5 ms·

Good series of posts. I'll add briefly to point (1) and (2). (1) vaccine manufacturing was very much blocked by approval. For example, instead of having 30M do

Good series of posts. I'll add briefly to point (1) and (2). (1) vaccine manufacturing was very much blocked by approval. For example, instead of having 30M doses of Astrazeneca in December, because of approval delays they delivered 5M instead. Companies also cannot produce too much of vaccines that might spoil. Letting them distribute even a nominal amount (say 1M/mo since June) would have learned us many valuable lessons by now and allowed many more vaccines to be manufactured. (2) they discussed long term side effects on the approval calls. There has only been 1 side effect after 6 weeks ever recorded in history. It was a long time ago with a live virus polio vaccine on an immunocompromised person. Given the many billions of vaccines given in history, the odds of a long term side effect are not literally impossible, but as close as we get in medicine.

artursapek 6y ago
A single instance of a long term side effect in all of recorded history? You actually believe that?
- aaron695 6y ago
  Rather than saying they are wrong, why not link to one of the records? The Varicella vaccine causes shingles years later - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150811103555.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150811103555.h...
  - Noumenon72 6y ago
    My reading of that abstract is that vaccinating an entire society leads to more shingles in that society because having chickenpox circulating in a population exposes people to the virus repeatedly, which boosts their immunity to shingles. A single person getting the shot would not have an increased risk of getting shingles.
    - aaron695 6y ago
      Sorry, you are correct. That abstract was the wrong one. "Since the varicella vaccine is a live virus vaccine, the virus can become dormant and reactivate, rarely causing serious side effects. Individual case reports of varicella vaccine virus reactivation leading to vaccine-associated herpes zoster ophthalmicus and encephalitis, and meningitis have been published." https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vaccines/varicella-vaccine.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vaccines/varicella-vaccine... https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055/s-0036-1597691.pdf https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055... "We present a case of a previously healthy twice-VZV vaccinated 14-year-old girl who presented with rash and headache who was found to have herpes zoster complicated by meningitis. Cerebrospinal fluid polymerase chain reaction confirmed zoster infection secondary to reactivation of vaccine-strain VZV"
  - simonh 6y ago
    No it doesn't. People not getting Chicken Pox leads to an increased prevalence of Shingles. It is not a side effect of the vaccine, it's a side effect of reducing the prevalence of certain viruses.
amluto 6y ago
For a recent counterexample, consider the Dengvaxia campaign in the Philippines [0]. Quite a few children ended up in the hospital. It’s impossible to attribute any specific case to the vaccine, but the numbers are fairly compelling. As far as I could tell, all documented affected children are alive and well, but that doesn’t rule out children who weren’t noticed by researchers, and I’d consider being hospitalized to be a fairly severe side effect. So, yes, you need to test vaccines, even for COVID. (Consider the UK’s dubious Oxford vaccine campaign. The data is muddled because AstraZenica screwed up, but the UK could easily end up in a situation in which the virus still circulates in a large population with weak vaccine protection, resulting in selective pressure on the virus to mutate to escape the vaccine’s protection. This would be bad news indeed.)

artursapek 6y ago

A single instance of a long term side effect in all of recorded history? You actually believe that?

aaron695 6y ago
Rather than saying they are wrong, why not link to one of the records? The Varicella vaccine causes shingles years later - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150811103555.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150811103555.h...
- Noumenon72 6y ago
  My reading of that abstract is that vaccinating an entire society leads to more shingles in that society because having chickenpox circulating in a population exposes people to the virus repeatedly, which boosts their immunity to shingles. A single person getting the shot would not have an increased risk of getting shingles.
  - aaron695 6y ago
    Sorry, you are correct. That abstract was the wrong one. "Since the varicella vaccine is a live virus vaccine, the virus can become dormant and reactivate, rarely causing serious side effects. Individual case reports of varicella vaccine virus reactivation leading to vaccine-associated herpes zoster ophthalmicus and encephalitis, and meningitis have been published." https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vaccines/varicella-vaccine.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vaccines/varicella-vaccine... https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055/s-0036-1597691.pdf https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055... "We present a case of a previously healthy twice-VZV vaccinated 14-year-old girl who presented with rash and headache who was found to have herpes zoster complicated by meningitis. Cerebrospinal fluid polymerase chain reaction confirmed zoster infection secondary to reactivation of vaccine-strain VZV"
- simonh 6y ago
  No it doesn't. People not getting Chicken Pox leads to an increased prevalence of Shingles. It is not a side effect of the vaccine, it's a side effect of reducing the prevalence of certain viruses.

amluto 6y ago

For a recent counterexample, consider the Dengvaxia campaign in the Philippines [0]. Quite a few children ended up in the hospital. It’s impossible to attribute any specific case to the vaccine, but the numbers are fairly compelling. As far as I could tell, all documented affected children are alive and well, but that doesn’t rule out children who weren’t noticed by researchers, and I’d consider being hospitalized to be a fairly severe side effect. So, yes, you need to test vaccines, even for COVID. (Consider the UK’s dubious Oxford vaccine campaign. The data is muddled because AstraZenica screwed up, but the UK could easily end up in a situation in which the virus still circulates in a large population with weak vaccine protection, resulting in selective pressure on the virus to mutate to escape the vaccine’s protection. This would be bad news indeed.)