Vaccines, past and present | Hacker News Reader

Vaccines, past and present

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34 pointsetiam41 comments

To prebuttal a few of the just-sane-enough-to-be-facile claims I've found vexing during COVID:

1. Yes, the COVID treatments we're using today are vaccines. The word has never meant Perfect Forever Invulnerability, we have a 200-year history of things labeled "vaccine" even when it didn't remove all symptoms, cover all strains, or need only one shot, etc.

2. No, the "normal" vaccines "back in your day" do have problems, and there are very good reasons we're pursuing new types like mRNA. For example, live-virus vaccines (containing a weak relative) can sometimes start their own spreading infection, and inactivatived-vaccines (with blended-up chunks of virus) require more doses and can sometimes mis-train your immune system.

I don't know where people got the idea that vaccines prevent all infection, transmissions and symptoms. They were never about that. If you can achieve it, fantastic! But not all pathogens are this easy.

Vaccines are not a force field. All they are doing is training your immune system so that it can respond faster if it encounters the actual pathogen (antibody production takes days). Your immune system has to reach the pathogen to fight it, which means you got infected already. If it is destroyed quick enough, you won't notice, but you still got infected.

I really love the XKCD on mRNA vaccines:

https://xkcd.com/2425/

title="To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first."

> I don't know where people got the idea that vaccines prevent all infection, transmissions and symptoms. They were never about that. If you can achieve it, fantastic! But not all pathogens are this easy.

Well the COVID vaccines were presented to the public as a panacea that would end the pandemic. While many of the scientific discussions were more nuanced, headlines in the popular press announcing vaccines were close to euphoric in many cases. [0]

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/vaccines-...

A lot of the effective vaccines work on pathogens with a long infection cycle. A vaccine primed immune system is able to completely squelch an infection before it's life cycle is complete. Think rabies, you can vaccinate people after infection and it works. Things like measles and smallpox have long life cycles. Point trying to make, people exposed often are often infected but don't become symptomatic or infectious if they've been vaccinated.

Then you got other things like diphtheria and tetanus vaccines which are toxoid vaccines. They protect against the toxins not the bacteria itself. Tetanus toxin is so toxic that a small latent infection that your immune system doesn't know is there can kill you. Point, vaccines are a very broad category.

Difficulty with covid is it's got a respiratory route of infection and transmission. But unlike most respiratory viruses also causes systemic infection[1]. Which influenza generally doesn't. Point there is it's difficult to get herd immunity but the downsides of covid makes it a worthwhile effort.

[1] That which doesn't kill you can leave you a shell of who you were.

> I don't know where people got the idea that vaccines prevent all infection, transmissions and symptoms.

The government propaganda when the Covid vaccines were launched said exactly that. Sure, people shouldn’t be so stupid to accept government propaganda at face value, but we know where people got the idea.

> The government propaganda when the Covid vaccines were launched said exactly that.

[Citation Needed]

Give us some links to clear examples, if you're right it should be super-fast and easy. (As opposed to the unfair task of proving a negative.)

Sure.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/21/politics/walensky-comment...

For context, that was in June 2021, in August 2021 he said this:

> Let me be clear: There are cases where vaccinated people do get COVID-19, but they are far less common than unvaccinated people getting COVID-19. And most importantly, their conditions are far less severe.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...

So the "government propaganda" is... unprepared statements by individuals being live-interviewed, which were so unusual and against accepted-truth that they provoked immediate and public correction from mainstream news outlets, as well as corrections (or at least distancing) by the rest of the government?

Even a brief look at the context shows those are "exceptions that prove the rule."

I'm sure that for some people those incidents defined "what [they knew] the government said", but that would probably be because they put themselves into media-bubbles which excluded the greater mass of nuanced (and boring) health information, allowing only the "OMG look at this" scornful submissions by their Facebook friends.

> So the "government propaganda" is... unprepared statements by individuals

Yes, when those individuals are the president of the US and the director of the CDC presenting half-truths and exaggerations to further their agenda, that is textbook government propaganda.

I just wish one of the first few panels conveyed that the construction-plans were deliberately-incomplete and only described the outer shell.

Yeah, there's exposition later about the laser not being wired up, but it's a little late in the framing and suggests it could be wired up, as opposed to impossibly absent.

> 1. Yes, the COVID treatments we're using today are vaccines.

There were efforts to figure out how to treat SARS-CoV-2 with existing safe medications, but these efforts were suppressed.

