13 ms·

In rare cases, coronavirus vaccines may cause Long Covid–like symptoms

156 points by Alex3917 5y ago

mrintellectual 5y ago
Long COVID-like symptoms or not, the protection afforded by COVID vaccines still clearly outweighs the negatives. This holds true especially for at-risk populations.
- henriquez 5y ago
- mfcl 5y ago
  Yes, we know that, thank you. This is not what the story is about.
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    Yes. But it still needs to be said. Other they may or may not work as good
- RONROC 5y ago
  This doesn’t seem like the case at all, considering, you know, the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything. In my experience (and this is anecdotal) there’s no rhyme or reason as to why this virus affects some people more than others. You can try to tell me why, but it would ask me to betray what i’ve witnessed (or lack thereof) over the past two years. The data isn’t reliable nor convincing, so i’m not sure how you’re in the definitive “experimental jab better than nothing” camp. PS - Two doses here.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    > the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything Unvaxxed people have 75x more hospitalization, 48x more death. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-breakthrough-infections-vaccines.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-brea...) "Compared with the unvaccinated, fully vaccinated people overall had a much lower chance of testing positive for the virus or dying from it, even through the summer’s Delta surge and the relaxation of pandemic restrictions in many parts of the country." (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-breakthrough-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-brea...) Vaccination definitely mitigates hospitalization and death.
    - landemva 5y ago
      It's starting to seem like the group who had it and recovered are ignored by the media. At least now the CDC is saying this group has more durable protection than the vaccinated. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm 'By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.'
      - 8note 5y ago
        The people who would have been hospitalized and died of covid already died in the previously infected group. You're looking at a fundamentally different group of people. If you didn't consider the vaccinated people who then died of covid, you'd see a lot less hospitalizations there too
        landemva 5y ago
        Can you help me understand the focus of your comment? Should the current group who have recovered take the side-effect risks, or is the CDC note about reduced susceptibility to infection something to consider when making a decision about the first vaccine shot?
      - jb1991 5y ago
        There was an article just one or two days ago that indicated that vaccination prevents against hospitalization something like many multiples of times greater protection than recovery from prior infection.
        peteradio 5y ago
        Link?
        jb1991 5y ago
        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029152244.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029152244.h...
  - nradov 5y ago
    Beyond the vaccination factor, it's clear that this virus affects obese people more than others. Regardless of what you might have witnessed the data is crystal clear on that point. https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-children-in-covid-icus-are-overweight-but-public-health-officials-rarely-talk-about-obesity https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c... https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/view/1118/1127 https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/vi... https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospitalization-obesity-teenagers/ https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    > the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything. tell me that you're completely uninformed without telling me that you're completely uninformed.
- john_moscow 5y ago
  Well, then like with any other trade-off, we need to quantify and refine: * How much does the vaccination status reduce the chance of death/hospitalization? * How does it differ among age groups? * How does it change over time (not 2 doses vs. booster, but by time since the last dose)? * How does it affect the transmission rates? Given how many people are critical to masks/vaccines, you can easily find volunteers to do transmissibility tests in 2 buildings of comparable layout. * What about comorbidities? How does the benefit of losing extra weight compare to an extra vaccine dose? * What about suicides and the mental health in general? * How often are new variants expected to appear and what is the estimated vaccine efficiency against them? * What about the treatments? Can they be scaled up to be more affordable? Considering and openly discussing these factors could help our society find a reasonable compromise, but we are not doing that. We are pushing a single solution that benefits a small economic group at the expense of everyone else, and are recruiting the general population to wage a holy war against the dissenters. I don't like this at all.
  - JimTheMan 5y ago
    You can already see the stats you mentioned. The unvaccinated get admitted to the ICU at staggering rates compared to the vaccinated. And given the spread of omicron, odds are that almost everyone will get exposed. I've had two near misses this week alone... Even at the anecdotal level everyone I know is vaccinated and no one is long term ill from it. I suspect the incessant querying from bad faith actors is more of an ideology than a true wish to seek an actual answer.
