5 ms·

Something I've noticed: when people in my surroundings bring up worries of long-term effects of the fast-tracked vaccines, they somehow tend to not consider the

Something I've noticed: when people in my surroundings bring up worries of long-term effects of the fast-tracked vaccines, they somehow tend to not consider the unknown long-term effects of covid. Even though the argument that we cannot know the long term effects yet should apply equally. When I bring this up they do seem receptive to this argument though, provided I'm not dismissive of their own skepticism. I'm not trying to convince them to get vaccinated, but I do wish that my friends stay safe until the pandemic is over at least, so I ask them to please be consistent and be worried about the unknown long-term effects of getting covid. Especially given that for the latter we do know that it's an actual disease that has already taken lots of lives and given lots of people long-term symptoms.

greenwich26 6y ago
You can't neglect the prior. In most European countries, somewhere around 5% of the population might have been infected with covid. Up to around 10% in the US. Therefore, to have comparable posterior probabilities for long-term side effects, you would need the side effects argument not to merely "apply equally", but to favour the vaccine over the disease by a factor of about 10.
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  You're not wrong, but my priority is to ensure that my friends who rely on emotion-based arguments (fear of the unknown regarding the vaccines, dismissing the risks of covid and taking too few precautions as a result) to be safe and to not contribute to keeping the pandemic going. Going this deep into statistics would just lose them, because I'd come across as trying to intimidate them into taking my viewpoint on how to reason about these things. edit: apparently none of you have ever been accused of being an ivory tower jerk in their lives, explicitly or implicitly, ever? We're not talking about a discussion between people trying to weigh uncertainties based on what they do and do not know and working it out on a paper napkin. We're talking about people being overwhelmed by the complexity of it all and as a result starting from what they're most scared of and reasoning backwards from there. Which is how most people out there function, like it or not.
  - adolph 6y ago
    >my friends who rely on emotion-based arguments Isn’t every argument based in emotion? Do unpalatable facts have a strong track record of success in arguments?
    - Retric 6y ago
      No. A lot of modern physics for example still seems objectively wrong when hearing about it as a student. Physical experiments and math has converted a lot of skeptics into believing some very “strange” things about how our universe works.
      - adolph 6y ago
        Are you saying that over a time period longer than a conversation or argument people who committed to learning a topic in depth were able to alter prior beliefs that were based in their lived experiences?
        Retric 6y ago
        An argument isn’t some specific length of time. A 20 year bet on some outcome is a single argument that takes decades.
        adolph 6y ago
        >Going this deep into statistics would just lose them The comment’s text quoted above leads me to believe “argument” in this context refers to a shorter length of time rather than a longer one spent in deliberate study of the argument’s topic. Do you have a different interpretation of the comment to which this particular thread is devoted?
      - sdenton4 6y ago
        Acceptance of some of those strange observations relied on the older generation - with strong emotional attachment to the old way of looking at things - dying off.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Without vaccination, the chance of eventually catching the disease is just about 100%. Yes, any single person may try and hope to be protected by herd immunity. But there are serious doubts that can be achieved given some variants' higher virulence and expected levels of eventual vaccine uptake considering justifiable reasons. Meanwhile, long-term harms from vaccination are entirely speculative. There isn't even a real theory as to any mechanism to cause any such effects: all components of the vaccines are well-known, except the COVID-specific parts which are a strict subset of the actual virus.
  - jerf 6y ago
    "Meanwhile, long-term harms from vaccination are entirely speculative." I don't think this is a safe thing to say about mRNA vaccines, which are brand new. IIRC one of the vaccines is essentially an old-style vaccine made for COVID, and for that one you may be able to reasonably say that, but not the new stuff that has never been mass-deployed before. Nor does this mean they're automatically bad either. There's always a first time for something new. I'm just saying that it isn't really justified to apply decades of experience with one type of vaccine to another blindly.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      The other US approved vaccine is a live viral carrier that has only been used fairly recently in experimental treatments (I think maybe an Ebola vaccine using it got approved recently?).
- standardUser 6y ago
  The CDC estimates around 25% of the US population has been infected so far. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
  - totheloop 6y ago
    It'll probably settle around 33-35% since that number is just for 2020.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Roughly 37% of the US population was infected. A large fraction of Americans never took it seriously. Does that sound familiar? Oh yeah, climate change.
- peter422 6y ago
  Well one pretty big side effect of the disease is death, which is very long term and we know the vaccines prevent way above 10x. So that should probably count for more.
cortic 6y ago
That the vaccine is better than the disease seems a ridiculously low bar to me. I'd be much more reassured if they listed the side effects with their likelihoods (1 in ??) subdivided this with age groups if appropriate, I've seen this in NHS prescriptions in the past and its always been very reassuring.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Every medication publishes this information and must include it in every box shipped. It has been available since approval if you Google “vaccine name” + prescribing information. The fact that I have yet to see it discussed in 1000s of news articles shows how ineffective news is as an information source.
DrBazza 6y ago
> fast-tracked vaccines It would be accurate to say that these vaccines have been developed in the optimal time, and vaccines are usually 'slow-tracked'. Nothing has been rushed here in the sense of cutting clinical corners. The development of these vaccines has gone through the same phases of testing that every other vaccine has. Things that slow down all vaccine development: funding, finding volunteers for testing groups, committee approval for the development of vaccines, submission and resubmission of proposals to name but a few. All of these barriers were removed by governments throwing cash at the various companies, and the companies and universities themselves removing barriers.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > Nothing has been rushed here in the sense of cutting clinical corners. The development of these vaccines has gone through the same phases of testing that every other vaccine has. They were approved for emergency use, which means skipping tests for long-term side-effects, because those usually take around two years. Every other vaccine has been around for a while and gone through this.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    Not to mention this is these are the very first mRNA vaccines deployed in this scale. We’re going to be honest about long-term risks, and possibilities, we can’t just hand waive this away. It’ll be fine. But pretending that long term risk isn’t there because we don’t want it to be isn’t very sciencey. It’s wrong to equate these to previous vaccines in multiple ways.
    - lofi_lory 6y ago
      In the past "long term" side effects meant within weeks after the fact. This includes things like autoimmune disease. However, the statistical signal may only appear years later. The mRNA vaccines also don't "infect" the whole body, but only the injection site, and they are metabolized quickly. There really is no reason to assume any late effects say 5 years later. If they were frequent late side effects, we would totally know by now. By the way, they are a brilliantly less complex system, much easier to reason about, than traditional vaccines.
airhead969 6y ago
The known effects of LC are horrendous: permanent damage to the brain, heart, lung, kidneys, liver, and pancreas.
- timr 6y ago
  > The known effects of LC are horrendous: permanent damage to the brain, heart, lung, kidneys, liver, and pancreas. None of these are "known effects". If you count "things that have happened to someone after contracting SARS-CoV2" as "long covid", then an entire universe of medical maladies is included in the set that may or may not be causally related. There are specific examples of patients with severe cases of SARS-CoV2 infection who have had damage to particular organs. However, it is misleading to draw a connection from these to the broader phenomenon of "long covid", which is neither well-characterized, nor necessarily related to these acute situations. The ambiguity in terminology here is being used to loop in everything from minor headaches to lung damage due to mechanical ventilation.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Look at the cadaver studies.
    - InitialLastName 6y ago
      Cadavers from Covid 19 have (by definition) not had very much time to recover from long covid.
      - airhead969 6y ago
        Strawman. That's not the point. The point is the permanent damage SARS-CoV-2 has on numerous organ systems. People also survive COVID-19 illness and die from other things.
        timr 6y ago
        If you pick a pile of dead bodies and look for things that killed them, you will find things.

