Serious question in good faith: what was the deal with the “calamari” (clots?) the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?
> Now an international team, led by Flinders University, have found that in a small number of people, the immune system can accidentally confuse a normal adenovirus protein with a human blood protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4).
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.
I am quite curious too. I had heard that, despite arm vascular being very consistent among individuals, it does still vary. And I think for most vaccines I guess it doesn't matter if you hit something other than muscle. Maybe for the mRNA vaccines it does matter? I'm baselessly speculating though. Wish other person hadn't been so vague.
In an intramuscular injection this is always tested by the nurse and this complication is far rarer than a nerve injury by the syringe. But in billions of cases anything can happen.
> the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?
"The deal" is the clot issue was a problem for Astrazeneca. Astrazeneca is not an mRNA vaccine. It came out first, and was offered to a lot of people - until the clots started showing up.
Australia's response (where I live) was to withdraw the Astrazeneca vaccine and go into lockdown instead. They exited lockdown once a safe replacement vaccine was manufactured and could be mass administered, which happened many months later. The safe replacements were predominantly mRNA vaccines.
From memory the final statistics were Astrazeneca, which was only available for a month or two killed 1 in every 1 million doses, the mRNA replacements which now have been used for years have caused about 1 death for every 55 million doses. You wouldn't want to be the unlucky 1 in 55 million, but you would not want to miss out on taking the mRNA vaccines either - they saved 1000's of lives.
In the high risk groups, Astrazeneca turned out to be worth its risks in over-60s in Australia, but killed more people than it saved in the lower risk groups. But Australia was among the best countries to manage the COVID pandemic. In countries like Mexico where the death rates from COVID were far higher, taking Astrazeneca increased your chances of surviving the pandemic, despite the higher complication rate.
The meme that mRNA causes clots seems to be remarkably common, despite being wrong. It is why to this day many people are vaccine hesitant. It's unfortunate. I think the underlying cause of the large number of people with clots was the mass roll out of Astrazeneca as soon as it passed testing. Normally the take up of a new medicine is gradual. The high prices of the early batches mean they are only given to people who stand to benefit most. The less common side effects are caught in that phase. The phase didn't happen for Astrazeneca.
IIRC the vaccines were provably linked to the death of young people who had blood clots they shouldn't have had.
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
Society is the trolley problem. The balancing act between individual and collective rights is the lever being thrown every time we pass a law or make a regulation.
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
Do you apply that same standard to other things, like cars? Do you feel allowing people to drive is also society "killing for the common good"?
After more than eight billion doses of the vaccine, about twenty deaths were causally linked to the vaccine. Five times as many people die every day from traffic in the US alone, many of them children.
What about gun ownership? How many people does that "kill for the common good"?
And by that measure, isn't not vaccinating people an even bigger atrocity? Aren't you also arguing to kill people "for the common good" by not mandating vaccination?
First up, for clarity, I have no issues with COVID vaccines and how they were used in Australia - the very few cases of myocarditis were mild and resulted in no deaths.
Second up, I'm confused by your use of "mandate" and how your government mandates you to remain in that country.
> by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
Not by my logic, nor that of Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey , Alonzo Church or others.
> I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
> how your government mandates you to remain in that country
I never said that. I said that government inaction is also a mandate; look at the context for my comment.
If you're arguing that leaving the country makes government action (or inaction) acceptable, then by your own logic, all government action (or inaction) is acceptable, which supports my point: vaccine mandates are fine, because by your own logic, if you disagree with them, you can leave the country.
> You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
You're missing the point I'm making, which is that not driving a car does not mean I won't get run over by other people, which is the actual point I brought up.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why you're responding to me, since you don't seem to be arguing against anything I actually said?
If you do something to a person and they die after, you killed them.
If you can’t admit you’re killing people you absolutely lack the ethics to compel actions for others, as in your case here.
COVID vaccines and their mandates absolutely did kill people — and you can believe that is justified, but if you cannot admit the fact, it’s a clear indication you’re not behaving ethically.
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
Perhaps "vaccine skeptics" say this because the Covid vaccines are not covered under VICP. They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
"Tyranny of the minority" doesn't remotely apply here. No one has the authority to sacrifice one group of citizens to save another group of citizens.
> They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
This is trying to play both sides. Appeal to emotion without having a rational thought process. Something bad happening is unfortunate and life changing. Then turning around and saying hundred grand isn’t life changing money for people.
What exactly is your remedy here - should people be not asked to provide proof for the harm and paid 10s of millions for every case? People have been asked proof for lesser things and paid even lesser for much bigger harm.
> My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing. At least I wouldn’t expect to see on HN but here we are.
It's so sad to see that you are the first one with any kind of source in your comment. The rest are only saying scary stuff and you are supposed to argue with that. They are saying stuff like "my friend died because of the jab" and you come with studies links, which can sound unfriendly. And we are on HN, for fuck's sake.
The articles are fantastic, it's the unscientific claim that the data implies safety that's at issue. You can't post research about the fact that people misinterpret research right? But it's factually true. Most of the people on HN are not trained in doing or reviewing research. And not just on HN. Everyone can purchase an ad that claims to be the arbiter. Everyone can say they represent the consensus.