    - exodust 5y ago
      > The unvaccinated get admitted to the ICU at staggering rates compared to the vaccinated. Without breaking that down by age group, we are no better informed. Emotive words like "staggering" without mentioning the data, is unhelpful. It's common knowledge that elderly and unhealthy/vulnerable represent most ICU beds. I think it was Italy or Greece who have mandated the jab for over 60's. This sounds like an expert has formulated a policy that matches the challenge: that the 60+ age group are filling the hospital beds. If only more countries could formulate measured, level-headed responses to match the reality of the pandemic. It's not commonly known whether younger unvaccinated people who end up in ICU, are there because they're unvaccinated vs existing health condition. That comes down to individual hospitals and doctors reporting efforts. What we hear in media reports is a broad mashing of data, reduced down to an oversimplified message that unvaccinated people are filling the hospitals. When in fact, it's more likely that unvaccinated people from a specific age and health status group, are filling hospital beds.
- throwme431 5y ago
  > Long COVID-like symptoms or not, the protection afforded by COVID vaccines still clearly outweighs the negatives. I don't think it's that simple to make such a blanket statement anymore. In much/most of the developed world, over half the population has already received 2 doses of vaccine and the conversation is moving from "What about the people who choose to remain unvaccinated?" to "Are you fully vaccinated with just 2 doses?" and "How many boosters do we give and how frequently do we give them?" We've gone from thinking that we might need a booster a year to advising people to get boosters just months after a previous jab. In light of omicron, the cost/benefit analysis is not anywhere near as clear anymore, especially when it comes to these boosters. There's also the issue that risk varies by magnitudes of order between age and comorbidity risk groups, and overall risk of severe outcomes is lower for all groups with omicron. From the article: > She says she has preliminary evidence that vaccination can lead to microclots, although in most cases they go unnoticed and quickly disappear—an effect she and a colleague saw in their own blood and that of eight other healthy volunteers, which they sampled after their vaccinations. This highlights the fact that there's a ton we still don't know. What if there are subclinical effects of vaccination that have the potential to affect people's health in negative ways, either in the near term or long term? Even small changes in uncommonly tested biomarkers can be clinically meaningful over longer time periods. Perhaps it's reasonable to argue that made the right decision early on by accepting these unknown risks in light of the efficacy of the vaccines at preventing hospitalization and death pre-omicron. But is it reasonable to do that with never-ending boosters when the currently dominant strain is proving to be far less virulent in all groups? Is it still reasonable to push for vaccination and boosting of children and younger and middle-aged adults who are otherwise healthy and at significantly less risk than older, unhealthy groups? If we just blindly accept that the cost/benefit analysis of vaccination always favors vaccination, how would we ever know that we've crossed a line where that is no longer the case?
  - mattzito 5y ago
    The cost-benefit of vaccination doesn’t always favor vaccination, which is why we mandate the polio vaccine but not the dengue fever vaccine, because the latter comes with attendant risks relative to the potential benefit. As far as the evolving science on what has to happen, well, it’s a rapidly changing situation. If someone had said at the start of the vaccine schedule, “hey, there’s going to be an incredibly infectious strain in late 2021 that will render vaccines much less effective”, maybe they would have mandated three shots up front. But they didn’t know that, and so when the first round of vaccine trial results came back with a 90%+ efficacy rates, I remember there were people arguing that those numbers were TOO effective, and we should reduce the volume of the second dose or remove it entirely in order to vaccinate more people. Good thing we didn’t do that. As far as the whatabouts - great, yes, therapeutics are great. More therapeutics. But focusing on omicron’s reduced level of severe cases misses the point of vaccination, which is that we don’t only vaccinate for ourselves, we do it to try to reduce spread in the community. We vaccinate to try to make it less likely that new variants that are better at escaping immune response arise. Maybe if everyone had embraced vaccination we wouldn’t be close to 2k dead/day.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- native_samples 5y ago
  It's not that clear unfortunately. Consider that all-cause death rate is a lot higher in the under-40s vaccinated than the under-40s unvaccinated (UK recently released stats on this): https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-covid-deaths https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-cov... That simply shouldn't be happening. The death rate gets 4x higher over last summer, it's an enormous difference. Even if you think there's some statistical or other problem causing this it cannot be said things are "clear" when such basic data has gone in the wrong direction.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Your article points out why this might be the case. If the vaccinated are less healthy, independent of the vaccine, they will die more.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      The bias runs in the opposite direction: the vaccinated are supposed to be more healthy, not less, because people on death's door aren't being vaccinated at all.
