The US meeting date is based on an arbitrary scheduling rule saying meetings like this must take place 15 days after request, or something to that effect.
The FDA itself closely inspects data throughout the phase 3 trials so this review should just consist of looking at the details to see if something was missed, (ideally) not some brand new information come to light.
Wow, thanks for the info. I didn't know it was arbitrary scheduling. Seems like given the circumstances you'd hope they would just setup a meeting tomorrow.
AFAIK both the FDA and the MHRA have been getting data regularly from the various vaccine developers. They didn't have to wait for a final dump of data just to see any of it.
Given that they could halt the rollout of the vaccine at any point, it makes sense to approve ASAP to get all bureaucratic burdens out of the way, and concurrently analyze the situation. Not saying that this is the case though.
For example, the EU is going to review the Pfizer vaccine on December 29, and they have requested further information.
Yes, it's likely. Regulators are not as independent from the industry as you think. They've been getting closer and closer over the decades. It's call corruption and it's growing.
Having a reasonable fear of corruption within the regulation process is not dangerous. How is it dangerous to address real concerns that a number of people at the CDC/WHO are deeply connected to Gavi/Gates and industrial interests?
Medical isn't constrained to science. Healthcare professionals are allowed to use tradition, authority, and Art in combination with science.
It's mind boggling to Engineers to hear this, but Medicine is older than the scientific method and physicians used Regulatory capture to prevent competition.
Science doesn't have all the answers. My partner recently got into a heated debate with a pharmaceutical company she was working for because they wanted something added to their standards of care document for a rare genetic disorder they developed a therapy for.
She couldn't find a study to backup the claims that the medical team wanted to make in the document, but the lead doctor said that if this wasn't included, the patients would suffer and ultimately die.
So she said "you need to prove this in a study so it can be included, otherwise you put the company at risk". To which the doctor said "We could do that, but it would take 3-4 years, and in the mean time, the patients we're caring for would go back home, the doctors would be missing the one key piece of advice, and then they'll all suffer and die".
I'm sure many, including myself, have experienced this issue very personally and tragically. Both parties were correct in your example. In my case I was the patient advocate and would argue very strongly on the side of the doctor. Your partners case has merit as well, however, as malpractice insurance and lawsuits are impacting healthcare costs and risk management decisions considerably.
But not a lot. That's what's fascinating. At least in the US, over 95% of fatalities are people over 55. We're at 200k ~ 300k deaths for the year in the US (and I think there is reason to believe this is an overestimate, not an underestimate). That's lower than heart disease and cancer (500~600k yearly). I doubt we'll even approach those numbers by March.
Science is slow because it needs to be right. We're no longer in a time 185 years ago when Jenner could just stab people with puss he pulled off of a Horsepox infected cow. Remember that 500 years ago, the Chinese were blowing smallbox puss into people's noses (infections in the nose were typically not bad and people recovered faster) and isolated them. Many of them survived fine, but some died.
Do you want to return to that world where we just experiment on humans without regards to what that means?
This vaccine should be a choice. I'm under 40 and not in a high risk group. I'm fine with people volunteering to take this vaccine. Maybe I'll take it in 5 years. But I don't want to see this become mandatory for going to work or being able to enter a music venue.
You can quote the Jacobson decision all you want, but that SCOTUS decision only said Jacobson had to pay the $5 fine, he never was forced to take the vaccine. Furthermore Jacobson lead to the Buck decision (forced sterilization) and the SCOTUS decision that led to the WW2 Japanese internment camps. It's bad law that's bread a poisoned well of bad law.
> At least in the US, over 95% of fatalities are people over 55
I'll never understand people who say this, thinking it somehow proves their point or something. My parents are nearly 60, and easily have 20 more years of time with me and their grandkids. Why are we okay with that?
Then why not protect them specifically? Give money to isolate them if they don't live in their own homes. Provide grocery delivery services. Let them make the choice. There are some old people who are 70 and say "I want to live my life" and so let them go out and do whatever and assume the risk themselves.
