Yes, but the mutations fortunately had only a limited effect on vaccine efficacy.

Depends on what you mean by "effective" (i.e. are you talking about infection, hospitalisation or death?), and relative to what (i.e. ancestral wild type vs Alpha vs Delta).

If you're talking Alpha vs Delta and about hospitalisation/death, then the vaccines are actually marginally more effective against Delta than Alpha according to data from Public Health England (although there's significant overlap in the confidence intervals).

So you don’t get it and pass it on to the unvaccinated in the window that you are infected and your body is fighting it off.

the 'it's just the flu' crowd probably doesn't realize how many people actually die from flu complications, but then, i wouldn't expect them to, unfortunately. perception of freedom trumps science for them.

It’s basically identical to other real world studies which have shown 89-91% effectiveness in the general population against the prevailing mixture of variants this winter and spring in the US and the UK. Which is in turn only slightly lower than the reported 94-95% effectiveness in the clinical trial environment last summer. Long story short it’ll be a long time before the mRNA vaccines aren’t effective.

efficacy is similar due to conservation of the receptor binding domain[RBD] of spike protien[S] the RBDab is billed as the gold standard neutralizing antibody as when it binds to RBD of the S protien, that particular S protien is no longer able to bind to its ligand [ACE2]

should we see a variant that escapes this RBD Antibody mechanism then there will be a possibility of escape, and concommitant requirement to tweak the vaccine antigen.

I would bet a huge personal sum that if there were a federal legal guarantee of no vaccine passports, hesitancy would evaporate overnight, and every single SMART health leak and backdoor regulation to enable them is creating an increasingly hard core and radicalized resistance movement.

Yellow card is for some international travel and school enrollment. It is not a vaccine passport, so while I appreciate engaging the question, it's not clear that this is the same use case. Nobody asks an adult for their measles vaccination status in a normal domestic interaction like a concert, train, office, etc.

I think most people should get vaccinated and we can all move on with our lives, however, I also think a generalized vaccine passport for domestic use is an abomination with inevitable and horrific consequences, and so I am trying to get a sense of what the sincere case for it is. If it's just leveraging the crisis to institute bureaucratic social controls, I'll be the most reasonable man on the barricades.

We need a better "why" that is actually true, and not a cynical "noble lie," (like masks/no-masks was), because when you actually get off the internet and talk to people, it's the percieved lies and the attitudes of the people who tell them that are creating the hesitancy.

If a covid-unvaccinated person goes into a stadium or bar full of covid-vaccinated people, what is the effect? The only way the shots get more traction is with a clear and honest answer to that, imo.

The wild emotionalism that has overflowed during Covid, is unlikely to go back into the container, unfortunately. It's a hellish birth child of the lunacy of the social media era meets rampant pandemic hysteria.

Software engineers (engineers in general actually) aren't special at all when it comes to being rational. They just like to think they are because of their field. It's identical to Stephen Hawking thinking he had special insight on politics, because he was gifted at one thing; or a famous actor thinking they have special insight on politics because they're gifted at one thing. Engineers are just as prone to failing to control their emotions properly, bouts of subject irrationalism and failing to strive for objectivity as is the typical person. Your typical software engineer on HN is no more rational than the typical plumber, the plumber is just likely more honest about it and less full of their self. You see it in every thread on HN, yet the rational engineer myth persists, amusingly.

> Just saw a quote from Gottlieb

Who is this? Why do we care what he says? Can you provide a source for the quote?

The Cleveland clinic disagrees with your “authoritative” quote (see comments above)

When it comes to schools, anyone can claim a "religious exemption" to those rules (as if public health is a religious matter...). There's no verification or proof involved in claiming that exemption. It's a major loophole.

We are still supply-limited in Germany. The number of new first doses are currently down because we need these doses for the second ones instead. 36% fully vaccinated, 54% have received the first dose at least. The percentages are of the total population, i.e. including kids which cannot even receive the vaccine yet, so we aren’t doing that bad, imo.

Check https://impfdashboard.de for up-to-date numbers.

pfizer trial showed first dose by itself was extremely effective. check out the chart here: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-well-pfizer-shot-works-a...

