I have trouble understanding why people post articles like this. IE, what's the ulterior motive? Is your goal to reduce trust in vaccines? A good faith attempt to show that there are a very small but detectable number of adverse outcomes from vaccines?
Whatever it is: a paper like this doesn't demonstrate anything like that. It's a case observation with n=1 and it actually shows nothing of the sort. It's as close to nonscientific as a doctor can get and still publish in the literature.
Maybe, this is also a new user pushing a bare minimum paper with a headline that denotes safety issues with the vaccine. We should be actively looking for scientific outlook, but the top of this comment chain is correct in asking questions about the motives when we see stuff like this pop-up continually on HN from groups of people.
Not the op, and didn't read the link, so no clue what it's validity.
BUT will say again, I am pro vaccines and vaccinated, but I still think the possible side effects are being downplayed in the media/state. I posted in another thread, but after one month, I am still having issues that are for sure linked to my booster shot. No-one told me about any of these possible side effects, but after suffering from them, and talking openly about it with many peopkle, I found others had exactly the same issues as I have after their shots (Pfizer if it helps anyone).
The issue of side effects being downplayed by the media is entirely a response by public health and media to the large amount of disinformation about vaccines. It was a calculus that was identified and decided on quite some time ago- the reasoning being most people need to hear a simple, straightforward and consistent message to be compliant.
The media and public health leadership has to work on a very thin "knife's edge" when communicating with the public. They have to do 10X the work to debunk garbage than the people have to work to dissemination garbage. And then, a reasonable set of people who do have vaccines problems end up in the middle. The symptoms I had when I had combined Flu/Pneumonia were: could not use left arm for a week, felt super-sick and couldn'tr work for a week. I know that's probably better than getitng a bad flu or pneumonia, but my doctor couldn't even care. She was just happy I got vaccinated. i do think that is a problem.
But it's a different problem and raising that and having a rational discussion about it is not something that can happen in a venue like hacker news, or really any social media.
> The issue of side effects being downplayed by the media is entirely a response by public health and media to the large amount of disinformation about vaccines.
That's your personal belief that may or may not be representative of reality.
Another possible belief that one might have, that you can find evidence for in reality, is that side effects are being downplayed in order to push vaccine mandates through as a way of exerting political control and/or profits for certain organizations (e.g. Pfizer, which has done a lot of extremely questionable things in the past, like a lot of large pharma companies).
> the reasoning being most people need to hear a simple, straightforward and consistent message to be compliant.
...and this line only adds more evidence to the second belief, as it's exactly what entities wanting control want - people to be "compliant" for its own sake, regardless of reality, ethics, or reason.
In any case, downplaying the side effects is unethical and obviously wrong.
If downplaying side effects had an overall greater outcome, would it be unethical and "obviously wrong"?
Nothing is truly obviously wrong. In fact many things we think are obviously wrong, aren't. The ethics of these sorts of things are truly nontrivial.
If you're suggesting we have hte vaccine policies we do so that pfizer etc profit, well I doubt I am going to convince you otherwise. I work in pharma, have a pretty good understanding of our leadership's thought patterns, and I think the vast majority of them would more than happily take a business loss if it meant the world became healthier, but they'd rather keep doing their research and development in the meantime.
> If downplaying side effects had an overall greater outcome, would it be unethical and "obviously wrong"?
Well, lets say that I will have the side effects for the rest of my life, or my kid (9y) will. So lying or hiding about the side effects is better for the big picture, and then fuck me/my kid? This is how you breed anti-vaxx and other people against goverment. 'We lied, but it was from your own good, sure, some suffered the consequenses of our lies, but hey, bars are open now, yay'
I am not against pushing vaccines. But if hiding/lying is the way they are doing, is it worth it? Will the public ever trust them again?
