Seems like this should have been a requirement before any emergency use authorization, and certainly before any mandates.
The fact that this research is just now being done ought to be enough to immediately revoke the FDA emergency use authorizations and pull the product from the shelves.
The covid vaccines have been a complete and utter disaster at every level. The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
We now have victims of vaccine injury so scared of societal backlash they don't speak out, and doctors so scared of losing their license/job they ignore the evidence in front of them.
As soon as the EUAs were issued, the vaccine manufacturers shut down clinical trial followup and, in many cases, allowed vaccination of the control branch of the trials. Same for Paxlovid, where support for independent trials was refused.
It's not specific to EUA, this is commonly done when a Phase 3 trial shows a clear benefit. Essentially, once you're sure a medicine confers a real benefit, it becomes unethical to deny it to the control branch any longer.
People in the control branch were told they were controls so that they had the option to get the newly-authorized vaccine for real. Standard practice for trials that go well.
Seeing how family who got infected prior to vaccine availability are still suffering brain fog and lack of energy even now, I am too. The long term effects of covid concern me far more than those of the vaccine do.
Remember the right comparison regarding apparent long-Covid: What proportion of people would self-report brain fog and lack of energy anyway, with nothing to do with Covid?
This sort of claim has been made after a study was released that took the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies as the source of thruth for whether people had gotten COVID-19.
This sort of claim can’t be made on that basis because a lot of people do not produce antibodies after infection.
Abstract: “Not all persons recovering from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection develop SARS-CoV-2–specific antibodies. We show that nonseroconversion is associated with younger age and higher reverse transcription PCR cycle threshold values and identify SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx as a major correlate of the systemic antibody response.”
Please note that this was already known when the study which is taken to show that people are imagining long COVID was published.
It’s not a good study.
Quite a bit of research has been done since then which further pins down the fact that long COVID is very real and how to diagnose it with biomarkers, which turn out to correspond very well with people saying that a SARS-CoV-2 infection messed them up.
Please also consider how harshly judgemental it appears when someone accuses a large number of people of imagining or making up a severe and disabling condition. You have to be very certain.
I'm glad the emergency use authorization allowed people who are interested to get the vaccine. I don't think mandates were ever appropriate, and I think people should also have had a right to NOT get the vaccine.
The emergency use authorization seemed absolutely like the appropriate course of action given the circumstances.
Also using steroids like dexamethasone were a later advent in treating covid that helped a lot. (They should have been standard of care right away like they would have been for any other respiratory illness).
These early follies increased the perceived need for a vaccine then and today still; risk : benefit analysis for the vaccines consider worst possible scenarios for covid, which include defunct practices like high PIP ventilator use and forgoing of common first-line treatments
The time frames for the graphs are not the beginnings of covid (EoY 2021). By that time the initial standards of care had improved to the steroid treatments (I can't say specifically which ones, because I do not know, but I do know they were generally the standard of care at that time).
The risk benefit analysis of the vaccine vs the disease is ultimately something that's impossible to do at this point, because it's impossible to be impartial to whatever side you think is riskier. In general, I think a disease is just always going to be riskier than a vaccine. Anything you say about the vaccine could be true of the disease as well until we have complete information about the disease.
Sorry for your loss, but there’s no way you could know that. The very same logic you would require you to espouse the belief that any person who received a vaccine and died, died because the vaccine.
He was in mid 30s, young for COVID - but diabetic. There have been actual studies done for the vaccine to show efficacy in preventing death for someone in his risk group. So not the same logic, but accrual proven causation. There's a very very good chance he would've made it had he been vaccinated.
Thanks. I wouldn't wish what he went through on my worst enemy. He was in the hospital for three months and spend half of that time on a ventilator. After a month COVID isn't contagious anymore and we were allowed us to visit him in the ICU (really visiting his family). I was at the hospital the night he passed away.
I think for a lot of people COVID isn't "real". They don't know anyone who died. Or if they do they were old, and/or it happened in the hospital far away from whatever their personal reality is.
Believe me when I tell you the risk associated with the vaccine is nothing compared to what he went through. I fully believe had he been vaccinated he'd still be here today.
> The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
Source needed. Reading these comments, one would think nobody ever died of COVID. One would think we didn't have hospitals crammed to the gills with them.
