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Comment by EricE | Hacker News Reader

That would be pretty hard to do since the mRNA "vaccine" neither prevented infection or stopped the spread.

The current mRNA vaccines are moderately effective at preventing Covid infections, about on par with current flu vaccines.

Not all vaccines are equally effective, but none of them are 100% effective at preventing infections. The only thing vaccines do is prepare the immune system for an infection. Since SARS-CoV-2 mutations happen a lot faster than (for example) measles, Covid vaccines are a lot less effective - by the time you're infected, the infection is dissimilar enough to what the immune system was prepared for that the preparation is no longer optimal.

I assume they're talking about attempts to eradicate it in the first few weeks when it was thought to only be present in a few people.

And yet there are still people that think it was supposed to in the first place. Thinking that makes it a failure, at least you don't think it's full of mind control tracking nanobots though. :D

Or maybe you are, since you used scare quotes. It's probably too late to share any facts with you at this point...

It did for the first variants, but then Omicron happened.

I see you're calling a vaccine a "vaccine". Noted.

MRNA vaccine is highly effective at reducing symptoms and saving lives of those at high risk (e.g., over 65), but it was never effective at preventing infection or stopping transmission. People who were saying that were somewhere between being over optimistic, and spreading disinformation to try to increase uptake.

Studies showed it decreased infection and transmission against the original strain of Covid.[0]

It lost effectiveness against delta and then became nearly ineffective against Omicron (although still helping with reduction of hospitalizations and deaths).

Non-mRNA vaccine is available now (Novavax) and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, seems similar.

[0] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/07/vaccination-a...

It was also more dangerous to healthy young men than just getting COVID, due to myocarditis.

This isn't generally true.

It does seem wise to preferentially get the Pfizer boosters over the Moderna boosters for lower dosage though, particularly if you're a young man.

Absolutely not true.

Looks like we have a science denier: https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/uk-now-reports-myocarditis-s...

"It is now clear for men <40, dose 2 and dose 3 of Pfizer have more myocarditis than sars-cov-2 infection, and this is true for dose 1 and dose 2 of Moderna."

You need to analyze the total risk of both options to state that getting vaccinated is more dangerous, not just the risk of myocarditis following each.

I need to state the risk of COVID in a healthy male under 40? That's self evident.

If you want to say you are doing science, then yes, you need to define what you mean by "healthy" and make the case that the harm from vaccination was greater in your group than the harm from infection.

If you want to say your subjective group is self evidently better off with some option, then don't say you are making a scientific argument.

Unfortunately I don't have the budget to fund a large RCT. It is also worrying that the companies and health authorities with the budgets haven't done so either.

Unless there is some unknown, long term effect from COVID that is yet to manifest itself, it is self-evident that the comment that "It was also more dangerous to healthy young men than just getting COVID, due to myocarditis." is "Absolutely not true" is incorrect.

You don't need an RCT. You need a study that compares COVID's many consequences and sequlae to the vaccine's myocarditis. Not COVID's myocarditis rate to the vaccine's myocarditis rate.

I can't find age-breakdown data of which specific complication causes the most death in COVID patients, but for the population broadly, it is multiple organ failure, then pneumonia and related pulmonary problems. Not myocarditis.

So if you're excluding the primary causes of death of COVID then sure, the tradeoff gets a lot less clear.

>> You don't need an RCT. You need a study that compares COVID's many consequences and sequlae

Effectively zero for healthy men under 40.

I do think common sense needs to play a part in your risk assessment.

But the rate of myocarditis, even using the upper end numbers for the highest risk group, is also “effectively zero”! That pre-print shows myocarditis rate of 0.01% for men under 40.

The IFR for men between 35-39 is five and half times higher than that.

I wouldn’t mind common sense, but in lieu of that, some basic numeracy would be helpful.

>>The IFR for men between 35-39 is five and half times higher than that.

For healthy men?

Not sure but CV risk is the primary comorbidity that matters for young people wrt COVID, which is also the main contributing factor to myocarditis risk. So no reason to believe there’s a huge difference here.

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