Everything you need to know about Covid-19 vaccines Which can be found by the authors. But, for the ones we can't find any information which actually we're all fascinated in, like Sputnik or the Chinese vaccines, or the Cuban vaccine, bupkes.
Oddly, nothing about Johnson & Johnson, the only single dose design I know about.
Absence of information leads to presence of .. assumptions. Like, "they're all bad" which is far from the truth: They have different qualities of test, but they're not nothing.
Also no mention of Covax, or the sub-strains of the Oxford Vaccine now made by CSL in Australia, but (regrettably) not yet recognized by many EU economies as a "valid" treatment despite being immunologically identical to the sources used in Europe. This kind of petty beaurocracy is causing real pain to individuals seeking to travel.
Also, nothing about vaccine mixtures. And, a lack of clarity about the emerging need of a third topup. Vaccine mixtures might elucidate a stronger response than just AZ twice (for instance) so this could mean MORE people getting higher immunity, if a mixture was used.
I know I’m not addressing the article , but the comment above and many others on this topic. I’m still surprised by the blank check this community generally gives to big pharma and governments, seeing their track records. It’s not that I expect an anti (COVID-19) vaccine attitude, but I would have expected to see here a more questioning tone more regularly, as I see how strongly voiced HN can be with other topics. For example: discussion of their fast development time vs safety, VAERS stats, vaccination of children and pregnant women, real-world efficacy and the fact that these vaccines are under experimental usage up to 2023 or so.
All I’m saying is that I’d expect to see less consensus here on not touching these matters.
The vaccine is now a political issue just like mask wearing and lockdowns or any other aspect of this pandemic. Rational discussions that deviate from the accepted narrative are attacked and suppressed even on HN. Apparently experimental mRNA vaccines, censorship, violation of civil liberties, and other transgressions are fair game during a “pandemic”.
Rational discussions are created by speaking only with calm rational arguments, instead of inflammatory discourse such as putting the word pandemic between quotes, implying that 4 million deaths by a virus are not enough to be considered a pandemic.
All of these issues have been discussed extensively for months.
According to the mRNA vaccine data I've seen, for adults the benefit of protection against COVID-19 vastly outweighs any observed risks due to the vaccine. This was already the case after the very large phase-3 studies, and much more so after real-world data from hundreds of millions of vaccinations became available. So it should not be surprising that there is a broad consensus that getting the vaccine is a good idea.
Of course the initial studies excluded riskier groups such as pregnant women and children. Now there is some data, but no general consensus between the different countries' regulatory agencies yet.
Overall, I don't see a "blank check" for the pharma companies at all. They had to conduct and publish very large studies before getting even emergency use authorizations for their products.
How many doses worldwide, how many reported incidents. It's that simple. If you think some at-scale public disaster is impending, Can you explain what you think it is, beyond skepticism it might exist and we're not adequately cautious?
Lead poisoning for example takes years to manifest itself.
So did other drugs which took years until regulators retracted them because they did more harm then good.
Specifically about mRNA vaccines, we know little about the long term effects of the lipid nano particles used in them and there are reasons to be concerned.
As far as I remember there were never serious adverse effects that did not appear within a few weeks of administration of a vaccine. The mRNA technology is conceptually even a lot simpler than other ways of vaccination. What are you exactly afraid about?
With hundreds of millions of people having received mRNA vaccines by now, we most likely have seen all the short term side effects that there are, except the rarest of them. I would not worry too much about these either.
Thanks! So the main concern seems to be autoimmune disease?
> Overall, the robust inflammatory milieu induced by LNPs, combined with presentation of the vaccine-derived peptides/protein outside of antigen-presenting cells, might cause tissue damage and exacerbate side effects. Since self-antigen presentation in an inflammatory environment has been linked to autoimmune disease development (Charles A Janeway et al., 2001), this merits further investigation, albeit not detected here.
Because short term inflammation is, as far as I know, not a big deal and somewhat desirable for vaccinations? It is my understanding that we intentionally mix in inflammatory substances ("adjuvants") with normal vaccines to kick the immune system into action?
That's just it: we are not adequately cautious. Who knows what the long-term side effects of the vaccines will be?
