6 ms·

It's not novel, this technology has been trialed and used for a decade, 3 years in vaccines. We do already have long-term data. You would see side effects for

by mrj 5y ago

It's not novel, this technology has been trialed and used for a decade, 3 years in vaccines. We do already have long-term data. You would see side effects for a vaccine within six months, and we have been administering it for much longer than that. The vaccines are safe. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7956899/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7956899/

sjwalter 5y ago
This is incredibly misleading. I used to be a close follower of the pharma industry, and you're making it seem like FDA trials happen on molecules and formulations somewhat related to the proposed formulation and then are, like, transitively approved on that hand-wavey basis. This is totally wrong. For reasons that should be obvious to any engineer that's worked on any kind of even moderately complex system, the molecule that is tested and trialed is the molecule that goes to production. You don't test "the technology" and then some unrelated other vaccine and then say, there we go, this one's safe. You test the actual formulation that will go to production. This can't have happened for this yet. The trials are still underway. Unknown risk. I dunno if you're misinformed or a troll, but that's dangerous stuff to be putting out there. Vaccines are amazing life-saving tech, and they're safe because of our cultural technologies (FDA trials for e.g.) that make them safe. You can't take all the safety gear out and still get the same safety rating. Doesn't make sense, lol.
- munk-a 5y ago
  The flu shot that's available each year doesn't undergo long term trials - it actually usually goes through about nine months to a year of trials due to predictions on what the flu outbreak will look like - but even then the substance is a reconfiguration of technology with new details being integrated. In some areas of medicine we can afford to move slowly and we absolutely should - but when it comes to the flu we don't have that luxury.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    And outside of some specific professions, the yearly flu shot is entirely optional. We don't have people running around screaming that you're a murderer or that you should be excluded from society if you choose not to get it. It's a personal medical decision, and that's the end of it.
- mrj 5y ago
  Even if true, this novel molecule is not floating around in a body for an entire year waiting to have some side effect. They've been shooting it into people for a year and a half now. If there was something to worry about, it would have been seen. But there are many parts of this vaccine that is shared with previous ones and the mechanics have been tested thoroughly. The science is the same. There's just no credible reason for those with normal immune systems to delay. "This can't have happened for this yet. The trials are still underway. Unknown risk." That's just simply untrue. The trials completed. Read the link.
  - incrudible 5y ago
    > Even if true, this novel molecule is not floating around in a body for an entire year waiting to have some side effect. They've been shooting it into people for a year and a half now. If there was something to worry about, it would have been seen. There are lots of things we do see and we should worry about. The problem is that we can't tell right away if it's just noise, if it's a potentially rare side-effect. Then you have the problems like Myocarditis, which are clearly caused by the vaccine, which we hand-wave away with speculative "the benefits still outweigh the risk" scenarios: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-24-at-5.09.01-PM.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Scree...
    - mrj 5y ago
      Right, anything not yet discovered is going to be a pretty rare side effect. We're still learning about what covid does to the body, tell me about the side effects of getting sick.
    - baq 5y ago
      > "the benefits still outweigh the risk" this is not handwaving, this is the foundation stone of modern medicine.
      - incrudible 5y ago
        Placebo-controlled studies that verify that the benefits actually outweigh the risk can be counted into those foundations. Speculative scenarios based on predictive factors that you could just fudge until the result looks "right" to you, those are the essentially quackery.
incrudible 5y ago
> The vaccines are safe. This is true by medicinal standards, but it's also a sleight-of-hand. The AstraZeneca vaccine had a rare side-effect that was right on track to kill more young women in Europe than the virus itself. That's why it was banned. By that standard, I could argue the viral infection is also safe - for young women at least.
- mrj 5y ago
  That was caught and the shots stopped. Millions of people have had the other vaccines with no similar bad news. If there was any kind of wide-spread problem, it would have been loudly seen by now and those vaccines would have also been pulled. There has not been. The vaccines (being administered now) are safe.
  - incrudible 5y ago
    > If there was any kind of wide-spread problem, it would have been loudly seen by now and those vaccines would have also been pulled. There has not been. Yes, if it was a wide-spread problem. The side-effect that killed AstraZeneca wasn't widespread, it was extremely rare, and it was caught because it was such an unlikely combination of symptoms. Yet, this extremely rare side-effect was enough to make the vaccine more dangerous than the virus - to young women at least. In a year, when all the facts are collected and processed, we'll see how much trouble the Pfizer vaccine really caused in terms of Myocarditis. Then we'll scramble to make up numbers on how many infections must've been prevented by the vaccine to make it all worthwhile.
    - mrj 5y ago
      In most cases it goes away on it's own or people don't even know they got it.. That doesn't seem all that scary.
      - incrudible 5y ago
        > In most cases it goes away on it's own or people don't even know they got it.. That doesn't seem all that scary. ...like COVID in young people? It's true that Myocarditis often goes unnoticed and undiagnosed. That's what makes it dangerous. It's a leading cause of cardiac arrest in young people. If you actually do get diagnosed with Myocarditis, it's not necessarily a mild case. That's what makes me suspect the cases being reported now are just the tip of the ice berg.
timr 5y ago
> You would see side effects for a vaccine within six months, and we have been administering it for much longer than that. We have now had two separate rare-but-serious side effects of different Covid vaccines: the CVT issue with J&J, and the myocarditis issue with the mRNA vaccines in children. It's disingenuous to suggest that the vaccines are "safe" merely because they've been widely administered; even the question of what "safe" means is a far more nuanced question than you're presenting. For children, in particular, two-dose vaccination with the mRNA vaccines is probably a poor risk/benefit profile. We didn't know that until we started dosing enough kids to see the rare side effects. The phase 3 trials were not powered to detect rare side effects, which is part of the reason that they're still classified as emergency use, and not fully approved. I am an advocate for vaccination, but it's not right to ignore these issues.
- mrj 5y ago
  Not ignoring but these are very rare side effects. It's something for doctors to know about in order to help treat the unlucky. But I think we have different meanings of the word safe. These vaccines are very, very unlikely to give anyone a hard time. Nothing's without risk, but even for the unlucky that doesn't even sound that bad. As soon as my son is eligible, he's getting it, too.
  - timr 5y ago
    > Not ignoring but these are very rare side effects. It's something for doctors to know about in order to help treat the unlucky. But I think we have different meanings of the word safe. The chances that a child will experience anything other than extremely minor illness from Covid is also very rare. The current numbers are teetering on the edge of implying that children are at more risk from the vaccine than from the virus. My definition of the word "safe" includes the rational weighing of risks vs. benefit for a target population. Is it worth it to put kids at risk from myocarditis that exceeds their risk from Covid, just to reduce population-level Covid stats and reduce the marginal risk to the elderly? I don't know, but it's not a question to simply ignore.
    - 5y ago