- blub 5y ago
  Although this comment is a cliche and it's been already shown to be incorrect in another reply, I'd like to also point out that any such new data that surfaces will likely change the risk/reward ratio for subsets of the population or in regard to boosters.
hirundo 5y ago
In the last few days several major publications have had articles discussing the grey areas of the covid response in ways that didn't seem acceptable recently. It feels like we've made a cultural shift from pandemic to endemic, and fear has much receded. HN readers are flagging these topics less heavily too. It's encouraging.
- kcplate 5y ago
  Let’s hope so, because this quote from the article scares the hell out of me: > Other researchers note the scientific community is uneasy about studying such effects. “Everyone is tiptoeing around it,” Pretorius says. “I’ve talked to a lot of clinicians and researchers at various universities, and they don’t want to touch it.” The minute we are no longer allowed to ask questions either through external censorship or pressure to internally censor, is the day we start declining to our demise as a species.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mint2 5y ago
    You realize a main reason they are reticent is because anything they say would get grasped upon and misinterpreted and blown up on the internet, And that it would be unbearable for a vaccine researcher to know their words, even if twisted online, caused people to die needlessly. Also the latest cia report on the Havana syndrome was that only a few dozen are unexplainable and could be an attack, all the hundreds of others reporting symptoms later were explainable by preexisting conditions, stress, and anxiety. Whether or not there are actual side effects to the vaccine like the story here, there will be hundreds or thousands of people who are like the ones from the Havana syndrome report. It’s a stressful anxiety filled time. Their symptoms are real, but the cause they attribute them to is misplaced.
    - kcplate 5y ago
      That’s the main reason? Doubt it. Scientists are not afraid of making mistakes, that happens all the time. They are afraid of losing funding and the fastest way in 2022 to lose funding is to suggest something outside the political and social acceptability narrative.
forgingahead 5y ago
You have to be very careful” before tying COVID-19 vaccines to complications, Nath cautions. “You can make the wrong conclusion. … The implications are huge.” No, you just tell the truth, every time, all the time. This foolish gymnastics where government and public health authorities are putting themselves through because they're scared of potential negative outcomes has resulted in a catastrophic collapse in trust by the public. This itself will have huge implications for any future society-wide initiatives that we may need for the public good. For reference, here is one counter example from Japan[0][1], where the benefits and risks are communicated clearly. Will crackpots still behave like crackpots? Sure, but crackpots are like that now any way. This "paper over the truth" has damaged credibility amongst a lot of moderates. [0]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_mrZXEAYUuLq?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_mrZXEAYUuLq?format=jpg&name=... [1]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_meqX0AUH6jh?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_meqX0AUH6jh?format=jpg&name=...
- phonypc 5y ago
  The quote is clearly about the potential implications of incorrectly tying the vaccines to complications. Do you imagine that you can't find a nearly identical blurb about myocarditis risk from the CDC? Or what point are you trying to make with the link?
  - musicale 5y ago
    PP isn't wrong about communication about vaccine risks being abysmal (in the US at least) or about the erosion of trust in public health agencies and officials. Even those awful "ask your doctor for a reason to take it" drug ads have a lengthy disclosure list of (often serious) potential side effects. Most of the "get the vaccine" ads I've seen have no such disclosure. It's disappointing, because being forthright about, for example, how many people have died from the vaccines vs. how many lives have likely been saved by them could help the public to assess the overall benefit without discounting the risks. And this should also be sliced by risk groups, such as young or old or people with secondary conditions. Moreover, vaccine mandates should include compensation for lost work (or school) time not just due to rare side effects but also due to feeling ill after getting the vaccine (or booster, which seems even more likely to make you feel unwell for multiple days.)
john_moscow 5y ago
Why is this flagged? Why expressing any vaccine-related concerns has suddenly become a thought crime with an army of volunteers ready to shoot the messenger? How can we possibly hope to resolve the pandemic in a way that benefits the ordinary people, if any discussion or questioning of the party line is not allowed anymore? Have I suddenly woken up back in the USSR?
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Because it causes unneeded worry until the studies actually show causation rather than weak correlation and there is so much misinformation out there already. The general public seems to have no concept of what statistics actually mean outside of "so all i'm hearing is there's a chance so now I'm going to decide to not get a vaccination because there is a chance even if the chance covid kills me is far higher"
