Hey guys- This data leak looks like the work of a misinformation campaign. The very first thing this article says is the data is from a cyberattack on European Medicines Agency (EMA), and the data was sent anonymously to journalists. A Reuters article claims that the Russian and Chinese are behind this: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-cyber/russian-chinese-.... May be it's true that there is mRNA instability, but the efficacy data says the Moderna vaccine works extremely well. mRNA in intrinsic in your cellular biology with all of its instability, and your body manages to deal with it just fine.
> May be it's true that there is mRNA instability, but the efficacy data says the Moderna vaccine works extremely well
The efficacy data was based on clinical trial batches though, and the challenge seemed to be with lower manufacturing quality in the large scale commercial batches : "changes were made in their processes to ensure that the integrity was improved and brought in line with what was seen for clinical trial batches."
To be honest, we do also have real world data now (Israel mainly) that confirms the benefit/risk balance to be extremely good.
From https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/cyberattack-ema-update-6 the EMA has acknowledge that the individual emails are authentic, though "data from different users were selected and aggregated, screenshots from multiple folders and mailboxes have been created and additional titles were added by the perpetrators in a way which could undermine trust in vaccines."
sounds like an excuse, it’s a little creepy that certain parties have such a stake in vaccines being extremely trustworthy, as if there’s something wrong with it being a different case per each individual’s health/risk status, they should be saying “talk to your doctor” rather than “everyone get the vaccine when it’s your turn”
A patient’s medical record isn’t useful when the only groups being advised not to take vaccines are children and people with past allergic reactions to vaccines. A doctor has no more information in this regard than the health regulators.
Just like everything in medicine it’s all risk management. If the risk of suffering damage from covid is lower than the risk of damage from a vaccine then you don’t need the vaccine. A doctor will know your proper risk assessment.
>This data leak looks like the work of a misinformation campaign. The very first thing this article says is the data is from a cyberattack on European Medicines Agency (EMA), and the data was sent anonymously to journalists
What exactly of the above makes this a "misinformation campaign" (a term so vague as to be misinformation itself)? Nowhere in what you say above says the data are falsified or wrong.
Hackers have leaked data from organizations almost as long as there were computers - and giving them to journalists and/or posting them just as often. People also did it before computers.
The difference being that then we saluted getting access to raw data, whereas now we are being conditioned to consider them "misinformation".
Official response from the EMA indicates that the "leakers" (lightly?) manipulated the data, and did not simply pass it on unmodified:
> A closer investigation of the published material has revealed that not all of the documents were published in their integral, original form and may have been taken out of context. Whilst individual emails are authentic, data from different users were selected and aggregated, screenshots from multiple folders and mailboxes have been created and additional titles were added by the perpetrators in a way which could undermine trust in vaccines.
So basically they took out the most interesting parts and left the rest. So this is just spin from EMA.
"manipulated data" sounds like Orwellian double speak from the company.
I remember the planned parenthood video, where they where haggling over prices for parts. Planned parenthood claimed it was a manipulated video too. Because it was an excerpt. They even locked up somebody for making the video.
Never mind that the full unedited video was also released on the internet.
And a few years earlier I watched a documentary on CBC about a black market in body parts. Little bits and pieces used during surgery. Which this totally corroborated.
yeah, don't really want to get into it. But the videos where real. The haggling for the price of fetus parts was real. Planned Parenthood defence rest on the claim that they where not making a profit. Which would be akin to your dentist charging you $500 to take out your daughter's tooth, causing her extra pain during extraction to make sure the tooth came out whole, then secretly selling her tooth for tens of thousands with out her knowledge. Then after the dentist gets caught in an undercover video haggling over the price to a potential buyer. The courts decide that that he made no money because after he pays himself a million dollar salary, his business is basically brake even. In a final bit of dystopian irony they charge and jail the guy that made the undercover video.
"a Texas grand jury chartered to investigate Planned Parenthood found no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood but instead indicted CMP founder David Daleiden and member Sandra Merritt"
It sounds like they got people together to go after PP and then it didn't turn out that way.
Doesn't that cut against the dystopia in your imagination where things are predetermined?
The parent wikipedia article shows that CMP attempted to entrap Planned Parenthood by offering them $1600 for fetal tissues, but PP declined. Mike Pence's own investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing. So no, you're wrong, and the proof is in the link you're replying to.
You're assuming "the most interesting parts" are from original documents and not doctored. There are many interests that create anti-vax campaigns, much of it coming from singular sources and brought to you by bots. Meaning somebody is making money or political power from it.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/facebook-anti-vax-influencers...
If there's actual proof the PP video was legitimate surely it's in that criminal case. Provide specific and high quality proof on specific instances, making wide generalizations does not make it convincing.
Which will show what kind of actions they did or did not actually go through. Are you basing the proof of pp selling parts soley based on an edited video?
instability of mRNA is not an issue under the following proviso, the truncated fragments of the whole mRNA must not destroy the structure of the epitope regions; and beyond this level there are still PAMPs [pathogen associated molecular patterns] that will trigger an immune response pathway as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system
> Hey guys- This data leak looks like the work of a misinformation campaign.
Setting aside the misinformation / disinformation rhetoric for a moment, a product that gets injected in virtually every human being alive needs to go through a generous amount of scrutiny to ensure it works as intended and does not cause more harm than good.
Biotech is a vastly complex field and taking the stance of "it works, trust me" is not exactly wise.
The leaked information requires analysis to identify the valid and relevant parts which should be treated as feedback for health policies and vaccine development.
> The very first thing this article says is the data is from a cyberattack on European Medicines Agency (EMA), and the data was sent anonymously to journalists.
It could just as likely be a hacker acting out of altruism, similarly to the one who broke into that italian company a few years ago. If someone didn't trust that the megacorp was acting in good faith, what they did here is probably the most effective (though morally ambiguous) way to hold them accountable.
The only question now is, are we going to brush their work aside without examination, blithely labelling it "misinformation", without any further thought?
Everything looks like a misinformation campaign perpetrated by 'them' anymore. This well could be. It also might not be. The data could have been manipulated. It might not have been.
We do what we can with what information is offered to us. Lies, half-truths, and all.
I could think of half a dozen parties with interest and the means to push this story in either direction. It's axiomatic that a story that's been covered is of interest to anyone. The response to a story implicitly carries on that property. The specific nature of the interests involved are not always clear.
Intactness of 55% vs 75% should make no real difference to your view either of efficacy or of danger. Because:
Efficacy: the mRNA vaccines have a large margin for error with respect to dose. 55% of several times more than enough is still more than enough.
Danger: suppose the danger of broken-up mRNA to increase linearly with the amount given. Then the increase of danger would be by a factor of (100-55)/(100-78) ~= 2. The substantiated near-term danger of Pfizer is very low. We're at 5.2 million people vaxxed in Israel now… Twice of very low is very low. In order to argue for "too much" danger you have to argue either for non-linearity or for long-term high danger. If you argue for the latter then you already think the danger to be high, so there's no real difference between your view now and your view before. If you want to argue non-linearity of danger then you are arguing for a very remarkable biological coincidence. You also have to explain why the occasional 5x overdoses, which happen when a someone is given a whole vial by mistake, don't seem to be doing any harm. Never mind that it would have come out in the animal trials.
Apologies, but I must have missed it when you said:
“If you want to argue non-linearity of danger then you are arguing for a very remarkable biological coincidence.“
What do you mean here? Can you give a bit more info?
Note, I am pretty well versed on nonlinearities from a mathematical-engineering point of view, but know very very little about biology. (If that’s of any use to know)
Just that increases in risk are usually approximated pretty well by a linear change with dose. Radiation, poison, allergens, etc. Drugs too – the ones where the toxic dose is close to the therapeutic dose are generally pretty nasty even when used as intended. It's possible for there to be a transition between "very safe" and "noticably unsafe" as the quantity of something increases twofold, but a priori unlikely. For this to happen not only in vaccines, but through an unknown mechanism that operates precisely in this particular range, would be truly rotten luck. It's also contradicted (a posteriori) by the evidence I referred to (overdoses and animal models).
This isn't right. Risk from overdoses of drugs, poison, and allergens is *highly* nonlinear. It'd be exceptionally unlikely in the case of mRNA vaccine, but that's the case the majority of the time.
There's a specific minimum dosage most people have of allergen before they hit on a life-threatening reaction. You might be okay with trace amount of peanuts, swell up with one peanut, and die with five. It's pretty consistent, and very nonlinear.