by mrj 5y ago

sjwalter 5y ago

This is incredibly misleading. I used to be a close follower of the pharma industry, and you're making it seem like FDA trials happen on molecules and formulations somewhat related to the proposed formulation and then are, like, transitively approved on that hand-wavey basis. This is totally wrong. For reasons that should be obvious to any engineer that's worked on any kind of even moderately complex system, the molecule that is tested and trialed is the molecule that goes to production. You don't test "the technology" and then some unrelated other vaccine and then say, there we go, this one's safe. You test the actual formulation that will go to production. This can't have happened for this yet. The trials are still underway. Unknown risk. I dunno if you're misinformed or a troll, but that's dangerous stuff to be putting out there. Vaccines are amazing life-saving tech, and they're safe because of our cultural technologies (FDA trials for e.g.) that make them safe. You can't take all the safety gear out and still get the same safety rating. Doesn't make sense, lol.

munk-a 5y ago
The flu shot that's available each year doesn't undergo long term trials - it actually usually goes through about nine months to a year of trials due to predictions on what the flu outbreak will look like - but even then the substance is a reconfiguration of technology with new details being integrated. In some areas of medicine we can afford to move slowly and we absolutely should - but when it comes to the flu we don't have that luxury.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  And outside of some specific professions, the yearly flu shot is entirely optional. We don't have people running around screaming that you're a murderer or that you should be excluded from society if you choose not to get it. It's a personal medical decision, and that's the end of it.
mrj 5y ago
Even if true, this novel molecule is not floating around in a body for an entire year waiting to have some side effect. They've been shooting it into people for a year and a half now. If there was something to worry about, it would have been seen. But there are many parts of this vaccine that is shared with previous ones and the mechanics have been tested thoroughly. The science is the same. There's just no credible reason for those with normal immune systems to delay. "This can't have happened for this yet. The trials are still underway. Unknown risk." That's just simply untrue. The trials completed. Read the link.
- incrudible 5y ago
  > Even if true, this novel molecule is not floating around in a body for an entire year waiting to have some side effect. They've been shooting it into people for a year and a half now. If there was something to worry about, it would have been seen. There are lots of things we do see and we should worry about. The problem is that we can't tell right away if it's just noise, if it's a potentially rare side-effect. Then you have the problems like Myocarditis, which are clearly caused by the vaccine, which we hand-wave away with speculative "the benefits still outweigh the risk" scenarios: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-24-at-5.09.01-PM.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Scree...
  - mrj 5y ago
    Right, anything not yet discovered is going to be a pretty rare side effect. We're still learning about what covid does to the body, tell me about the side effects of getting sick.
  - baq 5y ago
    > "the benefits still outweigh the risk" this is not handwaving, this is the foundation stone of modern medicine.
    - incrudible 5y ago
      Placebo-controlled studies that verify that the benefits actually outweigh the risk can be counted into those foundations. Speculative scenarios based on predictive factors that you could just fudge until the result looks "right" to you, those are the essentially quackery.

