> It is administered with a disposable needle-free injector, which uses a narrow stream of the fluid to penetrate the skin and deliver the jab to the proper tissue.
I've never heard of something like this [0],[1]. It's not injector-free, but rather needle-free.
Last jab I got I was sitting and waiting and I was looking around distracted and suddenly I felt the nurse was pushing the cotton already. She had injected me and I didn't feel anything at all. How are needles painful?
It varies on person (including mental state), needle size, and nurse/operator skill. I suspect one bad experience with a needle can prime someone for a poor response in follow up experiences.
Indeed. Both covid jabs were perfectly fine, it probably doesn't get any more painless than that come to think of it, but I had a regular one in February with a cocktail of various vaccines and that one was much less pleasant.
Very cool if the efficacy numbers turn out to be true. No reason to doubt them, but a few of the vaccines have turned out to have wildly worse efficacy numbers in the real world compared to what was reported by the manufacturer. 28K trial pool (including children) is good, let's see if the numbers hold up over time.
The CDC website said Pfizer is 53% effective against infection while the Indian one is 66% against symptomatic delta. So it’s probably still not as good as the mRNA ones.
But not particularly great compared to Covishield (Oxford-AZ) and Covaxin which are the main vaccines in use in India. The fancy needle free injector is almost certainly going to be more expensive than a normal syringe and will make logistics more difficult. While the thermal stability is great, I don't think it will be a game changer. The one thing it has going for it is that it can be given to children above 12.
Not qualified enough for intramuscular injections and paperwork? It doesn't seem likely.
Fancy injectors might have advantages: less expensive, more expensive (in a corrupt enough setup), more compact, faster to use, physically or chemically better, but novelty itself makes them less easy to use.
I couldn't find the effectiveness of Covishield against Delta but for Covaxin the claimed efficacy is in the same ballpark at 65%. So this is not bad at all.
My very limited understanding tells me that the human body is a very complex system not fully understood.
I only have engineering analogies, but deploying bad software in a complex distributed system can appear fine until latent effects are discovered literally years later (e.g. all data in a specific column for a subset of users was overwritten for records within 6 months in 2008).
My understanding with some debilitating, fatal conditions are that the causes are not well known.
Fundamentally, it seems that most science is a result of abductive, deductive reasoning etc but ultimately, tinkering and observation i.e. if you don't analyse something over 10 years, you don't know its effect over 10 years.
By using a variety of different vaccines all over the world the expression of humanity is that we are spreading the risk among various vaccine types or contracting COVID itself.
So for a mostly self-interested individual in a rural area with a low chance of catching COVID, would it follow that the safest (but maybe selfish) bet is to wait many years?
Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge?
>Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge?
Pharmaceutical-risk-based arguments aside, India is in a pretty bad spot COVID-wise. A massive proportion of the population is dirt poor (<$1/hr) and the broader society in general don't give a damn about their plight.
They cannot afford to lock down. If they do so, millions will starve to death.
They were literally begging, fighting and worse to get access to oxygen tanks earlier this year. The unlucky ones watched their parents and grandparents asphyxiate in their homes with no access to treatment of any kind.
If this stuff can be produced cheaply, locally and quickly, then it will be lapped up gratefully by the hundreds of millions of poor people who would be dead and buried before they got the opportunity to receive Pfizer or Moderna.
What could or might happen 10 years down the track will be the least of their worries if we see another flare up.
> if you don't analyse something over 10 years, you don't know its effect over 10 years
Yes, that is why long term studies are done. Vaccine as a methodology has been proven effective. Many diseases are non-existent now thanks to it.
My knowledge is limited with respect to COVID vaccines but if they are any thing like the vaccines developed for flu strains then they will not have any adverse impact.
>By using a variety of different vaccines all over the world the expression of humanity is that we are spreading the risk among various vaccine types or contracting COVID itself.
"spreading the risk among various vaccine types" could you elaborate on this?
"Yes, that is why long term studies are done. Vaccine as a methodology has been proven effective. Many diseases are non-existent now thanks to it."