That's why you can build up a tolerance to iocane powder too; small doses won't do anything, while large ones are guaranteed to kill. If it was linear, a 1/10th lethal dose would have a 10% chance of killing you.
I mean, they're all nonlinear at some point in the range of possible doses. Radiation too. I should have specified I was focusing on the "very low" bit of the curves. Chest X-ray vs two chest X-rays, rather than Louis Slotin vs the guy at the back of the room.
Nope. Most medicines are totally nonlinear. Almost any function is affine if you look close enough, but that's different from linear. If you half the dosage of ibuprofen, your odds of complications rarely fall by 50%.
Chest x-ray is pretty linear within reasonable dosage ranges, for much the same reason I'd expect mRNA damage to be.
Let's say a piece of mRNA has a 1E-12 chance of causing you to grow a third arm by virtue of a defect. Two pieces of mRNA would have very close to a 2E-12 chance of causing you to grow a third arm. That's linearity. If you've doubled the defect rate, you've doubled the risk.
This contrast with e.g. sports brain trauma, where one sports brain trauma might be relatively moderate risk, but two might be very high risk (much more than double). Or risk from ibuprofen, where 600mg is has close to zero risk, but an overdose of 60,000mg poses a significant risk of death (much more than 100x the risk of death of a 600mg dose). That's nonlinear.
I'm not sure how risk from mRNA defects would be anything but linear. It would take an extraordinary set of coincidences.
it would appear you are sampling an unknown distribution, finding it mostly to be negligible in its effects, and calling it linear?
I’m confused so let me try an analogy with DNA: most mutations do nothing. Every now and then, cancer.
Sample a large number of mutations for a short duration, and you have proven nothing regarding nonlinearity globally. Roughly speaking.
Another example: I can measure a the air near (but not to near) a shockwave, or just under (By human scale) the free surface of the ocean, and find pretty much linear behavior if no other pathologies are present. The underlying physics however, is not linear, it is only my approximation which is. Maybe it’s valid over configurations of interest. But then I better know something about the limits of my approximation.
The thing about DNA damage is that it replicates. mRNA is pretty much designed to be degraded almost immediately after it is transcribed.
If I understand woofie11 correctly, it means that the probability that an error in a single mRNA corresponds with an error in another mRNA to cause a larger perceivable effect is small. The errors would have to be made in the exact same way.
Or alternatively, the odds of a particular mRNA mutation doing something harmful are astronomically low. With 7 billion people being injected with large amounts of mRNA, you have a very small number times a very big number, so I can't estimate how likely something is to happen, but we know it's small since we haven't learned about anything critical with tens (hundreds) of millions of injections so far.
If an mRNA mutation were to make a self-replicating virus, or make something which damages DNA leading to cancer, or something wonky like that, I guess that's in abstract possible. It can make abstract proteins, and we don't know what those will do.
In that case, if I have twice as much mutated mRNA in my body, the odds of that happening almost exactly double. It's like rolling a 1-trillion sided die twice instead of once and seeing if I roll a 1. With one roll, I have a 1-in-a-trillion chance. With two rolls, I have a 2-in-a-trillion chance (minus 1-in-a-septillion of having the same thing happen twice, which we don't know what it would do, but is a small enough possibility we can ignore).
But yeah, unless something really wonky going on, I'm not going to end up with hundreds of strands of mutated mRNA in my body *all doing the same thing*.
The large sample size in cross section is not compelling to me - On its on - over a short duration of time. Because I know nothing about long term possibilities from that.
The statistics as derived from the dynamics of “how rna works” - yeah that’s compelling.
This:
“If an mRNA mutation were to make a self-replicating virus, or make something which damages DNA leading to cancer, or something wonky like that, I guess that's in abstract possible. It can make abstract proteins, and we don't know what those will do.”
Sounds astronomically I likely, but with unknown error bars. Sounds like our If our cross section test Is large enough going on long enough, we might just get there.
Given that the mRNA in the vaccine encodes for just a single protein of a given virus, it seems totally impossible to get an entire virus out of an error. :)
A prion (misfolded protein that causes other proteins to misfold) is more likely, but even then prions need to misfold in specific ways that encourage their replication as well. In all likelihood the error is just going to prevent the ribosome from finishing transcription and we'll have just a fragment of whatever protein the RNA initially encoded for.
Thanks! This is good to know as well. And thanks for pausing to help someone who honestly has no spare time whatsoever to dig in. I know that is probably frustrating for some (not necessarily you, it’s just I’ve been there and it can be exasperating)
Is there any reason to think it's unlikely that mRNA defects would have the same risk profile as Ibuprofen? The body is full of thresholding processes, where up to X% blood concentration the organs filter things out fine, and there's no issue, but over that level danger escalates quickly. I don't know immunology basically at all, but is there some reason to think it doesn't have processes that behave like this?
Ibuprofen reaches a threshold of toxicity; a level at which our body's ability to manage it gets met and then exceeded. Things go rapidly wrong at that point.
Degraded mRNA just... doesn't work. It'd be a problem if all the mRNA in your cells started suddenly degrading faster than usual, for sure, but that's because you need the resulting protein output to live. If the vaccine degrades too fast, it just doesn't produce the proteins it was supposed to, but we didn't need them to function. Lost efficacy, but you don't wind up growing extra arms.
Didn't I cover that in "danger"? The leaks are talking about maybe twice as much broken bits of mRNA in early batches. That's assuming all the not-intact stuff is broken mRNA rather than simple amino acids or something else just as boring. That shouldn't make much difference to anyone's view. If you think it's "doing" stuff that makes you not want to get vaccinated, well you probably thought that before you read this report, too.
Anything particular reason you're worried about extra mRNA fragments? mRNA needs a initiation sequence in order to be translated into a protein, which only exists at the front. It also needs a polyA tail to maintain stability or it would just degrade. Random fragments don't do anything on their own
Encode smaller bits of the same protein? Who cares.
Otherwise, the mRNAs aren’t present in high enough quantities to do significant signaling or silencing things, and it’s going in the deltoid... not really a medically interesting place. You could inject 1mL of dilute HCl there and it wouldn’t be a big problem.
I'd rather not be injected with bits of mRNA that encode random bits of proteins, thanks. The deltoid is "medically interesting" enough to produce Covid spike proteins.
Proteopathy is a real thing. Prion dysfunctions can cause self-replication, not that the makeup is necessarily there for that in these vaccines. Interesting starting point for consideration nonetheless.
these fragments of mRNA will be recognized as antigens, until the point that the folded structure of the epitopes is destroyed, these smaller fragments are still recognized as viral PAMPs and evoke innate immune responses.
I had looked at these emails when they leaked.
To be clear: If you'd offer me one of those mRNA vaccines like right now I wouldn't hesitate for a second and take it.
But I do think this raises some questions around transparency. If the EMA has concerns about the production of these vaccines then I think this is something that should be discussed in public - so the scientific community can weight in and review this issue. If the EMA thinks that this is a solved issue - which the emails imply is what they thought before they authorized the vaccine - then that's what they should communicate.
It's a technical concern. Publishing will only cause fear and doubt.
In any case, it's a matter of weighing risks. Even if there's a 10⁻⁶ probability of complications, giving the vaccine and stopping serious illness/deaths is still a better decision overall. Even if it means hundreds of cases of complications across Europe. And then, the complications might turn out to be statistically difficult to discern from uniform random anyway.
A probability of 10⁻⁶ is difficult to conceptualize so if it is published with scary words, people might interpret it as "will probably happen to me". Then if that affects vaccine roll-out negatively, publishing might be a bad decision.
Millions of people in the UK have received the AZ vaccine, which has demonstrated safety and efficacy.
The efficacy metric means protection against infection, which is not complete. But as far as I've heard, not one person who has received either Pfizer or AZ has become seriously ill or died. In other words, it "flattens the curve" instantly.
Unfortunately we/they are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If it was published, you can be sure the misinformation around what it meant would be through the roof. Having it hidden, and now come out may end up lending more credence to the conspiracy theories.
If you take the approach that it's going to be leaked by Chinese and/or Russian intelligence anyway, you might as well tell the truth to begin with rather than let Ivan or Winnie 'reinterpret' it for you.
On weighing risks, in a pandemic like that your choices are statistically limited to either getting vaccinated or getting ill. Not getting either, over time, is not a viable option.
>It's a technical concern. Publishing will only cause fear and doubt.
