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From reading a few vaccine threads here, people are very invested in the idea of vaccines being tested for long periods of time on many people before they feel
by Exmoor 6y ago
From reading a few vaccine threads here, people are very invested in the idea of vaccines being tested for long periods of time on many people before they feel its safe. That said, this seems more useful for vaccines for rarer diseases where even having very large populations of people on the vaccine and placebo is unlikely to result in many placebo people being infected, even over many years.
- sohkamyung 6y agoTesting vaccines for long periods of time is prudent, whether for rarer diseases or for common ones or even for COVID-19. One (little-known?) fact about the current COVID-19 vaccines soon to be available is that they have only been shown to protect you against the symptoms of COVID-19. They have not been shown to stop people from catching COVID-19 or from spreading it via asymptomatic infection. That is one reason why more vaccines may need to be developed and tested. See this Q&A from [1]: > [N]either the Pfizer nor the Moderna vaccine trials tested whether the vaccines prevent people from being infected with the virus. Those trials, instead, focused on whether people were shielded from developing disease symptoms. That means that it’s not clear whether vaccinated people could still develop asymptomatic infections — and thus still be able to spread the virus to others. [1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-19-coronavirus-vaccines-questions-social-distance-mask-transmission https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-19-coronavirus-vac...