But the people with more money can buy more ads just like Google can stomp out any competitor, because they control the data channel.
It's a logical problem. Should we start requiring a license to hold an opinion about research? Who would we trust to govern that licensing process?
It's not really so simple as finding a source to back your claim. You need to be able to defend your interpretation of that source.
Bottom line "safety" is subjective. That's the critical argument. Compared to what is it safe?
Vaccine with a guarantee of infection, maybe the vaccine is safer.
Vaccinating everyone? Well, we didn't really study that. How do you study people in larger numbers with a guarantee that they don't get infected?
They didn't. They just assume everyone is infected and that number makes the research look valid and safe.
In fact, it's not.
The average person is more likely to have negative outcomes from vaccine than natural infection combined with non-infection.
So is it safe for someone who won't be infected at all? What about for someone that won't exhibit symptoms?
No. It's far less safe for those people.
300x-30,000x less safe. Depends on your estimation of asymptomatic and uninfected subjects in the real world.
It's more safe for someone in their 70s, with cancer, or whatever. Fine. But say that clearly. Don't try to bury that in summaries that obfuscate what you really studied.
Doing so destroys trust in science.
Not advocating for or against this vaccine platform, though. I'm advocating for laws about what meets and doesn't meet scientific rigor, as are most scientists right now.
In [1] "those who are not vaccinated" is a tiny subset of society that is actually composed of those who are infected, and also symptomatic, and also not vaccinated.
A large portion of society can't be counted because they are asymptomatic. How do you find them to count them? In fact that's nearly everyone. And for those people the vaccine increases their risk by 4/100,000. (More harm than good.)
If we accept your (extremely unrealistic) premise, then sure, but the numbers get worse at just a 5% chance of contracting the virus itself, and downhill from there.
Your premise is that COVID infection at just 5% is incredibly dangerous. But you can't actually say that without first knowing how many people were actually infected and asymptomatic. And you don't know that.
For all we know, everyone was infected, and infection is nearly harmless. Or it could be that it's way less contagious than that, and extremely deadly. You simply don't know. You'd need to make wild guesses without evidence.
We're supposed to be doing science, right? Seems to me your premise is the one that's unrealistic. Mine is firmly grounded in evidence that we DO have. Not guesses and doomsday religion.
70/100k is baseline. 5/100k is vaccination. 200/100k is unvaccinated with covid.
With vaccination you're at 75/100k.
Without vaccination at 0% chance of covid you're at 70/100k.
Without vaccination at 5% chance you're at 77/100k (worse than 75 here), at 10% 83, etc, etc.
> We're supposed to be doing science, right? Seems to me your premise is the one that's unrealistic. Mine is firmly grounded in evidence that we DO have. Not guesses and doomsday religion.
There are plenty of studies linked in this thread, that you're simply ignoring.
See section 2.4. The "unvaccinated" group includes people with a history of myocarditis and pericarditis who had an episode during the study, and coupled with the fact that cases "without an episode" were excluded, we should expect that the numbers are very much inflated.
There indeed are plenty of studies linked. I'm not ignoring them, I'm using them to point out that they don't carry the implications necessary to recommend vaccination for everyone.
To make the claim that the vaccine LOWERED incidence of myocarditis even for those without covid, counter to so much other research (e.g. [0]), we would like to see that the study excludes people with a history of myocarditis.
Including them is cheating, quite simply.
Regardless, even if we did go with this Spanish study, you still can't say that a 5% chance of infection is worse. You can say that a 5% of symptomatic infection is worse. There isn't any study in the thread that includes asymptomatic infection, which we know is MOST infection.
So at least so far, I don't see that you have the math to back what appears to be an unscientific claim.
And when faced with the counter research below [0], defining the mechanism of action, we should assume that the risks are a valid concern. You can't just sweep them under the rug.
Most people who tested positive had no symptoms. Most people who didn't get tested also had no symptoms but were likely infected. All of those people shouldn't take on additional risk in their own self interest. At best you can claim that they should take on the risk to try to achieve herd immunity so as to protect others. And actually I'm not sure that we have the data to determine that either.
In retrospective cohort studies, researchers track newly occurring incidents during the study window.
If someone has a history, but suffers a new episode from covid, that is a medical event that should be counted.
> Regardless, even if we did go with this Spanish study, you still can't say that a 5% chance of infection is worse. You can say that a 5% of symptomatic infection is worse.
Yes you can. The mechanism for the side effect (as per your own source) is the same in both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases. Recipients of the vaccine do not get respiratory symptoms, and yet can contract the (very rare) side effects.
And as for your source, the author, Dr. Joseph Wu:
> “But COVID’s worse,” he added. A case of COVID-19 is about 10 times as likely to induce myocarditis as an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination, Wu said. That’s in addition to all the other trouble it causes.
5% of symptomatic COVID cases. So now you have to compare that to only people with injuries from the vaccine.
Otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges.
If you want to compare people who got the vaccine to people who didn't, then you need to include ALL people who didn't. Not just the ones who were symptomatic.
And no, you can't include those people who had previous symptoms in the "everyone" group. Obviously those people are way more likely to return for treatment than the average Joe. They are skewing the sample because they are immediately nearly 100% likely to return for treatment. That is not representative of a random sample of people in the general population.
The question was about the general population, and they didn't sample the general population. They sampled people who come to the hospital. That is, only people with symptoms of some sort or another that are bad enough to warrant a journey to get treatment.
So all you can conclude is that people who come to the hospital have a higher frequency of heart conditions. And even that claim is not firmly established by the data, it's just a sensible inference. We expect that people who need treatment are more likely to seek treatment than those that don't need it. But there are countless counter examples there too. Hypochondria, etc.
No doubt if we had the data we'd find more problems there.
Wu's statement is fine, because again, it's not ALL people with COVID. His statement holds for people seeking treatment with COVID which is what they sampled.
Wu has no clue how many people have COVID asymptomatically and how to separate them from people without COVID altogether, and makes no claim about that.
You're simply making a claim that isn't in the research. Vaccination for people without COVID or with asymptomatic COVID is not researched or compared here.
This research, if you want to use it for a comparison, is for vaccination of people already coming to a hospital with symptoms of some kind.
EDIT: forgot to mention this was during a pandemic, so you might see significantly lower numbers for heart conditions if the study was repeated today. And it might be the case that during the pandemic it would have been a good idea to vaccinate everyone coming to a hospital from a statistical standpoint. But an even better take would be to identify what was common amongst the group with bad outcomes and vaccinate them, more specifically.
Regardless, nothing here implies better outcomes for everyone. It's not claimed by and it's not inferable from the research. And certainly not when there is a bunch of research showing contrary results to this study an example of which I linked earlier.
Respectfully, I think you've mistaken the definition of the word cohort . A cohort specifically does not include everyone. Please check the definition of cohort and then read section 2.4.
They tested people treated at a small collection of hospitals (the cohort).
And, you have made several other mistakes aside from that.
The 2020 studies are all retracted. They were over-spinning the centrifuges, I think by a factor of 10 or 100 maybe? They got insanely high positive numbers and the guidance was all updated to correct for that. You can ask an LLM to help you find the CDC publications on that. Don't use those numbers.
Additionally, even if your interpretation was accurate, it would fly in the face of thousands of other studies, just like the one I posted earlier in the thread.
Make sure your beliefs are based on peer reviewed research, that is not retracted, has been established long enough to withstand challenges from the scientific community, and that you're interpreting it honestly, using the established academic criteria for the scientific method and publication standards. Be careful to check the definition words that you're not familiar with, and even ones that you think you're familiar with. They might have a different meaning when used in a scientific context.
Out of curiosity, are you a journalist, college educated? I'm trying to understand where science has failed here. I would like our institutions to produce adults that can identify sound research and draw logical conclusions. There are some basic methods for doing that. I don't mean any offense by that. I'm just trying to understand what's broken. And more to the point, whether or not you are actually interested in science or you're just trying to prove that the media knows more than the scientists. Or maybe you just can't believe that journalists lie about what scientists say.
Is the media in the business of selling truth for profit, even if it means they won't profit? Do you believe that enough to take drugs that legally restrict you from taking legal action against the manufacturer when you're injured? (See CARES act)
Is your motivation to continue discussion political? Or scientific? If it's scientific, let's stick to the facts and follow the science. Don't try to make the science say what you want. You'll find that doesn't work in the broader forum.
> Respectfully, I think you've mistaken the definition of the word cohort . A cohort specifically does not include everyone. Please check the definition of cohort and then read section 2.4.
> They tested people treated at a small collection of hospitals (the cohort).
In epidemiology, a cohort is simply a defined group of people followed over time. In a population-based cohort study (which this is), the cohort is the entire population of the health district (over 500,000 people).
The study did not just evaluate people treated at the hospital. It used the hospitals EHR to identify the numerator (the heart inflammation cases) out of the denominator (the entire regional population).
> The 2020 studies are all retracted. They were over-spinning the centrifuges, I think by a factor of 10 or 100 maybe? They got insanely high positive numbers and the guidance was all updated to correct for that. You can ask an LLM to help you find the CDC publications on that. Don't use those numbers.
You are confusing PCR testing with serology. The "over-spinning" you are referencing relates to PCR cycle thresholds (Ct values), which are used to detect active viral RNA swabs. Seroprevalence studies—which track historic asymptomatic spread—do not look for active RNA. They test blood serum for antibodies using immunoassays (like ELISA). They do not use PCR amplification, and they are absolutely not "all retracted." They are the standard of how we track the infection rate of a population.
> Is your motivation to continue discussion political? Or scientific? If it's scientific, let's stick to the facts and follow the science. Don't try to make the science say what you want.
This is... literally what I've been doing the entire time.
> a cohort is simply a defined group of people followed over time.
Yes, and the group is defined very clearly here, as is usually the case. I appreciate that you've conceded that it does not include everyone, as we see in your next quote:
> It used the hospitals EHR to identify the numerator (the heart inflammation cases) out of the denominator (the entire regional population).