And who appointed them as arbiters or censors of truth for "the public's own good" as opposed to researchers that should make their results public whatever they are?
You know you're in a cult when you must preface your fealty before voicing the softest of logical hardballs. This entire thread is 50% prefacing. We've lost our ability for true discourse.
If we can't entertain the idea that drug companies lie about their results and efficaccy to gain multi-billion contracts, their managers cover their arses either way, fast-track vaccine orders are problematic, and that it's at least suspect that vaccines that took decades to be created for other variants were now made in less than a year to be the "truth" - and we consider rational to proclaim that we'd "take" the vaccine "without hesitation", then yes, we've lost our ability for true discourse...
Hey I'm all for the vaccine, but lets be real about it. Humans struggle with productization. Games, phones, cars, and everything else we make have problems initially (and frequently after any small changes) because we have to come up with a repeatable and robust process for producing, packaging, shipping, delivery, etc, which may have totally different requirements from prototyping and development. Furthermore, these processes have a myriad of unknown unknowns -- with failure points we don't anticipate until they happen (complex systems).
This is another (very very) complex system with a relatively untested technology in an extremely noisy deployment environment. Every user is running a different OS basically, and every deployment corrupts the deployment image to some degree (RNA breakdown). Problems were bound to occur, and yes, the extent of those challenges are likely being downplayed to avoid panic and to get people to take the vaccine.
On the question of motivation: global pandemic, billions in R&D spent, pressure from people on politicians, etc. The usual set of unavoidable human reasons to release products before they are 100% tested (since 100% testing can only really happen in the wild anyway). Combine that with politicization of every topic, and the inability of the public at large to handle any nuance (e.g. "there may be some problems in production, but we believe overall it is worth the risks and won't pose a major problem because of X, Y, and Z.")
You can never test "100%", especially if you don't define what it means. But you've set it up to be an unsatisfiable expectation anyway, saying that "100%" means "testing in the wild". Which means releasing it. So you provide a definition that is always true: you can't adequately test a product before release, because you can only test it adequately after the release.
That's not that much different from the self deceiving mind trick those say who claim this is a "human experiment". Which is, of course it is! I mean the process for testing and certifying a medication has to include a phase where we experiment on humans.
And the whole process is designed with this in mind: increasing number of participants during phase 1-2-3 trials and then it gets released, without being tested "100%", if you will, and it enters phase 4, that is basically tracking it while being "out in the wild". Though you could argue that phase 3 is just as much out in the wild.
I think what you can see from how these vaccines are being tested and released is that these are the most rigorously tested products out there.
Another way to skin the same cat: Safety is not a binary variable even though we have this mental model of safe/unsafe. In fact safety is continuous ranging from high risk (unsafe) to low risk (safe).
With more information (more trials/subjects) we get a better estimate (with less uncertainty) of the associated risk. The properties (safety/risk) of the vaccine don't change. What changes is the uncertainty around our estimations.
This is still a simplification (e.g. there could be unknown unkowns) but I find it a better heuristic than safe/unsafe.
I agree on the simplification. No such thing as "safe", only "safe enough" which assumes every one's scale of safety is the same. That seems presumptuous.
And you are under appreciating the myriad ways differences can express themselves in nature. We share 50% of the same DNA as a banana, and we're 98.8% the same as a chimpanzee.
Spurious examples aside, the pandemic has highlighted ethnic differences in reactions to both pathogen and vaccine.
And from personal experience in the field, seemingly "random" confounding factors can have drastic effects - supposedly safe gadolinium based contrast agents caused NSF if you happened to have bad kidneys.
Aggregation occludes all nuance, essentially by definition.
Decisions that are correct for the aggregate can often be wrong for the individual.
But I guess that kind of thinking is why the pandemic has been such a crapshoot in the first place.
This is a widely repeated "internet fact" but it's not true. For one thing, a banana has only about 520 million base pairs of DNA, while the Human genome has 3.1 billion.
In reality, depending on the search method used, at most about 24% of human genes have orthologous genes in the banana genome:
My point is that in the terms of the weird analogy, we are pretty much running the same operating system as the chimp. For instance, they studied the immune response to the mRNA vaccines in primates.
I agree that there is so much variation in people’s reaction to the vaccine. My 99 year old Dad had very little negative reaction. I felt shitty for one day after my second vaccination. My Dentist has been missing about 1/3 of work days, periodically feeling very poorly for a few days. Most of my friends and family had just mild reactions.
I am in general skeptical about some vaccines, especially loading infants up on many vaccines all at once. However, with COVID-19, I think the general risk is worth keeping the global economy from complete collapse (if that is even possible).
My understanding is that this "reaction" is just immune response, and since you likely have a strong immune system than your father you saw a stronger reaction, both of which would likely be less deleterious than if your father contracted COVID directly.
> However, with COVID-19, I think the general risk is worth keeping the global economy from complete collapse (if that is even possible).
We could simply reopen the economy at any point. There are more than enough counterexamples around to demonstrate that lockdowns do not eliminate Covid-19, and that a lack of lockdowns does not lead to endless piles of dead bodies in the streets. Lack of sufficient vaccination is not what is keeping the economy closed -- its usefulness in driving forward certain agendas is. The vaccines aren't even promising anything close to 100% effectiveness, particularly not among the highest risk groups (who were excluded from the clinical trials).
"We can go back to normal soon if everyone just does this one thing" has been the carrot dangled in front of people's noses to get them agreeing to measures of dubious effectiveness since the start of the pandemic. If the virus mutates in the fall and winter and boosters have to be rolled out again, we'll either "have to" shut the economy back down until everyone gets shots in their arms again (in which case these vaccines are a poor preventative against economic damage) or we'll accept the need to live with some amount of endemic Covid spread (in which case it was certainly not lack of vaccines keeping us from reopening).
Lockdowns do not eliminate Covid-19: UK, California, New York, France, hell even Japan. Also pretty much the entirety of pre-Covid epidemiological science.
Lack of lockdowns does not lead to mass death: Sweden, Florida, South Dakota, vast portions of the Global South.
California effectively did not lock down; both state and county public health orders Constitutionally rely on enforcement by county sheriffs, most of whom did not (and many of whom very publicly announced they would not) enforce the (therefore, purely notional) orders.
Of course, never a true Scotsman nor a true lockdown. The worst spread and the highest seroprevalence are all in California's urban areas which locked down most stringently.
> The worst spread and the highest seroprevalence are all in California’s urban areas which locked down most stringently.
LA, Sacramento, and every Bay Area County Sheriff publicly announced a focus on “education and voluntary compliance”; virtually all the urban Southern California Sheriffs aside from LA County publicly annouced outright non-enforcement policies (some asserting that the orders were unconstitutional), as did the Sheriffs the counties with the major San Joaquin County cities.
The “most stringent lockdowns” weren’t anything like lockdowns.
Aside from the components that were directly within state or other non-sheriff’s authority to enforce (like the alcohol service components which could be enforced directly by state Alcoholic Beverage Control), there was no enforced lockdown essentially anywhere in the State, and this was publicly announced and widely reported in the media, so people were aware of the nonenforcement.
Minor late correction: “San Joaquin County” should have been “San Joaquin Valley”. (Or, since Sacramento was addressed elsewhere, it could have been in broader context “counties with the other significant Central Valley cities.”)
I guess it depends on your definition of "mass deaths"
The US has 500k deaths so far, I consider that pretty massive.
Lockdown _did_ eliminate covid in New Zealand, so there are examples both ways.
It's pretty clear that there's a spectrum of lockdowns and their effectiveness. Personally I would rather you all stayed home for 2 weeks rather than sacrifice my grandparents for the economy.
The lockdowns in much of the western world were pretty weak overall. So many caveats and exceptions. It was "lockdown except for that which is _too_ inconvenient for my voting base"
The lockdowns didn't help your grandparents at all, all they did was destroy the lives of many young people and business owners, and plunge over a hundred million people worldwide into extreme poverty: https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-health-ap-top-news-addi....
> Personally I would rather you all stayed home for 2 weeks rather than sacrifice my grandparents for the economy.
If you think the life of your grandparents is worth more than a hundred million people in poor countries being able to put food on their table, you're incredibly selfish.
The US didn't have a lockdown and the economy wasn't ruined by shelter in place. It was ruined because nobody wants to go to a restaurant if they might get sick - this would've happened even without public health restrictions.
Luckily, CARES aid was so effective it actually reduced poverty.
None of those places had lockdowns of the style Italy did.
