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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

I was hit hard by my first covid booster, and every traditional flu shot I've ever had has made me as sick as I've been from the flu itself (which is why I don't get flu shots anymore).

I wonder if an mRNA flu shot would be twice as bad, or better, in terms of impact on my health?

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It's funny, flu shots can make you feel sick. That's your body reacting and your immune system adjusting.

But compared to actually getting the flu, you get to skip the part where the disease eats at your organs and rips through your body destroying things.

So yes, you may feel sick after a flu shot. But I consider the alternative makes it worthwhile.

I was about to say, one of the big things we are learning is that what we see as merely a respiratory disease is actually a much more generalized attack.

This is why we are seeing things like a 40% reduced risk of Alzheimer if you get yearly flu shots. Short term you can feel bad from the shot but long term you are much resilient to the actual Flu's impacts. It looks like this could be the same with Covid.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/flu-vaccines-linke...

The ONLY thing you should take away from this link is the following:

> More research is needed to understand the biological mechanisms behind the results in this study. For example, it is possible that people who are getting vaccinated also take better care of their health in other ways, and these things add up to a lower risk of Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

That is true to some degree. But I just picked the first thing that I could find related to that search.

But on going research is starting to point towards the possibility that these repository illnesses are doing more long term damage, especially to other organs and the brain. That said this is still very early days and it could just be something that looks promising at first but could be nothing. The paths being explored does seem plausible. More research and data is needed.

Reminded of Alzheimer's being linked to Aluminum, looks promising at 1st but turned into nothing.

Following link to Journal summary; 'and≥65 years old by the start of follow-up.'

This is interesting and may warrant actual studies beyond lookback data mining.

The shot may not be technically as bad as the flu, but for me, it's plenty bad. I'm bedridden for about a week after them.

Since it's been a couple of decades since I've had the flu, the shot isn't worth the cost to me in burned PTO if nothing else.

But perhaps the mRNA one they're testing would be different. I'm also aware that it's probably not the vaccine itself that is causing my symptoms, but other ingredients and different formulations are available that I'm likely to tolerate better. I just haven't actually tried them yet.

Right, but the flu shot is generally far from 100% effective: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...

Compound that with the fact many adults don’t actually get the flu that often and it’s not exactly a sure choice for most. I have a terrible immune system and I’ve gotten the flu once as a teen/adult and I’m nearly 35. Apparently the average is 1-2 times a decade.

A more effective, longer lasting vaccine would make it a lot more palatable for people.

Does a particularly bad reaction to a flu shot correlate with an equally bad case of flu, had you not gotten the shot? Or is it just random?

I got covid in early 2021, and got the J&J shot at the end of the year. In both cases I had a fever, except the J&J lasted two days vs actual covid that lasted one. I have not been sick with covid since then.

I have never had a flu shot, and also never had the flu in over thirty years. I just don't see why I should get myself sick to risk not getting sick(er)? Anytime I mention this people call me antivax.

I was never skeptical about taking shots until the way the government handled covid. There is no chance I will take something that hasn't been thoroughly tested and proven to actually work the way our standard immunization schedule does.

The descent from "The vaccine is 99% effective and prevents transmission" to where we're at now was pretty eye opening. It sounded too good to be true and was.

Nobody has been held accountable for coercing (and worse) the US population based on bad data. I don't see any reason to trust the government going forward.

No one who understood the vaccine said that. But deniers still claim they did.

> No one who understood the vaccine said that. But deniers still claim they did.

This is historical revisionism.

The Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines were approved for a single indication, and a single indication only. Prevention of symptomatic Covid.

From the Pfizer vaccine package insert:

> COMIRNATY is a vaccine indicated for active immunization to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 12 years of age and older. (1)

They were never approved for anything else because the trials were never designed to test for anything else.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037

In a functioning science, when reality (almost everyone got symptomatic Covid, regardless of vaccination status) conflicts with predictions (~95% efficacy in prenting symptomatic Covid), there would be some attempt to understand why the trials failed so miserably.

