[nsainsbury]

Actually, I would argue we don't have good data from the use of the vaccines. Part of the reason is because all the mechanisms used for reporting things like side-effects, effectiveness, etc. have a litany of confounding variables which haven't been controlled for which could be far better corrected for/isolated with good studies.

For example, when it comes to vaccine side-effects, I don't think there exists a true account for how common the side-effects really are. The most common way to report side-effects (VAERS, and similar national databases) are dismissed due to the self-reporting nature, local GPs frequently dismiss side-effects and tell people to just go home and take a Panadol with zero reporting going on (I had this happen to me - started experiencing severe chest pain 2 days post-Pfizer. Subsequently saw a cardiologist after months of pain and his comment to me was "I'm seeing young people like you daily and your cases are going widely underreported"), etc.

Likewise, when it comes to vaccine effectiveness, there are a million and one confounding variables from % of the population that already had natural immunity, covid variants, health, age, seasonality, societal lockdowns, isolation, etc.

Also, it's important I think for us to raise the bar to the highest possible standard when you're talking about a medical intervention that was forced under significant duress (loss of job, social stigma, public/medical shaming) on a substantial percentage of the world's population. We should not be content as a society to come within inches of worldwide medical authoritarianism without asking some seriously hard fucking questions and imposing the absolute strictest and highest possible scientific standards to justify why.

[leppr]

> I had this happen to me - started experiencing severe chest pain 2 days post-Pfizer. Subsequently saw a cardiologist after months of pain and his comment to me was "I'm seeing young people like you daily and your cases are going widely underreported"

Orthogonal to the original conversation but have your cardiologist consultations yielded anything?

I also have chest pain for now more than 2 months after the second dose of the Biontech mRNA vaccine, but the tests revealed nothing abnormal. A few people in my entourage have been having similar symptoms but theirs has since receeded.

It doesn't help that search engine results for anything close to "Covid-19 Vaccine Chest Pain" are overran by both antivax conspiracy theorists and obvious propaganda. I couldn't find concrete information save from a few disparate accounts of similar conditions[1], despite the apparent frequency of those symptoms.

[1]: https://spectator.com.au/2021/11/my-post-vaccine-chest-pain-...

[guywhocodes]

For me it took 6 months before the pain was reduced to "infrequent", I'm back to exercising almost to the full extent now as I was in July.

I received a diagnosis of pericarditis and had persistent tachycardia, mildest strain and my heart rate would shoot to 170 BPM not going below 85 while lying down. Now I'm back to normal and my resting heart rate is now 50-55 BPM.

[YeBanKo]

Despite large population and supposedly lots of data, CDC was very slow to notice this.

[fabian2k]

But we actually don't need the VAERS data to examine if the vaccines are better than the alternative. We do need it to provide accurate labels for side effects, but that is all.

We can simply look at infection, hospitalization and death in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. If we properly match the populations, we can determine if the vaccine saves lives, and it turns out that they do save a lot of lives.

[nsainsbury]

That's true. And I agree that the vaccines have saved lives - mostly, of the old and the very sick/unhealthy.

However, what is less clear today is whether there has been a net positive or negative effect of the vaccine for young healthy people. You can only come to that conclusion if you actually had high quality data and studies on vaccine side-effects, effectiveness in population groups stratified by age, health, etc.

I suspect that the vaccines, mandates, lockdowns, etc. have been a net negative for the overall health of young (<50), and healthy people, and the body of scientific evidence will support this position in the future. It's just cloudy today because it's wrapped up in politics...but the science will eventually win out.

[fabian2k]

We have high-quality data on the vaccines and their side effects. We don't have RCTs with billions of people, but that is data we never had for anything and can't reasonably get.

Judging the risk/benefit ratio is the primary purpose of the regulatory agencies that approve vaccines. I don't see any reason to believe the claim that the vaccines are harmful for everyone below 50, that sounds quite outrageous to me. There have been adjustments based on new data for the vaccines a few times, e.g. younger people are generally recommended to be vaccinated with Biontech and not Moderna or AZ based on the side effects of these vaccines. That doesn't mean the risk/benefit ratio is bad there, it only means that we have vaccines with a more favorable profile for those age groups.