Travel restrictions are working for AU/NZ/Japan/Korea along with restricting indoor gatherings when necessary. They didn't work for NYC because they didn't restrict European travel.
> the agency told The BMJ that the levels of truncated mRNA “and the amounts of a potential protein produced by the truncated mRNA would be too low to constitute a safety risk.”
I still plan on getting vaccinated, but I always wondered about the failure modes of the mRNA as it decays and what materials it could produce. I'm hoping prions are not possible, but are they?
The story also asks what happens to the lipid nanoparticles, but I am wondering about another aspect of these crafted mRNA sequences. The "U" in the mRNA has been replaced 1-methyl-3’-pseudouridylyl, denoted by Ψ in their sequences. What happens to the Ψ and its byproducts as it decays or is metabolized?
mRNA encodes instructions for creating proteins, and prions are mis-folded proteins. I think the concern is more, our bodies' natural mRNA is unlikely to create prions or it would be a common occurrence, but lab-created mRNA isn't made of the same parts and doesn't have that millennia of evidence behind it.
This lab created mRNA creates a protein from a highly infectious virus, so it's probably not a big additional risk over the medium term (body probably gonna be folding some of them either by vaccination or infection).
Prions are mis-folded proteins which cause a cascade of mis-folding in proteins of the same structure which are already present in the body. The mis-folding affects their biological activity.
The “proteins of the same structure” we are talking about here are virus spike proteins. Assuming that there is a pathway that leads to the misfolded form propagating to begin with, the damage is that other spike proteins don’t work. These proteins, however, were never intended to perform any function whatsoever.
prions are fairly specific sequences to begin with, and then there is the folding issue that apparently makes some prions an active concern, the most concerning being those that are autotemplates and replicate themselves. commonly prions are not digestible by protease enzymes, thus accumulate like a factory floor full of broken, off spec parts.
its not good odds at all to bet on a viral mRNA fragment spontaneously creating a prion protien sequence. this is not beyond the realm of possibilities however the probability nonexistent, compared to the probability that anyone at random could have a nasty interferon mediated cytokine cascade, and sequential inflamatory response to the virus.
>>The story also asks what happens to the lipid nanoparticles<<
these lipid particles are incorporated into the cell membrane during vesicular fusion. Expression of the mRNA results in S protien being expressed on the surface of this cell, Antibodies of complementary clonal type bind to this spike in numerous locations the now adulterated cell is labelled as antigenic thus is destroyed by macrophages, the pieces of this cell are then compared to the self/nonself portfolio of patterns and further antibodies are produced.
all the while this cell is in distress due to the presence of foriegn nucleotides and this incurrs an interferon mediated response that spreads among cells and likewise induces interferon response
> What happens to the Ψ and its byproducts as it decays or is metabolized?
I had the same question. What I found in a long paper about mRNA vaccines is that they do not really know, but they assume you'll be fine, since they didn't see any immediate effects and because the quantities are tiny.
The question is why we allow information about a patented innovation to be kept secret, when the very point of a patent is that the inventor gets exclusivity in return for disclosure.
> EMA says the leaked information was partially doctored, explaining in a statement that “whilst individual emails are authentic, data from different users were selected and aggregated, screenshots from multiple folders and mailboxes have been created, and additional titles were added by the perpetrators.”3
The article by the BMJ is responding to the leak as if the information within it is believed to be correct.
Is the EMA suggesting that this isn't the case or are they just telling us that it was editorialised by whoever disseminated it?
Doctored is the word you'd use if the contents have been changed in order to deceive people. However this could be an attempt at damage control if they want people to dispute the veracity of the leak.
Edit: Since I'm questioning the EMA here I'll add that "Vaccines are Good" and that we should await expert opinion before making idle speculation.
It looks like none of the data was actually altered. What actual difference does an additional screenshot make, or the renaming of a file, or the reshuffling of user files? If the data was valid before those changes, those kinds of changes aren't going to invalidate it.
They can easily show discrepancies by publishing everything without hiding the important information. But for some reason they don't. AFAIK they even haven't bothered to specifically indicate which parts exactly are not authentic.
I find this part highly suspicious and it calls into question the motives of the "leaker" and wisdom of publishing this article. If someone wanted to discredit the vaccine finding some internal document around a process failure (even a temporary one), doctoring parts of it to make it more dramatic, and finding someone who will write about it is a good way to go about it.
By the time the correction is published for the doctored material, or the matter is contextualized, the fear will have already spread.
Even the Clinton team tried to say the Wikileaks were doctored, despite the vast majority of them having a DKIM signature confirming their authenticity.
The ball is in EMA’s field now: they have to demonstrate the leaks are doctored.
There’s pretty damning information in there, it’s in their interest to demonstrate it’s false.
The question wasn't if they were victims or not though. They are. The question is about the validity of data and questioning is just fine.
You might not have seen anything useful in what was presented but it doesn't mean someone else can't. Comparing it to "5G vaccines" to discredit the parents point isn't the right way to challenge their interpretation.
> The question is about the validity of data and questioning is just fine.
Are you going to question every "data leak" and smear campaign that comes from questionable sources (I think this leak was first published on Rutor - not the first time Russia does something like that)?
> it doesn't mean someone else can't
True, that's what the article addresses. And as you see it's making technical questions not implying they're hiding something.
The mRNA is the instruction that the body follows to produce the viral proteins that lead to an immune response. If the mRNA in a batch of vaccine degrades more than they have allowed for in the treatment protocol, it may not work.
(This is one of the reasons they have very specific handling rules and throw out vaccine that is improperly handled)
> Welcome to Moderna. We believe mRNA is the “software of life." Every cell in the body uses mRNA to provide real-time instructions to make the proteins necessary to drive all aspects of biology, including in human health and disease.
What's the metaphorical software equivalent of "mRNA instability": undefined reference, memory corruption, incomplete download, installation failure, program crash, ...?
> Given the central role of RNA in many fundamental biological processes, including translation and splicing, changes to its chemical composition can have a detrimental impact on cellular fitness, with some evidence suggesting that RNA damage has roles in diseases such as neurodegenerative disorders. We are only just beginning to learn about how cells cope with RNA damage, with recent studies revealing the existence of quality-control processes that are capable of recognizing and degrading or repairing damaged RNA.
How does it recognize corruption? Certainly some could be processed with incomplete or incorrect results. It's really hard (probably impossible) to show that there will not be negative effects from that.
Valid mRNA has a start codon and a stop codon. Without these mRNA will be broken down and untranslated. However without translation the vaccine will be useless. So while unintended translation is unlikely it is possible that efficacy would be impacted.
Is there a good way to test that an mRNA vaccine batch was stored improperly and in result has reduced efficiency? In the US supply chain may not be a problem, but if exported, in some countries it's possible that people will get near useless vaccine shots, thus hurting reputation of mRNA vaccines in general.
I hope it's not too political to say, that using tried and true methods is better in an emergency, shouldn't be time for experiments on people. mRNA vaccines seem to be more expensive and harder to store, so what are the benefits? Or who benefits?
It is worth being aware that according to the US state department, Russia and possibly other states are currently involved in vaccine disinformation campaigns.
I have taken the Moderna vaccine. So I'm obviously not an anti-vaxxer.
However, it does concern me to a great deal about all of this, and it reflects my previous worries. My biggest concern is that from the article, these mRNA strands appear to have not only degraded but formed into new "species". What if the mRNA causes the body to produce prions that leads to something like Mad Cow Disease? The fact that Moderna isn't saying anything is very disconcerting.
in this case "species" is in the context of Molecular species.
suppose we grabbed a molecule and then cut it in half, do this many times so you have a collection of first halfs, and second halfs. Each of these is a species of ribonucleic acid. It may sound sinister but its just tech jargon.
It's not molecular species. The full quote is: "truncated and modified mRNA species present in the finished product". It's specifically truncated and modified mRNA species.
if you are accustomed to reading or in any way communicating with a biochemist, or molecular biologist you will know, that what you have said is not in context of the professsion.
i know what was written, however that makes sensationalist and alarmist connotations when the meaning of species is defined by popular conceptions
you are wrong, this submission is speaking about molecular species.
also the prion concern is not valid, prions are a specific protien sequence and do not arise out of mRNA sequences of determined function.