  - tasogare 5y ago
    - hindsightbias 5y ago
      You are talking about extreme outliers there. Practically unicorns in the US.
    - wellthatsawrap 5y ago
  - john_moscow 5y ago
    >Because it causes unneeded worry until the studies actually show causation rather than weak correlation and there is so much misinformation out there already. You know, the studies can show anything other than the party line only if there is a culture of questioning the party line. Otherwise, the scholars are publishing praises to planned economy and condemning the "rotting West" while the plebs are queueing for bread. That was the fucking state of affairs in the USSR for decades, and the only reason the West didn't sink that low is that it had the culture of questioning the narrative, that so many people today are trying to destroy.
8note 5y ago
That's pretty believable, if long covid is a long term reaction to the spike protein. It's not like not getting the vaccine would prevent getting long covid in that case though. It does not however explain why getting the vaccine would get rid of long covid though?
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Actually, it could. If long COVID is a reaction to the spike, given that infection produces multiple orders of magnitude more protein and that vaccination leads to lesser viral vaccination, it's almost certainly a net positive. If it's because of latent infection, a vaccine that helps stop infection would reduce the amount of spike protein to zero, which would help. If it's an autoimmune reaction, vaccines generally provide a different immune reaction than infection, and subsequent immune reaction to infection would be different, so it could improve immune reaction.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    "infection produces multiple orders of magnitude more protein and that vaccination leads to lesser viral vaccination" Do you have a source for this claim? Last time I tried to research this and get a figure for the difference, there was just no way to directly compare dosages. But it turned out that antibody titer is much higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated-and-infected, which implies the effect of the vaccine is stronger. The general rule seems to be that whatever you assume about COVID vaccines, regardless of how basic it may appear to be, will turn out to be riven with conflicting facts when trying to find support for it.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Yes, the antibody titer will be higher with vaccines no matter what, because the virus has some serious immune evasion mechanism and that the vaccine is much more immunogenic. If you want to estimate the amount of spike produced by the vaccine, we can take the fact that we know the amount of mRNA in the Pfizer vaccine is 30mcg. The mRNA is ~4000 nucleotides long, which gives us a molar mass of 2000kg/mol. So the vaccine actually has 0.015 nanomoles of mRNA which turns out to be around 10^11 mRNA molecules. Now we know COVID infection produces around 10^12 virions each of which has ~30 spikes, and there are certainly at least 3x more spike protein made that doesn't end up in a virion, so we have ~10^14 spikes from natural infection. You would thus need each mRNA particle to enter a cell and be transcribed (impossible) and for each mRNA strand to produce 1000 spike proteins, which is very improbable. So it is very likely that indeed vaccines produce much fewer s proteins than natural infection.
theknocker 5y ago
TheGigaChad 5y ago
ngcc_hk 5y ago
There is always a risk to inject something to a healthy person. But we just hope the risk is low enough so many do it for themselves and others. It is hard call. Let the study and “experiment” continue. Not just totalitarian policy only.
gxt 5y ago
Have there been double blind studies on long COVID? Every time I hear about it sounds like nocebo.
donkarma 5y ago
I believe I read something about the spike protein causing inflammation
macilacilove 5y ago
That was exactly one of the key worries expressed by Robert W Malone(quite relevant expert to say the least), who is not even anti-vaxx, but argued that people should have informed consent over their health, but the censors thought othervise.
- crowbahr 5y ago
  All the hysterics in the comments over censorship and suppression. Wake up. 1. This is an article proving that people still have a voice. 2. The article shows a tiny fraction of those who got vaccines are experiencing major adverse side effects that are not yet explained. 3. If you told someone that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance this could make their life worse they rationally would still take the vaccine. The only people this affects are the irrational. Should people have informed consent? Yes. Does that mean you have to outline in excruciating detail every single rare chance that there is the remotest possibility of happening to them? Maybe, but I'd argue humans are terrible with statistics and worse with action: it's better for everyone and for each individual to know there are infinitesimal risks and huge, immediate benefits. Which is exactly what has been said. Long covid from vaccines is a new tiny risk that needs to be studied. But if you don't want long covid the best way to avoid it is still to take a vaccine. It's not a choice here: it's just mathematically provable.
  - macilacilove 5y ago
    If you can prove me mathematically that I am better off with the vaccine I will take it. Seriously. I believe I have sufficient background in math and I am willing to pick up extra if needed. I could give you background info on me (age, health, covid status etc) but you said you could prove it for all possible hn commenters so I'd keep my privacy.