The fact that those concerns are hand-waved away makes me more concerned. I mean, I don't trust Big Pharma, but at the very least, the FDA stood in their way. This time, the FDA gave them a pass called "Emergency Use Authorization," and that worries me.
Covid has long term effects too, seemingly much more than vaccines. Were this not the case then yes the calculus for younger people would be very different. But it seems that everybody benefits.
You can only make that judgment for yourself. Assuming that your judgment works for everyone is highly presumptuous.
For myself, I see less risk in going the route where I may not even get COVID at all and risk actually getting it, rather than having a 100% chance of injecting myself with a vaccine that I don't trust.
I don't know how you you calculated that risk, but right now the numbers are so overwhelmingly in favor of the vaccines that even with a 1% chance of getting COVID-19 getting the vaccine you don't trust is safer than getting the virus you should trust even less. And unless you live in one of the few countries that have contained COVID-19 (for now), the chance of getting COVID-19 is a lot higher than that.
If you've already had COVID-19 you could argue the numbers become less clear.
You say that right now, the numbers are overwhelmingly in favor of vaccines. I disagree, but even if you're right, that's only right now. Until we know more about their long-term effects, we don't know. I'm in the age group that has higher risk of blood clots from the vaccines.
Also, according to some estimates, 60-90% of people have had COVID, so I could have had it.
> You say that right now, the numbers are overwhelmingly in favor of vaccines. I disagree, but even if you're right,
How can you possibly disagree with that? There is a several orders of magnitude difference. Data for the USA: there are 6,207 reports of people dying after getting the vaccine (of which only a few have a plausible causal relationship between getting the vaccine and death) [1], while there are 607,289 registered COVID-19 deaths [2] (and yes, the excess deaths do agree with that number [3]). There are exactly three confirmed vaccine deaths in the USA, from TTS due to the J&J vaccine.
> Until we know more about their long-term effects, we don't know
I agree, so we should act on basis of the data we have right now. And that data says overwhelmingly says getting a vaccine is much safer than getting COVID-19 on the short and mid long-term. There is nothing that points to that on the long term suddenly the vaccines will be worse than the virus.
> I'm in the age group that has higher risk of blood clots from the vaccines.
There is no evidence that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines increase the risk of blood cloths. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that COVID-19 does.
With communicable diseases, your decision does not only affect you yourself but the rest of society as well. So we are actually making a decision for everyone with that.
One of the greatest lies of this COVID saga is that everyone is responsible for everyone else's health. We are not. The vulnerable are responsible for their own health and should take measures to protect themselves, not expect everyone else to do it for them.
You have always been responsible not only for your own safety but also for the safety of your contacts/co-workers/environment. If you think otherwise, you might want to reflect about communicable diseases/STDs/traffic/gun safety/work place safety/you name it in general and it should become glaringly obvious. Covid safety is not different. For now, the required measures are more severe but it is not true that it is a special in regard of having to look out for others.
> You can only make that judgment for yourself. Assuming that your judgment works for everyone is highly presumptuous.
Yet people who refuse to get vaccinated seem to have no problem making this judgement for other people that they are likely to spread COVID to, when they fall ill.
Covid also spreads asymptomatically, and for a lot of people, days 1-14 of it can feel a lot like a common cold. You need to take preventable measures to not be a potential spreader. Those measures are... Getting vaccinated.
Unless you are living in a spacesuit, you shedding viral particles into common spaces does make you responsible for the health of other people.
The blank check has a lot of research available to back it up, and the fact that vaccines are the most successful medical advance in human history having wiped out entire diseases like polio that had horrific consequences. There is also the non-negligible 600k deaths in the US alone directly due to covid with none attributable to the vaccine so far and a very clear decrease in hospitalization and deaths in vaccinated populations.
What is mind boggling is the callousness of people questioning vaccination because they think their personal risk is low when so many have died, and a belief in some unproven hypothetical risk when so many facts are weighing in favor of vaccination.
People seem to have a problem with overcompensating for issues they align with positively.