The actual FDA approval letter[0] calls out in the document that all long term testing will not be completed until May 2027. Pointing that out has always gotten one branded as an antivaxx conspiracy nutter, rather than a person who might want to ensure that, well, long term testing data is actually in before injecting something into their bodies.
> long term testing data is actually in before injecting something into their bodies.
You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
There may be concerning long term effects, but keep persepcive, the worst possible case is still better than the known case of COVID. And of course long term studies on COVID are also still in progress with all signs pointing to even more bad effects of COVID coming out in the coming years.
>There may be concerning long term effects, but keep persepcive, the worst possible case is still better than the known case of COVID.
The most common outcome of Covid is feeling bad for a couple of days (up to a week), and then moving on with life across all age groups. This has always been the case.
That really depends on the age group. The chances of someone under 30 having any real negative effects to Covid is virtually 0, while there is some evidence pointing to males under the age of 30 having issues with the vaccine.
For young people the risk of death goes from something like 0.1% to 0.01% with the vaccine (just aiming for order of magnitude risks), which isn't a big deal for an individual.
However, when you are talking about populations of 10s of millions in low risk age ranges, it's 10,000's of preventable deaths!
Even if you don't care about the deaths (it's their choice to die; whatever), note that for every death, there are 10-100 long covid cases that are pulling resources from the health care system indefinitely.
The vaccine seems to cut those by about 90% too. Why should we waste tax dollars on medicare and welfare for anti-vaxxers?
Not in young age groups its not. Those 10k at risk of Covid death are at significantly higher risk of death from other causes too. If we stratified by more than age you'd see significantly reduced IFR among all age groups in the group without comorbidities. Quit lumping all people together, this is the age of big data and we should be using it to enhance lives not subjugate with blithe renderings.
> You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
You seem certain of this, but the vaccines are new enough that we can't possibly have long term data to even evaluate.
Bodies are complicated, even more than software systems. I've been in enough SEV reviews where the root cause was seemingly innocuous to know that I can't anticipate with much confidence that any particular change won't result in some cascading failure scenario. This is why we have test environments. Luckily in software it's extremely rare for a change to take years to manifest bad behavior, but not so in medicine.
I'm no biologist, but an obvious question to ask is if the spike protein by itself, which the vaccine will produce, has different impacts than the spike protein coupled to the virus envelope. It's certainly smaller, will it be able to pass through areas where the whole virus package wouldn't? What about the end of the spike that would otherwise be attached to the envelope, will it have an effect?
You can't naively draw a Venn diagram of virus and vaccine impacts where the vaccine impacts are fully a subset of the virus impacts.
You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
That is actually yet to be determined, which is the point.
And I only mean that as it relates to specific demographic cohorts, not overall. If I were elderly, diabetic, immunocompromised etc. I don't think I'd hesitate. But the data I've seen on my demographic cohort is a toss-up at best, or even shows the vaccine to be riskier.
> Seems like this should have been a requirement before any emergency use authorization
Well... if you think that there's a case for an emergency use authorization, then you kind of can't wait to determine long-term risks. If there's a Covid epidemic threatening to kill millions of people in 2019, you can't wait for a study of long-term consequences that terminates in 2027. You have to decide with the information you have in 2019.
Was there a case for an emergency use authorization? Covid did in fact kill millions of people, so arguably yes.
Covid has killed millions. How many have died of myocarditis? While I agree with your sentiment, it's hyperbolic to claim the vaccine has done "exponentially more damage than the virus".
There is evidence of statistical lies perpetuated to benefit big pharma.
- The extreme false positive rate of COVID testing
- Blindly combining "of" and "with" Covid cases for cause of death based on those same broken tests.
- Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
- PCR testing cycles at extreme highs
When all of the broken testing was finally admitted and discontinued, were the previous misclassified deaths reinvestigated or reclassified? Of course not.
The entire pool of data of Covid deaths has been poisoned. There is no interest in accuracy. But there does seem to be extreme interest in protecting the liability and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven, untested, ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection, spread, or reduce symptoms.
Just a meta comment. This exact comment 1 year ago would have been downvoted until it was dead. However, much of the evidence for this was available at that time. I sadly think we'll continue to see excess deaths climb over the coming years particularly in the US.
