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Out of curiosity, how do people on HN rate the risk of long term side-effects?
Well, fwiw, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine idea, Ingmar Hoerr, thinks side effects are very unlikely, since the mRNA molecules dissolve after a few days. He has been working on this for 20 years, with no serious side effects ever observed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingmar_Hoerr
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Sadly, they are being realistic. The current UK government is riven with incompetence and cronyism. They couldn't organize a piss up a brewery.
Government is a continuum, and I don’t remember a time that it wasn’t riven with cronyism. A book came out in 2005 called The Essential Guide to Quangos and I’m willing to bet it wasn’t Blair’s government that invented them (and it certainly didn’t put a stop to them).
I haven't seen the word used outside the UK so a definition might be useful: a quango, or quasi non-governmental organisation is the platypus of the British government world. As the name implies it's neither a part of the government nor the private sector. Instead, quangos are paid for by taxpayers but are completely unaccountable to them, as they can't be directly controlled by ministers or the civil service.
The theory behind this is that governments are crap at things because elected politicians interfere with the expert work of technocrats. So by setting up artificial blockades to political interference, power is transferred to technocrats and things should work better.
In practice what happens is that the government ends up hiring people who aren't very good at what they claim to be expert in, and who get corrupted by whatever unaccountable powers have been delegated to them. But they aren't easily fixable because they're "independent".
The Electoral Commission is a good example of a completely broken quango. Its only goal in life is to organise elections and referendums in ways that everyone agrees is completely fair and trustworthy. It is a staggering failure: the board of directors is full of people who publicly state very strong political opinions. It engaged in a legal vendetta against people who campaigned for Brexit. It has constantly prosecuted pro-Leave campaigners and got its ass kicked in court, where judges have repeatedly dismissed cases on the grounds that they have no evidence and/or are engaged in malicious legal behaviour. They've referred cases to the police that were then dropped for lack of evidence. Senior staff have posted on Facebook that they cried when the Tories won the election. Nobody who has followed these sagas can possibly believe these people are neutral, independent or even possess basic competence, but as they're a "quango" there isn't much of a framework to fix it beyond changing the law to totally abolish them.
tl;dr quango = power without accountability.
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Good to hear you’re fine with 100000 people dying because we need to adhere to procedure. There is absolutely 0% chance at the end the vaccine will not be approved. But 100% chance 20 days will have been wasted.
>There is absolutely 0% chance at the end the vaccine will not be approved. That's not true, I think it's foolish to 100% trust a company to not make any rushed mistakes, lie, or hide some facts, when there are massive amounts of money involved.
How are they going to check if the manufacturer fudged the report? Run the experiment themselves again in 20 days?
Edit: by the way in the UK they were prepared properly and the vaccine is approved today. Or would you say they are acting irresponsibly?
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From a high level overview and global perspective, what the OP is saying, or meant , is that comparatively speaking UK is much better than possibly 80% of developed countries. Not to say NHS is without flaws, far from it. But if you step outside and look around the world many are surprised how awful public health services and logistics can be. So to put it another way, It is not that NHS is good, it is just the other…
What you're missing is that amongst a certain class of Brit, and across much of the West, relentless and savage cultural self-criticism has become the norm, and a currency used for in-group signalling. Even when people in the UK should be celebrating, as literally the first country in the world to develop an approved C19 vaccine in record breaking time, and enjoy the privilege of a free health system that can roll it…
How does this relate to your point about a culture of self-criticism?
Out of curiosity, how do people on HN rate the risk of long term side-effects?
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Vaccines that prevent disease symptoms but don't completely prevent infection are definitely a thing (they're said to confer "non-sterilizing immunity," vs. "sterilizing immunity" which prevents both infection and disease). The inactivated polio vaccine (the injectable one that's used in the US) is an example of such a vaccine. The oral polio vaccine, which is the main one used in the developing world, interestingly…
The researchers joke that "animals lie", in the sense that animals can have different reactions compared to humans, in spite of the researchers trying as much as possible to get something useful in the experiments. Having said that, I still believe your claim of what can be concluded to be unlikely based on "animal model observation" is false, from what is known up to now. Specifically: https://www.medscape.com/viewa…
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We all are still waiting peer-reviewd scientific papers instead of press releases....
This isn’t true. The health institutions of the respective countries have access to the raw study data which they use to determine whether or not to approve them. The amount of fear mongering in hackernews is just mind blowing.
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Yeah, there’s only about 5000 deaths extra for each day of delay. So no rush there!
If people don't trust that the vaccine is safe, they will not take it, which will basically throw away a year of vaccine development and lower trust in vaccines in general and prolong the pandemic.
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I'm sure the UK is in the top twenty countries in the world for logistics infrastructure. It's easy to read news stories about your country messing things up, and quietly not read foreign-language media about poorer countries messing things up a lot more by comparison, and get a biased perspective.
It's a fairly stereotypical British trait to be self deprecating. If we were singlehandedly saving the world from a rogue asteroid the general sentiment would probably be "let's hope we don't mess this up".
Being self deprecating is very common in a large number of countries, among all those who are reasonably intelligent or educated, to be able to notice how many bad things exist around them.
As others have already mentioned, this is caused by the fact that people can see directly the many bad things that exist in their neighborhood, but they have very little information about how things are bad elsewhere, and they hope that at least in other distant places the same mistakes are not being made.
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From a high level overview and global perspective, what the OP is saying, or meant , is that comparatively speaking UK is much better than possibly 80% of developed countries. Not to say NHS is without flaws, far from it. But if you step outside and look around the world many are surprised how awful public health services and logistics can be. So to put it another way, It is not that NHS is good, it is just the other…
What you're missing is that amongst a certain class of Brit, and across much of the West, relentless and savage cultural self-criticism has become the norm, and a currency used for in-group signalling. Even when people in the UK should be celebrating, as literally the first country in the world to develop an approved C19 vaccine in record breaking time, and enjoy the privilege of a free health system that can roll it…
That's like beating your children but comforting them that they atleast have food on the table and clothes on their back.