5 ms·

Vaccines are very safe because they are required to be very safe by law, if a vaccine is not shown to be very safe, it is pulled from production. They are not i

by ouid 6y ago

Vaccines are very safe because they are required to be very safe by law, if a vaccine is not shown to be very safe, it is pulled from production. They are not intrinsically safe.

wesleywt 6y ago
Isn't this the case for all medicines? Vaccines mechanism of action makes it safer than any other medicine as they are harnessing the bodies own immune response system.
- ouid 6y ago
  No, FDA standards for the safety of medicine that you give to healthy people are much more rigorous than for medicine that you give to sick people.
another_kel 6y ago
How many precedents we have of a potential vaccine found out to cause serious harm? Asking seriously. Is there any studies/stats?
- thisiscorrect 6y ago
  I don't know how often this occurs. I know a specific case was Pandemrix, the vaccine administered in a few European nationas during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, which seems to have increased the risk of narcolepsy especially for children [1,2]. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847694/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847694/ [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcolepsy-flu.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    IIRC, getting that variant of the flu also increased the risk of narcolepsy.
- nradov 6y ago
  Some vaccines have caused antibody dependent enhancement before. However that doesn't appear to be a problem with any of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2020.572681 https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2020.572681
roywiggins 6y ago
Even the most dangerous vaccine we've ever produced would almost certainly be safer for most people than actually catching Covid.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  You should google "the Cutter incident".
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    10 deaths out of 200,000 is much safer than COVID in the general population. In hardest hit areas, COVID has killed something like 1 in 100. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/
    - newen 6y ago
      Most of that 1% being people with pre-existing conditions.
      - roywiggins 6y ago
        If you restrict your interest into people with pre-existing conditions, the death rate of COVID is even higher and any danger posed by the vaccine is even less relevant to them. Maybe all ten children killed in the Cutter incident had pre-existing conditions. Most people have a pre-existing condition of some sort or another. It was an effort to inoculate generally, so that's why I used the death rate of COVID in the general population as a comparison.
        newen 6y ago
        It has to do with your argument being a bad argument. > Only 10 in 200,000 died from a vaccine This doesn't negate the fact that vaccines can be dangerous. This just happens to be the number for that particular vaccine. > 10 in 200,000 deaths is better than 1 in 100 The 10 could have been fine without the vaccine. Who knows, it's just speculation; maybe they had pre-existing conditions, maybe they did not. But comparing numbers like this knowing that the 10 in 200,000 are drawn from a different population from the 1 in 100 is being disingenuous.
epistasis 6y ago
As a class of biologically active agents, vaccines are incredibly mild. This is because rather than throwing a wrench in the gears of how cells work (the usual mechanism of action of drugs), they tell your immune system to do what it does every day, but just to include this one new target. The definition of "intrinsically safe" doesn't even sound like a consistent bar. Nearly every aspect of living involves risks, even if that risk is of falling and hitting one's head.
- newen 6y ago
  The current mRNA vaccines for coronavirus do throw a wrench in the gears of how cells work.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    There's no wrench in the gears, no mucking up of the normal function of enzymes. It's just ribosomes translating like they normally do, and then the rest of the immune system going after the translated peptides.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Anyone knows if the small number of people who do get side-effects from a vaccine would have been been likely to get a severe form of the disease if infected? Or if the side-effect subset is random.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    For the side effects of: * Injection site pain * Fatigue * Headache * Muscle pain * Chills * Joint pain * Fever The effects are too mild and short term to pose an interesting research question, I would think. For the more sever side effect of swollen lymph nodes, it has not been investigated, though that might provide enough immune system insight to be an interesting question to pursue. The only other adverse event, Bell's Palsy, is currently indistinguishable from the background rate of occurrence, so I would doubt that anybody is investigating that. There's a big methodological problem too: you can either get an extreme reaction to COVID-19, or you can have side effects from the vaccine, but a person going through one would poison the results of the other. So to come up with some sort of experiment, you'd need some sort or prognostic based on biomarkers that was strong and convincing enough to think it was related to what you're predicting, which we definitely don't have yet. Then you'd need to cross tab between effects. Potentially possible, but it relies on a pretty big discovery that would have better uses!
NoOneNew 6y ago
Agreed. This debate over the covid vaccines is getting weird. Especially when it comes to the HN demographic, I'm pretty sure 99%+ are perfectly fine with vaccines in general. As I am. Vaccines and a lot of modern pharmaceuticals are awesome and save many, many lives. However, I'm super against rushed, politicized pharmaceuticals. Especially when there are hundreds of millions of dollars in profit to be made. Big pharma isn't exactly known for doing the right thing when big money is on the line... ever. As you mentioned, vaccines are not safe because they are vaccines. They're safe because of the exhaustive testing trails. A majority of the forced vaccines have been tested for many decades, those are fine (speaking from a USA perspective). The problem we face now, the anti-vax idiots muddied the waters of actual problems of some vaccines. It's hard to determine what's true and what's just stupid. This is why it's important not to overblow anything. It makes it harder to weed out true, legit problems that can be legitimately fixed.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  All of the standard procedures for vaccine approval were followed. Timeline compression happened mostly by parallelizing procedures. (In the western world. Russia's Sputnik approval did skip steps. Which has probably saved a bunch of lives there, but it was riskier than ours).
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  It seems that you have concerns about the recently approved covid vaccines, at least from allusions such as "I'm super against rushed, politicized pharmaceuticals" and "A majority of the forced vaccines have been tested for many decades". To address those two points in particular: The trials for these FDA-approved vaccines were not "rushed". They included all the usual phases for their usual durations. That's why we only get the vaccines now (even though developing them took far less than a month). What made the trials faster is that they started preparing the next stage while the previous one was still ongoing - which is not normally done, so as to not waste money in case problems are found. As for the duration of testing: As mentioned, the set of stages before approval was not reduced. Vaccines are indeed monitored after being cleared for use, but having to wait decades would not make sense. I understand that this is different for other vaccines that are "forced", but you admit yourself that this is not true for all of them in the first place.
Consultant32452 6y ago
Talc baby powder is very safe because it is required to be safe by law. If talc baby powder is not shown to be very safe, it definitely will not be allowed to stay on the market for decades after the government learns it is giving us cancer.