156 points by Alex3917 5y ago

Long COVID-like symptoms or not, the protection afforded by COVID vaccines still clearly outweighs the negatives. This holds true especially for at-risk populations.

henriquez 5y ago
mfcl 5y ago
Yes, we know that, thank you. This is not what the story is about.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  Yes. But it still needs to be said. Other they may or may not work as good
RONROC 5y ago
This doesn’t seem like the case at all, considering, you know, the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything. In my experience (and this is anecdotal) there’s no rhyme or reason as to why this virus affects some people more than others. You can try to tell me why, but it would ask me to betray what i’ve witnessed (or lack thereof) over the past two years. The data isn’t reliable nor convincing, so i’m not sure how you’re in the definitive “experimental jab better than nothing” camp. PS - Two doses here.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  > the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything Unvaxxed people have 75x more hospitalization, 48x more death. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-breakthrough-infections-vaccines.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-brea...) "Compared with the unvaccinated, fully vaccinated people overall had a much lower chance of testing positive for the virus or dying from it, even through the summer’s Delta surge and the relaxation of pandemic restrictions in many parts of the country." (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-breakthrough-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-brea...) Vaccination definitely mitigates hospitalization and death.
  - landemva 5y ago
    It's starting to seem like the group who had it and recovered are ignored by the media. At least now the CDC is saying this group has more durable protection than the vaccinated. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm 'By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.'
    - 8note 5y ago
      The people who would have been hospitalized and died of covid already died in the previously infected group. You're looking at a fundamentally different group of people. If you didn't consider the vaccinated people who then died of covid, you'd see a lot less hospitalizations there too
      - landemva 5y ago
        Can you help me understand the focus of your comment? Should the current group who have recovered take the side-effect risks, or is the CDC note about reduced susceptibility to infection something to consider when making a decision about the first vaccine shot?
    - jb1991 5y ago
      There was an article just one or two days ago that indicated that vaccination prevents against hospitalization something like many multiples of times greater protection than recovery from prior infection.
      - peteradio 5y ago
        Link?
        jb1991 5y ago
        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029152244.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029152244.h...
- nradov 5y ago
  Beyond the vaccination factor, it's clear that this virus affects obese people more than others. Regardless of what you might have witnessed the data is crystal clear on that point. https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-children-in-covid-icus-are-overweight-but-public-health-officials-rarely-talk-about-obesity https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c... https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/view/1118/1127 https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/vi... https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospitalization-obesity-teenagers/ https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything. tell me that you're completely uninformed without telling me that you're completely uninformed.
john_moscow 5y ago
Well, then like with any other trade-off, we need to quantify and refine: * How much does the vaccination status reduce the chance of death/hospitalization? * How does it differ among age groups? * How does it change over time (not 2 doses vs. booster, but by time since the last dose)? * How does it affect the transmission rates? Given how many people are critical to masks/vaccines, you can easily find volunteers to do transmissibility tests in 2 buildings of comparable layout. * What about comorbidities? How does the benefit of losing extra weight compare to an extra vaccine dose? * What about suicides and the mental health in general? * How often are new variants expected to appear and what is the estimated vaccine efficiency against them? * What about the treatments? Can they be scaled up to be more affordable? Considering and openly discussing these factors could help our society find a reasonable compromise, but we are not doing that. We are pushing a single solution that benefits a small economic group at the expense of everyone else, and are recruiting the general population to wage a holy war against the dissenters. I don't like this at all.
- JimTheMan 5y ago
  You can already see the stats you mentioned. The unvaccinated get admitted to the ICU at staggering rates compared to the vaccinated. And given the spread of omicron, odds are that almost everyone will get exposed. I've had two near misses this week alone... Even at the anecdotal level everyone I know is vaccinated and no one is long term ill from it. I suspect the incessant querying from bad faith actors is more of an ideology than a true wish to seek an actual answer.
  - exodust 5y ago