We can provide support specifically to those at risk, while also respecting the liberty and freedom of everyone else. Someone with an autoimmune disease or who is 65 can choose not to go to a pub and simply not interact with the rest of the world using technology. At the same time, the pub owner should be allowed to make a damn living.
I don't think it is fear mongering. While the health institutes have access to the data, I don't. I don't think anyone on hacker news can make many intelligent statements about side effects, yet, though the press releases claim that they are similar to what is typical of other vaccines.
We are a scientifically literate society, and increasingly so. We do not simply summon blind faith in institutions to interpret the world in which we live; we share with each other and seek truth.
I do not trust governments, not only (and not primarily) because they have violated trust, but because trust in governments to be arbiters of scientific truth is not a healthy or sustainable practice in a civilized society.
Pretty much all governments have a history of maliciousness and/or incompetence. Well I think it unlikely they would allow it. It is certainly in the realm of possible scenarios.
I don't actually want the raw data as I am not an epidemiologist, but I do want to see peer-reviewed papers as the grandparent to my original comment was waiting for before making a judgment. The point is that there are very few people in the world who can currently say anything intelligent about the subject of side effects in this vaccine. From my basic knowledge of vaccines and the approval process, I suspect any side effects will be heavily out-weighed by the benefits, but right now, I have no way of making an educated assessment. To be clear, I'm not really worried about it. My point was simply that I saw only intellectual curiosity in the grandparent to my original comment where the parent saw fear mongering.
> the press releases claim that they are similar to what is typical of other vaccines.
They are much, much, worse but typically subside in a day and at most two. The side effects are bad enough that there is worry people won't show up for the second dose.
Why do you believe this out of curiosity? Every single "long term covid" symptom study I've read are case studies. The UK one from the publication in Charlottesville covered 60 distinct people and they were all either high risk workers or over 55.
We don't know what "permanent damage" is actually happening. I remember having pneumonia in the 90s and it took my lungs over 3 months to recover, and that's from a normal known infection.
I think there is a strong case to be made, that a lot of these "long covid" cases might be a combination of normal pneumonia recovery, nocebo effect and fear/hysteria over this disease.
For me personally the unknowns of such a new virus mean that the existence of the case studies would be enough to be concerned. And the strongest case is made by the fact that this virus' closest relative known to infect humans has caused lasting damage to people with cases that lead to hospitalization:
"Evidence from people infected with other coronaviruses suggests that the damage will linger for some. A study published in February recorded long-term lung harm from SARS, which is caused by SARS-CoV-1. Between 2003 and 2018, Peixun Zhang at Peking University People’s Hospital in Beijing and his colleagues tracked the health of 71 people who had been hospitalized with SARS. Even after 15 years, 4.6% still had visible lesions on their lungs, and 38% had reduced diffusion capacity, meaning that their lungs were poor at transferring oxygen into the blood and removing carbon dioxide from it."
We know this much and SARS is poorly studied because it faded away so we generally lost interest in it. This virus is both similar and different enough to be very, very wide spread so even minor negative effects over the total population that gets moderate to mild cases will have the potential to have very large impacts on worldwide health.
As time goes on we are going to better document the consequences of mild and moderate cases and understand these things better, caution seems advisable until we do.
It's important to remember that SARS was a lot more deadly that COVID-19. I am not at all surprised such a high percentage of people suffered long term lung damage given how virulent it was. Case fatality was somewhere around 10%.
I'm curious if there was widespread serology testing to get to that number with the original SARS. That's in the ballpark of what the early SARS-COV-2 research (15%) showed until we realized there were asymptomatics and people who don't go to the hospital (because they aren't severe) and that numbers drawn from the hospitalized were not representative. If that number was just pulled from hospitalizations because we shut SARS down before we studied it as closely, it makes me wonder if the mortality rates are similar.
There was not widespread serology testing but subsequent analysis has the WHO pegging the fatality rate at about 3% (as opposed to the 10% from the time of the outbreak itself).
We didn't really shut SARS down so much as it seemed to have shut itself down, conventional epidemic control measures were enough to contain it and it was not quite easily transmissible enough to sustain itself in the wider population without being allowed to gain a real foothold undetected first.