So it compared something studied in the cohort (the numerator) to something not studied and outside the cohort (the denominator). So now let's establish whether or not the denominator can be used without calling ourselves science deniers.
And as we go, let's consider that a slight adjustment to that denominator has a multiplicative impact on the result! So we really want to get that dialed otherwise our interpretation could lie very, very far from the truth.
Your next quote leads us right to the most convincing point about the denominator.
> You are confusing PCR testing with serology.
I said all methods measuring prevalence in 2020 were wrong. That doesn't imply confusion with PCR. Serology also was wrong.
Just to find something agreeable to cite, here is the CDC stating very clearly that we shouldn't use serology for this kind of decision making. [0] "Negative results do not rule out SARS-CoV-2 infection and should not be used as the sole basis for treatment or patient management decisions, including infection control decisions."
So, assuming you trust the CDC publishes good science, then you know damned well you can't trust that denominator you keep throwing around as fact. At the very least, you're in opposition to CDC guidance if you want to keep using that denominator. You're not a science denier are you?
> This is... literally what I've been doing the entire time.
Well, you may want to read back. The claim that a cohort includes everyone is not remotely in the realm of science. Neither of us can conceive of an experiment that would obtain the denominator to be used in the math above. Not as it is, and definitely not if you defined it as "everyone else." And that's been my point for the last few comments. It's an illogical, fantasy based approach to interpreting the data. You did not test everyone, and you never will for any research ever in the past or future. It's not even fathomably possible.
The denominator, implicitly, makes broad assumptions about cultural, environmental, and economic factors, and that's just the beginning. There are countless other factors that we haven't even thought of yet. So that denominator, can be seen as a wild guess at best, and at worst it's a blatant falsehood if the study was published after whatever research the CDC is relying on to tell us not to use it. And therefore, it must be considered with all of the ambiguity that it implicates, as a wild guess or a blatant falsehood.
I don't like to take things that are wild guesses and stuff them into my math. There's a special word for that, pseudoscience. I have more respect for science than to do that.
So, all things considered, I'll take your word for it that sticking to the science is literally what you've been doing. And you can literally do it better by not using wild guesses to try to make the math say what you want.
If you will use numbers that are based on measured (or even measurable!) data, I'll be more inclined to lend belief to what insight you have that's worth exploring. And I hope you will.
--
Summary: If you have an argument that makes sense, I'll gladly follow it. But you're not there yet.
Your argument is entirely based on a denominator that doesn't remotely meet what modern philosophers of science would refer to as worth believing in. It's a wild guess that the CDC says is inaccurate for weighing this kind of decision.
The denominator is literally the exact number of registered citizens in that district. There are no guesses, "wild" or otherwise.
Spain has a universal healthcare registry. Everyone living in that district has a medical record which can be continually tracked, which is used in this study.
The healthy people at home aren't "outside the cohort". You are arguing against a methodology you don't understand.
The CDC quote you linked tells doctors not to use antibody tests to triage acute patients because antibodies take weeks to form. It has nothing to do with retrospective seroprevalence studies, which the CDC (and WHO, and every major health organization in the world) itself uses to track population spread.
Do you have the prevalence numbers or not? You're not going to convince me that LATER we got better at testing and so you're using those test estimates to plug into this older study. That's not what was discussed in this research, obviously.
That wouldn't be scientific at all, would it?
I think you're trying to make the case that the estimates are good enough, but you haven't done a good job of substantiating that claim. You have provided no evidence other than your personal hearsay that the CDC and WHO agree on something that they never said. Go ahead and link to it if they did. I'll wait.
Separately you keep saying I misunderstand when it's clearly the opposite. Let me break it down for you clearly because, from my perspective, you are just plugging random bullshit into the wrong place in a math problem:
>The denominator is literally the exact number of registered citizens in that district. There are no guesses, "wild" or otherwise.
Right! But that's not what you're claiming. How does this tell us how many people were infected and asymptomatic? You are aware that "registered citizens in the district" is not the same is "infected people with no symptoms" right? So why are you plugging it into a math problem where "infected people with no symptoms" is the expected variable for substantiating your claim?
> Spain has a universal healthcare registry. Everyone living in that district has a medical record which can be continually tracked, which is used in this study.
Great! So tell us how many people were infected with no symptoms in 2020 so that we can make an effort to believe your claim that vaccines are less harmful than infection! It's pretty simple math, you just need the data that you claim to already have but refuse to share!
You are saying that COVID is worse than infection, so tell us when you tested people with no infection so that you can say that! When did you perform that test that you keep acting like is common sense knowledge? Why don't you just show us the number so we can stop the discussion and go home satisfied in our medical knowledge?
> The CDC quote you linked tells doctors not to use antibody tests to triage acute patients because antibodies take weeks to form.
It implies something about the data, even if you twist like you did. I personally prefer to go with the exact quote, which I gave you. But your twist on it isn't any better for your argument. It, in both cases, draws significant doubt about the accuracy of the test.
Let's pretend I have an allergy to the COVID protein. Should I use that test to make a decision about my vaccination?
