[i_cannot_hack]

> Historically, two cases of rushed vaccines (cutter polio and Gullah barre) were worse than the disease - and these were for diseases worse than covid.

This is just patently untrue.

The Cutter Incidence gave patients Polio due to an improperly activated virus. While this is bad, it could not be worse than the disease itself - since it is the disease itself, no worse, no less.

Regarding risk of Gullain-Barre syndrome due to vaccination, Wikipedia has this to say: "In fact, natural influenza infection is a stronger risk factor for the development of GBS than is influenza vaccination and getting the vaccination does reduce the risk of GBS overall by lowering the risk of catching influenza." So here I also find it hard to believe the vaccine would be worse than the disease,

I'm also sceptical of the claim that Polio or the 1976 Swine Flu would unambiguously be worse than Covid19. 70% of Polio case have no symptoms, and less than 0.5% cause permanent injury, according to Wikipedia. The 1976 Swine Flu outbreak seems to have caused a few hundred cases and only one death.

[beagle3]

No, the cutter incidence was worse than the disease, because the activated virus was injected into a population, whereas naturally only a tiny part would be exposed at the same level, and the rest would be exposed at a much lower level - that would give them immunity but not disease.

Cutter was, most definitely, much worse than the disease if you look at it from a population perspective.

The 1976 Guilian barre was at least comparable to the flu it was supposed to stop, if not worse. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak, the disease caused one death and 13 hospitalizations, and an uptick of Giullan barre reports - a disease that more often than not requires hospitalization and sometimes death. I can assure you it caused more than 13 hospitalizations, and - having known two GBS people who made a full recovery - a very long and painful months long process. So, at 50,000,000 immunized - a 1 in 1,000,000 would still be worse than the flu.

I am not anti vax even if HN constantly seems to interpret my comments as such.

I am vaccinated, so are my kids. But whenever I mention that immunizations have risks, I’m treated like a heretic.

Everyone is assuming something like cutter cannot happen again. This is a religious assumption, not a scientific one.

[i_cannot_hack]

> No, the cutter incidence was worse than the disease, because the activated virus was injected into a population, whereas naturally only a tiny part would be exposed at the same level, and the rest would be exposed at a much lower level - that would give them immunity but not disease.

This is a more reasonable assessment, but it is still patently false. According to Wikipedia, 0.04% vaccinations resulted in paralysis in the Cutter Incident, compared to 0.1-0.5% of wild type polio. So the vaccine was 2-10x safer than wild polio. Without vaccinations, virtually all children were infected with polio virus early in life [1], so being administered the defective vaccine was still a lot better than taking a chance with the real disease.

Of course, you are correct regarding the 1976 flu outbreak. If you administer something to a large segment of the healthy population, even a small risk of side-effects will add upp to a large number of cases. If the disease itself turns out to be very rare, as was the case with the flu outbreak, the vaccine itself could cause more damage than the disease even if the disease is much worse.

However, this is clearly not applicable Covid-19, which we already know is spreading very fast and will need to infect a large number of the population before herd immunity is achieved. The situations are simply not comparable at all – even the vaccine from the 1976 flu outbreak would be less risky than the odds of being infected with a serious case of Covid 19 (of which the long term effects are also unknown, to be clear).

> But whenever I mention that immunizations have risks, I’m treated like a heretic.

Mainstream media, healthcare professionals and social media are all worried about the risks of a rushed vaccine. I literally see articles and hear conversations about this several times a month. Nobody is denying that large scale vaccinations have risks.

I'm not criticizing you because I'm against being cautious of vaccination risks. The criticism is that you are spreading false facts and misleading analysis that grossly mischaracterise what the risks of vaccinations really are, both presently and historically.

"Some vaccines can have rare but serious side effects" is a perfectly alright statement. But "Historically, two cases of rushed vaccines (cutter polio and Gullah barre) were worse than the disease - and these were for diseases worse than covid" is just not. Some of it is false and the comparison to Covid19 is misleading.

[1] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/poliomyelitis/facts

[beagle3]

> According to Wikipedia, 0.04% vaccinations resulted in paralysis in the Cutter Incident, compared to 0.1-0.5% of wild type polio.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#1950%E2%80%93195... : "The Cutter vaccine had been used in vaccinating 200,000 children in the western and midwestern United States.[76] Later investigations showed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, killing 10.[76]". So, 20% incidence; mentions 250 "paralytic illness", so 0.125% paralysis (no idea where you took the 0.04% - it does not appear in the Wikipedia text).

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio#Paralytic_polio : "In children, nonparalytic meningitis is the most likely consequence of CNS involvement, and paralysis occurs in only one in 1000 cases." ; So, for children, the incidence of paralysis is 0.1%

Who got the cutter vaccine? Mostly children. See e.g. from https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-pol... "By April 30, within forty-eight hours of the recall,” Offit wrote. “Cutter’s vaccine had paralyzed or killed twenty-five children: fourteen in California, seven in Idaho, two in Washington, one in Illinois, and one in Colorado."

