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> Our study results, along with the benefit–risk profile, continue to support vaccination using either of the two mRNA vaccines.

j16sdiz 4y ago
Seriously, why not choose the non-mRNA alternatives? We have so many different vaccine to choose from.
- consp 4y ago
  The other ones also have risk factors. It's always a cost benefit relation.
- dustinmoris 4y ago
  Blood clots
- jmcgough 4y ago
  Any vaccine triggers an immune response, so it's not surprising that there's some small risk to people in taking them. But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.
  - WanderPanda 4y ago
    But you need to trust the data, and given the politicisation of the issue I get that people don‘t trust that this is properly researched/understood.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    Not for young healthy people. And the covid risk for that population, even before omicron, was negligible in the first place. As you said people are really bad at doing the maths, and it is easy to scare people with risks that are of the same order of magnitude than winning the lottery or dying in a plane crash.
    - undersuit 4y ago
      The study reported 411 events in over 15 million people aged 18-64. Meanwhile the US has had 6300+ Covid deaths for the ~46 million Americans aged 18-29. Pretty easy to see the numbers favor taking the vaccine.
      - leeroyjenkins11 4y ago
        It really depends. How many of the 6000+ had other major health issues? What are my chances as a healthy 20 something from dying or having a serious complications? VS the unknowns of the vaccine for short term and long term issues? If I had other issues I'd think harder about it. But especially since I already had covid this spring, I'm really see no need in getting the shot.
        cm2187 4y ago
        And on top of what you say, even based on the numbers from the parent we are comparing a 99.986% to a 99.997% chance of being ok. Either way not something worth worrying about, tiny risks. I am sure you can draw similar differences in risk of boarding a boeing plane vs an airbus plane (because so few events contribute to deaths and boeing had a few crashes recently). The reality is that either is a risk too small to worry about and it would be absurd to insist on one over the other. Understanding statistics isn’t just about computing things, it is also about looking at the numbers.
        jmcgough 4y ago
        I don't really understand this mentality. If the difference is negligible, why wouldn't you want to get vaccinated just to do more to protect other people around you? They can do everything right (get vaccinated etc) and still get sick and die if they're exposed to covid.
        cm2187 4y ago
        1. it doesn't protect people around me, the vaccine does not meaningfully reduce the spread of the virus. It is puzzling that people still make this argument. 2. I had side effects after both injections, including a day in bed with fever. This is not a candy.
  - parkingrift 4y ago
    >But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude. Covid risks are not evenly distributed throughout the population. An extreme majority of serious cases are people older than 65, fat people, or people with other existing health issues. If you are young, healthy, and active you are at virtually zero risk of Covid. If you are under 25, healthy, and active there is practically no personal health reason to get vaccinated for Covid.
    - jseban 4y ago
      Yep, it's just inflicting suffering also to the healthy in a misguided and desperate attempt to improve a situation by making it more "fair". When in reality the total amount of suffering is just increasing many times, which just makes it much worse. But this is a typical communist/religious idea that you should "share" suffering by punishing yourself.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        How is protecting yourself from a disease with a low but real risk of life-altering effects by taking a vaccine with minuscule (but also real) risks a form of self-punishment???
        jseban 4y ago
        How? Because you are (forced) to take a second dose of a vaccine that's not needed, which makes you sick and gives you heart inflammation. That's how.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        Well, taking the vaccine still has a much lower chance of causing heart inflammation than getting the disease while unvaccinated does, even when multiplied with the chance of getting the disease at all.
    - 4y ago
- oxff 4y ago
  I had the original COVID-19 in early '20. It was a like a flu, why take any shots for this if you aren't at-risk group (old or immunocompromised like cancer and aids)?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tempestn 4y ago
    I had the mRNA vaccines in mid '21. It was like any other shot, why risk covid if you can get the vaccine? Point is, just because my experience with the vaccine was fine doesn't mean everyone's would be, and just because your experience with covid was like a mild flu doesn't mean everyone's would be. The rational thing to do is to weigh the two risks. And the evidence so far shows that the total risks of covid, even for a young, healthy person, multiplied by the likelihood of getting it, do outweigh the risks of the mRNA vaccines. For children it's probably closer, at least in terms of acute risks. I expect the risks of chronic complications from covid are still enough to tip the scales, but I could be persuaded otherwise with more evidence. But you have to be willing to consider the evidence that exists, not just that which supports your priors.
    - lurker1984 4y ago
      because you can still get covid even with the vaccine... so if you are not in an at risk group, why bother injecting yourself with stuff you probably don't need?