No, I'm more concerned about the randomness of those degraded mRNA strands somehow degrading into instructions that cause harm. We know for a fact that prions exist that cause denaturing of nerve cells and brain cells. They are basically proteins that are misfolded that somehow cause a chain reaction of misfolding other proteins. Is there the possibility that just randomly the degraded mRNA will produce the wrong protein strands and cause people to experience the equivalent of Mad Cow Disease? It certainly sounds like it's possible, but I'm not sure if it's probable. But with them being so tight lipped about it besides pooh-poohing the idea, it really doesn't bring me much confidence.
What the data leak tells us about mRNA vaccine: it is manufactured in the same fashion and by the same types of executives as Boeing 737 Max 8. “Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts and prepare for takeoff”.
Not a "Data leak", it's a cyberattack plus editorialization/manipulation
Of course the details of drug approval are not "discussed in the open" because a) trade secrets b) the public doesn't know how sausages are made and can (and do) make a mountain out of a molehill
mRNA instability is probably not such a big deal. Sure you want a high number because that's going to cause the immune reaction, if you have a lower number it's potentially less targets. But having imperfect mRNA strands are not a big deal.
The vaccine does not have to be 100% "perfect", it has to be safer than the virus. I know where to take my chances.
You should trust the system and the process. No, AZ does not cause blood clots. It's being investigated for it. And even if it does cause, you should take into account the probability. Which seems to be extremely low compared to your chances of succumbing to covid. (Of course, the latter is a function of a lot of things, but if someone makes a claim that "AZ cuases bloog clots", I'm not sure if they ever looked into estimating and then comparing the said probabilities.)
It's not hard to imagine that rushed trials, rushed production and pressured approvals might not lead to the best process.
Next to that: Over the last 50-60 years approved medicines with the backing of more extensive clinical trials have been withdrawn. So the whole process in itself isn't flawless.
I'm not saying the vaccines are unsafe or all the processes are wrong, but many people who are wary are often put in a corner of conspiracy theorists and I don't think this is fair.
Fast doesn't mean rushed. The trials were fast because it was easy to gather huge numbers of participants, and the phases were carried out in parallel rather than sequentially (normally, to save money/resources, phase II would only start after a successful phase I).
> and pressured approvals
Immense pressure to make sure it's safe, too. Like this precautionary pause for what seems like a lower blood-clot rate than would be expected just by chance in that size of population.
It's not flawless. But the point is not that it is flawless or that it should be (because, I don't think such a complex process can ever be). The point is that it gives you the best possible result as of now. Meaning, you have the highest chance for survival/avoiding a permanent health damage (which COVID can cause too) is taking an EMA/FDA approved vaccine.
> but many people who are wary are often put in a corner of conspiracy theorists and I don't think this is fair.
I think think this happens for at least two reasons. First, they are often simply conspiracy theorists who just try to phrase their thoughts in a way that doesn't seem like conspiracy theory at first. I've talked to a lot of people (mostly online) and I can tell you that it happens a lot. And the same people will start the same conversations again and again along the same patterns, pretending they are not conspiracy theorists or anti-vaxxers for that matter but go down the same path and show themselves if you engage in a discussion.
Second, because of the above phenomenon, some people will just jump to the conclusion that anyone who raises concerns are indeed conspiracy theorists. (Again, because a lot of them will pretend that they are indeed sane people having sane questions.) It's not ideal, but not surprising either.
> It's not hard to imagine that rushed trials, rushed production and pressured approvals might not lead to the best process.
Fun fact: thalidomide, the drug that caused birth defects, would have passed the trials that the Moderna vaccine's been though, because pregnant women weren't included in the study participants.
If I'm supposed to be ok with small risks, why aren't any of the pharmaceuticals ok with the small risk that they've made a mistake and should be held liable?
Why did they seek indemnity if there's no chance the vaccine could risk my health?
I don't oppose the vaccine but this has never sat right with me.
This is an interesting question and has several responses beyond the knee-jerk one. First of all, the process was expedited at the request of the authorities, so it's natural that they try to reduce their risks. Also, even if we disregard the expedited process, the release (the rate of production and administering it) is faster than you'd expect normally, which in itself imposes a greater financial/business risk by exposing more people quicker to the same amount of risk.
To say it in a less abstract way: given the normal/expected risk levels (say it's 1:100000), they'd get say a 100 complaints a year for a new vaccine that gets administered to 10 million people. Say they may get brought to the court in one out of those 100 and lose with a 50% chance. And, of course it turns out that something's not right (and say 1:100000 actually dies because of the vaccine, they can still stop it at the 1M or 10M mark).
Now if they roll out the vaccine to 1B people a year, that means 100x more exposure. And it may not worth it business wise. Especially since at least some of the companies forgo (at least some of) the profit. So you have increased risk with decreased profit but increased demand. Perfectly logical move.
If we are talking about us, then let's not forget that while the vaccine definitely poses a higher risk than one that's been on the market for say a decade or more, the choice is not between:
a) I take the vaccine and accept the (small) risk
b) I don't take the vaccine and I don't expose myself to any additional risk
Because dying of covid has a pretty f*&^ high risk when compared to dying from the vaccine. (And covid also seems to cause long term health damage to way more people than it kills.)
But even if we add all this: the EU (and rightly so) did not give indemnity to the pharmaceuticals. (Because while there is logic for them to seek it, there is also logic in not giving it to them.)
I don't think it's appropriate to say up front that they don't have to worry about tail risk. If something happens, then we have the discussion about whether to bail them out. Maybe we should. But only after the fact.
It's one thing to say "we can't make vaccines at a substantial loss", which is reasonable. It's another entirely to say "you have to promise to preserve us from all unknown unknowns". The basic goal of society is not to eliminate all risks from collective enterprise, it's to take the risks off of individuals and put them on the collectives.
As a matter of principle, it just doesn't seem right, and I've never been convinced why nuclear power should get a liability exemption either.
I do think bailouts can be ok. "Socializing the losses" is a feature of living in a society. But what's corrupt is to promise it before we know what the catastrophe might be, that's completely different. In general, organizations (and people) can cause damage far beyond what they can fix. That's life, and bankruptcy. And we don't want to destroy what is left that is valuable. But when that happens, their assets should be systematically divvied up and/or ownership transferred. The people who can make restitution should be required to do so, e.g. the stockholders and/or bondholders. That's what they're there for.
Society already is on the hook if the worst happens, so it's not legitimate to make demands.
> Also, even if we disregard the expedited process, the release (the rate of production and administering it) is faster than you'd expect normally, which in itself imposes a greater financial/business risk by exposing more people quicker to the same amount of risk.
All this seems to dance around the fact that it's the first vaccine of its kind. It induces side effects that are not normal. And the process has been greatly expedited far beyond the usual liberal sentiment that the FDA is indispensable and we should be taking extraordinary amounts of time to approve medicines, etc.
Perhaps there is an asymmetric aggregated risk "exposure" for pharmaceuticals. But I still don't see a huge upside to someone like me who's relatively young, fit and who's had tons of relatives, friends, etc. who've gotten the virus and not only survived but really didn't notice any lasting effects.
> it's the first vaccine of its kind. It induces side effects that are not normal.
It wasn't clear that you were specifically talking about the mRNA vaccines (or maybe just the Pfizer vaccine) as the comment I was replying to mentioned both this and the AstraZeneca one. Also, I'm not sure what non-normal side effects you are talking about WRT the mRNA vaccines. Israel basically ran a huge trial for Pfizer with several million people. I'm pretty sure we know (or will have the data very soon) for all the possible side effects.
> But I still don't see a huge upside to someone like me who's relatively young, fit and who's had tons of relatives,
That's a different question. As I said (maybe in a different comment) you should calculate the probabilities yourself. What you feel doesn't matter. Also, what you see around yourself doesn't matter. What you call a huge upside is up to you, but it's hard to imagine that there is anyone who doesn't get at least a 10x upside. But again, look at the statistics, there are some that tell you how likely you are to die from covid based on your age.
I don't know how old you are, I don't remember all the numbers, but e.g. with the AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK they estimate that 40 out of 17M people had blood clotting problems. (And it's being investigated, which is good.) I don't think there is a single age group with lower COVID mortality than that. Definitely not among adults. So it's worth checking the numbers.
A second thing is that since the vaccines don't provide a 100% immunity, it's never just about yourself, of course, and the circulating virus can (and does) mutate and it may do so in the wrong direction. (It may also mutate towards a simple common cold.)
But since older people have a higher risk of dying from covid, the younger you are the longer you can wait, which means the better you will know the safety because the more people will get it before you. So your best strategy is convincing older people to take the vaccine, because it's what's best for them and you. And then if a few months you'll know better. (I'm pretty sure it will take months until you can get a vaccine if you are that young and healthy. Wherever you live.)
