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0 pointsMarkoff4y ago0 comments

This approval doesn't change a thing, about no known long term effects of viral vector vaccines (first time approved by any medical agency in world in November 2019) and mRNA vaccines (first time approved by any medical agency in world in December 2020).

Sorry for not wanting to inject myself with unproven technology with unknown long term effects. Why politicians and certain pharma companies keep pushing these vaccines instead offering conventional inactivated virus vaccines? Heck maybe I'd go even for protein based one (Novavax).

As healthy non-obese non-smoking relatively young person I'm not afraid of COVID, but I'd be willing to take safe vaccine with technology proven by decades of track record to make some people happy (though ideally everyone should have same rights vaxxed or unvaxxed and this should be entirely voluntary same as influenza, hepatitis and other vaccines nobody requires when you travel to neighboring country or visit restaurant).

For instance these are currently my options in EU, if I want conventional vaccine against COVID approved by EMA or any COVID vaccine using any technology approved more than 2 years ago:

EDIT: I wonder if all those people defending these new technoloy vaccines also use all their software running Alpha/Beta versions and don't wait for Stable version. But it seems when it comes to one's own health it's less important than software for most.

0 comments

renaudg4y ago

The mistake you're making is "omission bias" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_bias)

You're refusing the "beta" (installed by billions of users) version of something that can save your life because you (mistakenly) believe the choice is between that, and staying as you were before.

It's not. That's no longer true with the Delta variant. Now it's really a choice between "carefully designed, just officially declared stable" vaccine with billions of users vs getting the "totally unstable, totally doesn't care about your health, completely unknown long term effects" SARS-CoV-2 virus forcefully installed on you.

You will get antibodies one way or another, and there is orders of magnitude more risk and uncertainty associated with getting them through infection rather than controlled vaccination.

Furthermore, there has never been in history any vaccine side effect that occurred later than a few weeks after administration at most.

There is just no theoretical basis for why anything wrong would happen here.

Are you demanding 100% certainty ? Sure, you won't get it here but you also didn't get it with anything else you ever did in medicine and you can live with that.

With Delta, ICUs (and even more so long covid clinics) are full of unvaccinated "healthy non obese non smoking relatively young" guys like you.

If you're not afraid of Covid, rationally you should be even less afraid of getting a vaccine.

To put things in perspective, here are the odds in young males for the most talked about vaccine side effect (myocarditis, which usually resolves in a few days), vs the odds of getting severe Covid at your age :

https://imgur.com/a/uW52E51

wait_a_minute4y ago

> There is just no theoretical basis for why anything wrong would happen here.

Do you have a source for this? I’d like to read more about it. Also, what about people who have antibodies from prior infection with covid?

renaudg4y ago

This is the expert consensus based on everything they know about how immunity and mRNA works.

It's kind of hard to give you one single source, simply because it's hard to demonstrate the absence of something. What usually happens instead is that somebody with specific concerns raises them and explains the plausible mechanism they see as problematic, then it's either debunked immediately as BS or if the theory has legs, it's supported by other scientists and put the test.

None of that has happened with mRNA vaccines. This is a great read about the Pfizer one : https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

I mean, you can't technically rule out somebody coming up with a revolutionary theory that changes our understanding of immunity like Einstein did for physics, but there is no sign of that, no theoretical basis for trouble, and the vaccine is saving lives in the meantime

>Also, what about people who have antibodies from prior infection with covid?

Research is moving fast on this, but AFAIK the consensus is that prior symptomatic infection gives longer lasting but also less broad (against different variants) immunity compared to an mRNA vaccine.

The best protection seems to be in people with prior infection + 1 shot of mRNA vaccine (of course, that does not imply one should try to get infected then vaccinated, because the risk of damage from that first infection vastly outweighs the benefit of a slightly better immunity if you pulled through unscathed, then got vaccinated)

ch4s34y ago

To be fair, we've been shooting mRNA into people for medical research since about 1992. Early attempts were for gene therapy, but the approach has been abandoned because the mRNA breaks down so quickly. Beyond that, the mRNA is telling your cell to produce structural proteins. We've been using structural proteins in vaccines for AGES. Random bits of structural proteins are circulation around your body, being broken down, recycled, and eliminated as waste all of the time. There's no reason to believe that this structural protein is dangerous by itself.

I can't figure out what these vaccines do that could even have long term effects beyond getting your immune system to recognize the protein.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsMarkoff4y ago0 comments

For instance these are currently my options in EU, if I want conventional vaccine against COVID approved by EMA or any COVID vaccine using any technology approved more than 2 years ago:

0 comments

renaudg4y ago

The mistake you're making is "omission bias" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_bias)

You're refusing the "beta" (installed by billions of users) version of something that can save your life because you (mistakenly) believe the choice is between that, and staying as you were before.

You will get antibodies one way or another, and there is orders of magnitude more risk and uncertainty associated with getting them through infection rather than controlled vaccination.

Furthermore, there has never been in history any vaccine side effect that occurred later than a few weeks after administration at most.

There is just no theoretical basis for why anything wrong would happen here.

Are you demanding 100% certainty ? Sure, you won't get it here but you also didn't get it with anything else you ever did in medicine and you can live with that.

With Delta, ICUs (and even more so long covid clinics) are full of unvaccinated "healthy non obese non smoking relatively young" guys like you.

If you're not afraid of Covid, rationally you should be even less afraid of getting a vaccine.

https://imgur.com/a/uW52E51

wait_a_minute4y ago

> There is just no theoretical basis for why anything wrong would happen here.

Do you have a source for this? I’d like to read more about it. Also, what about people who have antibodies from prior infection with covid?

renaudg4y ago

This is the expert consensus based on everything they know about how immunity and mRNA works.

None of that has happened with mRNA vaccines. This is a great read about the Pfizer one : https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

>Also, what about people who have antibodies from prior infection with covid?

ch4s34y ago

I can't figure out what these vaccines do that could even have long term effects beyond getting your immune system to recognize the protein.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse