I thought (but don't have a source for this right now) that an additional factor was that the vaccine must accidentally have entered the bloodstream, as opposed to only the muscle (i.e. incorrect administration). This isn't mentioned by the article, so was this not the case?
It can and should happen for any intra-muscular vaccination in similar (very low) rates - it's a medical error when the vaccine is administered (accidentally hitting a small vein inside the muscle), not some property of the vaccine itself.
Are you referring to aspiration vs intravenous injection? I am not a medical doctor, but John Campbell and his presentation of data from Denmark convinced me to ask for aspirated admission of my dose(s). Can't find the presentation rn, unfortunately, but some similar considerations are mentioned here [1]
Oh, I saw a video in 2021 in which a retired doctor/uni. prof. explained AZ complications (it was someone from the UK) were most likely/could be related to how nurses handled the needle and where they stung it. Like, he was concerned about the lack of instructions given to vaccinating squad. I blacked this info out because it was too much of a yet another thing I had to watch for at the time on top of others but for my first booster I had a chat with the nurse about the dosage of the booster and... yeah... better check these kind of things out yourselves, things can go wrong really fast (and mark your legs and operation instructions on your body before going under the scalpel :).
very old dr told me he noticed the techs who gave him his shots failed to follow the best practice he was taught, which is to withdraw the plunger to see if you pull out any blood. If you draw any blood you have hit an artery and need to start over.
His vax people just stuck it in and plunged, no testing.
I’m not in this field at all, but having read a lot of research papers at the time it is my understanding that many countries have revised this recommendation (some even before Covid). It takes additional time, causes significant additional discomfort to patients, requires more training of whoever is administering the vaccines, and does not provide significant benefit. Similarly, it’s no longer commonplace to wipe the arm with alcohol before an injection, yet that was always considered best practice in the not-too-distant past.
when you start asking online commenters to disprove a theory you probably read from another online commenter you may want to re-evaluate how you're consuming information
You could take out the "probably" and replace with "maybe" - just have a look at this very page of comments and it shouldn't take you long to find wildly inaccurate statements or anecdotal -> conclusion type theories.
You could do that, but HN guidelines ask us to assume, and post in, good faith.
Blindly assuming/implying someone didn't get their source from some kind of trustworthy place and then giving them grief for it is not a good faith comment. And it discourages people from asking questions in the future.
OP seems genuinely curious and open to whatever answers they might get. Why be a dick to them?
PF4 was already considered the culprit for a while, but formerly it was thought that negatively loaded DNA activated it.
Incorrect administration is still a risk, but not systemic / wide enough for the clotting cases I guess. And, you'd (1) expect cases to go down over time and (2) see them in mRNA vaccines as well.
So, no, PF4's been consensus for a while, this study gives a probable theory on why PF4 gets activated.
That's a theory that I've seen quite often online, but as far as I could tell there is no evidence at all for it. I also haven't seen this argued from any official sources.
It's a plausible-sounding explanation, that has no data behind it as far as I can tell.
The larger question seems to be the biodistribution of the vaccine in general, not necessarily via bloodstream. From the first study: "We speculate that, following the vaccine administration, lipid nanoparticles containing the vaccine mRNA are carried to mammary glands via hematogenous and/or lymphatic routes."
No, hadn't seen that one! The 2021 consensus seems to be that the amounts detected are so minuscule that there is no cause for concern. I wonder if that's the whole story. I also wonder why there aren't more studies on this.
In the linked report, the organ distribution of the LNPs is given in a table that spans two pages (pages 16-17 of the PDF corresponding to pages 6-7 in the report's internal numbering). After 48 hours, only 24.6% of the lipids from the LNPs in the rodents' doses had remained at the injection site. The liver ended up with 16.2% and the spleen with slightly in excess of 1%. The remainder (nearly 60%) was widely distributed. The table has values for specific organs and tissues.
>Only <1% of the injected mRNA vaccine got into the ovaries, adrenal glands, heart, brain, and other tissues at 48-hour.
>Most of the vaccine remained in the injection site and went into the liver, “suggesting these LNPs may be eliminated mostly via hepatic [liver] clearance route,” Prof. Al-Ahmad wrote.
>the dose the Japanese study used is very high when controlled for weight; that is, 18–35-times higher than what is injected into humans.
>The Japanese biodistribution study results are consistent with Pfizer’s that was submitted to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in February 2021.
>Pfizer also found that the LNP-encapsulated mRNA vaccine was mainly metabolized in the liver and did not enter other tissues easily. They also noted no effects on fertility or ovarian functions.
>For the Moderna mRNA vaccine, the EMA assessment report has previously released its biodistribution data that also finds no cause for concern.
And then the author points out the absence of evidence regarding fertility risks:
>Even if the mRNA vaccines did enter the ovaries in tiny amounts, there’s no evidence that ovarian cells can translate the mRNA into spike proteins. Even if ovarian cells somehow managed to manufacture some spike proteins, there’s no evidence that this can harm the ovaries. Maybe the spike proteins expressed on ovarian cells degrade within hours or days and disappear in a few days. Animal studies have shown that cells that take up the mRNA vaccine only express the mRNA-encoded proteins on its surface for about 48 hours, which then quickly decline to zero in a few days. Thus, multiple stringent biochemical conditions and steps must be met to even allow for the tiniest possibility of mRNA vaccine harming the ovaries or other tissues.
I'm noticing a lot of "may be" / "consistent with" / etc. language in the lines you're quoting. If I'd received an mRNA covid shot, I might find it very comforting, but there's not much there of substance to grab onto.
Quick reactions:
* Less than 1% is not zero. Cells that express mod-spike are destroyed. How much autoimmune-mediated cell death in which locations in your or my body would be enough to kick off a chain of events that leads to a discernable real-world injury or death?
* Al-Ahmad's statement contrasts strongly with the Japanese Pfizer biodistribution study results: 24.6 + 16.2 = less than half at 48 hours.
* I'd love to see the study redone, with a larger number of test animals, at various dosage levels, including human-equivalent. Why did Pfizer use high dosages? Why are high dosages often used in animal studies of new pharmaceutical and other products?
* Where are the EU Pfizer biodistribution study results? WIll someone have to leak them or sue Pfizer or the EU to force their disclosure in the same way that Pfizer tried to delay releasing data in tranches over a period of months rather than in 75 years? Come to think of it, why would Pfizer (and the FDA) want to prevent the public from seeing such information for 75 years. Kinda suspicious.
* Pfizer has been wrong a lot and many things they said would never happen turn out to happen. Remember that the mRNA has been confirmed in breast milk of recently-vaccinated lactating women. This claim also doesn't match the Japanese Pfizer rodent biodistribution results.
* Are the Moderna covid vaccine biodistribution study results public? If so, I'd love to see a link (same for the EU Pfizer biodistribution study). I can't find any sign that such a study was even carried out. In the EMA assessment report from Jan 2021 (https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/assessment-report/spi...), they reference a previous rodent biodistribution study conducted by Moderna for mRNA-1647 (which is for CMV aka Cytomegalovirus, not covid) and the sort of detailed breakdown of biodistribution given in the Japanese Pfizer doc isn't included.
* Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Along with the pronounced spike in all-cause mortality in most nations which saw high penetration of mRNA and adenovirus-vector shots, we've seen a pronounced drop in birthrates. And in some nations, e.g. Scotland, there have been acknowledged increases in neonatal deaths. The authorities there report that the deaths are not due to covid and, without investigating the possibility, not due to maternal vaccination, either (https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23028843.covid-scotland-...). shrug In England, neonatal deaths are being intentionally misclassified as stillbirths (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/16/nhs-logging-baby...). Totally coincidentally, English coroners aren't allowed to investigate stillbirths but can investigate neonatal deaths. What's causing the increased all-cause mortality, drop in birth rates, and tip-of-the-iceberg reports of neonatal deaths? Climate change? Negative cerebral emanations? I look forward to observing the evolving scientific consensus on this and other issues.
And all for a virus that is a minuscule threat to most healthy people who are not extremely old. And none of these vaccines prevent infection or transmission, so trusting The Scienc...
my hat off to the scientists behind this very remarkable work.
so you can't get the clotting without that IGLV3-21*02 gene. now the interesting question here is that, with current tech, is it possible to manufacture very affordable (e.g. cost comparable to those COVID antigen test kits) rapid test kits that can detect such positive IGLV3-21*02 gene. some false positive level is fine, false negative must be very low.
surely people in low income countries who only have access to the AZ vaccine can benefit from such tests if affordable test kits can be made available to local healthcare workers administrating the vaccination.
> surely people in low income countries who only have access to the AZ vaccine can benefit from such tests if affordable test kits can be made available to local healthcare workers administrating the vaccination.
sounds suspiciously like the cost of the additional testing would more than ofset the savings on the vaccine itself
This vaccine isn't even effective any more against modern forms of Covid. Covid mutates multiple times per year. And by and large, low income countries have not been "overwhelmed" by Covid.
I'll add, this study is not comprehensive, there could be other risk factors as well, the other vaccines could have issues, majority of the general population has already contracted Covid at least once, etc etc but some people insist on quadrupling down on dubious mRNA treatments with unknown compounding risks for unknown numbers of people. It's the definition of insanity. It might be worth revisiting alternative therapeutic treatments including monoclonal antibodies and antiviral drugs, rather than continue on this ignorant path. Just a thought.
>low income countries have not been "overwhelmed" by Covid
India was completely devastated by COVID-19.
One reason was that India failed to focus their care on actually vulnerable elderly people and they instead had 30-something dudes demanding intensive care and taking up oxygen cylinders for themselves and their families.
Isn't most of India's population very young (half of it is under 15)? I'm skeptical that the "vulnerable elderly people" had much impact on India's covid story.
Either way, the elderly have already lived their life, isn't it better to focus on the younger people when a choice must be made?
If you had two hard drives and had to destroy one, without knowing what was on them, only how much information they each contained... wouldn't you keep the one with more stored in its memory?
You’re focusing on the memories and experiences of a person, but are completely ignoring the potential to grow, develop, and do things - something that 30-year-olds have, and 90-year-olds pretty much don’t.
>> what good are the kids of tomorrow without the old of today
Worshipping youth in its ignorance and speed while discarding the wisdom of elders is called fascism. The right question would be what can civilization hope to achieve besides a reversion to barbarism and "Lord of the Flies" if it doesn't hold its oldest, most vulnerable and most wise members, and their experience, in the highest regard?
The young have always been proud and disposable. And if they don't die young, they get old. Then maybe they have something more interesting to say.
Wow straight to the fascism argument, nice. I fail to see at all how sacrificing the young and healthy for the old and ill is not fascism, but sacrificing the old and ill for the young is? Isn't a component (not all...) of fascism any sacrifice 'for the good of the nation.' Didn't realise it was so specific.
You're putting the wrong lens on this. My argument is that we are to deliberately harm the young to possibly protect the old and ill (which in this case isn't so as the vaccines don't guarantee prevention), rather than leaving them alone in the hope of protecting the old and ill as-is. Not 'let the old die for the young.'
I agree that india bungled their Covid response royally (though not unexpectedly for me) but what evidence do you have that it was all because of 30-somethings hogging the oxygen cylinders.
I myself predicted there will be a run on oxygen concentrators and had one rented for my mom in case. But when delta hit I couldn’t in good conscience keep it and returned it back to the hospital. I know many rich families did not do that and hoarded cylinders and concentrators like this when people were dying. However I’m not convinced that this was the reason for the massive suffering caused in india. It’s just another facet of the cruelty that happened during this time.
Even if everything stated in western journalism were complete lies, I don't see how that would make the reporting out of autocratic dictatorships any truer.
Do you know anyone in China? Just ask them what life was like for most of zero-CoVID. Most people didn't even know a single person who had gotten infected.
You don't have to arbitrarily trust some authority. Everyone in the country could see from their own experience that spread of the virus really was being effectively controlled.
Depends if you believe everything that comes out of a dictatorship is a lie. How untrue is it? We know it's under-reported, but who do you trust to find the truth?
The question is, do you think it is easier or harder to spot the lies of Western journalism, and what problems does that cause in forming a base to judge others?
Pointing at flaws in Western journalism is a red herring. Using it as a whataboutist talking point is a favorite these days of dictatorships and their apologists.
No, it's not 'the question' whether it's easier or harder to spot the 'lies' of Western journalism. That has no bearing whatsoever on the obvious, cut and dry reason for the underreporting of covid deaths in China.
But it is worth pointing out that, unlike the "news" propaganda organs of dictatorships, Western journalism is in no sense a monolith that speaks with one voice. Not even mainstream media in the US speaks with one voice (because yes, Fox is the MSM too). So while it may require a bit more sophistication to pick out truths, it is at least not a one-sided distortion of history in favor of the rulers.
No, finding the flaws in western journalism takes more effort because it's not as obvious. Which means the rulers can get away with propoganda and manipulation much more easily than one who provides a direct, complete and obvious propoganda.
I think people would be wise to be equally critical of left and right MSM, not just assume they aren't propoganda because they are on different 'sides' (hint, they're not really)
It's a red herring because this article is about reported statistics from country to country. When the media in one relatively free country skews statistics, that is generally reported by opposition media in the same country and in other free countries abroad. Certainly it's right to point out that some "free" media has skewed statistics or parroted an establishment line about covid, and pointing it out is exactly what a free press is for. And if you read news from alternative and European and Latin American outlets as well, you can spot the biases of some MSM reporting in the US. But what is a red herring is pointing out MSM bias in the same breath as Chinese propaganda, presenting it in a context by which it is somehow meant to excuse the total top-down censorship of an unfree press. The attempt to draw draw that equivalence is the favorite tactic of dictatorships. It's not just a matter of detecting lies, but of exposing truth. For instance, the lab leak hypothesis would never have even been mentioned in an unfree press; to simply know that your government is lying via press manipulation only tells you that you don't know anything. It doesn't tell you what they're hiding from you. Yet the American press has shown itself free enough to expose these things, giving one the opportunity to determine what may or may not be true. That opportunity simply doesn't exist in the Chinese media ecosystem.