Much of the data comparing efficacy of 1 vs 2 doses doesn't wait until 10-days after the first dose, which defeats the point. That being said 2 doses is more effective, just not by as much as you'd might think.

edit: replaced the above link because it was pay-walled

>That's not what this says

I admit I'm not medically trained, but the graph [1] seems pretty clear to me, and the authors said:

> In contrast, participants with SARS-CoV-2 antibodies at baseline before the first vaccine injection rapidly developed uniform, high antibody titers within days after vaccination (median AUC before vaccination, 90 [43 participants];

>at 0 to 4 days, 133 [7 participants];

>at 5 to 8 days, 14,208 [15 participants];

>at 9 to 12 days, 20,783 [8 participants];

>at 13 to 16 days, 25,927 [20 participants];

>at 17 to 20 days, 11,755 [4 participants];

>at 21 to 27 days, 19,534 [14 participants]; and

>after the second dose, 22,509 [19 participants])

[1] https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...

Allegation of your excessive alcohol consumption or unpopular opinions is not going to decrease your credit score. Your donation to the government "charity" is not going to increase your credit score. With low credit score, you can still take a train to anywhere you want.

It's a privately ran optional system. I do realize that society generally makes it non-optional, but then that gets into arguments about running a debt based monetary regime.

They're all pretty comparable. Novavax should be getting a lot more attention since it doesn't require super cold storage and appears to be on par with the mRNA vaccines.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-vaccine-compariso...

Yes. But we only get one influenza vaccine per year. The expectation has been for antibody neutralization coverage (not just T-cell mediated infected cell killing) lasting that long.

15 weeks is rather short. Additionally, it's not really 15 weeks. The study time scale starts at the 1st vaccine dose (week 1). Then it's 3 weeks until the 2nd dose and 2 more weeks till full protection. So the actual protective coverage span in this study is week 8 to week 15, or 7 weeks.

This study being held up as proof of long lasting immunity doesn't hold water. It is not bad news though. Decent B-cell responses (though tailing off) till 7 weeks after full vaccination is good. But we definitely need to know what happens after the first 2 months too. This exact study should be repeated again in 6 months (24 weeks).

back in the day it was common sense surgeons washing hands is pointless.

I like your comment, and I agree the Swiss are probably free-er at this point--but we were something of a free nation at one time, and we still (Orwellian?) bill ourselves as such.

> There are tons of central databases you are already registered in, all available on demand.

Most of these are not ran by the government though. Thus their use is not mandated.

> your freedom ends where other's begins

In libertarian circles this is generally spoken about as the `non-aggression principle`.

I in no way think that a proof of vaccination system put together by private providers, coupled with businesses' choice to check vaccination status is wrong. I do think the responsible thing to do is somewhere along the lines of self isolating to either being vaccinated or having an antibody test.

My objection is a government orchestrated vaccination database with mandated use in private businesses.

edit: I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I did upvote you for the thoughtful commentary. : )

That’s why I put old in quotes. mRNA is also nothing new, just new at this scale. People are just acting like it’s something that was just invented over the last year.

Again, what is the effect of a covid-unvaccinated person entering a room full of covid-vaccinated people? We need clarity on that message.

Some people just aren't motivated by fear or shame, and so for a universal campaign to succeed, we need to appeal to those peoples' sense of reason.

How do I reconcile this with the existence of, say, Moderna booster? https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

(Genuine question.)

> I don't follow your argumentation - why would extremely high antibody titres not almost certainly result in a better immune response?

Antibody titres aren't constant. They increase when your immune system sees an antigen, and decline gradually afterward. In individuals with previous exposure to the antigen, they increase more quickly due to immune memory. This is true for any virus. Decline in circulating antibodies does not mean that your immunity has gone away.

Vaccination is, to a first approximation, injecting a large amount of antigen into someone to induce an immune response. Therefore, data that shows that previously exposed people have faster and stronger immune responses to vaccination are simply confirming what we already know about immunity. It does not mean that the vaccination made the response in exposed people stronger than it would have been otherwise.

Maybe it did, but you can't conclude it from this kind of data.

> I do think that it suggests that the current CDC guidance (of recommending 2 doses even for those previously infected) might be overkill and that it would be worth further study of whether 1 dose (or even 0 doses) would be sufficient (including against variants) for those previously infected.

We agree on this.

> I don't know of any study of the Delta variant (or other recent variants) comparing immunity acquired from infection versus immunity conferred by vaccination -- AFAIK, it's still unknown how these compare and whether a vaccination might provide additional immunity against variants.

