8 ms·

So at this point, we have now seen legitimate questions raised about both the benefits and the risks involved with this stuff. I can still totally understand a

So at this point, we have now seen legitimate questions raised about both the benefits and the risks involved with this stuff. I can still totally understand anyone who decides the risk is worth it for themselves or their understanding of “the greater good”, but forcing this choice on others is becoming less and less tenable of a position.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 5y ago
Your analysis is insufficient. Going forward, pretty much everyone is either going to get infected or get vaccinated. There's no 'risk' of exposure, it's pretty much inevitable. On average, people that get vaccinated will be exposed to much, much, much less spike protein than those that get infected. So if you are concerned about exposure to spike protein, vaccination is a good course of action...
- guscost 5y ago
  The right response is not “no, your concerns are actually illegitimate.” That direction only ends in war, because you will discover that I don’t care whether you agree with my choices, and I am 100% ready to die over them. Are you?
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    I didn't say your concerns were illegitimate, I said your analysis was insufficient. Being concerned about exposure to spike proteins is fine, whatever. Infection results in far more exposure to those proteins and is basically inevitable for people that aren't vaccinated, so any analysis of the risk of vaccination needs to include that context, the risk due to infection (which is as I have said, is essentially a 100% chance of a larger exposure to the spike protein).
    - guscost 5y ago
      You don’t fully understand the risks or benefits - nobody does. Where are you going with this?
      - maxerickson 5y ago
        I'm not going anywhere, I was just pointing out that your analysis was incomplete, and tacked on the obvious extension of it, where natural infection results in much higher exposure to spike protein than vaccination.
        guscost 5y ago
        You either misunderstood or ignored the point I was trying to make, and filled in some additional details about risk... to what end? None of this is relevant to the conversation, unless your goal is to imply (without actually claiming) that the risk/reward is in fact robustly understood, and that the choices made by the out-group are indefensible?
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    Well that isn't a good faith interpretation of that poster's comment.
    - guscost 5y ago
      We’re so far past good faith at this point, try to at least wake up to that fact. My good faith expired around week twelve of the original two weeks.
      - nkozyra 5y ago
        > My good faith expired around week twelve of the original two weeks. This is a non sequitur. Someone was responding to you specifically about spike proteins and was demonstrating why your assumption was based on some incomplete understanding. Why talk about the two weeks thing? If you're frustrated about covid, well ... join the club. It includes literally everyone.
        furgooswft13 5y ago
        We're not frustrated about covid. Covid is not a threat of any significance. It never was. The threat, from the beginning, is the absurd hysteria around it.
        nkozyra 5y ago
        It strikes me that a lot of people died from something that's no threat. If instead you mean little (not no) threat to you, sure. If you mean the response was not commensurate with the threat, you might be able to make that case. But not a threat? Sorry. Once you know someone in their late 30s with no comorbidities who dies from this your perspective changes a bit. To be honest I find the histrionics about this horrible, draconian fascist response a bit ludicrous.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - bootwoot 5y ago
    You're ready to die to defend them? That seems like a pretty extreme escalation.
    - guscost 5y ago
      I didn’t start any of this shit, someone else is barging into my life and saying that I need to comply with paranoid hypochondriac fascism, or else. I have tried arguing rationally with these folks, but this is one of the situations where the right strategy is simply: “No, fuck you too!”
      - JetAlone 5y ago
        You're too right. I'd hardly even blame the "someone else", they're victims too. This is just what paranoid hypochondriac fascism does.
      - Pyramus 5y ago
        Now think of the people that actually live or lived in a fascist regime - is that really what you are comparing your life to? Ironically people who do live under fascist regimes don't even get access to Covid vaccines...
- twofornone 5y ago
  >On average, people that get vaccinated will be exposed to much, much, much less spike protein than those that get infected Except unlike a natural infection with a gradual ramp up, the vaccine is effectively an immediate megadose of an inflammatory and apparently potentially mutagenic protein. Blindly presuming that the vaccine is preferable to natural immunity from infection is, frankly, dangerous. In addition, during the course of a natural infection, your cells are producing the full, assembled virus from the full viral genome. With the vaccine your cells are producing a single inflammatory protein which then embeds itself in the surfaces of your own cells, producing an autoimmune response in effect. Given the hysteresis of the human immune system there is a nonzero risk of semipermanent to permanent autoimmune effects/disorders. And obviously a side effect like a subtle autoimmune disorder