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mRNA vaccines are not new, just newer than existing platforms. mRNA vaccine clinical trials which usually last years (or a decade), were completed in 2017, as p

mRNA vaccines are not new, just newer than existing platforms. mRNA vaccine clinical trials which usually last years (or a decade), were completed in 2017, as per the nature article summary. The technology and its effects are well known in both in mice and human models. Is there residual risk that there were will be some unintended side-effect when billions of doses are administered? Yes, of course. There is no way to prove a vaccine is safe for everyone in all conditions, (see: Popper's falsification and the demarcation problem). Same goes for any other pharma formulation, food stuff or procedure. However, we have to weigh the residual risks against the risk of death from Covid and its variants and risk of long term damage to me or those around me who might be unwittingly in a higher risk category. Vaccination is a moral obligation and even if I would rather not, decency and civic duty to our fellow humans dictates that I must. And so should you.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jeremyis 5y ago
> Vaccination is a moral obligation and even if I would rather not, decency and civic duty to our fellow humans dictates that I must. And so should you. Well put
- aeternum 5y ago
  By that logic, shouldn't you also through that same sense of decency and civic duty donate to prevent starvation? How is it morally decent to live in an expensive city while that money could prevent others from dying? In fact, instead of taking that vaccine shouldn't you give it to a school teacher or hospital worker in a country that doesn't yet have the vaccine? This 'moral obligation' nonsense sounds good at face value but really doesn't hold up in practice.
medicineman 5y ago
>[...]civic duty to our fellow humans dictates that I must. It appears you grew up with more privilege than I can even fathom.
lolbrels 5y ago
No thanks. If someone is high risk that is their responsibility to accommodate themselves and their surroundings. You have a twisted sense of morality.
Pompidou 5y ago
My fear with mRNA vaccine is that we place too much hope in this technology. Maybe it's much less efficient from what was expected.
- alexfromapex 5y ago
  My fear is that we still don’t fully understand genetic and epigenetic coding and there are probably latent dangers lurking with this class of vaccines that may not even be apparent until a new generation of posterity.
  - jcadam 5y ago
    I suppose there's always a (very) small chance that we're making a civilization-ending mistake with this new vaccine :) On the flip-side, while COVID can cause serious illness (and death), with a survival rate north of 99%, there's virtually no risk of societal collapse if we do nothing (OTOH, our response to it has been far more de-stabilizing).
- elicash 5y ago
  I think we probably place too much hope in improving technology, in general. It's a tremendous breakthrough, I'd say. But rather than focus on the tech, I'd rather see a rethinking of our governmental approach to issues concerning public health and how approval processes are set up. I'd rather focus on how we incentivize breakthroughs on issues that are most important, rather than developing another medicine that's 1% better at treating acne, for example. And I'd rather see cultural changes around adopting already existing technologies -- less than half of folks take flu shots! I'd argue that getting flu shot numbers way up would be more of a breakthrough than any benefits from mRNA, as incredible as it is. Not that we have to choose one or the other. I'm just saying I'd like these other issues to get more prominence.
seriousquestion 5y ago
> moral obligation and even if I would rather not, decency and civic duty to our fellow humans dictates that I must. And so should you. When people are not on stable scientific ground, they invoke morality. That's what priests and politicians do, not scientists. (edited)
- diegoperini 5y ago
  For someone who doesn't work in the field, deciding to take the vaccine is an act of faith.
  - ubercore 5y ago
    By that logic, doing anything you aren't expert in is an act of faith. It's pretty reductive.
    - diegoperini 5y ago
      I'm not reducing it to entirely faith, but faith takes part in it.
    - mnw21cam 5y ago
      That logic seems sound to me.
    - donw 5y ago
      You’re more correct than you realize. If I get on a Boeing aircraft, I am indeed engaging in an act of faith: that it was built properly, maintained well, and all the rest. When that faith is violated, say by the control systems having the RANDOMLY_FALL_OUT_OF_THE_SKY flag set to “true”, then society engages in faith-restoring rituals: grounds the aircraft, leads an inquiry, does a recall, that sort of thing. What you are seeing here is what happens when a large chunk of the population has lost faith in, and thus no longer trusts, its institutions.
      - throwawayboise 5y ago
traviswt 5y ago
> Vaccination is a moral obligation Only if the mechanism of its action contributes to herd immunity. If it provides symptom abatement without lowering infection and transmission, then vaccination of those not at risk can prove counterproductive due to asymptomatic spread.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Death isn't the only negative outcome of covid. We're seeing a relatively high rate of long-term damage caused by low-level symptoms. If we can reduce those symptoms with a (perhaps annual) shot, then covid turns into the "just a cold" that we were all hoping it would be
  - TheBlight 5y ago
    >We're seeing a relatively high rate of long-term damage caused by low-level symptoms. Source? I've seen it reported that this may actually be dubious. [1] [1] https://archive.ph/CConv https://archive.ph/CConv
    - klyrs 5y ago
      https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210331204431.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210331204431.h...
      - mdorazio 5y ago
        I'm not saying COVID doesn't have long-term impacts in certain portions of the population, but this sentence is pretty important: "However, the findings are observational, and the authors cannot rule out the possibility that rates of diagnoses in general might have decreased indirectly because of the pandemic, particularly in people not admitted to hospital with covid-19." It's really hard to draw meaningful conclusions when COVID has completely changed all kinds of factors in healthcare ranging from people being stuck at home and eating poorly to opting not to visit the doctor because of overburdened hospitals and fear of infection. I'd like to see some studies a year from now before forming a strong opinion.
