I'm honestly pretty torn at this point which vaccine I should be going for. It seems like every week there is another article insinuating that there is some poorly understood, potentially high impact, facet of a given vaccine. Anyone else "holding out?"
I for one value keeping my sense of smell and taste higher than the risks i’m seeing from vaccines - eliminating the risk of hospitalization is just a bonus
I don't agree on waiting years for a vaccine, however the loss/alteration of sense of smell and taste is temporary. It can last more than the other symptoms, but usually after a few weeks it gets back to normal again.
I got symptomatic Covid last October and the spike protein test taken at the end of March reports I still have several hundreds u/ml of anti-rbd antibodies, so I'll be reasonably safe for some time, but wouldn't recommend waiting to not immunized people. I had people dying next to my bed, and that is something I can't unsee for the rest of my life.
Forcing maybe not, but as educational tool, not unlike trips to WWII concentration camps for schools, I would offer a free visit to Covid wards to denialists and similar idiots. Once they see someone taken into a bed with a simple oxygen mask, then given a respirator helmet, then intubated, then pronounced dead in a few days, they probably change their perspective.
I hope you continue to social distance for $N years, because vaccination isn't just about you -- its about protecting those who would be at risk.
It's also about reducing the risk of mutation. The more people it can infect, the greater the risk. We don't want to be dealing with a new variant that the vaccines don't protect against, and go back to square one.
Being scared of a well-tested vaccine over a virus that has killed 3.5 million worldwide and continues to do so is ridiculous. The vaccine is why things are slowly starting to return to normal.
> I hope you continue to social distance for $N years, because vaccination isn't just about you -- its about protecting those who would be at risk.
Those "at risk" should already have been vaccinated before the people "not at risk" have been.
> It's also about reducing the risk of mutation. The more people it can infect, the greater the risk.
It goes both ways: the more people that are vaccinated, the higher the selection pressure to evade the vaccination.
> Being scared of a well-tested vaccine over a virus that has killed 3.5 million worldwide and continues to do so is ridiculous.
Spare us your shaming, it has the opposite effect of what you intend it to have.
> The vaccine is why things are slowly starting to return to normal.
Notice how the narrative is slowly drifting from "protect the vulnerable, prevent the collapse of health care" to "every child needs to be vaccinated as soon as possible"? This is not "normal".
Newly developed vaccines for debilitating diseases aren't given to children indiscriminately en masse. We are dealing with a completely different scale here and we should be more careful about it.
Rushing the medical feedback process has huge potential downsides.
Vaccinating children with 20-100 year old (~1-4 generations of human feedback/testing) vaccines is normal, vaccinating them with 1 year old experimental vaccines is not.
In my opinion, people in high risk groups (elderly/preexisting conditions) should take the vaccine, but low risk healthy individuals should wait as long as possible for more feedback about the potential downsides.
Older at risk age groups have lived a full life and will mostly die in 20 years, so side effects are less of an issue but having otherwise healthy kids potentially live 70-80 years with permanent side effects is criminal.
Waiting N years is the correct approach like somebody else stated. Don't rush to be a guinea pig if you are not high risk.
We have about as much information about the effects of the vaccines now as we have about the effects of Covid-19, and they are generally better in each age group.
(this includes the blood clotting that has been attributed to the vaccines; the incidence is higher in people that have been infected)
At high risk are the elderly (65+ years old), the obese, and people of any age that are diabetic and/or have preexisting cardiovascular issues (which accounts for the majority of covid deaths). I also include people that have excessive and unavoidable human contact with 100± people as part of their daily lives/work (nurses, teachers, customer-facing service workers, etc).
At low risk are all healthy people under 40, especially healthy children. They have the capacity to fight these viruses and develop antibodies the old fashioned way without intervention.
The low risk don't necessarily have to avoid the vaccines completely but would be better served with an additional 2-5± years of vaccine testing before taking the plunge. In the meantime, the low risk should prioritize exercise, eating well, avoiding immunosuppressive drugs (hard street drugs, antibiotics, etc) and buying as much time as possible by avoiding high risk behaviors.
