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It's interesting to me how COVID vaccine skepticism has persisted so long despite the evidence the vaccine was safe and effective. All the nightmare scenarios

by jf22 2y ago

It's interesting to me how COVID vaccine skepticism has persisted so long despite the evidence the vaccine was safe and effective. All the nightmare scenarios and long-term side effects people speculated about never happened and more and more doses of the vaccine have been taken safely.

dev18019 2y ago
[flagged]
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  [flagged]
- autoexec 2y ago
  Most people are fully aware that any vaccine can, in rare cases, cause all kinds of problems. I haven't seen many instances of people acting like that isn't the case. The internet is a big place, and I don't doubt that you've felt silenced, but from what I've seen people are largely sympathetic to those who have experienced problems with the vaccines and are often quick to point out the fact that some percentage of the population not being able to take vaccines is exactly why it's so important that those who can take them get them. The folks I have seen shut down tend to be the ones who say that the vaccine did things like turning them "magnetic" or say that everyone should avoid the vaccine because the risks of the vaccine outweigh the risks of the disease. I guess I'm glad I'm not hanging out in places where people will attack or silence someone for trying to protect themself and others and being unlucky enough to have a bad reaction from it.
brandonmenc 2y ago
A close family member has permanent heart failure caused by the first Covid booster. They now go to the top heart hospital in the world. The doctors there say that while nothing can be proven for certain - obviously - the timing of their booster and the onset of their heart symptoms and the fact that there was no indication they had Covid at the time all point to the high probability it was the vaccine. And they’ve seen this in other patients. The scary thing is that this person had symptoms of heart failure for months before going to the ER and if they hadn’t, would have probably just died in their sleep long after getting the shot and it would have been a mystery, chalked up to bad luck and age. Ironically, their current status with heart failure puts them in a high risk group and the recommendation is that they keep getting Covid boosters. The logic here is that the chances of getting another bad reaction from the vaccine is overruled by the chances they’d die from severe Covid. It’s not as cut and dry as people on either side of this debate want to make it.
- wat10000 2y ago
  Doctors are as susceptible as anyone to all the cognitive biases that result in post hoc ergo propter hoc. I wouldn’t assume they’re correct about the cause just because of the timing and the fact that they’re doctors.
  - brandonmenc 2y ago
    Sure. Anything is possible. But this is a case of a person with no positive Covid tests or symptoms suddenly developing heart failure mere days after getting the booster. There is this absurd idea that unlike every other vaccine, the Covid vaccines have absolutely no harmful side effects for anyone, ever.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      Well no, the idea is just that, like most vaccines, the bad side effects are very uncommon. The other side is saying that there’s this silent epidemic of terrible side effects hitting a ton of people, but it’s all anecdotal. You say “anything is possible” like having heart failure due to other causes is some absurdly rare thing. It happens. The odds of this happening by coincidence are not that low. If there are a ton of people getting heart failure from Covid vaccines, it should show up in the data. Has it?
      - brandonmenc 2y ago
        Side effects can be uncommon while also passing our prior extremely low thresholds for acceptable vaccine safety. That might change the recommendation about who should get it or how often. Cardiovascular deaths have increased since Covid. Makes sense, because Covid causes heart damage. The vaccine also produces the thing that causes the heart damage - the spike protein - so there's at least a mechanism at play for the vaccine to cause similar looking damage. And while mRNA vaccines have been tested for decades, the Covid vaccine was only "tested" during the pandemic because we created it on the spot. At this point over 70% of the US population has had both Covid and the vaccine. So if someone drops dead from viral heart disease, there's no way to know if it was from one or the other. We don't have pre-pandemic trials of this vaccine to compare to. > You say “anything is possible” like having heart failure due to other causes is some absurdly rare thing. Viral heart damage is rare. Additionally, in my personal case, the symptoms of heart damage were present for nearly two months before a diagnosis. Early concerns about the vaccine were dismissed by pointing out that side effects from vaccines present very soon - hours, days - after administering. But it's entirely possible to get viral heart damage, not notice it, and chug along for quite a while before it kills you, if it ever does. All I'm saying is that there seems to be a clear mechanism for the vaccine to cause heart damage, and that I'm not convinced that we can even really know the true rate of damage caused by the vaccine because most people have both been infected with Covid and received the vaccine. I'm not making any claims about the magnitude, but I don't think it's anything crazy like I dunno, that half of everyone gets heart damage from the shot. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's just high enough that it changes the calculus for people who aren't in a high risk group. I want to be clear that I think mRNA vaccines are revolutionary and a good thing. But it also seems like there's more room for catastrophic error because you're no longer just injecting a static dose of dead material. I'm sure we'll also see multiple versions of future vaccines tailored to genetic variations in the population, things like that. For example, maybe some people produce way more spike protein than others from the shot? Maybe that's a small group so it doesn't present in routine testing? It just seems like we're in the early stages of being able to administer these things as safely as we're used to. Maybe we got lucky with this one. Who knows. (Some of my questions might have answers and I'm just not aware of them.)
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
> safe and effective Do you have any long studies you can point to? Let’s go very short. 5 years or more? The “The Science” crowd is so perplexing. You can’t believe in the upside in just faith. That’s exactly what you’re pretending not to do.
- Matticus_Rex 2y ago
  "Do you have 5 years or more of evidence about this thing that has existed for less than that time?" Obviously this is not a good faith question. And yes, we may find out that the vaccines are, over a long period of time, not perfectly safe. But we do have enough data to know they aren't super risky (at least for the vast majority), because big effects would be easy to see, and we do know that COVID is very risky. Classic economic thinking question: "compared to what?"
  - ifyoubuildit 2y ago
    Do you need big negative effects to outweigh the pros of another booster? If you take an under 40 healthy person who already had covid, the vaccine did basically nothing for them after a few months. It doesnt take a "big effect" to counter that, right?
    - Matticus_Rex 2y ago
      Depends on a bunch of factors, e.g. which booster, which variant, the person, and the relationship between dependent and independent variables in different risks from both COVID and the vaccine, but for the peak of the pandemic, the answer is no -- the risk of catching COVID was so large and our treatment wasn't honed in that you'd have to assume a pretty high rate of serious unknown long-term issues for it to come out net negative in most cases. Once we got past the peak and with particular variants where the boosters were less effective, that changed (and that was also when you found out that some people's belief in the vaccine was ultimately religious in nature). There weren't a lot of people trying to model that risk, but of the ones who were the vaccine looked pretty compelling as a better bet for the whole of the peak pandemic. And maybe it turns out that 15 years out from the vaccine everyone suddenly dies! But the expected value there is highly unlikely.
wat10000 2y ago
Regular vaccine skepticism has persisted for far longer, even after one of the cornerstones was exposed as outright fraud. We’ve got a “vaccines cause autism” nut in the Capitol right now about to be put in charge of the government’s health services. Covid vaccine hesitancy is nothing by comparison.

