It's like the aspartame or MSG of the medical world. No matter how much data you provide people will never get over the idea that it must somehow be dangerous.
Also
the cumulative COVID-19 mortality rate in the 15-24 year age group was 0.03%
The mortality rate of covid for your undocumented friend is higher than the target group mortality of RSV.
I also know dead persons after covid vaccination, serious injuries also in family. How many healthly people dead from covid do you know?
There were 3 deaths on my block, including a renowned weight lifter who was a daily staple at the gym.
Deaths and harm occur in some limited cases in vaccination. They occur in some limited cases without. That's why we have data.
One person being harmed cannot stop a program that reduces harm in aggregate.
I guarantee you the riskiest thing that child did on a regular basis was get into a car. There's a 1% lifetime risk of death in a car accident in America.
I guess this is the trolley problem in action but do we actually think all humans are the same? Would you divert the trolley from 2 90 year olds to 1 16 year old?
Among children? Name data and studies that supporting your claim, please.
Did you read those studies about negative side effects? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35094410 Those are not anecdotes.
> There's a 1% lifetime risk of death in a car accident in America.
Should we ban cars because of this data?
But anyway, in my dataset of about 1,000 acquaintances, the only one under 50 hospitalized related to Covid was a friend who was a 38 year mother of 2, in top shape, who had a heart attack within a month after her second dose, and to this day is still recovering. I do not think these vaccines are that dangerous—I would say they probably cause as much harm as one night of heavy binge drinking—but I saw zero evidence of any benefit, and yes I saw one very bad case of severe life threatening side effect.
There's a reason we don't use anecdotes as a substitute for medical research. Not least because they're subject to the post hoc fallacy. Just because one event follows another doesn't mean there's a causal relationship.
There's every chance that mother of 2 was going to have a heart attack anyways. It happens. The fact they had a vaccine first likely isn't relevant, clinically speaking. If you give a few billion people vaccines, you will find literally every effect that follows. Car crashes. Broken arms. Death by mauling. Syphilis. Turbo-cancer of the elbow.
In that age group, a boundary group, your risk of having a heart attack are somewhere between 17 and 97 per 100,000. [1] The risk of a heart issue from the vaccine is about two orders of magnitude lower than that.
> I do not think these vaccines are that dangerous—I would say they probably cause as much harm as one night of heavy binge drinking— ...
You have no basis to arrive at that conclusion.
> ... but I saw zero evidence of any benefit ...
It's in the data.
> ... and yes I saw one very bad case of severe life threatening side effect.
You saw one anecdotal report of a bad thing that happened to someone after they took a COVID vaccine, without any evidence they were connected. I'm sure more than once someone took a tylenol and got hit by a bus. That doesn't mean taking tylenol causes getting hit by a bus.
> The proportions of participants who reported at least 1 serious adverse event were 0.6% in the vaccine group and 0.5% in the placebo group. [2]
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32111640/
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer...
Yeah. Lightning-induced arrhythmia was (amusingly) a registered side effect (Serious Adverse Event) of Moderna's covid vaccine. https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struc...
The virus has a fairly low mortality rate for healthy people, most people aren't healthy.
The fact the vaccine is new is irrelevant because generally speaking you can substitute time with quantity. Most effects are normally distributed in time, and so if you have enough doses given, you can replace the fact it hasn't been around too long with a high number of administrations when making a safety assessment. And it's been given literally billions of times. We've seen the full gamut of consequences.
But anyways, 'long-term side effects' don't refer to latent effects. It's not things that magically appear 10 years later. They're effects that last a long time but usually onset almost immediately. There's no reason to think that 5 years of data is better than 3 years of data when administered billions of times.
And frankly if you think 3 years and billions of data points are insufficient nothing's going to change your mind. So you may as well stop pretending it's a data issue.
As I said, irrationality is your prerogative. But you are wrong.
The long-term side effects piece is still undecided and that's undebatable, simply because not enough time has gone by. Maybe I'll be open to changing my mind in 5-10 years. Even then, I'd win, no?
Like I said long-term side effects doesn't mean latent effects. It doesn't mean things that show up years after administration. It means things that happen right after administration but last a long time. If getting the COVID vaccine caused your arm to fall off 30 seconds after administration, that's a long-term side-effect because last I checked arms don't re-grow.
Yes, we do know what the long-term side effects are. You've confused 'long-term' and 'latent'.
Yes, it's decided. No, it's not debatable.
> ... simply because not enough time has gone by.
Again that (a) doesn't matter and (b) unless you're a vaccineologist then your opinion about whether sufficient time has passed is totally meaningless.
> unless you're a vaccineologist then your opinion about whether sufficient time has passed is totally meaningle Also, outright dismissal of an argument based on appeal to authority is not productive.