This happens with vaccines, masks, racial, gender, identity, environmental, etc. basically any issue that brings up strong feelings in people tends to go into a religious fanaticism (chips all in, this is absolutely right with no question, anyone not in on the groupthink is the enemy)
What do you think Equifax, LexisNexis, criminal background checks, person-search websites, and automated account termination are? "Social credit" only seems like some foreign concept because it was coined describing a foreign society - it's more difficult to look inwards at what already exists.
You don't have to do those for day to day living, attending school, getting on a plane, most employment, entering a grocery store, a pub or daycare for your kid. These will have to be scanned to work and will be able to be turned off. USA seems to be slow rolling towards it but look at France and UK just this week. Life ending fines, 6 month jail time if you enter one of these places without it. No exemptions for those that aquired natural immunity either.
> ut look at France and UK just this week. Life ending fines, 6 month jail time if you enter one of these places without it. No exemptions for those that aquired natural immunity either
You are wrong, you need a valid digital certificate which can come from 1) two doses and 14 days; 2) negative PCR less than 73hrs; 3) certificate you had covid (in some cases a vaccine dose is required on top). Considering people have had Covid multiple times, a generic exemption for them might be too broad.
The idea that you should expect to be searched to enter concerts and sporting events is more insane. And yet that's just been the new normal for the past 15 years.
The biggest issue is whether businesses can use your personal information for purposes other than checking vaccination status.
Some of the European systems I've read about seem to discourage that, and the GDPR would also seem to prohibit it. But there's no willpower for such laws in the US, so we'd inevitably end up with the synergy of government and corporate power, like everything else. For instance, half the surveillance systems I listed in my other comment rely on abusing government-mandated identifiers.
I never said that it was, which was apparent from my characterization of "insane". I was merely pointing out that framing vaccination requirements as some sort of watershed totalitarianism is ridiculous. We get far less specific benefit from other intrusions. For example, spending the political energy putting surveillance valley out of business would go much further for freedom's sake.
Three of your own examples (day to day living, attending school, most employment) actually do require subjecting yourself to control by the systems I listed. Furthermore, all of the examples you listed make you subject to observation.
The only way to be able to escape this is to be independently wealthy, which with the way our economy is designed is only ever possible for a minority of people. I agree that vaccine requirements are part of ever-creeping totalitarian control, regardless of apparent prudence, but to frame it as some sort of not-yet-here watershed moment is either uninformed or disingenuous.
People are strongly voiced and logical until their very life (or way of life) is on the table (or even just the whipped up perception of it being so). Then they retreat into a shell of conformity and xenophobia. We see this over and over again.
As I understand it, COVAX is the WHO program name for distribution of vaccines to developing countries, and will potentially include all vaccines, unless you have other information?
I am sorry I wasn't clearer. I meant, what about ALL the vaccines directed into covax which will at end, affect more of the world than the supset used in eurine and the US
This looks like a British publication, not a world-wide fact sheet.
As another commenter as noted, J&J is the company, their vaccine is called Janssen which is covered (but maybe not administered in the UK) [0]
Oxford/AstraZeneca is licensed/sold under several other brand names [1] including Covishield and Vaxzevria but so far the brands are used interchangeably (as long as the batch wasn't bad.. this makes sense, no?) Given this is British, the other brand names aren't particularly relevant to their population (they got the original). Covax, as far as I can tell, is a programme to deliver Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines (no matter the brand).. perhaps you meant Covaxin (an India developed vaccine)?
Vaccine mixtures haven't been explored much (this would mean restarting the trails again mixing and matching, which is tricky given people are either completely against, or want the vaccines yesterday).. but the WHO has cautioned against [2]. Never the less several countries are mixing.. we'll see the results as they play out. Oxford(!) did find that mixing AstraZeneca + Pfizer was more effective than double AstraZeneca [3]
ATAGI held off saying they approved of this AFAIK. If this is true, I wish it was widespread and recommended because I am due my second AZ in 5 weeks time and I would LOVE pfizer, but I suspect in Qld I will be told "nope"
This is the EudraVigilance web [1]: European database of suspected adverse drug reaction reports. On this website you can view data on suspected drugs side-effects, COVID vaccines included.
This is the Med Alerts web [2]: The U.S. Government database incidents of adverse health events that follow the administration of a vaccine.
