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> No evidence of vaccine effect
The increase in excess deaths is a symptom of healthcare system that is being increasingly starved of resources and which is having to make up for cutbacks across various parts of local and national government.
It's about austerity, not covid vaccinations - let's not bring misinformation and conspiracy theories into this.
edit: would the downvoters care to explain?
For me this has become an exit criteria for serious discussions. Once you are overcertain i realistically no longer argue the actual issue but against you not wanting to have been wrong. As i see it, given my social competence, best case would be making you over correct in the other direction or make you cry. Both bad outcomes.
I would recommend getting to grips with the varying degrees of uncertainty of a complex world. I get that this feels bad, but simply betting on the frames that make you feel less bad, even just because it confirms your view, is not a winning strategy.
Comparing the side effects of those two methods I think mRNA definitely wins out. Of course that's only the case if you ignore all the FUD being spread about how the mRNA vaccine will definitely kill you.
Also, the assertion in your comment is not true for all age groups. For males under 40 it has been repeatedly shown that the risk of myocarditis is greater from the vaccine (and increases with each dose) than from Covid itself. You are correct that on average across all age groups there is a higher risk of myocarditis from Covid.
Nope. That is only true if you were hospitalized for a severe case of Covid. There is virtually no myocariditis for short covid episodes where you recover quickly.
However to judge the risk you need to account for every potential outcome. And on myocarditis it still seems like the risk is greater with covid: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
There is one combination where the risk of myocarditis does come close to Covid-19 and that is with Moderna and men under 40. However myocarditis isn't the only potential side effect from Covid and you can just opt to get Pfizer instead if you're under 40.
You don't have to assume. You know it from almost Day + 30 of the pandemic that the people at real risk of a bad COVID were old and with 3-4 comorbidities. It was never a secret. The media has just been hyping up the risk to make it look like everyone could die from it for absolutely no reason.
> And on myocarditis it still seems like the risk is greater with covid: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
This data has virtually no value because it is based on myocarditis that was diagnosed and detected and who knows how many goes completely unnoticed or undiagnosed. You can't compare the rates of rare events this way.
Interesting to look at the footnotes for disclosures too:
> A.S. is a member of the Scottish Government Chief Medical Officer’s COVID-19 Advisory Group, the Scottish Government’s Standing Committee on Pandemics, and AstraZeneca’s Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Advisory Group.
> J.H.C. is chair of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) risk stratification subgroup and a member of Scientific Advisory Group for Emer-gencies (SAGE) COVID-19 groups and the NHS group advising on prioritization of use of monoclonal antibodies in SARS-CoV-2 infection.
> A.H. is a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation
Color me surprised that people whose livelihood depends on recommending vaccines and COVID19 treatment end up "finding" that vaccines cause less side effects than COVID19..
Of course there's a risk cases are being undercounted or there is some long term effect we just don't know about that goes against what we know about mRNA today. But that's life unfortunately, a chain of decisions based on your best knowledge at the time some of which may turn out to be wrong.
> Color me surprised that people whose livelihood depends on recommending vaccines and COVID19 treatment end up "finding" that vaccines cause less side effects than COVID19..
One of them serves on AstraZeneca's advisory board which is not an mRNA vaccine, in fact they would benefit from overestimating the risk of myocarditis with mRNA so the AstraZeneca vaccine would compare more favorably.
Another one serves on a board to prioritize the use of monoclonal antibodies, so he benefits from people who remain unvaccinated and get hospitalized.
If anything these people have a conflict of interest to inflate the dangers of mRNA vaccines.
> The media has just been hyping up the risk to make it look like everyone could die from it for absolutely no reason.
No argument from me there, but for anyone who thought the media wasn't prone to scaremongering hasn't been paying attention during the Ebola outbreak. However even if we are in a demographic not likely to have severe cases we shouldn't ignore the real strain epidemics put on the healthcare system and the risks it poses to demographics who are vulnerable. Also have you considered some of your own sources may be hyping up the risks of mRNA vaccines?
While the vaccine is available to everyone I prefer getting it even if I'm not likely to get hospitalized. Because based on the available data it looks safe enough to me and it gives me the option to plan some days off in advance to deal with the vaccine side effects rather than suddenly getting Covid and then having to deal with being out for a week or more and having to worry about additional side effects whose severity exceeds the vaccine.
based on clinical data that nobody has seen apart from a few experts in the FDA who are probably paid by Big Pharma anyway.
Its funny, I remember not so long ago on HN when the prevailing sentiment was that Big Pharma was just right next to Satan in terms of evil, but suddenly after the pandemic hit it]'s almost impossible to say that their motives and their data should be questioned. People have been completely brainwashed and were too quick to forget about VIOXX, Oxycontin and a lot more
Even for young people who had already had a covid infection?
Pathetic effect to contain the covid19 epidemic so which effect are you referring to?
I feel like this is going to be a waste of my time, so I'm going to drop this.
Vaccinating kids or anyone under 40 for that matter was wrong, period.
"No evidence of vaccine effect"
You can see the problem. Science communicators are using the same term - “no evidence” - to mean:
This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure.
We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.
This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
Look at those first two massive spikes in daily deaths in the last two charts. That level of exponential increase in daily deaths led to two long lockdowns, which as you can see temporarily dealt with the issue. Can you spot where vaccines were introduced en masse and we never had a lockdown again? It's really not difficult to see that vaccines effectively stopped exponentially growing daily deaths. To argue that they had no effect is bordering on insane, or at least just extreme ignorance of data.
* To argue against lockdowns is to say it's perfectly fine for those exponential deaths to climb to the level of tens of thousands per day. Obviously no reasonable government was ever going to let that happen, it would be a PR nightmare. So the anti lockdown argument was always a non starter.
* To argue against vaccines is to say that it's ok to have regular ongoing lockdowns.
Yet paradoxically the anti lockdowns and anti vaccine crowds are the same! Frankly, both positions are completely silly.
(A reasonable argument could be made for no lockdowns, but the reality is no western government would ever implement that strategy. We have to live in reality.)
This is completely false, because it cherry picks the data from people who were hospitalized with severe COVID cases. Most people who recovered with very few symptoms after COVID did not end up with any heart damage.