>Yes, those metals at the concentrations in vaccines can cause minor side effects, though there is no evidence of serious side effects.
How about this to ensure safety: demonstrate that they are safe at say 100 times the amount used in vaccines. Has this been done? No, is what I understand. ( if you do find a study to that effect please put it here or email me).If that can be demonstrated then we can be reasonably sure that 1/100 the massive dose will be relatively harmless.
The way it is normally put : that is no evidence of serious side effects is disingenuous. It's the other way round, it has to be demonstrated that it has no serious side effects.
> When in fact there is no data at the moment to support their safeness.
That’s patently untrue. We have data, from the phase III trials. Is the data final? No. But it’s good evidence for general safety. As for long-term problems, we have good theoretical reasons (based, in turn, on experimental data) to suspect that no such risks exist. In fact, we know quite a lot about how foreign RNA behaves in cells and while there are potential mechanisms to cause issues (most importantly strong immune reactions), there are no known plausible mechanisms to cause long-term problems.
We can’t fully exclude the possibility of long-term averse effects, but we do have data supporting the vaccines’ safety (both direct and indirect, experimental data), and most experts are confident that there won’t be any such effects — confident enough to put their own health on the line: many are enrolled in the ongoing trials.
> Data reviewed did not demonstrate convincing evidence of toxicity from doses of thimerosal used in vaccines. In case reports of accidental high-dose exposures in humans to thimerosal or ethyl mercury toxicity was demonstrated only at exposures that were 100 or 1000 times that found in vaccines.
I don't think this is unreasonable. (I lack the domain knowledge to call it reasonable or not. Though there are few vaccines that are safe for adults and unsafe for children.)
But it's a stretch to brand that as "the science we have so far."
"The safety of thimerosal is entirely possible to evaluate. It was in a bunch of childhood vaccines; it now is not. Has there been any demonstrable difference?"
If you don't believe that proper clinical trials are important to evaluate safety then there's not much more I can say. Epidemiological studies are rife with problems and the data can be manipulated to claim almost anything you want.
"Not necessarily. Could just not be worth the fight with the anti-vaxxers spreading bullshit about it. See also: Subway ditching azodicarbonamide because some blogger started a scaremongering movement around it."
Good point, but mercury is one of the most toxic substances known to man, does not break down, and is scientifically proven to bio-accumulate in mammalian tissues and never leave. It was also injected directly into the body, bypassing all the normal biological defenses a compound must go through before entering tissues. Furthermore, people can chose to not eat Subway without consequence. If vaccines had thimerosal in them again, it would be unavoidable without major life changes and being forcibly removed from large swaths of civil society. A consequence so severe necessitates a more proof than just saying you think mercury is safe in small doses with zero supporting concrete evidence.
Thimerosal was removed around 2001, well before the anti-vaxxer movement had enough influence to matter.
Your feelings and weak suppositions about thimerosal in vaccines are not science, and rather just indicate that you want to believe what you want to believe without presenting any concrete evidence.
> Is there any scientific literature on potential dangers of these standard vaccines? Maybe newer findings?
> I’m asking because this is such a polarizing topic that science-trusting people could totally have developed a blind spot by now.
There are massive publicly-accessible databases of reported possible adverse reactions to vaccines. You can easily download a spreadsheet listing every reported instance of someone developing a runny nose or rash after receiving a vaccine last year in the US. It is very reasonable to assume that the reporting rate for more serious reactions is plenty high enough for any real patterns to be quite noticeable from analyzing that data, at least for the vaccines that are given to large portions of the public. There is no blind spot when it comes to safety of the vaccines that have been recommended for the general public; this is well monitored and the safety of something like the MMR vaccine is supported by a mountain of data. Anyone questioning the long-established safety of common vaccines needs to provide up-front an analysis of VAERS data and a very good explanation for why they think that data is inaccurate.