Sub-Saharan Africa has of course also suffered greatly from SARS-CoV-2, they just have not the means to count their cases. SARS-CoV-2 does not behave differently in Africa than in other regions of the world, especially not in low-vaccination (or even no-vaccination) countries.
«Rather than an ‹African paradox,› the far simpler explanation is that COVID-19 has affected African countries just as the virus has everywhere else, but has gone undocumented.»
In countries with a younger population, less deaths from acute COVID-19 are expected, although the number of additional direct deaths from COVID-19 is still substantial. The disease burden burden, i.e., morbidity, also remains high, maybe even more given the sub-par health infrastructure.
> Sub-Saharan Africa has of course also suffered greatly from SARS-CoV-2, they just have not the means to count their cases.
Of course they do. If they suffered dramatically from Covid, it would be documented, just as it was for Ebola, Malaria, etc.
> SARS-CoV-2 does not behave differently in Africa than in other regions of the world, especially not in low-vaccination (or even no-vaccination) countries.
The statistics for Covid are all over the map with regards to vaccine status [2].
Some countries with high mRNA distributions did well (Canada, Australia). Some countries with high mRNA distributions did not do well (Brazil, US, Russia, Italy, Cuba). Some countries with low mRNA distribution did well (sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, DR, Jamaica, Egypt, Papa New Guinea) [1][2].
> In countries with a younger population, less deaths from acute COVID-19 are expected, although the number of additional direct deaths from COVID-19 is still substantial.
A lot of these countries are showing 50-100 excessive deaths per 100K. That's on par with a bad flu season. Sub-saharan Africa has suffered far worse disease outbreaks than Covid. And unlike Covid, diseases like Malaria affect children [3].
I'm not sure about the monoclonal antibody treatments, but antivirals have much much worse side-effects than vaccinating the entire population, even if we did have one that worked on Covid-19 (which, unlike vaccines, we don't).
By and large, the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines have probably been some of the most extraordinary accomplishments in medicine, with unthinkably low risks given the speed with which they were developed. We took a gamble, but the magnitude of evidence we now have that they are safe is incredible, they are up there with some of the most common OTC medicine.
Fortunately, the vaccines still seem to offer some protection to make sure that vaccinated people are less likely to have a severe form of Covid-19.
The mRNA vaccines drastically reduce severe disease and death in elderly people, it's a really strong and easily observed effect. And they were developed in record time compared to any previous vaccine, so that is certainly a very impressive accomplishment.
Against earlier variants of the virus the vaccines were also very impressive in preventing infections. Far higher than the 50% minimum standard that was set when the development started.
I'm willing to believe the mRNA vaccines have "saved a lot of lives" but there is a study that I haven't yet seen and I'd like to see: compare the number of deaths per hundred thousand in 2022 between the vaccinated and unvaccinated broken down into ten year age groups. 2022 because it's the year that the omicron strain has dominated.
My hypothesis is that there will be no significant difference below 60 and an advantage for the vaccinated above 60, but that's just my guess and I'd like to see this very simple study done.
Curiously they mostly stopped reporting on that this year.
Below 50's were never even close to high risk and as soon as it was known (which was very) the vaccines didn't prevent spread they should have immediately been halted for all low risk age groups.
Ooh yes, googling, the way to get the true and correct data first time, every time.
Unfortunately at this point there is no way to see if the vaccines have actually saved lives because a) they don't stop the virus or its spread, it is not confirmed that the vaccines haven't caused significantly more covid infections by being leaky (look up 'Leaky Vaccines,'[1] or OAS (original antigenic sin)) and they have encouraged high risk behaviour in the false belief the vaccines provide sufficient protection. I mean I don't even see any ads or posters around any more advising on hygiene improvements like not shaking hands, getting out in the sun, eating healthily, look after the weak and elderly, etc. People just take the vaccine as their safety blanket and worse, are signing their kids up for it when they were never a risk vector (until mid-covid the 'science' changed on that).
If you can point me to a study that conclusively shows vaccines absolutely saved lives over the longer term (that aren't based on models full of positive assumptions on efficacy and effectiveness), I'm happy to read it.
Exactly the sort of analysis you're describing was done in Hong Kong this year: [0].
The results are clear: the rate of severe or fatal cases was many times higher for unvaccinated people in all age groups.
For people aged 20-59, three doses (of either mRNA or inactivated virus vaccines) reduced the chance of severe or fatal disease by nearly 99%. Efficacy actually drops with age: for >80-year-olds, there's only a 97% reduction in risk (though because the starting risk is much higher, they get a larger overall benefit).
This was with Omicron, by the way. In an unprotected population, Omicron is still very destructive.
0. "Vaccine effectiveness of one, two, and three doses of BNT162b2 and CoronaVac against COVID-19 in Hong Kong: a population-based observational study", The Lancet Infectious Diseases, July 2022: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(22)00345-0
News from Christmas Eve (Dec 24), Google Translated:
There were 39 new deaths in Hong Kong today, of which
37 died in public hospitals and 2 were reported by
public mortuaries.
There are 37 newly reported deaths of patients infected
with the new coronavirus, including 23 males and 14
females, aged between 50 and 104 years old.
Among the newly reported deceased patients, 14 were
from institutions.
As for vaccination, 5 had no injection information, 3
received 4 left injections, 25 received 3 left
injections, 2 received 2 left injections, and 2
received 1 left injection.
Of the 39 deceased, all of whom were 50+ and 14 of whom were care home residents, only 5 were unvaccinated, 3 had received 4 shots, and 33 of the 39 had received at least 2 shots. That matches or exceeds the vaccination rate for their age demographics.
Without knowing the rate of vaccination in the population (particularly in the elderly population), the data you gave means nothing. Just to illustrate the point, in a fully vaccinated population, every person who dies will be vaccinated.
I cited a study that does a rigorous statistical analysis.
I've shared a typical daily report of covid-attributed deaths and the victims' levels of vaccination and, as I told you, the vaccination levels of those who die of covid are as high or higher than the rates for their age groups.
I'm sure it will be quite easy for you to find data points indicating vaccines are bad. The reason i will nonetheless simply disregard your conclusions and stick to what to me seems to be the scientific consensus is, that it is very hard to actually overcome biases (like motivated reasoning) and the scientific process is the best we have to overcome those.
In other words, please link a study. Or something else i can trust actually wants to get at the bottom of this, not win some argument.
In recent years, you may have noticed that the scientific consensus around covid, starting at the beginning with lab leak vs. "seafood market" and continuing on to the present moment, changes frequently and drastically. Sometimes accompanied by revelations of fraud and dishonesty on the part of trusted public servants and domain experts. Congratulations to you on staving off psychological whiplash amidst all of the consensus-flipping.
If your response to being shown government-announced covid deaths with details of the vaccination levels of the deceased (available on a daily basis from that and other news outlets) and, for comparison, age-bracketed vaccination levels reported by the same government is that you want to be shown a study, then I suspect what you truly want is reassurance or reaffirmation of your current set of beliefs rather than a grasp of what's currently going on.
Ofc consensus changes. Based on new data. That's how it is supposed to work.
> If your response to being shown government-announced covid deaths [..]
Well, that's what you are trying to promote. That you linked some raw data, not a conclusion-statement from this government, is all i need to know. I'm not calling you a liar. I just assume there to be another angle you might be missing (the motivated reasoning part), but this is something for experts in the respective area. And if not, it will change consensus accordingly. Unless, ofc, you believe in some grad conspiracy of all the governments all around the world. I don't.
The AZ vax is not an mRNA vaccine. In fact the entire point of this article is that the adenovirus vehicle in the AZ vax is the culprit.
When all is said and done, the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna) saved a lot of lives. Moreover they showed that the technology is safe and viable, so expect to see a lot more of that type of in-body, self assembling vaccine for everything from influenza to cancer in the next decade. Of course any formula can have unwanted side effects, whether it's generated in your body or not, but doing nothing and waiting to see how a virus treats you isn't safe, either. You could get pretty fucked up either way, but you're less likely to get fucked up from the vax, and less likely to get fucked up from covid if you had the vax. There's risk in everything. Do the math and take the route with best survival rate. In this case, even the AZ vax was a clear winner over getting covid unvaccinated in 2021.
It would be helpful if you made specific citations for empirical work. This isn't the kind of question that is benefitted by reasoning from first principles.
This makes no sense, the AstraZeneca vaccine isn’t an mRNA formulation but rather a vector vaccine (genetic material from the COVID-19 virus is placed in a modified version of a different virus—the vector—which gets into your cells and delivers genetic material that gives your body’s cells instructions to make copies of the S protein).
The mRNA vaccines worked to improve immunity and reduce the effects once infected; and to your point about mutations, the mRNA encoding the spike can be modified accordingly as this is a very quick and scalable method of delivery.
Given the hundreds of millions of people that have received mRNA vaccines I think generally we have an understanding of their safety.
The only insanity I see is people still now trying to deny vaccine efficacy, either as government conspiracy theories or through poor scientific understanding.
> Given the hundreds of millions of people that have received mRNA vaccines I think generally we have an understanding of their safety.
The conclusion does not follow from the premise.
Five months following a covid infection in which I had 4-6 weeks of neurological deficit, I received the bivalent mRNA booster, which seemed to somehow reactivate the neurological issues for a few days or a week. Doctors told me this is not uncommon.
These are not "safe" in the same way we mean that MSG or acetaminophen are "safe".
Corners were necessarily cut in the trials of these during development to accelerate time to market. They saved lives, the gamble paid off. But the trial protocols are in place for a reason and we do not fully understand these drugs as yet.
> dubious mRNA treatments with unknown compounding risks for unknown numbers of people
If that was the case, after 100s of millions of doses given out shouldn’t these have surfaced in sufficient numbers?
Sorry about your condition, but there’s nothing there that suggests it is related to the mRNA formulation; you could just as easily experienced the same with a viral vector formulation or even without any booster (long covid, if that’s what you had, is not without relapses)
Development corners were not cut, that’s the point of the mRNA formulation, it is incredibly faster than conventional methods to create a brand new product. I assume what you meant was the regulatory requirements for safety, which yes were accelerated and reduced because of the emergency use case. Two years ago. Those trials are tests on large populations , phase 3 being the largest then phase 4 a post-marketing surveillance period [0].
No, we don't have an understanding of their safety. Have you not noticed how most of the data is not even reported on now and near all previous studies stopped at three months? Even the study on interrupted menstrual cycles stopped at three months with 27% of participants still experiencing an interrupted cycle.
> Have you not noticed how most of the data is not even reported on now and near all previous studies stopped at three months?
No, I haven’t noticed this. Do you mean reported in the media? I was never looking there for safety trial results. Do you mean in journals? Then that’s the just wrong—as is the claim that they stop at 3 months. You can look up phase 4 trials, for instance [0]:
> In addition to the standard ongoing (phase 4) trials, people who took part in the phase 3 trials of approved vaccines are continuing to be followed up (up to 2 years after their second dose) to collect more data – for example on safety, asymptomatic infection, and how long protection from the vaccines lasts.
Even the original BioNTech(Pfizer) clinical trial reports it’s methodology of surveying serious side effects for up to 6 months after second dose, which makes it a 7+ month study overall [1]
I mean the UK stopped reporting vaxxed vs unvaxxed back in May and I believe they've also stopped or reduced reporting on birth rates. There are other reports that have stopped but I'd have to go digging to grab them again.
That Pfizer trial ended at 3.5 months because 97% of the control group got vaccinated.
By design, the modified spike proteins created in a vaccinated person's cells from mRNA and adenovirus-vector shots remain anchored within the cells but protrude through their cell membranes so that they can be readily "seen" by the person's immune system.
What do you think happens to the cells in question? That they live out the remainder of their lifespans unmolested? They are destroyed.
Much of the promise of safety at the outset rested on the belief that the contents of the vaccine doses would remain localized at the injection site (muscle in the arm in most places afaik, but the jabs are also given to some people in some places in their thighs). For the mRNA covid vaccines, at least, we know that the doses do not stay in the arm but travel throughout the body and even, in some cases, into breast milk. When the data about dissemination of the mRNA shots contents began to raise alarm bells, there was a period where some medical professionals blamed it on a failure to aspirate the needle before injecting and hoped that those who'd been injured had simply been unlucky and the person administering their dose had hit a blood vessel.
We've gone from, at the beginning, recognizing that wide distribution of the mod-spike-producing covid vaccine dose contents throughout the body was dangerous but believing that it wouldn't be an issue (because we're administering into muscle tissue in the arm) to knowing that the dose doesn't stay in the arm but completely forgetting why we hoped that it would stay there in the first place.
I’d like to see some credible sources for your claims, because it seems we’ve done no such thing.
Even if trace amounts are found, they are no longer functional [0]. And it’s important to consider the percent of dosage when looking at biodistribution post injection, not just the amount of lipids [3], so it’s really much less significant amounts found outside the site of injection. Most is taken care of via hepatic clearance.
UTR sequences, which regulate transcription and sub cellular localization, can be tailored for specific cell types [1].
There is no evidence of spike protein toxicity [2]. And while the covid spike protein has potential to cause damage for example to the cells lining the small vessels of the heart following infection, there is no evidence that this is also the case with vaccinations [4]
You have countless cells that are destroyed on a daily basis, something like a million per second. I don’t understand your point obsessing over cells being killed for expressing the spike proteins, it’s less than a drop in the ocean.