incrudible 5y ago

> The vaccines are safe. This is true by medicinal standards, but it's also a sleight-of-hand. The AstraZeneca vaccine had a rare side-effect that was right on track to kill more young women in Europe than the virus itself. That's why it was banned. By that standard, I could argue the viral infection is also safe - for young women at least.

mrj 5y ago
That was caught and the shots stopped. Millions of people have had the other vaccines with no similar bad news. If there was any kind of wide-spread problem, it would have been loudly seen by now and those vaccines would have also been pulled. There has not been. The vaccines (being administered now) are safe.
- incrudible 5y ago
  > If there was any kind of wide-spread problem, it would have been loudly seen by now and those vaccines would have also been pulled. There has not been. Yes, if it was a wide-spread problem. The side-effect that killed AstraZeneca wasn't widespread, it was extremely rare, and it was caught because it was such an unlikely combination of symptoms. Yet, this extremely rare side-effect was enough to make the vaccine more dangerous than the virus - to young women at least. In a year, when all the facts are collected and processed, we'll see how much trouble the Pfizer vaccine really caused in terms of Myocarditis. Then we'll scramble to make up numbers on how many infections must've been prevented by the vaccine to make it all worthwhile.
  - mrj 5y ago
    In most cases it goes away on it's own or people don't even know they got it.. That doesn't seem all that scary.
    - incrudible 5y ago
      > In most cases it goes away on it's own or people don't even know they got it.. That doesn't seem all that scary. ...like COVID in young people? It's true that Myocarditis often goes unnoticed and undiagnosed. That's what makes it dangerous. It's a leading cause of cardiac arrest in young people. If you actually do get diagnosed with Myocarditis, it's not necessarily a mild case. That's what makes me suspect the cases being reported now are just the tip of the ice berg.

timr 5y ago

> You would see side effects for a vaccine within six months, and we have been administering it for much longer than that. We have now had two separate rare-but-serious side effects of different Covid vaccines: the CVT issue with J&J, and the myocarditis issue with the mRNA vaccines in children. It's disingenuous to suggest that the vaccines are "safe" merely because they've been widely administered; even the question of what "safe" means is a far more nuanced question than you're presenting. For children, in particular, two-dose vaccination with the mRNA vaccines is probably a poor risk/benefit profile. We didn't know that until we started dosing enough kids to see the rare side effects. The phase 3 trials were not powered to detect rare side effects, which is part of the reason that they're still classified as emergency use, and not fully approved. I am an advocate for vaccination, but it's not right to ignore these issues.

mrj 5y ago
Not ignoring but these are very rare side effects. It's something for doctors to know about in order to help treat the unlucky. But I think we have different meanings of the word safe. These vaccines are very, very unlikely to give anyone a hard time. Nothing's without risk, but even for the unlucky that doesn't even sound that bad. As soon as my son is eligible, he's getting it, too.
- timr 5y ago
  > Not ignoring but these are very rare side effects. It's something for doctors to know about in order to help treat the unlucky. But I think we have different meanings of the word safe. The chances that a child will experience anything other than extremely minor illness from Covid is also very rare. The current numbers are teetering on the edge of implying that children are at more risk from the vaccine than from the virus. My definition of the word "safe" includes the rational weighing of risks vs. benefit for a target population. Is it worth it to put kids at risk from myocarditis that exceeds their risk from Covid, just to reduce population-level Covid stats and reduce the marginal risk to the elderly? I don't know, but it's not a question to simply ignore.
  - 5y ago