      - TravelPiglet 4y ago
        You can die with the seat belt on in a car crash. Why wear it at all?
        DaSHacka 4y ago
        Because seat belts don't leave people with with side effects.
- makomk 4y ago
  The main non-mRNA alternatives were the adenovirus vector vaccines, which caused blood clots in young people - quite a few countries ended up withdrawing them from use in those age groups because of this. Novavax, which is a more traditional protein subunit vaccine, is probably safer (and certainly seems to be better tolerated in terms of the more common side effects) but wasn't available until late on in the pandemic, still hasn't been approved in the US, and doesn't have a huge amount of real-world evidence because it arrived too late to be widely used. Safe vaccine design is just hard, as is determining their safety. Anyone who'd paid attention to the history of emergency pandemic vaccinations would've known this, there was just a push to ignore it largely for US domestic political reasons.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  There's less "stuff" in the mRNA vaccines than in any other. So for example, the fatal blood clotting conditions with the adenovirus-vectored vaccines turns out to be due to the binding of PF4 onto the adenovirus capsid causing an autoimmune reaction to PF4 after it is "ingested" intracellularly. This doesn't happen with mRNA vaccines because there's no capsid or anything else. You're getting exactly the same mRNA payload with those, but you're wrapping it with a pile of other crap that you can have autoimmune reactions to. Similarly inactivated virus is not just the mRNA payload of the virus but all the rest of the viral machinery, surface proteins, nucleocapsid, etc. All of those get presented. Plus you probably need an additional adjuvant to stimulate your immune system. And the chemical makeup of the mRNA in the inactivated virus will trigger the innate immune system to kill the cells presenting it (the use of pseudouridine in the mRNA vaccines makes the mRNA look more host-like so that the cells don't get killed before presenting antigen on MHC). The risks of autoimmune conditions will stack based on how much more mRNA and proteins are present in the payload. There's a benefit of the inactivated virus in that you also get antibodies and T-cells to other proteins, including nucleocapsid, etc, but we just haven't seen any clinical net benefit after triple-vaccination (and if anything the outcomes of inactivated virus are slightly worse -- although after triple-vaccination HK studies have shown that they're comparable and that inactivated virus isn't particularly worse).

j16sdiz 4y ago

Seriously, why not choose the non-mRNA alternatives? We have so many different vaccine to choose from.

consp 4y ago
The other ones also have risk factors. It's always a cost benefit relation.
dustinmoris 4y ago
Blood clots
jmcgough 4y ago
Any vaccine triggers an immune response, so it's not surprising that there's some small risk to people in taking them. But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.
- WanderPanda 4y ago
  But you need to trust the data, and given the politicisation of the issue I get that people don‘t trust that this is properly researched/understood.
- cm2187 4y ago
  Not for young healthy people. And the covid risk for that population, even before omicron, was negligible in the first place. As you said people are really bad at doing the maths, and it is easy to scare people with risks that are of the same order of magnitude than winning the lottery or dying in a plane crash.
  - undersuit 4y ago
    The study reported 411 events in over 15 million people aged 18-64. Meanwhile the US has had 6300+ Covid deaths for the ~46 million Americans aged 18-29. Pretty easy to see the numbers favor taking the vaccine.
    - leeroyjenkins11 4y ago
      It really depends. How many of the 6000+ had other major health issues? What are my chances as a healthy 20 something from dying or having a serious complications? VS the unknowns of the vaccine for short term and long term issues? If I had other issues I'd think harder about it. But especially since I already had covid this spring, I'm really see no need in getting the shot.
      - cm2187 4y ago
        And on top of what you say, even based on the numbers from the parent we are comparing a 99.986% to a 99.997% chance of being ok. Either way not something worth worrying about, tiny risks. I am sure you can draw similar differences in risk of boarding a boeing plane vs an airbus plane (because so few events contribute to deaths and boeing had a few crashes recently). The reality is that either is a risk too small to worry about and it would be absurd to insist on one over the other. Understanding statistics isn’t just about computing things, it is also about looking at the numbers.
        jmcgough 4y ago
        I don't really understand this mentality. If the difference is negligible, why wouldn't you want to get vaccinated just to do more to protect other people around you? They can do everything right (get vaccinated etc) and still get sick and die if they're exposed to covid.
        cm2187 4y ago
        1. it doesn't protect people around me, the vaccine does not meaningfully reduce the spread of the virus. It is puzzling that people still make this argument. 2. I had side effects after both injections, including a day in bed with fever. This is not a candy.