I'm glad I only got the J&J shot way back when it came out and avoided 3+ rounds of Pfizer or Moderna primary and boosters.
Depending on the exact claim it's often more like 12 months. A few even made it down to 6 months (affecting periods, for example) and I think one was as low as 2 months.
> Surprisingly, mortality rates in 2022 for most of the 10 leading “underlying” causes of death such as heart disease, stroke, and lung and colorectal cancer have been similar to previous years, or lower than expected. An exception is the rate for “symptoms, signs, and ill defined conditions” (mostly deaths resulting from old age and frailty) which has consistently been higher than expected and also caused the most excess deaths, but not enough to explain the overall excess.4
> However, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’ (OHID) analysis of deaths by “any mention” on the death certificate—rather than just the “underlying cause” of death—shows a substantial excess, in particular, of deaths from cardiovascular diseases and diabetes since April,6 prompting an investigation by the Department of Health and Social Care. Growing evidence suggests that covid-19 increases the risk of cardiovascular problems even months after infection,7 which could in part be driving excess deaths. Covid-19 itself remains the sixth leading cause of death, causing 200-400 deaths weekly—a reminder that this virus remains a threat for the foreseeable future.
> Another possibility is that people may not be receiving the care they need from an NHS that was already overstretched pre-pandemic and is now coping with unprecedented backlogs of care and pressures on emergency services. This “crisis” situation has an adverse impact on all patients, but a lack of timely care can be especially life threatening for people with acute cardiovascular problems.
> ONS analysis shows about 3300 excess deaths occurred during the heatwaves experienced in England and Wales between June and August, mostly in older people.8
> ONS also notes that excess deaths can occur following periods when deaths were lower than average, ie, “mortality displacement.”5 Could some of the excess deaths since April reflect the lower ASMRs in early 2022?
I'm also curious about why there's such a difference in relative excess death rates between the US and UK. Currently in the US the weekly death rates are far below what they were in 2020-2021: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
> The extreme false positive rate of COVID testing
Tools developed in one tenth of the normal time aren't perfect. Hardly surprising. If they detected covid most of the cases when people had it, they work. Much better than having no tools at all.
> Blindly combining "of" and "with" Covid cases for cause of death based on those same broken tests.
It does not matter if you die directly by a disease or by the sequels of the disease.
Lets assume that people were not dying really from covid. This still leads us with the problem that people were dying massively and more often than in normal years so we have a second hidden agent killing people that nobody found. How do we explain it?
> Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
Easily explainable when everybody was using masks and social distance in those two years. People remaining at home don't pick influenza at the same rate than people in a concert
> PCR testing cycles at extreme highs
I'm unsure about what you want say with that. PCR testing needs to chase an organism that is mutating fast. They need to change at a high pace. Lab chemicals and reactives having an expiring date is not rare
> and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven,
Green card granted by all regulatory agencies, so proven
> untested,
overtested, the entire planet toke it one year before the first antivacs
> ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection
vaccines never claimed to prevent infection. The makers repeated it again and again.
> [not prevent] spread
About spread. Too litle, too late and one step forward, two backward.
Negationists and agents actively promoted the disease, sabotaged healthcare and created chaos. People was videotaped deliberately coughing in the face of other after tearing off their masks.
The same people were videotaped later grooming the masses to commit a coup. Caught trying to sell a computer stolen from the capitol to Russian agents. None of them where found linked with pharma companies (and is very unlikely that a pharma company would lobby for convincing people to reject pharma products).
Not really fair to blame pharma while people were sabotaging the control.
>, or reduce symptoms.
This is simply false. Is a proven fact that vaccines reduced symptoms and saved people. Just take a look at the statistical data.
Is proven empirically that most of the zillions of people that received the vaccines didn't developed serious collateral effects.
Is proven than the group that received vaccines had a lower mortality than the group that rejected them. There are dozens of notorious antivacs videotaped bragging about the "inoffensive" disease, actively trying to caught it, doing everything wrong on purpose... and realizing too late that they will were dying from covid.
I agree that the main cause of death here should be stupidity, not covid.
Ok, I'll ignore the bit where you implicitly claim that 1000's of independent county health offices colluded to produce excess corpses before the vaccine came out, and then somehow hid exponentially more corpses after it came out.
