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Comment by jdndbfbf | Hacker News Reader

I'll let you test it for me and find out what the long term effects are.

I’ll let you know the long term effects of the vaccine, and you can let me know the long term effects of Covid-19.

I'll take my chances.

My sister-in-law is dead. A brother-in-law is still unsure if we can talk across a room without fainting (6 months ago he was running several miles a day). This is just in my tiny circle of close family.

Thousands in a much larger sample of had the vaccine with no side effects anywhere near that bad.

I'm deeply sorry for your loss. It's discouraging to me to see people respond so dismissively to something so tragic when it has yet to affect them personally.

If it cheers you up: I'll get myself vaccinated as soon as possible. Not just for myself but also because "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" as Mr. Spock would say.

You should balance that against your chance of contracting COVID-19, and the unknown long term effects of COVID-19.

For me, the long-term consequences of the vaccine seem to be better understood (theoretically, not empirically) than the long-term consequences of a COVID-19 infection.

I think "we" -- as a society -- should balance those two sides. Vaccinations do not always make sense at an individual level, but make a lot of sense at a societal level. If everyone was making a personal trade-off we would not reach the global maxima.

how can the long term consequences of the vaccine be better understood than the virus? The vaccine is younger than the virus, and orders of magnitude of more people have had the virus.

mRNA vaccines were understood and studied prior to Covid. Covid infections (still) are not understood.

This isn't entirely true; the technology is still very new.

A five second search finds papers on mRNA vaccines from 2018. I see no papers on Covid prior to 2019. In relative terms, as the parent comment was using, we have been studying them longer.

I am not arguing that they are well understood, but I imagine most people are filling in that word when they read the comment.

We've researched coronaviruses since the 1960s, had MERS and SARS most recently (less recent the 2018). I don't understand why we worry about long term effects of Covid, but not long term effects of mRNA vaccines? Both seem to have things to worry about, with both having different scales.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/types.html

Are there any prior mRNA vaccines that have been approved for human use? Wikipedia (currently...) says this and the Moderna ones would be the first.

There have been a few phase-1 trials in humans. But mostly it is research.

why do we get to generalize mRNA vaccines, but not SARS-Cov-2? We've known about coronaviruses since the 1960s, we've had MERS, SARS, and other more recent ones.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/types.html

I don't think we have long term information on either SARS-Cov-2 or the vaccine...

100% incorrect.

These are the very first mRNA vaccines. Here is Wikiepdia to confirm. [1]

You. Are. An. Alpha. Tester. And so is the rest of the world. We all are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine

"Up until November 2020, no mRNA vaccine, drug, or technology platform, had ever been approved for use in humans, and before 2020, mRNA was only considered a theoretical possibility for effective use in human"

From what I've read ~20% of COVID cases end up with some long term affect, some of which are quite bad and could be permanent. While the vaccine also probably has risks, I personally would rather take my chances with the vaccine instead of infection.

At the very least, the vaccine seems less likely to kill me in the very short term.

Where have you read that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25161040

Reply on news.ycombinator.com