So, I just tried to check your numbers, and I couldn't; Could you post references?

But I also wanted to check my memory, and Wikpedia seems to agree with me, Go on, please do check my quotes.

still patently false. pfft. Perhaps false under some assumptions, definitely not "patently false".

[i_cannot_hack]

You are almost certainly using the wrong numbers. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc... and https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048180, the faulty production applied to 120.000 doses of vaccine, which lead to 56 cases of paralysis (0.046%) among vaccinated children. These sources further mention "the exposures led to an epidemic of polio in the families and communities of the affected children, resulting in a further 113 people paralyzed and 5 deaths", which tells me that your number of 250 probably includes cases caused by such transmission. This is of course reasonable when discussing the total damage caused by the vaccine, but this number can not be compared to the incidence of paralysis for a single infection, as you do.

You would also have to include further transmissions caused by wild polio if you would like to make such a comparison.

> still patently false. pfft. Perhaps false under some assumptions, definitely not "patently false".

Even with your own calculation, which is inflated by also including transmission within the community for the vaccine but not for wild polio, the vaccine was very much comparable to wild polio (0.125% versus approx. 0.1%). Without vaccination, polio would usually infect virtually all children. So even with your own inflated assumptions it's false that the vaccine was worse than polio.

So under which assumptions would it not be false?

[beagle3]

> You are almost certainly using the wrong numbers

Take them with wikipedia, not me. I will note, that Wikipedia talks about both Cutter and Wyeth having problems, so it is possible the numbers are a sum of wyeth+cutter which would be compatible with your numbers being cutter only, but in the context of safety vs. polio wouldn't matter.

> You would also have to include further transmissions caused by wild polio if you would like to make such a comparison.

All wild polio numbers include those numbers by default - there actually is no way to get them otherwise, I guess you are saying "you should probably debase by more than 200,000 because of secondary infections". I don't know how to do that, exactly, but it will likely still be similar.

> Even with your own calculation, which is inflated by also including transmission within the community for the vaccine but not for wild polio, the vaccine was very much comparable to wild polio (0.125% versus approx. 0.1%).

With this calculation, the vaccine was 25% worse than the wild type. No error bars, but, that's easily worse, even much worse.

> So under which assumptions would it not be false?

How kind of you to drop "patently". If you didn't mean "patently" false earlier, why did you use that word? twice?

From[0]: "Patently: in a way that is so obvious that no one could disagree.". It's nice of you to finally bring sources, but even these sources don't make it "patently" false, given that they disagree with the sources I gave (which, I concede, reference more than just the safety of the Cutter incident which I originally mentioned, but which are definitely the subject matter under discussion)

[0] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/paten...

[i_cannot_hack]

> Take them with wikipedia, not me. I will note, that Wikipedia talks about both Cutter and Wyeth having problems, so it is possible the numbers are a sum of wyeth+cutter which would be compatible with your numbers being cutter only, but in the context of safety vs. polio wouldn't matter.

Wikipedia is not wrong, but you are using their numbers wrong. Your source is talking about the total number paralysis cases that occurred as a result of the vaccine ("250 cases of paralytic illness had occurred"). This includes secondary infections. If you follow the sources listed on Wikipedia page you reference, you will find two sources: my source [1], and [2] (via [3]), both which declare around 60 cases of paralysis in vaccinated persons, and then a larger number (in the order of 200) of total cases. The numbers you reference are referring to only the Cutter polio vaccine, by the way.

And you cannot use the total number of cases in the comparison that you did.

> All wild polio numbers include those numbers by default - there actually is no way to get them otherwise, I guess you are saying "you should probably debase by more than 200,000 because of secondary infections". I don't know how to do that, exactly, but it will likely still be similar.

If by debase you mean divide, then yes: you would need to divide by more than 200,000.

Your number is {how likely am I to get paralysed by the vaccine polio + how likely am I to cause further paralysis via secondary infection chain}, and you are comparing it to simply {how likely am I to get paralysed by the wild polio}. The first number is inflated a lot by the addition of secondary infections.

The numbers are not at all likely to be similar. As you can see in my (and your) sources, secondary infections accounted for more than double the number of paralysis cases, and therefore there it is likely a lot more people got sick via the secondary infections than the number people who was vaccinated. This causes the big discrepancy between our numbers.

Wild polio causes secondary infections as well, but this is not included in the number you are using for comparison, since it only includes the individual risk.

> With this calculation, the vaccine was 25% worse than the wild type. No error bars, but, that's easily worse, even much worse.

But the lack of error bars means that the calculation is meaningless.

You are assuming that "one in 1000 cases" means exactly one case per 1000 cases, and translate this to 0.100% with three decimals of accuracy.

It is clear from context that "one in 1000" is a rounded number for convenience, and they could very well have runded up from 0.8 or down from 1.4. You simply cannot conclude that the vaccine was 25% worse from your data. But we can conclude that they were in some way similar under your false assumptions, as they both would round to 1.