Pretty much any possible medical problem has a non-zero background rate in the population. When you vaccinate hundreds of millions of people, you probably sample all of those at least once. One needs to do a proper statistical analysis to determine if there is any causal link to the vaccination.
I imagine that this is not so easy, probably we can split the response by age, previous medical issues, etc. An also I am sure that Covid-associated problems (including dead) have been decreasing since it was first discovered in humans. So, which is the status?
The clinical studies clearly show that the benefit from getting the vaccine outweighs the possible risks. Otherwise the regulatory agencies would not have approved them.
Why don't you simply look up the reports from the approval agency of your choice if you want to know the details?
I am not sure that this is accurate. For me it is like a coin:
- One side shows the benefits of the vaccine, and let's not forget that this side is promoted by the vaccine sellers. No problem with that, they do their job, in a few months we will see a 3rd and 4th dose being promoted to ensure immunity.
- The other side shows the cons of the vaccine, but as you said it is not sufficiently studied.
Before conditional approval, possible risks have been extensively studied in very large phase 3 trials with a few ten thousand participants. For reference, the phase 3 study of the conventional TBE vaccine I recently got had just a few thousand participants. Like for any other medication, regulatory agencies have used this safety and efficacy data to judge whether the vaccine is beneficial or not. I strongly suggest you look up the corresponding reports for the various COVID-19 vaccines if you are interested in the details. Most countries' agencies post them publicly on their websites.
Due to the limited number of participants, is not possible to detect extremely rare side effects in a clinical trial. This is why most countries have adverse effect reporting systems. If they detect statistically significant anomalies (e.g. rare thromboses in vector vaccines), they then update their recommendations taking into account the new data. This is again standard procedure for all medications.
Thank you for your response, it seems you know a lot about this, no irony :)
I understand your point, and I have read some papers (not recently, but in the first months of the vaccines invention). Also I understood your words (probably my bad) "One needs to do a proper statistical analysis to determine if there is any causal link to the vaccination" as "not sufficiently studied".
Lets be clear, I am not antiVax (I have all of their recommended / required vaccinations and am very aware & grateful for the protection they provide), I have questions (the same kind of critical questions I do my self when choosing between mortgages or where spend my holidays).
Then, which are my doubts?
- This vaccines has been manufactured within a fraction of the normal time frame, I understand they may be used within vulnerable groups, but for the healthy ones... I am not in a hurry, let allow the test of time...
- Pharmaceutical companies are seeking indemnification against any adverse consequences from vaccines... It will be not the first time the seller of a drug hide adverse hide-effects. It looks like asymmetric to me, no responsibilities in one side, my health on the other.
- Without looking into details (details=lives), vaccination as a strategy has as little regard for human life / well-being and is just as reckless as herd immunity. Lets put 3 examples:
1) I have 2 kids, almost zero possibilities of being badly affected by covid, should I vaccine them bearing in mind the points above?
2) My wife has a rare disease, should she vaccine?
3) I am an healthy 37 man, should I vaccine?
See my comment above please. Not black, not white, my point is on the grey areas.
Note 1: I remember covid had a fatal rate of ~3% during the worst months. In the the Med Alerts web (see link above) the death rate of vaccines is 2.37%. It is the same scale. If I am misinterpreting it, I am happy to learn.
Note 2: Only as example (but you can iterate), lets analyse it from age perspective: Covid fatal rate has this [1] distribution by age, Would you recommend everybody vaccine given the probable hiden-effects of the vaccine?
To reply to your second note separately, yes everybody needs to be vaccinated to stop the spread. Otherwise unvaccinated individuals remain as a permanent pool of carriers that offer the virus the opportunity to spread and evolve.
And clearly from looking at the news there are many categories of high risk older people and even health care professionals like nurses that have fallen for this idiotic questioning, and are putting themselves and everyone else at risk.
Polio would have never been eradicated with this kind of - it doesn't affect me so why should I get it - mentality.
It's not clear to me what this data you are linking to means or that it is being correctly interpreted, but I think it is pretty safe to assume that if the vaccines had a 2.37% death rate we would know about it!
162M people in the US alone have been fully vaccinated, with a 2.37% death rate it would have resulted in 3.8M deaths!!