Most people conflate latent with long-term. They believe when researchers are looking for 'long-term' effects they're looking for things that magically show up somewhere down the line, and therefore 'we haven't waited long enough!!' and 'there's not enough data!!' - but that's not what they're doing, although they're open to being surprised.
We've studied mRNA for like 50 years now, we understand how it works enough to know that what you're suggesting just isn't a real outcome.
You are right it doesn't matter per se because outcomes are normally distributed in severity and time and if you give enough people the vaccine you can substitute that for waiting. And by vaccinating 70% of the world, we can be utterly, completely, 100% sure it's safe.
It's safe, end of story.
> Also, outright dismissal of an argument based on appeal to authority is not productive.
To invoke appeal to authority there would have to be an attempt to invalidate evidence on the basis that someone is or isn't an expert. The parent didn't provide any evidence whatsoever. If they had either evidence or experience in the area I'd take their claim more seriously (but still inconclusively). However at this point it's just some random person on the internet saying "we need more time!" without explaining why or why I should believe them in absence of data.
Sorry bud, it's MSG all over again. But like I said it's a personal responsibility thing now and if you want to be wrong you're free to do so.
What an utterly fortunate universal truth of vaccines!
The reality is most drugs and vaccines that you get are tested on a few hundred or a few thousand people over a long period of time. But mostly because it's very difficult to measure the efficacy of something with statistical significance if the prevalence rate is low.
So you can either give a bunch of people Ebola to check if the Ebola vaccine works, or you can wait a long time. Ethics boards frown on the former.
However with COVID like 1% of the population had it when we were ready to test vaccines so showing efficacy was very quick and very easy.
What reason do you or anyone else on earth have to think there would be a mechanism that yields latent issues? We have studied mRNA for about 50 years now. And the adenoviral vector vaccines are a completely different mechanism studied for about 50 years too.
What exactly bad thing do you think would miraculously appear 3 years later showing zero signs, symptoms or evidence in 6 billion people? And why would that be different after 5, 10 or even 15 years? There's no law that says Tylenol doesn't cause your arm to fall off 110 years later either, but that's not the standard of proof. Nothing in life has zero risk.
That aside I think if your n is large enough, I think even issues that are ordinarily latent would be at least detectable. Certainly 3 years later. The normal development cycle is as short as 5 years, 2 of which are in regulatory approval.
At some point we have to be guided by our past experience. You can't ever prove a negative, but you don't have to prove a negative to move forward.
mRNA and the adenoviral vector vaccine delivery mechanisms have been studied for 50+ years and are vetted.
> Did you know its rare but accepted that some dogs get injection site tumors and we don't really know why?
Did you know dogs aren't humans, and there's no evidence of this kind of thing in humans at all?
btw it's also extremely extremely rare in dogs, to the extent it's hard to find any kind of data on it. It wasn't thought to occur except in cats until the 70s, so I've written up the rest of this generously assuming cats.
Most study headlines you read are fun achievements that only work on the animals under study and they don't have the same effects in humans. You can significantly increase the life of worms by not feeding them, but humans not so much. Weird huh.
Again this brings us back to our 'substitution of T with N' conversation. It's always a normal distribution. While these VAS tumors develop a few years in, in some cases they develop within a few months. So if you give 6 billion people vaccines over 3 years, you would have definitely seen this kind of latent thing by now, even if its peak effect is a few years later.
> That would surely be a latent effect in dogs, why do we think it could never happen in humans who live much longer?
That's not a thing. Again you're asking to prove a negative, which is not how we do anything because it's impossible. The burden of proof is on you to explain why you think it could happen, not on me to prove why it couldn't.
Prove to me that eating a tomato won't cause turbo-cancer of the elbow. You can't.
I'm also saying that beyond that reasonable estimate based on the 300+ years of vaccine development behind us (and 50+ years of development of mRNA and viral vector vaccines) you are asking scientists to prove a negative which nobody can do.
That's not the standard we hold literally anything else to, nor should we.
That's alarmingly high for such an infectious virus. It's why CoVID-19 caused such a spike in mortality around the world over the last three years, and why life expectancy in the US declined by two years.
Given how infectious SARS-CoV-2 is, it is a very deadly virus. It's nearly a worst case for public health. It's not Ebola, but almost no one gets Ebola. It's far deadlier than other viruses that people get seasonally.
In the US, the median age of people who died of CoVID is around 75 years. The average person who died lost about 10 years of life.
CoVID is a significant contribution to mortality for most age groups. 10% of all deaths among 40-something-year-olds are due to CoVID. There are around 40k confirmed CoVID deaths in this age group alone.
The stats are here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
It only killed millions of people...