I think you should go to prison if you said yes. Don't you? You'd be a murderer.
But you're going to use it to make a broader, less evidence based claim than that?
Summary:
Please provide the prevalence data. A bunch of people that you didn't test, whether you call them the cohort or not, does not establish prevalence. You need to include "asymptomatic infected" numbers to make your claim. As far as we know so far, you don't have those numbers. And, the CDC and the WHO don't even claim to have them, which is why your claim sounds so implausible. I mean, unless you're at the forefront of research at the CDC or something. But I don't see that this is the case.
> You are saying that COVID is worse than infection, so tell us when you tested people with no infection so that you can say that! When did you perform that test that you keep acting like is common sense knowledge? Why don't you just show us the number so we can stop the discussion and go home satisfied in our medical knowledge?
That's the neat part, you don't have to. Vaccinated people had a prevalence rate of 5/100k. Unvaccinated AND symptomatic covid had 200/100k. Unvaccinated and asymptomatic or uninfected at 70/100k.
It doesn't matter what fraction of the unvaccinated group was asymptomatic, because the total average of the group you are advocating to stay in (70) is still 14 times higher than the group you are telling people to avoid (5).
EDIT: "tell us when you tested people with asymptomatic infection"
Also, I'm mind bogglingly curious how you think those people would be discovered to perform a test on! So let me know why you even think that's possible! It seems like common sense that it wouldn't be because they don't exactly line up for testing and treatment when they feel perfectly fine.
My interpretation of the Spanish study allows for both articles to be totally valid.
Your interpretation requires that you think you are smarter than one of these groups of researchers. It requires that Stanford's study is wrong.
Honestly, which is more likely?
It's okay to learn something here. You thought the denominator was people that weren't infected. You didn't think that it might be a group of 100% infected. But it could be. We simply don't know.
It's okay to not have realized that. The scientific thing to do here is learn from your mistake.
I'm probably misunderstanding something, but if the overall population risk for myocarditis is bigger than 4/100,000, wouldn't that indicate that mRNA vaccinated people have a lower risk? The number I found for the global population is 10~20/100,000. If taking the vaccine increases the risk, wouldn't the risk be bigger than 10~20/100k?
If the risk went down the term for that is "inverse correlation." In that case it would be preventative, rather than causative. Here we are seeing a correlation and we have a known mechanism of action that's driving that (described in the Stanford study).
Is that making more sense?
In part though, you are right to be noticing that the Pfizer study and the Stanford study disagree on the risk profile.
Why might that be?
Well, for one thing, if you look up the peer reviewers for the Pfizer study, it's the same list of names as the ones that performed the research, and each one of them is a Pfizer employee. Unsurprisingly, the lower risk profile was found in a study conducted by the same drug company that stands to profit from a lower risk profile. And it's not peer reviewed. Typically we rely on peer reviewed research in the world of science and medicine. Without it, it becomes very difficult to differentiate a science article from advertising, and pseudoscience.
Conversely the Stanford study was done by various researchers from various schools with no conflict of interest and no apparent profit from Pfizer, as best I can tell. And as we'd expect, they found not only a causal link, not only a higher incidence rate, but also the mechanism of action that drives it.
See my other comment answering this. It's only higher if you don't trust peer reviewed research, and instead use the numbers provided by the drug company in a study that was not peer reviewed. See the list of peer reviewers in Pfizer's study and notice that they are the same as the researchers, and that they've made claims without providing their results (those are still being released over an 80 year period by FOIA court order, you'll get the results when we're all dead).
If you can't find a link to the court case on this, let me know. I'll find it for you.
Yes, I think you are correct in reducing the argument to its basic factors. Yep, its fucked up.
However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
If you are going to hold one group responsible for vaccine-related deaths of mandated vaccines, you must also hold the group who refused the vaccine responsible for any deaths of other people who were infected as a result of their vaccine refusal.
Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare. COVID deaths from preventable spread were also real, and much more common. Public policy had to weigh both, not pretend either side of the risk didn’t exist.
Young people are actually right then in never ever taking any vaccine recommended by public policy ever again. If taking a vaccine is against your personal interest, and nevertheless public policy, that is the consequence.
It is one thing to make a judgement error in the heat of a crisis, it is quite another one to deny afterwards what a huge fuckup it has been.
There was only one category that it made sense to refuse the covid mrna vaccine in hindsight (excluding specific medical conditions), that was if you were over 10 and under 25 AND gave yourself greater than ~1,000 to 1 odds of not catching covid. That's based on the fact that the chance of a young healthy individual having a severe negative outcome from the vaccine was that much less likely than a sever negative reaction from catching covid. So yes in a vacuum you can say that having the mrna covid vaccine when you don't need it is a negative but "don't need' is specifically if you have low odds of catching the disease not low odds of having a bad outcome from the disease. I'd say a preeminently foolish bet by the time the vaccine was actually available.
I suppose you could also argue other categories based on higher or lower ages and who gave themselves lower chances of ever catching covid could technically also fall into that group. You could also argue moral reasons not to get the vaccine but I'd say in any situation where you still expected to get healthcare that detracted from the healthcare of others (i.e when the hospitals were at capacity and your treatment could kill another) would be morally bankrupt.
