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As far as I can tell is bad news for rare vaccine side effects. If the side effects are rare but you take a booster twice a year for 50 years, rare outcomes bec

As far as I can tell is bad news for rare vaccine side effects. If the side effects are rare but you take a booster twice a year for 50 years, rare outcomes become much more likely. (Referring here to the high count but not that high stuff that shows up in VAERS like tinnitus.) Hopefully more vaccines are developed that become safer over time so that the danger falls faster than the repeated risk accumulates. Or perhaps the rare side effects are due to personal susceptibility and aren't cumulative so people who didn't get bad side effects the first time won't get them the 90th.

jdavis703 5y ago
People take the flu shot annually and are generally fine. Unless it’s showing that COVID-19 vaccines are much more dangerous than flu vaccines, this isn’t a big concern.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  With regards to the side effects that don't matter (feeling really tired for one or two days) they're stronger than the average flu shot, so maybe they're stronger in other ways, or maybe not. Nobody can quantify the reporting bias on VAERS, and the side effects of midrange severity showing up there aren't scary enough to justify the kind of regulatory investigation that the blood clotting thing received, so we are unlikely to see a study on this in the near term.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Given that it's a very different technology from flu vaccines, we shouldn't really assume that they're not. Too early to be sure of course but there are some concerning studies and anecdata already [1]. [1] https://www.scivisionpub.com/abstract-display.php?id=1811&fbclid=IwAR35HRVBhLO5bjHyF_AtUr2H19YfAy2_uch94kwCD9DHcTGyRbslozNd8WE https://www.scivisionpub.com/abstract-display.php?id=1811&fb...
lamontcg 5y ago
> rare outcomes become much more likely. Citations needed. Alternatively if vaccine reactions depend on something like immunotype of the individual that isn't going to change, and if you tolerate the vaccine today you're likely to tolerate it for the next 50 years. Also if we apply the concept of Original Antigenic Sin, then once you've formed a healthy humoral reaction to a given antigen you're likely to continue to have healthy reactions to similar antigens in the future (and vice versa, if you form a poor immune reaction you my have poor reactions in the future).
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >Citations needed. Well, like you point out it depends on how many of the rare effects are determined by variation from person to person, and how many are determined by variation from time to time. If it's all person-to-person then your chance of a rare effect drops to zero once you have a single dose, but if it's time-to-time, your chances of making it through without something weird happening drop as (P_safe)^n, i.e., exponentially. Without any studies I know of that would tell us which was happening, we could assign a neutral prior of 50% to both cases. That leads to: P(safe) = 1/2(1-0) + 1/2 (P_safe)^n. Obviously this is an oversimplification, but it still leads to an exponential decay, just not to 0.

jdavis703 5y ago

People take the flu shot annually and are generally fine. Unless it’s showing that COVID-19 vaccines are much more dangerous than flu vaccines, this isn’t a big concern.

whatshisface 5y ago
With regards to the side effects that don't matter (feeling really tired for one or two days) they're stronger than the average flu shot, so maybe they're stronger in other ways, or maybe not. Nobody can quantify the reporting bias on VAERS, and the side effects of midrange severity showing up there aren't scary enough to justify the kind of regulatory investigation that the blood clotting thing received, so we are unlikely to see a study on this in the near term.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Given that it's a very different technology from flu vaccines, we shouldn't really assume that they're not. Too early to be sure of course but there are some concerning studies and anecdata already [1]. [1] https://www.scivisionpub.com/abstract-display.php?id=1811&fbclid=IwAR35HRVBhLO5bjHyF_AtUr2H19YfAy2_uch94kwCD9DHcTGyRbslozNd8WE https://www.scivisionpub.com/abstract-display.php?id=1811&fb...

lamontcg 5y ago

> rare outcomes become much more likely. Citations needed. Alternatively if vaccine reactions depend on something like immunotype of the individual that isn't going to change, and if you tolerate the vaccine today you're likely to tolerate it for the next 50 years. Also if we apply the concept of Original Antigenic Sin, then once you've formed a healthy humoral reaction to a given antigen you're likely to continue to have healthy reactions to similar antigens in the future (and vice versa, if you form a poor immune reaction you my have poor reactions in the future).

whatshisface 5y ago
>Citations needed. Well, like you point out it depends on how many of the rare effects are determined by variation from person to person, and how many are determined by variation from time to time. If it's all person-to-person then your chance of a rare effect drops to zero once you have a single dose, but if it's time-to-time, your chances of making it through without something weird happening drop as (P_safe)^n, i.e., exponentially. Without any studies I know of that would tell us which was happening, we could assign a neutral prior of 50% to both cases. That leads to: P(safe) = 1/2(1-0) + 1/2 (P_safe)^n. Obviously this is an oversimplification, but it still leads to an exponential decay, just not to 0.