If you want to conclude anything else except "they are both around 0.1%", you would have to find a source that specifies at least 1 decimal of accuracy in the number incidents per 1000 cases.

Of course, this does not really matter, since you would still be comparing the wrong numbers.

Your argument here is "It's ambiguous and inconclusive when using clearly wrong assumptions that inflate the difference". Taking that argument into consideration, I'm still willing to confidently call it patently false.

Although I agree that I should not have said "Even with your own inflated assumptions it's false that the vaccine was worse than polio." What I meant was "Even your own inflated assumptions does not support that the vaccine was worse than polio", but I clearly worded it badly.

> How kind of you to drop "patently". If you didn't mean "patently" false earlier, why did you use that word? twice?

I meant it when I used it, and my question had a purpose. If you cannot give any reasonable assumptions where it wouldn't be false (which you haven't been able to do), then it would be patently false to me. The reason it does not seem patently false to you is because you have several misunderstandings in your reasoning and your reading of the sources. But I'm not really interested in discussing this terminology further.

> given that they disagree with the sources I gave

They don't. As I said, you are simply misreading your sources.

But seriously, even if you would manage to find some source which would refute my sources and back up your original claims, I have a bigger point to make now:

During this discussion, you have made numerous mistakes in many posts, beyond my criticism of your faulty reasoning:

(1) Mathematical mistakes

(2) Misreadings of the sources

(3) Inability to clear up ambiguities by looking at the referenced source or secondary sources

Even if by some happenstance you would happen to be right (even a broken clock, etc), you clearly are not confident enough doing this kind of analysis to be lecturing people about the specifics of vaccination risks. You are just as likely to mislead yourself and others as you are to educate.

Of course, this probably won't stop you, since you are not likely to respect my opinion. But hopefully it will still be in the back of your mind next time you approach this topic.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048180 [2] https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/19642705083 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2928990

[roenxi]

On the one hand I tend to agree, and all my expectations for this vaccine are positive. The medical industry tends to be paranoid to a level that exceeds rationality and even if they dropped their standards for this that should only get them down to "conservative and rather safe" levels of caution.

On the other, a cursory search says the current record for fastest developed vaccine was mumps at 4 years. So this is a vaccine setting new milestones, and there is a risk that not all of them will be positive. I'd rather be a little late to be vaccinated than a little early, especially being in a lower risk demographic.

[taejo]

I'm not an expert by any means, but I do know that a lot of the speed comes from moving along the CHEAP-FAST side of the CHEAP-FAST-SAFE triangle, without necessarily changing anything on the FAST-SAFE axis. In particular, governments paid for the companies to start producing enough vaccines for phase 3 trials before phase 1 was complete, while normally drug companies would wait for phase 1 to be completed before preparing for phase 2 for economic reasons.

[beagle3]

BiondVax recently finished their phase 3 trial of a universal flu vaccine. It was 15 years in the making. Science was (still is solid). Phase 3 took two years to account for ADE and other safety issues.

At the 1-year mark, everything looked perfect. At the towo years mark (original endpoint) the conclusion was that while it was safe, it offered statistically insignificant protection.

Properly designed tests need those 2 years, at the very least. The “SAFE” confidence axis was compromised. Whether or nit it is justified is what we’re discussing here.

[fergal_reid]

I'm very pro-vaccine, and not disagreeing with your conclusions, but your logic leaves out the consideration that the natural risk also depends on catching the disease, whereas the vaccine is administered systematically.

[jjk166]

Well the odds of people getting the flu are pretty high

[disabled]

I have had Guillain-Barre Syndrome (not due to a vaccine). No matter what, I still always get my vaccines and make sure that I am up to date and never late on any of them.

Sure, having Guillain-Barre is scary, but it is something that you can make a full recovery from.

It is never an excuse NOT to get a vaccine, unless you actually know that you got Guillain-Barre Syndrome from a vaccine. That is a discussion between that particular patient and their neuromuscular neurologist. In that case, you do not get the flu vaccine any longer because it can cause you to experience Guillain-Barre Syndrome again.

But, this really is an isolated situation that can be categorized as very rare and the general public should always get their vaccines.

If you catch the flu, it can absolutely trigger Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and would be far more likely to trigger Guillain-Barre Syndrome than the flu vaccine itself. If you get the flu and had the flu vaccination, it typically makes the flu illness less worse, making you less likely to get something like Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

There are lots of infectious agents that can trigger Guillain-Barre Syndrome, so it is wise to get your vaccines to prevent them as much as possible. They prevent serious infections, at minimum, which would help prevent Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

I also have the long term variant of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, known as Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy, which is in pharmaceutical remission due to me taking subcutaneous immunoglobulin twice a week for 3 hours each time.

What I am saying is that while all of this sounds rare and devastating, it’s treatable. Not only that, you’re more likely to get Guillain-Barre Syndrome from a bad case of the flu than from a flu shot.