would be extremely difficult to detect in such a short time scale, doubly so if clinicians and researchers are not actively looking for evidence. Just diagnosing known autoimmune disorders can take years...and there's no guarantee that such a side effect would manifest in the near term. Two years in and the danger of COVID in healthy people, as in complication rate, has clearly been overstated. Ask yourself, if it weren't for news reports, would you even be aware from your day to day life that we are still in the midst of a pandemic? If the answer is no, then mandating an experimental vaccine, based on an untested technology, for what amounts to a bad flu, is unjustifiable. Edit: and on top of all that, considering that the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild, there's no reason to suspect that the total exposure of someone who builds natural immunity will produce a comparable exposure to spike proteins. Not to mention the assertion that everyone eventually will be exposed is also unfounded, and likely does not apply to rural populations.
  - foxrider 5y ago
    To me, the answer is, sadly - yes. The record of infections per day is being broken daily where I live, and in the past week alone I've lost good family friends and a neighbor. If I had to go from my anecdotal data I would say that it's at its worst right now. What I can also say about that is 3 people that died weren't vaccinated and one person was vaccinated by an EpiVacCorona shot, she sadly burned up in a week. The effectiveness of EpiVacCorona is still not proven to this day, despite being authorized.
- bavell 5y ago
  If it's inevitable, why the mandates? Everyone will get it anyway which means the vaccine only helps protect yourself, not others. If it's not about protecting others, then how can you justify forced medical procedures?
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    People with reduced immune function benefit from reduced disease prevalence, it's pretty straightforward. For example it's not great that some older folks will inevitably die of COVID over the next 20 years, but it's better than just letting happen over the next 12 months.
    - bavell 5y ago
      Those people are already getting their second or third boosters. What makes you think it would take 20 years for them to get it instead of inside of a year? Covid is highly infectious and spreads easily in spite of mass vaccinations. Getting vaccinated and boosted up is all you can do and even then if you're in a high risk demographic you can still die.
  - geomark 5y ago
    Since the vaccines have been shown to reduce severity of the disease, they will result is less load on medical services. I believe that is the only legitimate reason for mandates.
    - bavell 5y ago
      But if load on medical services is an issue, why are states firing health care workers by the thousands? I bought the "flatten the curve for 2 weeks" argument a year ago, not so much anymore.
      - geomark 5y ago
        Doesn't seem like a competent approach, does it?
- JPKab 5y ago
  I sit in a weird place myself: My father is an extremely high risk individual who was vaccinated and then ended up having a breakthrough infection. I highly doubt he would be alive today if he had not been vaccinated. My mother-in-law who was in her early 60s and healthy suffered a severe adverse event from her second Pfizer shot. 3 hours after receiving the second shot she went into cardiac arrest in the midst of a fever. This adverse event ended up not being reported to the CDC due to a bureaucratic error at the hospital. No conspiracy or anything it's just a 30 minute process to enter the event into the VAERS system and there's no penalty for not doing it. Translation most physicians put it on a list of to-do items and then forget to get to it. So the lack of nuance in your analysis has to do with where the spike proteins are in the body in a natural infection versus with an mRNA vaccine. The study is specifically talking about spike proteins in the nucleus of cells. That is not something that occurs with natural infection. I'm not against the vaccine. I caught the virus before I was eligible and it's not a great way to get immunized compared to a well-designed vaccine. For older folks or people who are at higher risk it's a deadly way to get immunized versus getting vaccinated. That being said it's important to note that this vaccine is not going to be the final one. It obviously has design flaws that could only have been discovered after a lengthy period of time. It appears based on studies like this one that the full spike protein is not a great payload. One of the reasons there are so many breakthrough infections is because the immune system doesn't even develop antibodies to the entire spike protein. It instead focuses on individual components of it which are not as evolutionary expensive to discard for new variants of the virus. They will be able to develop a new MRNA vaccine that creates a much more targeted spike protein payload that will likely have far fewer side effects in the long term. That's my crappy analysis on this anyway.