The obligatory Feyman quote comes to mind:

> For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled

The trials showed that 95% efficacy over the initial trial period -- about 3 months, as I recall. That wasn't a made-up number.

As time went on, it became apparent that while efficacy against symptomatic COVID faded quickly, efficacy against severe COVID (I believe defined by needing hospitalization) and also against all-cause mortality remained strong. You would have had them pull a life-saving vaccine from the market on a bureaucratic technicality? That's insane.

> You would have had them pull a life-saving vaccine from the market on a bureaucratic technicality? That's insane.

It is not a technicality.

There are no drugs, procedures, medical devices, or vaccines without adverse effects. It is always and everywhere a tradeoff between benefits and harms. If you intentionaly terminate a trial (breaking blindness is effectively terminating it), you cannot trade off the harms and benefits because you have no idea if there are harms, or whether the benefits last.

There were drugs, devices, procedures, and even vaccines, whose massive harms were only apparent years after they were approved.

> There were drugs, devices, procedures, and even vaccines, whose massive harms were only apparent years after they were approved.

However, in this case "massive harms" were incurred when people WEREN'T vaccinated. We do know, from data collected around the world, that the vaccine lowered all-cause mortality. We know that vaccine hesitancy led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US alone.

You're right about one thing -- it's a tradeoff. And in this case the benefits were huge, and if there has been some great harm, I've yet to hear of it.

> However, in this case "massive harms" were incurred when people WEREN'T vaccinated

Even if it was true, do you suggest dismantling the current FDA efficacy and safety testing because it worked in one case? Is this a serious approach to risk management?

> We do know, from data collected around the world, that the vaccine lowered all-cause mortality. We know that vaccine hesitancy led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US alone.

The sad thing is that we know no such thing. Early termination of the trial made it impossible to know the real risks.

For example, it currently appears that myocarditis is diagnosed in one in 5,000 to 10,000 otherwise healthy young males (16-19 year olds)[1].

The vaccine has zero benefit in this population group because Covid is so mild in this group. In Israel, for example, exactly zero otherwise healthy 16-19 year olds died or were in any serious condition due to Covid.

In older people, and other risk groups (cancer, diabetes, obesity), the calculus is obviously different. But there was no reason to vaccinate otherwise healthy kids using a vaccine that was not tested properly.

[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.0...

From my understanding, the RCTs were never big enough to gauge the risks you're talking about in a statistically valid way. As your data suggests, even if the relative risk of myocarditis from the vaccine is very high, the absolute risk is quite small. Meaning that carrying on the RCTs for years would almost certainly have told us nothing of value.

> From my understanding, the RCTs were never big enough to gauge the risks you're talking about in a statistically valid way.

You can't know because the trials were cut short.

The RCTs were too small to detect that specific risk. However, the only reason it was discovered outside of the clinical trial was because the base rate of myocarditis for 16-19 year olds is so vanishingly low.

If the base rate was even slightly higher, much larger effects could not have been easily detected. Would you be able to detect an increase, say, of the diabetes rate in 1 in 100 after the vaccine has been released? what about 1 in 500?

It should be obvious that if your trials cannot detect adverse events that occur in 1 in 10,000, you should not vaccinate populations in which there is a significant benefit in less than 1 in 10,000.

> As your data suggests, even if the relative risk of myocarditis from the vaccine is very high, the absolute risk is quite small.

And sadly, a few thousand kids had their heart damaged (hopefully minimally) for no possible benefit whatsoever.

> Meaning that carrying on the RCTs for years would almost certainly have told us nothing of value.

BTW, hindsight is not a valid way to design vaccine safety studies.

It actually was a made up number because they didn't measure correctly. They classified people as unvaccinated even for weeks after they took the shots. This is guaranteed to inflate effectiveness. Norman Fenton has made this point repeatedly and even written simulations to demonstrate it. With the delay period they used you get to 95% effectiveness for anything, including water.