China is currently amidst an explosion of covid cases and deaths. Outside the first tier cities, China is still a low income country. If you look at the excess deaths numbers across nations, you will see that some kept good records, while some did not. The deaths reported through official channels are about 1/3rd of excess deaths. There is plenty of room for official reports to understate deaths, which makes it tempting for incompetent governments to minimize failures.
the study said that the 5 patients with VITT that they looked at had the IGLV3-21 * 02 polymorphism, but it's a fallacy to say that means that you can't get clotting without it
Or just stop taking the vaccines because at this point they are doing nothing if not making things worse for most of the populations (look at New York considering its Vax rate for instance). Problem solved.
At the same time, there’s more than enough signal that we’ve done an intentionally terrible job looking into adverse effects, intentionally so because if the data isn’t there, it’s hard to demonstrate liability. On top of that there have been numerous examples of anyone trying to apply the null hypothesis being intentionally smeared or discredited because applying the null hypothesis was essentially against public policy for the vaccines. The way things have been handled have been less than honest. I know several people who have had issues after taking the vaccine. My father died like 2 months after his second Pfizer vaccine shot and at the time we didn’t do an autopsy because he had a bad ticker and it didn’t seem necessary. In the time since, I’ve learned enough to regret not requesting an autopsy to check if side effects from the vaccine had not been a contributing factor to him passing away sooner.
800 is much less than the 6.7 million that died of Covid-19. This is a mathematical fact, not some opinion. And 6.7 million is just the number of confirmed Covid-19 deaths - the real number is likely between 16-28 million given the excess deaths after 2020.
Note that all people ultimately die of a single cause of death: cardio-respiratory stop - whether they had cancer, Covid-19, obesity, were hit by a car, were sawed in half by a murderer. So just as you can say "they died with Covid-19, not of Covid-19", I can say that "they died with pulmonary cancer, not of pulmonary cancer". People who had Covid-19 at the time of death were killed, to some extent at least, by Covid-19 (if we exclude violent deaths, which every country did). I would bet you good money that at least some of the 8 people who died of the AZ vaccine blood clotting disorder had other co-morbidities, so your argument anyway applies to them as well. Not to mention, again, there are far more people who died of Covid-19 but weren't tested and are not part of the official counts.
I will state this again: by the exact same measure we use for this type of statistic for every disease, and taking only the deaths with confirmed Covid-19, it has killed about as many people as obesity (2.8 million/year), and has killed more people than pulmonary cancer (1.8 million/year), tuberculosis (1.5 million/year), AIDS (650k/year), malaria (670k/year), breast cancer (680k/year), prostate cancer (300k/year), and so many others.
And whatever deaths can be attributed to the vaccines we know work with extraordinary evidence, those deaths are not even a fraction of a percent of how many people Covid-19 has killed. And, again, they also include many many people with co-morbidities, just like the Covid-19 numbers.
" Mabye based on tuned "died with antibodies" gov stats and when comparing to this single issue."
Prove it
"There's been more than enough deaths"
Prove it
"from fake vaccine to initiate lawsuits against Big Pharma "
Starting and a lawsuit doesn't require evidence nor is it a sign of guilt.
"Big Gov. Florida has started investigating"
Starting an investigation doesn't is prove anything especially when the vaccine is political and Ron Desantis is a Republican.
"other states are sure to follow in '23."
Based on what?
"The issue of blod clots has been known for many months and governments continued"
Risk compared to dangers of Covid
"to force fake "vaccines" on employees and even contractors."
I thought the issue was the blood clots but now you are stating without evidence the vaccine is fake. Come on.
Finally, I can't believe that people like you have finally seeped into Hackernews, a community I normally consider being populated by more logical and educated people compared to the general population.
My neighbour died of blood clotting and heart complications that only ever showed up after AZ vaccines.
As in, fine for years,
AZ vaccine, into monthly hospital trips and complications,
Then finally a fatal heart attack at around the 1.5 year mark after the vaccine (iirc).
The dead is ruled as heart complications, but they only ever shown up after the vaccine. So it's difficult to say that the vaccine killed her if it's technically the heart complications.
If she never got the vaccine she probably would have been fine, but then again she could've eaten something spicy and had another heart attack. Who knows
I would be very wary for correlation without actual cause. Can you disregard stress for instance? You think there is cause but that does not mean there is any.
Generally impossible to pin down the cause for an individual, but a trend can be seen from looking at the whole population.
However any statistical analysis will have confounding variables (in this case, negative health effects of the virus itself, and the lockdowns etc.). Similarly with Chernobyl (the effects of the evacuations, and the general collapse of the Soviet Union around that time both had severe negative health effects). So basically any population level analysis of death rates etc. is always a bit dubious - how to tell one cause from another?
In the case of Chernobyl we already knew radioactive contamination is harmful (from previous experience). We know the AZ vaccine has certain potential complications (statistically). But it's impossible to pin down the cause for any given medical case.
> It's like if someone gets cancer after Chernobyl.
I don't think this metaphor will hold up because both Covid infections and vaccines present an increased chance of myocarditis, the former at a higher rate.
Cause and effect for any disease is pretty hard to pin down because of the astronomical amount of variables.
There are many possible causes of cancer, just as there are many possible causes of heart inflammation. It's easier in this case as there are fewer variables than for cancer, and more data on exposure to the various potential factors. Still a total minefield though, in terms of confounding variables. We know for sure which people got the vaccine, but we don't know exactly who got the virus (and, possibly importantly, when they got it and which variant). This also confuses things.
The kind of thing that often would come up in clinical trials
I’m glad people are researching this and other peculiarities from all angles, I got a lot of dismissive comments in 2021 about an opportunistic pathogen being a culprit for some issues
but the dismissiveness was paradoxical “scientists didn't study that so they must have ruled it out, stop fearmongering”
people didn't like the idea that there could be a parallel infection going around
Note that the study didn't find any opportunistic infection. It found that the immune response in people who had the blood clot problem suggests that they have previously been infected with some pathogen that happens to resemble the adenovirus vector used by AZ:
> That [the very quick progression of the blood clotting issue] suggested, Gordon said, their immune systems had already experienced this strange combination of adenovirus and PF4 – or something that looked a lot like it.
I think its fine to talk about ideas that may have been overlooked
In the past the same issue has occurred and it took years or nearly a decade to discover multi-variable components to ailments, let alone discover the new virus or bacteria
“Hey has anyone considered how this looks exactly like this other issue, is anybody putting resources into that”
“I don’t want to think about that so do you have any evidence!?”
its paradoxical, the people that would acquire the evidence are doing something else, more reactionary
You're right, and this was unfortunate. However, I think this is closely related to the nature of modern online discussions where this kind of oversensitivity to perceived "hostile" information is met with an unreasonably forceful response by either side.
First of all the neutral facts: all the major Western vaccines were immensely helpful to soften the impact of COVID on our societies. Some turned out better than others, mRNA vaccines proved to be the major breakthrough that scientists expected. None of the vaccines are without issues (blood clots, myocarditis etc.) but they are significantly better than the consequences of millions of unprepared COVID infections without prior immunization (Long COVID/Post-Viral Syndrome, long-term hospital stays, death, overwhelmed healthcare systems...).
Some folks and especially health institutions were calmly discussing and weighing benefits vs. costs and risk. But on the public side, online discussions once again moved into opposing "teams" which seemingly happens to a lot of political/culture war discussions:
- Team A were staunch supporters of getting everyone everywhere immediately vaxxed with no room left for discussion at all, not even on the scientific level
- Team B was spreading misinformation to spread unfounded fear and hate against the vaccines based on insane conspirational theories and easily dismissed bullshit information
- Team C was the rather silent but very large majority that was rather supportive of the vaccines but just kind of apathetic, never really getting into heated discussions about it online or offline, just doing whatever needed to be done.
While A and B represent the extremes, what's interesting to me about Team B is that it appeared as a minority in the population when actually looking at polls or protests [1]. But online they were way louder, amplified actually, to a degree that is really notable. And this is, in my view, often the case in online discussions.
I think it's also safe to say the opponents (Team B) were not rarely fueled by foreign agents to further instigate the culture wars in both Europe and the US, thereby politically weakening and destabilizing the countries from within. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if the very strong supporters were influenced just as much because in order to fuel a divide you may need to prop up both sides.
> people didn't like the idea that there could be a parallel infection going around
That sounds like fearmongering though.
This is a combination of at least two (if not more) unlikely factors happening in the same person. One of the is prior exposure to a pathogen, one of them is having the right kind of gene, and this study can't rule out other additional factors.
The pathogen is likely to be something which has been with the human race for thousands of years, not anything novel to the human race like SARS-CoV-2.
There's no point in trying to change your behavior to avoid trying to contact this other pathogen.
The pathogen may also be something incredibly common, but other accidental factors conspire to produce this exact antibody.
> AstraZeneca’s vaccine remains in use in Australia, but official health advice is to opt for Pfizer or Moderna if you’re under 60. But AstraZeneca continues to be distributed, particularly in low-income countries.
Interesting thing of note here: I keep reading this. Even the Wikipedia page on AstraZeneca suggests that it’s still used in many European countries. In Austria (where I live) while if’s technically possible to vaccinate with it, you absolutely will not be able to get it. It hasn’t been stocked for more than a year and a half. It has been effectively suspended since and everyone who got it, was boosted with one of the MRNA vaccines instead.
I would like to understand why the reporting on in (including the Wikipedia page) is so reluctant to mention the effective suspension of it.
I’m not familiar with the situation in Australia but I would be quite surprised if it’s still in use.
Meanwhile they rolled the dice and decided that Moderna is no longer available for 6 years and up, but remains available for children aged 6 months to <6 years.
Ah. That makes more sense then. The European numbers on the manufacturers are on ourworldindata and you can see there that it's effectively unused beyond July/December of 2021 (some refreshes were still made with it in December): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-vaccine-doses-by-ma...
I am not sure how you are reading this. The dose count across the entire EU in July 2022 for Astrazeneca is 67.18 Million doses in both July 2022 as well as December 2022. It has been at 67.17 Million at the beginning of 2022. In Austria the dose count for Astrazeneca is unchanged since September 2021.
I'm not here to judge the vaccine, at least in Europe it's fact that Astrazenca is not used any more for more than a year (except for really, really rare cases) and yet there has not been a note on this in Wikipedia.
Because giving people useful things generally does them good rather than harm, and doing people good isn't unethical just because you could have done them more good at greater cost?
Because if you are poor then buying more of something cheaper, rather than less of something more expensive, isn't unethical?
Poorer countries tend to have worse everything. Smaller houses. Less robust cars. Fewer doctors. Bumpier roads. Worse internet access. Worse schools. That's what being poorer means. It seems to me that whatever ethical problems there are here aren't in the fact that poorer countries are using a cheaper and probably less effective COVID-19 vaccine, but in the fact that some countries are much poorer than others in the first place.
The oath is "Do no harm." Unloading a "procedure" that's unacceptable in The First World on other markets is unethical. We're not talking about cars, etc.
There's no shortage of alternatives. There's no lack of manufacturing capavity. Etc. All there is is shoddy rationalization that the poor get what they deserve.
Pray you're never on the wrong side of such ethics.
First of all, a disclaimer: I am not a COVID-19 expert and my understanding might be out of date. Accordingly, I am not certain that the AZ vaccine still provides sufficient protection against current variants of SARS-CoV-2 for that benefit to outweigh the very small risk of side effects. I am pretty sure it does, though. If I am wrong about that, then I agree that giving people the AZ vaccine is no longer to their benefit, and none of what follows is applicable any longer (though it would have been in the recent past when the AZ vaccine definitely was net helpful even if slightly less so than the mRNA vaccines).
Giving someone who would otherwise go unvaccinated a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine is not doing them harm: it makes them less likely to get a severe case of COVID-19.
Vaccination with the AZ vaccine is only "unacceptable in The First World" in the sense that a better alternative is available if you don't mind paying the higher prices.
Most people's (and communities', and religions', and ...) ethical systems do not hold that it is unethical to do something that benefits someone unless what you are doing is the most beneficial thing you could possibly do, regardless of the cost to you.
I think it is a good thing that they don't, because that would mean e.g. that if you have the capacity to manufacture an effective COVID-19 vaccine in large quantities then you are obliged to provide it to everyone in the world for free, and if that requirement were in place then it would be a disincentive for any company that prefers not going out of business to develop that capacity, and that would be bad for everyone.
Without looking at the actual relevant numbers (how much it costs Pfizer or Moderna to make a given number of doses, how much it cost them to develop the vaccines, the costs of distribution, etc.) I don't have a definite opinion on whether (e.g.) wealthy Western governments have been much less generous than they should have been; I strongly suspect that they have. But you are not saying "they should have been more generous", they are saying "no one should be using the AZ vaccine for anything", and if the AZ vaccine is cheaper than alternatives then I think that's just plain wrong.
But maybe I am misunderstanding what you're claiming. What, specifically, do you think should have been done instead of what has actually been done? If it's more expensive than what was actually done, who should have paid? And, if the answer is anything less than "provide everyone in the world, for free, with the best available COVID-19 vaccine, regardless of cost", why are you confident that your proposal is better than one that uses the lower price of the AZ vaccine to provide more doses of that in preference to fewer doses of more expensive ones?
It is not my opinion that "the poor get what they deserve". I see no reason to think that any such belief is responsible for the fact that some poorer countries are using the AZ vaccine. If you disagree, then I would like to see some evidence rather than mere indignation.