by ouid 6y ago

Vaccines are very safe because they are required to be very safe by law, if a vaccine is not shown to be very safe, it is pulled from production. They are not intrinsically safe.

wesleywt 6y ago

Isn't this the case for all medicines? Vaccines mechanism of action makes it safer than any other medicine as they are harnessing the bodies own immune response system.

ouid 6y ago
No, FDA standards for the safety of medicine that you give to healthy people are much more rigorous than for medicine that you give to sick people.

another_kel 6y ago

How many precedents we have of a potential vaccine found out to cause serious harm? Asking seriously. Is there any studies/stats?

thisiscorrect 6y ago
I don't know how often this occurs. I know a specific case was Pandemrix, the vaccine administered in a few European nationas during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, which seems to have increased the risk of narcolepsy especially for children [1,2]. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847694/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847694/ [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcolepsy-flu.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  IIRC, getting that variant of the flu also increased the risk of narcolepsy.
nradov 6y ago
Some vaccines have caused antibody dependent enhancement before. However that doesn't appear to be a problem with any of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2020.572681 https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2020.572681

roywiggins 6y ago

Even the most dangerous vaccine we've ever produced would almost certainly be safer for most people than actually catching Covid.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
You should google "the Cutter incident".
- roywiggins 6y ago
  10 deaths out of 200,000 is much safer than COVID in the general population. In hardest hit areas, COVID has killed something like 1 in 100. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/
  - newen 6y ago
    Most of that 1% being people with pre-existing conditions.
    - roywiggins 6y ago
      If you restrict your interest into people with pre-existing conditions, the death rate of COVID is even higher and any danger posed by the vaccine is even less relevant to them. Maybe all ten children killed in the Cutter incident had pre-existing conditions. Most people have a pre-existing condition of some sort or another. It was an effort to inoculate generally, so that's why I used the death rate of COVID in the general population as a comparison.
      - newen 6y ago
        It has to do with your argument being a bad argument. > Only 10 in 200,000 died from a vaccine This doesn't negate the fact that vaccines can be dangerous. This just happens to be the number for that particular vaccine. > 10 in 200,000 deaths is better than 1 in 100 The 10 could have been fine without the vaccine. Who knows, it's just speculation; maybe they had pre-existing conditions, maybe they did not. But comparing numbers like this knowing that the 10 in 200,000 are drawn from a different population from the 1 in 100 is being disingenuous.