Let's say (as an experiment) we know that 10% of people will have life-long problems if they take the vaccine, BUT hiding this fact means that 90% of the population will probably take the vaccine and thus, 'saving' a lot of people. Is it ok to 'sacrifice' 10% for the remaining 90%? (I know the values are less, but the questions is, where we draw the line where we should 'hide' things or not). I still hope the side effects will go away, but after one month, this has serious implications in my life, and I feel betrayed for not being informed on the side effects correctly. And for sure, I will not have any other boosters, no matter what mandates or what else they will come up with, and right now, I am recommending others not to get the booster after my experience (maybe wrong, but my experience and suffering trumps any 'greater good' that may put my close friends/family at risk)
Unfortunately, I don't think we can have a truly utilitarian discussion about health care policy in the US. Here's the problem in a nutshell: if you propose that we carefully look at the likely outcomes for patients who need surgery and conclude that some will almost certainly die and instead save the resources for a patient who is more likely to survive, your opponent just has to say "death panels" and immediately, the whole debate is shut down.
My general belief is that the US's inability to address its public health costs in a utilitarian manner will ultimately bankrupt the country. Just today I was reading about how stanford spent millions of dollars to speed up a genomic sequencing pipeline to more rapidly identify rare diseases in infants (ostensibly, so they can be sent to the NICU). Problem is, those millions could also have been spent on covid patients, or covid reasearch, or heart disease research and cancer research (those are the two things that kill the most people in the US) and likely had a greater total outcome! Babies who survive and make it to the NICU bear tremendous costs on the health system, both in the NICU and throughout their lives. But, people love babies so we're willing to spend enormous, illogically enormous amounts of money to save them.
I'm actually with you: Tell us the truth about what you're asking us to do. I think anything else is immoral.
And I think that the last sentence of your first paragraph is critical: They had accumulated trust over decades, and they set all of that on fire. Was Covid a big enough emergency to make that worth it? I think not, even if you buy the "it's for the greater good that we mislead people" idea (which I don't). I think what they did was short-sighted, even within that moral framework.
All I was saying is that, if you are in that moral framework, it's not killing people with vaccines in order to open the pubs. It's killing people with vaccines in order to save more people. I still think it's immoral, and I think that because they destroyed their credibility they're killing more people in the long run, but I think you significantly mis-stated their actual moral calculus.
Not many of us are strict utilitarians. Also, people generally don't like being lied to, and I think this kind of pandering will accelerate the erosion of trust in institutions.
On pharma, they are obviously a business, and profits are of course a major consideration. I'm sure many people who work in pharma have other incentives too (like making world a healthier place, as you suggested). However, that certainly doesn't mean the correct framing is to see pharma companies as entirely altruistic.
Yes, it would be wrong because you don't have informed consent and you cannot really prove your assertion that compliance would be higher if adverse information did not get suppressed. In fact I think this had a negative influence on overall compliance for those that became aware of any framing. Neglecting the severe trust issues some have in official channels, this can even mean an overall bad outcome for health if you do not play with open cards.
I agree with your assertion about the medical industry otherwise. Still, dynamics of vaccines propose that their customers buy a minimum amount of dosages for the venture to be profitable. You create countless incentives to apply as much of them as possible and medical reasons slip into the background.
The ends justify the means is right out of the Machiavelli's The Prince. All sorts of bad things have happened for a greater good. With that logic you can pretty much justify anything.
Putting aside why the OP would get worked up about someone sharing a journal article on social media...
I agree its important for public health organizations to be consistent in their messaging. It creates a lot of confusion if they are sending mixed messages about the pros/cons of vaccines, especially if there is some urgency. Where I am, there is information provided about the type and relative frequency of reactions, but it's not the main message and that makes sense.
For governments that are forcing people to be vaccinated (either directly or de-facto through restrictions on what you can otherwise do), it's purely a political thing. How could they admit that the thing they are forcing on you could cause reaction, even if it's rare. So they pretend that anyone who talks about it is a threat to society and whip up anger against them.
People are regularly willing to voluntarily take medicine with higher risks (birth control, travel vaccines, etc) and generally would make the same choice faced with covid. But take the choice away and the government has to carefully control the message about it (plus the whole opportunity to create division and an out-group to improve their political footing)
> I posted in another thread, but after one month, I am still having issues that are for sure linked to my booster shot. No-one told me about any of these possible side effects, but after suffering from them, and talking openly about it with many peopkle, I found others had exactly the same issues as I have after their shots (Pfizer if it helps anyone).
I went and found your post.
Your symptoms could just as easily be explained by a viral infection (not necessarily COVID). That happens to people periodically, conservatively say once every 5 years. 2 weeks / 5 years is 0.7% of time. After billions of vaccine doses administered, that's millions of people that will attribute a random viral infection to a vaccine side effect...
