Ask HN: How quickly do you plan to get the vaccine once available?
I may have fallen into a dark social media bubble of distrusting government/large corps and fear of potential side effects from a rushed-to-market vaccine, but I am feeling hesitant to take it once available. Since I respect the HN community and its generally informed and objective discussion about science, I am interested to hear how you all are thinking about the vaccine personally and if you will rush to take it once made available to you.
45 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadGovernments and corporations have a very good history of doing shady stuff and rushing things when they shouldn't so it's not wrong to be sceptical based on history. To me it's about evaluation of risk profile and what you want to do.
Vaccines aren't zero risk, but the risk is very low. The candidate Covid vaccines have been tested on 30-50k volunteers with 0 or maybe 1 adverse event, so the risk must be well below 1:10000. Given that the risk with Covid is much higher, like 1:100 of death and 1:20 of other nasty long-term effects, and (without vaccines) most people would get it, that seems like a fantastic deal.
People in areas with no virus, like New Zealand, could plausibly consider the risk not worth it yet.
Nothing is zero-risk, but Covid is certainly a higher risk than even quickly-researched vaccines will be.
That's a decision each person has to make. That may make sense for people with comorbidities, but maybe not for otherwise healthy individuals who have previously had adverse events tied to vaccines.
I agree with reading the studies. PubMed is a great resource.
That's likely to be when something stable with an ordinary cold chain is at normal pharmacies, but who knows? I work for a large University that probably has hundreds of those super-cold freezers and we get a supply I might go into campus for the first time in seven months...
In hardware, software and now Covid vaccines, I try to avoid being an 'early adopter'. I wait til the bugs are ironed out.
This isn't the same getting an Apple Silicone Mac though. There's almost no downside to waiting for next year's laptops. With the vaccine, on the other hand, you need to evaluate the potential risk of getting the vaccine vs the potential dangers of not getting it (both for you and everyone you interact with).
Unless you are really taking isolation procedures seriously, with wipe downs, gloves, etc.
I can wait for better data.
I feel is that it has been less than a year since the pandemic was declared and the fact that a vaccine using new synthetic RNA technology that has never been used before is being promoted before studying the long term effects is scary as hell.
How many years did we use Antibiotics before it became apperant that over-use results in super bugs?
There have been many other novel medications that have turned out to be less than good after they were studied over a longer duration of time. I am worried in 5 or 10 years from now, a whole bunch of people are going to get some new type of autoimmune disease, or liver cancer, or their yet to be concieved kids will get it, or something I can't even imagine right now.
I hope I am wrong and that everything works out but I feel this whole situation could use some sober second thought before jumping in head first and dose-ing a large percentage of the human species so quickly with a novel technology.
* Edit: I would also like to see antibody tests being done prior to vaccination as already having antibodies might result in negative reactions that were not studied in the current trials, not to mention the effect it would have on the statistics that will be used as a metric to encourage more people to get jabbed.
Is there any evidence pointing in that direction?
I am not a biologist, but I have a basic understanding of how the mRNA vaccines work. As far as I know the protein the vaccine codes for is well understood.
The only kind of sketch part to me is whatever complicated bio-chem is used to enable the uptake of the mRNA, but from what I've read it seems like that process is a one time thing, not some lasting DNA based change.
Which is to say, at an intuitive level, I would expect to see any harsh side-effects immediately (hours to days). Again, just a layman's interpretation, like most of the anti-vax comments on here.
Well that's the rub for future unknowns. You don't know what specific issue you might be concerned about until it happens in the future. People in 1930 couldn't collect evidence for super bacteria as it was an unknown at that time.
FYI, I'm getting the vaccine and trust the test results. Just pointing out unknowns are hard to provide evidence for or against.
So my question is what evidence do we have that corners have been cut? Are you basing all of this only on the reduced time to produce the vaccine?
I encourage people to research this more deeply i.e.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron...
To my understanding the things that are being fast tracked are all the bureaucratic red tape and but covering stuff.
Not the actual science.
If any of the science was rushed we could have had the vaccines as early as this summer.
But a phase 3 human trail takes 8 months. There is just absolutely no way to rush that part as constructed
The vaccines are essentially unchanged since their formulation as early as March. Everything since then has been testing, not creation or modification (only some experimentation with respect to dosing).
You want "rushed"? Get a flu shot.
From a game theotetic perspective if most people get the vaccine, you're better off not taking it yourself. And if most don't, I will be happy with that too as a political statement.
For high risk individuals like very old people I wouldn't wait too long if the data is solid.
On a more general point of view, people enforcing the rules are the same people having both the data and the knowledge necessary to understand it. In other words, it's OK to be skeptical but don't forget you're not a scientist, and me neither, for that matter.
Being skeptical of the government and refusing to wear a mask are not part of the same discussion, unless you're in bad faith.