But aren't the new vaccines of a different kind? Genetically engeneered?
So I too had my doubts, before getting the shot. And I still do. But what I do know for example is, that I had strong side effects after the first dose. And also strong side effects just before my second shot of Astra. In other words, the mind is a strong factor here and the body is used to deal with alien dna all the time, so I do not worry too much about long term effects.
> But aren't the new vaccines of a different kind? Genetically engeneered?
Only some are (those based on mRNA and DNA). There are many others based on older biotech (using inactivated virus) too. I think some of the protein based vaccine, like Novavax, are also older tech than mRNA / DNA based ones, and have been studied longer (someone more experienced can chime in and correct me if I am wrong).
If you truly believe that you can wait out a few years without being at reasonable risk of getting COVID, you're logic isn't off. You are ultimately correct, we can't actually really know what the 5+ year side effects are until we actually witness them, though I believe the data at hand indicates that they should be long-term safe.
Pretty much any type of reasoning + data at hand would indicate that any type of "years past" risks that would occur with vaccines would also be present with COVID itself (especially along the inactivated virus and mRNA vaccine routes). And if the magnitude of the risks scale with exposure (they probably do), then getting straight up COVID would still yield higher long-term risk than getting vaccinated (and either successfully not getting infected, or getting infected).
Basically, if you really think your choice is between not getting COVID, and not getting COVID and getting vaccinated, then obviously not getting COVID at all yields the lowest possible risk. I would challenge anyone's risk assessment on thinking they can just... not get COVID over a 10 year window however.
Perhaps one change to your analogy is that the intention of these vaccines doesn't map well to new software into a distributed system. It's more like providing a specifically crafted input to a system. Long-term there is supposed to be no distinct "vaccine" sub-unit that you can point to in the human body, there's only the human bodies persisted long-term memory and response to a vaccine. I dunno if that's meaningfully changes your thinking at all, but maybe worth thinking about.
This seems like a good assessment. Personally I don't plan on avoiding COVID for the next 10 years nor do I even live in a rural area. Hypothetical.
I don't fully agree with the last paragraph. I mean I think if you're charitable you can alter the analogy a little bit to make it fit. I agree that there is no "vaccine" sub-unit, but let's say the equivalent is temporarily changing a data structure that is read by service A, not thinking about service B. Or not fully examining the flow on effects from service A etc.
I don't think we really need to think about "reaching in and changing internals". Vaccines are very literally specific inputs into a reactive distributed system with distributed memory/persistance. We are crafting inputs based on our understanding of system internals and prior system behaviour to similar inputs, but they are very much inputs.
> if you really think your choice is between not getting COVID, and not getting COVID and getting vaccinated,
Getting vaccinated, then getting COVID is always an option.
Either way, from my personal anecdotes, aka friends and family- I now know at least a handful of people with permanent life altering reactions to the vaccine, and one death from the vaccine. These are all younger people that were previously in good health. Given my age, health, and natural immunity- it makes zero sense for me to incur additional risk from the vaccine.
The vast majority of these events are happening at or below the level of "background noise", meaning people are indeed getting sick and dying after taking the vaccine, but that it is highly unlikely to be the vaccine's fault.
I would not really trust CDC pages as primary sources considering the surgeon general tweeted that masks don't work. The CDC is either incompetent or political, either way, not a reliable source of information.
Then you have Fauci redefining "Gain of Function" research to claim that engineering an animal virus to spread to humans is not Gain of Function: https://youtu.be/IqUOcVwRUtc
Mind you, Fauci is part of the NIH, not the CDC, but still an egregious case of government officials purposely pushing misinformation.
I can't vouch for this data being uncorrupted but it's pretty much all we have. It's also user submitted which is quite unfortunate - you think there would be a system for hospitals and doctors to use - with some higher level of verification. Nope, this is the crapshoot we are handed.
