I accept that taking medicine, any medicine, imposes risk for adverse events. What's crazy to me is we just underwent widespread inoculation of a brand new type of vaccine technology that has never been used in humans before, meant to inoculate us against a disease that never existed before, and it _feels_ like the powers that be just don't want to ask certain questions.
Let's say the vaccine is great, it causes no one harm (this is true if no vaccine, but I pose it for the sake of argument). It would still increase confidence and dispel paranoia if it and its possible harms were studied in a much more direct way than having to look at secondary metrics, like voluntary vaers data, all cause mortality, this state vs that state, etc, when the confounding factors make it impossible to be certain of anything.
COVID was never very dangerous for young people. Many didn't even want to take the vaccine. Even if the patient wasn't blinded, why couldn't we have at least kept control groups and monitored them and been fully transparent about the outcomes?
For me I can't help but conclude that an agenda was pushed here; I think it was well intentioned. The people pushing it may have even been right, but I'll never be able to trust them like I did before.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
We assumed that the vaccine doses are low enough to not cause any unacceptable health risks, but after finding these vaccines do cause cardiac complications, particularly in youth, we are hesitant to consider that these vaccines may in fact do more harm than good in some cases.
Why is this a criterium we should pay attention to? If you never roll anything out, you'll never have data about a roll out. So instead we do studies and statistical analyses. Are you aware of any studies that "normal"/previous vaccines had to go through, which mRNA COVID vaccines did not? If so, could you please share them?
There's no controlled experiment to suggest that mRNA vaccines provide a survival advantage to a healthy individual. The brief RCTs certainly don't support it. The increased cardiac risk, small as it may be, may well put the vaccine into negative benefit territory for some, but we'll probably never know for sure, because none of our data is robust enough to draw such conclusions.
Personally I would speculate the much larger "part of the issue" was that there was never any real need to seek authorization for mRNA vaccines in the US before COVID19, as alternatives for their targets existed. I would also speculate cardiovascular issues in mRNA COVID19 vaccines (which are real certainly) have something to do with spikey proteins in your bloodstream, and one can imagine what a more prevalent spikey virus might do to the same person. But I am not a doctor or medical researcher, just some guy on the internet who reads things; so I would not really put any stock into my speculations.
edit: my point is: it's good to be skeptical of things. Yes. It's not good to share inaccurate information, as the post above yours did.
All COVID vaccines deliver spike proteins into your bloodstream, but not all of them substantially raise the risk of Myocarditis.
> ...and one can imagine what a more prevalent spikey virus might do to the same person.
Imagination is not enough, we're going to need some hard data. COVID vaccines don't prevent infection. Is there a net risk reduction? This is further complicated by underestimating the number of COVID infections. Many studies presume to have found a higher risk of Myocarditis with COVID infection, but these cases tend to be biased towards health care settings. For comparison, the difference between infection fatality rate and case fatality rate may be an order of magnitude. In this study, COVID was not associated with an increased risk of Myocarditis in the unvaccinated:
Yes and I literally agree with you in my post. The problem is, as you admit, that data exists to point toward either conclusion; then you immediately speculate that the difference must be because:
> these cases tend to be biased towards health care settings
Also, if a large study measured no effect, there likely is no effect, even if troves of smaller studies disagree. Publication bias.
This conflates 'approved' with the ongoing emergency use authorization. Long term studies will help determine if it can be approved for normal use and effectiveness is part of that determination.
This vax technology is super impressive and promising. I would like to see it succeed, hopefully in a way that some of the loss in public trust can be restored.
If you're referring to mRNA vaccines here, then this simply isn't true. They had been used in humans before. For example they were given to humans in trials of a rabies vaccine in 2013. (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w)
mRNA vaccines are a more recent tool, but not something that is untested or one that has never been used before.
> and it _feels_ like the powers that be just don't want to ask certain questions.
Is it worth asking yourself why it feels that way when readily available evidence shows otherwise?