There's no evidence it caused harm. For example, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal#Toxicology - "the World Health Organization has concluded that there is no evidence of toxicity from thiomersal in vaccines and no reason on safety grounds to change to more expensive single-dose administration"
> They stopped putting it into American vaccines about then
Because American worry warts were induced into a false panic by a fraud pushing a false connection between vaccinations and autism, leading to a specific belief that the mercury in thiomersal was the main factor.
The US authorities believed the precautionary response of removing thiomersal would increase public confidence in the vaccination system, even without solid evidence that it caused a problem. (The evidence by comparing autism in the US with a country that didn't use thiomersal was that thiomersal did not have a contributing effect.)
The US can do this because it has the money that a poorer country does not.
However, this precautionary removal caused people like you to believe the authorities were hiding a connection.
See https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4826a3.htm for the stated reason. (" There is a significant safety margin incorporated into all the acceptable mercury exposure limits. Furthermore, there are no data or evidence of any harm caused by the level of exposure that some children may have encountered in following the existing immunization schedule. Infants and children who have received thimerosal-containing vaccines do not need to be tested for mercury exposure.")
> when they got a dozen simultaneous vaccinations each preserved with the stuff
However, the CDC link points out "Some but not all of the vaccines recommended routinely for children in the United States contain thimerosal". https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.... says MMR, Varicella, IPV, and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines have never contained thimerosal, which are 3 of the 11.
What on earth is that piece of random rumourmongering based on?
I felt horrible for ~24 hours after my second Pfizer shot. If that counts as hard then sure, 1% is believable. If it is actually harmful side effects than that is total nonsense. 1% is a huge, huge number of people.
> Am I correct in saying your grievance is a lack of evidence that they're helpful?
Part of the second picture that the user has highlighted basically says that said vaccine contains a mercury derivative and that it has not been tested for "carcinogenic or mutagenic potential, or for impairment of fertility". So I would say that this is also part of his issue.
>Up to 2019, there are some studies that clearly show that the VAERS data underestimates the bad side effects of (some) vaccines, up to a factor of 100.
You mean before vaccines became extremely politicized? I think we can safely assume those numbers aren't useful anymore now that the well has been poisoned.
>But this has to be objectively studied.
There were plenty of double blind studies on the covid vaccines. Those are the gold standard. I'm not even sure what you are asking for here.
> has been demonstrated through various data to be a spectacular failure in terms of safety and efficacy.
Wat.
There are 6 major vaccines which are approved for use in most countries. Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca, Sinopharm, Sputnik. Most are extremely safe (obviously risks are non-zero, but those risks are orders of magnitudes better than the effects of the disease). Some are extremely effective (at reducing severe disease and/or reducing the spread of disease), at least for the first several months. Some are even very effective against a variant that didn’t present until after development and testing were done. Only 2 are mRNA based, which I presume is what you mean by “experimental”. These vaccines have been administered in billions of doses and side effects have been monitored for over a year. Your statements completely overstate the facts as observed.
>well reasoned skepticism would come naturally for technical professionals.
It's not well-reasoned skepticism to question the safety of a vaccine for which every vaccine adverse event reporting database reports two orders of magnitude more adverse events than previous vaccines? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z would you call Nature an anti-vax journal?
You said the Covid vaccines contained heavy metals. You were corrected on that one simple fact. That's the limit of mine and the other commenters involvement.
I'll say it again: Neither he, nor I, made any statement to you for/against the vaccine. We corrected a factual inaccuracy about the ingredients.
That this is bothering you so much is kind of troubling. Don't you want to have all the facts?
Data please. Are you claiming vaccines does not contain large amount of aluminum and mercury. Large enough to cause autoimmune diseases and even death.
Let us talk data instead of trying to shoot down the voice, which seems to have become the trend in the west lately
How about this to ensure safety: demonstrate that they are safe at say 100 times the amount used in vaccines. Has this been done? No, is what I understand. ( if you do find a study to that effect please put it here or email me).If that can be demonstrated then we can be reasonably sure that 1/100 the massive dose will be relatively harmless.
The way it is normally put : that is no evidence of serious side effects is disingenuous. It's the other way round, it has to be demonstrated that it has no serious side effects.
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