FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine • Hacker News Board

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

#721

Post by xdennis » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #587

mlang23 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vaccination is still not mandatory, right? Why do you write "excuse"? Are you really so full of yourself that you can not accept that people make different decisions from yours? Why do you even care? I assume you got the vaccine for yourself. So what is the issue? Why do you have to speak about your fellow humans in such a derogatory tone?

Unvaccinated people are prolonging the pandemic, and everything about it: restrictions, lockdowns, healthcare workers' extreme overwork, you name it. Let's also not forget those of us who have friends and family who have compromised immune systems or who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons, or children under 12 who cannot yet be vaccinated. Anti-vaxxers are actively causing those people harm. I care b…

Nothing is going to stop covid, and pitting people against each other isn't going to do any good. We'll still have to live with each other.

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

#722

Post by 7952 » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

jboggan wrote: post #627

pgalvin wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really, really is not true. Many drug and vaccine approvals in the past have been done before the trial has run its full course. Many drug and vaccine trials have given the placebo group the real drug once safety and efficacy is clear - before the end of the trial. This is not new, and frankly I’m a little surprised to see such conspiracy theories on HN.

I would like to see an example of previous trials where the placebo group was invalidated prematurely by informing them and giving them the actual drug. If this is common practice I'm not aware of it. Note the date on this article - this was back in February of this year: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/9691430... Don't denigrate a perfectly valid criticism of deviations from historical norms of…

Surely the point of a placebo in this case was to measure effectiveness rather than detect long term side effects. There are other methods of establishing a control such as comparing to the general population.

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

#723

Post by mikeyouse » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

hhsbz wrote: post #660

mikeyouse wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your own article where it repeatedly emphasizes that the Pfizer vaccine is no way outdated: > The vaccine still provides very high levels of protection against hospitalization (92%) and severe illness (91%) caused by the Delta variant, the ministry said. .. > 91%. That’s how effective the Pfizer vaccine is at preventing serious illness and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant after two doses, according to…

Nice, then we can all lift the lockdowns and do away with the masks. Thanks, science!!

Sure, as soon as everyone (including children) is vaccinated and those with older vaccinations are given boosters.

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

#724

Post by seoaeu » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

xdennis wrote: post #675

seoaeu wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those could also be long term side effects of covid . A double digit percentage of people who catch the disease end up in the hospital soon after infection compared to fraction of a fraction of a percent of vaccine recipients in the time after they get the shot. Your priors have to be absolutely outrageous if based on the currently available data you think the risks are even within an order of magnitude.

> Those could also be long term side effects of covid. Of course, but it's a lot worse when a cure causes issues. The point of medicine is to "first, do no harm".

It isn't that much worse when a cure causes issues. People endure terrible side effects from treatments to cure their cancer. Nearly every medicine I hear advertised has some risk of causing serious side effects, if not outright death

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

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Post by purple_ferret » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

015a wrote: post #707

albatross13 wrote: post #430

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I'm already triple vaxxed (booster), but there are plenty of aspects to this that help drive people's fear: - Phase 3 trials for Pfizer not complete until May 2023: ( https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728 ) - Control group(s) were given vaccines after 14 days: ( https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/9691430... ) - Pfizer generates 1.9bn in revenue off of 100m doses, just in the USA alone, cre…

Here's another interesting one I heard from a friend, pharmacist at CVS (and I have no source for it, so take what you will): Apparently, they no longer stock the J&J. Less efficacious, issues in production, sure whatever, that's not the biggest reason. The biggest reason is: J&J's biggest advantage early on was how much cheaper it is. One shot, simpler manufacturing process (which they've screwed up several times an…

Medicare pays $40 per dose, no matter the vaccine[0].

[0]https://www.cms.gov/medicare/covid-19/medicare-covid-19-vacc...

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

#726

Post by mikepurvis » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

orblivion wrote: post #658

DangerousPie wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason there is fear is because people keep posting stories like these without putting them into context. It has been clear for a while now that the Pfizer vaccine works and is safe. Just because Pfizer has chosen to keep collecting data doesn't make that there is any doubt about that. This is also why control groups have been given the option to get vaccinated too. It would be highly questionable to prevent…

It seems reasonable to argue that the control group should have access to the vaccine, but it still makes them not really a control group anymore right?

I'm in a phase 3 study in Canada for a not-yet-approved vaccine called Medicago. It was a crossover study where you would either get the vaccine now or later, but there were some administrative issues with the second half of it. Between the delays associated with that and the sooner-than-expected availability of the mRNA vaccines in Canada, they ended up agreeing to unblind everyone with the thought that anyone who was in the placebo-first group would drop out and get an approved vaccine.

Those of us who got that vaccine first were encouraged to remain in, though, which I did. Though that may change depending on mandate/passport stuff, since for official purposes, I'm still considered unvaccinated. There have been a number of other issues like this that have come up, for example:

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/08/13/vaccine-passp...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/covid-1...

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

#727

Post by 015a » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

kristjansson wrote: post #709

All of these comments following the pattern "I'm vaccinated but [insert vaccine hesitancy content here]" sound quite a lot like the "I'm a democrat but [insert pro-trump content]" comments that abounded in the last cycle. I don't know what to make of it. Is this a rhetorical strategy that really works? A tic of people experiencing cognitive dissonance?

Its totally healthy to both believe that the vaccine makes sense for you, and still respect, love, include, and accomodate people who decide it isn't right for them. We're all different, and the world is very complicated; that's what makes life so awesome.

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

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Post by nathas » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #374

nathas wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the assumption that the probability of a covid transmission ending in harm crosses the same probability threshold if, say, drunk driving ending in harm. You do realize that drunk driving is illegal, right? Do you think drunk driving should be legal because it's "unlikely" to cause harm to others? > I say it doesn't. 628k confirmed deaths in the US from COVID. 37.8M confirmed infections. That's a death rate of 1.66%…

Yes I do realize that drunk driving is illegal and I support that. I think you are misunderstanding my post, which is about doing the science to determine the actual probabilities involved with having and transmitting covid, along with the probabilities of serious harm. Then after multiplying all of those probabilities, comparing it with drunk driving as a relative measure.

That's an interesting point of view. If we know the rate of an event's outcome, in aggregate, is X, why is it important to know if A * B * C = X, or to know A/B/C at all? Totally sincere - I don't know if I'm missing something.

Imagine we're bottling soda in plastic bottles. There's an X% chance that a bottle explodes during the process. We also know if we over-fill a plastic bottle with CO2 the start it makes it slightly more elastic, and empirically it reduces that rate by Y%. We're not really sure why they were exploding, but we know that stretching them works.

Do you care about the other parts of the bottling process?

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

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Post by the_doctah » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #269

throwawayboise wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live, 50% are unvaccinated. That's not a small minority.

The "small minority" is stated in the parent comment to be the "desperate, angry anti-vax people". Some of those are in the 50%, but quite a few are "meh, whatever" apathy or mildly anti-vax there too.

So how do you feel about the large number of unvaccinated African-Americans in the US?

Re: FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

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Post by bob33212 » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

jesusohchrist wrote: post #480

cbg0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely than not, they'll just move the goalposts farther and find a different excuse for not getting it.

Just like fauci 2 Shots of vaccine to end covid -> Most Americans will have to take booster shots -> Booster shots may not be one time thing

Plenty of people said on day 1 that this was very similar to the 1918 pandemic, which resulted in the "seasonal flu". It wouldn't be crazy for the same thing to happen here.