I see 500,000 submissions in the CSV for 2021 but not all of them are for covid vaccines. It'd be nice to see a data scientist pull this data into Tableau or scipy/pyplot/etc and create some good visuals and breakdowns so we can get a better idea of what's going on with these vaccine side effects.
It's more than possible, it's actually likely given Israel's soaring number of breakthrough cases in an almost entirely vaccinated population.
The vaccines have applied selective pressure to create super strains. It won't be long before we have a covid strain akin to airborne AIDS. I'd say it's prudent to have a good N100/P100 respirator for if and when that time comes.
> I now know at least a handful of people with permanent life altering reactions to the vaccine, and one death from the vaccine.
What type of life altering reactions? And also what country do you live in, because the number of AstraZeneca deaths due to clotting disorders is incredibly low.
POTs, myocarditis, heart attack(this was the death, in a healthy 28 yr old, same day as virus), stroke, and less seriously(I hope) wildly disrupted periods.
edit: Country - USA, all either Moderna or Pfizer.
Was the heart attack reported anywhere? That sounds like serious news (I assume you mean same day as the vaccine - Google is only showing me virus related ones).
The parents may have reported it. That I don't know. I do know that they were angry. They wanted an autopsy and instead got a cremation and got stonewalled by the doctors.
How did they wind up getting an unwanted cremation? Generally funeral proceedings are next of kin responsibilities (including financial, unfortunately). Was the body just not turned over to them? Do you know which state this happened in?
> Getting vaccinated, then getting COVID is always an option.
The point of your immune system is to fight a virus when you conduct it and the point of getting vaccinated is in very simplified terms to "train" your immune system for when that happens.
So, would you rather conduct the virus without having been vaccinated or after having been vaccinated?
I only had some biology in school so I'm far from an expert but it seems pretty weird to me that people think a vaccine will give them actual immunity, as in, they won't even be able to get that virus anymore.
Now in terms of mRNA and DNA vaccines, I personally think that this is how vaccines will generally work in the future, for many reasons. Although do note that there are all kinds of COVID-19 vaccines, about 30 around the world with different technologies being used. Only the "top" ones use this new technology and they are mostly used in more wealthy and developed nations. I can't really comment on your last paragraph, personally I don't know anyone who has had any complications from these vaccines, although here we only have Pfizer-BioNTech (mRNA based) and Moderna (mRNA based). AstraZeneca which is DNA based did not pass trials in my country.
I would rather not take my chances with the vaccine after already beating the virus, and having been exposed to it several times subsequently and having no symptoms whatsoever. Adverse reactions to the vaccine seem to be more common if you've already contracted covid in the past. I've read several(anecdotal) reports of people losing their naturally acquired antibodies after the vaccine. And there's evidence that the vaccine has an adverse effect on existing T-cell function. Hence the common side effects of viral resurgence for people with herpes/shingles.
The craziest thing about the approach to the vaccines is that there is almost no push to do mass antibody testing, nor is natural immunity being considered a viable option to the vaccine. Natural immunity should give you a fuller spectrum of protection, not just protection against the spike protein. But somehow this is no longer accepted science.
I think your premise is greatly flawed. The risk from getting a little piece of Covid mRNA is infinitesimal compared to the risk of getting Covid and having the whole genome replicated, all the proteins, and actually maybe dying to Covid or suffering long Covid after.
I don’t know of any risks that have been shown to be associated with the vaccine.
If I had to argue against your assessment of the risk, I would reframe or reiterate part of my premise which is really that you cannot measure the risk of what you don't know.
That being said, if I'm a betting man, I suspect someone strictly avoiding vaccines through my original line of reasoning would end up like a prepper who never lives through doom's day.
While my personal energies are geared towards physics, there are some underlying mechanisms in biology we collectively do have a solid grasp on. We're far away being from always being able do the X that results in Y, but we are getting to the point where we can rule out some actions. Like if you drive a ford pinto into a tree, it might crumple, it might combust, but it will almost certainly not undergo nuclear fission.
Since we're not replicating the entirety of the virus, just a segment with a particular geometry, we can say with some confidence what kinds of things it /can't/ do.