I'm not aware of any study of this, either. So far, everyone is focusing on the vaccines.

> re: your edits, the tangential bit from this paper about sars-cov-2 positive cases wasn't the main thrust and from the graphs it looks like their neutralizing antibody levels actually are multiple logs below mRNA vaccinated people at the same 15 week point. I'm not sure what all these citations about naturally infected people add to the topic being debated.

These are all real-world studies of actual duration of immunity. They trump any theoretical concerns based on lab measurements of neutralizing antibody levels.

Observing that the vaccines induce responses lasting as long as 15 weeks is completely unsurprising, based on what we already know from real-world observation of natural infection. Ignoring contextual evidence and concluding that this specific paper didn't provide reasonable evidence is losing the forest for the trees.

Could it be possible that the vaccines don't confer immunity lasting as long as what we're observing from natural infection? Sure, I guess.

Is it likely? No.

> Is it not like our situation with the flu?

No, as other commenters pointed out coronaviruses are different from the flu viruses in that they cannot mutate as easily as flu does. Hence it is possible that booster shots will not be required.

> Is it not like our situation with the flu?

Nope, and for the same reason COVID deniers who claimed "it's just like the flu" in the beginning were wrong.

There is simply no evidence we will need booster shots.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that about half of adults infected in an outbreak of the delta variant in Israel were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine

Source CNBC.

That includes the lag time. A single dose is supposed to be about 80% effective once immunity develops. They don't know how long that will last and thus have the second shot to increase effectiveness and hopefully longevity.

But the issue, is that if you had your first dose 2 days before being infected, you count as being infected after 1 dose.

We need to compare "1 dose, x days after first dose" and "two doses, x days after first dose" to compare the same thing

Is it worth getting a third dose?

>Every American is in a whole myriad of government databases form the federal level on down...

The park might be full of needles but that's no justification for further litter.

Why do we need yet another database? People have enough problems with the no fly list and that's a short list. A DB that has 1/3 of the country flagged would cause mayhem from false positives and inconsistent data.

I don't at all disagree, but this will be the first one openly limiting freedoms via the government's monopoly of force.

I do believe there are others already doing so too, but none of them are open and acknowledged by the public.

So you think that Nature as a journal saying previous covid infection gives antibodies like the vaccines, is comparable to how primitive medical science once didn’t know you had to wash your hands before surgery?

> Could you apply this same argument to taxes/SSNs, drivers licenses[+], and other existing centralized systems in the US?

Sure, but at least driver's licenses are about public spaces. I can drive on private property all I want without a license.

As for the other systems, I personally don't much believe those are okay either, but that's a much deeper argument than this.

We've been losing our rights since the income tax and probably prior. I just want us to stop losing them at a minimum, but asking for that is viewed as some kind of major indiscretion.

None of these violate your bodily autonomy.

i imagine perspective of being sued for spreading it would be a good motivation to get vaccinated.

Just googling, Israel vaccination rate is 57.0%

How is that relevant? The question is: How effective are these vaccines really against that variant? In the real world, not in the lab.

If half the cases are in vaccinated individuals and only half the people are vaccinated, how can the vaccine be 80%-90% effective? That's a mathematical impossibility.

In the case of the deaths, it might be possible because the vaccinated are far older on average and likely over-counted.

> Maybe you're in the wrong thread, then?

maybe. or maybe the thread is pointless and i'm just pointing it out.

> The scenario you are describing is the immunocompromised person whose body can't quite kill the virus, but also puts selection pressure on it. Such cases have been described, but whatever mutation would come out of that is not necessarily going to be much more effective at overcoming the defenses of a normal immune system.

i'd wager more than 99% of those mutations won't be more effective. i'm worried about the tail risk in the remaining 1%. i don't know how many mutations are needed for the virus to become sufficiently different for human immune system to stop being recognized and this scenario is the best way to find out.

> The Sars-CoV2 virus will almost certainly stick around and it will keep mutating, even with the best of vaccination efforts. Nature finds a way. We'll have to get used to it.

no disagreement about that. in the long run we're all dead anyway. my issue with just letting it run its course is timing and cost - the argument is that it gets much easier much quicker for all of us with the best vaccination effort compared to alternatives.

