Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

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I really don't understand the vaccines for all push:

A - The benefit for young people seems to be outweighed by the risk, for a given time period. The risk of mortality from vaccine induced clots in under 40s is twice the risk of death from Covid [0] (post relates to AZ but other vaccines has similar clot risks). The risk of hospitalisation from myocarditis is a multiple of the risk of hospitalisation from Corona, especially in young males [1] who have a four to six times risk. That alone would be enough to put serious doubt into the vaccines for all narrative, but there's also rarer and weirder confirmed side effects like Bell's Palsy and Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

B - The continued dramatic overlooking of natural immunity, which seems to be 6 or 7 times more effective than vaccines alone. Misinformation on this subject from vested interests and uncritical / complicit media has been rife [2].

C - Better, safer, more effective and more traditional vaccines are coming, ie, Novavax.

As a young male with no comorbidities and natural immunity, WHY in God's name would I risk taking an mRNA vaccine that has _far_ higher odds of sending me to hospital or killing me than it has of protecting me from the same by lowering Corona reinfection risk?

[0] - https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40328123.html [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r... [2] - https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2101

This is simply not true. The CDC has published a detailed analysis of the vaccine efficacy and known side effects [1]. This clearly shows that the benefit of being vaccinated vastly outweighs the risk due to side effects in all age groups >= 18 (only adults were considered in this analysis). Even in young males (18-29) they estimate that the risk of hospital admission due to COVID is an order of magnitude higher than the risk of myocarditis (which usually does not require hospital admission).

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e4.htm

I only skimmed this now, don't have the time to read it, but a few things to keep in mind:

1. Do they take into account the underreporting in VAERS? That could mean far higher adverse effects than those reported.

2. Are there any calculations regarding how the situation changes? As new variants emerge (like Delta), as immunity from vaccination wanes etc, how much will a vaccine prevent severe illness and death? Real world data seems to suggest vaccine efficacy isn't as great as previously thought.

3. Another point to keep in mind is that there are therapeutic solutions and as time goes on, hopefully better medications will be readily available, getting covid-19 will result in less severe illness and death.

I'm not against vaccination, I just think that these are all things we should consider.

Perhaps scientists have considered all this very carefully and have reached the conclusion that vaccination for all is better for the individual as well as for the society - I haven't looked deeply to find these answers. However, if all this has been carefully considered they & journalists/media really fail to communicate the science well.

No, other vaccines certainly do not have the same thrombosis risk as AZ. We easily have enough data here that we would have seen that by now. There is the myocarditis risk for the mRNA vaccines, but that is quite a different thing than the thrombosis risk for AZ. The myocarditis is not deadly.

The argument for vaccination of young boys is more complex, and different expert panels have come to different conclusions there. The UK is more of an outlier in this case. There is still enough uncertainty here, especially on the consequences of the infection itself that it's a really difficult decision.

As for point C, there is no reason to believe that Novavax would be safer than the mRNA vaccines. It could be, but there isn't anything inherently superior here that would automatically make it safer.

Speaking as another young male with no comorbidities, I do tons of reckless shit that put myself at way higher risk for no other reason than to entertain myself and my friends. So I figured I might as well get vaccinated if it's a tiny societal positive with no non-negligible risk to myself.

> ...the vaccine on the entire adult population [in France] would avert 10 deaths from Covid among 18-39-year-olds, but would be associated with 21 deaths from blood clotting in the same age grouping over the same time period.

There are ~16 million 18-39 year olds in France. So both those risks seem vanishingly small.

I'm not saying that marketing of vaccines has been honest overall, but that's just my 2 cents about "WHY in God's name I would risk taking an mRNA vaccine".

Bullshit. The CDC reports ~3,500 people below 30 dying of covid, as opposed to a rate of 7 in 1 million developing a blood clot (which isn't implicitly fatal), or 2,800 if everyone were vaccinated.

Aside from that, vaccination helps everyone by helping to prevent the spread of the virus.

Except that it doesn't prevent spread. If you are less symptomatic because vaccine limited the severity, you will be more likely to be functioning socially and spreading it.

Also, a million doses to kids will likely result in one less ICU admission but create six myocarditus cases. What's the five year average outcome for those six kids?

Myocarditus tends to be brief and harmless, especially if induced by vaccine.

We don't have enough data and time to say that yet.

> Except that it doesn't prevent spread

That's right, it doesn't prevent it, it reduces it. Just like wearing a seat belt does not prevent dying in a car accident but reduces the risk.

You're just splitting hair.

Do we have any hard data on that or is it just something people say?

I'm not saying it doesn't reduce individual risk for a period of time. It does.

But vaccinating entire populations for a respiratory virus that mutates and stays infectious is a recipe for never ending boosters and has a strong possibility of creating more lethal variants because these will thrive in the vaccinated less severe masses when normally they'd be bed ridden, symptomatic and easily contained through contact tracing (See sars 1)

You better hope they dial the targeting for the boosters and the timing of them correctly because when you're short lived immunity wanes from the previous dose you may be facing a more tuned up lethal version that was kept circulating by all these vaccinated persons.

Vaccines for the most vulnerable are very appropriate here but not for the individuals that have very low risk. It would be better to unlock this population and let them develop stronger natural immunity while dealing with the edge cases with monoclonal antibodies and other promising viral therapies.

This is completely at odds with what the experts say. They could be all wrong, or you could be. What are your credentials in virology/immunology?

And do you have examples of vaccinations favoring the apparition of variants for other diseases? As far as I know, that's never happened. On the contrary, I've seen researchers point to immunocompromised patients as possible sources for variants, as the infection lingers in them. On the other hand, vaccines, even when they don't work to prevent the infection do shorten it, so by that logic they should reduce the apparition of variants.

Shortening it if it doesn't bring the R naught below 1 doesn't have much advantage.

Look at what happened with a vaccine that was applied to the poultry industry that didn't prevent transmission and had similar mutational characteristics to SarsCov2: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...

> Shortening it if it doesn't bring the R naught below 1 doesn't have much advantage.

If it reduces R, other measures can help bring it down further. Further down the line, inhaled vaccines currently in development targeting the mucosal membrane are likely to enhance efficacy.

> Look at what happened with a vaccine that was applied to the poultry industry that didn't prevent transmission and had similar mutational characteristics to SarsCov2: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...

So that vaccine, uniquely, precisely caused the infection to linger instead of quickly killing the host. That's not what's happening with Covid and current vaccines, the opposite in fact is.

The fact is that the majority of cases are still coming from unvaccinated people though, this hypothetical widespread infection of vaccinated people you're suggesting isn't happening.

Right now in my area 1 in 4 new cases are in fully vaccinated people. Why is Gibraltar experiencing a surge in cases with 99% of its population fully vaccinated? Its a leaky vaccine and this has huge implications for producing variants that are more deadly. See the article I posted on Marek's vaccine in chickens.

That's... still a minority? I'm not saying it's impossible, but here's a link saying that the risk here is minor: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.01.20241836v.... You can throw out all the theorhetical risks of a vaccine all you want but the harm of avoiding vaccination is readily apparent and obvious.

> Its a leaky vaccine and this has huge implications for producing variants that are more deadly.

The Covid vaccines reduce the duration of the infection (as well as reducing the likelihood of infection). The Marek vaccine caused it to last longer, by prolonging the life of the host. You're drawing the exact opposite conclusion to what your data shows.

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