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Comment by rajin444 | Hacker News Reader

Do we have data on 5, 10 years after usage? I'm fairly certain that there won't be anything either (based on what experts have said), but we should withhold making assertions without data to back it up, right?

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Why do you think 5 or 10 years are important metrics? Why not 40 or 60 years?

You start climbing ladders at the bottom rung. Do you have 40 to 60 year data? Or are you just avoiding the 5-10 year scale by redirecting?

Well, mRNA vaccines have been in human clinical trials for over 10 years now, so if 10 years is your metric you may want to look in to that. My greater point is that to you and I - people who do not research the human immune system - 5 or 20 or 40 years may all seem like reasonable metrics. The people closest to the science disagree with us, at least in part because they cannot identify any mechanism for these vaccines to possess stealth side effects that only emerge decades later.

To be fair, vast majority of those scientists also claimed the lab leak theory was impossible and a conspiracy theory and 1.5 year later flip flopped. If it was so easy to silence scientists on such an obvious issue, what else were the dissenting scientists silenced on?

>Well, mRNA vaccines have been in human clinical trials for over 10 years now, so if 10 years is your metric you may want to look in to that.

I've tried. I have not found any hard data from sources I would trust. I've found lots of opinions penned by people I have no reason to trust.

I don't care if this data exists or it doesn't. Even without this data, there's no good reason to think that the vaccine has a higher chance of long term complications than COVID itself, which makes the decision to get vaxxed an obvious one, even for young people.

Yes, training your cells to mass produce a new protein we're not familiar with is absolutely safer than your trained immune system possibly encountering a mild viral load, with the proteins attached to the shells as normal.

Anyone who doubts the safety of this new immune system programming is obviously either a science denier or a paid [insert foreign country] shill.

This is silly because of the strong evidence that has emerged about long COVID. We know there are often significant long-term complications to COVID. You can see things like reduced grey matter volume in people who have had COVID across multiple regions of their brain. Yet for mRNA vaccines there is simply no reason to expect anything remotely this bad. You're positing that there could be surprise side effects into the future that will, with non-trivial probability, outweigh the long-term side effects from COVID (e.g. literal brain damage) that we've already observed. If long COVID wasn't a well-established observation, then I'd grant that you have the ghost of a point.

I'm all for more data! 40 or 60 years sounds great.

Most vaccines take 10-15 years to develop, so that should probably be my target, but I'm willing to take on some extra risk.

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