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We are very risk averse of taking vaccines, while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them. Probably more harm is done because peo

We are very risk averse of taking vaccines, while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them. Probably more harm is done because people are too afraid of taking a vaccine than the opposite (not only looking at covid19 vaccines). The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful.

ekianjo 5y ago
> while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them Alternative explanation: nobody knows the risks in details, and side-effects are widely under-reported anyway. Ask any doctor how often they report even serious side effects, you will be very surprised.
majkinetor 5y ago
Barely have any acute risk. Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach. > The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful. What kind of nonsense is that? Its the same as saying "there is no problem in taking any drug, the worst it can get is lose some money". You can't clamp entire technology as good or wrong. Vaccine as technology obviously has merit. Any particular vaccine may be problematic or not. Think H1N1 and narcolepsy, anthrax vaccine in gulf war etc. This kind of trash talk is exactly the same as anti-vax talk. I have no sympathy for either clan. As usual, people convert complex topic into binary decision which is madness.
- derefr 5y ago
  > Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach. Most vaccines are much older than a decade. We know who gets vaccines; it's in their medical record, if not centralized anywhere. Longitudinal studies aren't impossible. So any random hospital could do a longitudinal retrospective data-collection study on the consequences for their own patients of either having received a given vaccination decades previous or not, no? > What kind of nonsense is that? I understood what they meant, and they're right. They're making an incomplete-information decision-theory argument. To rephrase them with more precision: Selecting a person from the population at random; and taking the category of "vaccines that will confer absolutely no benefits to that person specifically", and selecting a vaccine at random from that category; that person will, with high probability, incur more QALY-risk from paying for the vaccine (because they'll then have fewer dollars to pay for unplanned expenses, which can be quite problematic for the median member of the population), than they will from any iatrogenic illness induced by getting the vaccine itself. Outlier vaccines do nothing to change this, any more than those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin. Especially because, like the poisoned aspirin, outlier vaccines aren't on the market for very long compared to safe vaccines.
  - majkinetor 5y ago
    > study on the consequences for their own patients of either having received a given vaccination decades previous or not, no? No! If you think its possible to pin point exactly what is the source of the problem with decade of various stressors piling up on anybody you should think again. It basically has infinite confounding variables. > those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin. Please educate more about this - do you know that ibuprofen is result of long time search to replace aspirin due to its toxicity (such as stomach bleeding that you will get sooner or later). Its insane that people outsource medicine. One should strive to know as much as possible about it, with focus on prevention.
    - derefr 5y ago
      > It basically has infinite confounding variables. Yes, but: Law of Large Numbers. The great thing about retrospective data-collection studies is that you can potentially get hundreds of thousands of histories as datapoints. With those numbers, basically every confounder washes away, other than the selection effect of "what kind of person frequents this hospital rather than some other hospital." And you can get rid of that confounder, too, if you meta-analyze studies done in hospitals in very different areas.
- 6510 5y ago
  It makes a truly boring person if everything that is unknown must QUICKLY be asserted to be true or false. One should actively question all things again and again. Most things we believe to be true are just true because we have no reason to think they are false. Hell, most here write some code, look at it, it looks fine? Then it doesn't run because there are one or more typos. Note here how the whole thing doesn't work. If you organize your life like that the whole thing wont work. I so often told people to ask anyway in stead of already "knowing" what someone is going to say. Even if you are 95% certain you are still 100% wrong. If you do life like that you will never find a book you like, a job, a partner, a place to vacation, an interesting new food, a pet, a study. There is no need to bother, you already "know", they are all just going to disappoint you. God might be real, Trump might be a woman, Aliens might walk the earth, people might be living on mars, someone might have a working antikythera mechanism in their private collection, King Enmen-lu-ana might have ruled for 43,200 years, he might have visited the martians in his Vimana. What would I know about it?
- andrekandre 5y ago
  > say a decade, with the current approach. what could happen a decade after taking a vaccine?
  - toast0 5y ago
    Shingles happens decades after getting chickenpox. Conceivably an atennuated (or live) virus immunization could have a similar future issue. Lots of other possibilities of immunization causes a small but unnoticed inury that later on proves to be fatal, but because of the gap between injury and fatality is very hard to track down. My son participated in a 'long term' vaccine trial of a slightly different combination of childhood vaccines (if it had been successful in the US, it would have reduced the number of needles by one, but I don't recall the specifics). But long term means they followed up for one year. It's just not really possible to keep track of participants for very long outside of very small studies. Maybe if one day we have decent medical records, it will be easy to run epidemiological studies and find small effects. But you would need to make the decision on the immunization with the known information; maybe 20-40 years later you might find out that it increased or decreased the likelyhood of some disease in old age.
kiba 5y ago
That's why if you hadn't done your homework, I believe you should just follow the recommendation of your doctor and/or the CDC. They likely laid all the groundwork for you in term of cost/benefit. But there's no point in blindly taking vaccines for the sake of taking vaccines and increasing your risk of becoming part of the fatality statistics.

