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I didn't know a vaccine could CAUSE the disease it is meant to prevent. If a layman said this I would have dismissed them as a conspiracy nut. How common is th

I didn't know a vaccine could CAUSE the disease it is meant to prevent. If a layman said this I would have dismissed them as a conspiracy nut. How common is this across all vaccines in general (irrespective of how low the probabilities are in each case.)

teektalker 4y ago
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- teektalker 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/02/14/fact-check-false-claim-thailand-banning-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine/11237189002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/02/14/fac...
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    What's your source for that? She did supposedly fall ill and go into a coma from heart arrhythmia, caused by a form of bacterial pneumonia. Which admittedly sounds suspicious. But I don't see anything linking this directly to a vaccine.
aw1621107 4y ago
I don't think it's easy to summarize in a useful manner because it basically comes down to how a specific vaccine works. For example, subunit vaccines like the whooping cough vaccine use a portion/fragment of the infectious agent, which means it is literally impossible for such a vaccine to cause the illness it is supposed to work on since there is none of that agent in the vaccine in the first place. Attenuated vaccines, such as some polio vaccines and the MMR vaccine, include a weakened version of the infectious agent. These types of vaccines can result in a full-blown infection, especially in immunocompromised people. So in short, the risk of a full-blown infection from a vaccine is going to depend on the type of vaccine, and I suspect there's variation within each type as well. There's more info on the various types of vaccines at https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html
DoreenMichele 4y ago
It depends on the vaccine. My recollection: There are two types of polio vaccine, one made from live germs and one made from killed germs. You cannot get polio from the killed polio version. IIRC, polio vaccines are the primary cause of polio today.
btilly 4y ago
This is pretty common, actually. https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-a-live-virus-vaccine-200925 https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-a-live-virus-vaccine-... is a recent article with a partial list of common vaccines that are live. They tend to be more effective than alternative vaccines. And, unless you are immunocompromised, they are very unlikely to make you sick. What makes the polio vaccine more complicated is that it is given orally, multiplies, passes through your body, and comes out in your feces. Which gives it a route by which it can infect people other than the person who received the vaccine. The same does not happen with injected live vaccines. There is an inactivated polio vaccine that is given with a needle. That is used by the USA and most advanced countries. But it is more expensive, is harder to deliver (you need multiple shots on a schedule), and is less effective. It does protect the recipient against becoming paralyzed, but does not stop you from getting a mild stomach infection and passing it on in your feces where you can spread it to others. Therefore only the oral vaccination can halt an active community outbreak. However the fact that the oral vaccine can also START a community outbreak means that we have to be careful where we use it.
trompetenaccoun 4y ago
Depending on how the vaccine works this is normal because the mechanism is infecting you with a low dose or weakened version of the virus, in simple terms. >If a layman said this I would have dismissed them as a conspiracy nut Should make you think about how most of us approach the problem, right? How often are we told a truth and despite not knowing anything about the topic we dismiss it as nonsense? If you're an expert in some niche field you'll know it happens all the time.
pengaru 4y ago
This is more or less why antivaxxers have at least some rational ground to stand on. And this isn't the first time a Polio vaccine has caused the disease [0]: > In April 1955 more than 200,000 children in five Western and > mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the > process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. > Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month > the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be > abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, > manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter > Laboratories, had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 > children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/
- elcritch 4y ago
  Right, I believe the messaging around vaccines exacerbates the issue too. Especially with mrna covid-19 vaccines, the condescending tone used by the CDC and media outlets while implying no safety risks throw people off. If you don't upfront say there's some risk and explain it it gives room for antivaxxer propaganda that builds on those doubts. IMHO, the media campaigns for the mRNA vaccines did the opposite of that. All existing vaccines have risk, however they're at least a factor off 100 safer. I find if you explain this, and why they're still a good choice people respond well. Especially if you give the history of people / scientists working on them. There was a study posted on HN a while back that showed mothers who were given an explanation months before birth had a higher vaccination uptake rate.
  - freehorse 4y ago
    It is the word "vaccine" that somehow triggers scary narratives in these crowds; recently, in denmark a very common antibiotic was found that it contained a bunch of highly antibiotic resistant bacteria, causing disease to a few people, and having unpredictable consequences for a lot more in the future (as it seems that these antibiotic resistant bacteria have colonised them and can potentially trigger disease any point). If this was a vaccine it would have triggered a lot of different narratives than just being in some news.
  - 4y ago
echelon 4y ago
Some vaccines are live attenuated virus. You have to activate the immune system somehow. Sometimes presenting deactivated viruses or parts of viruses - viral capsids or nucleic acids - is not enough. Sometimes you can't find a good adjuvant.
lamontcg 4y ago
You're only going to see this in the case of live attenuated vaccines. They can mutate and become virulent (since they were mutated to attenuate them in the first place). You're not going to see that with mRNA vaccines, you're not going to see that with the adenovirus-vectored vaccines. You're not going to see that with inactivated virus vaccines (like most influenza[*] or CoronaVac or the Sinopharm COVID vaccines). Live attenuated virus vaccines are one of the oldest vaccine methods and have been around since the 19th century. They're created by culturing the virus serially in artificial media and isolating a strain which is less virulent. Very brute force laboratory methods that only require the ability to culture the virus and an animal model of virulence with decent correspondence to human virulence. One thing to remember is that we're dealing with a medical triage situation and its better to cause a very small amount of disease in order to eradicate most of it. People get hung up on the fact that medical science is a human activity that doesn't have perfectly flawless outcomes like in Star Trek, while the natural diseases are orders of magnitude worse. [*] Except the Flumist nasal spray is live attenuated. Still with influenza that isn't likely a big deal. I would be willing to wager a bit that this technique is still being used there because the influenza virus is very good at getting past the nasal mucosa and we don't know how to engineer particles that do that very well (still no nasal COVID vaccine).
freehorse 4y ago
It depends on the vaccine. Some vaccines use a "weakened" form of the pathogen to trigger immunity response without causing actual disease, but sometimes, especially in cases of weaker immune systems, this can cause actual disease. This is not the case with most modern vaccines as they use different methods (and certainly not of covid19 vaccines), and certainly not what antivaxxers usually talk about (if anything, covid19-antivaxxers for example were proponents of getting _real_ infection instead of vaccine).
- Izkata 4y ago
  > Some vaccines use a "weakened" form of the pathogen to trigger immunity response without causing actual disease For anyone who wants to look up more, the word "attenuated" is used to describe this. > This is not the case with most modern vaccines It's actually really common, just not with flu shots: https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html
icemelt8 4y ago
I am from Pakistan, one of the last remaining countries where Polio is not eradicated, all cases of Polio in Pakistan are from vaccines.

