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Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise

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Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#201

Post by Sabinus »

zoul wrote: post #163
Sabinus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tiny fraction of infants react to infant vaccinations. But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations. It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.

They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.

No, they did the best for their child. They had no way of knowing their child would react before they gave the vaccine. The harms and risks of illness prevented by vaccination are far greater than the harms and the risks of adverse reaction.

Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.

Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#202

Post by qsera »

timr wrote: post #48
lokar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there would be none without government support. Remember when everyone was contributing spare dimes to fund a vaccine?

No. Pharmaceutical companies love vaccines. They’re relatively easy to make, they’re indemnified against harms, they cannot be generic , and they are wildly profitable. And on top of all of that, they often get mandated by schools, ensuring a captive market. If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.

That "Vaccines are not profitable" is a misinformation put out there by...I don't know who, but it is out there somehow...

It is really weird that even here in HN where everyone is aware of corporate greed and corruption, corporations becomes the good guys when it comes to vaccines.

Now you might think of bringing up regulators and checks and balances at this point...

But imagine this. If approving a vaccine, or like here, a vaccine technology could unlock 1 Trillion dollars in revenue, imagine how much of that can be paid politicians/regulators/scientists/thought leadrs to act favorably?

How many of those regulators, who are just average human beings, can resist that?

Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#203

Post by defrost »

_heimdall wrote: post #105
_heimdall wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your concern with what the studies tested or whether it was acknowledged? I can find you links, though it will be directly to the original studies done for the covid vaccines. The studies were well written and clearly called out their methodology. The problem was with how the studies were interpreted and explained to the public, not with the studies themselves.

[flagged]

The issue specifically is:

  early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
Who made such stupid claims and __why__? My own recollection, from Australia watching the US, was the the US political administration of the time turned any scientific based discussion into a complete shit show - many images of cowered CDC employees sucking their faces in while Trump v1.0 babbled on about bleach and sunlight.

From my first free of politics encounters with world class epidemiologists in 1980 or so I've not heard one claim that any vaccine had a 100% efficacy rate for both disease prevention and for eliminating spread - it has _always_ been a numbers game, like seat belts, of statistical reduction.

Your own link agrees:

  Conclusions: A two-dose regimen of BNT162b2 conferred 95% protection against Covid-19 in persons 16 years of age or older.
95% protection is pretty good, but for all manner of reasons it's unusual to expect any vaccine to prevent 100% of all infections across millions of people or animals.

Typically, in educated countries, phrases such as "prevent infection and spread*" are understood to mean that in the same manner as "seat belts prevent death and injury*"

( * exceptions expected )

Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#204

Post by defrost »

vfclists wrote: post #127
epistasis wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even during the pandemic response it was eventually acknowledged that early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials. To the very best of my knowledge this is just misinformation. If you have a citation here, please provide it.

Where are the citations supporting your view that the vaccines were effective at preventing infection?

_heimdall provides one here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755933

Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#205

Post by cedws »

estearum wrote: post #190
cedws wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the crux of my original point was not about absolute number of lives saved or lost. It was about the trolley problem and mandates.

But the trolley problem doesn't make sense here. The statistically correct thing to do, in nearly all cases for nearly all people, both for themselves and for their community (separately!), was to get vaccinated.

It does though. A government mandate is the same as pulling the lever, it’s trading who lives and who dies. Even if more people survive as result, just like in the original trolley problem, the one who pulls the lever becomes responsible for the exchange.

I’m not even arguing the government shouldn’t pull the lever, I just want people to be held accountable for the lives lost as a result, and for the families to be treated with compassion.

Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#206

Post by Sabinus »

qsera wrote: post #173
Sabinus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tiny fraction of infants react to infant vaccinations. But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations. It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.

> it's a trade off but it's one that must be made. It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.

Well regulated markets are extremely productive.

If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well.

Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#207

Post by idontwantthis »

Sabinus wrote: post #136
cedws wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A tiny fraction of infants react to infant vaccinations. But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations. It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.

It's a false trade off because without vaccines, the kids that would have died from vaccines are still in danger!

Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#208

Post by voxl »

cedws wrote: post #81
swingboy wrote: post #67

Serious question in good faith: what was the deal with the “calamari” (clots?) the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?

IIRC the vaccines were provably linked to the death of young people who had blood clots they shouldn't have had. The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because…

Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person. At that point its a matter of risk assessment for yourself. Take a 2% chance of dying, a slightly higher chance of reduced quality of life (long COVID), or take a lottery-winning chance of dying to this blood clot. It is appropriate to do the math correctly to decide if this makes sense, but to claim that scientists and advocates did not do this personal risk assessment math and merely went off the benefits of herd immunity is a lie and anti-vaccine propaganda.

Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#209

Post by OrvalWintermute »

yieldcrv wrote: post #56

> The researchers emphasize that, like all vaccines, mRNA vaccines can have side effects. They found that serious adverse events—such as myocarditis, which occurs more frequently in younger males—are rare and consistently outweighed by the vaccines’ protection reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 y…

“Rare”? :)

We don’t know the actual numbers as pericarditis and myocarditis can occur asymptomatically, and people truly need to be under very active medical surveillance to detect it

Re: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 

#210

Post by marcosdumay »

tjohns wrote: post #88
Torn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now an international team, led by Flinders University, have found that in a small number of people, the immune system can accidentally confuse a normal adenovirus protein with a human blood protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4). Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect https://www.flinders.edu.au/research/articles/covid-vaccine-...

It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.

The mRNA vaccines also had a cloth problem (as in, it was extremely rare), that practically disappeared with a change on the application procedure.
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