I think the "official" side effects are a true best estimate of what the side effects really are, and tracking side effects like you are trying to do is very prone to various biases. You can't possibly understand vaccine side effects without looking at data from large numbers of people. That's why these random anecdotal stories of "vaccine -> ailment" are problematic. The question is if those ailments are happening more frequently after vaccination than before, and no individual can possibly answer that question.
The classic example of this is the vaccines -> autism issue. Thousands of parents were convinced that vaccines caused autism because autism appeared immediately after getting vaccinated. But now we know, decades later after massive population scale study, that this was just statistical noise.
Vaccine mandates by the government are legal but there are restrictions. Jacobson vs. Massachuestts, but of course, see today's ruling (which is being misreported; it's correct that OSHA doesn't ahve the latitude to do this, but the president has the absolute right to vaccine mandates nationally. he just hasn't done it, and given the omicron experience, I doubt he will).
I'm not sure why those cities have those policies and I don't expect them to stand much longer given the relatively weak protection provided.
> I have trouble understanding why people post articles like this
Here's a good reason: because there's no obvious reason why the vaccine should result in immune-mediated hepatitis (unlike, say, an immune response after receiving it, which is both explainable and (somewhat) desirable). HN is about curiosity and novelty, and this is curious indeed.
This paper is based on a single patient. Normally, in any sort of health study, you want to work with a large population for statistical reasons. However, for many practical reasons (such a very rare event like this) you can't do that. While there are statistical techniques to deal with small n studies ("If nobody dies, did anything go wrong?" from Glantz's stats book), mainstream science never makes a strong assertion (as this paper does) of causality. My read of the paper does not find any evidence truly supporting their assertion, but this isn't really uncommon, doctors publish case reports like this all the time with the hope that they're the first person to actually report on a real problem (and hope all the other times they reported are conveniently ignored).
And, of course, as a truly honest scientist, I will say: it's entirely possible they did find a situation where it occurred. It may be that all my complaining is actually against a legitimate problem. But, to be honest, when all the data is evaluated holistically, it is unlikely that this is a major concern. And the real problem is that somebody is going to go share this with some website that publishes "COVID vaccine causes hepatitus" and then a whole bunch of people won't get vaccinated.
I wish people would stop censoring information needed to make informed consent. If the study is non scientific then point that out, don't try to censor the post. You hurt your own cause by hiding information from intelligent people because that is what makes them suspicious.
Intelligent people, trying to form their own opinions, aren't doing so from the random assortment of articles that appear on popular web sites. They're reading the primary literature directly, rather than letting the Web pick and choose the articles that it finds interesting.
The vast majority of people aren't capable of that. They're usually taking secondary or tertiary sources, as collected by their favorite aggregators. That's not informed consent, regardless of the conclusion they come to.
Intelligent people recognize that they're not surveying the primary literature. They instead have to trust some informed source. That source must, among other things, pick things that inform rather than mislead. It can't feature every scrap of data -- you might as well just go to the primary sources.
So what makes me suspicious is people claiming "censorship", because most of the time it means "here is a thing that confirms my biases, and I'll ignore all of the things that contradict my biases even though I'm not as expert as I imagine I am".
If you want the facts, they're out there on the NIH web site. If you want HN to pick and choose facts for you, then you're welcome to, but do not fool yourself into believing that it informs consent.
Wow, that's a pretty compelling N=1 study. this guy goes from totally healthy to acute liver injury, each expression of illness and injury tied very closely to vaccine dose!
Autoimmune issues, including those related to vaccines, are not well understood.
I looked into this when I saw that many people were having covid-like adverse reactions to the vaccines. The only thing I found was that when the immune system is activated that collateral damage is possible.
Right - they point out the pathway. It does sound like you might have hepatitis already, so the vaccine is just in injury pathway. Or you might have some other (small) issue and immune response makes it a big one. I find this a bit plausible because the vaccine is designed to trigger an immune response (generally).
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 87.5 ms ] threadWhatever it is: a paper like this doesn't demonstrate anything like that. It's a case observation with n=1 and it actually shows nothing of the sort. It's as close to nonscientific as a doctor can get and still publish in the literature.