> I'd say a preeminently foolish bet by the time the vaccine was actually available.
A preeminently foolish bet is to use a vaccine where you don't know anything about medium or longterm effects, for something that doesn't really affect you. If you know anything about science, you know that.
> However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
that's all nice and dandy except COVID "vaccines" (remember, they had to change vaccine definition for this very reason) did NOT STOP the spread, they were at best protecting some old people, it was completely pointless for young healthy people to risk their lives by taking them
I remember how the vaccine narration/propaganda went - it will protect you from getting infection, it will protect you from symptoms, it will protect you from getting sick, it will protect you from serious symptoms, it will protect you from hospitalization, it will protect you from death, so now basically all they can claim it will protect you from going to hell and you can go to heaven if you use them
> Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare.
so were COVID deaths in people under 50 unless you have some health condition, extremely rare for people under 20-30, yet they pushed down the throat "vaccinesd" to everyone, not just risk groups, which is why vaccine mandates/passes hurt proper useful vaccines for decades ahead
Cowpox was used to vaccinate against smallpox. Cowpox is a less severe infection that stimulates the same immune response as smallpox, but it’s not the same virus.
Inoculation is where a weakened pathogen is introduced to create immune resistance against that same pathogen (see inoculation parties).
Prior to COVID I seem to remember that the point of a vaccine was so that you didn't get the disease at all. That's where the herd immunity argument comes from. If 85-90% of the herd has immunity (immunity meaning you can't catch it at all) then even the people who can't get the vaccine are protected because the susceptible are too spread out for the infection to spread.
Do you see how this absolutely requires not just a lowered infection rate with lowered severity of infection? You need a less than ~10% chance of infection in the vaccinated/otherwise immune for the math to work. If the chances of infection after vaccination are still 80% then there is still a large reservoir of potential carriers and you don't have herd immunity.
For most of history what people expected out of a vaccine was immunity from infection not still getting infected but with less severity.
Yes some diseases were eradicated that way. Not all of them and we keep vaccinating.
Herd immunity means the disease wont cause epidemic, if it comes from elsewhere. It does not mean that no single person will get the disease if he encounters it.
Notably, flu vaccine did not stopped flu entirely, is the most common yearly vaccine and I really never seen anyone claim it 100% stops flu.
Oh, you made a category error, I think. Flu has variants and they sometimes "predict" which variant to prepare for incorrectly, but as far as I am aware the flu vaccine is very effective against the correct strain.
Let's not forget that Norway was heavily criticized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and several international health experts for its decision to permanently drop the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
For the record, this comment is not arguing against vaccines or their veracity, there seems to have been confusion about that. I am specifically arguing against vaccine mandates.
If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies, isn't that morally equivalent to "forcing" a vaccine on someone, who then dies? Your argument seems to be "people who choose to put others at risk, should be prevented from doing so." This seems like a much stronger argument in favor of requiring unvaccinated people to stay home rather than putting others at risk?
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
No, it's not morally equivalent, as one of these is very obviously unintentional and a result of simply living one's normal life, and the other is neither of those things.
It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure.
Scientists and the government were also unaware of vaccine side effects. These vaccine injuries and deaths were also unintentional.
"Living one's normal life" seems to unreasonably privilege the status quo. I am sure many drunk drivers also felt they were simply living their normal lives, before drunk driving was illegal. The definition of "normal life" changed because it needed to. When there's a global pandemic on, it needs to include vaccinations.
"Herd immunity is too multivariate to measure" seems like a very strong claim. Do you have a source for that?
Some people can't take vaccines because of allergic reactions. Other people have weakened immune systems and so the effect of vaccines is low.
For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish people that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish people was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.
Except COVID "vaccines" did not prevent infecting yourself or someone else, are there still people believing this nonsense? This "vaccine" at best protects you if you are old at risk and it's not good even at doing that comparable with those flu "vaccines".
But the same article has the following quote from the above video, from Bayer's executive Stefan Oelrich:
> “Ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say, if we had surveyed two years ago in the public, ‘would you be willing to take gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?,’ we would have probably had a 95% refusal rate. I think this pandemic has also opened many people’s eyes to innovation in the way that was maybe not possible before.”
So it seems Bayer (or at least, Stefan Oelrich from Bayer), indeed classifies the mRNA vaccines as gene therapy.
If the pandemic had been deadlier and even more infectious like measles or smallpox were, would you still be against mandates? Surely there is a scenario like airborne Ebola or 28 days Later Rage virus that would justify mandates.
I would also be against vaccine mandate if we also had a law where if I could prove you infected me, that would count as assault with a deadly weapon, and all the other laws that determine what I could do when someone assaults me with a deadly weapon would apply.
The polio vaccine is much older and as far as I could find has never had a death attributed to it. COVID vaccines are newer, and their safety profile was not fully understood when they were rolled out.
A tiny fraction of infants react to infant vaccinations.
But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations.