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  At this point, it looks as though maintaining the vaccines' very marginal protection against SARS-CoV-2 requires biannual dosing with more spike-generating booster doses. Even in this case, the protection is marginal. While the vaccinated may clear the virus from a breakthrough infection more quickly, the peak viral loads are about the same. There's also the question of biodistribution. Do the spikes from the vaccine wind up in more sensitive, easily damaged cells than the ones which occur from a SARS-CoV-2 infection? Anecdotally, most of my close contacts who were vaccinated spent more time out of commission and had a far worse time than I did with COVID (although I did start treatment early on the second day of symptoms with the FLCCC ivermectin protocol). Theoretically all the vaccine is doing is creating a bunch of spike protein -- if the dose is so much lower why does it affect people so much more? I still see so much discussion premised on the idea that there is still some tradeoff to be made between mutually exclusive outcomes of "get vaccinated" or "get infected" and it's simply not the case.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    Having had 3 doses (I'm overweight, they offered me a 3rd shot at a recent appointment), I had about 6 hours of mild fatigue so far from the vaccines (a day after the 2nd shot). Par for the course for anyone I've talked to about it, with some people having more like a day of fatigue. Many fewer vaccinated people are getting infected than unvaccinated, so the comparison between people that do get infected isn't the whole story.
    - geomark 5y ago
      Many fewer vaccinated people are getting infected than unvaccinated I think the data is showing that isn't true, that the numbers are nearly equal in places with a high percentage of the population vaccinated. The only benefit is that the vaccinated don't get as severely ill.
      - maxerickson 5y ago
        The percentages aren't the same, incidence is much lower (6x) among the vaccinated. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/95119 https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9511...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dv_dt 5y ago
As a public health analysis, there is still a tradeoff between exposure of the population directly to the full spike protein vs in a more constrained vaccine. Especially if, as most governments and economic policies have decided that they are more or less going to forego the bulk of systematic non-medical social measures to protect public health. And as the paper itself suggests - an even more focused approach to vaccines could be used.
encryptluks2 5y ago
At this point people are too far invested in the vaccine both mentally and financially. First, many people simply cannot admit when they were wrong. If you were quick to get vaccinated, and then later found out that people who are vaccinated are still contracting, spreading and dying from the virus after being vaccinated; it takes a lot to say, hey... maybe the vaccine helped me, but this isn't the solution that is going to get everyone back to normal like I was told. Many people were very much against the vaccine when Trump was President, saying it was rushed, that they wouldn't get the Trump vaccine; but once Biden was promoting it, then suddenly it is fine again. People want this type of flip flopping to go unnoticed, to simply rewrite history and hope that people have the attention span of a goldfish. Never have we mandated flu shots, and they are only 40 to 60% effective. I see the COVID vaccine in a similar boat, we can never plan for or protect against all the variants. If I was 65 years old I'd be getting the flu vaccine. However, if you're healthy it doesn't make as much sense. Sure, if you want it, you can get it but telling people that they'll be fired for not getting it is ridiculous. The OSHA rules is because of an emergency that they've known about for how long, and now they are delaying it until after Christmas? So much of an emergency, that they don't want it to impact Christmas workers. It is all BS.
- Pyramus 5y ago
  We don't live in a comic world - things aren't black and white. People die from the virus with or without vaccination - what matters is how many. > Never have we mandated flu shots Flu shots are already mandatory in many countries for many professions, e.g. in the US military. Should we encounter a pandemic strain with similar IFR as SARS-Cov-2 in the future (and the likelihood of that happening in the next 100 years is very high) I'm certain we will see mandates.
  - dukeofdoom 5y ago
    Even the Flu shot, its not very clear that it actually does work, and is not just a statistical effect of selection bias. The people most likely to take the flue shot are already from a subgroup that cares more about their health, if you add in young and healthy people in the military it skews things even more. Sure you can show that the group that took the flue shot died less. But its mostly a statistical effect. The sickest people and the ones that are near death already, or neglect their health are the most at risk of dying from the flue. They're also the group that will not take the flue shot, or will not be prescribed. Its easy to convince yourself that cheering for your team has an effect on how well they play. The companies doing the research also have financial incentive to show that it works. But honestly, mandating a half walk everyday, will probably be more beneficial to the US population than any flue or covid vaccine. Since both diseases are so tied to BMI, weight and its complications like diabetes.
mackal 5y ago
Not all of the vaccines are affected by the questions this paper raises. The mRNA vaccines aren't affected, only the adenovirus vector vaccines are. If you're concerned about the spike protein because of this paper, it's still best to vaccinated. The 4 adenovirus vector vaccines will still give you less exposure, but taking one of the others will completely avoid it. (And if you get exposed after vaccination you'll have extremely minimal exposure to the spike protein compared to if you were unvaccinated)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