padobson 5y ago
This had me nodding my head: However, we have to weigh the residual risks against the risk of death from Covid But then this made me wonder if there was a paragraph I missed: Vaccination is a moral obligation I think it's a mistake to think the weighing process you endorse in the first quote will land everyone with the moral obligation you endorse in the second.
krona 5y ago
Informed consent, a cornerstone of medical ethics, has very little to do with the fact that we can't prove treatment will not be detrimental in all cases. Or perhaps you prioritise the group above the individual in all cases and think e.g. the Nuremberg Code is worthless historical artifact?
- haltingproblem 5y ago
  You have packed two strawman arguments into one comment. I was talking about a moral obligation and not about informed consent or this: "The Nuremberg Code aimed to protect human subjects from enduring the kind of cruelty and exploitation the prisoners endured at concentration camps. The 10 elements of the code are: Voluntary consent is essential. The results of any experiment must be for the greater good of society." ;)
claytongulick 5y ago
This would require a degree of confidence in the benevolence of pharmaceutical companies that I do not currently have.
- Diederich 5y ago
  > benevolence of pharmaceutical companies I get that sentiment. There's a question of alignment of incentives. Covid19 vaccinations are likely to be a thing for many years to come, and there are a number of entities that will be able to produce those future vaccinations. If one of the big vaccine providers produces something that's demonstrably less safe than the others, then the odds of them getting more money for future vaccines goes down. It's far from a perfect system, and there are a lot of holes, but in this case, things line up pretty well. In short, you can be confident that these companies are primarily focused on long-term profit, which often aligns with good short and long term outcomes for its customers.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
In the semi-rural area where I live we have 1/3 trumpsters who won't get it due to their political allegiances and 1/3 hippies who won't because woo woo reasons. I am assuming there will be a harsh reckoning in store for this and similar places.
- vkou 5y ago
  The harsh reckoning will be for the urban areas who subsidize that stupidity, when variants will emerge from among these unvaccinated populations, and we are going to go through this song and dance all over again. It's also why I'm incensed that vaccine production is ramping up both too slowly, and will top out at too low a number. It can't take six months to vaccinate the first world, and eighteen to vaccinate the developing world against a variant.
  - call_me_dana 5y ago
    Or variants emerging from those vaccinated. It’s nonsense to assume “the unvaccinated are dirty Petri dishes where mutations come from!” Variants can come from vaccines themselves or mutating in the host and then spreading. If anyone think that’s impossible, such a phenomenon is happening right now in Africa with Polio. Wild Polio is declared to be eradicated. A vaccine derived strain is keeping the outbreak alive. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/25/905884740/africa-declares-wild-polio-is-wiped-out-yet-it-persists-in-vaccine-derived-cases https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/25/9058847...
    - vkou 5y ago
      Sure, it can happen, and viruses spread even through a vaccinated population, but quantity is a quality all of its own. Vaccinate everyone, and the number of opportunities for the virus to mutate and spread drops by orders of magnitude. Vaccinate half the population, and all that you'll do is create a great amount of evolutionary selection pressure for a mutation.
- splistud 5y ago
  It's hard when people you don't like won't do what you want them to do isn't it?
what_happa_god 5y ago
Regardless of your opinion of vaccination being a moral obligation, that does not sway my personal decision whether to take an experimental vaccine for an illness with a 99.5% survival rate. Collectivist ideals like "vaccinate everyone for the greater good!" does not trump my personal sovereignty and never will. I do not consent.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jcadam 5y ago
  There are people (not so much on HN, but definitely other places on the net) openly advocating for forced vaccinations and/or completely shunning the unvaccinated from society (to include employment). Oh, I'm with you on this, but I think it's only a matter of time before things get very uncomfortable.
kokanator 5y ago
Just an interesting question here, if you are saying vaccination is a moral obligation does this mean you are a moral realist [0]? My guess is not. You may mean to say for you vaccination is a moral obligation which if this is the case you are a moral relativist [1] and therefore your moral obligation does not necessarily apply to others. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/ [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/
- haltingproblem 5y ago
  Of course, my moral obligation only applies to me. But I can advocate for others to follow my line of reasoning through persuasion. Many moons ago, when I lived in a community where most residents were of the all-organic-no-vax types, I convinced the powers that be that vaccination was a moral obligation for the (mostly young) community due to the effects of infecting young and old and the resulting deaths. Everyone got a flu vaccine that year. I was not very popular after that ;(
splistud 5y ago
You keep saying we. There is no we in this CHOICE (your assumed moral obligation notwithstanding).
dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. It's tedious and evokes worse from others. We're trying for the opposite here. Especially please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents like "Vaccination is a moral obligation". They're highly repetitive and don't lead any place interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- haltingproblem 5y ago
  I posted what I thought was a very uncontroversial idea - "vaccination is a moral obligation for me", since Covid is surging again and vaccination rates have flatlined because vaccine hesitancy et.al. I don't know why this evoked such a negative response. I will just cool off posting comments on HN for a while.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jeremyis 5y ago