Perhaps its just interesting and they want to see what people say.
Interesting things are worth posting even when you may not agree with it or even know anything about it.
Posting is like asking, "what do HNers think about this?"
BUT will say again, I am pro vaccines and vaccinated, but I still think the possible side effects are being downplayed in the media/state. I posted in another thread, but after one month, I am still having issues that are for sure linked to my booster shot. No-one told me about any of these possible side effects, but after suffering from them, and talking openly about it with many peopkle, I found others had exactly the same issues as I have after their shots (Pfizer if it helps anyone).
The media and public health leadership has to work on a very thin "knife's edge" when communicating with the public. They have to do 10X the work to debunk garbage than the people have to work to dissemination garbage. And then, a reasonable set of people who do have vaccines problems end up in the middle. The symptoms I had when I had combined Flu/Pneumonia were: could not use left arm for a week, felt super-sick and couldn'tr work for a week. I know that's probably better than getitng a bad flu or pneumonia, but my doctor couldn't even care. She was just happy I got vaccinated. i do think that is a problem.
But it's a different problem and raising that and having a rational discussion about it is not something that can happen in a venue like hacker news, or really any social media.
That's your personal belief that may or may not be representative of reality.
Another possible belief that one might have, that you can find evidence for in reality, is that side effects are being downplayed in order to push vaccine mandates through as a way of exerting political control and/or profits for certain organizations (e.g. Pfizer, which has done a lot of extremely questionable things in the past, like a lot of large pharma companies).
> the reasoning being most people need to hear a simple, straightforward and consistent message to be compliant.
...and this line only adds more evidence to the second belief, as it's exactly what entities wanting control want - people to be "compliant" for its own sake, regardless of reality, ethics, or reason.
In any case, downplaying the side effects is unethical and obviously wrong.
Nothing is truly obviously wrong. In fact many things we think are obviously wrong, aren't. The ethics of these sorts of things are truly nontrivial.
If you're suggesting we have hte vaccine policies we do so that pfizer etc profit, well I doubt I am going to convince you otherwise. I work in pharma, have a pretty good understanding of our leadership's thought patterns, and I think the vast majority of them would more than happily take a business loss if it meant the world became healthier, but they'd rather keep doing their research and development in the meantime.
Well, lets say that I will have the side effects for the rest of my life, or my kid (9y) will. So lying or hiding about the side effects is better for the big picture, and then fuck me/my kid? This is how you breed anti-vaxx and other people against goverment. 'We lied, but it was from your own good, sure, some suffered the consequenses of our lies, but hey, bars are open now, yay'
Mind you, I'm not claiming that they are justified. Just that pro-vax side of the question is a lot more than "but bars are now open".
Let's say (as an experiment) we know that 10% of people will have life-long problems if they take the vaccine, BUT hiding this fact means that 90% of the population will probably take the vaccine and thus, 'saving' a lot of people. Is it ok to 'sacrifice' 10% for the remaining 90%? (I know the values are less, but the questions is, where we draw the line where we should 'hide' things or not). I still hope the side effects will go away, but after one month, this has serious implications in my life, and I feel betrayed for not being informed on the side effects correctly. And for sure, I will not have any other boosters, no matter what mandates or what else they will come up with, and right now, I am recommending others not to get the booster after my experience (maybe wrong, but my experience and suffering trumps any 'greater good' that may put my close friends/family at risk)
My general belief is that the US's inability to address its public health costs in a utilitarian manner will ultimately bankrupt the country. Just today I was reading about how stanford spent millions of dollars to speed up a genomic sequencing pipeline to more rapidly identify rare diseases in infants (ostensibly, so they can be sent to the NICU). Problem is, those millions could also have been spent on covid patients, or covid reasearch, or heart disease research and cancer research (those are the two things that kill the most people in the US) and likely had a greater total outcome! Babies who survive and make it to the NICU bear tremendous costs on the health system, both in the NICU and throughout their lives. But, people love babies so we're willing to spend enormous, illogically enormous amounts of money to save them.
And I think that the last sentence of your first paragraph is critical: They had accumulated trust over decades, and they set all of that on fire. Was Covid a big enough emergency to make that worth it? I think not, even if you buy the "it's for the greater good that we mislead people" idea (which I don't). I think what they did was short-sighted, even within that moral framework.