Excess mortality is higher now because we're in the middle of a massive rebound of all the other respiratory illnesses (that were stopped by widespread masking and record flu vaccination last year). Also Covid is still around. Omicron has partially "escaped" the updated vaccines (which you should take anyway).
The numbers were cooked particularly badly in Russia. There are 2 different government agencies reporting Covid deaths and excess deaths, and their numbers differ by a factor of 7; meanwhile many deaths are reported as caused by "viral pneumonia".
Meanwhile for the US and European countries, Covid death and excess death numbers are pretty close.
Chemo Therapy is literally poisoning you just enough to kill the cancer.
The anti-arthritis medications I take cause terrible side effects.
These options are still better than the underlying problems. Throwing out pithy feel good quotes doesn't capture the nuance of the line that doctors walk when trying to treat illnesses. "Do no harm" is the ideal. In reality it's to do less harm than the disease.
It reminds me of how Japanese honeybees kill hornets - they overheat it by swarming it and flapping their wings vigorously to transfer body heat and cook it alive.
They fortunately can tolerate a few degrees higher core temperature than the hornet - it can't be good for the bees but if your lifespan is 60 days.
> Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?
This is not a good rule if taken to the extreme. Almost all medical procedures have an associated risk, some higher. The key question is whether the risk outweighs the benefits.
This is more people than COVID kills in the same time period, but strangely there's no panic about that. No mandates. No significant steps from any authorities to do anything about it. Perhaps because there's no money in that, unlike pushing a remedy for something that's not as significant as people feel.
edit: Since HN is ratelimiting me and not letting me reply to the below, here's the reply I've tried posting after an hour of "slowing down":
What would be the mandate for user error (which is what 'preventable medical errors' boils down to), beyond an ongoing attempt to improve procedures in hospitals which I'm sure they're already doing, especially since the US is very litigious and they often get sued for malpractice.
Humans are messy, can't hold all knowledge about everything in their heads at all times, and error prone. Unless you replace them entirely you're not going to be able to eliminate medical errors.
There are a staggering number of mandates and regulations around preventable medical errors. One that has been absolutely defining is CMS not compensating for healthcare-associated infections.
Also, many hospitals view things like infection control or antimicrobial stewardship as cost centers, and they're not doing nearly as much as they can.
I think now I can finally write this in public: I didn't take COVID vaccine at all, because for coincidental reasons, my dad ended taking it first. Despite the fact he is already 50+ he had really severe, but thankfully mostly temporary cardiac side effects (mostly, because even months later he needed to go to his cardiologist and change his cardiac-related medicine, because since the vaccine his blood levels changed and he kept having weird symptoms).
Since my dad had his health go so poorly after the vaccine, I decided to not risk it, specially considering my existing conditions.
It also seems like, in the absence of assurance of long-term safety, you would recommend the vaccine for at-risk groups only. It's known now that the risk to young people (under 19) is minimal: IFR < 3/1,000,000. And that was during the much more dangerous early strain of Covid-19, not the ones circulating now. Yet here we are in 2022 with a recommendation from the CDC to vaccinate ages 5 and up, regardless of health condition.
It is wild to me that people look at a number like 3/1,000,000 and don't think wow, that's 1900 Children who could die from something we have a vaccine for, that actively prevents the cause.
Also, can you imagine losing a child to something that was preventable? You can play numbers and statistics all day, but we're talking about children's lives.
You're probably not a parent? But for reference, go find examples of people who are parents that have lost children to some cause, and see what they're doing now? I would bet 9/10 times they're trying to prevent that from happening to others.
Also, brief note, that you might think you're an emotionless rational machine, but very few people actually respond well to that. So it's important to use everything in your rhetorical toolbox including appeals to emotion to try and convince the wide range of responses people might have.
If you want my "appeal to numbers" argument, you can see it all over this thread.
It seems like I'm getting a continual -2 on votes for all of my arguments just cause I'm coming off as "pro-vaccine". So it doesn't actually seem to matter what appeals I make.
Also though, I don't really believe I'm changing anyone's mind on this. I'm just inviting people consider the humanity of things like "child deaths". Which, is much easier to consider as a number than it is as an actual concept.
I have a couple kids (teens). I'm worried about many other things, not COVID; it's just far down on my list of things that I consider active risks to my children that I have the power to impact.
