Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by _-david-_ 1792 days ago
The measles vaccine has been around for decades. There are plenty of long term studies on the efficacy and saftey. How many long term studies have there been on any of the covid vaccines?
2 comments

Has there ever been serious long-term side effects caused by vaccines? Yes, a tiny number of people have had serious short-term complications from them, but I'll take five deaths over 3,000 deaths a day.

mRNA vaccines have been well studied - from a scientific standpoint it's hard to imagine how it even could cause problems.

You will take 5 deaths, meaning you will choose for others whether to risk that. Do you not realize the implication here?
No worse than you choosing that the people around you may die from your not vaccinating.
Studied or researched is not that reassuring given the replication crisis. There's a big difference between academia and real world use.
A few people have died from covid vaccines which sure seems long term to me.

Here is an example of a long term problem caused by a (traditional, non-mrna) vaccine

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...

As far as I know there hasn't been much research into the long term effects of many vaccines. After decades of availability if they were causing issues I hope somebody would have found a connection if they were causing issues. I would very much like to see research into this though.

I do agree mrna vaccines are unlikely to cause long term issues.

Just to be clear. I am very much in favor of vaccines. I just don't like being required to take it so soon after it was created.

mRNA vaccines have been researched for decades, and the only really novel part of the covid vaccine is the particular protein, which will also be present in a natural infection.

So if you trust the decades of mRNA vaccine research, you should consider the vaccine strictly safer than covid, as getting the disease will expose you to everything the vaccine exposes you to.

Do you believe there doesn't need to be long term studies of traditional vaccines? There have been decades of research into them as well.

I believe both mrna and traditional vaccines are safer than covid. I just don't like to take vaccines or medication without longer results than a year. I also agree mRNA vaccines shouldn't have any long term negative effects, but I tend to take the position when in doubt don't take an action.

If in 5 years there hasn't been any widespread negative effects I will probably take it.

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the amount of customization in an mRNA vaccine is much less than in more traditional vaccines, so the room for unexpected problems is essentially just the protein.

This is similar to how flu vaccines vary from year to year, but the mechanisms and changes are well understood so the approval process can be streamlined, but we don't expect issues from this year's flu vaccine that we didn't see last year, even though they are different.