I recall government sources and pharma claiming >90% efficacy for the mRNA shots, which alone seemed absurd for a virus we knew was mutating at a rapid rate.

They also claimed you could not contract or transmit the virus if you were "vaccinated". Then redefined vaccination to fit their narrative. It took dystopian levels of misinformation for me to just lose all faith in the "experts". However honest their intentions may have been, to make claims you know aren't true is malicious at best.

From [1]:

> We're not sure, at this point, that the vaccine protects you against getting infected. We know for sure it's very, very good, 94 percent, 95 percent in protecting you against clinically recognizable disease, and almost a 100 percent in protecting you for severe disease.

I'm looking at this paper[2] released in the Lancet in Feb 2022 and very, very few of the efficacy figures against severe disease show 100% effectiveness, nor anything like it in the vast majority of instances. I could be reading that big table wrong though, but the findings section has this:

> For severe COVID-19 disease, vaccine efficacy or effectiveness decreased by 10·0 percentage points (95% CI 6·1–15·4) in people of all ages and 9·5 percentage points (5·7–14·6) in older people. Most (81%) vaccine efficacy or effectiveness estimates against severe disease remained greater than 70% over time.

so I don't think I have, but happy to be corrected. The figures are certainly higher against alpha, but not 100%, that's quite an overstatement, in my view.

[1] https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/CPT/date/2020-12-10/segment... Chris Cuomo interviews Dr Fauci

[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Duration of effectiveness of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease: results of a systematic review and meta-regression

Yeah, the parent comment illustrates a misunderstanding of how vaccines work.

Could it be possible that in the last 30 years you’ve had seasonal influenza and not recognized it, maybe a mild case? In my experience catching it a few times, there’s sick with the flu and siiiiiick with the flu.

But immunocompromised people and others most at risk can catch it regardless of how bad you feel - mass vaccination is for those people too, not just you.

Sure but knowing that the efficacy of the flu shot has been less than 50% for most years of my life (in my region) it seemed like a coin toss not to get it but a 100% chance of feeling lousy if I did.

Everyone has days when they feel kinda crummy, off their game, etc. I've always wondered if it's a super low-grade infection like influenza. No way to know without testing all the time.

Vaccines on a population level are less risky than the illnesses they prevent and generally reduce death and healthcare costs to society. This is true of both the flu and COVID vaccines. There's a nonzero chance that you'll feel worse with the vaccine than with the illness, there's also a nonzero chance that:a) someone else getting a vaccine has helped you not get sick and b) having gotten the vaccine could prevent serious harm in the case of illness. You can bet against those outcomes but your odds get worse and worse as you get older.

My gripe was them claiming the vaccine would prevent you from getting or spreading covid despite knowing that was not true.

It has now devolved to the vaccine will make covid suck less if you get it, there's a non-zero risk of complication from the vaccine, and lets just not talk about transmissibility.

As somebody who was in the Phase 3 clinical trial for the Pfizer vaccine in 2020, I was never skeptical about the intelligence of my fellow Americans until I saw the way we handled covid. It's an article of faith in Team Hoax that "COVID vaccines will eventually turn out to be bad", even though unvaccinated people dropped like flies throughout all of 2021 (forever the year of the Herman Cain Awards). 400,000 deaths that were preventable by the vaccines. smh.

As one of those unvaccinated people that got covid in 2021, I wonder if you're aware of what your actual odds of dying from covid were at the time. Bonus points if you break it down by age.

I'm not sure what probability dropping like flies equates to, but I think it's probably something pretty far off from reality.

Also, whatever your position on any of this, the whole Herman Cain Awards thing is not something to be proud of participating in. Even if you buy the line that not taking the shots was some sort of major crime against your fellow humans (pretty hard to argue at this point, but for the sake of argument) HCA was disgusting.

