71–77 of 77 posts
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Cadavers from Covid 19 have (by definition) not had very much time to recover from long covid.
Strawman. That's not the point. The point is the permanent damage SARS-CoV-2 has on numerous organ systems. People also survive COVID-19 illness and die from other things.
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> because those usually take around two years As I said in my parent comment, COVID vaccines appear 'fast tracked' because all the bureaucracy was removed to expedite them. Every phase of clinical trials have been followed otherwise the MHRA (and the EMA) would not have approved them. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/clinical-trials/ All vaccines have been through phases 1-3. > skipping tests for long-term side-effect T…
Phase 3 under normal circumstances from that link: > Trials often last a year or more and involve several thousand patients. Also this seems to be a US/UK difference, as over here phase 3 includes long-term safety before it's approved for use, with emergency use authorization to skip that being the exception: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/timeline
"Long term" side effects mean weeks or few month later, not years as many people assume. In the past things like rare autoimmune disease associated with vaccination appeared within weeks after the dose, but it may take years to pick up the statistical signal, which may explain this belief. There is literally no reason to assume the mRNA vaccines will cause side effects 5 years later or something.
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> Nothing has been rushed here in the sense of cutting clinical corners. The development of these vaccines has gone through the same phases of testing that every other vaccine has. They were approved for emergency use, which means skipping tests for long-term side-effects, because those usually take around two years. Every other vaccine has been around for a while and gone through this.
Not to mention this is these are the very first mRNA vaccines deployed in this scale. We’re going to be honest about long-term risks, and possibilities, we can’t just hand waive this away. It’ll be fine. But pretending that long term risk isn’t there because we don’t want it to be isn’t very sciencey. It’s wrong to equate these to previous vaccines in multiple ways.
If they were frequent late side effects, we would totally know by now.
By the way, they are a brilliantly less complex system, much easier to reason about, than traditional vaccines.
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It's not an oversight, it's a limitation of how the study was conducted - you can't check for Vitamin D levels through an app. But what you can do in this study, is have a dataset with a good size (4m people from the UK!) which allows for much broader analysis than would be possible through other means. Blood testing 4m people during a pandemic is impractical, and widescale self-reporting will provide insights not ot…
> Blood testing 4m people during a pandemic is impractical On at least two occasions China has swab -tested 10 million people in a single city within a week, when covid re-occurred in a city where it had been thought to be extirpated. I don't think blood testing is twice as difficult as swab testing. So, I don't think it's impractical per se . It's just impractical in the UK . You know what's impractical? 2.7 million…
That’s different to focusing resources on doing vitamin D testing for a speculative study to determine if there is a link between vitamin D and long Covid.
I’m just saying that given limited resources during this global pandemic, the best use of resources at present probably isn’t monitoring 4 million people’s vitamin D levels for this specific study.
I’m also saying that not every study has to study every possible factor - in fact this is almost impossible to do! This is a brilliant dataset of millions of people self reporting, and there are things that you can find with self reporting that you can’t find with blood testing (and visa versa). This is why other papers will do a literature review to compile together the results of multiple studies to understand the impact.
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No. A woman, at any age and number of symptoms, has twice the risk of a man. Which was already well-known before.
I find that particularly interesting considering that men are more at risk of dying from Covid. Maybe women have a somehow weaker immune response, making it harder to clear the infection, but lowering the risk of a deadly overreation. I wonder if there is serious research about that.
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> Blood testing 4m people during a pandemic is impractical On at least two occasions China has swab -tested 10 million people in a single city within a week, when covid re-occurred in a city where it had been thought to be extirpated. I don't think blood testing is twice as difficult as swab testing. So, I don't think it's impractical per se . It's just impractical in the UK . You know what's impractical? 2.7 million…
In your example in China they were swab testing for the virus in an attempt to measure/control its spread. That’s different to focusing resources on doing vitamin D testing for a speculative study to determine if there is a link between vitamin D and long Covid. I’m just saying that given limited resources during this global pandemic, the best use of resources at present probably isn’t monitoring 4 million people’s v…
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In your example in China they were swab testing for the virus in an attempt to measure/control its spread. That’s different to focusing resources on doing vitamin D testing for a speculative study to determine if there is a link between vitamin D and long Covid. I’m just saying that given limited resources during this global pandemic, the best use of resources at present probably isn’t monitoring 4 million people’s v…
That's a fair point: in China they weren't screening for unknown risk factors like hypovitaminosis D either. And if hypovitaminosis D is a large risk factor (it is, though the causal relationship is unclear—it may just be a comorbidity stemming from some other underlying cause that increases covid risk) studies with much less power should be able to find it (and they did).