The question is what amount of freedom, legal order and economic growth is worth giving up over what amount of deaths.
For example: I'm pretty sure most would agree 1 extra death a year wouldn't justify any limitations whatsoever.
The implicit consensus also seemed to be that winter season flu (+ misc virus) excess deaths didn't justify any limitations either[0].
I don't believe that the (yes, yet higher) amount of deaths caused by COVID justifies them either. The moral precedent here is very troubling to me and I hope it will be rejected by the people.
Many of the policies manufacture the impression of popular support. Without enough people actively signaling their disapproval the perception will remain slanted.
So IMO it's perfectly reasonable for a healthy young person to disregard some rules. While those at real risk should obviously take necessary precautions including potential vaccines.
And this is exactly what a good (in my opinion) policy would do. Focus on helping those at risk without any compulsion. In which case I would also be more willing to follow recommendations as doing so wouldn't signal support for any policies.
[0] Although I could see that changing post corona, many were simply unaware.
That said, context is important. I'm not sure this is the right way of thinking in this specific case.
Problem is: that there's no way to control the virus. In other words, the law of big numbers throws a wrench in the health system... a small percentage of a very big number (like the people currently living in the US) is still a very big number. Many people getting ill together, is not good anyway you look at it.
Also, keep in mind that health and money are directly related: an ill population is a poor population. That's why people happily pay taxes for healthcare in many countries.
With a vaccine the situation should hopefully be more in control, but the basic modus operandi was to avoid people getting in touch too much (lockdowns, distancing etc.).
Lockdowns were a hasty solution to a sudden emergency... it worked, but can't be enforced forever. Still, there is a reason why a policy is enforced. As I said, context is important.
The solutions (basically just wear a mask and dont' be too close) are easy to follow and not so disruptive. Still, I have the feeling many people do not reject the policy per se, but the enforcement itself. This is not an honest reponse.
Potentially. I do expect that most restrictions will be rolled back eventually. But even the damage that has already happened is significant. If protesting stops just 1 more year of that I think it's worth it.
The future concern is similar reasoning will be used in other domains.
> Also, keep in mind that health and money are directly related: an ill population is a poor population. That's why people happily pay taxes for healthcare in many countries.
Well, I am against too much government healthcare. I generally find that most of its proponents do not make the money argument (which I do disagree with). As far as I can tell the main argument has always been the same moral argument about potential deaths/suffering. Similarly I'm willing to acknowledge that some small percentage of the population would indeed be worse off under a private system. But that doesn't justify nationalization.
The desirable policy is to focus on improvements to healthcare as a whole, which by proxy helps everybody. A poor person in 2020 has access to better private healthcare than a poor person in 1980 simply because everything got better.
I'm not strictly against all collectivist solutions, but the threshold for such actions should be much higher. When COVID restrictions were first introduced around the world, I was generally supportive. The advertised death rate was an order of magnitude higher. Restrictions were presented as a temporary measure to let healthcare systems ramp up capacity. That seemed reasonable to me.
> The solutions (basically just wear a mask and dont' be too close) are easy to follow and not so disruptive.
If you're in the US, then I think many states are doing the right thing. A few are overzealous. If you look at GDP drops across the world US is one of the lowest. And I also credit that to the many people in the US who actively voiced their opposition. Haven't seen that happen much elsewhere.
In the country I'm in there are mandatory (could go to jail) quarantines for merely suspected cases and those entering from some countries. Some businesses can't operate at all. Big fines for businesses breaking rules. Tickets for not wearing a mask. And as opposed to the US most of these restrictions are legally solid, you'll have a hard time challenging them. Compliance very high. From what I'm hearing and reading it's still one of the laxer ones in Europe. The GDP drop was one of the lower ones too.
So apparently I can recieve a vaccine that still allows me to contract the virus to the point where I can still have enough vital load to spread it, but I'm somehow protected from the severe symptoms which are thought to be an overreaction of the immune system which was previously stimulated into producing the antibodies to target this virus. I'd be interested to know how that works since I must be missing some mechanism.
A plausible explanation for your second question is that the vaccine significantly reduces the peak viral load, reducing the overall immune response, but not reducing the peak so much that shedding is prevented.
Yeah, I was wondering if it gives a person a "head start" when exposed to the virus. I saw something saying that some people have T-cells that don't recognize covid specifically but do recognize it as a foreign body. Maybe people that have those better T-cells are also the ones that have fewer symptoms. I'm sure will see many more studies over the next decade. I will be interested to see how my musings fare.
The 95% effectiveness is calculated base on how many people in the vaccine group had symptomatic infections (this happens with pretty much all vaccines; many are less effective than these).
The presence of infected people in the vaccine group doesn't give us much information about what is typical though; it can be the case that most people don't get anywhere near shedding virus once they are vaccinated.
(and then if the virus antibodies aren't persistent...)
To be sure, they would have to regularly test the participants for an active infection.