The Prime Minister of Australia at the time signed up to AZ as our eggs in one basket vaccine. Also, because we were in heavy lockdown, we were virtually COVID-free for a long time meaning we were de-prioritised in allocation. Double-whammy, and so people from 30-and-over got AZ as their primary (and only vaccine).
... tl;dr: Australia was heavy AZ because of politics
My first reaction was “wow, what?” - but after reading the link you provided, it seems this was a plan B and a safeguard in case actual ministers would get sick.
“Mr Morrison only used the powers of his appointments once: to refuse an application for a petroleum exploration licence, PEP-11, using powers as head of the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.”
Thanks for giving the link but please don’t overexaggerate :)
The two specific parts that made this beyond the pale are:
* this was done in complete secrecy, no one was told, not even the Ministers whose portfolios he assumed the powers of,
* this was unneccesary and a very poor "backup plan" to have one single person be the only person that was "pre approved" with multiple normally silo'd powers.
This was both a first and a last, rules are being rewritten to prevent this kind of behaviour in the future.
Anecdotes don't add much to the discussion, I could truthfully write the exact opposite, I have no medical expertise whatsoever though:
I would say the vaccine injection wasn't behind the blood clots. I choose to have it. Guess what? Life went on just the same as before. Who would have thought it?
"I keep driving without seatbelts and nothing bad happened - who would have thought it?"
"I chose to not buy insurance and nothing bad happened"
Despite not wearing seatbelts or having insurance, nothing negative occurred in these situations. However, this does not mean that these were good decisions. Even if nothing bad happens, it is still a risky choice. The same goes for not getting vaccinated. Just because nothing negative happens does not mean it was a wise decision.
Yep, people fail to understand that life is not a zero sum game. You not risking the vaccine doesn’t give you 0 risk, it exposes you to the multiple orders of magnitude bigger risk of a severe COVID infection. Going for lower risk is the vaccine.
> I would say the vaccine injection was behind the blood clots.
I don't think I've heard this theory before. Are you saying the delivery via injection was somehow the cause of blood clots and that another delivery method would have avoided them?
Their theory is "the AZ vaccine causes clotting problems in people who (a) have some particular relatively common gene, and (b) have previously been exposed to a pathogen that is similar from their immune system's point of view to the adeno-virus that was used a vector". Point b means that the pathogen is something these people have been exposed to in the past: the only trace is the immune response that got reactivated, so identifying which particular pathogen it was is not easy.
Viral pathogens are extremely hard to find. When we test for viruses in the human body we look for the antibodies because to get enough virus material to recognise it is extremely hard. Viruses hide inside our cells and stay there dormant slowly creeping and expanding throughout the body when they aren't in an acute phase of infection. You need tissue samples and then RNA testing to find them, its expensive and extremely invasive and has a high chance of finding nothing unless you are testing the right place.
This has been a big problem with chronic illnesses. Even now despite the US military having great indicative data that EBV causes MS there hasn't been much luck in finding the virus in sufferers bodies, just the antibodies and the usual profile of cytokines associated with the viruses presence. Only recently Dr Bhupesh Prusty found EVB and HHV6 in the autopsy of 3 ME/CFS patients brains and none in controls strongly suggesting a viral cause for the disease but its not a test we could do on a live person and they never found these viruses in the patients fluids when they were alive.
Everything I've read suggests that the myocarditis associated with the vaccines is rarely more than a passing nuisance, and that the rate of myocarditis associated with catching the virus without being vaccinated is higher in the same age groups.
Do you have any evidence to base your statement on?
Before covid vaccines came around, if a doctor said to you "don't worry, that myocarditis is just a passing nuisance," what would your response have been?
Or put another way, if you had this from covid itself and someone said to you "oh myocarditis is just a passing nuisance side effect of covid," how would you respond?
I would say "Thank you for reassuring me that even though this is a problem affecting my heart, which on the face of it sounds super-scary, it actually isn't all that threatening". (Well, probably I wouldn't be so explicit, and probably I would first ask some questions about what they meant by "passing nuisance". And I might be annoyed that a medical professional treating me was using dismissive-sounding language about something I found distressing, but obviously that particular annoyance isn't relevant when it's Some Guy On The Internet talking about it in the abstract.)
What if you knew myocarditis could have a risk of complications and your doctor said that? Wouldn't you prefer the doctor said 'generally it's temporary and will go away, but there are some potential complications and you should monitor for the following...' You shouldn't have to ask questions for that.
The way people are now happily accepting hand-waving away heart damage because someone said 'hey it's fine' is astonishing. I do truly hope it is a mostly transient issue, because we haven't done the long term studies yet.
Of course I would prefer my doctor to give me an accurate account of what's wrong with me and what its likely consequences are.
We are talking here about some guy in a brief Hacker News comment, talking to some other guy on Hacker News. The level of detail it's reasonable to demand is not the same in these two cases.
Looking at the "Controversial articles" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports does not give me much confidence in the rigorousness of "Scientific Reports"'s review process.
What do you think it would be reasonable to expect me to have, if in fact the article is wrong or dishonest in some way?
I am not a virologist or cardiologist or any other sort of medic. I have not gone to Israel and interviewed the people they worked with. I am guessing the same is true of you.
So what can I do? I can look at whether the authors seem reputable (answer: probably? -- the corresponding author for this paper seems to be somewhat conspiracy-theory-ish on this particular topic, but since the question at issue is roughly speaking whether he's found an actual conspiracy that doesn't seem like a good reason to dismiss what he says). I can look at whether the journal seems reputable (answer: not incredibly so, it seems to be publishing quite a lot of junk). I also note that there's a note attached to the paper saying that something about it is disputed and they're still discussing with the relevant parties; that could indicate a real problem or it could just indicate that anything to do with COVID-19 vaccines is likely to provoke controversy.
I could also read the paper. But, again, I am not an expert in this field; if it looks good, I could easily be missing subtle errors (accidental or deliberate); if it looks bad, I could easily be missing subtle reasons why the things that look wrong to me are actually right.
My reaction to a quick look at the paper, as a mathematician who doesn't know much about vaccines or viruses or cardiac arrests: I'm not going to try to redo their analysis, but the graphs suggest that if there's anything here it probably isn't much; the matchup they say they see between vaccination and emergency-service calls for cardiac arrests is not obviously any bigger than the random noise in the latter. Maybe sufficiently clever analysis can make it clear whether it's signal or noise, but figuring out whether their analysis is sufficiently clever (and sufficiently robust, and done correctly) seems like way more work than I am interested in doing on this.
(Also: even if the most alarming conclusions anyone could draw from the data are correct, the number of adverse events here is still really small compared with, say, the number of deaths from COVID-19. The paper chooses to describe it as "a 25% increase" but that's from a baseline of "hardly any". The fatality rate of COVID-19 would need to be a lot lower than it is (even for the age group they're looking at, where it's relatively low) for this effect, even if real, to make the vaccinations a bad idea. Of course it's still an interesting question whether getting vaccinated against COVID-19 can cause heart trouble, and if so how, and if so whether there are ways to make it happen less. And it might (though it's not altogether obvious[1]) be worth warning people getting vaccinated to be on the lookout for signs of myocarditis. Reminder: you posted this link in response to something asking for evidence that myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination is "a much, much bigger problem" than blood clotting after adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccination. It doesn't look to me as if the numbers bear that out even if the effect claimed in this paper is entirely real.)
[1] Because giving this sort of warning may increase stress, which is also not great for your heart.
These 444 cases of blood clots are after an estimated 24.9 million first [Astrazeneca] doses, and 24.2 million second doses of the vaccine in the UK. Of the 444 people who developed blood clots, 80 died. Six of these deaths occurred after the second dose.
Up to 23 November 2022, there were 554 suspected cases of myocarditis or pericarditis reported in the 18 to 29 age group following the vaccine. This is an average rate of 31 reports per million doses.
In the 30 to 39 age group, there were 470 cases suspected cases of myocarditis or pericarditis reported in the same time period. This is an average rate of 27 reports per million doses.
Studies looking at myocarditis and pericarditis after the vaccine have not found any increased risk of death or cardiac arrest, compared with being unvaccinated. A large study of 4 million vaccinated people in Denmark, published in the BMJ found there were no deaths or diagnoses of heart failure in people who were diagnosed with myocarditis or pericarditis after being vaccinated.
A higher rate of myocarditis in the highest risk groups compared to blood clotting, but there is a more than an order of magnitude difference in the severity of blood clotting vs Myocarditis. In addition, blood clotting from the Astrazeneca Vaccine is thought to be incidental to immune response development, while Myocarditis with all covid vaccines is related to the strength of the immune response and is also a symptom of COVID-19.
you should really re-evaluate your ability to determine what is reliable and factual information if you are sharing that link. Blows my mind that so many people who point to VAERS as evidence still have no understanding whatsoever of what VAERS is.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is jointly-run by the US FDA and CDC established by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (the same legislation that transferred liability for vaccine injuries from drug manufacturers to US taxpayers through federal funding of vaccine injury compensation) and is one of a handful of tools for monitoring vaccine safety.
The greatest concern with regards to VAERS has been underreporting. A HHS-commissioned study (PDF available here: https://digital.ahrq.gov/ahrq-funded-projects/electronic-sup...) found, about a decade ago, that "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."
So, no, VAERS is not some conspiracy theory website and was created at the same time that vaccine manufacturers were relieved of legal liability for injuries and deaths caused by their products. It's a government-run system for identifying vaccine safety signals that, if anything, suffers from underreporting. Any entity or any individual seeking to discredit VAERS with nebulous handwavery in the absence of a workable, running alternative is engaging in extremely dubious, vaccine-safety denialism.
Of course it isn't. However, it is raw data, and it takes careful analysis to separate the signal from the noise.
Most of the reported events are not caused by vaccines. VAERS is meant to be used as a tool for identifying possible rare vaccine side-effects. If a pattern emerges in VAERS reports, then there is further study.
As the FDA explains,[0]
> VAERS reports generally cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. Some events may occur coincidentally after the administration of a vaccine while others may in fact be caused by a vaccine. As a result, if a safety signal is found in VAERS, further studies can be conducted in safety systems such as the CDC's Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), or the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) project. These systems do not have the same limitations as VAERS and can better assess health risks and possible connections between adverse events and a vaccine.
What will be forgotten in this discussion (and in history) is how awful humans are at predicting and reacting to risk.
It's hard to peer through the layers of emerging science and virology, psychology and sociology, policymaking and politics, media and information theory... to find the truth of a thing like COVID.
Oh many of us are pretty good at assessing risk. Specially being observant of the security theater that has been so heavily increased since Sept 11 2001 but what happened in relation to covid and communications since 2020 was pretty much an extremely effective suppression of any dissenting view to the local authority forces/government pushed narrative.
It was not about science or credentials. Wrongthink was not allowed and people were made believe they were fringe minorities by simply turning up censoring to very high levels.
People really hate being killed. Like 100x more than just dying. It's why you can win elections by fear-mongering crime or terrorism but not disease, auto safety or disaster preparedness.
Active vs passive deaths is important in people’s minds. People act like all these passive things are simply endemic to “reality” when many are side effects of lack of collective action such as climate change, bad transportation infrastructure / zoning, poverty, etc.
My guess is that 80% are good at assessing risk, but most of us are either born or raised to be compliant, so this assessment doesn't relate well to outcomes.
Using the grandparent's 9/11 TSA analogy - talk to literally anyone - the vast majority of people will openly acknowledge that TSA screening is pure security theatre, but they accept and go through it anyway. You'll find the same thing regarding the Epstein suicide, domestic spying apparatus, etc. Most people know and accept statistically likely truth, but they play along because compliance makes for a more comfortable life.
A common mental model seems to be if perceived risk (possibility of harm) is low relative to other risks, take no actions to improve safety (freedom from risk).
My model is if extreme harm is remotely possible, I ignore comparisons to other risks and take action to help limit it to minor harm (e.g. don't text while driving, wear a seat belt, wear a hard hat on a skyscraper building site, etc.).
But "take action to increase safety" creates a combination of challenges for the average person:
(1) Most people don't change easily ("Taking action" means change);
(2) Most people underestimate the likelihood that the near future will be different than the present, that change will be thrust upon them;
(3) Most people don't recognize that they don't change easily, or that they underestimate the likelihood of near-term change.
(4) Very few realize that changing behavior overlaps with a lot of performance-related skills, some of which are poorly understood by virtually everyone.
I have coached ten of thousands of sessions teaching voice acting, and I find that people attempting performance get stuck between stages 1 and 2 in the “Four Stages of Competence”:
People think that if they've simply been given information and received coaching, that it somehow magically imbues them with special performance powers, yet they haven't:
(1) Turned information into knowledge.
(2) Applied knowledge to build skill.
(3) Practiced skills to build awareness.
So when people making an effort and paying to achieve change still fail at most steps for implementing change, I think there are a number of blind spots making it very difficult for people to really understand what safety is, because it's hidden behind "life performance" issues. Just my two cents.
You might ask if I am simply a poor coach, and if better coaches get better results—maybe it's not an "other people" problem, but more a problem with my perceptions and approaches.
There is a saying among some in our industry: "Once you get an agent, you lose your talent". (https://AcademyofVoiceover.com) This is due to newly trained talent no longer applying skills they have learned, due to believing that having had their training affirmed by getting an agent makes their performance "automatically high quality".
There is a similar statement commonly found on websites of acting coaches, that goes something like "I'm one of the best coaches of my acting method, and I know this because I get the students of other coaches teaching my method and they haven't learned the method well". Of course statements along the lines of "others are bad, I alone am good" usually overlook many things.
So in my experience, even trainers and producers of performers have a blind spot to some of the challenges in creating change in even people who are motivated to change.