That last point would be why you would not expect (and I would think it is impossible) to find that at the end of the day COVID-19 will be anywhere near as deadly as SARS. We have strong evidence that it takes truly extraordinary measures to suppress this new virus at a rate that will in fact eliminate it from a population when compared to SARS. SARS simply didn't spread that widely because if it did that would directly contradict the relative ease of its containment.
Sounds like they're saying Coronaviruses aren't a new thing, just that new types pop up. The CDC lists human Coronaviruses were first found in the mid-1960s [0]
Ok, how is that relevant?
Coronaviruses collectively have been known for a long time, this was also true when the SARS outbreak occurred, is true during MERS.
Likewise influenza was well known before the 1917 pandemic, or H1N1.. and?
I am not a doctor but normal pneumonia recovery doesn't cause myocarditis, memory loss, abnormal liver function, kidney damage or gastrointestinal damage.
It seems very likely at this point that COVID is a disease of the blood vessels, which has the potential to do some really nasty damage to your organs. The numbers are hard to estimate but I've seen experts say that they think about 5 times the number of people who die will have enough problems to be considered having a long term disability. With estimates of case fatality being about .5% - 1.5% that would mean about 5% of the people who get it will have enough long term damage to be disabled.
theres a huge hysteria market for this virus. it seemed like at one point and article was coming out weekly saying long term effects were worse and worse and worse. i don’t believe it
What do you know about the long-term side-effects of "the" vaccine, and how? Could you elaborate? You must know about it to be able to determine the risk between the two.
CDC has a page [1] with the notable historical vaccine adverse events. I think it's an informative page to read, but just in case you don't have time, here's my summary:
- most adverse events were due to manufacturing issues (e.g. contamination with some live virus). In this respect, I don't think the Covid vaccines are likely to be any more or less risky than other vaccines, such as the annual flu vaccine
- two vaccines had an association with the Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). Even nowadays, if you take the annual flu vaccine they advise caution if you've had GBS before.
- one Rotavirus vaccine was quickly discontinued after they saw it can cause a serious condition called intussusception
- finally, a case that you'll hear lots of people talking about, a possible link between a flu vaccine adjuvant (AS03) and narcolepsy. The CDC page directs you to the actual study [2]. My summary is that this link was observed only in Sweden and Taiwan, but in no other countries. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines do not have adjuvants (but Novavax and others will have).
Well, fwiw, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine idea, Ingmar Hoerr, thinks side effects are very unlikely, since the mRNA molecules dissolve after a few days. He has been working on this for 20 years, with no serious side effects ever observed.
A lot of these side-effects affect >50% of people (phase 3 dosage is 100ug), including fatigue, chills, headache, muscle pain, nausea, and pain.
100% of the 100ug treatment group had at least one symptom, 80% of those classified as moderate. The vaccine is going to make you feel sick for a little while.
the parent is concerned regarding the appearance of ADE (Antibody-dependent enhancement) during the creation of the SARS vaccine.
While we cannot totally disregard ADE, I assume we should have seen it by now (and the Oxford trial was stopped exactly because they thought they might have observed something like it). Whether it appears again on a population scale level, nobody knows.
Not a doctor, just a member of a risk group. The continued spread of Covid poses a rather high risk to me, both because of mortality and because of potential long-lasting aftereffects ("Long Covid"). Even if the vaccine turns out to have longterm side effects, I find it very unlikely that those will be more significant than Long Covid. Therefore the risk tradeoff makes any vaccine a complete no-brainer to me.
What about people in the risk group(s) for vaccine side-effects? E.g., people with autoimmune issues. Does their safety matter less than yours? (Assuming you're advocating for vaccinating others; if you're just advocating for vaccinating yourself and yourself only, then carry on.)
I'm also in the autoimmune-disorder bucket. From what I understand, Covid also triggers plenty autoimmune issues, so the risk assessment does not change in a significant way.