maxerickson 5y ago

Your analysis is insufficient. Going forward, pretty much everyone is either going to get infected or get vaccinated. There's no 'risk' of exposure, it's pretty much inevitable. On average, people that get vaccinated will be exposed to much, much, much less spike protein than those that get infected. So if you are concerned about exposure to spike protein, vaccination is a good course of action...

guscost 5y ago
The right response is not “no, your concerns are actually illegitimate.” That direction only ends in war, because you will discover that I don’t care whether you agree with my choices, and I am 100% ready to die over them. Are you?
- maxerickson 5y ago
  I didn't say your concerns were illegitimate, I said your analysis was insufficient. Being concerned about exposure to spike proteins is fine, whatever. Infection results in far more exposure to those proteins and is basically inevitable for people that aren't vaccinated, so any analysis of the risk of vaccination needs to include that context, the risk due to infection (which is as I have said, is essentially a 100% chance of a larger exposure to the spike protein).
  - guscost 5y ago
    You don’t fully understand the risks or benefits - nobody does. Where are you going with this?
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      I'm not going anywhere, I was just pointing out that your analysis was incomplete, and tacked on the obvious extension of it, where natural infection results in much higher exposure to spike protein than vaccination.
      - guscost 5y ago
        You either misunderstood or ignored the point I was trying to make, and filled in some additional details about risk... to what end? None of this is relevant to the conversation, unless your goal is to imply (without actually claiming) that the risk/reward is in fact robustly understood, and that the choices made by the out-group are indefensible?
- nkozyra 5y ago
  Well that isn't a good faith interpretation of that poster's comment.
  - guscost 5y ago
    We’re so far past good faith at this point, try to at least wake up to that fact. My good faith expired around week twelve of the original two weeks.
    - nkozyra 5y ago
      > My good faith expired around week twelve of the original two weeks. This is a non sequitur. Someone was responding to you specifically about spike proteins and was demonstrating why your assumption was based on some incomplete understanding. Why talk about the two weeks thing? If you're frustrated about covid, well ... join the club. It includes literally everyone.
      - furgooswft13 5y ago
        We're not frustrated about covid. Covid is not a threat of any significance. It never was. The threat, from the beginning, is the absurd hysteria around it.
        nkozyra 5y ago
        It strikes me that a lot of people died from something that's no threat. If instead you mean little (not no) threat to you, sure. If you mean the response was not commensurate with the threat, you might be able to make that case. But not a threat? Sorry. Once you know someone in their late 30s with no comorbidities who dies from this your perspective changes a bit. To be honest I find the histrionics about this horrible, draconian fascist response a bit ludicrous.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- bootwoot 5y ago
  You're ready to die to defend them? That seems like a pretty extreme escalation.
  - guscost 5y ago
    I didn’t start any of this shit, someone else is barging into my life and saying that I need to comply with paranoid hypochondriac fascism, or else. I have tried arguing rationally with these folks, but this is one of the situations where the right strategy is simply: “No, fuck you too!”
    - JetAlone 5y ago
      You're too right. I'd hardly even blame the "someone else", they're victims too. This is just what paranoid hypochondriac fascism does.
    - Pyramus 5y ago
      Now think of the people that actually live or lived in a fascist regime - is that really what you are comparing your life to? Ironically people who do live under fascist regimes don't even get access to Covid vaccines...
twofornone 5y ago
>On average, people that get vaccinated will be exposed to much, much, much less spike protein than those that get infected Except unlike a natural infection with a gradual ramp up, the vaccine is effectively an immediate megadose of an inflammatory and apparently potentially mutagenic protein. Blindly presuming that the vaccine is preferable to natural immunity from infection is, frankly, dangerous. In addition, during the course of a natural infection, your cells are producing the full, assembled virus from the full viral genome. With the vaccine your cells are producing a single inflammatory protein which then embeds itself in the surfaces of your own cells, producing an autoimmune response in effect. Given the hysteresis of the human immune system there is a nonzero risk of semipermanent to permanent autoimmune effects/disorders. And obviously a side effect like a subtle autoimmune disorder would be extremely difficult to detect in such a short time scale, doubly so if clinicians and researchers are not actively looking for evidence. Just diagnosing known autoimmune disorders can take years...and there's no guarantee that such a side effect would manifest in the near term. Two years in and the danger of COVID in healthy people, as in complication rate, has clearly been overstated. Ask yourself, if it weren't for news reports, would you even be aware from your day to day life that we are still in the midst of a pandemic? If the answer is no, then mandating an experimental vaccine, based on an untested technology, for what amounts to a bad flu, is unjustifiable. Edit: and on top of all that, considering that the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild, there's no reason to suspect that the total exposure of someone who builds natural immunity will produce a comparable exposure to spike proteins. Not to mention the assertion that everyone eventually will be exposed is also unfounded, and likely does not apply to rural populations.
- foxrider 5y ago
