[atoav]

Slight change:

There is no science if reasonable doubts aren't allowed.

The thing with this pandemic is, that the time where you could have a reasonable doubt in the vaccines are over for a while now. We vaccinated half of earths population. If there would have been horrible side effects they would have shown. The more data we gather the clearer the picture becomes and the less reasonable certain doubts become.

The thing about doubt is that one can always doubt anything. You can doubt that a stone in your hand falls to the ground if you let it go, but no amount of doubt will change the outcome if you actually do it. Physical reality for the most part doesn't care for our feelings. If you are a brilliant physicist you could doubt is the explainations why the stone falls to the ground, but you cannot reasonably doubt the fact that it does accelerate towards the ground, because this is what is observed.

You could have the feeling the universe is holographic and all this falling does not occur, however if you cannot create an experiment that would falsify existing, simpler explainations it remains just a interesting feeling and not a reasonable doubt.

[commandlinefan]

> there would have been horrible side effects they would have shown

If they actually protected you against the virus that would have shown too, though.

[lalaland1125]

The vaccines do protect people. Look at the data. Vaccinated people are like 5-20x less likely to die or get hospitalized.

[bell-cot]

Many people seem to expect "vaccinated" to mean "enjoy utter immunity to". Kinda like some World of EverDungeon video game, where having the Amulet of Foozaz makes you utterly immune to any & all poisons.

Anti-vaxer's love to play up that meme.

A better analogy would be the body armor that Marines wear in combat zones. No Marine is stupid enough to believe that wearing body armor will make him completely immune to bullets. And certainly no Marine is stupid enough to say "I won't wear it, because it doesn't make me completely immune to bullets".

[lenkite]

Well, the definition of vaccine changed late last year after it was found that the Covid vaccinations did not prevent infections.

Definition before late-2020:

"a product that stimulates a person's immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, thereby protecting against that disease",

To

"a preparation used to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific disease".

Now, we are realising that the Covid vaccines are helpless against the new variants, so I guess the definition will be changed even further.

Compared to something like the Smallpox vaccine (lifelong/multi-decade immunity), the Covid vaccine is mostly useless.

[spurgu]

Yup. And besides, it's been clear for a good while now that it boils down to personal protection and keeping hospital capacity at bay. Yet there is so much illogical fear of "antivaxxers/unvaccinated" in the vaccinated crowd.

[peteradio]

You need to justify the marginal benefit of force vaccinating young healthy people. That conversation never properly happened. First it was "that's not even being talked about, fuck off antivaxxer" then the next it was "are you kidding me we already decided this for you, fuck off antivaxxer". You can believe that vaccines are beneficial at preventing serious illness while doubting if they ought be required to a recovered young populous.

[Daishiman]

Pediatric COVID cases are a thing. COVID reinfections are a thing. None of these things are up for discussion.

[tzekid]

In science everything is up for discussion. Anything else and it's not science anymore, but ideology.

[Daishiman]

False. Things are up for discussion when facts on the ground change and when new evidence arises that makes for a case that paradigms should be reconsidered.

Every piece of available evidence points to the same conclusions, over and over again: the general safety of vaccines, the risks of long COVID, the contagiousness of the Omicron variant, and so on and so forth.

Those things are clearly not up for the discussion given the absolute garbage quality of the proposed counterevidence offered by these "skeptics".

[blub]

Facts on the ground are continuously changing and have been for the duration of the pandemic: e.g. risk of myocarditis for young males. Medical bodies are reacting to these changes, in that case by recommending against Moderna for people younger than 30.

Another example is the recommendation for AstraZeneca which was first not offered to older people because of unclear efficiency data, and then not offered to younger people because of the risk of blood clots.

Yet another example is the recommendation for boosters against Omicron. Israel's backing off from recommending a fourth to the general population because among other things the faster loss of protection.