> Vaccination is more comprehensive than natural immunity though. We've already see that the BNT vaccine offers a higher degree of protection against variants than natural immunity, or indeed other vaccines.

I have seen no evidence for either of these claims, other than assertions. If you have some, please provide citations.

It's quite irresponsible to try and coerce people who don't need treatment to accept it as well

> Then there's the elephant in the room: so few people have been tested that it really difficult to know who has had it. Anyone who has had a cold in the past 18 months is going to claim they had covid, regardless of whether they tested positive or not.

There are many many people who have confirmed positive COVID tests. At least excuse those.

>I think it's a little irresponsible to society to give anyone an out on getting vaccinated.

I think it's irresponsible to require people who most science points to having better protection naturally, to also have to get a vaccine. From this point of view, 2 dose vaccine still have less protection than natural antibodies. Maybe we should require the vaccinated to keep getting more vaccine shots until science shows they're at par with natural antibodies, lowest hanging fruit and all...

To be fair, your comment was rather nebulous. If you're going to comment on a topic that tends to polarize people, then it's wise to be slightly more explicit in one's statements.

It should be drawn where it's safe to draw it based on current knowledge.

I don't believe that it's firmly established that natural immunity is as good as 2 shots or natural immunity + 1 shot.

We bought more than enough doses to vaccinate everyone and downsides are small.

Consider a population of 10 million with natural immunity. Let us suppose that vaccination with Pfizer will kill between 0 and 1.

Suppose that 1% would fall ill and 1% of those die. That is 1000 preventable deaths.

It needn't be very much of a difference just 1/100th of 1% to vastly outweigh the risk of a very safe vaccine.

Every system has some number of malicious actors. You should trust, but you must also verify. If a system designer assumes no bad actors exist, the system will be quickly exploited, which is why voluntary mask mandates and distancing rules didn't work. We have locks on doors, passwords for computers, seat belts in cars, and rules against drunk driving, precisely because of a small number of dishonest and reckless people.

> hell

My Canadian friends seem to think that's what their country has turned into, and on just about every front, not just vaccines.

I misinterpreted your post as some kind of “herd immunity” scheme where we all get infected and that is somehow better. That doesn’t seem to be the argument you were making so I am sorry.

It seems like we should be optimizing for vaccinating as much of the (non-antibody) population up to a level where the spread of the virus is contained rather than maximizing resistance in the population with antibodies. There must be a threshold at which the low hanging fruit becomes “people without antibodies” rather than “people with fewer antibodies”. I’m not sure it matters if the antibodies are from the vaccine or infection.

> we already know that covid is not a danger to kids

We don't actually know this. We know it's less dangerous to them thus far. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-56696907 https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...

covid absolutely is a danger to kids, it's just less of a danger than to old people. the question is whether risk of vaccination is significantly less than risk of covid. we don't really know yet, but i'd surely vaccinate my kids if it meant they couldn't transmit the disease to their grandparents.

I actually strongly disagree with this point. America has a very precise definition of individual freedom that I disagree with - it's a big part of why I emigrated. In the US you're absolutely free to die as you wish - in Canada you're free to live a healthy life and do with that life what you may.

Socialism and socialized healthcare frequently gets painted as being anti-freedom but I think that the lack of socialized healthcare infringes more effectively on individual freedoms than the presence of it. In the case of vaccinations - encouraging widespread vaccination (and there is currently and probably will never be a mandate) allows more of the population to act freely. Canada is only behind on vaccinations (and, in total doses administered we're now actually tied) due to the fact that we don't have domestic production facilities which resulted on our dose orders being delayed until America dealt with their domestic population. I don't think that's unfair and I've been pretty critical of the LPC that failed to build out domestic production facilities early into the pandemic but - eh, we work with what we've got.

I think you are projecting what you view as two options in America - either communism or individual freedoms - onto the rest of the world. That is a myopic approach to take when considering all the cultures and governments in the world.

It's unfortunately impossible to answer this question as it relies on a number of factors. If you are now in the military you're going to have an easy time through tricare - if you were previously in the military you should be able to get an MRI for free from the VA, but you may have an easier time utilizing medicaid or, if you're old enough to qualify, medicare. Additionally, if you're considering getting coverage through medicaid there are generally a wide number of requirements for eligibility that can range from trivial (I was automatically enrolled in green mountain care when I was an out of work student in VT) to extremely onerous work seeking requirements in some southern states. Medicare, if you're old enough to be eligible, is usually pretty guaranteed but you'll need to be near retirement age to access it.