I believe this approach drastically reduces iatrogenesis (disease brought on by the healer), which is a leading cause of death in most developed countries.
I appreciate your support. I've noticed my favorite science-related publications (ArsTechnica was especially surprising) completely suppressing and deleting these kinds of discussions in the comment sections.
Unfortunately this topic has been heavily politicized and dissenting opinions are no longer seen through a science-based lens.
As a person that generally dislikes both political parties, I get hit from both sides.... for being pro-mask/pro-temporary-lockdown (attacked from the right) and for being vaccine-cautious/anti-vaccine-passports (attacked from the left).
Please make your substantive points without personal attacks. Crossing into the flamewar style like this is guaranteed to make the discussion nastier and more predictable, which are two things we're trying to avoid on HN.
Is your behaviour in this thread a coping mechanism intended to relieve your own anxieties and make you feel good about yourself? Or is it a genuine attempt to convince vaccine skeptics by shaming and scorning them with appeals to emotion and ad hominem attacks?
In any case, your arguments, if they can be called that, are very doubtful, in light of emerging evidence about the risks of the vaccine (see OP), and the diminishing infection rates in many countries.
So is getting the vaccine. It is a risk-reward calculation with many unknowns.
The following must be kept in mind: For the younger population, there a strong incentive to exaggerate the risk of the virus and to downplay the risk of the vaccine, in order to maximize vaccinations and (hopefully) minimize overall mortality. I must assume that public health authorities act in the collective interest, not mine.
Personally, I am unwilling to sacrifice myself for the "greater good", even if it's a really small risk. My individual risk of contracting COVID must exceed the individual risk of taking the vaccine. As long as that remains in question, I will remain hesitant.
I fail to see any logical reasoning here. This research suggests an unspecific alteration to your immune system. It affects everyone who gets vaccinated, not just researchers.
If you are young and healthy, there is a high chance that getting infected with COVID is harmless. Your body will deal with it in the natural way. Furthermore, the risk of getting infected at all is not 100%. I could make the same argument here: There are more important things to be worrying about than COVID.
> affects everyone who gets vaccinated, not just researchers.
If you understood my comment to stand in opposition to that obvious statement, then I'm not surprised its logic escaped you. Or are you just indulging in pointless rhetoric?
For most of us there are indeed more important things to worry about than Covid. So just do what society asks of you, for good reason, and move on.
> If you understood my comment to stand in opposition to that obvious statement, then I'm not surprised its logic escaped you.
Let me rephrase it: Surely you couldn't mean that there is connection between being a researcher and the risk of vaccination. Therefore, what is the logical connection between the premise and the conclusion?
> So just do what society asks of you, for good reason, and move on.
I have a response to this, but it would be inappropriate to post it here.
If you get COVID, statistically you’ll pass it on to a few people. Let’s hope you live amongst less selfish people so your own selfish behavior doesn’t affect other.
Furthermore, the people I could pass it on to are either taking the same risk as me (which is fair), or they want to but couldn't get the vaccine yet, in which case they should be vaccinated first, not me.
As far as I can tell the difference between the pfizer and moderna vaccines are negligible. The results of differences in their testing procedure and conditions - the stuff you’re getting is basically the same. So, unless you’re (in my opinion) wrongly calculating the risk from a vaccine as larger than the risk from the disease, the best shot is the one you can get soonest.
Given a choice, I would choose Pzifer over Moderna, since it has fewer side effects [1], but otherwise they're both good and protect approximately equally against known variants. I wouldn't choose J&J or AZ if my age is below 60yo because of a very low risk of deadly side effects (clots).
Edit: unless my BMI > 30, in which case any vaccine is better than no vaccine, because of the increased risks of covid-19 on high BMI.
Johnson and Johnson. Because you only need one shot and you are good to go. Immediately followed by whatever vaccine is available at the moment. Which leaves, at least for the next couple of weeks, with option three: none of the above.
Your strategy is not optimal. If you want to be efficiently freeloading, you should not be announcing your position.
Freeloading with vaccination only works if just a small enough minority of people are doing it. In order to minimize your personal risk from both covid and potential side effects of vaccination, you should be advocating for others to get vaccinated but not get the shot yourself.
