IMO that's actually a good example of why we should be confident about the COVID vaccines. There was only about 2 weeks between the Cutter Lab vaccine being approved for distribution, and being pulled because of the side effects. Vaccine side effects aren't vanishingly rare, even serious ones, but vaccine side effects taking months or years to appear (in contrast to minutes-weeks) are.
2) Do you have any evidence to suggest a risk with the mRNA delivery vehicle? If so, what is that risk and why will it materialize in some unknown amount of time instead of after someone gets the vaccine?
1) That's not really a convincing response. There were only two viral vector vaccines ever approved for human use before 2020, both for ebola I believe, and therefore probably not widely administered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector_vaccine
2. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
[Full disclosure: I have had one shot of BioNTech and am waiting for my second.]
> 1) That's not really a convincing response. There were only two viral vector vaccines ever approved for human use before 2020, both for ebola I believe, and therefore probably not widely administered.
So the concern isn't mRNA or is it?
> 2. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Sure, but it also means you need some sort of empirical or a priori starting point.
There isn't even a hypothesis to gather evidence for except "this vaccine might cause something spooky to happen in the future". What is that spooky thing? Let's gather evidence.
I'm only guessing based on my personal interpretation of azangru, but I think the concern is delivery mechanisms that have never, or only rarely, been used before.
Regarding evidence for "spooky things", well, by their nature there is no or little evidence for them. They are black swans and the means by which they are addressed is the precautionary principle. In particular, by their nature, there can be no evidence about presence or absence of long term effects of novel delivery mechanisms.
Personally speaking, I suspect I'm a lot better off being vaccinated than not but some of the credulity around vaccines is rather surprising to me (especially the fact that many people don't seem to know that J&J uses a novel delivery mechanism too).
> I think the concern is delivery mechanisms that have never, or only rarely, been used before.
What is this concern based on? That it's new or rarely used? Why would you have prior concern one way or the other?
> Regarding evidence for "spooky things", well, by their nature there is no or little evidence for them. They are black swans and the means by which they are addressed is the precautionary principle. In particular, by their nature, there can be no evidence about presence or absence of long term effects of novel delivery mechanisms.
This runs into the same problem. And it's even worse because you have a known risk (COVID-19) and a future, unknown and unquantifiable risk with no prior reason to believe such a risk exists and you're opting to defend against that risk instead.
It's like never investing in the stock market because one day something might happen and cause something to happen. It doesn't make any sense.
> Personally speaking, I suspect I'm a lot better off being vaccinated than not but some of the credulity around vaccines is rather surprising to me (especially the fact that many people don't seem to know that J&J uses a novel delivery mechanism too).
Sure, but to be fair not a single one of these people ever questioned any other vaccine delivery mechanism they were getting. Questioning this stuff is new, and it's a deliberate disinformation campaign.
The mechanism of action of the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines is DNA, which is effectively like mRNA but with a couple of extra steps with their own risk attached. I think there's some suspicion that the blood clotting issues with the AZ vaccine were due to errors in the DNA to mRNA transcription causing erroneous and dangerous proteins to be produced. There's not really any traditional inactivated vaccines in widespread use against Covid at the moment.
> My point is, an appeal to history does not work when you are dealing with something new.
I'm not appealing to history. I'm appealing to the science of creating vaccines. Do you take no vaccines? You could apply the same argument to the measles or flu vaccine. Nobody did until now.
> By the way, how long have we had vaccines based on adenovirus vectors?
Can you articulate in a scientific manner why an adenovirus would be treated differently as it relates to the creation of vaccines and the body's response to them?
> Can you articulate in a scientific manner why an adenovirus would be treated differently as it relates to the creation of vaccines and the body's response to them?
For whatever reason that is not the prevailing method when it comes to regulating new medical interventions.
I'm genuinely curious if you could sue Google if you got J&J because of their mandate and you happened to be one of the extremely rare folks who got a blood clot from it.
Are there vaccines widely available in the US whose delivery mechanism was well established before 2020? The J&J vaccines are viral vector, a class of vaccines which has only been approved for human use twice before, in presumably small numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector_vaccine
Not yet. I believe Novavax's protein subunit vaccine would use the same mechanism as the MMR vaccine. Well outside my domain but my understanding is that you're given a premade dose of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins and an adjuvant to boost an immune rsponse to them, instead of producing the spike proteins yourself (as is the case for both mRNA and viral vector vaccines). [1] gives results of their phase 3 trials. The Atlantic [2] gives an overview aimed at a popular audience.
The answer is no for any detectable or significant population size. If one in million gets something unexpected, it does not matter.
All mRNA vaccine is gone from the body in few days. Usually, the immune response comes within days or weeks.
Theoretically, there is always a change that vaccination triggers some slowly developing auto-immune disease, but that could be triggered by COVID-19 as well (they have the same mRNA). I would be more worried about Long-COVID symptoms. They might be a sign of something chronic for a significant fraction of the population.
>When new vaccines are released, the unknown side effects, if any, show up within two months of vaccination. This history goes back to at least the 1960s with the oral polio vaccine and examples continue through today.
Beyond that you have to look at this in context - the probability of being harmed by COVID-19 vaccine (including long term) vs the probability of being harmed by a COVID-19 infection (including long term). The vaccine have the lower probability of harm by a very large magnitude.
> Are there any vaccines in history that have caused something unexpected 10 years from injection?
Yes [1]
*EDIT* - People are being pedantic saying it's not a vaccine while technically true it was a government approved medication that had horrific side effects discovered after approval. This is why people are wary about taking a vaccine still under approval as 'emergency use'. And also ridiculous to force employees back into an office and also require them to be injected with something they may not wish to. Just let them work from home if they choose to not get vaccinated with am emergency approval drug.
Thalidomide was a terrible medical scandal, but it's not a vaccine. Secondly it didn't cause something unexpected 10 years from injection, it had a side-effect if you were pregnant while taking it.
The Cutter Incident seems like the most damning.