    > The unvaccinated get admitted to the ICU at staggering rates compared to the vaccinated. Without breaking that down by age group, we are no better informed. Emotive words like "staggering" without mentioning the data, is unhelpful. It's common knowledge that elderly and unhealthy/vulnerable represent most ICU beds. I think it was Italy or Greece who have mandated the jab for over 60's. This sounds like an expert has formulated a policy that matches the challenge: that the 60+ age group are filling the hospital beds. If only more countries could formulate measured, level-headed responses to match the reality of the pandemic. It's not commonly known whether younger unvaccinated people who end up in ICU, are there because they're unvaccinated vs existing health condition. That comes down to individual hospitals and doctors reporting efforts. What we hear in media reports is a broad mashing of data, reduced down to an oversimplified message that unvaccinated people are filling the hospitals. When in fact, it's more likely that unvaccinated people from a specific age and health status group, are filling hospital beds.
throwme431 5y ago
> Long COVID-like symptoms or not, the protection afforded by COVID vaccines still clearly outweighs the negatives. I don't think it's that simple to make such a blanket statement anymore. In much/most of the developed world, over half the population has already received 2 doses of vaccine and the conversation is moving from "What about the people who choose to remain unvaccinated?" to "Are you fully vaccinated with just 2 doses?" and "How many boosters do we give and how frequently do we give them?" We've gone from thinking that we might need a booster a year to advising people to get boosters just months after a previous jab. In light of omicron, the cost/benefit analysis is not anywhere near as clear anymore, especially when it comes to these boosters. There's also the issue that risk varies by magnitudes of order between age and comorbidity risk groups, and overall risk of severe outcomes is lower for all groups with omicron. From the article: > She says she has preliminary evidence that vaccination can lead to microclots, although in most cases they go unnoticed and quickly disappear—an effect she and a colleague saw in their own blood and that of eight other healthy volunteers, which they sampled after their vaccinations. This highlights the fact that there's a ton we still don't know. What if there are subclinical effects of vaccination that have the potential to affect people's health in negative ways, either in the near term or long term? Even small changes in uncommonly tested biomarkers can be clinically meaningful over longer time periods. Perhaps it's reasonable to argue that made the right decision early on by accepting these unknown risks in light of the efficacy of the vaccines at preventing hospitalization and death pre-omicron. But is it reasonable to do that with never-ending boosters when the currently dominant strain is proving to be far less virulent in all groups? Is it still reasonable to push for vaccination and boosting of children and younger and middle-aged adults who are otherwise healthy and at significantly less risk than older, unhealthy groups? If we just blindly accept that the cost/benefit analysis of vaccination always favors vaccination, how would we ever know that we've crossed a line where that is no longer the case?
- mattzito 5y ago
  The cost-benefit of vaccination doesn’t always favor vaccination, which is why we mandate the polio vaccine but not the dengue fever vaccine, because the latter comes with attendant risks relative to the potential benefit. As far as the evolving science on what has to happen, well, it’s a rapidly changing situation. If someone had said at the start of the vaccine schedule, “hey, there’s going to be an incredibly infectious strain in late 2021 that will render vaccines much less effective”, maybe they would have mandated three shots up front. But they didn’t know that, and so when the first round of vaccine trial results came back with a 90%+ efficacy rates, I remember there were people arguing that those numbers were TOO effective, and we should reduce the volume of the second dose or remove it entirely in order to vaccinate more people. Good thing we didn’t do that. As far as the whatabouts - great, yes, therapeutics are great. More therapeutics. But focusing on omicron’s reduced level of severe cases misses the point of vaccination, which is that we don’t only vaccinate for ourselves, we do it to try to reduce spread in the community. We vaccinate to try to make it less likely that new variants that are better at escaping immune response arise. Maybe if everyone had embraced vaccination we wouldn’t be close to 2k dead/day.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
native_samples 5y ago
It's not that clear unfortunately. Consider that all-cause death rate is a lot higher in the under-40s vaccinated than the under-40s unvaccinated (UK recently released stats on this): https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-covid-deaths https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-cov... That simply shouldn't be happening. The death rate gets 4x higher over last summer, it's an enormous difference. Even if you think there's some statistical or other problem causing this it cannot be said things are "clear" when such basic data has gone in the wrong direction.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Your article points out why this might be the case. If the vaccinated are less healthy, independent of the vaccine, they will die more.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    The bias runs in the opposite direction: the vaccinated are supposed to be more healthy, not less, because people on death's door aren't being vaccinated at all.
blub 5y ago
Although this comment is a cliche and it's been already shown to be incorrect in another reply, I'd like to also point out that any such new data that surfaces will likely change the risk/reward ratio for subsets of the population or in regard to boosters.