I really liked your comment, it was very interesting to read. I appreciate you, internet stranger.
My pet hypothesis is that:
1: (Some) People are terrified of death.
2: Death is in the future.
3: The future means change, people reject change and the future.
4: Rejecting the future, people embrace their past.
5: Memories of the past are simple. The past does not change.
6: Change is bad, because it brings to mind the future, and death.
The above doesn't explain or really take into consideration future planning, like "if we won the lottery", or "let's settle down and have kids, a house, pets, hobbies together and apart. Let's create a home." The fear of death certainly seems to loom larger as one ages.
I try not to be afraid of death. I do freely admit I have trouble with a future that I don't get to see, I would love to be able to experience thousands of years of awareness, to see what happens next. I never want the story to end, and I'm never satisfied with "and they lived happily ever after."
Looking at the numbers mentioned and thinking rationally of risk, the deaths from the reaction to AZ despite the scale of the vaccination program are negligible compared to deaths from COVID itself, to the extent that this amount of discussion over this is comparatively an overreaction.
My observation is that people's personal views on the matter depend not so much on statistics, but personal experience: how bad was their COVID, whether they had taken the vaccine or not when they fell ill, what kinds of symptoms they developed afterwards, whether they know some people who died from COVID or sudden heart condition some time after COVID or taking the vaccine etc.
The advantage of using micromorts is that they're units that can be added and directly compared. As a populace, we tend to be rather bad at doing fractions and percents - things like mpg - going from 34 to 50 mpg is less of a savings than having a vehicle go from 18 to 28 mpg for the same distance traveled.
Consider the problem: you must either do X (1/200 chance of death) or YZ (Y has 1/300 chance of death, Z has 1/300 chance of death).
Reworded this becomes: you must either do X (5 micromorts) or YZ (Y is 3.3 micromorts, Z is 3.3 micromorts). And now you've got things that are easier to compare and work with in a scale that we can think about. Most people are doing things on the scale of 0 to 20 micromorts. The more adventurous are doing things that get up to 100 or so. The thrill seekers go up from there.
Those numbers aren't really comparable, because the meaningful decision you can make is between "getting vaccinated" and "not getting vaccinated". If you don't get vaccinated, you still might not contract COVID, and if you do contract it, the chances are pretty good that it won't be severe enough to ever be diagnosed by a doctor. So that 1000 micromorts is estimated from a subset of people whose outcomes were significantly worse than average.
I still think it's almost certain that, for a typical healthy person, getting the vaccine is by far the safer choice. (And that's before we even start worrying about non-fatal outcomes such as long COVID.) But the difference is probably a lot less than the 3 orders of magnitude you're suggesting.
> If you don't get vaccinated, you still might not contract COVID
My understanding is at this point very nearly everyone has either contracted COVID or been vaccinated? And that your chances of never getting COVID if you remain unvaccinated are extremely low? But even if this was 75%, it only changes you from a 1000 to 750.
The denominator in my statistic I don't think was diagnosed by a doctor, it was just having a positive PCR test, which could happen through regular surveillance. But I agree that that's something we need to adjust for if we want things to be directly comparable. The CDC estimates this is about a factor of 4 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...), bringing the 750 down to 190. Still much larger than 0.6!
> your chances of never getting COVID if you remain unvaccinated are extremely low
That is right. And some get infected without suffering harm, as was known by early reports from the quarantined Diamond Princess boat. Passengers in a cabin with infected mates sometimes had no medical issues.
It is important to consider how certain groups such as children had nearly zero negative outcome from the virus while developing robust antibodies and this without the shots. For children the vaccine risks outweighed gains that may have been helpful to those in high risk categories (older compromised lung capacity obese).
That's right, though I'm not sure how "nearly zero" for the safest group (2-5) compares with "nearly zero" for the vaccine. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them is multiple orders of magnitude larger, but we're talking about very low risks regardless.
The benefits to children are nearly zero, while there is some risk. I am still unclear why a medical treatment emergency use exemption was extended to low risk of mortality age groups. Importantly, the shots don't prevent virus re-transmission to others.
> The benefits to children are nearly zero, while there is some risk. I am still unclear why a medical treatment emergency use exemption was extended to low risk of mortality age groups.
The question of which of these "nearly zeros" is smaller, no? A risk of 8 in 13M is still very small, and could easily be an order of magnitude smaller than the risk of death in this age group.
> So that 1000 micromorts is estimated from a subset of people whose outcomes were significantly worse than average.
Not really. Like others have posted the risk of getting the virus is close enough to 100% as to not matter at all. And the risk cited was for a 35 year old man, not an octogenarian, which is pretty average. It would be better in this specific instance to use the average 35 year old woman since they suffered clotting disorders more commonly (just about exactly). It wouldn't be as useful to compare with children since they didn't suffer from the clotting disorders as commonly--it mostly affected middle aged women.
IF you are diagnosed with covid, which ignores all those who have minor or asymptomatic symptoms and never get diagnosed skewing the stat to those who had worse symptoms.
you're confusing population risk with personal risk.
Think about it like this.
The chances of dying in a vehicle wreck is very small. But those who have died in them probably would have preferred finding an alternative means to get to their destination.
If someone doesn't want to get a vaccine for fear they'll become a statistic, that's perfectly valid.
Yep, personal risk may be wildy different than a population risk.
As someone who lives in a sparsely populated, rural and mountainous area in Greece, the risk of being killed in a car accident still exists but it is a lot different than city accidents. Seatbelts, car mirrors, airbags are all mandated by the government.
Mirrors are not so useful, because not many cars are driving on the road at any given time. Most motorcycles do not have even one mirror because they are useless. Animals may cross the road, sharp rocks may have fallen on the street which can cause a vehicle to literally fall of a cliff. Good luck hoping for an airbag to save your life, while you are on a 10-20 meter fall.
Safety is still provided by the car gizmos, albeit to a very small negligible amount of the local population. Safety measures mandated from the government to the car manufacturers are more relevant to big cities than here.
Dangerity on the other hand, the ability to be in danger, is more preferable when it is cheaper. The car gizmos, take up space, and cost money. Safety is not always better, and when it costs too much money, every normal person should fear safety, and take the side of dangerity instead.
A normal non fat person, who exercises once in a while, and is reasonably mindful of their eating habits, should definitely choose the side of dangerity in case of Covid. Safety in that case costs too much money, and it should definitely be avoided.
As can be seen, getting infected is actually not that bad compared to getting the AZ vaccine. In younger age groups the vaccine became hard to recommend contrary to what many claimed and continue to claim on social media.
You also obviously haven’t read case reports for the people that got the blood clots and survived, if you’re only considering deaths as an undesirable outcome. They will have to adjust to significant sequelae for the rest of their lives.
> As can be seen, getting infected is actually not that bad compared to getting the AZ vaccine.
The analysis that your link is missing a comparison between the harm of getting hospitalized with covid and the harm of a case of blood clots. Without that severity comparison, while it does show that for all age groups hospitalization is many times more likely than clots it's hard to make a judgment either way.
> You also obviously haven’t read case reports for the people that got the blood clots and survived, if you’re only considering deaths as an undesirable outcome.
But you also need to count the people who got covid and survived with serious long-term symptoms, no?
I think most people would agree that getting hospitalized beats brain surgery. The only comparable Covid outcome is the ICU and that’s very rare for people below 40.
It probably makes sense to get a vaccine for younger people, just not the awful AZ. And many countries agree, having switched to mRNA. What they didn’t do yet is admit that they were pushing the AZ crap much harder than was called for and apologize for screwing up vaccine procurement.
What's forgotten is that people were forced to take it, continuously lied to, had lifehood destroyed and their options suppressed just to over time get to hear "oh, yeah, your were right but you're bad at assessing risk so no one should care".
And this is just a first of more bad reactions to vaccines that are happening, which should be added up. And then mortality comparison for kids will be much different.
All that was required to avoid this madness was being honest and make jabs voluntary.
People gauge the trust they should put in the medical government complex actually quite well.
> What's forgotten is that people were forced to take it, continuously lied to, had lifehood destroyed and their options suppressed just to over time get to hear "oh, yeah, your were right but you're bad at assessing risk so no one should care".
It's really weird to see 5K people die from COVID-19 in the last 14 days and then come to HN and read someone describing a fantasy reality. Really cool place.
I find it interesting that certain books on personal risk (stoicism, antifragile, etc) have become must-reads over the last few years. At least to help you see the signal through all the noise of neomania(obsession of what's new).
Fortunately there were a couple of heuristics one could use:
1. If one of the vaccines causes horrible blood clots in the brain, get the other one.
2. If a bunch of self-important dilettantes claim that said vaccine is safe, but can’t comprehend how sex and age affects the risk profile… ignore them.
If you have taken AstraZeneca, try and get some blood and hypertension tests done. Blood clots can be managed with anti-coagulants like rivaroxaban, your doctor will advice based on the tests.
Post AZ, mini strokes start occurring for some. Mini strokes are hard to notice if you aren't post 60. Many strokes don't kill, but they kill the life of you.
Based on the sample set of 1 personally known and 8 indirect.
In a world where Science has become like religion which can't be questioned; use Science and the limited data you have.
It's likely I got to this thread too late, but does the incidence rate of AZ vaccine blood clots match the J&J one? Very few sources report on J&J even though it's a similar (but not identical) vaccine.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] thread[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35320581/
Edit: not sure if it's the video I watched but it's definitely the guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBaIRm4610o
His vax people just stuck it in and plunged, no testing.
It’s silly theater. Like a lot of medicine was and is.
can you at least explain why it's "silly theater"?
You are criticizing OP based on an evidence-less assumption that you have made about them.
You could take out the "probably" and replace with "maybe" - just have a look at this very page of comments and it shouldn't take you long to find wildly inaccurate statements or anecdotal -> conclusion type theories.
Blindly assuming/implying someone didn't get their source from some kind of trustworthy place and then giving them grief for it is not a good faith comment. And it discourages people from asking questions in the future.
OP seems genuinely curious and open to whatever answers they might get. Why be a dick to them?
Way too much credentialism of late.
Incorrect administration is still a risk, but not systemic / wide enough for the clotting cases I guess. And, you'd (1) expect cases to go down over time and (2) see them in mRNA vaccines as well.
So, no, PF4's been consensus for a while, this study gives a probable theory on why PF4 gets activated.
What is a negatively loaded DNA?
It's a plausible-sounding explanation, that has no data behind it as far as I can tell.
Detection of spike protein in brain and heart (single case study): https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/10/10/1651
The larger question seems to be the biodistribution of the vaccine in general, not necessarily via bloodstream. From the first study: "We speculate that, following the vaccine administration, lipid nanoparticles containing the vaccine mRNA are carried to mammary glands via hematogenous and/or lymphatic routes."
https://www.docdroid.net/xq0Z8B0/pfizer-report-japanese-gove...
>Only <1% of the injected mRNA vaccine got into the ovaries, adrenal glands, heart, brain, and other tissues at 48-hour.
>Most of the vaccine remained in the injection site and went into the liver, “suggesting these LNPs may be eliminated mostly via hepatic [liver] clearance route,” Prof. Al-Ahmad wrote.
>the dose the Japanese study used is very high when controlled for weight; that is, 18–35-times higher than what is injected into humans.
>The Japanese biodistribution study results are consistent with Pfizer’s that was submitted to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in February 2021.
>Pfizer also found that the LNP-encapsulated mRNA vaccine was mainly metabolized in the liver and did not enter other tissues easily. They also noted no effects on fertility or ovarian functions.
>For the Moderna mRNA vaccine, the EMA assessment report has previously released its biodistribution data that also finds no cause for concern.
And then the author points out the absence of evidence regarding fertility risks:
>Even if the mRNA vaccines did enter the ovaries in tiny amounts, there’s no evidence that ovarian cells can translate the mRNA into spike proteins. Even if ovarian cells somehow managed to manufacture some spike proteins, there’s no evidence that this can harm the ovaries. Maybe the spike proteins expressed on ovarian cells degrade within hours or days and disappear in a few days. Animal studies have shown that cells that take up the mRNA vaccine only express the mRNA-encoded proteins on its surface for about 48 hours, which then quickly decline to zero in a few days. Thus, multiple stringent biochemical conditions and steps must be met to even allow for the tiniest possibility of mRNA vaccine harming the ovaries or other tissues.
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/biodistribution-and-s...
So I think I'm not supposed to worry about any of this?
Quick reactions:
* Less than 1% is not zero. Cells that express mod-spike are destroyed. How much autoimmune-mediated cell death in which locations in your or my body would be enough to kick off a chain of events that leads to a discernable real-world injury or death?
* Al-Ahmad's statement contrasts strongly with the Japanese Pfizer biodistribution study results: 24.6 + 16.2 = less than half at 48 hours.
* I'd love to see the study redone, with a larger number of test animals, at various dosage levels, including human-equivalent. Why did Pfizer use high dosages? Why are high dosages often used in animal studies of new pharmaceutical and other products?
* Where are the EU Pfizer biodistribution study results? WIll someone have to leak them or sue Pfizer or the EU to force their disclosure in the same way that Pfizer tried to delay releasing data in tranches over a period of months rather than in 75 years? Come to think of it, why would Pfizer (and the FDA) want to prevent the public from seeing such information for 75 years. Kinda suspicious.
* Pfizer has been wrong a lot and many things they said would never happen turn out to happen. Remember that the mRNA has been confirmed in breast milk of recently-vaccinated lactating women. This claim also doesn't match the Japanese Pfizer rodent biodistribution results.