Thank you. Yes, it seems a lot to me, that's why I think it might be misinterpreted, but I don't know how to interpret it. If anyone knows I'd be grateful for help.
Regarding the polio argument, yes, I agree, but it also works the other way around, how many healthy people have to be harmed for the others to survive? We can argue about this ad infinitum, but this is about numbers and I don't see the whole picture.
See I think right there is where the problem starts, if you can't interpret it then you have to trust the experts to do it, or get a degree in immunology or whatever scientific field is required to properly be able to interpret this data. Why should you a non-expert want to interpret it on your own, or expect to be able to without properly studying this.
This is a tech site, and any of us would laugh off a non-programmer taking a peak at code and drawing a conclusion from it. And the science we are talking about here is far more advanced than just programming.
So removing this completely useless speculation based on ignorance, you have to look at the big picture and the hard facts. 600k deaths vs. no measurable negative impact of vaccines, and virtually complete protection against hospitalization and death, using a very established science (vaccines are safe and effective, and have a very long proven track record, and even mRNA is not that new.)
The numbers are very clear and available, if you don't see the whole picture it's because you don't want to.
Serious question: Is going straight to a vaccine the typical route for new infectious diseases? Are treatments the equivalent of a Z Pack or Tamiflu more challenging to develop?
Antivirals are a relatively new development. Historically, your only options for most viral diseases have been supportive care (keep you comfortable or at least alive while your body fights off the infection), vaccination, and of course prevention (hygiene, quarantine, and so on).
The COVID vaccine is pretty specific to the infection mechanism the virus uses. Azithromycin is a general purpose antibiotic that will kill most bacteria that aren't specifically resistant to it.
Definitely more complex to develop - antibiotics can be found in the dirt, mRNA designer vaccines can not. However, the effort that went into the COVID vaccine is akin to a moonshot for the mRNA tech. Costs should come down and the number of ways it's deployed should go up, hopefully both of those will drive further innovation.
It really comes down to cost-benefit. Cancer and global pandemics, yes. Designer drugs for minor inconveniences, probably not in the near future.
The first licensed flu vaccine became available in the 40s; tamiflu in 1999. And realistically, if we had an antiviral that was as effective against covid as tamiflu is against flu, that… would not be very interesting and we’d still be vaccinating everyone.
Antivirals are difficult and slow to develop, relatively new tech, and often not particularly good.
It was not clear which vaccine development projects would succeed and which would not. For a reasonably wealthy country, the cost of the vaccine doses is completely negligible compared to the cost of the pandemic. This is why it made sense to massively overpurchase doses.
Interesting enough testes are ranging from £50-250 and usually u need few, even self-test kits have similar range. I wonder is there a way to have a really cheap tests (£3-5) ?
I guess it would be interesting to find out PCR test cost break down.
Maybe you all can help me out. For someone who's not yet vaccinated, what's the point?
1. We now know that most of the carnage of February/March/April 2020 had to do with the aggressive use of ventilators. Once doctors stopped ventilating the majority of their patients, survival became the likely outcome of a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
2. We now know that severe COVID-19 is basically a Serotonin Syndrome (without the customary drug trigger), whereby plasma levels of serotonin becomes elevated, platelets release cluster-bombs of serotonin in the lungs, and lungs damaged by the bacterial/viral infections aren't able to remove excess serotonin from the blood. [0], for example.
3. Serotonin Syndrome is easily controlled with the anti-serotonin drug Cyproheptadine, and other similar substances [0].
4. We know that lungs are damaged by pure oxygen, and that 5% CO2 completely alleviates the problem of #OxygenToxicity.
5. We now know that severe COVID-19 is likely a post-viral auto-immune condition [1].
6. Most cases of severe viral lung infections also have concomitant bacterial infections such as tuberculosis [2]. Treating the concomitant bacterial infection is easier, more important and more effective than treating viral infections.
7. People who are already immune due to natural infection display robust immunity already, and have little-to-no potential for benefit from a vaccine jab.
8. While vaccination may be somewhat protective against SARS-CoV-2, it does not improve the population's overall health levels. Malnourished people will still be malnourished and vulnerable to other infections, or "breakthrough infections", due to their Vitamin B-1 deficiency, Zinc deficiency, etc.