I look at the vaccine vs. virus risk profile quite differently.
I am in my mid-30s, with good levels of vitamin D, and I'm prepared to treat any Covid infection I do get with a protocol including ivermectin and various vitamins which has proven effective where it has been tried in India in Mexico. I'm not going to die from it (certainly don't have a "pretty f*&^ high risk"). The long haul risk is a little bit more substantial, but having a treatment lined up reduces my risk a lot there too, and in the vast majority of cases it is not debilitating and I'm optimistic that treatment methods will be found.
So the "risk of ruin" from the virus is basically nonexistent. What's my risk of ruin from the vaccines? We really have no idea because they're new and almost completely untested (in some cases this is even true of the techniques used). If there's even a 0.1% chance of the vaccine causing some sort of debilitating, significant harm, that's a far worse bargain for me than taking my chances with the virus. The chances of something like antibody dependent enhancement are essentially impossible to predict until the vaccine's interaction with the circulating virus has been observed for many more months (ideally through another winter season). It will probably take at least a couple of years of seeing the vaccine in widespread use for this risk calculus to tilt the other way for me.
which is not proven to have any relevance to Covid-19, unfortunately.
> I'm prepared to treat any Covid infection I do get with a protocol including ivermectin and various vitamins which has proven effective where it has been tried in India in Mexico.
Please do not spread potentially dangerous health misinformation and false hopes, even in good faith. If there was such a protocol that worked, the world would know.
Now that Hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 has been thoroughly debunked, snake oil peddlers have apparently moved on to Ivermectin. Efficacy-wise it seems to be taking the exact same path as HCQ, unfortunately. Hopefully this time around, no more precious research time and resources than strictly necessary will be wasted trying to prove again and again that the "Internet's miracle cure" does. not. work.
> Please do not spread potentially dangerous health misinformation and false hopes, even in good faith. If there was such a protocol that worked, the world would know.
Just because you have convinced yourself that legitimate treatments for Covid could never possibly be suppressed because they are not profitable, does not mean that is actually the case. Your attempts at ideological discipline disguised as "just trying to keep the forum free of dangerous misinformation" are not going to work with me.
The pattern of "HCQ didn't work, therefore Covid is untreatable and any other suggested therapies are quackery" has certainly gotten a lot of mileage since HCQ flamed out as a standalone treatment, but it is baldly anti-scientific thinking. Some other good signs of motivated, un-scientific reasoning are peppered throughout the blog post you linked (which by the way was written long before the release of numerous RCTs demonstrating ivermectin's effectiveness), such as frequent use of the term "Covidiots" or using the Surgisphere researchers (who as far as I can tell were grifters paid to discredit HCQ) to tar ivermectin because they mentioned it once.
The NIH finally had to withdraw its recommendation against ivermectin in mid-January. Of course they're still maintaining the line of "there's insufficient studies to recommend its use and we're certainly not going to fund any!" but the trend is continuing in this direction and RCTs are continuing to pile up showing its effectiveness in fending off severe cases when taken early.
Also, good news! HCQ has actually been shown to be effective in combination with other drugs like bromhexine which block the virus entry pathways that HCQ misses. Perhaps not as significant now that far better treatments like fluvoxamine and ivermectin are out there, but it still show that HCQ is a far cry from "snake oil." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175911/
> Between one in six and one in three people, to be precise. A "little bit more" indeed.
Is it your serious contention that up to one in three people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop long haul symptoms?
> 76% of hospitalised patients still have symptoms after 6 months.
Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?
> Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of
> people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?
Yes, how many? Shouldn't you know it if you are advocating (or at least considering) just catching the virus instead of getting vaccinated? Esp. since we do know the risks of the latter with a pretty high confidence and the scientific consensus is that you should definitely choose the vaccine and not get infected.
But to give you a number I heard: here in Hungary 3% were hospitalized for the "base" variant. Now we have the UK variant and it seems to present a higher hospitalization rate. According to a UK study it has a 55% higher fatality rate too. So with 3% you get 2.28% chance of having symptoms after 6 months (or dying). Doesn't sound good at all. That's 1 in 40 people. More than a million times the risk of getting a blood clot from e.g. AstraZeneca if it is real (and if they've discovered all the cases, of course).
I'm pretty sure it doesn't apply to the HN crowd, but on a side note, I found it quite interesting how people consistently get probabilities wrong. They may be afraid of something happening with say 1:100 000 chance (severe vaccination side effect) and saying that something else, with more severe consequences shouldn't be afraid of, because it happens pretty infrequently (dying of covid infection which we don't know exactly but is somewhere between 2:100 - 1:1000). Usually, of course, people say these in different conversations, or at least in separate comments (if online) but they'll have a hard time reconcile these even if you point out that these are numbers that they can actually compare. (Of course, I get it's the cognitive dissonance and their irrational fear of vaccines, or maybe the loss of control, still it's fascinating.)
Like many of us here, you clearly seem to be a smart person, with expertise in one or several technical fields, and confidence in your ability to learn a new one and apply your existing knowledge and mental models to it. You've probably done this many times before.
Please accept that this does not make you immune to the good old "Mt Stupid" phase of the Dunning-Krüger curve. In fact, "smart hackers" like us are really prime examples of people who might fall for it. I contend that you are currently stuck there on Covid, and together with other smart people you're finding yourself inadvertently aligned with very dumb run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists that you would normally want nothing to do with. Please don't take that as an insult and bear with me for a moment :
Without even getting into a debate about Ivermectin, have you considered what else should be true in order for your current take on Covid severity and treatments to be correct ?
It would take a majority of people around the world who have dedicated their lives to this topic to be wrong, or careless, dumb or plain evil. Many of them are doctors and researchers who are not only acting in good faith and genuinely want nothing more than to help their patients or advance science, but perhaps more convincingly, also have personal, visceral, "can't lie about it" interests at stake, like desperately wanting to save a colleague, dear friend, or their own dad or spouse.
Please do not insult them (and delude yourself) by automatically assuming that you know better than them, that they failed to save their mom, dad or friend because they didn't want it enough.
If you believe that the powers that be (institutional research / politicians / regulators / big pharma / whatever) are broken / dysfunctional / stupid and prevent the truth from surfacing, and that people like yourself are gonna disrupt the shit out of the system, stop it now. This is the definition of arrogance, and you're deluding yourself.
I could stop here really.
But let me just answer a few of the points you raised (and then I'll consider my efforts at convincing a stranger done : do whatever you like with it) :
> Just because you have convinced yourself that legitimate treatments for Covid could never possibly be suppressed because they are not profitable,
This is a strawman argument, I do not think that. But I do use Occam's razor, and there is a much simpler explanation to the current absence of early stage treatments than a "suppression" conspiracy theory : that we really did try but simply have not found one that works yet.
This suppression theory was already untenable for the reasons most conspiracy theories are, but it should have been killed for good when 3 things happened :
1. A cheap generic drug, dexamethasone, is found to be our only effective treatment (albeit late stage only) with a 30% fatality reduction.
2. Remdesivir, the "big pharma contender" in an imaginary battle against HCQ that some insisted was happening, is found to be ineffective and is dropped without discussion.
3. In the same trials, HCQ is not outright dismissed just because it originated from quack doctors circles, but given the same fair chance as others.
> The pattern of "HCQ didn't work, therefore Covid is untreatable and any other suggested therapies are quackery
This is again a strawman argument. Covid may be treatable.
When it comes to prioritizing research, it is unlikely that a treatment touted by the same circles that touted HCQ, using the same flawed reasoning (something that does work in vitro should work in vivo) is going to be THE miracle cure. But it should still be allocated some resources to verify that. It has been, and the results are unsurprisingly, nothing to write home about.
> Is it your serious contention that up to one in three people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop long haul symptoms?
"According to a recent survey done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35% of nonhospitalized patients who had mild COVID-19 cases did not return to baseline health 14 to 21 days after their symptoms started. And this wasn’t just in older people or people with underlying health conditions. Twenty percent of previously healthy 18-to-34-year-olds had ongoing symptoms. Overall, research shows as many as one-third of individuals who had COVID-19 and weren’t hospitalized will still be experiencing symptoms up to three months later."
> Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?