* Are the Moderna covid vaccine biodistribution study results public? If so, I'd love to see a link (same for the EU Pfizer biodistribution study). I can't find any sign that such a study was even carried out. In the EMA assessment report from Jan 2021 (https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/assessment-report/spi...), they reference a previous rodent biodistribution study conducted by Moderna for mRNA-1647 (which is for CMV aka Cytomegalovirus, not covid) and the sort of detailed breakdown of biodistribution given in the Japanese Pfizer doc isn't included.
* Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Along with the pronounced spike in all-cause mortality in most nations which saw high penetration of mRNA and adenovirus-vector shots, we've seen a pronounced drop in birthrates. And in some nations, e.g. Scotland, there have been acknowledged increases in neonatal deaths. The authorities there report that the deaths are not due to covid and, without investigating the possibility, not due to maternal vaccination, either (https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23028843.covid-scotland-...). shrug In England, neonatal deaths are being intentionally misclassified as stillbirths (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/16/nhs-logging-baby...). Totally coincidentally, English coroners aren't allowed to investigate stillbirths but can investigate neonatal deaths. What's causing the increased all-cause mortality, drop in birth rates, and tip-of-the-iceberg reports of neonatal deaths? Climate change? Negative cerebral emanations? I look forward to observing the evolving scientific consensus on this and other issues.
And all for a virus that is a minuscule threat to most healthy people who are not extremely old. And none of these vaccines prevent infection or transmission, so trusting The Scienc...
https://en.ssi.dk/news/epi-news/2021/no-19-21---2021
so you can't get the clotting without that IGLV3-21*02 gene. now the interesting question here is that, with current tech, is it possible to manufacture very affordable (e.g. cost comparable to those COVID antigen test kits) rapid test kits that can detect such positive IGLV3-21*02 gene. some false positive level is fine, false negative must be very low.
surely people in low income countries who only have access to the AZ vaccine can benefit from such tests if affordable test kits can be made available to local healthcare workers administrating the vaccination.
> About four people in every 100 have IGLV3-21*02
sounds suspiciously like the cost of the additional testing would more than ofset the savings on the vaccine itself
I'll add, this study is not comprehensive, there could be other risk factors as well, the other vaccines could have issues, majority of the general population has already contracted Covid at least once, etc etc but some people insist on quadrupling down on dubious mRNA treatments with unknown compounding risks for unknown numbers of people. It's the definition of insanity. It might be worth revisiting alternative therapeutic treatments including monoclonal antibodies and antiviral drugs, rather than continue on this ignorant path. Just a thought.
India was completely devastated by COVID-19.
One reason was that India failed to focus their care on actually vulnerable elderly people and they instead had 30-something dudes demanding intensive care and taking up oxygen cylinders for themselves and their families.
Either way, the elderly have already lived their life, isn't it better to focus on the younger people when a choice must be made?
[edit] also, do things for whom? To what end if not to build experience?
In other words I'm saying that's a silly analogy
Worshipping youth in its ignorance and speed while discarding the wisdom of elders is called fascism. The right question would be what can civilization hope to achieve besides a reversion to barbarism and "Lord of the Flies" if it doesn't hold its oldest, most vulnerable and most wise members, and their experience, in the highest regard?
The young have always been proud and disposable. And if they don't die young, they get old. Then maybe they have something more interesting to say.
You're putting the wrong lens on this. My argument is that we are to deliberately harm the young to possibly protect the old and ill (which in this case isn't so as the vaccines don't guarantee prevention), rather than leaving them alone in the hope of protecting the old and ill as-is. Not 'let the old die for the young.'
I myself predicted there will be a run on oxygen concentrators and had one rented for my mom in case. But when delta hit I couldn’t in good conscience keep it and returned it back to the hospital. I know many rich families did not do that and hoarded cylinders and concentrators like this when people were dying. However I’m not convinced that this was the reason for the massive suffering caused in india. It’s just another facet of the cruelty that happened during this time.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.30.21264376v...
In line with many first world countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...
Notably, sub-Saharan Africa did not suffer greatly from Covid.
Neither did China. How stunning. It must be due to their fantastic public health systems.
You don't have to arbitrarily trust some authority. Everyone in the country could see from their own experience that spread of the virus really was being effectively controlled.
The question is, do you think it is easier or harder to spot the lies of Western journalism, and what problems does that cause in forming a base to judge others?
No, it's not 'the question' whether it's easier or harder to spot the 'lies' of Western journalism. That has no bearing whatsoever on the obvious, cut and dry reason for the underreporting of covid deaths in China.
But it is worth pointing out that, unlike the "news" propaganda organs of dictatorships, Western journalism is in no sense a monolith that speaks with one voice. Not even mainstream media in the US speaks with one voice (because yes, Fox is the MSM too). So while it may require a bit more sophistication to pick out truths, it is at least not a one-sided distortion of history in favor of the rulers.
No, finding the flaws in western journalism takes more effort because it's not as obvious. Which means the rulers can get away with propoganda and manipulation much more easily than one who provides a direct, complete and obvious propoganda.
I think people would be wise to be equally critical of left and right MSM, not just assume they aren't propoganda because they are on different 'sides' (hint, they're not really)
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you keep the virus out of the country, you don't need great hospitals.
«Rather than an ‹African paradox,› the far simpler explanation is that COVID-19 has affected African countries just as the virus has everywhere else, but has gone undocumented.»
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/morgue-data-reveal...
In countries with a younger population, less deaths from acute COVID-19 are expected, although the number of additional direct deaths from COVID-19 is still substantial. The disease burden burden, i.e., morbidity, also remains high, maybe even more given the sub-par health infrastructure.
Of course they do. If they suffered dramatically from Covid, it would be documented, just as it was for Ebola, Malaria, etc.
> SARS-CoV-2 does not behave differently in Africa than in other regions of the world, especially not in low-vaccination (or even no-vaccination) countries.
The statistics for Covid are all over the map with regards to vaccine status [2].
Some countries with high mRNA distributions did well (Canada, Australia). Some countries with high mRNA distributions did not do well (Brazil, US, Russia, Italy, Cuba). Some countries with low mRNA distribution did well (sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, DR, Jamaica, Egypt, Papa New Guinea) [1][2].
> In countries with a younger population, less deaths from acute COVID-19 are expected, although the number of additional direct deaths from COVID-19 is still substantial.
A lot of these countries are showing 50-100 excessive deaths per 100K. That's on par with a bad flu season. Sub-saharan Africa has suffered far worse disease outbreaks than Covid. And unlike Covid, diseases like Malaria affect children [3].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations#what-share-of-... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/malaria-introduction
By and large, the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines have probably been some of the most extraordinary accomplishments in medicine, with unthinkably low risks given the speed with which they were developed. We took a gamble, but the magnitude of evidence we now have that they are safe is incredible, they are up there with some of the most common OTC medicine.
Fortunately, the vaccines still seem to offer some protection to make sure that vaccinated people are less likely to have a severe form of Covid-19.
Against earlier variants of the virus the vaccines were also very impressive in preventing infections. Far higher than the 50% minimum standard that was set when the development started.
Below 50's were never even close to high risk and as soon as it was known (which was very) the vaccines didn't prevent spread they should have immediately been halted for all low risk age groups.
The chance of death is low for those up to 50. But vaccines even further reduce that.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.scientificamerican.com/arti...
Here's another one with a bit more of a specific breakdown
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Unfortunately at this point there is no way to see if the vaccines have actually saved lives because a) they don't stop the virus or its spread, it is not confirmed that the vaccines haven't caused significantly more covid infections by being leaky (look up 'Leaky Vaccines,'[1] or OAS (original antigenic sin)) and they have encouraged high risk behaviour in the false belief the vaccines provide sufficient protection. I mean I don't even see any ads or posters around any more advising on hygiene improvements like not shaking hands, getting out in the sun, eating healthily, look after the weak and elderly, etc. People just take the vaccine as their safety blanket and worse, are signing their kids up for it when they were never a risk vector (until mid-covid the 'science' changed on that).
If you can point me to a study that conclusively shows vaccines absolutely saved lives over the longer term (that aren't based on models full of positive assumptions on efficacy and effectiveness), I'm happy to read it.
[1] example: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/theres-something-antigeni...
The results are clear: the rate of severe or fatal cases was many times higher for unvaccinated people in all age groups.
For people aged 20-59, three doses (of either mRNA or inactivated virus vaccines) reduced the chance of severe or fatal disease by nearly 99%. Efficacy actually drops with age: for >80-year-olds, there's only a 97% reduction in risk (though because the starting risk is much higher, they get a larger overall benefit).
This was with Omicron, by the way. In an unprotected population, Omicron is still very destructive.
0. "Vaccine effectiveness of one, two, and three doses of BNT162b2 and CoronaVac against COVID-19 in Hong Kong: a population-based observational study", The Lancet Infectious Diseases, July 2022: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(22)00345-0
Of the 39 deceased, all of whom were 50+ and 14 of whom were care home residents, only 5 were unvaccinated, 3 had received 4 shots, and 33 of the 39 had received at least 2 shots. That matches or exceeds the vaccination rate for their age demographics.
I cited a study that does a rigorous statistical analysis.
Yes, you've linked a study.
I've shared a typical daily report of covid-attributed deaths and the victims' levels of vaccination and, as I told you, the vaccination levels of those who die of covid are as high or higher than the rates for their age groups.
In other words, please link a study. Or something else i can trust actually wants to get at the bottom of this, not win some argument.
If your response to being shown government-announced covid deaths with details of the vaccination levels of the deceased (available on a daily basis from that and other news outlets) and, for comparison, age-bracketed vaccination levels reported by the same government is that you want to be shown a study, then I suspect what you truly want is reassurance or reaffirmation of your current set of beliefs rather than a grasp of what's currently going on.
> If your response to being shown government-announced covid deaths [..]
Well, that's what you are trying to promote. That you linked some raw data, not a conclusion-statement from this government, is all i need to know. I'm not calling you a liar. I just assume there to be another angle you might be missing (the motivated reasoning part), but this is something for experts in the respective area. And if not, it will change consensus accordingly. Unless, ofc, you believe in some grad conspiracy of all the governments all around the world. I don't.
(I agree with the rest of what you say.)
When all is said and done, the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna) saved a lot of lives. Moreover they showed that the technology is safe and viable, so expect to see a lot more of that type of in-body, self assembling vaccine for everything from influenza to cancer in the next decade. Of course any formula can have unwanted side effects, whether it's generated in your body or not, but doing nothing and waiting to see how a virus treats you isn't safe, either. You could get pretty fucked up either way, but you're less likely to get fucked up from the vax, and less likely to get fucked up from covid if you had the vax. There's risk in everything. Do the math and take the route with best survival rate. In this case, even the AZ vax was a clear winner over getting covid unvaccinated in 2021.
Are personal observations be good enough, or will they be dismissed as mere anecdotes?
The mRNA vaccines worked to improve immunity and reduce the effects once infected; and to your point about mutations, the mRNA encoding the spike can be modified accordingly as this is a very quick and scalable method of delivery.
Given the hundreds of millions of people that have received mRNA vaccines I think generally we have an understanding of their safety.
The only insanity I see is people still now trying to deny vaccine efficacy, either as government conspiracy theories or through poor scientific understanding.
The conclusion does not follow from the premise.
Five months following a covid infection in which I had 4-6 weeks of neurological deficit, I received the bivalent mRNA booster, which seemed to somehow reactivate the neurological issues for a few days or a week. Doctors told me this is not uncommon.
These are not "safe" in the same way we mean that MSG or acetaminophen are "safe".
Corners were necessarily cut in the trials of these during development to accelerate time to market. They saved lives, the gamble paid off. But the trial protocols are in place for a reason and we do not fully understand these drugs as yet.
> dubious mRNA treatments with unknown compounding risks for unknown numbers of people
If that was the case, after 100s of millions of doses given out shouldn’t these have surfaced in sufficient numbers?
Sorry about your condition, but there’s nothing there that suggests it is related to the mRNA formulation; you could just as easily experienced the same with a viral vector formulation or even without any booster (long covid, if that’s what you had, is not without relapses)
Development corners were not cut, that’s the point of the mRNA formulation, it is incredibly faster than conventional methods to create a brand new product. I assume what you meant was the regulatory requirements for safety, which yes were accelerated and reduced because of the emergency use case. Two years ago. Those trials are tests on large populations , phase 3 being the largest then phase 4 a post-marketing surveillance period [0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research
What "corners" were "cut"? And if your answer is "they were rushed", don't bother replying.
After a real infection you develop anti-bodies. Why then get the vaccine which would be less good protection and have risks?
No, I haven’t noticed this. Do you mean reported in the media? I was never looking there for safety trial results. Do you mean in journals? Then that’s the just wrong—as is the claim that they stop at 3 months. You can look up phase 4 trials, for instance [0]:
> In addition to the standard ongoing (phase 4) trials, people who took part in the phase 3 trials of approved vaccines are continuing to be followed up (up to 2 years after their second dose) to collect more data – for example on safety, asymptomatic infection, and how long protection from the vaccines lasts.
Even the original BioNTech(Pfizer) clinical trial reports it’s methodology of surveying serious side effects for up to 6 months after second dose, which makes it a 7+ month study overall [1]
[0] https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
That Pfizer trial ended at 3.5 months because 97% of the control group got vaccinated.
What do you think happens to the cells in question? That they live out the remainder of their lifespans unmolested? They are destroyed.
Much of the promise of safety at the outset rested on the belief that the contents of the vaccine doses would remain localized at the injection site (muscle in the arm in most places afaik, but the jabs are also given to some people in some places in their thighs). For the mRNA covid vaccines, at least, we know that the doses do not stay in the arm but travel throughout the body and even, in some cases, into breast milk. When the data about dissemination of the mRNA shots contents began to raise alarm bells, there was a period where some medical professionals blamed it on a failure to aspirate the needle before injecting and hoped that those who'd been injured had simply been unlucky and the person administering their dose had hit a blood vessel.