by jf22 2y ago

dev18019 2y ago

[flagged]

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
[flagged]
autoexec 2y ago
Most people are fully aware that any vaccine can, in rare cases, cause all kinds of problems. I haven't seen many instances of people acting like that isn't the case. The internet is a big place, and I don't doubt that you've felt silenced, but from what I've seen people are largely sympathetic to those who have experienced problems with the vaccines and are often quick to point out the fact that some percentage of the population not being able to take vaccines is exactly why it's so important that those who can take them get them. The folks I have seen shut down tend to be the ones who say that the vaccine did things like turning them "magnetic" or say that everyone should avoid the vaccine because the risks of the vaccine outweigh the risks of the disease. I guess I'm glad I'm not hanging out in places where people will attack or silence someone for trying to protect themself and others and being unlucky enough to have a bad reaction from it.

brandonmenc 2y ago

A close family member has permanent heart failure caused by the first Covid booster. They now go to the top heart hospital in the world. The doctors there say that while nothing can be proven for certain - obviously - the timing of their booster and the onset of their heart symptoms and the fact that there was no indication they had Covid at the time all point to the high probability it was the vaccine. And they’ve seen this in other patients. The scary thing is that this person had symptoms of heart failure for months before going to the ER and if they hadn’t, would have probably just died in their sleep long after getting the shot and it would have been a mystery, chalked up to bad luck and age. Ironically, their current status with heart failure puts them in a high risk group and the recommendation is that they keep getting Covid boosters. The logic here is that the chances of getting another bad reaction from the vaccine is overruled by the chances they’d die from severe Covid. It’s not as cut and dry as people on either side of this debate want to make it.

