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The important part is that 15000 apparently did not get serious side effects, so clearly much less people experience problems from the vaccine than they would f
by tinus_hn 6y ago
The important part is that 15000 apparently did not get serious side effects, so clearly much less people experience problems from the vaccine than they would from the disease.
So now it’s time to stop delaying and start distributing these vaccines.
- nabla9 6y agoNo. Timetables can be compressed for everything else but not for safety evaluation. The number of people vaccinated is increased gradually. Even after phase III and approval, the monitoring for side effects continues and the vaccine can be withdrawn if necessary. Vaccines can cause autoimmune responses detected months later. These two vaccines are RNA vaccines never used n this scale Residual DNA risk is probably not significant, but there is small potential blowback. On positive side, RNA vaccines can open new era of programmable vaccines for viral infections and cancer treatments.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoRemember that the threshold shouldn't be "fully safe", the threshold should be "better than the alternatives". If the alternative is COVID, that's a pretty low bar to clear. Given that we may have several vaccines to choose from it's worth a bit of effort to weed out any unsafe ones, but remember that every day of delay may cost thousands of lives.
- nabla9 6y agoI do remember. The anti-vax nuts make discussion vaccination risks difficult because everyone pushes back to different direction just to be on the safe side. Existing vaccine testing and approval process have more or less the the right balance. Sometimes vaccines are withdrawn, in general they are safe.
- __s 6y ago15000 also becomes a much smaller number as you start to consider factors which may change how someone reacts to the vaccine (gender, race, age, preexisting conditions, etc)
- dmurray 6y ago> If the alternative is COVID, that's a pretty low bar to clear. It's really not a low bar. A healthy 35-year-old has maybe 0.01% chance of dying, 1% chance of lasting side-effects from Covid. Untested medicines can be way more dangerous than that: thalidomide, for example, has a 50%+ chance of causing stillbirth or birth defects for pregnant women [0]. If you just vaccinate the old and sick, risky vaccines start to look more attractive. But those people also have a greater risk of side effects and are underrepresented in the clinical trials, and most vaccination strategies mooted so far for Covid are based on mass vaccination of healthy people. So it has to be really safe for that to work. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737249/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737249/
- xorfish 6y ago> 1% chance of lasting side-effects from Covid. Source? But even if it were "only" 1%, that is still a pretty easy bar to clear for vaccines.
- Arnt 6y agoSo may every day of rushing. These testing/approval protocols aren't designed simply to provide job security. They were much cheaper and quicker before events like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal
- tinus_hn 6y agoIf you are willing to wait for years. Waiting a few weeks or months is just going to cause more people to die from the disease and isn’t going to make any vaccine more safe.
- nabla9 6y agoYou don't have to wait for years. Just months.
- tinus_hn 6y agoSo a vaccine can cause problems after months, but not after years? Where did you get these timeframes?
- nabla9 6y agoIt can cause problems after months or years. It's just question of risk management. >Where did you get these timeframes? From government regulators in different countries. There are accelerated approval and fast track processes.
- bluGill 6y agoFor all previous vaccines all side effects happened within two months. (with most of them in less than 15 minutes). We have no way of knowing when an unknown side effect might wait 10 years to show up, but there is every reason to think that won't happen.
- tinus_hn 6y agoSo how long do you think these trials ran for? Less than two months?
- nabla9 6y agoTrials for these drugs have already been running for months. They stared in July and over 15,000 people have already been vaccinated. They started with with just handful of people, gradually increasing the number of people. The likelihood of hitting some genetic combination that triggers some autoimmune reaction decreases as the sample size increases and no side effects are found.
- refurb 6y agoI'm not implying these vaccines are unsafe at all, but when you're vaccinating close to the entire world' population (eventually), a side effect of 1 death for every 50,000 people vaccinated, might not be seen in a trial of 15,000. But vaccinate 6B people and that's 120,000 dead. So your vaccine can go from "safe" to "it kills people" pretty quick when you're treating millions of people. Edit: And sure, Covid has killed more than 120,000, but what do you think will happen when people find out the vaccine kills people? They won't care it's 1 in 50,000, they'll just refuse any and all vaccines. Then what?
- macintux 6y agoTrue, but 120k deaths beats the hell out of the situation we’re in now.
- tinus_hn 6y agoYou make it sound pretty terrible, until you realise that about 10000 people are dying from corona every day. So yes, if by checking for 12 days you can prevent all these deaths, you should delay. If not you should not delay.
- pzo 6y agoThat's true. But currently just a fraction of global population got infected and already 1.3 million people died. I still think though they shouldn't rush and do enough research because any bad side effects would have long term effect for any other future vaccine treatments.