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Comment by jljljl | Hacker News Reader

What would be the benefit of a placebo study vs studying the differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations?

Is the hypothesis that there is some kind of psychosomatic/placebo effect to vaccines, where just the process of getting injected changes outcomes? I find that hard to believe.

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Vaccines are already double blind tested with a placebo, but the yearly updates for seasonal vaccines based on a previously tested mechanism are not. The goal of this new requirement is to create delays making it effectively impossible to create annual flu & covid vaccines within these constraints.

The reason the updates aren't currently tested this way is because medical research ethics perspectives on the balance of risk of novel unknown effects vs known risk of withholding effective treatment from the placebo group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_equipoise

Yeah that makes sense. If there was an update of MMR, and there was a 50/50 chance that your child does not actually get vaccinated against MMR, you’d refuse to participate in the trial.

It depends on what type of placebo you use. The adjuvants used in vaccine injections appear to have some effect on the immune system themselves, even without the material intended to promote an immune response against a specific pathogen.

Maybe they should be double blind. Maybe whether or not your doctor thinks you got the vaccine impacts your later susceptibility.

I guess the danger here is that for vaccines that we already know reduce the risk of deadly diseases, you’d either:

Randomly expose patients to the risk of contracting a known debilitating/deadly disease

No one who comes in for the vaccine will consent the trial

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