At this point, the autoimmune dangers of vaccines are well understood but the autoimmune dangers of COVID-19 aren't. Doesn't that mean it's safer to avoid the vaccine, until that situation changes? In fact it's exactly the opposite of what many people here are saying, considering only themselves and not others, but using their own logic!
I dunno. I have an autoimmune disease. I was COVID-19 positive without any symptoms. It has been some time now. Everything is fine. With regarding to the vaccine: I do not want to risk it, when I know that I went through COVID-19 without symptoms and may just do it again and again after 6 months? They say I have 6 months of immunity.
> A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms 54,166 induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity 167,168 . Thus, identification of individuals at an increased risk of autoimmune reactions before mRNA vaccination may allow reasonable precautions to be taken. Another potential safety issue could derive from the presence of extracellular RNA during mRNA vaccination. Extracellular naked RNA has been shown to increase the permeability of tightly packed endothelial cells and may thus contribute to oedema 169. Another study showed that extracellular RNA promoted blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation 170. Safety will therefore need continued evaluation as different mRNA modalities and delivery systems are utilized for the first time in humans and are tested in larger patient populations.
I'm curious for an actual expert to answer, but when I've heard this question presented they would point out that the risk of long-term side effects from a vaccine must be compared relative to the unknown, long-term side effects of a covid infection and continuing to live in a society that's locked down.
The only potential long-term risk I wonder about is antibody dependent enhancement [1] for future variants of the virus. But, that has nothing to do with whether the vaccine uses mRNA or an attenuated virus. Those involved in making a vaccine are very much aware of this issue and design vaccines to avoid it.
I'd also be interested to know whether mRNA vaccine, in hijacking the body's own cells then training the immune system to attack them, carries extra risk for those with autoimmune disorders i.e. people whose immune systems already have an unfortunate tendency to attack themselves.
I'm sure this has all been thought about by relevant experts but I'd like to see the published research.
From what I understand, people unlucky enough to have certain conditions haven't been included in the studies, and therefore won't be taking the vaccine. That includes pregnant women, and (I think?) people with autoimmune disorders.
I’m not aware of any vaccine that had long term side effects that were not also apparent in the short term.
E.g. I believe it was the swine flu vaccine that caused narcolepsy in a small percentage of people receiving it. But that was apparent immediately.
To my knowledge no one has identified any slow acting consequences of a vaccine that would not have been obvious from the first rollout of a vaccine.
So this question is mostly academic. Unless you’re someone in the UK slated to get the first dose, you probably won’t even have an opportunity to get the vaccine before the effects in early groups become known. And for those in high risk early groups, the risk of covid surely outweighs the risk of vaccine.
Nothing has shown up in trials so far so I’m not expecting side effects beyond the known effect of short term flu like symptoms for a couple days.
What do you mean by short term? That swine flu vaccine is my main concern. It wasn't clear in trials, and it took a couple of years before anyone took the problem seriously as far as I can tell -- by that point a significant chunk of the world could have a COVID vaccine.
I mean the effects would have been immediate, rather than say “develops cancer in 20 years”. Though I guess the narcolepsy took about a month to develop. I suspect there will be much more monitoring and speed with these vaccines than with the swine flu vaccine.
The mechanism for the narcolepsy was a protein present in the virus itself. So actually getting the flu would have been much worse for those with the genes that made them susceptible.
It doesn’t sound like mRNA vaccines would have this vulnerability. Though I do take your point that it’s possible something like the swine flu narcolepsy event would only be found after the fact. However that would be a pretty small consequence since in this case the flu also would have caused worse narcolepsy.
Even if we just vaccinated those at greatest risk the death rate would plummet to an acceptable level, and for those people the benefits far outweigh any potential risks.
Vaccines are also very young. We've had them for 185 years, and there were probably a lot of side effects from people getting stabbed with Horse Pox, but a lot of them probably just died and we didn't collect data back then they way we do today.
No the 2009 one. Caused narcolepsy in a small number of people. Notably the mechanism was the same one as in the flu itself, so actually getting the flu would have caused worse narcolepsy.