  To me, the answer is, sadly - yes. The record of infections per day is being broken daily where I live, and in the past week alone I've lost good family friends and a neighbor. If I had to go from my anecdotal data I would say that it's at its worst right now. What I can also say about that is 3 people that died weren't vaccinated and one person was vaccinated by an EpiVacCorona shot, she sadly burned up in a week. The effectiveness of EpiVacCorona is still not proven to this day, despite being authorized.
bavell 5y ago
If it's inevitable, why the mandates? Everyone will get it anyway which means the vaccine only helps protect yourself, not others. If it's not about protecting others, then how can you justify forced medical procedures?
- maxerickson 5y ago
  People with reduced immune function benefit from reduced disease prevalence, it's pretty straightforward. For example it's not great that some older folks will inevitably die of COVID over the next 20 years, but it's better than just letting happen over the next 12 months.
  - bavell 5y ago
    Those people are already getting their second or third boosters. What makes you think it would take 20 years for them to get it instead of inside of a year? Covid is highly infectious and spreads easily in spite of mass vaccinations. Getting vaccinated and boosted up is all you can do and even then if you're in a high risk demographic you can still die.
- geomark 5y ago
  Since the vaccines have been shown to reduce severity of the disease, they will result is less load on medical services. I believe that is the only legitimate reason for mandates.
  - bavell 5y ago
    But if load on medical services is an issue, why are states firing health care workers by the thousands? I bought the "flatten the curve for 2 weeks" argument a year ago, not so much anymore.
    - geomark 5y ago
      Doesn't seem like a competent approach, does it?
JPKab 5y ago
I sit in a weird place myself: My father is an extremely high risk individual who was vaccinated and then ended up having a breakthrough infection. I highly doubt he would be alive today if he had not been vaccinated. My mother-in-law who was in her early 60s and healthy suffered a severe adverse event from her second Pfizer shot. 3 hours after receiving the second shot she went into cardiac arrest in the midst of a fever. This adverse event ended up not being reported to the CDC due to a bureaucratic error at the hospital. No conspiracy or anything it's just a 30 minute process to enter the event into the VAERS system and there's no penalty for not doing it. Translation most physicians put it on a list of to-do items and then forget to get to it. So the lack of nuance in your analysis has to do with where the spike proteins are in the body in a natural infection versus with an mRNA vaccine. The study is specifically talking about spike proteins in the nucleus of cells. That is not something that occurs with natural infection. I'm not against the vaccine. I caught the virus before I was eligible and it's not a great way to get immunized compared to a well-designed vaccine. For older folks or people who are at higher risk it's a deadly way to get immunized versus getting vaccinated. That being said it's important to note that this vaccine is not going to be the final one. It obviously has design flaws that could only have been discovered after a lengthy period of time. It appears based on studies like this one that the full spike protein is not a great payload. One of the reasons there are so many breakthrough infections is because the immune system doesn't even develop antibodies to the entire spike protein. It instead focuses on individual components of it which are not as evolutionary expensive to discard for new variants of the virus. They will be able to develop a new MRNA vaccine that creates a much more targeted spike protein payload that will likely have far fewer side effects in the long term. That's my crappy analysis on this anyway.
AndrewBissell 5y ago
At this point, it looks as though maintaining the vaccines' very marginal protection against SARS-CoV-2 requires biannual dosing with more spike-generating booster doses. Even in this case, the protection is marginal. While the vaccinated may clear the virus from a breakthrough infection more quickly, the peak viral loads are about the same. There's also the question of biodistribution. Do the spikes from the vaccine wind up in more sensitive, easily damaged cells than the ones which occur from a SARS-CoV-2 infection? Anecdotally, most of my close contacts who were vaccinated spent more time out of commission and had a far worse time than I did with COVID (although I did start treatment early on the second day of symptoms with the FLCCC ivermectin protocol). Theoretically all the vaccine is doing is creating a bunch of spike protein -- if the dose is so much lower why does it affect people so much more? I still see so much discussion premised on the idea that there is still some tradeoff to be made between mutually exclusive outcomes of "get vaccinated" or "get infected" and it's simply not the case.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Having had 3 doses (I'm overweight, they offered me a 3rd shot at a recent appointment), I had about 6 hours of mild fatigue so far from the vaccines (a day after the 2nd shot). Par for the course for anyone I've talked to about it, with some people having more like a day of fatigue. Many fewer vaccinated people are getting infected than unvaccinated, so the comparison between people that do get infected isn't the whole story.
  - geomark 5y ago
    Many fewer vaccinated people are getting infected than unvaccinated I think the data is showing that isn't true, that the numbers are nearly equal in places with a high percentage of the population vaccinated. The only benefit is that the vaccinated don't get as severely ill.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      The percentages aren't the same, incidence is much lower (6x) among the vaccinated. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/95119 https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9511...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dv_dt 5y ago