[helloworld11]

Oh please, many events are a "thing" without being likely at all or likely enough to force a mass, obligatory response to them. Every year in the world a small number of children also die of the flu, this hasn't been used to justify forced, mandatory flu vaccinations on a national and global scale. It's very reasonable to argue against these things without self important response like yours. Furthermore, look at the WHO's list of known cases of vaccine side effects. By your own logic of things simply being a "thing" as justification for strict measures, plenty of argument could be made specifically against olbigatory vaccinations, especially of young people.

[peteradio]

If a person cares about holding Government accountable then they demand answers to why action is taken. In my mind, a rational person would say, "what marginal benefit is accomplished by this action." So that is what I ask you, have you seen real estimated numbers for what is hoped to be accomplished here? If not, why is that not important, I thought this was supposed to be motivated by facts and figures. If these decisions aren't being motivated by numbers then what objective basis is being used to make this decision?

[atoav]

>40% of those infected show long COVID symptoms. Compared to that receiving a little sting that makes you tired for a day is pretty much nothing.

[peteradio]

Well my experience is the bill always comes due later, 10x true with the way medicine is practiced in the US. I'm not at all worried about the vaccine/covid anyway, I take tons of relatively insane risks. My concern is basically saying to my own government: "Yes sir, Ill inject whatever you want, oh yes for the greater good, yes sir." What other way can I see it after enduring nearly 6 months of demonizing propaganda? Personally I think our government has not made a good enough case to be engaged in the tactics they are taking and the broad support of it approaches fascism. That is

"authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy"

This is coming from someone who was deeply concerned by the erosion of precedents under President Trump. I didn't turn off my skepticism when the man I voted for actually got to office. It feels like I'm on the receiving end of my own political retribution and its really made me pause.

[charlieyu1]

Doubting a vaccine that is developed in a few months instead of years like how it was done in the past, is already reasonable doubt

[dahart]

It is reasonable, if it’s true. It was reasonable initially. Unfortunately, that narrative isn’t very true or honest, and it’s getting less true over time. This vaccine’s method was developed for years before COVID hit, and specific mRNA vaccines can be developed faster than other kinds. It took the normal amount of time to get testing and FDA approval, and at this point, the vaccine has been both approved and more widely tested than almost all other vaccines in history. At this point, the doubt should by all historical markers be fading into the ether.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

[atoav]

You know how 64x1.2 GHz multicore CPUs can be faster than one single 1.2 GHz CPU?

The same principle works in medicine. Instead of one institute doing 10 trials over 5 years you can also have 10 institutes doing 10 trials in a year (Note: these are not actual numbers, just a show of peinciple).

The trials for the corona vaccines have not been done at a worse quality, as far as I can tell the opposite is actually the case. No vaccine ever had this many critical eyes on it.

[peteradio]

Science does not in general parallelize like that.

[atoav]

I did not claim this is the case in general, but the phases the vaccine trials were conducted more parallel than usually would be the case. See Nature.com:

> The world was able to develop COVID-19 vaccines so quickly because of years of previous research on related viruses and faster ways to manufacture vaccines, enormous funding that allowed firms to run multiple trials in parallel, and regulators moving more quickly than normal.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03626-1

[peteradio]

No amount of parallelism is going to impact the fundamental time constraint of 1 human body. So it goes with pregnancy and so it must go for trusting long term impact. In an ideal world we'd know the second generational impact which would necessarily take 20-40 years. Referring to the awesome parallelism is a red herring to distract from the lack of long term controlled study.

[blub]

While it's very unlikely, we simply don't know if some unknown side-effect will pop up in 10 years and the only way to find out is to wait 10 years and verify empirically.

[atoav]

This is a non-argument. We simply don't know many things before we actually observe them. We don't know whether the stone we let fall a thousand times will still fall after thousand-and-one times. But we can assume it does not, because this wouldn't match the rest of the rules we observed so far.

Granted, RNA vaccines are quite new (although a lot older than the pandemic), but the mechanisms behind RNA are older still. Out cells produce RNA all the time. What you propose is, that RNA produced by our cells today, will somehow miraculously show an effect a decade after it is gone. What is true for the RNA triggered by the vaccine must be true for our own RNA as well. That means our body would have to remember every piece of RNA produced in every cell for a decade.