We know how to successfully treat severe COVID-19 cases (though most doctors are not yet aware of 'best practices'). A vast number of people already benefit from natural immunity to SARS-Cov-2. Old people do not benefit from flu vaccine [3], and probably won't benefit during the coming winter season from their COVID-19 vaccines either.
What's the point of promoting vaccines, when we now have any number of cost-effective health-improving interventions that will prevent almost all of the not-yet-immune from dying from COVID-19 (save those who are statistically likely to die in the coming year anyways)?
[1] "Our study explaining the pathophysiology of acute COVID has been published by ERJ, the flagship scientific journal of the European Respiratory Society @ERSpublications. Here, we describe how severe COVID-19 is NOT a viral pneumonia, but a post-viral autoimmune attack of the lung. -- https://twitter.com/DaveLeeERMD/status/1413816137570205697
[3] Turning 65 was associated with a statistically and clinically significant increase in rate of seasonal influenza vaccination. However, no evidence indicated that vaccination reduced hospitalizations or mortality among elderly persons. The estimates were precise enough to rule out results from many previous studies. - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32120383/
1) Do we know that? So all the doctors in Indonesia and India are currently killing 100,000s by begging for ventilators? Interesting.
2) Wait a minute. You are arriving at this conclusion based on a study of T-W-O people?
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of it because it's infuriating reading this. If you don't have a medical degree, I will completely disregard your few hours of research online. It's people like you who will make this take longer than necessary.
> Maybe you all can help me out. For someone who's not yet vaccinated, what's the point?
The point is that COVID-19 and its variants is very happily spreading through the unvaccinated population.
And that even if you don't die from it, we now know that a lot of people come down with incredibly serious short-term symptoms, and serious long-term symptoms.
It’s crazy how we’re expected to cope with myocarditis, blood clots, other mystery symptoms and even death by participating in a large scale clinical trial for experimental gene therapy. The shot is usually free or cheap but god forbid you end up one of the unlucky ones with ruined health and expensive medical bills with no one to sue or take responsibility but yourself. You’ll most likely get censored on social media and gas lighted by health care providers if you speak out too. All this for the greater good of society?
I got pericarditis, I'm expected to make a full recovery and the gas lightning is probably the worst part of it. Lost a couple of friends to it, "maybe it's just anxiety".
EDIT: I've been diagnosed, all my doctors agree, still: "maybe it's just anxiety".
We have an environment of fear and denial about these adverse effects. Many people like you are afraid or weary of sharing experiences because of personal attacks, gaslighting, and censorship. There isn’t adequate informed consent.
Btw you might want to look into mitochondrial supplements, N -acetylcysteine (NAC), zinc, vit D, even ivermectin, etc. Look at the literature and make your own decisions. There are lots of good supplements that could help manage symptoms with safety.
The alternative is to participate in the more ad-hoc yet even larger-scale clinical trial for an objectively dangerous virus of unknown (possibly artificial) origin, with its own profile of unpleasant side effects and potential long term sequelae even if you survive.
No one is saying this is an ideal situation! The vaccine is merely the best of the options, all of them bad.
Don’t forget the supplement that begins with N. Not to mention government essentially denying their own research demonstrating the efficacy of these cheap and safe treatment options.
The title of the article completely devalues it in my eyes. How does the author know that the reader does not want to know something else? This seems to me to be a very paternalistic attitude. What is not discussed at all, for example, are cross-vaccinations with different vaccines, e.g. AstraZeneca + mRNA.
Oddly, nothing about Johnson & Johnson, the only single dose design I know about.
Absence of information leads to presence of .. assumptions. Like, "they're all bad" which is far from the truth: They have different qualities of test, but they're not nothing.
Also no mention of Covax, or the sub-strains of the Oxford Vaccine now made by CSL in Australia, but (regrettably) not yet recognized by many EU economies as a "valid" treatment despite being immunologically identical to the sources used in Europe. This kind of petty beaurocracy is causing real pain to individuals seeking to travel.
Also, nothing about vaccine mixtures. And, a lack of clarity about the emerging need of a third topup. Vaccine mixtures might elucidate a stronger response than just AZ twice (for instance) so this could mean MORE people getting higher immunity, if a mixture was used.