All I was saying is that, if you are in that moral framework, it's not killing people with vaccines in order to open the pubs. It's killing people with vaccines in order to save more people. I still think it's immoral, and I think that because they destroyed their credibility they're killing more people in the long run, but I think you significantly mis-stated their actual moral calculus.
On pharma, they are obviously a business, and profits are of course a major consideration. I'm sure many people who work in pharma have other incentives too (like making world a healthier place, as you suggested). However, that certainly doesn't mean the correct framing is to see pharma companies as entirely altruistic.
I agree with your assertion about the medical industry otherwise. Still, dynamics of vaccines propose that their customers buy a minimum amount of dosages for the venture to be profitable. You create countless incentives to apply as much of them as possible and medical reasons slip into the background.
I notice the word "accurate" wasn't included in what people need to hear from their public health professionals.
I think that's the problem.
I agree its important for public health organizations to be consistent in their messaging. It creates a lot of confusion if they are sending mixed messages about the pros/cons of vaccines, especially if there is some urgency. Where I am, there is information provided about the type and relative frequency of reactions, but it's not the main message and that makes sense.
For governments that are forcing people to be vaccinated (either directly or de-facto through restrictions on what you can otherwise do), it's purely a political thing. How could they admit that the thing they are forcing on you could cause reaction, even if it's rare. So they pretend that anyone who talks about it is a threat to society and whip up anger against them.
People are regularly willing to voluntarily take medicine with higher risks (birth control, travel vaccines, etc) and generally would make the same choice faced with covid. But take the choice away and the government has to carefully control the message about it (plus the whole opportunity to create division and an out-group to improve their political footing)
I went and found your post.
Your symptoms could just as easily be explained by a viral infection (not necessarily COVID). That happens to people periodically, conservatively say once every 5 years. 2 weeks / 5 years is 0.7% of time. After billions of vaccine doses administered, that's millions of people that will attribute a random viral infection to a vaccine side effect...
I think the "official" side effects are a true best estimate of what the side effects really are, and tracking side effects like you are trying to do is very prone to various biases. You can't possibly understand vaccine side effects without looking at data from large numbers of people. That's why these random anecdotal stories of "vaccine -> ailment" are problematic. The question is if those ailments are happening more frequently after vaccination than before, and no individual can possibly answer that question.
The classic example of this is the vaccines -> autism issue. Thousands of parents were convinced that vaccines caused autism because autism appeared immediately after getting vaccinated. But now we know, decades later after massive population scale study, that this was just statistical noise.
I'm not sure why those cities have those policies and I don't expect them to stand much longer given the relatively weak protection provided.
Here's a good reason: because there's no obvious reason why the vaccine should result in immune-mediated hepatitis (unlike, say, an immune response after receiving it, which is both explainable and (somewhat) desirable). HN is about curiosity and novelty, and this is curious indeed.
And, of course, as a truly honest scientist, I will say: it's entirely possible they did find a situation where it occurred. It may be that all my complaining is actually against a legitimate problem. But, to be honest, when all the data is evaluated holistically, it is unlikely that this is a major concern. And the real problem is that somebody is going to go share this with some website that publishes "COVID vaccine causes hepatitus" and then a whole bunch of people won't get vaccinated.
The vast majority of people aren't capable of that. They're usually taking secondary or tertiary sources, as collected by their favorite aggregators. That's not informed consent, regardless of the conclusion they come to.
Intelligent people recognize that they're not surveying the primary literature. They instead have to trust some informed source. That source must, among other things, pick things that inform rather than mislead. It can't feature every scrap of data -- you might as well just go to the primary sources.
So what makes me suspicious is people claiming "censorship", because most of the time it means "here is a thing that confirms my biases, and I'll ignore all of the things that contradict my biases even though I'm not as expert as I imagine I am".
If you want the facts, they're out there on the NIH web site. If you want HN to pick and choose facts for you, then you're welcome to, but do not fool yourself into believing that it informs consent.
I looked into this when I saw that many people were having covid-like adverse reactions to the vaccines. The only thing I found was that when the immune system is activated that collateral damage is possible.