I don't really have time to cross reference all your different comments, but when you post a comment that is just appeal to emotion, I tend to mention it.
<s> I mean, it's definitely the kind of good constructive criticism that really helps improve the discussion. </s>
In all honesty, I will say that pointing out rhetorical styles is probably the least constructive internet discussion you can have. Mostly because even if you can point to a logical fallacy, doing so doesn't negate the underlying argument unless you can actually explain it.
The COVID-19 fatality risk for children is very low overall (0.002% estimated by the CDC). Those deaths have almost all been in patients with severe pre-existing health conditions such as obesity. For pediatric patients without pre-existing conditions, the death rate is virtually zero. So from a public health perspective it's most important to focus vaccination campaigns on those at greatest risk.
To be clear, I am not telling anyone to avoid vaccination for themselves or their children. Vaccination is a good option for the vast majority of patients. Talk to your doctor.
And ironically, school closures and lockdowns during the pandemic actually increased the rate of childhood obesity. The purported "cure" was not only worse than the disease, it actually made the disease worse by placing children at greater risk.
It's not a case where no children die if everyone takes the vaccine and 1900 children die if nobody does. There are numerous other variables at play, each of which contains some unknowns and affects quality of life or even the continuity of it. I can't say that I know what the currently best course of action for children is, but the problem is far from black and white.
I am a parent. It's not that I don't think some children should be vaccinated; some should. Overweight, diabetic, etc. We know where the risk is, and we know the vaccine reduces serious outcomes. It's recommending it across-the-board that I object to.
Now if your argument is "what's the harm?, why not vaccinate everyone?" my answer would be we don't actually know what the harm might be to these kids later in life. No one does. Probably no harm, I guess? Maybe a 3/1,000,000 chance of harm? no one knows.
> It's recommending it across-the-board that I object to.
Early on, the goal was to reach herd immunity while we still had vaccines that were fairly effective at reducing transmission against the variants we had had, before they mutated.
But also, I don't know how familiar you are with gov't messaging. But the more widespread you make a message, the less nuanced you can make it. People at large don't take nuance very well, and people at large are bad at evaluating circumstances. So if you give them a message like "People over the age of 65 should get 3 doses, and people over 30 should get 2 doses, etc." You're going to end up with most of the people not knowing what to do.
To add to that, you have people "doing their own research" who have no idea what the requirements for actual peer-reviewed research is, screaming from the rooftops that you can't trust anything coming out of anyone's mouth. And they will latch onto any piece of nuance and tear it to shreds.
Now, I still think that American institutions have done a bad job communicating, but considering they were undermined at every step of the process, I'm inclined to believe that it's more reasonable for them to give a blanket across-the-board recommendation than it is to destroy their own goal by adding confusion of "nuanced recommendations".
> Early on, the goal was to reach herd immunity while we still had vaccines that were fairly effective at reducing transmission against the variants we had had, before they mutated.
The mRNA vaccines weren't even tested for transmission during the early trials. It was impossible to make educated statements about reaching herd immunity through mass vaccination without any data. This did not stop people from introducing mandates in some places, even after it became clear that herd immunity will not be reached, which goes a little beyond bad communication.
I think that was a reasonable assumption given our understanding of infectious diseases.
In hindsight, that was incorrect, but you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time. It is reasonable to assume that viruses would be subject to herd immunity, because it's been true for the vast majority of viruses we've interacted with in the past.
> you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time.
I can absolutely criticize handwavy low knowledge / high impact decisions afterwards, because that's what they were and that was clear to many at that time already. Consensus wasn't reached based on knowledge, but based on power.
Luckily I came to that conclusion early during the pandemic, so I don't feel compelled to defend unethical decisions now.
It does not need to be that nuanced. It's basically if you (think you might) have these X conditions, get vaccinated. You can give the detailed recommendations to doctors and other caregivers, and refer the public to them and the CDC website to check more in case they don't know.
What are the conditions, please list all of them in a way that makes it easy for me to find?
What age groups does this affect?
I think I have condition Y so I should go get vaccinated, but I have conflicting information on that from multiple doctors. Should I get vaccinated?
Also, in the US people often take advertised medications to their doctors and ask if they should take it, rather than doctors recommending things to people.