[jeromegv]

Exactly. They DID make adjustments to not give Moderna/AstraZeneca to younger people because they had the side effect data and compared it to the risk of getting COVID and realized that Pfizer was probably better at mitigating those risks

Another clear case of someone implying totally crazy things (younger folks without the vaccine would have been better without the vaccine) with absolutely NOTHING to support it.

[mandmandam]

.. If only we had clear data to make such a decision.

However, collecting and analyzing that data would likely have eaten a percent or two into the eighty billion dollars Pfizer made last year, so I guess there's nothing we can do but trust the same authorities that brought us 'natural origin for sure', 'masks don't work', 'NNVTs don't mean anything any more', and 'Covid isn't airborne'.

[jeromegv]

Why do you mix mandates and lockdowns in there? What does it have to do with the vaccine?

If you bring lockdowns into the picture, you have to compare to what would have happened WITHOUT a lockdown as well, how many more deaths in hospitals, etc. The countries that tried this strategy have a very high excess death to compared to those that tried to limit human contacts (especially PRE vaccine).

[guywhocodes]

But we have a similar noise in COVID death and injury as we have incentivized hospitals to register everything and everyone as COVID related. And I believe we all know just about any PCR test can be made positive if you use enough cycles.

Sorry but I can't distrust VAERS and then trust the COVID injection complication data added by the same people but now with financial incentives.

[rsfern]

You shouldn’t distrust VAERS per se, but it’s purpose is not risk assessment. It’s purpose is surfacing rare side effects for further study.

You don’t have to trust the drug co’s for that, we also have vaccine safety datalink system; so far the only notable side effect of the mRNA vaccines has been the myocarditis in younger people.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34477809/

Also your point about PCR testing is not accurate.

[guywhocodes]

> Also your point about PCR testing is not accurate.

Source on that? Because all graphs I've seen show impossible to miss fluorescence around 35 cycles and up.

AFAICT VSD only does specific research at their own behest and currently don't have a section on COVID-19 vaccines.

Btw your link is dead.

I had pericarditis and some immediate reaction, my cardiologist thinks it was partially intravenously applied. Looking at the data on severe reactions from where I live I've been able to obviously tell that CDC must have used incredible criteria for their numbers. At least initially, I stopped caring when it eventually became clear to me that we do not really want to know how many are harmed.

And from the perspective of everyone involved I understand it, I too want this to be over, I too want this to be a safe magic bullet. But seems to me somewhere between 1:1000-10000 have significant heart issues from the Pfizer vaccine, but when we were rolling it out the numbers were claimed to be 1 in 230M.

[rsfern]

The link isn’t dead for me, but I guess there’s no abstract on pubmed, sorry. This is the DOI link: https://DOI.org/10.1001/jama.2021.14808

It’s an editorial summarizing the first VSD report on Covid vaccine side effect research that I was describing (https://DOI.org/10.1001/jama.2021.15072)

I’m not going to argue that the US seemed to take longer and have worse communication about the myo/pericarditis issue than some other countries, but these things are being followed up on. The absolute timing I think is hard to discuss with a definite time frame

Here are some resources on PCR amplification:

- https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking...

- https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning...

[ummonk]

"If we properly match the populations," - that's a big if though. Without any matching, vaccines appear to have negative value because older people are more likely to get vaccinated, but even controlling for age there are a variety of potential confounding variables like general health, risk-avoidance, etc.

[rsfern]

VAERS is for surfacing hypotheses about rare side effects

For serious risk quantification and causal analysis, we have things like the vaccine safety datalink, which links all electronic health records across a bunch of hospital systems, covering IIRC 3% of the US population. The UK has something similar I think. I think transparency in that system (VSD) could be better, but it has the same problem this thread is discussing, that anonymizing the records may be at odds with making the analysis reproducible.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34477809/