Though at least with pain, you could compare with previous reports from that same person. Pain started day 1, never subsided until 2 months after. Pain starting at 2 months is probably not a side effect, unless it's something that consistently shows up in the data after the same period of time since vaccination (background noise would not).
Maybe add a self-reported intensity scale for the symptoms.
Anyway, I can see why studies like these can be hard.
There are people with long term issues starting right after vaccination. Not safety issues, which everyone and their dog studies, just multi-month constant pain that will not kill you but just disables you from your normal life for months, that is not solvable by regular NSAIDs, as usual, and that you'll get no compensation for from anyone.
I'm just interested in how common this is after vaccination, and perhaps when may this end, so I again spent a few hours yesterday to try to find some significant (N > 5000, preferably more) independent prospective studies of "mild" side effects like these of this vaccine.
So much vaccination going on, so why not just give every 5th person vaccinated in some large center a link and a code to enter observed side effects after 1 day, 3 days, week, and a month, and then maybe 3 months after into some website. Maybe ask for a phone number and call them to ask, if they don't fill the form in time. Even such a stupid study design would satisfy me.
No such thing on google scholar.
There are barely any studies that track side effects over time. It's almost all just binary X,Y,Z side effects after vaccine - yes/no. All studies I could find are < 1000 people or in that range.
The small amount of studies that actually tracked side effects over time, just track for 7 days and end with 4% people still having side effects after a week. One Czech study I found tracked side effects for a month! With 2% having still issues after a month. Well, good! No, not really, N<1000 again, and a biased survey style study.
Also the fucking irony of search returning about 5-10x more so called "hesitancy" studies per a side effect survey, despite me not search for it.
I'm fully vaccinated, and there's no shortage of studies about efficacy, so no problem there. But people that proclaim how well the side effects are studied, because of how many millions of people were already vaccinated just sound ridiculous to me now. Where are all the actual studies?
From what can be found it just seems that very little fuck is given about serious study of so called "mild" side effects, and some guidance given on how to mitigate them, based on results.
("no compensation for from anyone" is because my country actually passed a law that allows for compensation for covid vaccine gone wrong; but with no proof of some statistical relationship, this was just another bullshit anti-hesitancy stunt from the government, and will be of no real help to the affected)
This + side-effects not going away as advertised. Finding some longer term side effect studies is not that easy in general search engine, due to slew of regurgitated basic information about side effects.
Would be nice to have some data, instead of a ton of articles that say the same old "most symptoms go away within a few days". How does one decide whether to vaccinate or not based on such information? What is most? What is few days?
Some side effects are extremely common, like shoulder pain. Acceptable if it goes away in a week, let's say. But if there's a risk I'll have it for 3 months or forever, I'd like to know how common is that to make a calculated risk assessment. < 1% probably acceptable. >2-3% probably not.
And this will only be more apparent with time and more studies. The study I managed to find tracked people only for 8 days, had a nice graph of symptoms fading away with time. Mind calming exponential decay. :) Good, but 5% still had some symptoms at day 8. How many do have them at day 60?
I don't understand why such information has to be so hard to find for normal people, who don't spend days searching around on google scholar.
You don't actually know how common vaccine side effects are, because standard practice is to assume anything that happens >7 days after a vaccine isn't caused by it. This was the standard used in the trials for example. But from the paper:
"the mean time to onset of symptoms [for VITT] after vaccination is 8 days ... The mean time to onset of symptoms after vaccination [for auto immune hepatitis] is 13 days, ranging from 4 to 26 days"
etc. The trials had many other problems like smartphone apps for reporting side-effects that had a fixed list of 'expected' side effects, without any free-form input field to enter new ones. It's clear when you look into the details here that nearly the entire medical system is strongly biased against any findings of side effects and sets things up carefully to let them make such claims, regardless of common sense or what you might expect ethically.
I am not going to say that's impossible. I am going to say that there would be Nobel prize in medicine waiting if 2-year effects are both observed and explained.
I'm not an expert myself, but I've done a lot of reading. I don't have a specific source at hand, but this is the consensus I've gotten from any interviews of vaccinologists or epidemiologists I've read or heard. Essentially that any side effects from vaccinations show up within a few weeks—that there just isn't a mechanism for them to appear years down the line if they haven't already been seen sooner, for the reason I described.
Now again it is possible that side effects could still be discovered in patients with complicating factors that weren't represented in the trials (like pregnancy or other known or unknown pre-existing conditions). Or just because the effects were too rare to show up significantly in the trials. But again these would be expected to show up quickly as widespread vaccination begins, as did the few severe allergic reactions that have occurred.
Of course as with anything, especially as charged an issue as vaccines, if one goes looking for it one can find plenty of purported evidence that long-term side-effects (by which I mean here side effects that don't show up until long after the vaccine is taken) are possible or even common. But the expert consensus based on the totality of evidence appears to be that this is not a serious concern.
Thanks for the reference. Reading the wikipedia article on the topic, I get the impression that side effects that develop slowly (e.g. more than 3 months post vaccination as in this case) will either not be detected at all or it will be almost impossible to attribute them to the particular vaccine (esp. if you get a different one each year).
What is really bothering me is the overall "debuggability" of the vaccines/medication. I mean, people developing them simply have no clue about the different mechanisms by which they can cause harm to the body. Let alone any adverse effect when combined with e.g. over the counter drugs or supplements.
> 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.
Fair enough, I am no vaccine expert. So, what I got from sciency layman's info is the following: Long term effects are called that because the sustain for a long time, not because they kick in after a long time. Second take away, these effects for vaccines show themselves in the first couple of weeks and months. Given that we started trials almost a year ago and serious vaccination campaigns months ago with literally millions of people vaccinated, and still being monitored under Phase 4 trials if I remember well (which are standard for drugs and so), it is highly unlikely that any side effects have not been discovered yet. Sounds reasonable and logic to me, but then I have all vaccinations that are recommended were I live. Plus some optional ones. Neither do I read through al the potential side effects before I take drugs.
For all previous vaccines all side effects happened within two months. (with most of them in less than 15 minutes). We have no way of knowing when an unknown side effect might wait 10 years to show up, but there is every reason to think that won't happen.
Vaccines either produce side effects in 3-6 months or they don't.
There's no hidden time bomb in all the people who were vaccinated last year.
The FDA doesn't require long term safety studies for vaccines, and all the coronavirus vaccines have met the requirements. Nothing has been rushed.
We have a good understanding of this because the side effects are entirely dominated by autoimmune conditions, and we understand from the field of rheumatology how those arise.
We don't need to study pregnant women for another 5 years to see if any more babies pop out after the first one. Pregnancy is done in 9 months. Autoimmune side effects from vaccines happen in 3-6.
Maybe add a self-reported intensity scale for the symptoms.
Anyway, I can see why studies like these can be hard.
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