[offsign]

Here's how someone in the field recently explained it to me...

Let's say you have a vaccine that appears effective (great, right?) You give it to 1000 willing test subjects, and most become immune (fantastic, right?). Then, three to six months later 50 of the subjects go into terminal liver failure due to their body's immune response to the vaccine (as determined by their genetics.)

It's not just whether a vaccine 'works' for you, it's whether it's effective AND safe over the huge genetic pool that is humanity (as measured over a sufficient period of time). This kind of stuff comes up all the time with drug trials, and it's why there's a process, and things can't be rushed.

[gman83]

Yeah and just imagine how the anti-vax conspiracy crowd would respond in that situation. Things would get really crazy really fast. Even in a pandemic we can't rush this.

[pbhjpbhj]

Well, in this pandemic we don't need to rush this as mortality is relatively low. If it were a variant Ebola, but with the same transmission rate as Covid19 then we'd sure was hell be rushing it.

[CaptainZapp]

Your reply bugs me. Not yours personally, but especially in the US this attitude seems to be a very binary thing. You either die, or most people survive it and your chances of survival seem to be good.

What this leaves out is all those nasty consequences observed, where Covid victims survive, but encounter all sorts of health issues. From kidney - to heart damage, up to funky things it may do to your brain.

This leaves out the long timers[1], who survive it, but have massive health issues for month with no end in sight.

I, for one, are really hell bent not to catch it and as a society there seems to be number of quite simple measures to avoid spread.

Unfortunately even those, like masks, in my opinion a no brainer, get politicized.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...

[Kiro]

Funny that you've shifted your argument from death rates to "long-term effects" when it no longer fits your agenda.

> Sweden is slithering into a full blown catastrophy […] the numbers are bound to explode in the next few days.

> The grim reality, however, looks very different and Sweden is on the best way to one of the greatest corona catastrophies in Europe.

Didn't happen and the curve continued to sharply decline after you made your comment. Sweden currently has one of the lowest infection rates in Europe and exactly what I said would happen is happening in other countries.

[pbhjpbhj]

Thank you, just to expand, as I fear there's a disconnect.

"we don't need to rush this" and put out a vaccine super-quick that might itself inadvertently kill/harm a large proportion of the population.

I'm not at all diminishing the severity of Covid19 (deaths _&_ life-changing health effects, as you remind us), but thankfully it's not killing 40% (IIRC) of the infected like Ebola. Under that pressure a vaccine would probably be advisable even if it 'only' killed 20% (!) - if you could get anyone to have such a vaccine?

All vaccination programmes cause some harm, mass inoculation in a rush has the potential to cause more harm than no vaccination.

There's some very interesting work on apparent immunity to Covid19 going on (The Lancet article recently), which I'm hoping will suggest that an endemic "common cold" coronavirus has effectively inoculated people. That would seem to give an inoculation known to already be relatively safe. But it's way out of my areas of expertise.

[tinus_hn]

However you put it there is a limit to how long you can wait. It’s never going to be risk free.

Of course incidents where 5% of the subjects of a drug test die do not happen ‘all the time’, if they happen it’s on the news. And it’s not on the news ‘all the time’.

Balancing risks does not mean attempting to avoid all the risks.

[minerjoe]

Given the enormous amount of advertizing bought by the pharmaceutical companies, I would not think that the "news" can be considered objective.

[beagle3]

I did not research this, but in my undirected layman reading have encountered at least the following three cases in which vaccine was more harmful than the disease:

Live polio vaccine which wasn’t properly attenuated and caused polio;

A vaccine in the us that caused Gillan-Barre syndrome way more often than disease symptoms (1960s or early 1970s, don’t remember disease name)

A vaccine given to children in Sweden that dramatically increased chances for narcolepsy.

It is important to recognize that not all vaccines ever produced are safe for everyone, and there are a few which were a total net negative for society (even though most are net positive despite some bad outcomes)

Vaccines, especially if mandatory, need to be held to an extremely higH standard of Safety. It is my impression that the COVID-19 panic is leading us to approved though net negative vaccines. We will only know much later , unfortunately.

[tinus_hn]

I’m sure you agree that 3 incidents in a century hardly mean it ‘happens all the time,’ that’s just a gross exaggeration.

[beagle3]

As I mentioned, I didn’t research this - it is things I came across accidentally in my reading. I assume these three are not the whole story.

I agree even 10 over 60 years is likely worth it to society as a whole. But ignoring this reality and saying “all vaccines are always safe and no vaccine ever caused anything bad” which many supposedly science people do is not good either.