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The vaccines have regular approval in the EU by the EMA, the US approval is the odd case here. And there is no reason to expect a significant risk for side effe

The vaccines have regular approval in the EU by the EMA, the US approval is the odd case here. And there is no reason to expect a significant risk for side effects that only appear after several years, for vaccines they generally appear reasonably close to the date of the vaccination. And you're seriously downplaying the risks of COVID-19 here, of course it is relatively harmless for very young people. But it is seriously dangerous for a large part of the population that is older.

logicchains 5y ago
>And you're seriously downplaying the risks of COVID-19 here, of course it is relatively harmless for very young people. But it is seriously dangerous for a large part of the population that is older. It's not only "very young" people. Did you look at the link I provided? For people 20-30, it's around one in a hundred thousand. For people 30-50, it's around one in ten thousand (similar to giving birth). When someone's making a rational decision, it's with regard to their individual risk; the risk of covid to an eighty-year-old is irrelevant to a twenty-year-old deciding whether to take the vaccine, especially given the vaccine doesn't prevent them infecting others if they get it (see this data from the Singapore government: https://covid.viz.sg/ https://covid.viz.sg/ ). >for vaccines they generally appear reasonably close to the date of the vaccination. The MRNA vaccines are quite different from normal dead/live virus vaccines and have never been used at scale.
- johncolanduoni 5y ago
  > The MRNA vaccines are quite different from normal dead/live virus vaccines and have never been used at scale. Their closer relative, the viral vector vaccines (like J&J’s), have been. You’re right about calculating risk, but when’s the last time a vaccine in normal, longer term stage three trials resulted in a higher fatality rate than COVID (for any age group)? The link for the SARS vaccine candidate was a failure that was caught in a mouse model, which unsurprisingly they also did with the new vaccines before the human trials started. To echo the parent comment, these were immediate side effects on challenge (which would likely been caught in stage 2 trials even if they only happened in humans and not in animal models). If we want to go with unusual reactions that only show up over time, what about the chance that whatever long term side effect you’re imagining from the vaccines instead happens for people who have been infected with COVID 5 years from now? Once you decide to make decisions based on rare and novel events with unquantifiable risks, you’ll find they show up absolutely everywhere if you’re being intellectually honest. > given the vaccine doesn't prevent them infecting others if they get it (see this data from the Singapore government That data’s N is a little low, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. The vast majority of vaccinated people in that dataset did not go on to infect others, and none of them were epicenters for super-spreader events. Eyeballing it, it’s consistent with a sterilizing immunity in excess of 80%. If the vaccines turn out to be that effective at preventing transmission, that’s an excellent outcome (it is higher than most vaccines).
  - logicchains 5y ago
