[bingohbangoh]

People know. They know, if anything, because you need to be vaccinated to attend colleges.

The issue is that this vaccine is not FDA approved. A vaccine that provides for only a year is hardly the same as a booster shot which is good for 10 iirc.

[karmelapple]

Reading this, I wondered what might be keeping it from being fully FDA approved. I found this article explains it well: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2021/07/30/why-ha...

A few quotes I thought were noteworthy:

> For emergency authorization, the FDA required two months of safety data versus six months for full approval, he explains.

> Pfizer submitted its application on May 7 and was granted special priority review status on July 16. In a press release, the company said the decision whether to fully approve the vaccine should come by January 2022. Other reports suggest Pfizer’s approval will likely be sooner, possibly as early as the start of the school year.

> As you might expect, clinical trial data is scrutinized, but the process involves more than just experts reading data. The FDA also inspects manufacturing facilities and meets many times with company executives.

> "I think a lot of us are baffled why the FDA is taking so long.” - Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health

> To that end, the agency has reportedly expedited the process, even deprioritizing other projects in order to accelerate the timeline.

That last sentence struck me strangely, seeming to imply reprioritizing other projects was a big deal. We're still in a global pandemic, people are still dying here in the USA, and the economic realities still actively happening... yeah, I think deprioritizing other things is about the least surprising thing imaginable.

[ashtonkem]

It’s time to move these vaccines up into regular approval, for a variety of reasons. This is probably the most scrutinized vaccine ever, keeping it in emergency use is mistake.

> A vaccine that provides for only a year is hardly the same as a booster shot which is good for 10 iirc.

As compared to the flu shot? The one that I’ve been given for free in every school and workplace I’ve attended in the past twenty years?

Logistically, yearly shots are nbd. Maybe we should make flu shots mandatory for education just like the MMR shot, given the number of kids killed by the flu every year.

[chana_masala]

> This is probably the most scrutinized vaccine ever

Not in terms of long term data, at all

[ashtonkem]

What exactly are you expecting to happen, for the vaccine to turn around and kill 600,000 Americans?

[criticaltinker]

See these peer-reviewed papers for some insight into the second and third order evolutionary dynamics that we face with the current spike protein focused mRNA vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 [1][2].

These are serious long-term concerns, which may not manifest overnight, but they are certainly on the radar of many experts in the field.

[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

[2] SARS-CoV-2 immune evasion by the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant of concern https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/30/scie...

[3] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

[TheAdamAndChe]

On websites where covid vax hesitancy is rampant, I often see posts discussing antibody mediated enhancement, vascular damage caused by circulating spike protein increasing vascular damage and causing death from heart attack and stroke in a few years, prion disease development from misfolded protein propagation, and fertility issues. For most of these issues, long term data is needed to rule them out.

[chana_masala]

Over a long period of time anything is possible.

[ashtonkem]

Isn’t this just an argument for nihilism? Over a long time anything is possible, but that’s not an excuse to ignore the data that we have right here and now. Never mind that there will never be a point where there isn’t a “long period of time” in front of us, which becomes a convenient excuse for permanent inaction.

Also, anything being possible is not the same as anything being probable. The vaccine might make me grow a third arm too, after all anything is possible in the long run, but you would laugh if I said that I wasn’t getting a vaccine for the fear of my tailoring bill.

[_ph_]

The vaccines have full approval here in the EU. Thats why we got the vaccines 2 months later than the US. It is also not clear, how long the vaccines protect. Some part of the immune response is considered to be quite long-term, only the antibody-count falls quicker. The thing is: we lack precise data here and we have an ongoing pandemic. Once the pandemic is over, it is much safer to explore how long we can set the interval for booster shots.