greenwich26 6y ago

You can't neglect the prior. In most European countries, somewhere around 5% of the population might have been infected with covid. Up to around 10% in the US. Therefore, to have comparable posterior probabilities for long-term side effects, you would need the side effects argument not to merely "apply equally", but to favour the vaccine over the disease by a factor of about 10.

vanderZwan 6y ago
You're not wrong, but my priority is to ensure that my friends who rely on emotion-based arguments (fear of the unknown regarding the vaccines, dismissing the risks of covid and taking too few precautions as a result) to be safe and to not contribute to keeping the pandemic going. Going this deep into statistics would just lose them, because I'd come across as trying to intimidate them into taking my viewpoint on how to reason about these things. edit: apparently none of you have ever been accused of being an ivory tower jerk in their lives, explicitly or implicitly, ever? We're not talking about a discussion between people trying to weigh uncertainties based on what they do and do not know and working it out on a paper napkin. We're talking about people being overwhelmed by the complexity of it all and as a result starting from what they're most scared of and reasoning backwards from there. Which is how most people out there function, like it or not.
- adolph 6y ago
  >my friends who rely on emotion-based arguments Isn’t every argument based in emotion? Do unpalatable facts have a strong track record of success in arguments?
  - Retric 6y ago
    No. A lot of modern physics for example still seems objectively wrong when hearing about it as a student. Physical experiments and math has converted a lot of skeptics into believing some very “strange” things about how our universe works.
    - adolph 6y ago
      Are you saying that over a time period longer than a conversation or argument people who committed to learning a topic in depth were able to alter prior beliefs that were based in their lived experiences?
      - Retric 6y ago
        An argument isn’t some specific length of time. A 20 year bet on some outcome is a single argument that takes decades.
        adolph 6y ago
        >Going this deep into statistics would just lose them The comment’s text quoted above leads me to believe “argument” in this context refers to a shorter length of time rather than a longer one spent in deliberate study of the argument’s topic. Do you have a different interpretation of the comment to which this particular thread is devoted?
    - sdenton4 6y ago
      Acceptance of some of those strange observations relied on the older generation - with strong emotional attachment to the old way of looking at things - dying off.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Without vaccination, the chance of eventually catching the disease is just about 100%. Yes, any single person may try and hope to be protected by herd immunity. But there are serious doubts that can be achieved given some variants' higher virulence and expected levels of eventual vaccine uptake considering justifiable reasons. Meanwhile, long-term harms from vaccination are entirely speculative. There isn't even a real theory as to any mechanism to cause any such effects: all components of the vaccines are well-known, except the COVID-specific parts which are a strict subset of the actual virus.
- jerf 6y ago
  "Meanwhile, long-term harms from vaccination are entirely speculative." I don't think this is a safe thing to say about mRNA vaccines, which are brand new. IIRC one of the vaccines is essentially an old-style vaccine made for COVID, and for that one you may be able to reasonably say that, but not the new stuff that has never been mass-deployed before. Nor does this mean they're automatically bad either. There's always a first time for something new. I'm just saying that it isn't really justified to apply decades of experience with one type of vaccine to another blindly.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    The other US approved vaccine is a live viral carrier that has only been used fairly recently in experimental treatments (I think maybe an Ebola vaccine using it got approved recently?).
standardUser 6y ago
The CDC estimates around 25% of the US population has been infected so far. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
- totheloop 6y ago
  It'll probably settle around 33-35% since that number is just for 2020.
airhead969 6y ago
Roughly 37% of the US population was infected. A large fraction of Americans never took it seriously. Does that sound familiar? Oh yeah, climate change.
peter422 6y ago
Well one pretty big side effect of the disease is death, which is very long term and we know the vaccines prevent way above 10x. So that should probably count for more.