    >You’re right about calculating risk, but when’s the last time a vaccine in normal, longer term stage three trials resulted in a higher fatality rate than COVID (for any age group)? The link for the SARS vaccine candidate was a failure that was caught in a mouse model, which unsurprisingly they also did with the new vaccines before the human trials started. To echo the parent comment, these were immediate side effects on challenge (which would likely been caught in stage 2 trials even if they only happened in humans and not in animal models). It's basically like saying: "the unit tests have all passed now, the regression tests all pass, so let's roll out the fix straight to prod, because it's urgent and we don't have enough time to do the normal amount of staging environment testing". Sure, probably it's fine. But mistakes happen. In any other context, a 1/100,000 chance of error would be considered incredibly low, a great achievement. But in this case, a 1/100,000 chance of seeing after 2-3 years a failure like happened early on in those previous trials would be an incredible tragedy, if the vaccine was taken by people with less than 1/100,000 chance of being killed by covid. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 makes a better case than I can that "a finite, non-theoretical risk is evident in the medical literature that vaccine candidates composed of the SARS-CoV-2 viral spike and eliciting anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, be they neutralising or not, place vaccinees at higher risk for more severe COVID-19 disease when they encounter circulating viruses" >If we want to go with unusual reactions that only show up over time, what about the chance that whatever long term side effect you’re imagining from the vaccines instead happens for people who have been infected with COVID 5 years from now? Once you decide to make decisions based on rare and novel events with unquantifiable risks, you’ll find they show up absolutely everywhere if you’re being intellectually honest. The difference is that covid does not have a big qualitative difference from other respiratory viruses, and no circulating respiratory viruses are known to cause serious long-term symptoms in people who were short-term asymptomatic. Whereas the MRNA treatment is quite a different mechanism from previous vaccines. Separately, ethically it's generally considered worse if a death results from deliberate human action than from an "act of nature". E.g. nowhere is it morally acceptable to murder somebody just because their organs could be used to save ten people. In this case that means it would be considered morally worse if people were coerced into taking a vaccine that ended up killing them than if, absent the vaccine, they died from natural causes of equivalent risk. >That data’s N is a little low, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. The vast majority of vaccinated people in that dataset did not go on to infect others, and none of them were epicenters for super-spreader events. Eyeballing it, it’s consistent with a sterilizing immunity in excess of 80%. If the vaccines turn out to be that effective at preventing transmission, that’s an excellent outcome (it is higher than most vaccines). There's one super-spreader there, a prison cook. I pulled the data from the backing rest API (if you want I could upload the notebook and show you): pd.Series(vax_links).describe() count 17.000000 mean 2.705882 std 3.670230 min 1.000000 25% 1.000000 50% 1.000000 75% 2.000000 max 14.000000 dtype: float64 pd.Series(unvax_links).describe() count 127.000000 mean 2.181102 std 1.965647 min 1.000000 25% 1.000000 50% 2.000000 75% 2.000000 max 15.000000 dtype: float64 While there are way fewer vax cases than unvax cases, looking at the average number of infectees it doesn't appear that vaccinated people infect fewer on average than the unvaccinated do, at least given the limited data.
- klapatsibalo 5y ago
  The thing about covid is that you can't consider just the individual risk, you have to also think about the fact that this is contagious, so if you don't actively try to stop it, it will kill many more people. So yes, chances are I wouldn't die if I didn't vaccinate, but chances are I would kill my grandma if I caught covid.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    Wouldn't she be vaccinated at this point? And if we assume some people can't be vaccinated for health reasons and that we have to take the vaccine to protect them... Isn't it pretty awful that they will be denied access to most public places because they don't have a vaccination proof?

