I'm sure there are more and very detailed differences, like if the evidence leads to an unsafe vaccine that there are different processes.
I think the major talking point is covered by this info, which is meant for the general public. I'll make an assumption that the general public is also less educated on average than the users on HN on average. A flowchart that would satisfy a bunch of nerdy engineers (us HN users) with all possible paths would confuse the heck out of everyone else.
I guess it would be comparing the improvement from a vaccine to the better natural immunity versus the risks from a vaccine. I don't know that this is obvious.
For example, a hundredth of a percent improvement is 1 in 10k. And an already exposed person would be expected to have a less severe reaction if exposed again.
Also some people worry about certain aspects of the vaccine. Did you know that it took over 25 years to develop a lipid delivery system for mrna vaccines that wasn't toxic in animal tests? Or that they have concerns about accumulation of these lipids in organs like the liver? Or that getting sick after the vaccine may not be healthy? Or that they don't do a great job of looking for auto-immune reactions when it comes to vaccines?
It's a lot to think about. I'm a numbers guy and am happy with my conclusions on this. But I don't think it's right to force anything on others. The media often seem to do a better job of coming to conclusions for people rather than educating them.
I am not sure that this is accurate. For me it is like a coin:
- One side shows the benefits of the vaccine, and let's not forget that this side is promoted by the vaccine sellers. No problem with that, they do their job, in a few months we will see a 3rd and 4th dose being promoted to ensure immunity.
- The other side shows the cons of the vaccine, but as you said it is not sufficiently studied.
Yeah, I get your point, at the end of the day the net result is what we care about.
But the assumptions that you use to calculate that net are where all of the disagreements stem from. In your example, you've constrained it to losing well defined revenue, and "you know this fix is low risk", so the answer is easy.
Maybe (wrongly or rightly) you don't have faith in the revenue numbers, or in the test suite or the engineers writing the tests or the fix, maybe there's office politics involved, etc.
This thread started with my reaction to these lines from op:
> Knowing long-term effects (1+ years) is not a precondition of approval for most vaccines. It just so happens that vaccines usually take a long time for approval, so we end up knowing long-term effects as a side effect.
This is because there generally isn't a known mechanism for vaccines to have long term effects. Not ruling out the possibility, but we understand how vaccines work pretty well. [...]
I've seen this claim dozens of times, and it always always always makes me think of those scenarios where you find a bug in code that you or someone you trust/respect wrote from the ground up, and you wonder "how in the f*** did this ever work?". I'm not claiming I'm right to feel that way, maybe this is a defect in my character, but I just can't buy the "we understand vaccines pretty well" thing.
You’re right, they completely differ from each other (regarding their relevance) and should therefore face an adjusted amount of scrutiny.
If you’re one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world, some press releases and study protocols are simply not enough [1] and should be (imo) discarded.
If you’re a new player (Vaxxas) claiming “complete protection” by testing your product on mice, it’s simply not enough and should be (imo) discarded.
Agreed, it can be very difficult for anyone to make useful decisions outside of just trusting the existing consensus.
I mean there is no real way for me to know if a vaccine is safe. I assume it is, and prefer to gamble on it not harming me and potentially helping the current situation.
But there is really no way for me to know for sure.
To put it another way, when the Omicron variant emerged, there were newspaper articles that often showed pictures of the spike protein labelled with different mutations.
As it happens, I did research in protein structural bioinformatics, so I have a good idea what the detail in these images 'mean' in a certain sense. However they are of zero use in making a single meaningful decision about how to alter my behaviour (or not!).
Of course, the journalists add these images as decoration, but to me it symbolises the mass of irrelevant detail provided. Which is not the same as saying 'just believe science!' as that is also wrong and unhelpful.
Right, there’s not way to know that without the clinical trials that are required even for small formulation changes, our quantitative understanding of biology is not that good.
But there’s plenty of supply chain and manufacturing aspects of the approval that seem like wouldn’t need any more stringency than the ongoing monitoring for the currently approved vaccines, from my lay persons perspective anyway
Right. Either way, it’s a process we don’t have much data about. I really hate to feel this way because I’m absolutely for universal vaccination as a principle.
But this will give so much ammo to conspiracy lovers and antivaxxers :/
I don't think it is fear mongering. While the health institutes have access to the data, I don't. I don't think anyone on hacker news can make many intelligent statements about side effects, yet, though the press releases claim that they are similar to what is typical of other vaccines.
The factors are not the same in the two comparisons.
It's people who develop these vaccines. These people have friends and family, with children. These children will be vaccinated. Why would they want to place these children at too high of a risk?