In the early days Dr. Zelenko treated his obviously-COVID patients with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin. His logic was ‘why let the patient deteriorate while we wait for the test to come back, when we can just start treating now?’ Most of his patients made a full recovery.

Eventually some scam-treatments got approved - remdesivir (“run, death is near”) and… paxlovid were two ineffective treatments.

In my understanding the COVID vaccines were quite efficient against infection for the original strain. But then the virus mutated and it lost a lot of that (still a very efficient against ending up in an hospital bed).

Vaccine deniers seem to often forget about the timeline.

> The populations of the industrialized nations have forgotten (or never known at all) what all these diseases used to do, and imagine things like measles, pertussis, and rubella to be breezy little fevers that used to make kids miss a day or two of school before they were all good as new.

By being old enough and being born in a developing country I was able to witness some of those diseases. Pertussis and measles were still around when I was a kid.

Polio was the worst. There were plenty of survivors so, if we use the modern discourse that focus on deaths, Polio was fine. Except it was not fine. People with limbs so atrophied that they were skin and bone. Not even quadriplegics look so emaciated; I don't know what the mechanism is. Those were the lucky ones.

I was vaccinated, thankfully. I was also vaccinated for smallpox and I have the scar. Can you imagine a modern vaccine that leaves a scar? People would go apeshit. Except that everyone had it, it would be odd if you didn't, so no one gave it a second thought. The polio vaccine could even, in rare cases, cause polio. And yet people were lining up to get it early in the morning as soon as the government-run clinics opened. Why? Because they witnessed first hand how bad it was.

I can't even think of any medications that are more scrutinized than vaccines. If we applied the same rules everywhere else, we would have no medications available for headaches. NSAIDs are awfully dangerous compared to vaccines, and yet they are available over the counter. People seem to think their risk is worth it to get rid of pain. I don't know why vaccines are viewed differently.

> The HPV vaccination campaign was the subject of a dramatic recent report from Scotland, showing that not one single case of cervical cancer has been diagnosed so far in women who got the shots at a young enough age

Holy crap.

Side note: it's been approved for people up to 45 years of age. I'm going to look into that while I still can.

The article also did not touch on the new research on mRNA vaccines for other conditions, including some forms of cancer. We now have a very precise instrument we can use to create all sorts of therapies. The idea of using chicken eggs looks kinda barbaric in comparison.

I got Pertussis at 16 (DTaP only lasts 10 yesrs), it was the scariest disease I’ve had in my 30 year life.

I coughed so hard I cracked ribs, and also couldn’t catch my breath after coughing (hence “whooping cough”) that I passed out a few times.

Shit lasted for almost a month. Get vaccinated!

Lucky you, I got it at ~5. My mother reacted badly to hepatitis vaccine, decided her children won't be vaccinated (had to do the measles one), I got the whooping cough, passed out after a week, got diagnosed, I think it lasted 3 months but honestly the only memory I have left is passing out in school, then being alone in my bed, quarantined. All of us got our vaccine after that.

The big three reasons infectious disease isn't keeping human populations at 1850 levels are: (A) soap and disinfectants across the board, (B) vaccines and (C) antibiotics.

Yes, there have been problems in all these areas - some cleaning agents turned out to be carcinogenic or caused liver damage and other issues, overuse of antibiotics gave rise to antibiotic resistance in many infectious microbes, and some vaccines have been ineffective, induced too many negative side effects, or were subject to contamination due to poor manufacturing and distribution policies.

With Covid vaccines, looking at the references in the above publication is illuminating. Here's an inital 2020 safety/efficacy claim:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577

> "BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6). Similar vaccine efficacy (generally 90 to 100%) was observed across subgroups defined by age, sex, race, ethnicity, baseline body-mass index, and the presence of coexisting conditions."

By 2023, it was clear the rapid mutation rate of the virus had lead to many infections of fully vaccinated individuals, indeed it may have become entirely ineffective in preventing infection, though possibly reducing symptom severity:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482361/

> "...the bivalent-vaccinated group had a slightly but statistically significantly higher infection rate than the unvaccinated group in the statewide category and the age ≥50 years category. However, in the older age category (≥65 years), there was no significant difference in infection rates between the two groups. This suggests that while the bivalent vaccine might offer protection against severe outcomes, it may not significantly reduce the risk of infections entirely."

