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Comment by greatfilter251 | Hacker News Reader

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>Even if there's a tiny increase in inflammation (which is doubtful: if this were real it would have been caught during clinical trials

I'm reminded here of what happened with Vioxx. When the clinical studies showed a dangerous increased risk of heart attacks, Merck simply falsified their data to remove those data points. It's estimated that 10000s of people died as a result of taking the drug. Some estimates even top 100000 deaths in the USA alone.

Also it wasn't exactly a tiny increase, the study puts the figure at 2.8% or 1 in 35 people had myocardial injury.

If this is "antivax", then it's only pretty mildly such:

> mRNA-1273 vaccine-associated myocardial injury was more common than previously thought, being mild and transient, and more frequent in women versus men. The possible protective role of IFN-λ1(IL-29) and GM-CSF warrant further studies.

A mild and temporary case of inflammation - affecting the exact opposite demographic the antivaxxers harped upon - is hardly some vindication of the antivax cause. A vaccine having side effects ain't mutually exclusive with it being safe and effective.

It's totally anti-vax or paranoiac because if these were studies about some other drug side effect no one but no one would care at all. Even a doctor that treats patients with a drug with a similar side effect would just completely lose interest when he reads that the rate is a few per million and it resolves itself.

Doesn't help the anti-vaxers and paranoiacs can't be reasoned with at all.

That all has nothing to do with this study (or its findings) and everything to do with antivaxxers being intellectually dishonest.

The details matter, beyond the "safe and effective!" catchphrase.

Vaccinate teenagers? kids? Babies? One shot? Four shots? Seasonal boosters? Should 30 yos take the same shots as a 75yo? Are antibody-only studies good at measuring "effectiveness" vs looking at patient outcomes?

There's like a million interesting questions here.

The vaccines have been ineffective at preventing infection from COVID. There is evidence that they reduce the severity of symptoms when you do catch it, but it does nearly nothing to prevent infection with COVID.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

Prevention ain't some binary absolute. It's a matter of reducing viral load, which in turn reduces both severity of symptoms (often to the point of nonexistence) and the likelihood of retransmission. Would you say that life vests are "ineffective at preventing drowning" just because some people drown despite wearing life vests?

We were told in no uncertain terms that this vaccine was 95% effective at preventing COVID and there were no side effects. Now all of a sudden the authorities are sheepishly admitting, no, it's not anywhere near 95% effective and it just reduces symptoms of COVID to more manageable levels. So I'm not surprised to hear that they lied about there being no side effects.

Just so you know, the FDA wanted 55 years to comply with a FOIA request related to the vaccines, so that seems a bit suspicious to me. Almost like they have some things to hide.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants...

> We were told in no uncertain terms

By whom? I don't recall any actual authorities speaking in such absolutes. (Laypersons and journalists and politicians, on the other hand...)

> So I'm not surprised to hear that they lied about there being no side effects.

"We don't know of any side effects at this time" (even assuming that was ever said, which it wasn't; soreness, allergic reactions, fatigue, etc. were known and declared as side effects since pretty much day 1) is not a lie, even if it's discovered later that there might be some (additional) side effects.

> Just so you know, the FDA wanted 55 years to comply with a FOIA request related to the vaccines, so that seems a bit suspicious to me. Almost like they have some things to hide.

Or almost like going through 329,000 pages of documentation to redact confidential information (including PII) takes awhile, and that the FDA has other FOIA requests to handle on top of that.

What specifically makes this study anti-vaxx? Science is an ongoing process and it’s unambiguously unscientific to be closed off to new information.

I understand the conspiratorial narratives on Covid are tiring, but this does not seem to be the study to project onto.

Perhaps I’m missing something from my quick read of the study.

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