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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

What blows my mind is cigarettes are on the market but are _definitely_ not safe. They even say it on the box. And they REMAIN on the market!

I think if people went at this with rational minds:

* Discover side effects (via actual science, not the "vaping is melting your brains" commercials on TV)

* List them on the box

* Let people decide

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> What blows my mind is cigarettes are on the market but are _definitely_ not safe

The FDA is allowed by law to regulate vapes. The Supreme Court ruled that the FDA wasn't allowed to regulate tobacco. Congress fixed the SC's complaint and since then the FDA has been moving slowly to prevent another (harder to overcome) legal issue from the SC or to lead to prohibition.

That's why the FDA is suddenly proposing rules limiting nicotine and menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Cigarettes and other tobacco products predate the FDA by hundreds of years and despite the harm they are known to cause, they're essentially 'grandfathered in' because of cultural inertia.

If rational minds were allowed to prevail at the FDA, we would have had an Omicron booster months ago.

Who is stopping you getting an omicron booster?

(I'm not aware of the current situation in the US btw, just know that it's perfectly possible to get a booster in the NL)

The OP’s point is that in US (and also almost certainly in Netherlands), you’re not getting the omicron booster, you’re getting original Covid strain booster.

OP is more interested in the reformulated vaccines from Pfizer/Moderna more specifically tailored to the Omicron variants rather than another shot with the original formulation which has showed waning efficacy against the newest strains.

It hasn't been approved, no one is making it.

Moderna has a candidate that'll probably land on the market sometime around september

Which is a pathetic turnaround for what was supposed to be a technology quick to iterate with. I'd love to know where the holdup actually is.

The hold up is with the FDA. The variant booster had been ready for months, it just takes a long time to approve.

The FDA.

I am fairly grumpy that we didn't get the Moderna SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for 2-5yos months ago. Waiting for Pfizer's data was such a strange policy choice. There may be something going on under the hood here I don't understand, but the behavior of VRBPAC has felt very strange to me.

Are you not concerned that a lot of European countries stopped giving that one to people under 30 for safety reasons? (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2477)

The risk was very minor, and was in hindsight not worth waiting for.

But now that the data is in, though, when your option is two vaccines, one with very minor risk, and one with even less risk, and they are both equally effective, it's obvious that you should prefer the latter.

If you look at the FDA press release it does seem like they seem to have mostly narrowed down the at-risk groups since, I guess they might've also tweaked dosages at this point.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...

Not entirely sure about what this refers to, but..

1: The Moderna vaccine is separate from Pfizer/Biontech even if they share technological base.

2: Moderna was discontinued for younger people (below 30yos) in at least some European countries due to slightly higher risk of myocarditis (even if the Pfizer vaccine had slightly lower efficiancy).

Seems like both vaccines are allowed for smaller children in the US now. Over here they put the cutoff for the vaccine at 12-13yos iirc (my older kid got it but not my younger one).

It's only been two and a half years, we're still very early in this pandemic. I'm sure that a few more years, maybe a decade, when everyone who understands vaccines are confident that the entire category of COVID vaccines is safe and effective, we'll have a flu-like assembly line producing new vaccines for the deluge of new variants we'll be facing.

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