> It would still increase confidence and dispel paranoia if it and its possible harms were studied in a much more direct way than having to look at secondary metrics, like voluntary vaers data,
Not all the research looking into the safety of these vaccines is dependent on VAERS data. Research on the safety of these vaccines has been going on starting long before they were ever used on a human, and before the release of the covid vaccines trials (with controls and monitoring) were done to look for safety issues. The very article we're commenting under is about research that didn't depend on voluntary vaers data or all cause mortality stats. This is how science detects problems with medications and vaccines. By doing research and trials for years, then following all of the data we have available to reach the most likely conclusions.
> COVID was never very dangerous for young people.
That is very much unclear. The fact remains that we're still learning about the risk that getting infected has on everyone, young and old alike. This takes time. We already have evidence to suggest there may be long term or even permanent damage from prior infection even in cases where the symptoms were mild or even undetected.
Lots of people didn't want the vaccine, but there were many many reasons for that and not all of them held up to facts and reason. At least here in the US, people were strongly encouraged to take it, but ultimately still had the choice and there are many who are not vaccinated to this day. According to the best data we have right now, it appears that those people are dying and getting seriously ill at a rate not seen in the vaccinated population.
> For me I can't help but conclude that an agenda was pushed here;
this is very broad, and speculative, but I'm inclined to agree with you. I think that agenda was most likely promoting what the best information we had at the time indicated was the best available options we had at the time to combat a new virus that devastated our economy and our way of life. Of course governments and those in power wanted people to take them. Wouldn't they all be hoping it would help things return to normal as quickly as possible?
> The people pushing it may have even been right, but I'll never be able to trust them like I did before.
This I also agree with you on, although probably for different reasons. I've lost a great deal of faith that the CDC will be honest with the public and in our government to make sure that the American people are well cared for in times of crisis.
It may still turn out that the vaccines were a terrible mistake. Maybe everyone who took it will suddenly drop dead in 20 years time, but today there's no evidence to suggest that might be the case.
I try to make the best choices I can with the information I have currently available. I accept that I may have screwed myself over, but I'm putting my money on avoiding getting infected at all if I can, and using the best medications and vaccines available to minimize the harm that an infection would cause me if I fail at that.
The problem with this whole situation is we were/are in inherently uncharted waters here. I suspect people above a certain age or in certain circumstances should be vaccinated and probably get boosted at some frequency and people below a certain age who are otherwise healthy do not receive enough of a benefit for this to be a blanket recommendation. I am confident that the benefit to the patient and others (vis a vis transmission) is too low to mandate vaccination for young people.
What has happened is the authorities and public health officials generally marched out there in a very authoritative and confident way, asserted things they could not assert, and then mandated censorship and vaccination in a very cavalier way. There's been a lot of lying, or more charitably, just getting ahead of their skis and asserting things as truth that were just unknowable. This puts everyone in a situation of having to evaluate a lot of murky data on their own.
I was a microbiology major in college long enough to have taken immunology, virology, etc courses. I'm not totally ill-equipped, but I have no interest or frankly time and ability to read and digest these studies and make the best possible decisions for myself. Lacking some central authority I can trust now, I don't think I have a choice though.
I very much hope mRNA vaccines turn out to be revolutionary. There's a lot of promise there, and maybe we've even realized it. If there are issues, maybe they are minor and can be resolved, but the damage to public trust is almost irreparable.
An ex-colleague who is now 31 (or 32) who was running the Stockholm marathon in 2018 and 2019, got Covid very early in 2020, and suffered a massive pulmonary embolism which took him months to fully recover from.
This was before the vaccines were available, of course.
Was that determined by a blood test for developed antibodies, or by swabbing around and amplifying whatever was picked up?
Do note that VAERS registers any adverse effect post-vaccination, someone dying from a bullet wound is registered in VAERS as a post-vaccination adverse effect. I've seen a lot of people reading into VAERS as causation.
Don't bother doing full statistical analyses with VAERS, dig around on PubMed and you'll find some. Either way, excess deaths are getting a lot of attention so expect more analyses to pop up in the coming months.
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Edited out some confusing phrasing.