If you publicly announce that you are not going to get the vaccination, that may encourage others to avoid it as well. That's against your own interests, because then it's more likely that you get covid when the vaccination coverage in the population is lower.
I already thought about this and I fully agree! But I feel rather anonymous on this global message board.
I tell all my friends who asked for my opinion to just do what they please and lied to them that yes, I am registered for my shot. Which I am not and won't be, unless my employment or personal comfort are threatened too much.
I am also happy my elderly parents took the vaccine. A covid infection is probably more dangerous to them than the vaccine and now I can visit them without testing with a clear conscience.
I... kind of was? I wasn't in a rush, anyway. Figured I'm healthy enough that I'd let those who are more at risk than me get their shots.
And then I went in to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and they said, hey, we've got this extra dose, do you want it? So I took it, just because I was there and it was easy.
Not being an expert in the subject, but a lot of the COVID vaccines are based on established and well-tested mechanisms that AFAIK, are fairly predictable.
“Innate immunity” is a particular thing in immunology that’s distinct from “adaptive immunity”. Adaptive immunity includes things like antibodies, and is most often what we are targeting with vaccines. Innate immunity covers a huge range of inherited systems including hard-codes responses to things like bacterial proteins, markers for fungi and viruses, etc
Like everything else in biology, there is tight coupling between innate immunity and adaptive immunity), so the distinction in reality isn’t so clear-cut about what’s part of innate vs adaptive, but that’s the broad gist.
I'm wondering if the Moderna vaccine acts similarly, and innate training occurs mostly during the first shot seeing the VLPs and/or spike proteins. Then, perhaps more of the adaptive system generating IgGs is trained weeks after the first shot and/or reinforced during the second shot which triggers a large response, hence flu-like symptoms. Additional shots or pathogen exposure would likely not produce much of a response as it seems the innate system participates, in addition to the adaptive system. It might be because humoral and cellular elements straddle both systems, and perhaps they cooperate in some form even if they're operating in mostly different domains.
On the fungi cytokine increased responses front, I wonder if the alterations in toll-like receptors heightens fungal allergies in addition to fighting fungal infections more efficiently.
Not that that would help anyway. That's becoming increasingly an appeal to authority. There isn't anybody to do the review that isn't a colleague or a competitor, or worse part of an established GroupThink.
Peer review has had its day due to specialisation in science. The gold standard now has to be replication from the published method.
I like seeing the strategy of asking for the highest level of accuracy and testing for all things that do not confirm my biases while being more lax about the things that confirm my biases. I've seen this strategy becoming much more popular these past few years.
Is anyone here well versed in this stuff? Can you dumb it down a little bit for me?
Is the article saying that the pfizer vaccine reduces the inflammatory response to covid19 and happens to increase the inflammatory response to some random fungus?
I must have re-read this article a whole bunch of times and I'm still not convinced I understood anything at all.
The experimental covid vaccines changes your immune system response to non-covid pathogens in ways that aren‘t fully understood, potentially permanently. For example, your immune system will react with a stronger inflammatory response to fungus.
They also warn that those effects could change (worsen) the effectiveness of other vaccines, for other diseases.
> Key exclusion criteria included a medical history of COVID-19. Sera and blood samples were collected before the first administration of BNT162b2, three weeks after the first dose (right before the second dose), and two weeks after the second dose. A high percentage (56.3%) of individuals had been vaccinated with BCG in the past 12 months due to the fact that many participants participated in parallel in a BCG-trial. One individual was removed from the dataset after detecting high concentrations of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 N-antigen at baseline.
Which just gives me lots of questions. By excluding people that already had COVID-19, how can you be sure it's the vaccine that's causing this and not the vaccine causing the same changes as covid19?
As in what if COVID-19 causes the change in innate immune system response and for some reason the vaccine mimicks that. Also they only tested Pfizer and not the "more traditional" vaccines, how can they confidently link it to mRNA technology?
> potentially permanently.
They only tested 2 weeks after the second dose, is that really enough time to be making such statements?
Again, I'm completely uneducated on the topic, but it seems like a lot of assumptions are being made with lots of variables unaccounted for.