Of covid or the vaccine? Vaccine side effects are, generally speaking, either immediate, or are a problem with the immunological response that they elicit. I would say that these scenarios have not been fully evaluated, but the risk of other kinds of side effects is very very low.
I am personally quite terrified of the possible unknown long term side effects of COVID-19 and largely confident that the vaccines are going to be safe.
If you offered me a vaccine tomorrow vs a 100% certain mild case of COVID-19 that would guarantee me immunity for a year so I could get the vaccine in 12 months when there was /even more/ confidence about the safety of the vaccine I would take the vaccine.
Yeah I think that basically sums it up. The dangers of long term COVID far, far outweigh the potential risks of the vaccine. It seems many people have a fundamental distrust of vaccines and many also still don't understand how dangerous COVID seems to be for people who have relatively little risk of dying from the disease.
I haven't been able to come up with a theory as to why public health departments and the media haven't been making the long term effects a key part of their messaging.
Is the long covid phenomenon any more pronounced with this virus than any other coronavirus (last I read[0], the answer seems to be 'no')? Since there are four others circulating, will this vaccine even have a significant effect on these post-viral symptoms?
That article is really something, the first thing that jumps out:
"Second, covid is not some magical entity, it’s a coronavirus, and it behaves like other coronaviruses, and other respiratory viruses more generally. It would be strange for covid to cause symptoms that other respiratory viruses don’t. And since I’ve never heard of “long rhinovirus” or “long influenza”, I’m inherently doubtful of claims that there’s such a thing as “long covid”."
This is just getting caught up in silly semantics, people are experiencing longer term health effects, they are calling it "long covid" for lack of a better name not because it is an affirmative diagnosis.
"On MedRxiv, there is a pre-print awaiting peer review of a prospective cohort study that followed 4,182 people with positive PCR tests... if we assume that this study was reasonably accurate, then one in 50 people who get covid still have symptoms at the twelve week point..."
This is supposed to be an argument that inclines me to think that whatever "Long Covid" is I am not supposed to be worried about it? If 1 in 50 people that get a positive test are still feeling after effects of having what the author believes "behaves just like other coronaviruses" then I think we should be very concerned! Even if truly long term effects only develop in 1 in 500 COVID-19 cases.. that's a lot of people who are going to be sick for a really long time! It would be 400 Americans a day right now. Yikes! That's bad!
I'll take my chances with a vaccine!
(And I know the standard response to this is.. "well, those people are mostly old or sick with something else so you can't really count it that way" but a certain, maybe large, proportion of those people would probably never get a serious respiratory virus in the near or medium term in the absence of COVID-19. It is a really large number of extra sick people, and all at once.)
Also the 4 other coronaviruses circulating thing is silly, obviously the long term effects of the common cold viruses are not going to be comparable if the short term effects are clearly not comparable, it is reductionism of the worst kind.
Hmmm. I've read your comment twice now, and it seems like you have glossed over the entire observation and assertion that Rushworth (and Gupta, and Henneghan, and Kulldorff, and other reputable experts) are making with what amounts to a side note in your comment:
> Also the 4 other coronaviruses circulating thing is silly, obviously the long term effects of the common cold viruses are not going to be comparable if the short term effects are clearly not comparable, it is reductionism of the worst kind.
What you are saying is "obvious" is not at all obvious, and is not the assessment of the experts who have looked at the data and weighed in.
In terms of obviousness: why do you think that the long term effects are unlikely to be comparable (if not strikingly similar), since the long term (adverse) effects of each of these four (and also several of the influenza A) viruses seem to be clinically identical, despite each having distinguishable acute characteristics?
> This is just getting caught up in silly semantics, people are experiencing longer term health effects, they are calling it "long covid" for lack of a better name not because it is an affirmative diagnosis.
I agree that the terminology becomes tricky. But I think the question is better stated as: is "long COVID19" any different from other "long covid" (ie, the rare but well known post-viral syndrome that is observed with all coronaviruses).
> Even if truly long term effects only develop in 1 in 500 COVID-19 cases.. that's a lot of people who are going to be sick for a really long time! It would be 400 Americans a day right now.
