> I wouldn't really call that "soon after it is administered".
The median delay between vaccination and the onset of narcolepsy in that case was 42 days. Not nearly the four years magic number that sharken was waiting for. I would call that soon after it is administered. Far more people are well beyond that period after the Pfizer-Biontech vaccination than were ever administered Pandemrix.
> And the same is also true for covid's long term effects
Those long term effects are visible soon after infection. Both of your examples seem to be in support of my point.
However, this does prove my point: The people who developed narcolepsy after this vaccine started showing symptoms one to two months after their vaccine.
How about the cases of narcolepsy that were caused by the swine-flu vaccine Pandremix? As far as I understand it took around 2 years before it was officially stated that the vaccine was/is the cause for these cases. Until 2015 the numbers grew even higher because of the delay between vaccination and the first symptoms.
I wouldn't really call that "soon after it is administered".
And the same is also true for covid's long term effects. I'm still reading new articles/conclusions about those effects.
> Pandemrix, a flu vaccine, caused a notable uptick in narcolepsy in Sweden, Finland and likely the UK.
"The increased risk of narcolepsy due to vaccination was 1 in 18400 or 0.005%."[1] Considering the fatality and long term disability rate of Covid, and the way testing and safety protocols are done for vaccines, I don't really see how there could be an unknown and unseen risk that would outweigh the risk of contracting Covid.
In Norway, some children developed narcolepsy after being vaccinated with Pandemrix. The average time from vaccine (or influensa) until developing narcolepsy was 8 months.
It was less than a year before people started reporting it, and it took less than 2 years before a study was released by the Swedish health agency warning of increased narcolepsy risk in Children--not 4.
Also the increased rate of narcolepsy was 0.005%. That's why it took several months before anyone noticed it.
Additionally the flu itself can cause the same kind of narcolepsy, which means that this vaccine was worse than other vaccines, but still potentially better than no vaccine at all.
I did not say show me a vaccine with unexpected side effects… there are many examples of that.
I said show me one where the onset is hidden until after 6 months. The narcolepsy link above was concentrated in the first 6 months after the shot. At least try me with the dengue vaccine and ADE so I could explain why that is different.
Hundreds of millions of people have taken the vaccines and we know with huge amounts of power the side effects and their (incredibly tiny) probabilities. It is beyond uncommon for a hidden side effect to only appear later, especially with something like a vaccine. It produces an antibody response and goes away. If that antibody response is going to cause problems it generally happens sooner than later when there are the most antibodies.
I, like you, didn’t want to be the first person to take the vaccine. But at this point the safety record shows it is one of the safest, if not the safest, vaccine ever produced. Hopefully you don’t get COVID in the meantime of this point becoming clear to you.
The Pandemrix vaccine against the latest pandemic (the swine flu) caused narcolepsy in some individuals -- seemingly with a propensity for affecting young people and possibly related to the choice of adjuvant.
We're in a similar situation now. Early vaccines may have side effects and a forced introduction of a vaccine may increase the risk.
My original reply to you quoted your sentence which I will requote here:
> In other words, the only vaccine side effects possible after a month or so are a strict subset of covid side effects.
At this point you're just talking past me -- and maybe I am talking past you as well.
I don't personally hold any particular view about short or long term studies, but I do enjoy logic and engaging in discussion.
> if we agree that any side effect (short-, or long-term) would be initially detectable in a month or two, and given that the vaccine already meets the bar for safety, what is the point of a long term study? You're not going to detect any new side effects, and the only thing you may find is that existing side effects might be less serious.
The CDC maintains a list of Historical Vaccine Safety Concerns[0] and at least two of those have long term studies attached to them.
In 1976, a Swine Flu vaccine was provided to people.
This caused an increase of 1 in 100,000 cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) and when 40,000,000 people had been vaccinated, the government stopped vaccinations to prevent this.
> The Institute of Medicine (IOM) conducted a thorough scientific review of this issue in 2003 and concluded that people who received the 1976 swine influenza vaccine had an increased risk for developing GBS.
This is a very long term study and I think we needed it, personally.
Similarly, in 2009 and 2010 there was an H1N1 Influenza Vaccine distributed in Europe which produced an increased rate of narcolepsy.
While the first cases started showing up in 2010, it wasn't until 2012 and later that this link was shown to be significant.
The rest of the CDC text focuses on the subsequent testing of other H1N1 vaccines to show that they do not increase the risk of getting narcolepsy, but that should not detract you from the findings that the oil-in-water emulsion adjuvant called ASO3 that was present in Pandemrix is somehow related.
Even with all of that, we still don't know why AS03 seemed to increase the incidence of narcolepsy, but we don't give that vaccine to people since 2011 or so because of it.
> What reason should I (or you) have to care about "long-term" studies?
*Conclusion*: I agree that side effects will generally be seen early on, but I believe we can benefit from "long term" studies because there is a large amount of complexity in the way the human body responds to various chemicals and some of those responses aren't able to be understood even after months or years of study... so we should keep studying them
Actually what happened with the 2010 swine flu vaccine was that people developed narcolepsy starting about a year after the first shots were administered (many of them to people who were never at particularly high risk from the swine flu itself). It took about another year after those symptoms first arose for authorities to acknowledge the link to Pandemrix.
Your source is wrong. The Pandemrix swine flu vaccine caused narcolepsy in children which did not start showing up for a year after the first doses were administered, and it took authorities another year after that to acknowledge the link to the vaccine.
"At the end of March 2011, an MPA press release stated: 'Results from a Swedish registry based cohort study indicate a 4-fold increased risk of narcolepsy in children and adolescents below the age of 20 vaccinated with Pandemrix, compared to children of the same age that were not vaccinated.' The same study found no increased risk in adults who were vaccinated with Pandemrix"
Actually there was that flu vaccine that triggered narcolepsy very rarely in young people after 12 - 24 months. But this is the only example i heard of.
> The history of vaccines shows that delayed effects following vaccination can occur. But when they do, these effects tend to happen within two months of vaccination
> These experiences demonstrate two important findings. First, when these events occurred, the onset was within eight weeks of receipt of the vaccine.
I understand the confusion. I meant that the long-term narcolepsy was caused by something that happened in the short-term while the immune system was still reacting to the vaccine.
From that link:
> The flu vaccine is designed to trigger antibodies to influenza’s surface proteins, but if it elicits antibodies to the nucleoprotein as well, those might well latch on to the hypocretin receptor, and eventually lead to death of the cells, the researchers thought.
That couldn't just spontaneously happen a year after getting a vaccine.
“An increased risk of narcolepsy was found following vaccination with Pandemrix, a monovalent 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine that was used in several European countries during the H1N1 influenza pandemic. This risk was initially found in Finland, and then other European countries also detected an association.”
Also, during the H1N1 scare a vaccine used in Europe caused some people to develop narcolepsy (though perhaps more would have gotten it from the virus itself without a vaccine). It can be hard to determine that something is “safe” quickly.
The median delay between vaccination and the onset of narcolepsy in that case was 42 days. Not nearly the four years magic number that sharken was waiting for. I would call that soon after it is administered. Far more people are well beyond that period after the Pfizer-Biontech vaccination than were ever administered Pandemrix.
> And the same is also true for covid's long term effects
Those long term effects are visible soon after infection. Both of your examples seem to be in support of my point.
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