Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

Ah, interesting, thanks! I was wondering.

This is the first mRNA vaccine; it cannot be measured by the same standards as a standard vaccine.

Per your first comment, see Johnson&Johnson's own website[0] for typical time periods for vaccine testing and approval. Phase 1, Preclinical stage can usually take up to 4 years, but mRNA circumvents a lot of this, and J&J did it from end of January 2020 to end of March 2020. Phase 1/2a usually takes several months to a year. I am not talking about immediate side effects that a lot of people experience, but possible, long term effects we cannot know at this point in a novel vaccine. We are getting reports of pericarditis and myocarditis emerging in otherwise healthy young males. Rare given the number of vaccines given, but so then are deaths rare to the same age group this is occurring in [1], and we've only been giving the vaccine for almost 7 months (first vaccine Dec. 14, 2020). There have been 326 deaths in 0 to 17 year olds in the US as of June 30, 2021. That's 9.939e-7 or 9.939e-5 percent based on a US population of 326m. By comparison and for perspective of risk/benefit, there were 792 deaths by pneumonia in the same age bracket in the US. Why rush to vaccinate our young and healthy, and those healthy, young people who have already had COVID?

On the positive side, mRNA vaccines take away the risk associated with making vaccines the traditional way in the handling of live virus to produce a traditional vaccine, allow for transmitting the formula electronically anywhere to be made by a suitable laboratory, and production can be sped up. I am excited by its future to fight disease and save lives, however, it's just too soon for a push to vaccinate 12 year olds given the risk/benefit analysis and the amount of data to study.

I have skin in this game, like most of us, not just improving my Google Fu or points on HN. I have older children who have been vaccinated at ages 21 and 23(even though they had COVID already in late December 2020), and younger ones (2 and 6 years old who I will not vaccinate until more data has been collected and evaluated. The mRNA COVID vaccines seem to have a wider bio-distribution than a traditional vaccine's contents do, specifically in the ovaries of women and in the bone marrow, and only time will tell what this means. It is the first of its kind, so I hardly think it can be evaluated under the same criteria as traditional vaccines. 30% profit margin on $15bn and total immunity for the vaccine companies should something go wrong per the PREP act doesn't give me confidence as a consumer of a novel vaccine. I am not an anti-vaxxer, maybe a anti-novel-vaxxer-without-sufficient-data-and-time person!

Given I am otherwise healthy (no diabetes, heart disease, obesity, or other conditions), and my entire immediate family has had COVID, I will play it safe and go with natural immunity until the vaccines have more time under their belt. I am still skeptical on why natural immunity is being pushed to the side. Try finding reputable articles and studies vs. the number of social and regulatory pressures to get vaccinated. Even when antibodies no longer show in some testing, it has been shown that the body has been prepared to deal with future COVID or SARS viruses vs. a first exposure. Natural immunity also triggers based on the entire surface of the virus, and not just the spike protein that the mRNA is engineered to, so it offers a wider response to COVID/SARS than the mRNA vaccine IMHO.

[0] https://www.jnj.com/innovation/the-5-stages-of-covid-19-vacc...

[1] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

UK study with access to NHS patient records: Within 1,199,812 individuals with any acute COVID-19 code, 3327 individuals also had a recorded long COVID code, constituting 0.27% of COVID-19 cases.

Furthermore very few self-reports of long covid symptoms can be paired with a positive covid test.

How do you explain the difference in estimated prevalence of 'long covid'?

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.24.21259277v...

Started around April.

For example (random Google search):

https://www.google.co.il/amp/s/www.makorrishon.co.il/news/33...

Vaccinated passengers coming from countries with the Delta variant asked to get tested again 72 hours after arrival.

Since then fully vaccinated were asked to get tested on multiple occasions during contact tracing when encountering the Delta variant.

To quote Prof. Ran Balicer (co-author of the 95% efficacy NEJM paper):

https://www.haaretz.co.il/health/corona/.premium-1.9971759

> It is very difficult to estimate vaccine efficacy because coronavirus testing is done selectively.

Well it’s still better than it has ever been in the history of humanity:

- While famines are still a thing, the number of deaths due to hunger has fallen considerably since the start of the 20th century.

- The real median household income in the US has been consistently increasing in the past several decades. While growing inequality is a huge problem most people in the world still have a much higher QOL than their predecessors.

- While there was a spike in homicides in 2020, the homicide rate in the US is lower than it has ever been since the early 60’s (obviously it’s still huge compared to all other developed countries).

- Climate change obviously is going to have a huge effect, however claiming that it’s going is destroy all life on earth is delusional.. In any case most natural ecosystems have already been destroyed or permanently altered by humans, in the past few thousands of years anyway, so there isn’t that much left for climate change to “kill” besides humans (whom I’m sure will manage to adapt to a couple percent rise in avg. temperature, even though it’s likely it will cost several millions of lives).

- There is zero incentive for either US or China to start a nuclear war over Taiwan (or anything else for that matter) so I’d say the threat of a nuclear war is pretty low.

- Life expentancy has been increasing prior to 2020 and there is no reason to believe that it won’t rebound to the previous level soon and continue growing in the future. Healthcare related costs are likely to continue increasing due to ageing societies and higher R&D costs (as technologies become more complex). I don’t see this as huge problem, though, as long as it’s outweotghted by increasing productivity in other sectors. Ensuring universal access to high quality healthcare is a political problem that needs to be solved but even a market based system will likely result in better outcomes for the majority of the population.