...but a relatively small cohort in the bigger picture of post-viral syndrome, if indeed it occurs with approximately equal frequency with the other coronaviruses (and some influenza A viruses).
I think we need to be careful about measuring potential adverse outcomes against one another, and try our best to use numbers that reflect the likely lived experience of people (to wit, nearly everyone contracts the "garden variety" coronaviruses a few times in their life).
If the current slate of vaccines don't prevent this effect, then I'm having trouble putting any math together that suggests that it will generally reduce population-level instances of "long covid" (again, defined broadly as long effects from any covid, not just COVID19).
Inspired by your citation I went out and had a look on the Internets.. a direct quote from Sunetra Gupta in May: "the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in [the UK]."
How is this a credible person to listen to? It boggles the mind, she is an epidemiologist! After making a professional error on that scale I would crawl in a hole and not come out for a year!
I guess I glossed over the claim that the author offered completely unsupported, yes. This is the fundamental problem here, you need to be completely absorbed into this information universe to just accept statements like "all coronaviruses are the same as this one" as fact. Rushworth is not an expert on viruses, Kulldorff is not an expert on viruses, Gupta is not an expert on viruses.. there is a difference between epidemiology and virology. If you want to make virology claims based on citing authorities, cite virologists.
Asserting that all coronaviruses are similar and must have very similar effects in the short and long term seems like a very bad assumption to make, before the original SARS outbreak the scientific consensus was that coronaviruses were not capable of causing sevre illness in humans - despite their long history of being known killers of animals! Asserting we absolutely know things about this virus based on things that we didn't think the whole category of viruses was capable of doing less than 20 years ago without citations is bad!
So asserting that the long term effects of this virus are likely to be similar to the long term effects of other coronaviruses is not credible given the available evidence, and saying that it is likely to be similar to influenza (an unrelated virus that is very different) is even less credible. (And if the hospitals were this overloaded with flu patients every year we'd be worried about the long term effects on the survivors, but they are not!)
"I think we need to be careful about measuring potential adverse outcomes against one another, and try our best to use numbers that reflect the likely lived experience of people (to wit, nearly everyone contracts the "garden variety" coronaviruses a few times in their life)."
I don't know what this is supposed to mean, but if is contingent on believing that "garden variety" coronaviruses are similar in their effect to SARS-COV2.. I mean we can see just by looking at the ICU tallies in nearly every jurisdiction in the world that this is not the case so I don't know what conclusions you expect anyone to draw.
At the end of the day that is what this always comes down to with these COVID-19 debates it seems, the jurisdictions that haven't taken the virus seriously have been absolutely devastated by it, there is no secret knowledge to uncover. One should draw from that the inference that assuming that there is some secret formula of logic that will arrive at the conclusion that we already know the long terms effects of this virus seems less than credible. It might turn out to be correct! But that still won't vindicate the flawed logic of drawing the conclusion now.
If having one's virus research repeatedly published in the world's top journals, and securing a patent for a novel influenza vaccine, does not make one an expert, I think maybe we're casting too narrow a net. Not only in Sunetra Gupta an expert on viruses in my book, but one of the world's best.
> Asserting that all coronaviruses are similar and must have very similar effects in the short and long term seems like a very bad assumption to make
But I didn't do that. This brings us back to my original question: is there evidence that "long COVID19" is different than other long covids? If I'm understanding you correctly, you seem wont to presume that the answer is "yes", simply because the acute affects are different. But, as I pointed out, viruses with a wide-range of acute effects all produce clinically similar "post-viral syndrome". To my knowledge, there is no convincing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is an outlier in this specific respect. Or am I wrong?
You misunderstand the nature of Gupta's expertise and how it might relate to the issue at hand. She has also demonstrated her lack of qualifications in this matter with her public statements even in the areas where she would be legitimately qualified.
You're just goalpost moving here, the argument in the article you are citing clearly says the viruses are similar and presumes that their effects are similar on that basis. If YOU don't accept that then you don't accept your own cited authority, you're wasting your own time here on that basis.