Finally, there are large segments of the population that don't consult doctors for varying reasons.
same. it's also interesting that many of the folks commenting are not likely to be in the most vulnerable group at risk of developing myocarditis from the vaccine [0] -- that unfortunate category is one that i belong to. as a young man, i spoke about this risk nearly a year ago to the tee [1]. since then, i've also found out i am particularly vulnerable, as i had a history of heart issues as a young child (heart murmer -> arrhythmia). it will be nice to see more data available, but i don't regret any of the vaccines in the slightest.
there are plenty of comments here that speak to the general age recommendation other countries have provided, but i have yet to see people connect the other MAJOR group of people that should, by all means, totally, 100% consider getting their nth vaccination -> anyone with a comorbidity! if you are a young man with diabetes, the risks you face from the vaccine vs a covid infection are no longer as murky.
There are 5 reports of death following Covid-19 vaccination in VAERS for children 0.5-5, and ‘1.6 million US children ages 6 months-4 years have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine’ as of 11-2-22. This is 3.125 deaths per million, and VAERS notoriously undercounts.
There are 31 reports of death following Covid-19 vaccination for children 5-12, and ‘10.9 million US children ages 5-11 have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine’ as of 11-2-22. This is 2.84 deaths per million. Again, VAERS notoriously undercounts.
EDIT: I wasn't kidding when I said I can play numbers and statistics all day.
When you say "VAERS notoriously undercounts", I think you're probably referring to the flu vaccine (where we would have historical data), but I don't think it's fair to say that would be true for the Covid vaccine.
Specifically because at the onset of this new vaccine, people are much more likely to report that a death happened after a covid vaccine. There is a segment of the population that has never trusted the covid vaccine, so they are a lot more likely to report a death after vaccination of a loved one. Also as the vaccine is new, there's probably a lot more data gathering around it because scientists would definitely like to know if the vaccine causes death. Lastly, it's an event you're much more likely to have talked to with your loved ones before you passed away, than with the flu vaccine.
My family knows I got a covid vaccine. My family has no idea about my flu vaccine status.
Lastly, and most importantly, the numbers for those are not intrinsically linked. There's not actually any implied causal link in any of those numbers "VAERS Covid/Flu Vaccine Reported Deaths by Days to Onset all Ages". They are all just correlated. If you want to look for a causal link you'd have to compare against the total number of people who got vaccines on that day. And then compare against total number of deaths for the whole population.
When I say VAERS notoriously undercounts, I’m referring to the literature on the subject. For example, the Harvard report Electronic Support for Public Health - Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS) https://digital.ahrq.gov/ahrq-funded-projects/electronic-sup...:
Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported.
Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event,
less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events
are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low
reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs
and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for
drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed. Barriers to reporting
include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what
to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part
of clinicians’ usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative.
Sensitivities ranged from 72% for poliomyelitis after
the oral poliovirus vaccine to less than 1% for rash
and thrombocytopenia after the MMR vaccine.
Regarding your speculation that deaths associated with the Covid-19 vaccines are probably reported at rates higher than that of other vaccines: I have a hard time believing that the report rate is higher than poliomyelitis after the oral poliovirus vaccine which is itself underreported.
And regarding the protestation that correlation does not imply causation, it’s not on me to prove that the treatment is harmful, and otherwise it’s safe and thus administered—-it’s on you to prove that it confers an all cause mortality benefit. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that such a benefit obtains in children, and suggest that this dearth of evidence explains the failure to approve the vaccines for children in many European countries.
I mean, there is no standard of proof that will convince you that the vaccine is better than the virus. But also, I'm not really trying to convince you of anything. I'm just stating why your sources don't say what you think they do.
As well as explaining confounding variables that your reference doesn't take into account for what that means. None of your sources are accounting for how politically embroiled this vaccine is, and how much of a difference that would make in who/what gets reported.
Just in case, I will make this point. If you had a loved one get a covid vaccine, and then die 20 days later, would you report it to VAERS?
I personally experienced a week of heart palpitations following my second dose of Moderna, as well as an acute visual aura, having never had a migraine. Not only did I fail to report this to VAERS, it only occurred to me as a vague possibility that the vaccination might be related, so I didn’t think twice about getting the booster. After her second dose of Moderna my sister developed a migraine (having never had one previously) that lasted a week, culminating in an emergency room visit, for which no VAERS report was made. My mother recently intimated that ever since her second Moderna shot she periodically experiences heart palpitations, and especially when ingesting caffeine, whereas before this was not the case. Again, no VAERS report.