We've gone from, at the beginning, recognizing that wide distribution of the mod-spike-producing covid vaccine dose contents throughout the body was dangerous but believing that it wouldn't be an issue (because we're administering into muscle tissue in the arm) to knowing that the dose doesn't stay in the arm but completely forgetting why we hoped that it would stay there in the first place.
Even if trace amounts are found, they are no longer functional [0]. And it’s important to consider the percent of dosage when looking at biodistribution post injection, not just the amount of lipids [3], so it’s really much less significant amounts found outside the site of injection. Most is taken care of via hepatic clearance.
UTR sequences, which regulate transcription and sub cellular localization, can be tailored for specific cell types [1].
There is no evidence of spike protein toxicity [2]. And while the covid spike protein has potential to cause damage for example to the cells lining the small vessels of the heart following infection, there is no evidence that this is also the case with vaccinations [4]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK565969/
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaccine-safe-idUSL...
[3] https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/biodistribution-and-s...
[4] https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/news-arc...
Any answer that is not a variation on "They are destroyed." is incorrect.
You're changing the subject and copy-pasting canned "How to refute spike protein toxicity content online" stuff at me.
Secondly, why do you feel that it's more than that?
Thirdly, even 800 deaths would be quite little compared to Covid19.
Note that all people ultimately die of a single cause of death: cardio-respiratory stop - whether they had cancer, Covid-19, obesity, were hit by a car, were sawed in half by a murderer. So just as you can say "they died with Covid-19, not of Covid-19", I can say that "they died with pulmonary cancer, not of pulmonary cancer". People who had Covid-19 at the time of death were killed, to some extent at least, by Covid-19 (if we exclude violent deaths, which every country did). I would bet you good money that at least some of the 8 people who died of the AZ vaccine blood clotting disorder had other co-morbidities, so your argument anyway applies to them as well. Not to mention, again, there are far more people who died of Covid-19 but weren't tested and are not part of the official counts.
I will state this again: by the exact same measure we use for this type of statistic for every disease, and taking only the deaths with confirmed Covid-19, it has killed about as many people as obesity (2.8 million/year), and has killed more people than pulmonary cancer (1.8 million/year), tuberculosis (1.5 million/year), AIDS (650k/year), malaria (670k/year), breast cancer (680k/year), prostate cancer (300k/year), and so many others.
And whatever deaths can be attributed to the vaccines we know work with extraordinary evidence, those deaths are not even a fraction of a percent of how many people Covid-19 has killed. And, again, they also include many many people with co-morbidities, just like the Covid-19 numbers.
Why does yours?
" Mabye based on tuned "died with antibodies" gov stats and when comparing to this single issue."
Prove it
"There's been more than enough deaths" Prove it
"from fake vaccine to initiate lawsuits against Big Pharma "
Starting and a lawsuit doesn't require evidence nor is it a sign of guilt.
"Big Gov. Florida has started investigating"
Starting an investigation doesn't is prove anything especially when the vaccine is political and Ron Desantis is a Republican.
"other states are sure to follow in '23."
Based on what?
"The issue of blod clots has been known for many months and governments continued"
Risk compared to dangers of Covid
"to force fake "vaccines" on employees and even contractors."
I thought the issue was the blood clots but now you are stating without evidence the vaccine is fake. Come on.
Finally, I can't believe that people like you have finally seeped into Hackernews, a community I normally consider being populated by more logical and educated people compared to the general population.
As in, fine for years, AZ vaccine, into monthly hospital trips and complications, Then finally a fatal heart attack at around the 1.5 year mark after the vaccine (iirc).
The dead is ruled as heart complications, but they only ever shown up after the vaccine. So it's difficult to say that the vaccine killed her if it's technically the heart complications.
If she never got the vaccine she probably would have been fine, but then again she could've eaten something spicy and had another heart attack. Who knows
Generally impossible to pin down the cause for an individual, but a trend can be seen from looking at the whole population.
However any statistical analysis will have confounding variables (in this case, negative health effects of the virus itself, and the lockdowns etc.). Similarly with Chernobyl (the effects of the evacuations, and the general collapse of the Soviet Union around that time both had severe negative health effects). So basically any population level analysis of death rates etc. is always a bit dubious - how to tell one cause from another?
In the case of Chernobyl we already knew radioactive contamination is harmful (from previous experience). We know the AZ vaccine has certain potential complications (statistically). But it's impossible to pin down the cause for any given medical case.
I don't think this metaphor will hold up because both Covid infections and vaccines present an increased chance of myocarditis, the former at a higher rate.
Cause and effect for any disease is pretty hard to pin down because of the astronomical amount of variables.
Basically it's impossible to estimate.
I’m glad people are researching this and other peculiarities from all angles, I got a lot of dismissive comments in 2021 about an opportunistic pathogen being a culprit for some issues
but the dismissiveness was paradoxical “scientists didn't study that so they must have ruled it out, stop fearmongering”
people didn't like the idea that there could be a parallel infection going around
annoying
Probably because the clotting risk of COVID is higher.
> That [the very quick progression of the blood clotting issue] suggested, Gordon said, their immune systems had already experienced this strange combination of adenovirus and PF4 – or something that looked a lot like it.
Did you have any evidence or were you just throwing out hypotheticals?
In the past the same issue has occurred and it took years or nearly a decade to discover multi-variable components to ailments, let alone discover the new virus or bacteria
“Hey has anyone considered how this looks exactly like this other issue, is anybody putting resources into that”
“I don’t want to think about that so do you have any evidence!?”
its paradoxical, the people that would acquire the evidence are doing something else, more reactionary
First of all the neutral facts: all the major Western vaccines were immensely helpful to soften the impact of COVID on our societies. Some turned out better than others, mRNA vaccines proved to be the major breakthrough that scientists expected. None of the vaccines are without issues (blood clots, myocarditis etc.) but they are significantly better than the consequences of millions of unprepared COVID infections without prior immunization (Long COVID/Post-Viral Syndrome, long-term hospital stays, death, overwhelmed healthcare systems...).
Some folks and especially health institutions were calmly discussing and weighing benefits vs. costs and risk. But on the public side, online discussions once again moved into opposing "teams" which seemingly happens to a lot of political/culture war discussions:
- Team A were staunch supporters of getting everyone everywhere immediately vaxxed with no room left for discussion at all, not even on the scientific level
- Team B was spreading misinformation to spread unfounded fear and hate against the vaccines based on insane conspirational theories and easily dismissed bullshit information
- Team C was the rather silent but very large majority that was rather supportive of the vaccines but just kind of apathetic, never really getting into heated discussions about it online or offline, just doing whatever needed to be done.
While A and B represent the extremes, what's interesting to me about Team B is that it appeared as a minority in the population when actually looking at polls or protests [1]. But online they were way louder, amplified actually, to a degree that is really notable. And this is, in my view, often the case in online discussions.
I think it's also safe to say the opponents (Team B) were not rarely fueled by foreign agents to further instigate the culture wars in both Europe and the US, thereby politically weakening and destabilizing the countries from within. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if the very strong supporters were influenced just as much because in order to fuel a divide you may need to prop up both sides.
[1] https://www.dovepress.com/a-global-map-of-covid-19-vaccine-a...
That sounds like fearmongering though.
This is a combination of at least two (if not more) unlikely factors happening in the same person. One of the is prior exposure to a pathogen, one of them is having the right kind of gene, and this study can't rule out other additional factors.
The pathogen is likely to be something which has been with the human race for thousands of years, not anything novel to the human race like SARS-CoV-2.
There's no point in trying to change your behavior to avoid trying to contact this other pathogen.
The pathogen may also be something incredibly common, but other accidental factors conspire to produce this exact antibody.
Interesting thing of note here: I keep reading this. Even the Wikipedia page on AstraZeneca suggests that it’s still used in many European countries. In Austria (where I live) while if’s technically possible to vaccinate with it, you absolutely will not be able to get it. It hasn’t been stocked for more than a year and a half. It has been effectively suspended since and everyone who got it, was boosted with one of the MRNA vaccines instead.
I would like to understand why the reporting on in (including the Wikipedia page) is so reluctant to mention the effective suspension of it.
I’m not familiar with the situation in Australia but I would be quite surprised if it’s still in use.
https://covid-vaccine.healthdirect.gov.au/booking/
Meanwhile they rolled the dice and decided that Moderna is no longer available for 6 years and up, but remains available for children aged 6 months to <6 years.
Pfizer was the worst for side effects. Like a bad cold for 12 hours. Other than that, no COVID.
If you think it is lacking thoroughness, edit the page with a reference, it will then have a note.
The following source [1] indicates that its deprecation is due to relative efficacy compared to the other leading vaccines.
If you think there is another reason (and/or has a wider regional block in place), you would need to source that in whichever article you find.
[1] https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...
"Give it to the poor"? Why isn't this considered unethical?
Because if you are poor then buying more of something cheaper, rather than less of something more expensive, isn't unethical?
Poorer countries tend to have worse everything. Smaller houses. Less robust cars. Fewer doctors. Bumpier roads. Worse internet access. Worse schools. That's what being poorer means. It seems to me that whatever ethical problems there are here aren't in the fact that poorer countries are using a cheaper and probably less effective COVID-19 vaccine, but in the fact that some countries are much poorer than others in the first place.
There's no shortage of alternatives. There's no lack of manufacturing capavity. Etc. All there is is shoddy rationalization that the poor get what they deserve.
Pray you're never on the wrong side of such ethics.
Giving someone who would otherwise go unvaccinated a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine is not doing them harm: it makes them less likely to get a severe case of COVID-19.
Vaccination with the AZ vaccine is only "unacceptable in The First World" in the sense that a better alternative is available if you don't mind paying the higher prices.
Most people's (and communities', and religions', and ...) ethical systems do not hold that it is unethical to do something that benefits someone unless what you are doing is the most beneficial thing you could possibly do, regardless of the cost to you.
I think it is a good thing that they don't, because that would mean e.g. that if you have the capacity to manufacture an effective COVID-19 vaccine in large quantities then you are obliged to provide it to everyone in the world for free, and if that requirement were in place then it would be a disincentive for any company that prefers not going out of business to develop that capacity, and that would be bad for everyone.
Without looking at the actual relevant numbers (how much it costs Pfizer or Moderna to make a given number of doses, how much it cost them to develop the vaccines, the costs of distribution, etc.) I don't have a definite opinion on whether (e.g.) wealthy Western governments have been much less generous than they should have been; I strongly suspect that they have. But you are not saying "they should have been more generous", they are saying "no one should be using the AZ vaccine for anything", and if the AZ vaccine is cheaper than alternatives then I think that's just plain wrong.
But maybe I am misunderstanding what you're claiming. What, specifically, do you think should have been done instead of what has actually been done? If it's more expensive than what was actually done, who should have paid? And, if the answer is anything less than "provide everyone in the world, for free, with the best available COVID-19 vaccine, regardless of cost", why are you confident that your proposal is better than one that uses the lower price of the AZ vaccine to provide more doses of that in preference to fewer doses of more expensive ones?
It is not my opinion that "the poor get what they deserve". I see no reason to think that any such belief is responsible for the fact that some poorer countries are using the AZ vaccine. If you disagree, then I would like to see some evidence rather than mere indignation.
... tl;dr: Australia was heavy AZ because of politics
* Minister of Health,
* Minister of Finance,
* Minister of Treasury,
* Minister of Home Affairs and Industry, and
* Minister of Science, Energy and Resources
at the same time as being PM.
People from other countries will start asking difficult questions and calling us a banana republic and such things.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-25/key-takeaways-from-sc...
“Mr Morrison only used the powers of his appointments once: to refuse an application for a petroleum exploration licence, PEP-11, using powers as head of the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.”
Thanks for giving the link but please don’t overexaggerate :)
* this was done in complete secrecy, no one was told, not even the Ministers whose portfolios he assumed the powers of,
* this was unneccesary and a very poor "backup plan" to have one single person be the only person that was "pre approved" with multiple normally silo'd powers.
This was both a first and a last, rules are being rewritten to prevent this kind of behaviour in the future.
I would say the vaccine injection wasn't behind the blood clots. I choose to have it. Guess what? Life went on just the same as before. Who would have thought it?
"I chose to not buy insurance and nothing bad happened"
Despite not wearing seatbelts or having insurance, nothing negative occurred in these situations. However, this does not mean that these were good decisions. Even if nothing bad happens, it is still a risky choice. The same goes for not getting vaccinated. Just because nothing negative happens does not mean it was a wise decision.
I don't think I've heard this theory before. Are you saying the delivery via injection was somehow the cause of blood clots and that another delivery method would have avoided them?
This has been a big problem with chronic illnesses. Even now despite the US military having great indicative data that EBV causes MS there hasn't been much luck in finding the virus in sufferers bodies, just the antibodies and the usual profile of cytokines associated with the viruses presence. Only recently Dr Bhupesh Prusty found EVB and HHV6 in the autopsy of 3 ME/CFS patients brains and none in controls strongly suggesting a viral cause for the disease but its not a test we could do on a live person and they never found these viruses in the patients fluids when they were alive.
Do you have any evidence to base your statement on?
Or put another way, if you had this from covid itself and someone said to you "oh myocarditis is just a passing nuisance side effect of covid," how would you respond?
The way people are now happily accepting hand-waving away heart damage because someone said 'hey it's fine' is astonishing. I do truly hope it is a mostly transient issue, because we haven't done the long term studies yet.