> Vaccination is a moral obligation and even if I would rather not, decency and civic duty to our fellow humans dictates that I must. And so should you. Well put

aeternum 5y ago
By that logic, shouldn't you also through that same sense of decency and civic duty donate to prevent starvation? How is it morally decent to live in an expensive city while that money could prevent others from dying? In fact, instead of taking that vaccine shouldn't you give it to a school teacher or hospital worker in a country that doesn't yet have the vaccine? This 'moral obligation' nonsense sounds good at face value but really doesn't hold up in practice.

medicineman 5y ago

>[...]civic duty to our fellow humans dictates that I must. It appears you grew up with more privilege than I can even fathom.

lolbrels 5y ago

No thanks. If someone is high risk that is their responsibility to accommodate themselves and their surroundings. You have a twisted sense of morality.

Pompidou 5y ago

My fear with mRNA vaccine is that we place too much hope in this technology. Maybe it's much less efficient from what was expected.

alexfromapex 5y ago
My fear is that we still don’t fully understand genetic and epigenetic coding and there are probably latent dangers lurking with this class of vaccines that may not even be apparent until a new generation of posterity.
- jcadam 5y ago
  I suppose there's always a (very) small chance that we're making a civilization-ending mistake with this new vaccine :) On the flip-side, while COVID can cause serious illness (and death), with a survival rate north of 99%, there's virtually no risk of societal collapse if we do nothing (OTOH, our response to it has been far more de-stabilizing).
elicash 5y ago
I think we probably place too much hope in improving technology, in general. It's a tremendous breakthrough, I'd say. But rather than focus on the tech, I'd rather see a rethinking of our governmental approach to issues concerning public health and how approval processes are set up. I'd rather focus on how we incentivize breakthroughs on issues that are most important, rather than developing another medicine that's 1% better at treating acne, for example. And I'd rather see cultural changes around adopting already existing technologies -- less than half of folks take flu shots! I'd argue that getting flu shot numbers way up would be more of a breakthrough than any benefits from mRNA, as incredible as it is. Not that we have to choose one or the other. I'm just saying I'd like these other issues to get more prominence.