Knowing what I know now, were a family member to die 20 days after a vaccination I would certainly submit a VAERS report, but I find this question incredible: are you really disputing multiple studies that conclude that VAERS underreports adverse events by appealing to your nebulous feeling that family members surely would not neglect to file a VAERS report after the death of a family member?
Does the fact that only a tiny minority of the population even knows VAERS exists provoke doubt?
“Underreporting" is one of the main limitations of passive
surveillance systems, including VAERS. The term, underreporting
refers to the fact that VAERS receives reports for only a small
fraction of actual adverse events. The degree of underreporting
varies widely.
Further, even if I granted that literally every death due to the vaccines was reported to VAERS, there still remains the extant signal which logically admits the possibility that children 0.5-5 suffer a higher rate of death to the vaccine than they do the disease.
As for the insulting claim that no standard of proof would convince me that the vaccine is better than the virus: all I require is a sufficiently powered RCT with a genuine placebo in the control, full disclosure of patient level data, and all cause mortality as the primary endpoint. It baffles me that you don’t demand the same.
I think most people misunderstand the point of emergency use.
It was an emergency.
At the time the vaccine got authorized, we were in a middle of a pandemic, millions of people with no immunity were getting sick, and we couldn't stop the spread even with heavy restrictions. It was clear that we will all have some immunity eventually. The point of the emergency use of vaccine was to give people immunity in a way that wasn't as bad at getting sick. Wait too much, and the vaccine would have been mostly useless. It was a game of how much uncertainty we allow vs how much more deaths if we do nothing. And I think the (fairly conservative) bet saved millions, maybe we could have saved a bit more if we actually vaccinated people before the end of phase 3.
We are now in the end game, and the rules have changed. We are now almost all immunized in one way or another, the virus is now optimized for immune escape instead of raw speed, thankfully making it less deadly in the process. Because of that, the way we approach vaccination needs to change too. We can't compare today's situation with the beginning of 2021.
Earlier in pandemic 196k post Covid patients were monitored a year... "We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection."
> Associations were stronger in men younger than 40 years for all vaccines. In men younger than 40 years old, the number of excess myocarditis events per million people was higher after a second dose of mRNA-1273 than after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test (97 [95% CI, 91–99] versus 16 [95% CI, 12–18]).
> The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.
That's from the study you linked; for the group most at risk of vaccine myocarditis, the vaccine was associated with a higher risk than the virus. In this study, this was true for Moderna, with Pfizer being about equivalent risk to the virus (albeit without considering that the risk of infection remains after vaccination). However, there have been other studies that found this to be true for all mrna vaccines.
So to answer your question, its technically true, but only if you dilute the at-risk group by including the entire population.
No, not for younger men: the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine does not appear to offset the benefit. So if you only care about that one single dimension, younger men shouldn’t have the vaccine. That said, other costs and benefits matter far far more I think.
In men younger than 40 years, we estimate an additional 4 and 14 myocarditis events per million in the 1 to 28 days after a first dose of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively; and an additional 14 , 11 and 97 myocarditis events after a second dose of ChAdOx1, BNT162b2, and mRNA-1273, respectively. These estimates compare with an additional 16 myocarditis events per million men younger than 40 years in the 1 to 28 days after a SARS-CoV-2–positive test before vaccination. [ChAdOx1 == AstraZeneca, BNT162b2 == Pfizer, and mRNA-1273 == Moderna]
The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.
Disclaimer: I try to be apolitical however there is a strong aura of bullshit around this topic so double check everything!
Except you can get infected even if you get the vaccine. In fact it seems to me that people got it despite the fact that they were vaccinated or not, without a particular logic.
Yes. In particular, the contents of the mRNA vaccines are a subset of what a covid infection produces.
The anti-vax stance is similar to the claims that tightly regulated nicotine vapes are worse than high tar cigarettes. (Except that you can just choose to not smoke, of course.)
I hear a lot of anti-vaxy stuff about how the spike protein is damaging in itself (implying that you shouldn't get the vaccine because you'll have spike proteins flowing around in your blood), but they seem to ignore the fact that when you get actual covid the virus is multiplying in your cells and spike proteins are more widespread and more numerous.