If your thesis is true, then you would expect that the children or grandchildren of pharmaceutical researchers are less likely to be inoculated. Do you think that's the case? Do you have any evidence for that?
(Personal anecdote: I once met a woman who worked at Glaxo-Wellcome, back before they became GSK. Once the chicken pox vaccine was available, she immediately got her daughter inoculated.)
There are many public health organizations besides the CDC. There's the WHO, and the public health organizations of different countries. The EU, for example, also has a very extensive set of requirements and oversight. So you can also look towards the UK, or Australia, to see what they think. (I picked English speaking countries to make it easier on you.)
There are significant differences between the CDC and NSA: 1) the NSA is institutionally secretive, while public health research is not, 2) the NSA staff are less likely to have an adverse effect by the NSA accessing their private data than the public at large, and 3) other espionage organizations, who are in the position of finding out what the NSA does, are also secretive and not likely to publish that information to the public.
I assume you considered these differences as part of your critical analysis. Why did you think they aren't significant?
I think the place where the disagreement or misunderstanding lies is in how we're describing thinking about unknowns.
You seem to be taking this from the perspective that, because there are unknowns, literally anything could happen. And we don't think that's the case with my vaccines or code.
Pushing v2 of your webapp to master isn't going to cause rockets to launch. There are things that could happen and there are even very surprising things that are unlikely but could happen. But not everything is possible.
When we say "we understand how vaccines work pretty well", we mean that in the same was as "we know how our app works pretty well". That doesn't mean that we can't still be surprised, but it does mean that we have some things that we can be confident won't happen.
One such thing is sudden onset symptoms well after the thing has left your system, because there isn't a biological way for that to have an effect (to use the code analogy, you enable an experiment, it modifies database writes for a while, then you disable the experiment and delete the code. Once you've deleted the code, we know it can't do anything else, because it's not there anymore.
I know I’m not addressing the article , but the comment above and many others on this topic. I’m still surprised by the blank check this community generally gives to big pharma and governments, seeing their track records. It’s not that I expect an anti (COVID-19) vaccine attitude, but I would have expected to see here a more questioning tone more regularly, as I see how strongly voiced HN can be with other topics. For example: discussion of their fast development time vs safety, VAERS stats, vaccination of children and pregnant women, real-world efficacy and the fact that these vaccines are under experimental usage up to 2023 or so.
All I’m saying is that I’d expect to see less consensus here on not touching these matters.
Thanks! I would love to see a similar chart of competing vaccines.
So the side effects are huge relative to standard vaccines but rationally, if it works everybody should still take it. This will need to be enforced by politicians as I doubt people would have the maturity to take it voluntarily. It's the kind of wicked problem where we want that everybody take it except ourselves
It’s not a “simple” explanation if you take some time to understand how vaccine works. Just because there’s a side effect form vaccine doesn’t mean that the vaccine isn’t the best option.
Your thought process is classic example of zero risk bias.
And you are not repeating stuff you read from other people? Details on safety and efficacy of vaccines for different sub-populations are still subject of study, new data is being generated, and as new information comes out, our ideas on the risks and benefits may keep changing.
Thank you for the links but please keep the arrogant tone down.
It’s curious that the most complete peer-reviewed report on the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine got less attention on HN than the press releases about the trial and approval process. I’m sure it’s largely luck of the draw but it would have been cool to see more discussion here.
In particular, Figure 2 could be of interest to anyone receiving this vaccine as it provides a detailed breakdown of % participants experiencing various side effects.
Your argument may be too strong - you're suggesting that big companies or the professional class of responsible people always does things better. But HN is founded on many examples of that not being true.
i.e. if your argument applies word for word against Semmelweis (who advocated hand-washing) or doubters against other earlier amateur vaccines, it it will fall victim to what we now know about those older cases, when the at-the-time experts were wrong.
In this case I wouldn't say that the reason this kind of research is valuable is anything related to medicine per se - but more that it can show the value of the much lower liability level he operates in, and how it means that amateurs can make massive cuts in preparing and defending from lawsuits. Example: if a company realized that only food-quality ingredients were required, not lab-quality, would it be worth it for them to justify that to the FDA and spend millions on it? probably not. My hypothesis for what's going on in general in medicine is this effect times a thousand, at every stage of development.
I think the major talking point is covered by this info, which is meant for the general public. I'll make an assumption that the general public is also less educated on average than the users on HN on average. A flowchart that would satisfy a bunch of nerdy engineers (us HN users) with all possible paths would confuse the heck out of everyone else.
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