hirundo 5y ago

In the last few days several major publications have had articles discussing the grey areas of the covid response in ways that didn't seem acceptable recently. It feels like we've made a cultural shift from pandemic to endemic, and fear has much receded. HN readers are flagging these topics less heavily too. It's encouraging.

kcplate 5y ago
Let’s hope so, because this quote from the article scares the hell out of me: > Other researchers note the scientific community is uneasy about studying such effects. “Everyone is tiptoeing around it,” Pretorius says. “I’ve talked to a lot of clinicians and researchers at various universities, and they don’t want to touch it.” The minute we are no longer allowed to ask questions either through external censorship or pressure to internally censor, is the day we start declining to our demise as a species.
- deleted 5y ago
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- mint2 5y ago
  You realize a main reason they are reticent is because anything they say would get grasped upon and misinterpreted and blown up on the internet, And that it would be unbearable for a vaccine researcher to know their words, even if twisted online, caused people to die needlessly. Also the latest cia report on the Havana syndrome was that only a few dozen are unexplainable and could be an attack, all the hundreds of others reporting symptoms later were explainable by preexisting conditions, stress, and anxiety. Whether or not there are actual side effects to the vaccine like the story here, there will be hundreds or thousands of people who are like the ones from the Havana syndrome report. It’s a stressful anxiety filled time. Their symptoms are real, but the cause they attribute them to is misplaced.
  - kcplate 5y ago
    That’s the main reason? Doubt it. Scientists are not afraid of making mistakes, that happens all the time. They are afraid of losing funding and the fastest way in 2022 to lose funding is to suggest something outside the political and social acceptability narrative.

forgingahead 5y ago

You have to be very careful” before tying COVID-19 vaccines to complications, Nath cautions. “You can make the wrong conclusion. … The implications are huge.” No, you just tell the truth, every time, all the time. This foolish gymnastics where government and public health authorities are putting themselves through because they're scared of potential negative outcomes has resulted in a catastrophic collapse in trust by the public. This itself will have huge implications for any future society-wide initiatives that we may need for the public good. For reference, here is one counter example from Japan[0][1], where the benefits and risks are communicated clearly. Will crackpots still behave like crackpots? Sure, but crackpots are like that now any way. This "paper over the truth" has damaged credibility amongst a lot of moderates. [0]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_mrZXEAYUuLq?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_mrZXEAYUuLq?format=jpg&name=... [1]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_meqX0AUH6jh?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIm_meqX0AUH6jh?format=jpg&name=...

phonypc 5y ago
The quote is clearly about the potential implications of incorrectly tying the vaccines to complications. Do you imagine that you can't find a nearly identical blurb about myocarditis risk from the CDC? Or what point are you trying to make with the link?
- musicale 5y ago
  PP isn't wrong about communication about vaccine risks being abysmal (in the US at least) or about the erosion of trust in public health agencies and officials. Even those awful "ask your doctor for a reason to take it" drug ads have a lengthy disclosure list of (often serious) potential side effects. Most of the "get the vaccine" ads I've seen have no such disclosure. It's disappointing, because being forthright about, for example, how many people have died from the vaccines vs. how many lives have likely been saved by them could help the public to assess the overall benefit without discounting the risks. And this should also be sliced by risk groups, such as young or old or people with secondary conditions. Moreover, vaccine mandates should include compensation for lost work (or school) time not just due to rare side effects but also due to feeling ill after getting the vaccine (or booster, which seems even more likely to make you feel unwell for multiple days.)

john_moscow 5y ago

Why is this flagged? Why expressing any vaccine-related concerns has suddenly become a thought crime with an army of volunteers ready to shoot the messenger? How can we possibly hope to resolve the pandemic in a way that benefits the ordinary people, if any discussion or questioning of the party line is not allowed anymore? Have I suddenly woken up back in the USSR?

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Because it causes unneeded worry until the studies actually show causation rather than weak correlation and there is so much misinformation out there already. The general public seems to have no concept of what statistics actually mean outside of "so all i'm hearing is there's a chance so now I'm going to decide to not get a vaccination because there is a chance even if the chance covid kills me is far higher"
- tasogare 5y ago
  - hindsightbias 5y ago
    You are talking about extreme outliers there. Practically unicorns in the US.
  - wellthatsawrap 5y ago
- john_moscow 5y ago
  >Because it causes unneeded worry until the studies actually show causation rather than weak correlation and there is so much misinformation out there already. You know, the studies can show anything other than the party line only if there is a culture of questioning the party line. Otherwise, the scholars are publishing praises to planned economy and condemning the "rotting West" while the plebs are queueing for bread. That was the fucking state of affairs in the USSR for decades, and the only reason the West didn't sink that low is that it had the culture of questioning the narrative, that so many people today are trying to destroy.