The TL;DR is that you may be able to get it for free, but there's a very large proportion of the population that fails to qualify for medicaid and also won't have the financial stability to float $500 out of pocket and, if they happened to get one, wouldn't be able to afford any follow up treatment.

But I totally agree that the US system is an absolute breeze if you've got money to spare.

It's not novel, this technology has been trialed and used for a decade, 3 years in vaccines.

We do already have long-term data. You would see side effects for a vaccine within six months, and we have been administering it for much longer than that.

The vaccines are safe.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7956899/

How sure are you about the long term effects of COVID?

Did I miss the long term safety information of the corona virus?

Hear hear. That will never be the norm in the United States of America, no matter what some cliques and bubbles online seem to think.

> Again, from what we know today, it is safer to vaccinate your kids then driving them around in a car.

...and if it were choice between vaccinating kids and driving them places, then this example would be relevant.

We don't approve drugs simply because they're less risky for a target population than some other selection of risky things.

> Even when the risk/benefit profile is even/negative, absolute risk is super low.

Yes. So is the benefit.

And outside of some specific professions, the yearly flu shot is entirely optional. We don't have people running around screaming that you're a murderer or that you should be excluded from society if you choose not to get it. It's a personal medical decision, and that's the end of it.

> Just to clarify - that is false.

It isn't false, though the blanket "it was banned" statement lacks context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford%E2%80%93AstraZeneca_COV...

> It is generally advisable to get Moderna/Pfizer if they're available and you're a young woman but the chance of mortal thrombosis is around 5 per one million.

No, the risk for anyone to develop a lethal thrombosis is roughly 5 per million. The chances are much higher for younger women, to the point where it exceeds the risk to die of COVID.

> Not ignoring but these are very rare side effects. It's something for doctors to know about in order to help treat the unlucky. But I think we have different meanings of the word safe.

The chances that a child will experience anything other than extremely minor illness from Covid is also very rare. The current numbers are teetering on the edge of implying that children are at more risk from the vaccine than from the virus.

My definition of the word "safe" includes the rational weighing of risks vs. benefit for a target population. Is it worth it to put kids at risk from myocarditis that exceeds their risk from Covid, just to reduce population-level Covid stats and reduce the marginal risk to the elderly? I don't know, but it's not a question to simply ignore.

> If there was any kind of wide-spread problem, it would have been loudly seen by now and those vaccines would have also been pulled. There has not been.

Yes, if it was a wide-spread problem. The side-effect that killed AstraZeneca wasn't widespread, it was extremely rare, and it was caught because it was such an unlikely combination of symptoms. Yet, this extremely rare side-effect was enough to make the vaccine more dangerous than the virus - to young women at least.

In a year, when all the facts are collected and processed, we'll see how much trouble the Pfizer vaccine really caused in terms of Myocarditis. Then we'll scramble to make up numbers on how many infections must've been prevented by the vaccine to make it all worthwhile.

I don't know where you're getting your information from, but what I stated is very easy to validate and I'm completely correct. Here are the links to the actual FDA trials for the different major co vid vaccines on clinicaltrials.gov as well as their associated estimated completion dates. All are currently in Phase 3 trials. (Aside, it's not clear how they will complete reporting for these trials as the companies blew up the placebo arms of the study. I guess that's another role I can play in this pandemic, being the control arm of the experimental trials currently underway.)

Please do not spread misinformation, especially misinformation about healthcare during a deadly and dangerous pandemic. Lives are at stake.

Moderna's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427 Estimated Study Completion Date: October 27, 2022

Pfizer's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728 Estimated Study Completion Date: May 2, 2023

JnJ's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04505722 Estimated Study Completion Date: January 2, 2023

Not sure why everyone keeps saying the trials completed, or which link you mean, because we can go right to the primary source (clinicaltrials.gov) and see that all the vaccines are still in Phase 3 of FDA trials. Here are the links.

Please stop spreading misinformation during a deadly pandemic.

Moderna's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427 Estimated Study Completion Date: October 27, 2022

Pfizer's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728 Estimated Study Completion Date: May 2, 2023

JnJ's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04505722 Estimated Study Completion Date: January 2, 2023

> Even if true, this novel molecule is not floating around in a body for an entire year waiting to have some side effect. They've been shooting it into people for a year and a half now. If there was something to worry about, it would have been seen.