As a public health analysis, there is still a tradeoff between exposure of the population directly to the full spike protein vs in a more constrained vaccine. Especially if, as most governments and economic policies have decided that they are more or less going to forego the bulk of systematic non-medical social measures to protect public health. And as the paper itself suggests - an even more focused approach to vaccines could be used.

encryptluks2 5y ago

At this point people are too far invested in the vaccine both mentally and financially. First, many people simply cannot admit when they were wrong. If you were quick to get vaccinated, and then later found out that people who are vaccinated are still contracting, spreading and dying from the virus after being vaccinated; it takes a lot to say, hey... maybe the vaccine helped me, but this isn't the solution that is going to get everyone back to normal like I was told. Many people were very much against the vaccine when Trump was President, saying it was rushed, that they wouldn't get the Trump vaccine; but once Biden was promoting it, then suddenly it is fine again. People want this type of flip flopping to go unnoticed, to simply rewrite history and hope that people have the attention span of a goldfish. Never have we mandated flu shots, and they are only 40 to 60% effective. I see the COVID vaccine in a similar boat, we can never plan for or protect against all the variants. If I was 65 years old I'd be getting the flu vaccine. However, if you're healthy it doesn't make as much sense. Sure, if you want it, you can get it but telling people that they'll be fired for not getting it is ridiculous. The OSHA rules is because of an emergency that they've known about for how long, and now they are delaying it until after Christmas? So much of an emergency, that they don't want it to impact Christmas workers. It is all BS.

Pyramus 5y ago
We don't live in a comic world - things aren't black and white. People die from the virus with or without vaccination - what matters is how many. > Never have we mandated flu shots Flu shots are already mandatory in many countries for many professions, e.g. in the US military. Should we encounter a pandemic strain with similar IFR as SARS-Cov-2 in the future (and the likelihood of that happening in the next 100 years is very high) I'm certain we will see mandates.
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Even the Flu shot, its not very clear that it actually does work, and is not just a statistical effect of selection bias. The people most likely to take the flue shot are already from a subgroup that cares more about their health, if you add in young and healthy people in the military it skews things even more. Sure you can show that the group that took the flue shot died less. But its mostly a statistical effect. The sickest people and the ones that are near death already, or neglect their health are the most at risk of dying from the flue. They're also the group that will not take the flue shot, or will not be prescribed. Its easy to convince yourself that cheering for your team has an effect on how well they play. The companies doing the research also have financial incentive to show that it works. But honestly, mandating a half walk everyday, will probably be more beneficial to the US population than any flue or covid vaccine. Since both diseases are so tied to BMI, weight and its complications like diabetes.

mackal 5y ago

Not all of the vaccines are affected by the questions this paper raises. The mRNA vaccines aren't affected, only the adenovirus vector vaccines are. If you're concerned about the spike protein because of this paper, it's still best to vaccinated. The 4 adenovirus vector vaccines will still give you less exposure, but taking one of the others will completely avoid it. (And if you get exposed after vaccination you'll have extremely minimal exposure to the spike protein compared to if you were unvaccinated)