Distribute the Vaccines Now | Hacker News Reader

Distribute the Vaccines Now

scottaaronson.com

69 pointsjseliger17 comments

Good series of posts. I'll add briefly to point (1) and (2).

(1) vaccine manufacturing was very much blocked by approval. For example, instead of having 30M doses of Astrazeneca in December, because of approval delays they delivered 5M instead. Companies also cannot produce too much of vaccines that might spoil. Letting them distribute even a nominal amount (say 1M/mo since June) would have learned us many valuable lessons by now and allowed many more vaccines to be manufactured.

(2) they discussed long term side effects on the approval calls. There has only been 1 side effect after 6 weeks ever recorded in history. It was a long time ago with a live virus polio vaccine on an immunocompromised person. Given the many billions of vaccines given in history, the odds of a long term side effect are not literally impossible, but as close as we get in medicine.

A single instance of a long term side effect in all of recorded history? You actually believe that?

Rather than saying they are wrong, why not link to one of the records?

The Varicella vaccine causes shingles years later -

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150811103555.h...

My reading of that abstract is that vaccinating an entire society leads to more shingles in that society because having chickenpox circulating in a population exposes people to the virus repeatedly, which boosts their immunity to shingles. A single person getting the shot would not have an increased risk of getting shingles.

Sorry, you are correct. That abstract was the wrong one.

"Since the varicella vaccine is a live virus vaccine, the virus can become dormant and reactivate, rarely causing serious side effects. Individual case reports of varicella vaccine virus reactivation leading to vaccine-associated herpes zoster ophthalmicus and encephalitis, and meningitis have been published." https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vaccines/varicella-vaccine...

https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055... "We present a case of a previously healthy twice-VZV vaccinated 14-year-old girl who presented with rash and headache who was found to have herpes zoster complicated by meningitis. Cerebrospinal fluid polymerase chain reaction confirmed zoster infection secondary to reactivation of vaccine-strain VZV"

No it doesn't. People not getting Chicken Pox leads to an increased prevalence of Shingles. It is not a side effect of the vaccine, it's a side effect of reducing the prevalence of certain viruses.

For a recent counterexample, consider the Dengvaxia campaign in the Philippines [0]. Quite a few children ended up in the hospital. It’s impossible to attribute any specific case to the vaccine, but the numbers are fairly compelling.

As far as I could tell, all documented affected children are alive and well, but that doesn’t rule out children who weren’t noticed by researchers, and I’d consider being hospitalized to be a fairly severe side effect.

So, yes, you need to test vaccines, even for COVID.

(Consider the UK’s dubious Oxford vaccine campaign. The data is muddled because AstraZenica screwed up, but the UK could easily end up in a situation in which the virus still circulates in a large population with weak vaccine protection, resulting in selective pressure on the virus to mutate to escape the vaccine’s protection. This would be bad news indeed.)

Distributing all the doses now doesn't make sense.

- The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine requires a booster shot after 21 days.

- The Moderna vaccine requires a booster shot 28 days later.

If the vaccine manufacturer recommends a booster shot then that's what should be done.

Then not everyone:

1) ...is at a high risk

2) ...puts others at a high risk

Therefore prioritization makes sense.

The success of Israel against COVID is not only due to vaccination campaign (which of course, helps) but also their ability to adapt to the current situation and mobilize against the virus.

We've had enough of people fighting sanitary authorities for months. Let them do their job. Unpublishing this blog post would be a better thing to do right now.

The booster shot gets you to the highest immunity but a single shot still gets you increased immunity. Several countries in europe are considering single-shot strategies, as was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25579393

And yeah not everyone is high risk but getting a shot into every health care worker, teacher, every person who interacts with lots of people etc will greatly reduce the impact of the virus, which includes reducing risk to high risk people.

Israel is a country with 9 million people, with a highly disciplined population that can be effectively mobilized to do practically anything. That's part of the reason they're being successful against COVID-19, rather than just vaccines alone.

Vaccines help but vaccination alone will not get you to where they are now.

If you want to do a country-wide campaign to encourage social distancing, masks, washing hands, etc... it's much easier to do there.

For example, see how Israel erradicated Malaria and see what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1chsYafMqE

Did you mean to reply to someone else?

If the "authorities" fail or show low effectiveness, you have to criticize them and offer other solutions. That's how we make progess. By the way, other authorities run a different strategy, the UK focuses on distributing first doses. Some authorities fail completely at distributing the vaccine, like we are seeing in Europe where I am currently.

Strange to see that on a page called "hacker news", some people think questioning the "authorities" is something you shouldn't do.

That is why I said "sanitary authorities" instead of than political authorities. I do not care about what political authorities have to say, but I do care about what credible medical professionals in positions of authority have to say.

You do not know what is in the vaccine.

> The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine contains the following ingredients: messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), lipids (SM-102, polyethylene glycol [PEG] 2000 dimyristoyl glycerol [DMG], cholesterol, and 1,2-distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine [DSPC]), tromethamine, tromethamine hydrochloride, acetic acid, sodium acetate, and sucrose.

https://www.fda.gov/media/144638/download

> The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine includes the following ingredients: mRNA, lipids ((4-hydroxybutyl)azanediyl) bis(hexane-6,1-diyl)bis(2-hexyldecanoate), 2 [(polyethylene glycol)-2000]-N,N-ditetradecylacetamide, 1,2-Distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine, and cholesterol), potassium chloride, monobasic potassium phosphate, sodium chloride, dibasic sodium phosphate dihydrate, and sucrose.

https://www.fda.gov/media/144414/download

Governments are not ready to allow the economy and population to return to 'normal'. They want to finish their bailouts/pork barreling, and to continue the destruction of the economy and society so that it can be fully recreated along ideological lines.

They want to ready systems like limiting travel and cinema visits only for the vaccinated.

How else can you explain things like the new executive order and $1million penalty in New York from Governor Cuomo for distributing the vaccine to non-prioritised people?

Maybe those people are being prioritised for valid reasons? If so, maybe it's important that the prioritisation happens.

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