logicchains 5y ago

>And you're seriously downplaying the risks of COVID-19 here, of course it is relatively harmless for very young people. But it is seriously dangerous for a large part of the population that is older. It's not only "very young" people. Did you look at the link I provided? For people 20-30, it's around one in a hundred thousand. For people 30-50, it's around one in ten thousand (similar to giving birth). When someone's making a rational decision, it's with regard to their individual risk; the risk of covid to an eighty-year-old is irrelevant to a twenty-year-old deciding whether to take the vaccine, especially given the vaccine doesn't prevent them infecting others if they get it (see this data from the Singapore government: https://covid.viz.sg/ https://covid.viz.sg/ ). >for vaccines they generally appear reasonably close to the date of the vaccination. The MRNA vaccines are quite different from normal dead/live virus vaccines and have never been used at scale.

johncolanduoni 5y ago
> The MRNA vaccines are quite different from normal dead/live virus vaccines and have never been used at scale. Their closer relative, the viral vector vaccines (like J&J’s), have been. You’re right about calculating risk, but when’s the last time a vaccine in normal, longer term stage three trials resulted in a higher fatality rate than COVID (for any age group)? The link for the SARS vaccine candidate was a failure that was caught in a mouse model, which unsurprisingly they also did with the new vaccines before the human trials started. To echo the parent comment, these were immediate side effects on challenge (which would likely been caught in stage 2 trials even if they only happened in humans and not in animal models). If we want to go with unusual reactions that only show up over time, what about the chance that whatever long term side effect you’re imagining from the vaccines instead happens for people who have been infected with COVID 5 years from now? Once you decide to make decisions based on rare and novel events with unquantifiable risks, you’ll find they show up absolutely everywhere if you’re being intellectually honest. > given the vaccine doesn't prevent them infecting others if they get it (see this data from the Singapore government That data’s N is a little low, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. The vast majority of vaccinated people in that dataset did not go on to infect others, and none of them were epicenters for super-spreader events. Eyeballing it, it’s consistent with a sterilizing immunity in excess of 80%. If the vaccines turn out to be that effective at preventing transmission, that’s an excellent outcome (it is higher than most vaccines).
- logicchains 5y ago
  >You’re right about calculating risk, but when’s the last time a vaccine in normal, longer term stage three trials resulted in a higher fatality rate than COVID (for any age group)? The link for the SARS vaccine candidate was a failure that was caught in a mouse model, which unsurprisingly they also did with the new vaccines before the human trials started. To echo the parent comment, these were immediate side effects on challenge (which would likely been caught in stage 2 trials even if they only happened in humans and not in animal models). It's basically like saying: "the unit tests have all passed now, the regression tests all pass, so let's roll out the fix straight to prod, because it's urgent and we don't have enough time to do the normal amount of staging environment testing". Sure, probably it's fine. But mistakes happen. In any other context, a 1/100,000 chance of error would be considered incredibly low, a great achievement. But in this case, a 1/100,000 chance of seeing after 2-3 years a failure like happened early on in those previous trials would be an incredible tragedy, if the vaccine was taken by people with less than 1/100,000 chance of being killed by covid. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 makes a better case than I can that "a finite, non-theoretical risk is evident in the medical literature that vaccine candidates composed of the SARS-CoV-2 viral spike and eliciting anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, be they neutralising or not, place vaccinees at higher risk for more severe COVID-19 disease when they encounter circulating viruses" >If we want to go with unusual reactions that only show up over time, what about the chance that whatever long term side effect you’re imagining from the vaccines instead happens for people who have been infected with COVID 5 years from now? Once you decide to make decisions based on rare and novel events with unquantifiable risks, you’ll find they show up absolutely everywhere if you’re being intellectually honest. The difference is that covid does not have a big qualitative difference from other respiratory viruses, and no circulating respiratory viruses are known to cause serious long-term symptoms in people who were short-term asymptomatic. Whereas the MRNA treatment is quite a different mechanism from previous vaccines. Separately, ethically it's generally considered worse if a death results from deliberate human action than from an "act of nature". E.g. nowhere is it morally acceptable to murder somebody just because their organs could be used to save ten people. In this case that means it would be considered morally worse if people were coerced into taking a vaccine that ended up killing them than if, absent the vaccine, they died from natural causes of equivalent risk. >That data’s N is a little low, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. The vast majority of vaccinated people in that dataset did not go on to infect others, and none of them were epicenters for super-spreader events. Eyeballing it, it’s consistent with a sterilizing immunity in excess of 80%. If the vaccines turn out to be that effective at preventing transmission, that’s an excellent outcome (it is higher than most vaccines). There's one super-spreader there, a prison cook. I pulled the data from the backing rest API (if you want I could upload the notebook and show you): pd.Series(vax_links).describe() count 17.000000 mean 2.705882 std 3.670230 min 1.000000 25% 1.000000 50% 1.000000 75% 2.000000 max 14.000000 dtype: float64 pd.Series(unvax_links).describe() count 127.000000 mean 2.181102 std 1.965647 min 1.000000 25% 1.000000 50% 2.000000 75% 2.000000 max 15.000000 dtype: float64 While there are way fewer vax cases than unvax cases, looking at the average number of infectees it doesn't appear that vaccinated people infect fewer on average than the unvaccinated do, at least given the limited data.
klapatsibalo 5y ago
The thing about covid is that you can't consider just the individual risk, you have to also think about the fact that this is contagious, so if you don't actively try to stop it, it will kill many more people. So yes, chances are I wouldn't die if I didn't vaccinate, but chances are I would kill my grandma if I caught covid.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  Wouldn't she be vaccinated at this point? And if we assume some people can't be vaccinated for health reasons and that we have to take the vaccine to protect them... Isn't it pretty awful that they will be denied access to most public places because they don't have a vaccination proof?