seriousquestion 5y ago

> moral obligation and even if I would rather not, decency and civic duty to our fellow humans dictates that I must. And so should you. When people are not on stable scientific ground, they invoke morality. That's what priests and politicians do, not scientists. (edited)

diegoperini 5y ago
For someone who doesn't work in the field, deciding to take the vaccine is an act of faith.
- ubercore 5y ago
  By that logic, doing anything you aren't expert in is an act of faith. It's pretty reductive.
  - diegoperini 5y ago
    I'm not reducing it to entirely faith, but faith takes part in it.
  - mnw21cam 5y ago
    That logic seems sound to me.
  - donw 5y ago
    You’re more correct than you realize. If I get on a Boeing aircraft, I am indeed engaging in an act of faith: that it was built properly, maintained well, and all the rest. When that faith is violated, say by the control systems having the RANDOMLY_FALL_OUT_OF_THE_SKY flag set to “true”, then society engages in faith-restoring rituals: grounds the aircraft, leads an inquiry, does a recall, that sort of thing. What you are seeing here is what happens when a large chunk of the population has lost faith in, and thus no longer trusts, its institutions.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago

traviswt 5y ago

> Vaccination is a moral obligation Only if the mechanism of its action contributes to herd immunity. If it provides symptom abatement without lowering infection and transmission, then vaccination of those not at risk can prove counterproductive due to asymptomatic spread.

klyrs 5y ago
Death isn't the only negative outcome of covid. We're seeing a relatively high rate of long-term damage caused by low-level symptoms. If we can reduce those symptoms with a (perhaps annual) shot, then covid turns into the "just a cold" that we were all hoping it would be
- TheBlight 5y ago
  >We're seeing a relatively high rate of long-term damage caused by low-level symptoms. Source? I've seen it reported that this may actually be dubious. [1] [1] https://archive.ph/CConv https://archive.ph/CConv
  - klyrs 5y ago
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210331204431.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210331204431.h...
    - mdorazio 5y ago
      I'm not saying COVID doesn't have long-term impacts in certain portions of the population, but this sentence is pretty important: "However, the findings are observational, and the authors cannot rule out the possibility that rates of diagnoses in general might have decreased indirectly because of the pandemic, particularly in people not admitted to hospital with covid-19." It's really hard to draw meaningful conclusions when COVID has completely changed all kinds of factors in healthcare ranging from people being stuck at home and eating poorly to opting not to visit the doctor because of overburdened hospitals and fear of infection. I'd like to see some studies a year from now before forming a strong opinion.

padobson 5y ago

This had me nodding my head: However, we have to weigh the residual risks against the risk of death from Covid But then this made me wonder if there was a paragraph I missed: Vaccination is a moral obligation I think it's a mistake to think the weighing process you endorse in the first quote will land everyone with the moral obligation you endorse in the second.

krona 5y ago

Informed consent, a cornerstone of medical ethics, has very little to do with the fact that we can't prove treatment will not be detrimental in all cases. Or perhaps you prioritise the group above the individual in all cases and think e.g. the Nuremberg Code is worthless historical artifact?

haltingproblem 5y ago
You have packed two strawman arguments into one comment. I was talking about a moral obligation and not about informed consent or this: "The Nuremberg Code aimed to protect human subjects from enduring the kind of cruelty and exploitation the prisoners endured at concentration camps. The 10 elements of the code are: Voluntary consent is essential. The results of any experiment must be for the greater good of society." ;)

claytongulick 5y ago

This would require a degree of confidence in the benevolence of pharmaceutical companies that I do not currently have.