- parkingrift 4y ago
  >But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude. Covid risks are not evenly distributed throughout the population. An extreme majority of serious cases are people older than 65, fat people, or people with other existing health issues. If you are young, healthy, and active you are at virtually zero risk of Covid. If you are under 25, healthy, and active there is practically no personal health reason to get vaccinated for Covid.
  - jseban 4y ago
    Yep, it's just inflicting suffering also to the healthy in a misguided and desperate attempt to improve a situation by making it more "fair". When in reality the total amount of suffering is just increasing many times, which just makes it much worse. But this is a typical communist/religious idea that you should "share" suffering by punishing yourself.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      How is protecting yourself from a disease with a low but real risk of life-altering effects by taking a vaccine with minuscule (but also real) risks a form of self-punishment???
      - jseban 4y ago
        How? Because you are (forced) to take a second dose of a vaccine that's not needed, which makes you sick and gives you heart inflammation. That's how.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        Well, taking the vaccine still has a much lower chance of causing heart inflammation than getting the disease while unvaccinated does, even when multiplied with the chance of getting the disease at all.
  - 4y ago
oxff 4y ago
I had the original COVID-19 in early '20. It was a like a flu, why take any shots for this if you aren't at-risk group (old or immunocompromised like cancer and aids)?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tempestn 4y ago
  I had the mRNA vaccines in mid '21. It was like any other shot, why risk covid if you can get the vaccine? Point is, just because my experience with the vaccine was fine doesn't mean everyone's would be, and just because your experience with covid was like a mild flu doesn't mean everyone's would be. The rational thing to do is to weigh the two risks. And the evidence so far shows that the total risks of covid, even for a young, healthy person, multiplied by the likelihood of getting it, do outweigh the risks of the mRNA vaccines. For children it's probably closer, at least in terms of acute risks. I expect the risks of chronic complications from covid are still enough to tip the scales, but I could be persuaded otherwise with more evidence. But you have to be willing to consider the evidence that exists, not just that which supports your priors.
  - lurker1984 4y ago
    because you can still get covid even with the vaccine... so if you are not in an at risk group, why bother injecting yourself with stuff you probably don't need?
    - TravelPiglet 4y ago
      You can die with the seat belt on in a car crash. Why wear it at all?
      - DaSHacka 4y ago
        Because seat belts don't leave people with with side effects.
makomk 4y ago
The main non-mRNA alternatives were the adenovirus vector vaccines, which caused blood clots in young people - quite a few countries ended up withdrawing them from use in those age groups because of this. Novavax, which is a more traditional protein subunit vaccine, is probably safer (and certainly seems to be better tolerated in terms of the more common side effects) but wasn't available until late on in the pandemic, still hasn't been approved in the US, and doesn't have a huge amount of real-world evidence because it arrived too late to be widely used. Safe vaccine design is just hard, as is determining their safety. Anyone who'd paid attention to the history of emergency pandemic vaccinations would've known this, there was just a push to ignore it largely for US domestic political reasons.
lamontcg 4y ago
There's less "stuff" in the mRNA vaccines than in any other. So for example, the fatal blood clotting conditions with the adenovirus-vectored vaccines turns out to be due to the binding of PF4 onto the adenovirus capsid causing an autoimmune reaction to PF4 after it is "ingested" intracellularly. This doesn't happen with mRNA vaccines because there's no capsid or anything else. You're getting exactly the same mRNA payload with those, but you're wrapping it with a pile of other crap that you can have autoimmune reactions to. Similarly inactivated virus is not just the mRNA payload of the virus but all the rest of the viral machinery, surface proteins, nucleocapsid, etc. All of those get presented. Plus you probably need an additional adjuvant to stimulate your immune system. And the chemical makeup of the mRNA in the inactivated virus will trigger the innate immune system to kill the cells presenting it (the use of pseudouridine in the mRNA vaccines makes the mRNA look more host-like so that the cells don't get killed before presenting antigen on MHC). The risks of autoimmune conditions will stack based on how much more mRNA and proteins are present in the payload. There's a benefit of the inactivated virus in that you also get antibodies and T-cells to other proteins, including nucleocapsid, etc, but we just haven't seen any clinical net benefit after triple-vaccination (and if anything the outcomes of inactivated virus are slightly worse -- although after triple-vaccination HK studies have shown that they're comparable and that inactivated virus isn't particularly worse).