I'm concerned about that, but I'm far more concerned about covid-19, so I would be pretty happy to take a vaccine. Covid is known to have risk of death, side-effects, and unknown future medical conditions, so it seems unlikely that a vaccine would be much worse than that.
It's really a problem everywhere, UK & US are just leading the charge. E.g. Germany has over half the population overweight, and a solid 1 in 4 are obese. While that doesn't match the US, it's not exactly something to brag about.
I can't be bothered to grab numbers, but in the US, and perhaps elsewhere, I'd wager that the number of people a) over 55, or b) obese, or c) otherwise high risk make up more than half the population, or very much near it.
However, if they do not screw something up in production (which I regard a larger potential source of error than the vaccine itself) there won't be long term side-effects for most people. There were some side effects from swine-flu in Sweden around 2010 that were certainly major and those affected 1/12.000 people. I would guess that is an upper bound for side effect, but as I said, guessing probabilities of an unknown with sample size one is hard.
BioNtech has been developing mRNA vaccines for cancer patients for some time, so I would not expect any really large long term (in the range of 2-4 years) side-effects for fractions of the population larger than 20% based on that alone.
That's a question for someone who's heavily schooled on mRNA vaccines and/or a practitioner involved in the trials for this particular vaccine.
Not that I have a problem with your asking the question, I just don't think an opinion poll on a tech board is going to yield an accurate prediction of what to expect.
> I just don't think an opinion poll on a tech board is going to yield an accurate prediction of what to expect.
Part of your answer, which I'm paraphrasing to "I don't know, talk to the experts", is already a good answer. But I was hoping that there was an expert lurking around that might be able to explain the risks or link to some evidence.
If you hold a strawpoll of everyone around, then you may get an expert. But you will also primarily get non-experts, which is the problem and what headmelted is pointing out. If expert opinions are desired, why not ask for that? The non-expert opinions are already abundant, vocal, and ready to spread misinformation. shusson was not soliciting only expert opinions or even primarily expert opinions, whether that was intentional or not.
> I just don't think an opinion poll on a tech board is going to yield an accurate prediction of what to expect.
I'm pretty sure they were hoping to be answered by someone heavily schooled in mRNA vaccines and/or a practitioner involved in the trials for this particular vaccine. On this particular "tech board", there's a reasonable chance of getting a response from those kinds of experts.
From covid? Pretty high, pretty sure I read 5-10% of people in infected. For these vaccines 0.0000001%. So I'm saying not zero but you're more likely to die on the way to get the vaccine (car/bus/stroll) than any long term side effects.
Hopefully the risk for long term side-effects will be lower than last time with the 2009 swine flue pandemic when my government used pandemrix. Hopefully any similar signs of long term side-effects will be discovered before low-risk groups start to receive the vaccine.
Personally since I belong to a low-risk group, there will be quite some time before the line reaches me where I need to make a decision, in which more data will be available from high-risk groups. It will also take time for my country currently pressured health care system to allocate resources for vaccinations without causing even more problems. My current estimate is many months from now.
Outside of long term side-effects I am concerned about how long the protection last. It is difficult to calculate risk without knowing that data point.
For me, from a strictly individual perspective, the health risks from a vaccine is almost certainly less than the long term (and short term) risks of COVID-19 infection.
Is the long covid phenomenon any more pronounced with this virus than any other coronavirus (last I read[0], the answer seems to be 'no')? Since there are four others circulating, will this vaccine even have a significant effect on these post-viral symptoms?
As I see it, the political side is pushing for a solution for the now, damn the consequences in 5-10 years. This is really just BAU in politics.
I wouldn't be surprised if the leaders of the vaccine firms weren't using their own vaccines on themselves and their families for a couple more years, until they have sufficient data.
I have read enough research papers about the replication crises in many fields to know how much these long term studies are needed to properly assess a risk-benefit analysis for vaccination. I will, personally, stay the fuck away for the next couple years. My life didn't change much anyway, I've been working from home for years now. Less social life, but I can weather that.
As a note, we got COVID with the wife, I was without symptoms while she lost taste for a couple days and was tired for a week. That was all.