Diederich 5y ago
> benevolence of pharmaceutical companies I get that sentiment. There's a question of alignment of incentives. Covid19 vaccinations are likely to be a thing for many years to come, and there are a number of entities that will be able to produce those future vaccinations. If one of the big vaccine providers produces something that's demonstrably less safe than the others, then the odds of them getting more money for future vaccines goes down. It's far from a perfect system, and there are a lot of holes, but in this case, things line up pretty well. In short, you can be confident that these companies are primarily focused on long-term profit, which often aligns with good short and long term outcomes for its customers.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

In the semi-rural area where I live we have 1/3 trumpsters who won't get it due to their political allegiances and 1/3 hippies who won't because woo woo reasons. I am assuming there will be a harsh reckoning in store for this and similar places.

vkou 5y ago
The harsh reckoning will be for the urban areas who subsidize that stupidity, when variants will emerge from among these unvaccinated populations, and we are going to go through this song and dance all over again. It's also why I'm incensed that vaccine production is ramping up both too slowly, and will top out at too low a number. It can't take six months to vaccinate the first world, and eighteen to vaccinate the developing world against a variant.
- call_me_dana 5y ago
  Or variants emerging from those vaccinated. It’s nonsense to assume “the unvaccinated are dirty Petri dishes where mutations come from!” Variants can come from vaccines themselves or mutating in the host and then spreading. If anyone think that’s impossible, such a phenomenon is happening right now in Africa with Polio. Wild Polio is declared to be eradicated. A vaccine derived strain is keeping the outbreak alive. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/25/905884740/africa-declares-wild-polio-is-wiped-out-yet-it-persists-in-vaccine-derived-cases https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/25/9058847...
  - vkou 5y ago
    Sure, it can happen, and viruses spread even through a vaccinated population, but quantity is a quality all of its own. Vaccinate everyone, and the number of opportunities for the virus to mutate and spread drops by orders of magnitude. Vaccinate half the population, and all that you'll do is create a great amount of evolutionary selection pressure for a mutation.
splistud 5y ago
It's hard when people you don't like won't do what you want them to do isn't it?

what_happa_god 5y ago

Regardless of your opinion of vaccination being a moral obligation, that does not sway my personal decision whether to take an experimental vaccine for an illness with a 99.5% survival rate. Collectivist ideals like "vaccinate everyone for the greater good!" does not trump my personal sovereignty and never will. I do not consent.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jcadam 5y ago
There are people (not so much on HN, but definitely other places on the net) openly advocating for forced vaccinations and/or completely shunning the unvaccinated from society (to include employment). Oh, I'm with you on this, but I think it's only a matter of time before things get very uncomfortable.

kokanator 5y ago

Just an interesting question here, if you are saying vaccination is a moral obligation does this mean you are a moral realist [0]? My guess is not. You may mean to say for you vaccination is a moral obligation which if this is the case you are a moral relativist [1] and therefore your moral obligation does not necessarily apply to others. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/ [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/

haltingproblem 5y ago
Of course, my moral obligation only applies to me. But I can advocate for others to follow my line of reasoning through persuasion. Many moons ago, when I lived in a community where most residents were of the all-organic-no-vax types, I convinced the powers that be that vaccination was a moral obligation for the (mostly young) community due to the effects of infecting young and old and the resulting deaths. Everyone got a flu vaccine that year. I was not very popular after that ;(

splistud 5y ago

You keep saying we. There is no we in this CHOICE (your assumed moral obligation notwithstanding).

dang 5y ago

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. It's tedious and evokes worse from others. We're trying for the opposite here. Especially please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents like "Vaccination is a moral obligation". They're highly repetitive and don't lead any place interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

haltingproblem 5y ago
I posted what I thought was a very uncontroversial idea - "vaccination is a moral obligation for me", since Covid is surging again and vaccination rates have flatlined because vaccine hesitancy et.al. I don't know why this evoked such a negative response. I will just cool off posting comments on HN for a while.