that.
My main point though is that with the level of data provided and the fact long term studies have not, and cannot have been conducted in this time frame - the push to mandate (and coercively pressure vaccination uptake through fear of losing your job, or access to regular life things bars, cafes, travel etc.) is unjustified and arguably doesn't even reach the bar for informed consent (with many people getting it under the impression it would prevent contraction and transmission).
>The true incidence of myocarditis after influenza vaccination may be underestimated because of the subclinical and nonspecific clinical manifestations of myocarditis. A prospective study about the incidence of cardiovascular adverse events after smallpox and influenza vaccination revealed that the rate of clinical or subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis after smallpox vaccination was approximately 1:5,500, despite the fact that the rate of troponin elevation was 1:200 [9]. Similarly, 2.6% of the influenza vaccine cohort showed new onset cardiac symptoms, such as chest pain, dyspnea, and palpitation, but no case of clinical or subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis
- informed consent at the time of signing an employment (e.g. military, medical) contract with known career conditions
- new conditions (mandates) being added to existing labor contracts, while there is active litigation on the purpose and legality of those conditions, and re-definition of legal language (e.g. CDC's 2021 redefinition of "vaccine") used in mandates
Very different from mandates being applied to existing jobs previously not subject to mandates.
> It ain't the mandates that are new.
The CDC (re)definition of vaccine is new.
Also the redefinition of pandemic around 2010.
And the CDC wrote zero of these laws. The CDC's rephrasing of an FAQ article on their website may be a good starter for a right wing conspiracy theory article, but it has no bearing on this topic.
Also, we should be doing clinical trials on flu shots as well. New drugs, even if they are only slightly different still require clinical trials. Why is hacking the immune system not subject to the same scrutiny?
Could you help me understand why you think the context is so similar between the two?
What's your opinion on members of the FDA leaving due to widely publicized political pressure to approve the vaccine? Do you think they were wrong for pushing back?