teektalker 4y ago

[flagged]

teektalker 4y ago
[flagged]
- gus_massa 4y ago
  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/02/14/fact-check-false-claim-thailand-banning-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine/11237189002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/02/14/fac...
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  What's your source for that? She did supposedly fall ill and go into a coma from heart arrhythmia, caused by a form of bacterial pneumonia. Which admittedly sounds suspicious. But I don't see anything linking this directly to a vaccine.

aw1621107 4y ago

I don't think it's easy to summarize in a useful manner because it basically comes down to how a specific vaccine works. For example, subunit vaccines like the whooping cough vaccine use a portion/fragment of the infectious agent, which means it is literally impossible for such a vaccine to cause the illness it is supposed to work on since there is none of that agent in the vaccine in the first place. Attenuated vaccines, such as some polio vaccines and the MMR vaccine, include a weakened version of the infectious agent. These types of vaccines can result in a full-blown infection, especially in immunocompromised people. So in short, the risk of a full-blown infection from a vaccine is going to depend on the type of vaccine, and I suspect there's variation within each type as well. There's more info on the various types of vaccines at https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html

DoreenMichele 4y ago

It depends on the vaccine. My recollection: There are two types of polio vaccine, one made from live germs and one made from killed germs. You cannot get polio from the killed polio version. IIRC, polio vaccines are the primary cause of polio today.

btilly 4y ago

This is pretty common, actually. https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-a-live-virus-vaccine-200925 https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-a-live-virus-vaccine-... is a recent article with a partial list of common vaccines that are live. They tend to be more effective than alternative vaccines. And, unless you are immunocompromised, they are very unlikely to make you sick. What makes the polio vaccine more complicated is that it is given orally, multiplies, passes through your body, and comes out in your feces. Which gives it a route by which it can infect people other than the person who received the vaccine. The same does not happen with injected live vaccines. There is an inactivated polio vaccine that is given with a needle. That is used by the USA and most advanced countries. But it is more expensive, is harder to deliver (you need multiple shots on a schedule), and is less effective. It does protect the recipient against becoming paralyzed, but does not stop you from getting a mild stomach infection and passing it on in your feces where you can spread it to others. Therefore only the oral vaccination can halt an active community outbreak. However the fact that the oral vaccine can also START a community outbreak means that we have to be careful where we use it.

