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Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

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Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#81
post #72

The narrative about COVID is starting to fall apart and these cynical people want to make as much money as they can before it falls apart completely. CDC admits only 6% of reported COVID-19 deaths were actually caused by COVID.[0] [0]: https://t.co/W7Sxq4Pmos?amp=1

You probably know this, but that’s not what that table means. > Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.

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Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#82
post #38
post #22

How dangerous are untested vaccines and what would be the worst case scenario?

Unlikely worst case: there are rare side-effects that get only discovered very late. For example: 70% of those who get the vaccine develops liver complications within 3 years and 60% die a horrible death with no way to cure. Or every women who gets the vaccine becomes infertile within a decade. This is super unlikely, and moreover could only partially detected in a Phase 3. But the longer you give people to look for…

Honestly, is it really worth throwing away the strict guidelines for this?

Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#83
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The risks of COVID are pretty well known at this point, and for the vast majority of people they seem quite low.

If the risks are quite low for the vast majority of people, then how come COVID-19 can be seen "from space" i.e. as excess deaths in death statistics.

How does the existence of some excess death (mostly among at-risk people) disagree with the risk being quite low for the vast majority of people? I don't see how these things cannot coexist.

Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#84
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're below 40 your risk of dying of the regular influenza is higher than the risk of dying of covid-19. If your fear of the flu doesn't motivate you to take the flu vaccine every year, rationally, you shouldn't want to take the covid-19 vaccine either.

Not true. Covid 19 is about 10x as likely to kill you even in that age group. See: https://i.insider.com/5ef234caf34d051bc821d0d8?width=1000&fo...

Have you got a more compelling source than that? Because that disagrees not only with the common sense of seeing what is happening in front of us, but also with all the other evidence I've seen.

Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're below 40 your risk of dying of the regular influenza is higher than the risk of dying of covid-19. If your fear of the flu doesn't motivate you to take the flu vaccine every year, rationally, you shouldn't want to take the covid-19 vaccine either.

Death is not the only metric that matters.

Are you trying to ambiguously perpetuate the myth that Covid-19 is likely to cause strange and unknown medical issues even in people that it only causes a minor acute illness in? If you're not trying to spread that falsehood, could you clarify what you mean?

Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#86
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2

That does not compare flu to covid19.

Good thing you posted a comparison graph then, too bad that the covid-19 numbers in your graph are old and outdated.

The Nature article has risk of death for 0-19yo at about 0%, while your graph has flu deaths at 0.01% for that group.

Which means the flu is more dangerous for kids than covid-19.

The Nature article has risk of death for 20-40yo at ~0.02%, same as your graph, so it's probably on par in that age group. Which means that my original point stands, if you're not scared of dying of the flu, you should not be scared of dying of covid-19.

Unfortunately, humans have some crazy biases when it comes to evaluating risk. We're very bad at weighing the risk of rare events (extremely bad at weighing new and previously not encountered risks, we severely overestimate them. The same bias also causes us to underestimate known risks, which is why some people are afraid of flying, but not of driving to the airport, even though risk analysis says it should be the other way around.

And this is why people think covid-19 is super-duper scary, while no-one cares about the flu, even though for most of us we should value them about the same.

Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#87
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The risks of COVID are pretty well known at this point, and for the vast majority of people they seem quite low.

If the risks are quite low for the vast majority of people, then how come COVID-19 can be seen "from space" i.e. as excess deaths in death statistics.

There is excess death due to influenza every year. The number of dead due to covid-19 is not some kind of crazy anomaly that's going to stick out in the statistics.

In no-good zombie-apocalypse Sweden, the total deaths/capita for 2020 is probably going to be above the 5-year average, but below the 10-year average and below the death rate of 2012.

Here's how the excess mortality of 2020 compares to the last 40 years of mortality in Germany, Sweden, France, and Belgium: https://medium.com/@FrankfurtZack/unprecedented-overall-mort...

If you didn't know about it, you wouldn't think anything special at all happened in 2020, just by looking at the statistics.

Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#88
post #7
post #3

Well, it's being done for all the wrong reasons, but I'd gladly take a relaxing of safety measures to be done with COVID, depending on the vaccine and the risks. The relatively known risks of some types of a vaccine seem a lot better than the unknown ones of COVID. I would want to wait for full phase III before we had a mandatory vaccine, relied on this fully, or otherwise did too much with it. But we can't ramp up p…

Without the time to properly test the vaccine, you're as much in the unknown as with COVID-19. Maybe even more. This is really high risk that can backfire a lot. If the vaccine is ineffective, or worse, cause health issues, how would you convince a population (with already a portion being anti-vaccine) to get vaccinated to the point it requires to stop the spread once a good vaccine is available? Taking this risk for…

I wouldn't. I would offer it to selectively to narrow segments of the population who have extremely high exposure to other people (for example, a huge number of NYC mass transit drivers came down with COVID19). That's where the risk-balance benefit swings.

Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#89
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most important thing to remember is that the risk profile of covid-19 is vastly different for different people. I'm sure as fuck not getting an untested vaccine, because I'm not in a risk group. If I catch the virus, my risk of death is in lightning strike territory. For my 70+ dad, he's in a bunch of risk groups, which means the risk equation looks very different for him, and for him it might be worth th…

> If I catch the virus, my risk of death is in lightning strike territory. there's two wrong concepts here - you don't know how the virus will affect you medically. May be you will only suffer minor symptoms, or may be you will almost die with fluids in your lungs. But that's not important. The most important aspect of you catching the virus is you become a transmission vector. And you cause infection in other people…

> there's two wrong concepts here - you don't know how the virus will affect you medically. May be you will only suffer minor symptoms, or may be you will almost die with fluids in your lungs.

We do know the probabilities of those things, and for healthy non-elderly people the latter outcome is very unlikely.

I'm curious why you decided to bring up the fact that we can't predict, with certainty, in advance which will happen. We can't do that for any disease, many of which are as bad or much worse than Covid-19.

Re: Alarm as FDA willing to issue Covid-19 vaccine before stringent safety testing

#90
post #3

Well, it's being done for all the wrong reasons, but I'd gladly take a relaxing of safety measures to be done with COVID, depending on the vaccine and the risks. The relatively known risks of some types of a vaccine seem a lot better than the unknown ones of COVID. I would want to wait for full phase III before we had a mandatory vaccine, relied on this fully, or otherwise did too much with it. But we can't ramp up p…

Really? The risks of COVID are pretty well known at this point, and for the vast majority of people they seem quite low.

Okay, if they're known, describe them to me.

* What portion of the population will have reduced lung capacity post-COVID? How long will it last?

* What about other long-term effects, such as chronic fatigue? What puts me at risk? What causes it? How long does it last?

* What about other organ damage?

Please give me some semblance of an idea of what portion of the population will have long-term disability due to COVID?

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