Since many health professionals and affiliated media were initially claiming that only the unvaccinated were at risk for Covid infection, this later reversal understandably may have reduced public trust in future pronouncements about vaccine efficacy, which is unfortunate. (IMO side effects were mininal compared to eg smallpox vaccine, claims of widespread vaccine injury seem grossly overblown)

The lesson is that rushing vaccine development in response to an emergency didn't work out quite as advertised, and really isn't the best way to develop vaccines.

Another good quote from Bret Weinstein a few days ago: “There is a, and the oldest vaccine technology involves using an attenuated pathogen, that is to say a relative of the thing that actually threatens your health and giving you an infection. Your body responds to infections. It's one of the things it does very well. So if it has an infection, it can learn the antigen that it is supposed to be targeting. Now vaccine manufacturers do not like this technology. And there are reasons they don't like it. One, it's cumbersome, right? You have to actually cultivate these organisms and because you're cultivating them, they can evolve. They can evolve once the patient has the infection. So it's a little bit scary, that technology. But what they've replaced it with is an inferior technology where they separate the antigens, where you're getting something inert and dead and the body does not respond to it like an infection and therefore does not develop the immunity, right? They're weak is what they are. And as a trick to trigger the immune system to react as if it has an infection, they're basically giving you a chemical sickness, right? They're tricking your body into thinking it's sick so that the body then is in surveillance mode trying to figure out which of the particles that are present are actually hostile with no mechanism for telling it how to distinguish between ragweed and some antigen of a virus. So of course this would cause autoimmune disorders, allergies, it will cause dysregulation of that entire extremely elegant system. So I guess what I'm realizing, and I'm still somewhere in this trajectory, is that much of what allows us to protect our own health are based on assumptions that simply are not met by the mechanisms that are being employed, right? You think that there is a system that tests vaccines carefully to make sure that nothing is injected into you for which the benefit does not exceed the cost. That is simply not true. These things are being created because they're profitable. They are being created in ways that are economically efficient at arbitrary cost to human health."

"Weinstein has been criticized for making false statements about COVID-19 treatments and vaccines, and for spreading misinformation about HIV/AIDS."

Brett Weinstein posted this in X / Twitter recently: “They love the mRNA technology because, A, it's cheap to produce. I mean, basically, you can produce a new vaccine by typing a sequence into a computer. Yeah. Right? B, it allows them to take a bunch of shots that are arduous to produce, streamline their production so it's economically tremendously efficient. C, you can produce shots for a whole bunch of new things without having to come up with some uh new protocol for producing them because it's all the same. D, you can tell the FDA well this is the same shot you've already authorized. So we're just gonna. It's already been proven to be the same technology. Yeah, we'll just test the antigen this time, see if the antigen causes any special problems. So your control group and your treatment group are both gonna have the pathologies of the mRNA platform. They're gonna disappear because you get the same amount of pathology in both groups. So anyway, it's a dream come true for the ruthless bastards in pharma. It's a nightmare from the point of view of patients. Absolute nightmare”

The Brett Weinstein who told Joe Rogan that he believed AIDS could be caused by amyl nitrite?

> That's what makes anti-vaccine activism so frustrating.

People are quick to label others "anti-vaxx" but it ain't always so. A friend of mine got, on purpose, several vaccines when Covid hit, as a middle finger to those prone to call others "anti-vaxx". But he did not get the Covid "vaccine". A smart guy btw: several of you here have worked for him and he did a nice exit in 2022 (before the tech crash).

I deeply regret conceding to peer pressure and getting that mRNA shot: "we lied about just about everything, and conveniently didn't tell you there were nano structures forming from the mRNA vaccine after it got injected". There are many studies on the subject. This was not mentioned.

Covid-19 is not just a lab leak: it's man-made using gain-of-function research.

They lied about that. They lied about masks not working "so that people wouldn't all go out and buy all the masks" to then force us to wear masks for months.

And the "Covid is going to mutate into a yet more deadly virus" never happened either.

So lies, lies, and more lies.

Thankfully there are still a few real investigative journalists out there. The fiasco and the coverup were insane. Several people lied in front of congress and belong in jail.

So proponent of that horrible, totalitarian, nano-structure-assembling mRNA vaccine (which, once again, I got): get lost.

> "Covid is going to mutate into a yet more deadly virus"

Delta very much did happen, and was very much more deadly than earlier strains. But as we know, viruses tend to drift towards being less deadly if it helps them spread.

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