There are lots of things we do see and we should worry about. The problem is that we can't tell right away if it's just noise, if it's a potentially rare side-effect. Then you have the problems like Myocarditis, which are clearly caused by the vaccine, which we hand-wave away with speculative "the benefits still outweigh the risk" scenarios:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Scree...

> I have yet to find a source that gives the risk for that cohort.

The data is publicly available for many countries, e.g. here for the UK:

[1] Report on adverse reactions until 16 Jun 2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...

[2] Vaccination statistics https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...

Check the table with reports and fatalities by age, and the paragraph interpreting the data. Together with [2] you can calculate the fatality rate for the 20-29 group. In the end you'll end up with a fatality rate for women age 20-19 in the range of 1:150k-300k (quick back of the envelope calculation).

> Even if it's an order of magnitude higher, the risk of a actually getting a PCR-confirmed infection is an order of magnitude lower.

The source I posted is a metastudy, computing IFR based on seroprevalence from many different countries, so PCR tests have nothing to do with it.

no disagreement here, but the same standards should be applied to misinformation from vaccine-skeptical folks. 'we don't know' is an honest answer for both sides.

How do the ethical calculations stack up when we account for the hundreds of thousands of lives saved?

Regardless of whether you think the vaccines are safe, they are quite clearly effective.

It’s clear you are incorrect. Phase 3 trials have concluded as reported by all manufacturers. It’s literally that simple. Extended monitoring of those that were in Phase 3 does not mean Phase 3 is still ongoing. There is no debate to be had here, I am correct, and you are strangely insistent on misrepresenting anything I provide. The correction at the top of the previous article had nothing to do with what you claimed it did. Phase 3 met its endpoints for Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J full stop. They are over. You can write a bunch of irrelevant BS, but that’s all there is to it. I’m obviously fully aware what EUA is, do not talk down to me.

Please stop fear mongering and repeating falsehoods that have been proven time and time again to be incorrect.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccine-monitor...

https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/about-our...

“ This trial began July 27, 2020, and completed enrollment of 46,331 participants in January 2021. On November 18, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that, after conducting the primary efficacy analysis, their mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine met all of the study’s primary efficacy endpoints. On December 2, 2020, the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the U.K. authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, marking the first Emergency Use Authorization following a worldwide Phase 3 trial of a vaccine to help fight the pandemic. Shortly after on December 11, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use.”

Key words: met all of the studies efficacy endpoints, (Phase 3 is primarily designed to find EFFICACY), following a worldwide phase 3 trial

EUA does not equal still in Phase 3. Not even remotely correct.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

Key word: CONCLUDES

Your previous comments point to the long development of other vaccines as a mark against COVID-19 vaccines. Surprise surprise, a vaccine developed during a pandemic gets pushed to the front of the line and has full priority, no issues with funding, etc. The speed at which it was passed is not a slight against it, considering it was able to still make it through Phase 1, 2, and 3, and then ultimately gain EUA. Again, not because it was rushed, it still had to go through all other testing other vaccines had, if anything full approval was delayed so they could get 6 months of additional EFFICACY data.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/04/29/covid-19-vaccine-myth...

I'm not arguing against consent, of course. The data is out there but you are misinterpreting it.

I just think you're taking issue with silly things, overblowing the risks and trying to make other people scared. That's seriously messed up.

Be truthful. You've decided not to take it no matter what. Now you're back-filling reasons not to. If you truly were about your ethics, you'd stop trying to make others afraid because you are.

A few of my friends used to be in the Chairforce and told me about their forced vaccination schedules. One had severe adverse reactions to some now-banned anthrax vaccine. None of them took the covid vaccine.

Strange you think we should all be as subservient as you were when you were a Marine. I mean, I get it, I want our armed forces to have a solid CoC that can be relied upon, but pushing it to the point where you have to obey orders to take random needles without any informed consent seems a bridge too far for me. Stranger still is you seem to think this is how we should operate in the civilian world.

I never said anything was safe or not safe. I claimed that the long-term safety profile of the vaccines is unknown. This is demonstrably true.

It seems like you're claiming anything that gets an EUA, regardless of FDA trial status or outcome, is "safe".