I am not a medical expert, but I think this is highly unlikely. That would be like drinking a bottle of Schnaps today and being drunk 10 years after it left your body.

[blub]

While you're technically correct, gravity vs. side-effects from vaccines are in wholly different categories.

I don't know enough to judge by myself and agree that it's highly unlikely, but I've noticed that we've been surprised before by these new vaccines: the AZ blood clots came out of the blue and it took about a year for the cause to be discovered - I remember reading that the culprit was accidental injection in the bloodstream after all. Myocarditis is still a mystery.

I call this the "vaccines will turn us into zombies" theory. Quite laughable, but we'll have to wait and see. :-)

[salawat]

Myocarditis.

I know several mothers squeamish on risking their children to continual rolling of the dice w.r.t the mRNA vector vaccines. Also, I can unequivocally state that no other vaccine have I ever seen that has to be continually boosted to maintain it's efficacy, which sounds to me like a deficiency in memory cell formation. The bigger issue there, is that in spite of that being an interesting quirk of these vaccines to do research on, no one will, because having "this year's model" of vaccine is a jackpot to Pharmaceutical companies. Dat Annual Recurring Revenue producing nothing but upsides for them.

-New repeatably, and reliably recurring business -Relaxed or increasingly streamlined approval processes to be lobbied for the next time they want to sneak something through

And the downsides being safely (to them) externalizable

-increased attrition of horseshoe crab populations and concomitant environmental knock-on effects -accumulating social costs in the damage done by implementing the infrastructure for implementing things like vaccine passports, which can be adapted to non-public health use cases.

I mean, I get where you're coming from. However, I've researched the supply chains, and the stuff that is relied upon for QC'ing this stuff (horseshoe crab blood) is not inexhaustible, and the incentives we're manufacturing are not at all ideal. Just because you've stopped analyzing the problem at the physiological effects on the patient does not mean there isn't reason for concern. Everything is interconnected.

[lamontcg]

> Also, I can unequivocally state that no other vaccine have I ever seen that has to be continually boosted to maintain it's efficacy, which sounds to me like a deficiency in memory cell formation.

The mRNA vaccines don't produce IgA-mediated sterilizing mucosal immunity and they would not have been expected to, and they should never have really been expected to or promoted as providing sterilizing immunity.

The point, though, is to prevent severe disease and death which is mediated through memory cells, which are doing just fine and not waning, and mostly likely responsible for the bulk of the headlines that Omicron is less virulent -- because the vaccines are actually working for their intended purpose (turning severe COVID into a bad cold).

The vaccine misinformation on HN is really crazy. Conflating lack of protection against infection to failure to form memory cells is not a remotely well informed take.

The DYOR crowd does the absolute worst research. I don't have a problem with the policy in the title article because you all don't know what you're talking about.

And a multiple shot series of a vaccine is common, most of them are. The initial interval with the mRNA vaccines was probably too short for hypermutation/maturation to happen (but was necessary to get people protected as fast as possible, and to keep the trials as short as possible) so the "boosters" are the really the second shot of a two shot series.

[salawat]

You didn't address half the concerns I brought up. I'll even give you your points on "not being designed to provide long term sterilizing immunity".

You still haven't addressed the anti-pattern of cranking out "vaccines of the month", the environmental impact of utilizing a protein from a natural source in a QC process intended to track pharma batches for multiple doses for every human on earth, the incentive problem that emerges from vaccinations not designed for long lasting, sterilizing immunity in that it's already been acknowledged by Goldman Sachs analysts that cures are not a good business model and that this approach to vaccine making seems eerily in that vein of taking this advice to heart.

Condescend on the DYOR folks all you want. If someone didn't, none would ever get done. I, for one, will continue to learn as much as I can, and will encourage people to do as much thinking for themselves as I can. Funny thing I noticed is half the people who say "leave it to the experts" tend to own stock in said experts.

[lamontcg]

> You still haven't addressed the anti-pattern of cranking out "vaccines of the month"

We're still using the same OG strain vaccine that we started with and we're not doing this.