I will let you look this up, and immediately after ask yourself whether it would make more sense to reason in absolute numbers to better visualize the burden it will cause on society (hint : it would)
We're talking about letting ICUs run at full capacity for months, causing widespread grief in families, unbearable pressure on doctors/nurses, and consequences for every age group (including the 20 year olds involved in a car accident and not getting the care they could have). Not to mention that every new case is a ticket in the evolution lottery for variants.
So yeah, you probably shouldn't be second-guessing the benefits/risk profile of vaccines for people your age, and in any case please stop with the "99.x% survive this thing"/"as a healthy 30-something I shouldn't be forced to ..." narrative. It doesn't make you look good and more importantly, it definitely hurts society and it could very well hurt you or someone you love directly.
> If you believe that the powers that be (institutional research / politicians / regulators / big pharma / whatever) are broken / dysfunctional / stupid and prevent the truth from surfacing
I don't believe it, I know it, because I read the news and don't shy away from its implications. Millions of lives were destroyed by the opioid epidemic, a crime which required the complicity and silence of almost all the institutions you cite. None of them have suffered any real consequences whatsoever. But hey, that's all in the past, I'm sure it's just crazy talk to think those same institutional imperatives could be creating any problems now.
> Twenty percent of previously healthy 18-to-34-year-olds had ongoing symptoms. Overall, research shows as many as one-third of individuals who had COVID-19 and weren’t hospitalized will still be experiencing symptoms up to three months later."
There's a million variables at play here, is it a random twenty percent? My guess would be that at least in the US 20~40% all age groups are seriously unhealthy to begin with.
Even if you migh not have you health ruined by covid, getting infected still makes it possible for you to infect others who might not be so lucky.
While vaccination apparently doesn't completely prevent you from infecting others, all studies as far as I can tell say that they reduce the risk quite substantially.
I don't believe I am obligated to take an experimental vaccine in order to reduce the risk that I will transmit a virus with a 99.95% survival rate for people under 70. And while I'm optimistic about the prospect for these vaccines to reduce transmission in the short run, it remains to be seen how well they will work over the long term against the evolving virus.
They will work fine because this virus can't evolve for shit. It's only produced 2-3 strains and only has one external protein it can mutate. The current vaccines are still good enough against it, and it doesn't take long to edit an mRNA vaccine either.
> I will transmit a virus with a 99.95% survival rate for people under 70.
This math is wrong, you should think of it as getting a flu but ten times worse that also gives you a permanent heart condition. And remember that the flu is already ten times worse than you think it is, because the last thing you thought was a flu was just a cold.
> you should think of it as getting a flu but ten times worse that also gives you a permanent heart condition
Perhaps we should think of it as getting SARS-Cov-2 and as much as 1/3 of people don't even know they're infected.
Unhealthy people are often really hit hard, the most vulnerable have a substantial risk of death.
But an overwhelming number of healthy people are fine, and given the prolonged disruption of normal life, those people suffer vast consequences from interventions that outweigh catching the virus.
Children especially are being sacrificed for the elderly and chronically ill.
I’m glad that you’ve come to the conclusion that if you did get COVID that actually you’d be fine so it doesn’t matter.
You might be right. You very well could be wrong. There are plenty of people who thought they’d be fine or it didn’t even exist and a non-trivial number of them are dead now.
This is a backwards argument and doesn’t stand up to basic logical scrutiny. You’re inventing the numbers and deciding based on the numbers you’ve come up with the conclusion.
That’s your prerogative but let’s be clear that you’re not basing this math on anything other than your gut feelings.
I'm in the same boat, I'm not against vaccination either. I've taken every vaccine offered, I get the yearly flu vaccine and even went out of my way for the HPV vaccine.
This is not completely correct, at least in the EU there have not been any emergency vaccine authorisations by the EMA which means that pharmaceutical companies will be liable for mistakes that cause adverse health effects.
In the UK there was an emergency authorisation which means that they will not be liable to the same degree.
As for why they do this: There is always a small chance that the vaccine will cause adverse health effects because pharmaceutical stuff is very complex. Minimizing legal risks is a completely normal thing in all industries and part of the negotiation process. I would not draw the conclusion that they aren't 100% convinced of their vaccine but instead that their team of highly paid lawyers told them what was a good business decision.
You're being pretty generous, and I think it sounds reasonable but placed within the broader picture (and given how liberals generally consider profit-driven healthcare systems and industry in other circumstances...) it seems like people are looking to paper over some dastardly stuff and dismiss legitimate concerns so as to not "rock the boat."
For instance:
> Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded more than the usual indemnity against civil claims filed by citizens who suffer serious adverse events after being inoculated. They said Pfizer also insisted the governments cover the potential costs of civil cases brought as a result of Pfizer’s own acts of negligence, fraud, or malice. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs.
Interesting points, I did not know about these actions in South America. I don't want to be too generous to Pfizer/Biontech and you rightly point out the need to be cautious with these companies especially if they are in such an influential position. However my guess would be that legal risks in countries with weaker rule of law protections (for reference see this report https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/) is a lot higher. You might find yourself in a position where a court rules against you although you did not commit any crime – or you might presume that there is a possibility that you will be in such a position. If you want to protect yourself and have an extremely strong negotiation position, you might write very far-reaching liability clauses.
This in itself could – imo rightfully – be seen as a deplorable strategy because you are dictating these rules for a life saving vaccine. But it does not imply that you are committing any crimes at the moment.
I don't know which system and process you mean specifically, but I don't think that the system of approval under the FDA in the United States generally deserves our admiration or support.
The current opioid crisis is a great case study in the tragedy of trust, profit, and death.
As a scientifically literate society, we can do much better.
I mean the scientific system and the vaccine/medication authorization process in general in the western world. (I don't know about the other parts, so can't comment.) Yes, I completely beleive that process of the FDA and/or the EMA can be improved and if so, it should. Still:
- your best bet is trusting the current system as of now
- improving the system is part of the system. That's what's hard for e.g. science denialists to understand. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not hinting you are one of them, just came to mind.)
I have great confidence in the scientific method, precisely because it doesn't ask for my trust. The "scientific system" seems to be largely designed to obfuscate the implementation of that method.
I can't help but notice that, even amidst social pressure for people to use these vaccines, the underlying data used to produce the reports remains unavailable, and will remain unavailable until the conclusion of the monitoring of phase III of the trials. I'm not sure I understand the reasons for that, and I'm quite sure that this is the first time in my life that mainstream scientists and medical journal editors have expressed such consternation about a vaccine approval process.
> and the vaccine/medication authorization process in general in the western world
I think it's not unfair to say that this process has failed and is no longer relevant in an internet-connected society. Countless cases demonstrate this, such as the capricious and scientifically unsound reject of cannabis happening contemporaneously with the approval of opioid preparations touted as non-habit forming, when even a single dose (of the drug and of common sense) easily refutes that claim.
> - your best bet is trusting the current system as of now
Why? When I can do my own research, access experts fairly directly, and make my own health care decisions?
> - improving the system is part of the system. That's what's hard for e.g. science denialists to understand. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not hinting you are one of them, just came to mind.)
I think everyone is interested in improvement. The question is which parts of "the system" have shown promise worth keeping. It seems to me that involvement of the state as a gatekeeper will necessarily result in this system being used for regulatory capture and profiteering first, and public health second or worse.
> I have great confidence in the scientific method, precisely because it doesn't ask for my trust.
> The "scientific system" seems to be largely designed to obfuscate the implementation of that method.
You are just playing around the specific words I've used. No one asked for your trust. I just said whoever is unsure about what to do, their best chance at the moment is trusting the system that is based on science (the scientific method). And also transparency. (Well, actually at any given moment. Besides working on trying to improve it.) Yes, there will always be inefficiencies and politics, etc. But even with that, your best bet is that. Because the alternatives are worse.
> the underlying data used to produce the reports remains unavailable, and will remain unavailable
Is this unusual? I don't know, just asking. What I know is that the Russian one, that we have bought a few millions here, doesn't have an EMA certificate yet but they have published their results in The Lancet. Now you can say that's still not the raw source data, and I agree, though scientists say that it's very unlikely to be falsified (and they are under the EMA process now anyway).
> first time in my life that mainstream scientists and medical journal editors have expressed such consternation about a vaccine approval process.
Who and where? Not trying to downplay it, but since it is happening under pressure (from the pandemic) since it is thus unusual it's unsurprising that there will be public criticism from inside the community as well. Under normal conditions, if they were about to change the process e.g. in preparation for something like this, it would be just a simple scientific/professional debate that we wouldn't hear about.