Yes but what is known is the number of deaths from covid, currently standing at 4.4 millions worldwide and 600k and counting in the US vs. very few if any attributable to taking the vaccine.
So I would argue any reasonable measure of risk is pointing to the vaccine being absolutely the safer alternative (also taking into account that vaccines have been around a very long time, the long term risk is not likely to be high).
And thats is before taking into account the fact that no matter how isolated you are, unless you never interact with anyone, you will likely come into contact with the virus sooner or later.
What are you talking about now? The vaccine or the virus? Because that's literally true for both! And the mRNA vaccine has a fraction of the code compared to the full virus.
What are the risks? The only ones I know are some thrombosis risk which is tiny for the traditional Astra Zeneca vaccine in the UK. Can you list any serious risk for the mRNA vaccines that has been demonstrated or revealed?
>1 As of 4 April 2021, a total of 169 cases of CVST and 53 cases of splanchnic vein thrombosis were reported to EudraVigilance. Around 34 million people had been vaccinated in the EEA and UK by this date. The more recent data do not change the PRAC’s recommendations.
How many lives should we estimate those 34 million doses saved? This is simple math. Thrombosis sounds scary but what is more scary and mathematically favored is my unvaccinated family member whose lungs are bricks right now, alone on a ventilator with a 10-15% chance to live.
There is a potential rate of 1-3000/1-6000 getting myocarditis for young males after the second dose [0]. The CDC says the chance of being hospitalized for COVID is 1-2 in 100,000 [1]. Other doctors are saying one dose may be adequate [2] for those in this age range. As someone who falls in this age group, after evaluating my risk factor, it seems logical to not get the vaccine, or potentially get 1 dose. Am I wrong for thinking this?
I agree with you. The one thing I will say though is, it is necessary to look at the vaccines more in depth to make a judgement.
For example, I would vastly prefer the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA based vaccines over the AstraZeneca DNA based vaccine.
That is because the AstraZeneca vaccine uses a "harmless" carrier virus to carry the DNA. The problem I see with that is that your immune system also builds resilience against said carrier virus, rendering future shots of the vaccine more ineffective. Because of that, they might have to "update" the vaccine if more booster shots in the future are required.
"So for a mostly self-interested individual in a rural area with a low chance of catching COVID, would it follow that the safest (but maybe selfish) bet is to wait many years?"
It would be fine strategy for Hepatatis B, for example, however delta COVID is so infectious that most people will get it, vaccinated or unvaccinated (with currently available vaccines). The only difference will be severity of the disease.
Yep. We’ve seen Covid spread a lot in many rural states. It’s not about living in rural area, it’s more about living without seeing any human for a very long time.
If you've ever cut yourself in a non-sterile environment, then you have been exposed to thousands of times more genetic material and invading pathogens then a vaccine contains, bent on doing much more serious damage.
For some reason people worry about "what vaccines might do" but not "what the virus invades your cells, splices it's DNA into the replication machinery, and then invades more cells uncontrolled" will do. The virus that literally did not exist in nature till 1.5 years ago when it started infecting humans and killing them.
Like it does not only produce more viruses either - that's the goal but it's a stochastic process. You also get filled with bits of viral DNA from sheared up viruses, or ones that run into a DNAase enzyme, or from viruses where the cell shuts down or dies early and it blows fragments of viral protein into your blood stream.
I've tidied up the paragraph, but I was originally split between being COVID specific and the more general point that we're invaded by viruses and bacteria all the time. "Getting exposed to weird DNA/RNA" is the normal human experience from living in the world.
It seems the newer variants like delta are more contagious yet vastly less lethal, so if it continues this trend then yes, we're past the optimal time period for vaccinations.
I know several people that almost died from the vaccination I'm one of them and I never heard anything about any problems with the vaccination until I had problems and that seems to be the normal. The behavioral health center forced me to get it never asked me never told me just jabbed me and then all the sudden I had a ton of tubes and hoses coming out of me. I'll get reparations if I have to get them myself. Hardly any doctor will even entertain the fact that the vaccine did damage to my body. The few that do are baffled, even though I'm not the only patient they're seeing with the same exact problems that won't go away.