The ancestral mRNA vaccines still protect against death and hospitalization even with Omicron.

If you're doing your own research, then watch a course on virology and try to learn something:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3MhWWi6n4&list=PLGhmZX2NKi...

I probably do way more research than you do, but it all reinforces what the experts actually say because I don't spend all my time trolling blogs for counter intuitive takes so I can feel intellectually special.

[dahart]

> Also, I can unequivocally state that no other vaccine have I ever seen that has to be continually boosted to maintain it's efficacy

There’s a new flu vaccine every year.

[eggy]

I am glad you have declared the time for reasonable doubt is over. How about this: Would it be reasonable to say there should be long-term random trial studies instead of no saying no short-term side effects have occurred, yet, since that is how science is (was?) done? Pfizer eliminated their long-term control study group by vaccinating them. Would it be reasonable for scientists to review the FDA's approach and data they used to quickly approve the vaccines? Why does the FDA want to have 55 years to release the data? Is that reasonable given current technology to search, sort, filter, and redact or organize what they want to share to comply with the FOIA request? And the review could prove that people are at risk if errors or omissions are found, so they should staff up, and comply. Would it be reasonable for those of us who have had COVID to wonder why natural immunity is being totally ignored by the US government? It's a pandemic of the immune vs. the non-immune, and not the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated. Or the old and unhealthy vs. the rest. Why a privately funded study on natural immunity by John Hopkins being done because our unquestionable CDC has done barely any given most studies show natural immunity is equal if not better than the vaccine more in line with how natural immunity has been viewed for decades? As rare as myocarditis is, vaccine causes it more in 16-24-year-old males than a COVID infection, and your risk of a serious COVID infection in that age group assuming you're not obese and suffering from other comorbidities is small enough that you should have the right to decide on whether it is good for you or not to get jabbed. If you are winded and have trouble making a flight of stairs, you have other issues aside from COVID you should be addressing. And if you get vaccinated, you need to get boosted soon thereafter to be in the "in crowd". Is it reasonable to point out that more than three quarters of hospitalizations and deaths involve older aged people and involve comorbidities such as obesity and diabetes, and expect policies to be more intelligent and discriminatory in using data to make societal decisions that minimize COVID serious hospitalizations and deaths while also minimizing impact to the well being of the younger, healthier population that are not in the same risk category, our economy, mental health, and quality of life with reasonable risk? They post an article of a six-year old that says they were otherwise healthy, and then you see a photo, and the child is beyond a doubt, obese, and who knows what other comorbidities were at work. Great to way to scare mass vaccination of healthy children as human shields for uninformed fearful parents and adults. Where is the healthy skepticism of people pre-COVID when big pharma was not given a pass without scrutiny? Aren't we at present dealing with the opioid crisis they helped create? I am shocked people trained in science have bought the current version of "The Science" which is nothing other than shut up and do it or else. I and my family are not anti-vax. We have had our vaccinations for everything other than COVID, except we had COVID and recovered. Why is my job being put on the line over a jab I don't need, and does not protect anyone else given my status? I get tested weekly in order to be able to go to my office (pre-mandate policy), yet 6 of 175 people have had a COVID infection after a double jab, and at least 2 of those had a booster! How come they don't need to be tested? They can give it to me, other vaccinated people, and anyone who is not vaccinated nor immune. And boy, do the miracle vaccines seemingly become less miraculous each month as studies show how quickly their effectiveness fades or is downgraded. A vaccine has to show 50% effectiveness for the FDA to approve it. They are touted as helping the majority of the population, which is at lower risk for serious hospitalization or death. I am not suggesting you wait and get COVID, but I am asking for you to think about the naturally immune. By the CDC's own numbers over a month ago, it is at least 140 million people in the US. When combined with those who have been vaccinated, why would you divide society based on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated vs. immune vs. non-immune, and why do people just buy into this memory-holing of natural immunity and embrace the authoritarianism of "The Science" and not actually, you know, science?