wat10000 2y ago
Doctors are as susceptible as anyone to all the cognitive biases that result in post hoc ergo propter hoc. I wouldn’t assume they’re correct about the cause just because of the timing and the fact that they’re doctors.
- brandonmenc 2y ago
  Sure. Anything is possible. But this is a case of a person with no positive Covid tests or symptoms suddenly developing heart failure mere days after getting the booster. There is this absurd idea that unlike every other vaccine, the Covid vaccines have absolutely no harmful side effects for anyone, ever.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    Well no, the idea is just that, like most vaccines, the bad side effects are very uncommon. The other side is saying that there’s this silent epidemic of terrible side effects hitting a ton of people, but it’s all anecdotal. You say “anything is possible” like having heart failure due to other causes is some absurdly rare thing. It happens. The odds of this happening by coincidence are not that low. If there are a ton of people getting heart failure from Covid vaccines, it should show up in the data. Has it?
    - brandonmenc 2y ago
      Side effects can be uncommon while also passing our prior extremely low thresholds for acceptable vaccine safety. That might change the recommendation about who should get it or how often. Cardiovascular deaths have increased since Covid. Makes sense, because Covid causes heart damage. The vaccine also produces the thing that causes the heart damage - the spike protein - so there's at least a mechanism at play for the vaccine to cause similar looking damage. And while mRNA vaccines have been tested for decades, the Covid vaccine was only "tested" during the pandemic because we created it on the spot. At this point over 70% of the US population has had both Covid and the vaccine. So if someone drops dead from viral heart disease, there's no way to know if it was from one or the other. We don't have pre-pandemic trials of this vaccine to compare to. > You say “anything is possible” like having heart failure due to other causes is some absurdly rare thing. Viral heart damage is rare. Additionally, in my personal case, the symptoms of heart damage were present for nearly two months before a diagnosis. Early concerns about the vaccine were dismissed by pointing out that side effects from vaccines present very soon - hours, days - after administering. But it's entirely possible to get viral heart damage, not notice it, and chug along for quite a while before it kills you, if it ever does. All I'm saying is that there seems to be a clear mechanism for the vaccine to cause heart damage, and that I'm not convinced that we can even really know the true rate of damage caused by the vaccine because most people have both been infected with Covid and received the vaccine. I'm not making any claims about the magnitude, but I don't think it's anything crazy like I dunno, that half of everyone gets heart damage from the shot. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's just high enough that it changes the calculus for people who aren't in a high risk group. I want to be clear that I think mRNA vaccines are revolutionary and a good thing. But it also seems like there's more room for catastrophic error because you're no longer just injecting a static dose of dead material. I'm sure we'll also see multiple versions of future vaccines tailored to genetic variations in the population, things like that. For example, maybe some people produce way more spike protein than others from the shot? Maybe that's a small group so it doesn't present in routine testing? It just seems like we're in the early stages of being able to administer these things as safely as we're used to. Maybe we got lucky with this one. Who knows. (Some of my questions might have answers and I'm just not aware of them.)

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago

> safe and effective Do you have any long studies you can point to? Let’s go very short. 5 years or more? The “The Science” crowd is so perplexing. You can’t believe in the upside in just faith. That’s exactly what you’re pretending not to do.

Matticus_Rex 2y ago
"Do you have 5 years or more of evidence about this thing that has existed for less than that time?" Obviously this is not a good faith question. And yes, we may find out that the vaccines are, over a long period of time, not perfectly safe. But we do have enough data to know they aren't super risky (at least for the vast majority), because big effects would be easy to see, and we do know that COVID is very risky. Classic economic thinking question: "compared to what?"
- ifyoubuildit 2y ago
  Do you need big negative effects to outweigh the pros of another booster? If you take an under 40 healthy person who already had covid, the vaccine did basically nothing for them after a few months. It doesnt take a "big effect" to counter that, right?
  - Matticus_Rex 2y ago
    Depends on a bunch of factors, e.g. which booster, which variant, the person, and the relationship between dependent and independent variables in different risks from both COVID and the vaccine, but for the peak of the pandemic, the answer is no -- the risk of catching COVID was so large and our treatment wasn't honed in that you'd have to assume a pretty high rate of serious unknown long-term issues for it to come out net negative in most cases. Once we got past the peak and with particular variants where the boosters were less effective, that changed (and that was also when you found out that some people's belief in the vaccine was ultimately religious in nature). There weren't a lot of people trying to model that risk, but of the ones who were the vaccine looked pretty compelling as a better bet for the whole of the peak pandemic. And maybe it turns out that 15 years out from the vaccine everyone suddenly dies! But the expected value there is highly unlikely.

wat10000 2y ago

Regular vaccine skepticism has persisted for far longer, even after one of the cornerstones was exposed as outright fraud. We’ve got a “vaccines cause autism” nut in the Capitol right now about to be put in charge of the government’s health services. Covid vaccine hesitancy is nothing by comparison.