epistasis 6y ago

As a class of biologically active agents, vaccines are incredibly mild. This is because rather than throwing a wrench in the gears of how cells work (the usual mechanism of action of drugs), they tell your immune system to do what it does every day, but just to include this one new target. The definition of "intrinsically safe" doesn't even sound like a consistent bar. Nearly every aspect of living involves risks, even if that risk is of falling and hitting one's head.

newen 6y ago
The current mRNA vaccines for coronavirus do throw a wrench in the gears of how cells work.
- epistasis 6y ago
  There's no wrench in the gears, no mucking up of the normal function of enzymes. It's just ribosomes translating like they normally do, and then the rest of the immune system going after the translated peptides.
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
Anyone knows if the small number of people who do get side-effects from a vaccine would have been been likely to get a severe form of the disease if infected? Or if the side-effect subset is random.
- epistasis 6y ago
  For the side effects of: * Injection site pain * Fatigue * Headache * Muscle pain * Chills * Joint pain * Fever The effects are too mild and short term to pose an interesting research question, I would think. For the more sever side effect of swollen lymph nodes, it has not been investigated, though that might provide enough immune system insight to be an interesting question to pursue. The only other adverse event, Bell's Palsy, is currently indistinguishable from the background rate of occurrence, so I would doubt that anybody is investigating that. There's a big methodological problem too: you can either get an extreme reaction to COVID-19, or you can have side effects from the vaccine, but a person going through one would poison the results of the other. So to come up with some sort of experiment, you'd need some sort or prognostic based on biomarkers that was strong and convincing enough to think it was related to what you're predicting, which we definitely don't have yet. Then you'd need to cross tab between effects. Potentially possible, but it relies on a pretty big discovery that would have better uses!

NoOneNew 6y ago

Agreed. This debate over the covid vaccines is getting weird. Especially when it comes to the HN demographic, I'm pretty sure 99%+ are perfectly fine with vaccines in general. As I am. Vaccines and a lot of modern pharmaceuticals are awesome and save many, many lives. However, I'm super against rushed, politicized pharmaceuticals. Especially when there are hundreds of millions of dollars in profit to be made. Big pharma isn't exactly known for doing the right thing when big money is on the line... ever. As you mentioned, vaccines are not safe because they are vaccines. They're safe because of the exhaustive testing trails. A majority of the forced vaccines have been tested for many decades, those are fine (speaking from a USA perspective). The problem we face now, the anti-vax idiots muddied the waters of actual problems of some vaccines. It's hard to determine what's true and what's just stupid. This is why it's important not to overblow anything. It makes it harder to weed out true, legit problems that can be legitimately fixed.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
All of the standard procedures for vaccine approval were followed. Timeline compression happened mostly by parallelizing procedures. (In the western world. Russia's Sputnik approval did skip steps. Which has probably saved a bunch of lives there, but it was riskier than ours).
MauranKilom 6y ago
It seems that you have concerns about the recently approved covid vaccines, at least from allusions such as "I'm super against rushed, politicized pharmaceuticals" and "A majority of the forced vaccines have been tested for many decades". To address those two points in particular: The trials for these FDA-approved vaccines were not "rushed". They included all the usual phases for their usual durations. That's why we only get the vaccines now (even though developing them took far less than a month). What made the trials faster is that they started preparing the next stage while the previous one was still ongoing - which is not normally done, so as to not waste money in case problems are found. As for the duration of testing: As mentioned, the set of stages before approval was not reduced. Vaccines are indeed monitored after being cleared for use, but having to wait decades would not make sense. I understand that this is different for other vaccines that are "forced", but you admit yourself that this is not true for all of them in the first place.

Consultant32452 6y ago

Talc baby powder is very safe because it is required to be safe by law. If talc baby powder is not shown to be very safe, it definitely will not be allowed to stay on the market for decades after the government learns it is giving us cancer.