8note 5y ago

That's pretty believable, if long covid is a long term reaction to the spike protein. It's not like not getting the vaccine would prevent getting long covid in that case though. It does not however explain why getting the vaccine would get rid of long covid though?

sudosysgen 5y ago
Actually, it could. If long COVID is a reaction to the spike, given that infection produces multiple orders of magnitude more protein and that vaccination leads to lesser viral vaccination, it's almost certainly a net positive. If it's because of latent infection, a vaccine that helps stop infection would reduce the amount of spike protein to zero, which would help. If it's an autoimmune reaction, vaccines generally provide a different immune reaction than infection, and subsequent immune reaction to infection would be different, so it could improve immune reaction.
- native_samples 5y ago
  "infection produces multiple orders of magnitude more protein and that vaccination leads to lesser viral vaccination" Do you have a source for this claim? Last time I tried to research this and get a figure for the difference, there was just no way to directly compare dosages. But it turned out that antibody titer is much higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated-and-infected, which implies the effect of the vaccine is stronger. The general rule seems to be that whatever you assume about COVID vaccines, regardless of how basic it may appear to be, will turn out to be riven with conflicting facts when trying to find support for it.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Yes, the antibody titer will be higher with vaccines no matter what, because the virus has some serious immune evasion mechanism and that the vaccine is much more immunogenic. If you want to estimate the amount of spike produced by the vaccine, we can take the fact that we know the amount of mRNA in the Pfizer vaccine is 30mcg. The mRNA is ~4000 nucleotides long, which gives us a molar mass of 2000kg/mol. So the vaccine actually has 0.015 nanomoles of mRNA which turns out to be around 10^11 mRNA molecules. Now we know COVID infection produces around 10^12 virions each of which has ~30 spikes, and there are certainly at least 3x more spike protein made that doesn't end up in a virion, so we have ~10^14 spikes from natural infection. You would thus need each mRNA particle to enter a cell and be transcribed (impossible) and for each mRNA strand to produce 1000 spike proteins, which is very improbable. So it is very likely that indeed vaccines produce much fewer s proteins than natural infection.

theknocker 5y ago

TheGigaChad 5y ago

ngcc_hk 5y ago

There is always a risk to inject something to a healthy person. But we just hope the risk is low enough so many do it for themselves and others. It is hard call. Let the study and “experiment” continue. Not just totalitarian policy only.

gxt 5y ago

Have there been double blind studies on long COVID? Every time I hear about it sounds like nocebo.

donkarma 5y ago

I believe I read something about the spike protein causing inflammation

macilacilove 5y ago

That was exactly one of the key worries expressed by Robert W Malone(quite relevant expert to say the least), who is not even anti-vaxx, but argued that people should have informed consent over their health, but the censors thought othervise.

crowbahr 5y ago
All the hysterics in the comments over censorship and suppression. Wake up. 1. This is an article proving that people still have a voice. 2. The article shows a tiny fraction of those who got vaccines are experiencing major adverse side effects that are not yet explained. 3. If you told someone that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance this could make their life worse they rationally would still take the vaccine. The only people this affects are the irrational. Should people have informed consent? Yes. Does that mean you have to outline in excruciating detail every single rare chance that there is the remotest possibility of happening to them? Maybe, but I'd argue humans are terrible with statistics and worse with action: it's better for everyone and for each individual to know there are infinitesimal risks and huge, immediate benefits. Which is exactly what has been said. Long covid from vaccines is a new tiny risk that needs to be studied. But if you don't want long covid the best way to avoid it is still to take a vaccine. It's not a choice here: it's just mathematically provable.
- macilacilove 5y ago
  If you can prove me mathematically that I am better off with the vaccine I will take it. Seriously. I believe I have sufficient background in math and I am willing to pick up extra if needed. I could give you background info on me (age, health, covid status etc) but you said you could prove it for all possible hn commenters so I'd keep my privacy.