It's so sad to see that you are the first one with any kind of source in your comment. The rest are only saying scary stuff and you are supposed to argue with that. They are saying stuff like "my friend died because of the jab" and you come with studies links, which can sound unfriendly. And we are on HN, for fuck's sake.
The articles are fantastic, it's the unscientific claim that the data implies safety that's at issue. You can't post research about the fact that people misinterpret research right? But it's factually true. Most of the people on HN are not trained in doing or reviewing research. And not just on HN. Everyone can purchase an ad that claims to be the arbiter. Everyone can say they represent the consensus.
But the people with more money can buy more ads just like Google can stomp out any competitor, because they control the data channel.
It's a logical problem. Should we start requiring a license to hold an opinion about research? Who would we trust to govern that licensing process?
It's not really so simple as finding a source to back your claim. You need to be able to defend your interpretation of that source.
Bottom line "safety" is subjective. That's the critical argument. Compared to what is it safe?
Vaccine with a guarantee of infection, maybe the vaccine is safer.
Vaccinating everyone? Well, we didn't really study that. How do you study people in larger numbers with a guarantee that they don't get infected?
They didn't. They just assume everyone is infected and that number makes the research look valid and safe.
In fact, it's not.
The average person is more likely to have negative outcomes from vaccine than natural infection combined with non-infection.
So is it safe for someone who won't be infected at all? What about for someone that won't exhibit symptoms?
No. It's far less safe for those people.
300x-30,000x less safe. Depends on your estimation of asymptomatic and uninfected subjects in the real world.
It's more safe for someone in their 70s, with cancer, or whatever. Fine. But say that clearly. Don't try to bury that in summaries that obfuscate what you really studied.
Doing so destroys trust in science.
Not advocating for or against this vaccine platform, though. I'm advocating for laws about what meets and doesn't meet scientific rigor, as are most scientists right now.
In [1] "those who are not vaccinated" is a tiny subset of society that is actually composed of those who are infected, and also symptomatic, and also not vaccinated.
A large portion of society can't be counted because they are asymptomatic. How do you find them to count them? In fact that's nearly everyone. And for those people the vaccine increases their risk by 4/100,000. (More harm than good.)
If we accept your (extremely unrealistic) premise, then sure, but the numbers get worse at just a 5% chance of contracting the virus itself, and downhill from there.
Your premise is that COVID infection at just 5% is incredibly dangerous. But you can't actually say that without first knowing how many people were actually infected and asymptomatic. And you don't know that.
For all we know, everyone was infected, and infection is nearly harmless. Or it could be that it's way less contagious than that, and extremely deadly. You simply don't know. You'd need to make wild guesses without evidence.
We're supposed to be doing science, right? Seems to me your premise is the one that's unrealistic. Mine is firmly grounded in evidence that we DO have. Not guesses and doomsday religion.
70/100k is baseline. 5/100k is vaccination. 200/100k is unvaccinated with covid.
With vaccination you're at 75/100k.
Without vaccination at 0% chance of covid you're at 70/100k.
Without vaccination at 5% chance you're at 77/100k (worse than 75 here), at 10% 83, etc, etc.
> We're supposed to be doing science, right? Seems to me your premise is the one that's unrealistic. Mine is firmly grounded in evidence that we DO have. Not guesses and doomsday religion.
There are plenty of studies linked in this thread, that you're simply ignoring.
See section 2.4. The "unvaccinated" group includes people with a history of myocarditis and pericarditis who had an episode during the study, and coupled with the fact that cases "without an episode" were excluded, we should expect that the numbers are very much inflated.
There indeed are plenty of studies linked. I'm not ignoring them, I'm using them to point out that they don't carry the implications necessary to recommend vaccination for everyone.
To make the claim that the vaccine LOWERED incidence of myocarditis even for those without covid, counter to so much other research (e.g. [0]), we would like to see that the study excludes people with a history of myocarditis.
Including them is cheating, quite simply.
Regardless, even if we did go with this Spanish study, you still can't say that a 5% chance of infection is worse. You can say that a 5% of symptomatic infection is worse. There isn't any study in the thread that includes asymptomatic infection, which we know is MOST infection.
So at least so far, I don't see that you have the math to back what appears to be an unscientific claim.
And when faced with the counter research below [0], defining the mechanism of action, we should assume that the risks are a valid concern. You can't just sweep them under the rug.
Most people who tested positive had no symptoms. Most people who didn't get tested also had no symptoms but were likely infected. All of those people shouldn't take on additional risk in their own self interest. At best you can claim that they should take on the risk to try to achieve herd immunity so as to protect others. And actually I'm not sure that we have the data to determine that either.
I'm probably misunderstanding something, but if the overall population risk for myocarditis is bigger than 4/100,000, wouldn't that indicate that mRNA vaccinated people have a lower risk? The number I found for the global population is 10~20/100,000. If taking the vaccine increases the risk, wouldn't the risk be bigger than 10~20/100k?
If the risk went down the term for that is "inverse correlation." In that case it would be preventative, rather than causative. Here we are seeing a correlation and we have a known mechanism of action that's driving that (described in the Stanford study).
Is that making more sense?
In part though, you are right to be noticing that the Pfizer study and the Stanford study disagree on the risk profile.
Why might that be?
Well, for one thing, if you look up the peer reviewers for the Pfizer study, it's the same list of names as the ones that performed the research, and each one of them is a Pfizer employee. Unsurprisingly, the lower risk profile was found in a study conducted by the same drug company that stands to profit from a lower risk profile. And it's not peer reviewed. Typically we rely on peer reviewed research in the world of science and medicine. Without it, it becomes very difficult to differentiate a science article from advertising, and pseudoscience.
Conversely the Stanford study was done by various researchers from various schools with no conflict of interest and no apparent profit from Pfizer, as best I can tell. And as we'd expect, they found not only a causal link, not only a higher incidence rate, but also the mechanism of action that drives it.
See my other comment answering this. It's only higher if you don't trust peer reviewed research, and instead use the numbers provided by the drug company in a study that was not peer reviewed. See the list of peer reviewers in Pfizer's study and notice that they are the same as the researchers, and that they've made claims without providing their results (those are still being released over an 80 year period by FOIA court order, you'll get the results when we're all dead).
If you can't find a link to the court case on this, let me know. I'll find it for you.
Unvaccinated occurance was 200 per 100k [1].
[0] https://www.oslo-universitetssykehus.no/en/departments/hjert...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262150/