cortic 6y ago

That the vaccine is better than the disease seems a ridiculously low bar to me. I'd be much more reassured if they listed the side effects with their likelihoods (1 in ??) subdivided this with age groups if appropriate, I've seen this in NHS prescriptions in the past and its always been very reassuring.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
Every medication publishes this information and must include it in every box shipped. It has been available since approval if you Google “vaccine name” + prescribing information. The fact that I have yet to see it discussed in 1000s of news articles shows how ineffective news is as an information source.

DrBazza 6y ago

> fast-tracked vaccines It would be accurate to say that these vaccines have been developed in the optimal time, and vaccines are usually 'slow-tracked'. Nothing has been rushed here in the sense of cutting clinical corners. The development of these vaccines has gone through the same phases of testing that every other vaccine has. Things that slow down all vaccine development: funding, finding volunteers for testing groups, committee approval for the development of vaccines, submission and resubmission of proposals to name but a few. All of these barriers were removed by governments throwing cash at the various companies, and the companies and universities themselves removing barriers.

Izkata 6y ago
> Nothing has been rushed here in the sense of cutting clinical corners. The development of these vaccines has gone through the same phases of testing that every other vaccine has. They were approved for emergency use, which means skipping tests for long-term side-effects, because those usually take around two years. Every other vaccine has been around for a while and gone through this.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  Not to mention this is these are the very first mRNA vaccines deployed in this scale. We’re going to be honest about long-term risks, and possibilities, we can’t just hand waive this away. It’ll be fine. But pretending that long term risk isn’t there because we don’t want it to be isn’t very sciencey. It’s wrong to equate these to previous vaccines in multiple ways.
  - lofi_lory 6y ago
    In the past "long term" side effects meant within weeks after the fact. This includes things like autoimmune disease. However, the statistical signal may only appear years later. The mRNA vaccines also don't "infect" the whole body, but only the injection site, and they are metabolized quickly. There really is no reason to assume any late effects say 5 years later. If they were frequent late side effects, we would totally know by now. By the way, they are a brilliantly less complex system, much easier to reason about, than traditional vaccines.

airhead969 6y ago

The known effects of LC are horrendous: permanent damage to the brain, heart, lung, kidneys, liver, and pancreas.

timr 6y ago
> The known effects of LC are horrendous: permanent damage to the brain, heart, lung, kidneys, liver, and pancreas. None of these are "known effects". If you count "things that have happened to someone after contracting SARS-CoV2" as "long covid", then an entire universe of medical maladies is included in the set that may or may not be causally related. There are specific examples of patients with severe cases of SARS-CoV2 infection who have had damage to particular organs. However, it is misleading to draw a connection from these to the broader phenomenon of "long covid", which is neither well-characterized, nor necessarily related to these acute situations. The ambiguity in terminology here is being used to loop in everything from minor headaches to lung damage due to mechanical ventilation.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Look at the cadaver studies.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    Cadavers from Covid 19 have (by definition) not had very much time to recover from long covid.
    - airhead969 6y ago
      Strawman. That's not the point. The point is the permanent damage SARS-CoV-2 has on numerous organ systems. People also survive COVID-19 illness and die from other things.
      - timr 6y ago
        If you pick a pile of dead bodies and look for things that killed them, you will find things.