That would imply you believe FDA Phase 3 trials are irrelevant, and that safety, particularly long-term safety, is easy to assess without doing any long-term safety studies.

That's quite a strange position to take, but OK, you can take it.

I trust the FDA, however. It's strange to be arguing with somebody who doesn't trust the FDA, but here we are. I trust them, and they think long-term safety trials for pharmaceuticals are really important. You seem to disagree. That's fine.

I agree that the vaccines show good safety profiles for older patients in the short term. The younger the cohort it's administered to, the greater the number of adverse events occur, however, which is worrying, because it's the opposite for covid. But still, they look reasonably safe for the 18+ crowd, in the short term.

You seem to think they're perfectly safe in the long-term based on no studies. That's a cool, if strange, way of magical thinking. I think differently, and I seek data and trustworthy sources for my medical information.

For what it's worth my doctor also recommended I don't get the vaccine, for the same reasons I've laid out here.

The science on hypovitaminosis D being a serious risk factor for bad COVID-19 outcomes is now quite clear. This site has a fairly comprehensive index of the studies.

https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/

There are 4 tiny RCTs with split results.

There is one medium sized almost randomized trial that shows a strong result. I'm not interested in small retrospective studies. There are 50 retrospective studies that show HCQ is an amazing drug against covid.

Clearly since there is little downside to given vitamin D to people who have low levels, it can and probably should be done, but that is very far from proving that it is a "potent inhibitor" of covid. There also is a clear bias for the person who makes that site since they also want it to be true. Maybe they don't look as hard for studies which disprove what they want. It isn't an overwhelming case.

There is more than enough evidence for a big RCT to actually confirm, but given the safety considerations and low expense it probably makes more sense to just dose everybody and hope it works. But I don't see how you could make grand claims with this evidence.

I'm not a doctor so I wouldn't encourage anybody to do anything in terms of medical advice. What I would encourage people to do is to think for themselves and review all available evidence before taking any kind of medical treatment, and particularly treatments that have not completed Phase 3 FDA trials.

The evidence about coronavirus is quite, quite clear. There may be long-term severe effects of covid, just like there may be severe deleterious long-term consequences of the vaccines. So you must calculate your risk-benefit ratio and use that to elect whether to take the vaccines or not. For those that are worried about experimental vaccines, I absolutely encourage them to get more fresh air and sunlight--in fact, almost everyone would benefit in many ways from getting outside in the sun, getting fitter, and avoiding prolonged "lock downs" in their houses. (To boot, covid has never been observed in the scientific literature to be transmissible outdoors.)

Here's a peer-reviewed study from the Lancet from this month that shows just how short-term irrelevant covid is to those under age 40 who are reasonably healthy: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...

For those under the age of 60, obesity is far and away the thing that makes covid dangerous, and if you're under age 40 and are not obese, the death rate is too low to be measured.

So from that, it seems clear to me: If you're under age 60, get fit (I already am, and getting fitter and fitter every day, which is oddly something never mentioned by the higher-ups at CDC or Pfizer or wherever, which is curious, wouldn't you say?). Get outside.

Effectiveness of the vaccine is irrelevant to me personally because for all people like me covid has thus far posed a risk profile similar to that of driving. Novel vaccine technology presents a totally unknown level of risk, and we've already observed plenty of healthy, young people get all sorts of negative outcomes from it. Plus, again, totally unknown long-term safety profile.

I'm curious why you're so against any kind of solution for covid that doesn't involve novel vaccines.

I did not say show me a vaccine with unexpected side effects… there are many examples of that.

I said show me one where the onset is hidden until after 6 months. The narcolepsy link above was concentrated in the first 6 months after the shot. At least try me with the dengue vaccine and ADE so I could explain why that is different.

Hundreds of millions of people have taken the vaccines and we know with huge amounts of power the side effects and their (incredibly tiny) probabilities. It is beyond uncommon for a hidden side effect to only appear later, especially with something like a vaccine. It produces an antibody response and goes away. If that antibody response is going to cause problems it generally happens sooner than later when there are the most antibodies.

I, like you, didn’t want to be the first person to take the vaccine. But at this point the safety record shows it is one of the safest, if not the safest, vaccine ever produced. Hopefully you don’t get COVID in the meantime of this point becoming clear to you.