It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
> the kids that would have died from vaccines are still in danger
Except that we knew by May 2020 (possibly even earlier) that the data showed that the young and otherwise healthy were at extraordinarily low risk from Covid.
I still recall a conversation with child#2 after one of his school friends was at home quarantining after testing positive for Covid.
I asked my son if he knew if his friend was feeling better...
Kids spread the virus, whether they’re at risk of dying or not. Vaccines reduce the chance of them spreading it by reducing the symptoms and the time that they they’re infectious.
The main benefit of vaccines is that they reduce the transmission of disease. This aspect saves more lives than individual protection.
The overall VE [Vaccine Effectiveness] of the complete primary series against infection with any SARS-CoV-2 variant was 70.7%. VE was lower for Omicron, at 26.1%, than for pre-Omicron strains, at 77.0%. Over time, VE against infection by any variant decreased from 68.9% to 38.9% after 6 months.
> A reduction is still a reduction, even if is not a 100% total and full stop
The advice I was given from our family doctor was that having had an utterly mild case of (actual) Covid, as I had (two separate times!), during the pandemic, was significantly better in protecting against both future infection - and subsequent transmission - than any protection I could have gained by vaccination.
YMMV. I suspect this is down to those who have had mild Covid pre-vaccination and those who have not.
Some of us didn't even know we had had Covid until afterwards, others think the vaccine saved them from an untimely death/hospitalisation.
If you’ve had Covid twice then you’ll have had the antibodies in your system, however there were several strains and getting boosters to maximise resistance was important.
Remember that you caught Covid twice, because your body’s immune system was still not strong enough to make you asymptomatic the second time. You likely caught Covid several times but several of those times you were asymptomatic.
It’s incorrect to say that catching the virus gives you “better” protection than a vaccine. The vaccine teaches your immune system how to react to the virus without the damage and long-term effects caused by actually having the virus. This makes future infections much less severe and you are less likely to spread the virus to others when you catch it.
Worth restating because of all the misinformation out there: a vaccine will not prevent you from catching a virus, it cannot do that. It trains your immune system to fight the virus so that when you catch it your immune system can fight it immediately and symptoms are much less severe (ideally asymptomatic, but that is not guaranteed), so that you have less chance of passing it on.
That’s what Dr Fauci said for seasonal flu in 2004.
Yes you will have antibodies from being exposed to one strain of flu. You won’t for the next strain.
Catching COVID carried a far greater risk because although symptoms can be mild in many cases it can kill vulnerable people and it spreads incredibly quickly. At the peak of the pandemic, hospitals were being overrun by people sick with the virus, which affected everyone’s access to care. Vaccines helped prevent the spread of new strains to vulnerable people and reduced pressure on the hospitals.
They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.
No, they did the best for their child. They had no way of knowing their child would react before they gave the vaccine. The harms and risks of illness prevented by vaccination are far greater than the harms and the risks of adverse reaction.
Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.
At the latest by May 2020, we knew that Covid risk was extremely stratified by age and underlying health conditions.
To be very clear: this does not mean the virus was harmless to everyone else, but treating the population as if risk were evenly distributed was bad analysis, and policy built on that assumption was deeply flawed.
What I would have wanted was a more honest debate about how to protect the old, the frail, and those with major risk factors while also minimising the social, educational, economic, and indirect medical harms caused by restrictions. Yes, that is hard! Policy is supposed to deal with hard problems, not pretend that trade-offs disappear because they are uncomfortable.
Instead, much of the public discussion collapsed into a useless binary: "lock down harder and longer" versus "let it rip". With hindsight, both look far too crude for the actual problem we faced.
> it's a trade off but it's one that must be made.
It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.
If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well.
Healthy children and young adults were at very little risk from COVID though. Seatbelts are a safety measure that applies almost uniformly across age groups.
But the trolley problem doesn't make sense here. The statistically correct thing to do, in nearly all cases for nearly all people, both for themselves and for their community (separately!), was to get vaccinated.
It does though. A government mandate is the same as pulling the lever, it’s trading who lives and who dies. Even if more people survive as result, just like in the original trolley problem, the one who pulls the lever becomes responsible for the exchange.
I’m not even arguing the government shouldn’t pull the lever, I just want people to be held accountable for the lives lost as a result, and for the families to be treated with compassion.
> just like in the original trolley problem, the one who pulls the lever becomes responsible for the exchange.
That is a conclusion you can have, but you're speaking like its the official correct conclusion, which isn't really true.
The reason the trolly problem is so popular is because there isn't an agreed upon answer and different people come to different conclusions about it. Some people would agree that by pulling the lever you become morally responsible in a way you aren't if you take no action. Other people think you are morally culpable either way.
Should we really be using words like "correct" for something like this? It's just a tradeoff, you could say it's a better solution optimizing for fewer dead people, but it is in no way a morally superior solution. You could just as easily argue that not vaccinating at all and letting COVID spread would be a better solution for a nation since COVID overwhelmingly killed old and unhealthy people who are otherwise a drag on the economy.
> Healthy children and young adults were at very little risk from COVID though.
People repeat this but there is no validation of this.
Sure, children and young adults mostly weren't at risk of dying. It is not at all clear that there are not bad side effects from getting an active Covid infection. We're still crunching the data.