I maintain that the unnecessary death of 400,000 people due to misinformation was more disgusting, but hey, to each his own.

The unnecessary death of 400k people for any reason is indeed disgusting (even if those 400k were heavily weighted towards people who were at or beyond life expectancy, it's still tragic).

That doesn't make it any more admirable for smug redditors to celebrate tragedy. Do you really find that to be a compelling argument?

Whether you call it celebrating or properly recognizing, I feel they were doing a public service. Go back and read it, and you will see a distinct pattern, repeated literally hundreds of times. The same arc of (often vile) right-wing memes, conspiracy theories, and bravado, giving way to "tested positive, COVID is no joke", then to "calling all prayer warriors", and finally giving way to "X was the best, most generous person I ever knew". People who were obviously kind and good-hearted in their personal lives, but who had bought into, and propagated, the right wing disinformation loop.

A generation from now, when history majors in US universities take their required course on the COVID-19 pandemic, I expect that the HCAs will be required reading.

What was this public service?

The best interpretation of this that I can come up with is that somehow, HCA would shame some number of at risk people into getting the vaccine and saving their lives. I wonder, are you familiar with any estimates on number needed to treat to prevent a death? In other words, how many people would need to be shamed into taking tbe vaccine to save one life?

Realistically, it was a schadenfreude circle jerk. I obviously can't know this for sure, but I'm willing to wager that the number of people saved this way was negligible. It was just yet another place for the in crowd to shit on the out group and cheer each other on while they did it.

I already told you. When historians ask "Why did the US do so much more poorly in the pandemic than other first-world countries?" they will have a ready-made compilation of testimonials. This is tremendously important for future generations to know.

Did the HCAs convince large numbers of people to get vaccinated? Almost certainly not, because these people were way beyond convincing. Yes every single person working in the ICU saw an instance where an unvaccinated patient wanted to get the vaccine after they were already on their death bed with COVID. But beyond that, I think almost no Team Hoax people changed their minds about the vaccine.

Ok, so the public service was in "documenting" some scenarios of unvaccinated people dying, if they can manage to figure out what is actually real and what was just karma farming from an audience that is very hungry for exactly that kind of content.

And this will somehow be useful (tremendously important even) in the next pandemic.

We're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I think it's about as important as Fox news keeping old men angry and scared. HCA served the same purpose just for a different demographic.

>> Anytime I mention this people call me antivax.

You should politely and directly point out to them that the "flu shot" is not a vaccine and referring to it as a vaccine is ignorant.

I was talking about both covid and the flu.

> I just don't see why I should get myself sick to risk not getting sick(er)

If everyone acted this way, we'd never reach herd immunity with any vaccine-preventable disease, so yes, this is an anti-vaccine position. You're missing the fact that vaccines protect not just you, but the people around you.

No covid vaccine prevents transmission of covid, there's not even good evidence that it reduces transmission. Anyone I know who was vaccinated at this point has gotten at least one other person in their household sick. Should I just ignore this because someone who had something to gain from shilling the vaccines told you otherwise?

I'm not against vaccinations as long as there is evidence that they actually work.

> Anyone I know who was vaccinated at this point has gotten at least one other person in their household sick.

This is frankly not credible. You can't be surprised when people call you antivax when you are making claims that don't fit any of the available data.

I have enough empirical data to conclude it doesn't work anywhere near as well as they claim, and act on that knowledge. I'm not harming anyone by not getting a booster shot, despite the claims of the covid cult that what I'm doing is akin to murder.

> so yes, this is an anti-vaccine position.

Or, at the very least, it is a deeply selfish one.

It's a deeply selfish attitude for the elderly and obese (those most at risk from covid and influenza) to expect healthy people to take something that might have a net negative effect to them as individuals.

Children under five are at high risk from influenza. Even if you see nothing wrong with the antisocial and frankly eugenicist idea of letting the elderly and obese die off for want of herd immunity, you might consider the utility of keeping children alive so they can feed and change you in the nursing home.

