The important part is that 15000 apparently did not get serious side effects, so clearly much less people experience problems from the vaccine than they would from the disease.
So now it’s time to stop delaying and start distributing these vaccines.
No. Timetables can be compressed for everything else but not for safety evaluation.
The number of people vaccinated is increased gradually. Even after phase III and approval, the monitoring for side effects continues and the vaccine can be withdrawn if necessary.
Vaccines can cause autoimmune responses detected months later. These two vaccines are RNA vaccines never used n this scale Residual DNA risk is probably not significant, but there is small potential blowback.
On positive side, RNA vaccines can open new era of programmable vaccines for viral infections and cancer treatments.
Remember that the threshold shouldn't be "fully safe", the threshold should be "better than the alternatives". If the alternative is COVID, that's a pretty low bar to clear. Given that we may have several vaccines to choose from it's worth a bit of effort to weed out any unsafe ones, but remember that every day of delay may cost thousands of lives.
> If the alternative is COVID, that's a pretty low bar to clear.
It's really not a low bar. A healthy 35-year-old has maybe 0.01% chance of dying, 1% chance of lasting side-effects from Covid. Untested medicines can be way more dangerous than that: thalidomide, for example, has a 50%+ chance of causing stillbirth or birth defects for pregnant women [0].
If you just vaccinate the old and sick, risky vaccines start to look more attractive. But those people also have a greater risk of side effects and are underrepresented in the clinical trials, and most vaccination strategies mooted so far for Covid are based on mass vaccination of healthy people. So it has to be really safe for that to work.
So may every day of rushing. These testing/approval protocols aren't designed simply to provide job security. They were much cheaper and quicker before events like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal
15000 also becomes a much smaller number as you start to consider factors which may change how someone reacts to the vaccine (gender, race, age, preexisting conditions, etc)
If you are willing to wait for years. Waiting a few weeks or months is just going to cause more people to die from the disease and isn’t going to make any vaccine more safe.
For all previous vaccines all side effects happened within two months. (with most of them in less than 15 minutes). We have no way of knowing when an unknown side effect might wait 10 years to show up, but there is every reason to think that won't happen.
Trials for these drugs have already been running for months. They stared in July and over 15,000 people have already been vaccinated.
They started with with just handful of people, gradually increasing the number of people.
The likelihood of hitting some genetic combination that triggers some autoimmune reaction decreases as the sample size increases and no side effects are found.
So again, some vague conjecture about ‘likelyhoods’ and vague handwavy timeframes. While in reality chances are all of these people already got the vaccine months ago; the study started in June.
What is it that makes people lust for delays? Some irrational fear for side effects? The fear isn’t going away, there’s just more people dying every day you wait, both from corona and the measures.
No, these people aren’t wrong. People in politics who say well thank you, now we’re going to sit on it for a few months while we think about it are wrong.
I'm not implying these vaccines are unsafe at all, but when you're vaccinating close to the entire world' population (eventually), a side effect of 1 death for every 50,000 people vaccinated, might not be seen in a trial of 15,000. But vaccinate 6B people and that's 120,000 dead. So your vaccine can go from "safe" to "it kills people" pretty quick when you're treating millions of people.
Edit: And sure, Covid has killed more than 120,000, but what do you think will happen when people find out the vaccine kills people? They won't care it's 1 in 50,000, they'll just refuse any and all vaccines. Then what?
That's true. But currently just a fraction of global population got infected and already 1.3 million people died. I still think though they shouldn't rush and do enough research because any bad side effects would have long term effect for any other future vaccine treatments.
So now it’s time to stop delaying and start distributing these vaccines.