We're just now beginning the process of correlating virii and bad latent effects many years later. HPV -> Cervical Cancer. Epsetin-Barr -> MS. And, of course the one we have known about for a while: Chicken Pox -> Shingles.
Healthy individuals spread the disease to others, ultimately killing more people than the infinitesimal odds from getting vaccinated at the height of the pandemic
My cousin died in 2021 at the age of 28 after AstraZeneca vaccine. Quite unfortunate, they starter increasing the age group of people receiving that vaccine literally days after he got it. His parents obviously are obviously still struggling with it and will never really accept it.
> Imagine if you had lost a son or daughter due to this
And imagine if you lost a son or daughter due to not doing this.
You are making a choice either way. If the opposite choice was made there are different consequences. Its not like you can opt out of consequences by not choosing.
Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person. At that point its a matter of risk assessment for yourself. Take a 2% chance of dying, a slightly higher chance of reduced quality of life (long COVID), or take a lottery-winning chance of dying to this blood clot. It is appropriate to do the math correctly to decide if this makes sense, but to claim that scientists and advocates did not do this personal risk assessment math and merely went off the benefits of herd immunity is a lie and anti-vaccine propaganda.
>Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person.
I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID.
Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits.
About 17400 people under 20 died of covid. According to this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875435/ all the people who died from side effects of the covid vaccine were over 22 (its possible that is not exhaustive, but i can't seem to find any examples of confirmed deaths related to the vaccine for children. If there are any i think its likely the number is in the single digits).
So even if the risk of death from covid in kids is small, its still probably at least 1000 times higher than the risk from the vaccine, and possibly much higher.
> something that had the potential of side effects
Literally everything has potential side effects. Clean drinking water? Has side effects (e.g. less vitamin b12 from poop). All choices have consequences.
i didn't say "immediately after a vaccine" i said "after the vaccine mandate", people doing press conferences, football, dancing, whatever would just fall down.
2% chance of death? A quick google shows it to be around 0.16%, and the deaths seem to be allocated to people who are older or just have other comorbities. I think the scientists in retrospect just didnt want hospitals to get full honestly, since they dont have the capacity for it as it is — atleast here in Canada.
For comparison the death rate from the vaccine is around 0.0001%.
Yes they didn't want the hospitals to get full. That's when the younger healthy people who would have recovered can't get the medical care they need to survive.
You had to have spent covid in a pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks.
The only people that really qualify for this is military service people. Everyone else could take weekly covid tests. The rule to require vaccines more generally was pretty quickly struck down.
So you are right. I shouldn't have said "nobody". But also, it's not exactly everyone.
And for clarity sake, it's way more people than just the military. Many cities and counties had mandates, including NYC. Everyone in nearly the entire health industry across the country. Many restaurant workers. A bunch of banks and many, many other companies in various industries had mandates just because their leadership was political or used it as a way to reduce labor without penalty. A lot of people were forced.
I don't think it's fair to try to minimize that. It's a major point of ongoing political contention and its among the many reasons why many people stopped voting left (including me).
> Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
Since there was basically a soft mandate for it, especially on top of some of the usual official red tape being cut, the manufacturers really wouldn't be the appropriate party to hold responsibility. That'd be the government.
Dismissing people like this is part of what fuels the antivax movement. Vaccines are generally effective, but they're not perfect and have side effects, and failing to acknowledge that when someone is asking in in good faith polarizes people and makes it look like someone's trying to hide something.
Those people are going to be polarised regardless. If you don't give them a reason to be polarised they'll invent one because they want to be polarised.
Good faith isn't enough. I just reread some tweets, and there were multiple people who in completely good faith (from their point of view) were protecting their community by claiming everybody who took a vaccine would be dead by June 2026.
Not saying this about parent, but am absolutely saying it about the vaccine skeptic community in general.
If the barrier to asking a question is zero (i.e. someone without a high school biology education can ask a question and be listened to) but the barrier to answering any question to the community's satisfaction is high (i.e. a full study, on exactly that question, controlled for all variables, that shows a clear result) then the effort asymmetry leads to many unanswered questions.
... which the skeptic community then points to to support the belief that there are many legitimate unanswered questions.
It is okay to dismiss negligible things. People sustain a lot of injuries and die in their bathrooms but it would be insane to both-sides somebody’s campaign against taking shits
I lost friends during covid who turned into morons like that; so much so that I started to think maybe it is a side effect of the virus. One of them recently moved to the other side of the world 'because Trump is going to nuke us' (he lived in the EU). It is fine to dismiss, ignore and berate morons; they won't change their mind and must have been always like that; just before covid everyone would've laughed in your face so you would not have said any of this out loud. Now I meet a few too many people who point at vapour trails and tell me how their gov is blocking the sun and is poisoning us to keep us dumb. Dismiss and hope they won't procreate.
It was a nothingburger. It wasn't even a side effect of the mRNA vaccines.
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
It's hard to tell "dangerous misinformation" from "thing someone made up for tiktok views". The difference is facts and evidence. I'm still waiting to see either.