ekianjo 5y ago

> while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them Alternative explanation: nobody knows the risks in details, and side-effects are widely under-reported anyway. Ask any doctor how often they report even serious side effects, you will be very surprised.

majkinetor 5y ago

Barely have any acute risk. Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach. > The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful. What kind of nonsense is that? Its the same as saying "there is no problem in taking any drug, the worst it can get is lose some money". You can't clamp entire technology as good or wrong. Vaccine as technology obviously has merit. Any particular vaccine may be problematic or not. Think H1N1 and narcolepsy, anthrax vaccine in gulf war etc. This kind of trash talk is exactly the same as anti-vax talk. I have no sympathy for either clan. As usual, people convert complex topic into binary decision which is madness.

derefr 5y ago
> Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach. Most vaccines are much older than a decade. We know who gets vaccines; it's in their medical record, if not centralized anywhere. Longitudinal studies aren't impossible. So any random hospital could do a longitudinal retrospective data-collection study on the consequences for their own patients of either having received a given vaccination decades previous or not, no? > What kind of nonsense is that? I understood what they meant, and they're right. They're making an incomplete-information decision-theory argument. To rephrase them with more precision: Selecting a person from the population at random; and taking the category of "vaccines that will confer absolutely no benefits to that person specifically", and selecting a vaccine at random from that category; that person will, with high probability, incur more QALY-risk from paying for the vaccine (because they'll then have fewer dollars to pay for unplanned expenses, which can be quite problematic for the median member of the population), than they will from any iatrogenic illness induced by getting the vaccine itself. Outlier vaccines do nothing to change this, any more than those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin. Especially because, like the poisoned aspirin, outlier vaccines aren't on the market for very long compared to safe vaccines.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  > study on the consequences for their own patients of either having received a given vaccination decades previous or not, no? No! If you think its possible to pin point exactly what is the source of the problem with decade of various stressors piling up on anybody you should think again. It basically has infinite confounding variables. > those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin. Please educate more about this - do you know that ibuprofen is result of long time search to replace aspirin due to its toxicity (such as stomach bleeding that you will get sooner or later). Its insane that people outsource medicine. One should strive to know as much as possible about it, with focus on prevention.
  - derefr 5y ago
    > It basically has infinite confounding variables. Yes, but: Law of Large Numbers. The great thing about retrospective data-collection studies is that you can potentially get hundreds of thousands of histories as datapoints. With those numbers, basically every confounder washes away, other than the selection effect of "what kind of person frequents this hospital rather than some other hospital." And you can get rid of that confounder, too, if you meta-analyze studies done in hospitals in very different areas.
6510 5y ago
It makes a truly boring person if everything that is unknown must QUICKLY be asserted to be true or false. One should actively question all things again and again. Most things we believe to be true are just true because we have no reason to think they are false. Hell, most here write some code, look at it, it looks fine? Then it doesn't run because there are one or more typos. Note here how the whole thing doesn't work. If you organize your life like that the whole thing wont work. I so often told people to ask anyway in stead of already "knowing" what someone is going to say. Even if you are 95% certain you are still 100% wrong. If you do life like that you will never find a book you like, a job, a partner, a place to vacation, an interesting new food, a pet, a study. There is no need to bother, you already "know", they are all just going to disappoint you. God might be real, Trump might be a woman, Aliens might walk the earth, people might be living on mars, someone might have a working antikythera mechanism in their private collection, King Enmen-lu-ana might have ruled for 43,200 years, he might have visited the martians in his Vimana. What would I know about it?
andrekandre 5y ago
> say a decade, with the current approach. what could happen a decade after taking a vaccine?
- toast0 5y ago
  Shingles happens decades after getting chickenpox. Conceivably an atennuated (or live) virus immunization could have a similar future issue. Lots of other possibilities of immunization causes a small but unnoticed inury that later on proves to be fatal, but because of the gap between injury and fatality is very hard to track down. My son participated in a 'long term' vaccine trial of a slightly different combination of childhood vaccines (if it had been successful in the US, it would have reduced the number of needles by one, but I don't recall the specifics). But long term means they followed up for one year. It's just not really possible to keep track of participants for very long outside of very small studies. Maybe if one day we have decent medical records, it will be easy to run epidemiological studies and find small effects. But you would need to make the decision on the immunization with the known information; maybe 20-40 years later you might find out that it increased or decreased the likelyhood of some disease in old age.

kiba 5y ago

That's why if you hadn't done your homework, I believe you should just follow the recommendation of your doctor and/or the CDC. They likely laid all the groundwork for you in term of cost/benefit. But there's no point in blindly taking vaccines for the sake of taking vaccines and increasing your risk of becoming part of the fatality statistics.