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Comment by parkingrift | Hacker News Reader

In the Pfizer trial for children 5-11 there were zero severe cases of covid among the vaccinated group or the placebo.

> not to mention helping prevent them from being an unwitting vector to sicken others around them

The covid vaccines don’t stop you from getting sick or spreading covid.

Combine these two facts and we have a vaccine that doesn’t appear to do anything at all for children.

And before anyone says the vaccine prevents severe covid, Pfizer must prove that. Their own clinical trial provided no such evidence.

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> In the Pfizer trial for children 5-11 there were zero severe cases of covid among the vaccinated group or the placebo.

What's severe? being on the ventilator for a few weeks or long covid for the rest of your life?

People need to stop framing death or ICU are the only shitty outcomes of Covid. Long Covid is far worse.

What is Long Covid? People need to stop framing ill-defined terms which include symptoms ranging from insomnia and loss of smell to persistent trouble breathing reported across timelines ranging from 2 weeks to several months as an singular overarching condition.

This will contribute to deeper understanding of how viruses are related to chronic illness.

Part of the challenge is to not mistake as-of-yet unmeasurable or ill-documented conditions for non-existence of the condition. Just because you can readily measure oxygenation levels, and not "Long Covid", does not mean the first is real and the latter is not.

This doesn’t help with decision making though. If long covid is worse than going to the ICU then something must’ve been measured or documented that shows this. Otherwise what’s your point?

That's basically the paradox of evidence based medicine, and there's plenty of published criticism on the subject. Naturally, we haven't measured the effect of decades of Long Covid yet. Yet, we can have strong and logical suspicions that the effect is potentially much more severe than a few weeks ICU (although they probably correlate strongly). I am personally in favor of acknowledging the trap of evidence based medicine, and taking 'softer' risks into account, even without evidence. In retrospective, there are plenty of things for which some sounded early alarms, but only when the evidence was in was policy adjusted. I think we can do better.

Severe and mild are measurable, clinical terms. It’s not subjective.

Severe Illness: Individuals who have SpO2 <94% on room air at sea level, a ratio of arterial partial pressure of oxygen to fraction of inspired oxygen (PaO2/FiO2) <300 mm Hg, a respiratory rate >30 breaths/min, or lung infiltrates >50%.

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/overview/clin...

> People need to stop framing death or ICU are the only shitty outcomes of Covid. Long Covid is far worse.

Long Covid is far worse than ICU or death? Surely that’s a typo on your part.

In the Pfizer clinical trial for 5-11 100% of Covid cases were mild. No ICU, no hospitalization, no death, and no long Covid.

> Severe and mild are measurable, clinical terms. It’s not subjective.

Obviously, but we don't have to re-use the same definitions of some group who wrote a paper. We can think of the impact of a life-long of diminished performance as much more grave than a temporary low oxygenation level. It's up to us to decide what's worse, there is no god-given criterion.

> Obviously, but we don't have to re-use the same definitions of some group who wrote a paper.

I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. We’re not discussing “some group who wrote a paper.” These are accepted standards worldwide, and the link is from the National Institute of Health.

> It's up to us to decide what's worse, there is no god-given criterion.

Sure. Fortunately the Pfizer trial made it easy. Every single case was mild.

It may be true that the Pfizer vaccine is effective in some way for children 5-11, but Pfizer have not proven that.

> These are accepted standards worldwide, and the link is from the National Institute of Health.

That does not mean they are not up for debate, which is the thing I'm trying to raise. Global criteria are mostly there to make comparisons easy, which nebulous things like Long Covid are not. That does not mean the problem does not exist, or that it is not potentially much more severe, and you won't find anyone writing these papers argue that.

You tend to rate your results according to widely accepted standards in your scientific community, unless you're specific in discussing them. Which is why most publications with data don't go into it.

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