[tome]

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.]

[ericmay]

> 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.

[tome]

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).

[ericmay]

> 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.

[tome]

> > 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?

I didn't originate this conversation so I can't speak for the original commenter, but it seems to me it's worth pausing for thought when a billion people are due to receive a medical intervention of a type that has never been used before.

> 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.

I'm not opting to defend against that risk but nor do I think the calculus is as obvious as you are making out. On the one hand I am very, very glad the vaccines are available because they seem to be significantly suppressing infection numbers and keeping people out of hospital. On the other hand I believe that individuals should not be coerced by their employer into receiving a vaccine.

> 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.

Which people? People have been questioning the safety of vaccine delivery mechanisms for at least 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine#False_claims_about...

[ericmay]

> I didn't originate this conversation so I can't speak for the original commenter, but it seems to me it's worth pausing for thought when a billion people are due to receive a medical intervention of a type that has never been used before.

Sure... but what makes you think the scientific and medical community haven't done the equivalent of this?

> I'm not opting to defend against that risk but nor do I think the calculus is as obvious as you are making out.

Then how would you describe the calculus? I know what COVID-19 infection numbers and statistics are, at least within some +-% differential.

But I have no knowledge or evidence of any future problem with the COVID-19 vaccine. Why would I accept a known and severe risk against an unknown risk with unknown severity?

So, could you expand on the less obvious aspects of the calculus here? If there's knew information I want to know.

> On the one hand I am very, very glad the vaccines are available because they seem to be significantly suppressing infection numbers and keeping people out of hospital. On the other hand I believe that individuals should not be coerced by their employer into receiving a vaccine.

I think it's a tough subject, but just as someone shouldn't be coerced by their employer into receiving a vaccine, I'm not sure others should be coerced into having to share space with someone who is willingly unvaccinated from a contagious disease. How do you reconcile that?

> Which people?

Take the total number of people who are now anti-vax, subtract those who became anti-vax before 2020. That remaining population.

> People have been questioning the safety of vaccine delivery mechanisms for at least 20 years.

And what has come of it? Billions of people around the world have received vaccines, untold lives have been saved, we've eliminated insane diseases like SmallPox and Polio... but now I'm supposed to side with the anti-vax people because why exactly? What did the medical and science community do to lose my trust? I guess you could argue the funding of gain of function research in Wuhan (where the virus almost certainly originated from), but that's not going to undo the cumulative history of medicine that has been wildly successful for me.

[tome]

I'm not sure how to respond. Did you miss the part where I said I have been vaccinated? I'm not trying to persuade anyone to go unvaccinated! I'm just expressing surprise that a lot of people either (a) don't know that the mechanisms for all the popular vaccines available in the west are completely new or (b) are completely unconcerned about the risks of giving such new medical interventions to a billion people within the space of months.

Given the grave situation we find ourselves in it seems to me that mass vaccination is the best option for humanity and for individuals. However, there is an unquantifiable downside risk as a result of lack of knowledge.

>I'm not sure others should be coerced into having to share space with someone who is willingly unvaccinated from a contagious disease. How do you reconcile that?

Well, we have been defending successfully against that risk for about 18 months.

> > People have been questioning the safety of vaccine delivery mechanisms for at least 20 years.

> And what has come of it? ...

I was just a bit surprised because you seemed to be suggesting that vaccine skepticism was a new phenomenon.

[azangru]

> Then how would you describe the calculus?

Here's the calculus.

When a needle goes into your arm, you know, with a one hundred percent certainty, that you are subjecting yourself to a tiny risk that something will go wrong. You don't know how your body will respond to the vaccine, nor can you know how protective it is going to be in a couple of months. You know that the risk, to the best of our current knowledge (which tends to change bewilderingly fast), is tiny. Yet, there is no denying that it exists. And you know, know with an absolute certainty, that your body is getting exposed to the vaccine. How much this thought scares you, if at all, is a part of the instrument known as informed consent.

What you also know is that if your body gets exposed to the actual virus, there is a much greater chance that something will go very wrong. What you cannot know is whether you will have that encounter with the virus. You also do not know whether you have already been exposed to it and have had it asymptomatically (in theory, it is technically possible to test your immune system, but in practice, no-one is going to do it outside of a clinical trial).

> I'm not sure others should be coerced into having to share space with someone who is willingly unvaccinated from a contagious disease

Pre-2019, we did not mandate that people around us get vaccinated against flu, although we know that flu can result in a lethal pneumonia. Nor did we require people around us to be vaccinated against chickenpox, meningococcus, tuberculosis, etc. Each of those infections can be lethal, so why should we be coerced into sharing space with people who can be contagious?

Thing is, we were not concerned about it, just as you are not concerned about the possible side effects of a vaccine.

The narrative on covid vaccines has been changing over the course of the last several months, which may have given rise to resentment that has nothing to do with politics. The narrative used to be that maybe some happy day we will get the vaccines that will protect our most vulnerable, and then it will be safe to lift the lockdown. Then it celebrated that the vaccines became available to the general public. Good, happy news. Then the narrative shifted to emphasise that vaccines are not perfectly protective, yet still protect people from severe and long covid. That would have been a great place for it to stop, but it keeps shifting further.

Now, if a vaccine protects the vaccinated person against catching the virus (with, say, 60% probability) and against a severe covid (with an over 95% probability), then why do the vaccinated make demands of the unvaccinated? The vaccinated got their extra insurance; why are they still freaking out?

> but now I'm supposed to side with the anti-vax people because why exactly?

No-one asks you to side with the anti-vax people; the only request they can make is to peacefully co-exist.

[makomk]

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.

[ericmay]

So are you suggesting that the risk of Covid-19 vaccines is blood clotting?

What’s the incidence rate? How does that compare against the risk of getting Covid-19?