We are talking here about some guy in a brief Hacker News comment, talking to some other guy on Hacker News. The level of detail it's reasonable to demand is not the same in these two cases.
I am not a virologist or cardiologist or any other sort of medic. I have not gone to Israel and interviewed the people they worked with. I am guessing the same is true of you.
So what can I do? I can look at whether the authors seem reputable (answer: probably? -- the corresponding author for this paper seems to be somewhat conspiracy-theory-ish on this particular topic, but since the question at issue is roughly speaking whether he's found an actual conspiracy that doesn't seem like a good reason to dismiss what he says). I can look at whether the journal seems reputable (answer: not incredibly so, it seems to be publishing quite a lot of junk). I also note that there's a note attached to the paper saying that something about it is disputed and they're still discussing with the relevant parties; that could indicate a real problem or it could just indicate that anything to do with COVID-19 vaccines is likely to provoke controversy.
I could also read the paper. But, again, I am not an expert in this field; if it looks good, I could easily be missing subtle errors (accidental or deliberate); if it looks bad, I could easily be missing subtle reasons why the things that look wrong to me are actually right.
My reaction to a quick look at the paper, as a mathematician who doesn't know much about vaccines or viruses or cardiac arrests: I'm not going to try to redo their analysis, but the graphs suggest that if there's anything here it probably isn't much; the matchup they say they see between vaccination and emergency-service calls for cardiac arrests is not obviously any bigger than the random noise in the latter. Maybe sufficiently clever analysis can make it clear whether it's signal or noise, but figuring out whether their analysis is sufficiently clever (and sufficiently robust, and done correctly) seems like way more work than I am interested in doing on this.
(Also: even if the most alarming conclusions anyone could draw from the data are correct, the number of adverse events here is still really small compared with, say, the number of deaths from COVID-19. The paper chooses to describe it as "a 25% increase" but that's from a baseline of "hardly any". The fatality rate of COVID-19 would need to be a lot lower than it is (even for the age group they're looking at, where it's relatively low) for this effect, even if real, to make the vaccinations a bad idea. Of course it's still an interesting question whether getting vaccinated against COVID-19 can cause heart trouble, and if so how, and if so whether there are ways to make it happen less. And it might (though it's not altogether obvious[1]) be worth warning people getting vaccinated to be on the lookout for signs of myocarditis. Reminder: you posted this link in response to something asking for evidence that myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination is "a much, much bigger problem" than blood clotting after adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccination. It doesn't look to me as if the numbers bear that out even if the effect claimed in this paper is entirely real.)
[1] Because giving this sort of warning may increase stress, which is also not great for your heart.
A higher rate of myocarditis in the highest risk groups compared to blood clotting, but there is a more than an order of magnitude difference in the severity of blood clotting vs Myocarditis. In addition, blood clotting from the Astrazeneca Vaccine is thought to be incidental to immune response development, while Myocarditis with all covid vaccines is related to the strength of the immune response and is also a symptom of COVID-19.
The greatest concern with regards to VAERS has been underreporting. A HHS-commissioned study (PDF available here: https://digital.ahrq.gov/ahrq-funded-projects/electronic-sup...) found, about a decade ago, that "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."
So, no, VAERS is not some conspiracy theory website and was created at the same time that vaccine manufacturers were relieved of legal liability for injuries and deaths caused by their products. It's a government-run system for identifying vaccine safety signals that, if anything, suffers from underreporting. Any entity or any individual seeking to discredit VAERS with nebulous handwavery in the absence of a workable, running alternative is engaging in extremely dubious, vaccine-safety denialism.
Of course it isn't. However, it is raw data, and it takes careful analysis to separate the signal from the noise.
Most of the reported events are not caused by vaccines. VAERS is meant to be used as a tool for identifying possible rare vaccine side-effects. If a pattern emerges in VAERS reports, then there is further study.
As the FDA explains,[0]
> VAERS reports generally cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. Some events may occur coincidentally after the administration of a vaccine while others may in fact be caused by a vaccine. As a result, if a safety signal is found in VAERS, further studies can be conducted in safety systems such as the CDC's Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), or the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) project. These systems do not have the same limitations as VAERS and can better assess health risks and possible connections between adverse events and a vaccine.
0. https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccine-adverse...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.28.22272975v...
It's hard to peer through the layers of emerging science and virology, psychology and sociology, policymaking and politics, media and information theory... to find the truth of a thing like COVID.
It was not about science or credentials. Wrongthink was not allowed and people were made believe they were fringe minorities by simply turning up censoring to very high levels.
>Oh many of us are pretty good at assessing risk.
My figure would be less that 5% of the population are good at assessing risk, what's your guess?
Using the grandparent's 9/11 TSA analogy - talk to literally anyone - the vast majority of people will openly acknowledge that TSA screening is pure security theatre, but they accept and go through it anyway. You'll find the same thing regarding the Epstein suicide, domestic spying apparatus, etc. Most people know and accept statistically likely truth, but they play along because compliance makes for a more comfortable life.
My model is if extreme harm is remotely possible, I ignore comparisons to other risks and take action to help limit it to minor harm (e.g. don't text while driving, wear a seat belt, wear a hard hat on a skyscraper building site, etc.).
But "take action to increase safety" creates a combination of challenges for the average person:
(1) Most people don't change easily ("Taking action" means change);
(2) Most people underestimate the likelihood that the near future will be different than the present, that change will be thrust upon them;
(3) Most people don't recognize that they don't change easily, or that they underestimate the likelihood of near-term change.
(4) Very few realize that changing behavior overlaps with a lot of performance-related skills, some of which are poorly understood by virtually everyone.
I have coached ten of thousands of sessions teaching voice acting, and I find that people attempting performance get stuck between stages 1 and 2 in the “Four Stages of Competence”:
(1) Unconscious incompetence (Ignorance)
(2) Conscious incompetence (Knowledge)
(3) Conscious competence (Skill)
(4) Unconscious competence (Awareness)
As https://TaskCompetency.com/ points out, stage 3 is okay for accountants, unworkable for performers.
People think that if they've simply been given information and received coaching, that it somehow magically imbues them with special performance powers, yet they haven't:
(1) Turned information into knowledge.
(2) Applied knowledge to build skill.
(3) Practiced skills to build awareness.
So when people making an effort and paying to achieve change still fail at most steps for implementing change, I think there are a number of blind spots making it very difficult for people to really understand what safety is, because it's hidden behind "life performance" issues. Just my two cents.
You might ask if I am simply a poor coach, and if better coaches get better results—maybe it's not an "other people" problem, but more a problem with my perceptions and approaches.
There is a saying among some in our industry: "Once you get an agent, you lose your talent". (https://AcademyofVoiceover.com) This is due to newly trained talent no longer applying skills they have learned, due to believing that having had their training affirmed by getting an agent makes their performance "automatically high quality".
There is a similar statement commonly found on websites of acting coaches, that goes something like "I'm one of the best coaches of my acting method, and I know this because I get the students of other coaches teaching my method and they haven't learned the method well". Of course statements along the lines of "others are bad, I alone am good" usually overlook many things.
So in my experience, even trainers and producers of performers have a blind spot to some of the challenges in creating change in even people who are motivated to change.
My pet hypothesis is that:
1: (Some) People are terrified of death.
2: Death is in the future.
3: The future means change, people reject change and the future.
4: Rejecting the future, people embrace their past.
5: Memories of the past are simple. The past does not change.
6: Change is bad, because it brings to mind the future, and death.
The above doesn't explain or really take into consideration future planning, like "if we won the lottery", or "let's settle down and have kids, a house, pets, hobbies together and apart. Let's create a home." The fear of death certainly seems to loom larger as one ages.
I try not to be afraid of death. I do freely admit I have trouble with a future that I don't get to see, I would love to be able to experience thousands of years of awareness, to see what happens next. I never want the story to end, and I'm never satisfied with "and they lived happily ever after."
In a joke format: Boss: Why didn't you come to work today? Me: I realized I could die, so I stayed in bed.
* Eight deaths out of 13 million doses is 0.6 micromorts from getting the vaccine, about equivalent to driving 150 mi.
* For a 35-year-old man in the US, risk of death if you're diagnosed with covid is 0.1% [1] or 1000 micromorts.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...
Consider the problem: you must either do X (1/200 chance of death) or YZ (Y has 1/300 chance of death, Z has 1/300 chance of death).
Reworded this becomes: you must either do X (5 micromorts) or YZ (Y is 3.3 micromorts, Z is 3.3 micromorts). And now you've got things that are easier to compare and work with in a scale that we can think about. Most people are doing things on the scale of 0 to 20 micromorts. The more adventurous are doing things that get up to 100 or so. The thrill seekers go up from there.
This is also a concept in insurance - https://www.insurancethoughtleadership.com/six-things-commen...
Cambridge University - Professor Risk https://youtu.be/a1PtQ67urG4
A previous discussion on it from 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266462
I still think it's almost certain that, for a typical healthy person, getting the vaccine is by far the safer choice. (And that's before we even start worrying about non-fatal outcomes such as long COVID.) But the difference is probably a lot less than the 3 orders of magnitude you're suggesting.
My understanding is at this point very nearly everyone has either contracted COVID or been vaccinated? And that your chances of never getting COVID if you remain unvaccinated are extremely low? But even if this was 75%, it only changes you from a 1000 to 750.
The denominator in my statistic I don't think was diagnosed by a doctor, it was just having a positive PCR test, which could happen through regular surveillance. But I agree that that's something we need to adjust for if we want things to be directly comparable. The CDC estimates this is about a factor of 4 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...), bringing the 750 down to 190. Still much larger than 0.6!
That is right. And some get infected without suffering harm, as was known by early reports from the quarantined Diamond Princess boat. Passengers in a cabin with infected mates sometimes had no medical issues.
It is important to consider how certain groups such as children had nearly zero negative outcome from the virus while developing robust antibodies and this without the shots. For children the vaccine risks outweighed gains that may have been helpful to those in high risk categories (older compromised lung capacity obese).
The question of which of these "nearly zeros" is smaller, no? A risk of 8 in 13M is still very small, and could easily be an order of magnitude smaller than the risk of death in this age group.
Not really. Like others have posted the risk of getting the virus is close enough to 100% as to not matter at all. And the risk cited was for a 35 year old man, not an octogenarian, which is pretty average. It would be better in this specific instance to use the average 35 year old woman since they suffered clotting disorders more commonly (just about exactly). It wouldn't be as useful to compare with children since they didn't suffer from the clotting disorders as commonly--it mostly affected middle aged women.
Think about it like this.
The chances of dying in a vehicle wreck is very small. But those who have died in them probably would have preferred finding an alternative means to get to their destination.
If someone doesn't want to get a vaccine for fear they'll become a statistic, that's perfectly valid.
As someone who lives in a sparsely populated, rural and mountainous area in Greece, the risk of being killed in a car accident still exists but it is a lot different than city accidents. Seatbelts, car mirrors, airbags are all mandated by the government.
Mirrors are not so useful, because not many cars are driving on the road at any given time. Most motorcycles do not have even one mirror because they are useless. Animals may cross the road, sharp rocks may have fallen on the street which can cause a vehicle to literally fall of a cliff. Good luck hoping for an airbag to save your life, while you are on a 10-20 meter fall.
Safety is still provided by the car gizmos, albeit to a very small negligible amount of the local population. Safety measures mandated from the government to the car manufacturers are more relevant to big cities than here.
Dangerity on the other hand, the ability to be in danger, is more preferable when it is cheaper. The car gizmos, take up space, and cost money. Safety is not always better, and when it costs too much money, every normal person should fear safety, and take the side of dangerity instead.
A normal non fat person, who exercises once in a while, and is reasonably mindful of their eating habits, should definitely choose the side of dangerity in case of Covid. Safety in that case costs too much money, and it should definitely be avoided.
As can be seen, getting infected is actually not that bad compared to getting the AZ vaccine. In younger age groups the vaccine became hard to recommend contrary to what many claimed and continue to claim on social media.
You also obviously haven’t read case reports for the people that got the blood clots and survived, if you’re only considering deaths as an undesirable outcome. They will have to adjust to significant sequelae for the rest of their lives.
The analysis that your link is missing a comparison between the harm of getting hospitalized with covid and the harm of a case of blood clots. Without that severity comparison, while it does show that for all age groups hospitalization is many times more likely than clots it's hard to make a judgment either way.
> You also obviously haven’t read case reports for the people that got the blood clots and survived, if you’re only considering deaths as an undesirable outcome.
But you also need to count the people who got covid and survived with serious long-term symptoms, no?
It probably makes sense to get a vaccine for younger people, just not the awful AZ. And many countries agree, having switched to mRNA. What they didn’t do yet is admit that they were pushing the AZ crap much harder than was called for and apologize for screwing up vaccine procurement.
And this is just a first of more bad reactions to vaccines that are happening, which should be added up. And then mortality comparison for kids will be much different.
All that was required to avoid this madness was being honest and make jabs voluntary.
People gauge the trust they should put in the medical government complex actually quite well.
It's really weird to see 5K people die from COVID-19 in the last 14 days and then come to HN and read someone describing a fantasy reality. Really cool place.
1. If one of the vaccines causes horrible blood clots in the brain, get the other one.
2. If a bunch of self-important dilettantes claim that said vaccine is safe, but can’t comprehend how sex and age affects the risk profile… ignore them.
Post AZ, mini strokes start occurring for some. Mini strokes are hard to notice if you aren't post 60. Many strokes don't kill, but they kill the life of you.
Based on the sample set of 1 personally known and 8 indirect.
In a world where Science has become like religion which can't be questioned; use Science and the limited data you have.