Do you have an literature which suggests herd immunity is even possible for flu?

You can't reach herd immunity without a highly effective vaccine. No highly effective vaccine exists. If they manage to develop one, and if enough people get vaccinated, then herd immunity is possible. It's just math. The question is really whether a highly effective universal flu vaccine is possible to develop, and nobody knows that.

So you think it appropriate to preemptively call people antisocial eugenicists based on a hypothetical vaccine?

All of this discussion is abstract, based on a vaccine that doesn't exist yet, yes. It is possible to discuss eugenics in the abstract. And in the abstract, saying "It's a deeply selfish attitude for the elderly and obese... to expect healthy people to take something that might have a net negative effect to them" is eugenicist and antisocial.

> saying "It's a deeply selfish attitude for the elderly and obese... to expect healthy people to take something that might have a net negative effect to them" is eugenicist and antisocial.

Ok, but why? It seems like socially it cuts both ways. If I ask someone to do something they don't want to do and they refuse are they necessarily antisocial? How are you balancing the gains with the losses? It seems that your methods of accounting only value the most likely losers if there is no intervention.

Let's play hypothetical and say the people who are at risk are less than 1% then who is the selfish group? Less than 0.1%? Does that number ever cause you to switch positions or at an arbitrarily small number would the rest of the world be selfish to not get a medical intervention on their behalf?

> which is why I don't get flu shots anymore

You could try one of the non-egg based vaccines and see if that helps with your side effects for example Flublok Quadrivalent[0]

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/qa_flublok-vaccine.htm

Yeah, I might. Friends have suggested such alternatives to me as well. I'm not opposed, but I also am not highly motivated to try, because I haven't actually come down with the flu since my children grew up and moved out a couple of decades ago.

there's a lot of people that get a bad cold and think it's the flu. the actual flu can be insanely debilitating. (some get a lighter infectious dose and they escape a real bad case though)

I used to think I got the occasional Flu, until I actually got it... I was 30 then and it felt like I was dying!

> has made me as sick as I've been from the flu itself (which is why I don't get flu shots anymore)

#1 FEELING sick is not the same as BEING sick. Even if your perceived experience is comparable, almost certainly there's less long-term damage to your health from a controlled vaccine than from an uncontrolled viral infection

#2 Some selection bias is definitely in place here. Those times you got a flu shot you didn't subsequently get that season's flu strain that the vaccine was targeted for. Since you didn't get that season's flu strain, you have no idea how much worse it would've been if you didn't have the vaccine. (And if you DID get the flu anyway, then you DO know that it would've been even worse had you not had the vaccine).

#3 Getting flu shots isn't just for you, it's for your community. Even if you don't get sick from the flu or don't mind getting it, by passing it around you increase the risk to those more vulnerable than you - the immunocompromised, and the elderly.

Please continue to get flu shots. Your future you and the rest of humanity thanks you.

#1: I'm fully aware of this. But the flu shot puts me down for 3-5 days, so the cost is not low.

#2: I haven't got a flu shot in over 15 years, and I also haven't gotten the flu. Before I gave up on flu shots, and after my children moved out, I never got the flu either. There's no actual selection bias going on with me.

#3: Which is why I'm hopeful about this mRNA vaccine. If I can tolerate that, I'm on board.

> and the elderly.

Not sure when "elderly" starts, but I may qualify.

> Please continue to get flu shots.

I would if it didn't cost me so much.

> Even if you don't get sick from the flu or don't mind getting it, by passing it around you increase the risk to those more vulnerable than you - the immunocompromised, and the elderly.

Isn't it backwards to ask the young to make health sacrifices for the elderly? Plus it seems influenza vaccines don't even reduce hospitalisation in the elderly: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37045684/ .

From the HN Guidelines:

>"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's why the do these studies. But more seriously ask your doctor.

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