I am sorry you had to go through that experience. But you are one those 1 or 2% rare and unlucky cases that are known to happen, who have some severe reaction to the vaccines. That said, I am shocked that you were vaccinated without your knowledge. I am very pro-vaccine, but would never support someone being vaccinated against their will.
> Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge?
One obvious flaw I can point out in your reasoning is that you are mixing tried and tested technology with new ones. While mRNA and DNA based COVID-19 vaccines are based on new technology and perhaps their long-term impact is not yet fully known or understood (and need to be studied), there are many other vaccines based on the older, more widely used and studied bio-technology (e.g. vaccines using inactivated virus). The older vaccine biotech have been studied for, and perfected over, more than half a century. So even if the efficacy of vaccines created with older tech maybe purportedly lower (not really) than the vaccines based on newer biotech, you can be relatively sure that they are safe.
Your concern about the long term impact of newer mRNA and DNA based vaccines may be justified. But that shouldn't extend to the vaccines based on the old, tried and tested and well-understood popular tech that has successfully been used in other older vaccines for decades now. (Yes, even the COVID-19 vaccines based on older biotech need to be studied. But because of the decades of data we already have, we can be reasonably predict that nothing biologically unexpected will happen. And so most of the long-term studies of these older biotech vaccines are more focused, with fewer parameters, to determine how long their efficacy lasts. With the newer mRNA and DNA vaccines though, the long-term study will have more parameters to study and more diligently observe if some thing unexpected may occur in the future.)
So all said and done, even if the prevalence of the epidemic is low in your rural area, it is much better and safer for you and your community to get vaccinated, than remain unvaccinated. It just takes one undetected case to spread it to others.
It is helpful to consider the four prior coronaviruses that are in widespread circulation among humans.
They are believed to have causes pandemics when they first crossed over into humans, but like SARS-CoV-2 they caused very little death in children even though children are easily infected. Once someone caught them and survived, that person had some immunity. Immunity against reinfection fades, but immunity against serious illness lasts longer.
So what happened with them is that you got a terrible pandemic that did a number on adults but while widely infecting children didn't harm them much. People who caught it and survived would get reinfected as their immunity against infection faded, but would not get seriously ill, so the pandemic would eventually end with everyone eventually having been infected, and the virus regularly in circulation. Everyone gets infected every year or so, for the most part getting only mildly ill at worst.
Children born after this point all catch these viruses when they are young. They don't yet have any immunity, but these viruses only very rarely cause serious illnesses in children. They then get reinfected every year or so just like adults, but now they have the immunity against serious illness too so remain fine when they get older.
Now, hundreds of years after those viruses crossed over and caused their pandemics they are so routine that we generally don't specifically track them and don't even have a specific name for the illnesses they cause. We just lump the illness in with the illnesses caused by several other respiratory viruses and call it the "common cold". Those four coronaviruses are responsible for about 20% of the common colds in the US.
It looks like SARS-CoV-2 is heading toward becoming another common cold virus. Look at infection rates, hospitalization rates, and death rates by age group (US, through May 2021, rates per 100k):
Age Infect Hosp Death
0-17 37k 287 0.5
18-49 44k 1100 25
50-64 32k 2600 85
65+ 22k 5200 1140
Children get it, but very rarely die from it. For comparison, the death rate for children 0-12 per year in car accidents is a little over 1.3 per 100k. For kids, COVID is about as risky as taking about 50% more car trips.
If it is indeed heading down the path of the other four then it is extremely likely that you will get COVID-19 at some point, despite living in a rural area. Vaccination makes it so that when you do get your first COVID-19 infection, it will almost certainly act more like a second or third infection. Without vaccination, you go into that first infection with your immune system totally unprepared.
As far as the risks of vaccination go, yes, there is a lot we don't know about how the body works. (Ask me sometime about the mysterious lump that showed up on my ass one day, baffled all the doctors that looked at it, and a few years later just went away on its own).