> Why? When I can do my own research, access experts fairly directly, and make my own health care decisions?
You can make your own decisions, of course. Everybody can. But you can't do your own research. I mean you can, but it's naive to think it will not be significantly worse than what's being done by the scientific community. You are alone, they are many (thousands, tens of thousands). You have basically no idea or very little idea, they have spent their life learning about one or two of the sub-fields that provide knowledge for vaccine development and safety testing. And, of course, these guys are doing it full time now, while you'll just invest a couple of hours (days, maybe weeks in the best case).
I see a lot of smart people fall into this trap. There is a big difference in trying to understand the scientific results, the state of the art for the sake of understanding and between trying to somehow at some (arbitrary) level 're-evaluate' or 'check' the results and draw a contradicting conclusion. Verify whether all those science guys were right. You can't do that. I'd say that your chances are pretty slim, but I think in practice they are close to 0. Because you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you are missing out.
What you can do is try to make good decisions by trying to evaluate the the risks and the costs of the outcomes. E.g. you can say that getting a blood clot seems to be 1:167 000 from a vaccine (from the AZ one, but let's use that as an estimate for the others). You can get the numbers for the adverse outcomes for a COVID infection AND you can estimate your chance of actually contracting it. (Because the if you compare with the assumption that you get infected with a high chance then it's a no brainer.) Then you can adjust your behaviour, if it seems doable. E.g. you may be able to say that "OK, I'm waiting another year with the vaccine, because I'm not meeting anyone and not going to any closed public place, so my chances of contracting is really 0". That makes sense.
It is not unusual at this stage of research. What is unusual is that the EUA process has been used for a product meant for the well. Given that, it seems prudent, at least to me, to release data as if this were closer to the normal and established process.
It was very eye-opening to me to hear a BMJ forum focused on how much we still don't know.
> Not trying to downplay it, but since it is happening under pressure (from the pandemic) since it is thus unusual it's unsurprising that there will be public criticism from inside the community as well.
You say "from the pandemic", but the contents of this leak make it very obvious where the FDA felt the pressure was coming from. They felt they were being "pushed hard by Azar and US GOV". EMA's assessment was that "Azar and still under his influence. Trump is still pulling strings on this."
It's right there in black and white: these communications aren't an optimal scientific process. They are scared of the politics and making enormous adjustments.
> There is a big difference in trying to understand the scientific results, the state of the art for the sake of understanding and between trying to somehow at some (arbitrary) level 're-evaluate' or 'check' the results and draw a contradicting conclusion. Verify whether all those science guys were right.
I don't think that's the nature of individual research on topics of safety and health in the internet age. One needn't second-guess every expert; there is plenty of solid meta-research to consider.
What I am saying is that I think I can make better decisions about my own health in the absence of the regulatory capture happening at FDA.
>someone makes a claim that "AZ cuases bloog clots", I'm not sure if they ever looked into estimating and then comparing the said probabilities.
I understand the stakes here regarding this discussion topic, but your tone is undeserved and unwarranted.
>No, AZ does not cause blood clots. It's being investigated for it.
Why is it being investigated for that specific side-effect?
>You should trust the system and the process.
Which system? Which process?
If I'm German, French, Italian or Spanish then the system and process are at-odds with the AstraZeneca vaccine, no?
Do we all just trust that our particular governing body is the all-wise entity that GotItRight, when opinions across the world and their respective governing bodies don't necessarily agree with one another?
hard to blindly trust 'the system and process' at this point when 'the system and process' are fractured and dissimilar in nearly every region of the world.
Some government must be making worse decisions than the rest.
Blindly encouraging trust in unknown systems across the world at large isn't great for everyone.
>And even if it does cause, you should take into account the probability.
The answer to "Why are they investigating?" is simple and, in fact, driven in part by the pharmaceutical industry itself.
First: The rate of thrombosis in AZ recipients is the less than it is in the general population -- Gen pop, ~.1% [1], AZ ~ 0.001% [2]. There is no evidence that the vaccine causes substantially higher risk. Also, the populations being prioritized for vaccination are a higher risk population for DVT to begin with.[1]
AZ, along with effectively every pharma company out there of note, takes the reporting of adverse drug responses (ADRs) very, very seriously. Both FDA and EMA require ALL companies that produce a labeled product (aka a drug you can "buy" and isn't only available in a trial setting) to investigate and report on every instance of a reported potential ADR. Companies want to investigate because they want to be able to keep selling their drugs. Regulators want to investigate because they want to limit ADRs as much as possible.
From the therapeutic point of view, it is bad if the treatment causes ADRs but also some may be unavoidable because of how the treatment works -- think chemo and cancer. The safety window for a drug is determined by balancing the therapeutic gain of treatment (usually, shorter time to recovery, increased QOL, or, in the case of cancers, increased life span/PFS) with the number and severity of known adverse effects. You might hear about cancer patients "cycling" their treatments, this is to allow time for the body to recover from known/expected ADRs.
Any way, this was a long winded way of saying every entity involved -- drug manufacturer, regulators, doctors, patients -- wants reports of ADRs investigated.
> AZ, along with effectively every pharma company out there of note, takes the reporting of adverse drug responses (ADRs) very, very seriously.
This is the reason that a lot of medications list the thing they're treating as a side effect. It doesn't work perfectly, so people report they're still having the condition, and that has to go on the list.
I've spent the last couple of weeks working my way through the spectrum from healthy skepticism to conspiracy theory with regards to Covid-19 (on Twitter mostly).
One of the patterns I find really interesting is that the more towards conspiracy theory, the more extreme the allocation of trust becomes. At the end of the spectrum people will fully distrust large parts of society (government, big pharma, general scientists, WHO, CDC), but at the same time they will fully trust a small group of 'independent scientists'.
I trust the lady that spent her whole life on mRNA, gives a dose with >3x more mg than Pfizer’s and requires less refrigeration than Pfizer’s
But thats at the top of the list, I would take any of the vaccines on the market except the one touted by China.
I would take the Sputnik V, for example.
I’ve researched them all and am comfortable with the methodology of each, except the one touted by China.
I’ve talked with people bothered by the vaccination and there isnt much nuance or awareness of geopolitics or many times even awareness that there are like 5 vaccines, some using different technology. Makes it easier to keep with my convictions.
for me it’s the data collection methods not being transparent enough, coupled with the behavior of the state being even less about an individual but more about reputation performance metrics
other governing systems could have the same result, but the current vaccines on my shortlist have data collection thats tolerable for me and the mRNA ones are at the top of my list by along shot.
Feel free to correct anything inaccurate if there is good data on the China one (or if there are multiple vaccines from organizations in china)
My instincts still raise the hair on the back of my neck every time I go up the basement stairs. What was once a good survival mechanism millennia ago is now a vestigial distraction.
I'm all for science, but as one of the other comments points out, you can't ignore other factors at play and just exclude the humans from the equation. It's not like science is brought upon us from the heavens above. If some product cost billions in R&D and still does not work quite as planned, you may rest assured that the owners will go to all lengths to cover the losses and persuade buyers to ignore the facts as long as possible. This is simple logic, isn't it?
Somehow I always have to think about the articles from a while ago covering Russian propaganda campaigns against Covid vaccines. Leaking emails would fit.
" OGA coordinated with other U.S. government agencies to strengthen diplomatic ties and offer technical and
humanitarian assistance to dissuade countries in the region from accepting aid from these ill intentioned states. Examples include using OGA’s Health Attaché office to persuade Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine,"
The risk profile for vaccines overlaps almost perfectly with the risk profile for COVID.
That is, the age groups most at-risk from the virus (ages 70+, with comorbidities) are also going to live the shortest, and so suffer from fewer side-effects as well as not reproducing.
So why aren't the rollouts focused on vaccinating the elderly first? By the time this is done the kinks will be ironed out.
There certainly was a large effort to reach the elderly first. For a host of reasons though the population was not vaccinated 100%. Issues with scheduling appointments, getting people to clinics, doubts over safety, etc. At some point the number of doses still coming in is increasing but the number of those for example 70+ began to dwindle and so it has to opened up so these doses can be put in people’s arms.
Well, in NZ the elderly come third, but that's because we're trying to keep it out, rather than contain an existing infection. (MIQ = "Managed Isolation/Quarantine")
> Group 1 – Border and MIQ workers and the people they live with
> Group 2 – Frontline workers and people living in high-risk settings
> Group 3 – People at higher risk of serious outcomes or illness