I see the argument here in this thread that the vaccine isn't really preventing you from getting covid at this point (which is probably largely true) but shouldn't being vaccinated mean that you'll have a lower viral load and shorter duration of illness?
The mRNA vaccines work by causing the spike protein to multiply in your cells. Yes, the mechanism is different - the virus copies itself and the spike protein just happens to be part of the virus, whereas the vaccine mRNA just causes the spike protein itself to be copied. Note that with the vaccine, you're getting a massive number of cells "infected" all at once, equivalent to quite a bit of virus self-replication. So the result is the same, a lot of spike protein floating around and doing damage. The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected (and which therefore have to be eliminated by your immune system), whereas with the virus there is effectively no upper bound. But that doesn't translate at all into a difference of how much damage the spike protein produced by X infected cells produces, and it doesn't mean that the number of infected cells with mRNA is significantly less than the number of infected cells you would have gotten with a successfully-fought-off infection. So it could do just as much damage.
> The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected
Reverse-transcriptase enzyme in liver cells in a lab has been shown to convert the mRNA vaccines into DNA. While it's unclear if it would actually be a permanent change to cells, DNA is a lot more stable than RNA and could hang around a lot longer than expected, and result in a lot more spike protein than expected.
You're missing part of the argument: Vaccine-generated spike protein is free-floating, while virus-generated spike protein is attached to the virus. The free-floating spike protein is a lot smaller than the virus, so it can get a lot more places, and while some will break off of the virus and become free-floating it wouldn't be in anywhere near as large amounts as vaccine-generated spike protein.
It's been a while since I've looked at the ins-and-outs of the immune system, but doesn't this basically not hold up to scrutiny? Again, correct me if I'm wrong:
A) The general method of action of the vaccines is that the mRNA enters a cell (generally dendritic cells), the cell transcribes it into the spike protein, then the cell detects something off about the proteins and presents them on their cell wall for the immune system to respond to. The proteins aren't just "free floating" unless your immune response is
B) The likelihood of an immune response to an active infection never doing the same thing with cells that contain partially constructed virons / viron components, or achieving the same effect by breaking down full virons, is basically zero. So it's almost certain that an active infection would have "free-floating" proteins in some capacity as well.
The problem seems to be that the vaccine isn't decreasing infection risk all that much. Is it also decreasing myocarditis risk among the infected? I've seen mixed results, so it isn't clear to me.
It is. With the exception of a very narrow age range of young men, the COVID vaccine is protective against heart disease alone, even ignoring all other outcomes.
> the COVID vaccine is protective against heart disease alone
Wait, what? As in people should just take it as a prophylactic for heart disease, without even taking covid into consideration? It seems like this would be shouted from the rooftops if it were true.
The issue isn't Covid vs vaccine heart risks, it's that you're going to get Covid 100% after having the vaccine, so you've essentially doubled your risk. That's the issue.
That is such a biased study. They aren't comparing Covid postive + no vaccine with covid negative + vaccine. If that was the comparison 1st group fares better as they did not find any covid positive + non vaccinated being diagnosed with myocarditis.
Also their dataset had 13% covid positive rate. So ideally we should multiply the non vaccinated risk by 13%.
I don't know about the rest of your methodology and I'm suspicious of the concept of "Oh they forgot to multiply by 13%" cause you just don't multiply percentages (with very few exceptions).
But more to the point, the group "Covid Positive + No Vaccine" has a high sampling bias built into it. Because you're sampling "People who lived through covid without the vaccine".
No, that gets it totally backwards. The miniscule risks of the vaccine are blown out of proportion by bad reporting and people reading the statistics wrong.
In converse: we should have skipped phase 3 trials (effectivity) and should have started vaccination after safety was approved.
If anything the vaccination campaign has shown that sometimes acting fast can be tremendously helpful.
The fact that this research is just now being done ought to be enough to immediately revoke the FDA emergency use authorizations and pull the product from the shelves.
The covid vaccines have been a complete and utter disaster at every level. The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
We now have victims of vaccine injury so scared of societal backlash they don't speak out, and doctors so scared of losing their license/job they ignore the evidence in front of them.