But we do know a lot about vaccination in general. We've been doing that a long time. For all vaccinations so far if there was going to be a side effect it showed up within something like 6 months.
For new vaccines for new diseases the things that go into them are all things that have been well tested before, except for whatever is specific to the new disease. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, that new thing is the mRNA, but mRNA is broken down in cells in a few days.
All the COVID-19 vaccines in use in the US and Europe have been given to enough people long enough ago that we can be confident that if there are any side effect that we do not yet know about it is because they are extremely rare rather than because they take longer to develop.
Bottom line: Waiting it out perhaps made sense when it seemed like there was a chance we could eradicate SARS-CoV-2, but too many people were not willing to do what that it would have taken to do that. With it heading toward becoming the fifth common cold coronavirus that is no longer the case. Get vaccinated with one of the vaccines that has been widely deployed for at least six months.
> administered with a disposable needle-free injector, which uses a narrow stream of the fluid to penetrate the skin and deliver the jab to the proper tissue.
> They can also be stored at higher temperatures - 2 to 8C. Cadila Healthcare claims that their vaccine had shown "good stability" at 25C for at least three months
No needles means, ideally, less training needed to administer. This can keep medical staff working hospitals, where they are needed. And high temperature storage means easier handling, less spoilage.
Even if efficacy is lower with this vaccine, it's still going to save millions of lives of people who don't live in wealthy cities.
DNA is remarkably stable. I’m not sure if it’s true, but I’ve heard reports of separating it from proteins by boiling the stuff, which will certainly destroy the proteins but apparently leaves DNA largely intact.
The second it’s inside your body the enzymes in your bloodstream will start tearing it apart, but that’s also true for practically anything else you can inject. Until then, refrigeration is far more than enough.
I too see some corporate competitive politics behind Novavax - Serum Institute of India (SII), one of the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world, had been licensed to manufacture Novavax in India last year, but apparently the US administration held it up by preventing exports of the raw material with their "US first" policy. That's kind of understandable, but even in the US, I don't think Novavax is so easily available (or perhaps it is but the US media is excessively giving attention to only the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna?). Even recently, SII said they are in talks to start production of Novavax this year, but it's still not available. It's not clear what is going on behind the scene with this particular vaccine.
The company started with zero manufacturing capacity. It’s now slated for fourth quarter in the US but earlier for Europe. I wish they would have been able to partner with big pharma much like the Pfizer vaccine.
That explains why they have a tie-up with one of the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world (SII), but the delay still seems to be political (either diplomatic or because of lobbying or both). According to a recent statement by SII MD, Novavax apparently still hasn't got the full approval from US FDA - https://youtu.be/Y8xw-NO1QA0?t=15 . Meanwhile there are other reports that SII has started to test the Novavax vaccine in India (which they plan to distribute under the brand name "Covovax" after approval).
This is really cool to see. Just to help people with some context, this vaccine is 2 milligrams per shot (which is equal to 2000 micrograms). I am unsure if they use an adjuvant or not (seems like they don't).
The reason they need to use so much material is the immune activation doesn't line up with spike protein expression and presentation. This is because the plasmid has to be turned into mRNA by the cell that takes it up. By the time the mRNA is being read to make the protein, the initial immune activation by the DNA itself is already waning.
The concomitant signalling (immune activation to trick the body to think it's an actual infection, and detection of the foriegn spike protein at the time and place) is essential for robust immune response against the target. This is why the mRNA vaccines can use 100 micrograms and 30 micrograms (Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, respectively)--the innate immune activation caused by the mRNA itself occurs in at the time and space as antigen (spike protein) expression and presentation.
I wish them luck with this, but I don't believe outside of an emergency this technology will be robust enough compared to mRNA, viral-vector, and traditional vaccines.
One more thing, they detect plasmid for a month at the injection site (in non-clinical study) and nearly a month in the blood. That is a concern to me, but not a huge concern. (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428240v1)
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