3 ms·

There's no need to fear the .gov or big pharma when it comes to smallpox because there's no need to trust them in the first place. The smallpox vaccine is old

There's no need to fear the .gov or big pharma when it comes to smallpox because there's no need to trust them in the first place. The smallpox vaccine is old and very well proven.

bee_rider 5y ago
I'm having trouble getting good stats on it, but it looks like there were a handful of deaths -- maybe, single or low double digits -- that could be directly attributed to the COVID vaccine. The smallpox vaccine, if we had to vaccinate the whole country, could cause some deaths too. This pretty old paper estimates somewhere ~200, I've seen an estimate elsewhere of around ~500, can't get a good source on the second one (probably they are in the same ballpark accounting for error bars and population growth since the '60s). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196911272812205 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196911272812205 Anyway, all this is to say -- there are definitely complaints to be had about big pharma, but the industry is pretty good at managing measurable risks nowadays. I don't know if 'old and well proven' is quite right. They were working with a different set of tradeoffs -- they had worse tech at the time, expectations were lower (and medicine was generally more dangerous)... but obviously, better than getting smallpox!
- sokoloff 5y ago
  How many deaths would we expect from the injection of a billion “doses” of injected saline solution? I don’t know that that number is zero.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I'm not sure, actually. I wasn't able to find any information on the safety of a single dose of saline solution. There is apparently a health risk from being on saline solution for a long time (I guess it hurts your kidneys and some other stuff). Stories about this swamped stories about the fundamental safety of a small amount. These vaccines do of course have some (rare! and way less bad than getting sick!) side effects. So I'd suspect a saline shot to be less dangerous. But that's a guess.

There's no need to fear the .gov or big pharma when it comes to smallpox because there's no need to trust them in the first place. The smallpox vaccine is old and very well proven.

bee_rider 5y ago

I'm having trouble getting good stats on it, but it looks like there were a handful of deaths -- maybe, single or low double digits -- that could be directly attributed to the COVID vaccine. The smallpox vaccine, if we had to vaccinate the whole country, could cause some deaths too. This pretty old paper estimates somewhere ~200, I've seen an estimate elsewhere of around ~500, can't get a good source on the second one (probably they are in the same ballpark accounting for error bars and population growth since the '60s). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196911272812205 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196911272812205 Anyway, all this is to say -- there are definitely complaints to be had about big pharma, but the industry is pretty good at managing measurable risks nowadays. I don't know if 'old and well proven' is quite right. They were working with a different set of tradeoffs -- they had worse tech at the time, expectations were lower (and medicine was generally more dangerous)... but obviously, better than getting smallpox!

sokoloff 5y ago
How many deaths would we expect from the injection of a billion “doses” of injected saline solution? I don’t know that that number is zero.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  I'm not sure, actually. I wasn't able to find any information on the safety of a single dose of saline solution. There is apparently a health risk from being on saline solution for a long time (I guess it hurts your kidneys and some other stuff). Stories about this swamped stories about the fundamental safety of a small amount. These vaccines do of course have some (rare! and way less bad than getting sick!) side effects. So I'd suspect a saline shot to be less dangerous. But that's a guess.