trompetenaccoun 4y ago

Depending on how the vaccine works this is normal because the mechanism is infecting you with a low dose or weakened version of the virus, in simple terms. >If a layman said this I would have dismissed them as a conspiracy nut Should make you think about how most of us approach the problem, right? How often are we told a truth and despite not knowing anything about the topic we dismiss it as nonsense? If you're an expert in some niche field you'll know it happens all the time.

pengaru 4y ago

This is more or less why antivaxxers have at least some rational ground to stand on. And this isn't the first time a Polio vaccine has caused the disease [0]: > In April 1955 more than 200,000 children in five Western and > mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the > process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. > Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month > the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be > abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, > manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter > Laboratories, had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 > children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/

elcritch 4y ago
Right, I believe the messaging around vaccines exacerbates the issue too. Especially with mrna covid-19 vaccines, the condescending tone used by the CDC and media outlets while implying no safety risks throw people off. If you don't upfront say there's some risk and explain it it gives room for antivaxxer propaganda that builds on those doubts. IMHO, the media campaigns for the mRNA vaccines did the opposite of that. All existing vaccines have risk, however they're at least a factor off 100 safer. I find if you explain this, and why they're still a good choice people respond well. Especially if you give the history of people / scientists working on them. There was a study posted on HN a while back that showed mothers who were given an explanation months before birth had a higher vaccination uptake rate.
- freehorse 4y ago
  It is the word "vaccine" that somehow triggers scary narratives in these crowds; recently, in denmark a very common antibiotic was found that it contained a bunch of highly antibiotic resistant bacteria, causing disease to a few people, and having unpredictable consequences for a lot more in the future (as it seems that these antibiotic resistant bacteria have colonised them and can potentially trigger disease any point). If this was a vaccine it would have triggered a lot of different narratives than just being in some news.
- 4y ago

echelon 4y ago

Some vaccines are live attenuated virus. You have to activate the immune system somehow. Sometimes presenting deactivated viruses or parts of viruses - viral capsids or nucleic acids - is not enough. Sometimes you can't find a good adjuvant.

lamontcg 4y ago

You're only going to see this in the case of live attenuated vaccines. They can mutate and become virulent (since they were mutated to attenuate them in the first place). You're not going to see that with mRNA vaccines, you're not going to see that with the adenovirus-vectored vaccines. You're not going to see that with inactivated virus vaccines (like most influenza[*] or CoronaVac or the Sinopharm COVID vaccines). Live attenuated virus vaccines are one of the oldest vaccine methods and have been around since the 19th century. They're created by culturing the virus serially in artificial media and isolating a strain which is less virulent. Very brute force laboratory methods that only require the ability to culture the virus and an animal model of virulence with decent correspondence to human virulence. One thing to remember is that we're dealing with a medical triage situation and its better to cause a very small amount of disease in order to eradicate most of it. People get hung up on the fact that medical science is a human activity that doesn't have perfectly flawless outcomes like in Star Trek, while the natural diseases are orders of magnitude worse. [*] Except the Flumist nasal spray is live attenuated. Still with influenza that isn't likely a big deal. I would be willing to wager a bit that this technique is still being used there because the influenza virus is very good at getting past the nasal mucosa and we don't know how to engineer particles that do that very well (still no nasal COVID vaccine).

freehorse 4y ago

It depends on the vaccine. Some vaccines use a "weakened" form of the pathogen to trigger immunity response without causing actual disease, but sometimes, especially in cases of weaker immune systems, this can cause actual disease. This is not the case with most modern vaccines as they use different methods (and certainly not of covid19 vaccines), and certainly not what antivaxxers usually talk about (if anything, covid19-antivaxxers for example were proponents of getting _real_ infection instead of vaccine).

Izkata 4y ago
> Some vaccines use a "weakened" form of the pathogen to trigger immunity response without causing actual disease For anyone who wants to look up more, the word "attenuated" is used to describe this. > This is not the case with most modern vaccines It's actually really common, just not with flu shots: https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html

icemelt8 4y ago

I am from Pakistan, one of the last remaining countries where Polio is not eradicated, all cases of Polio in Pakistan are from vaccines.