You make a couple of reasonable points, and then asset that mRNA vaccines are not really vaccines and that they don’t work, and you’re shocked that this is the point that gets people’s attention? People are so unreasonable, right?
I actually said they seemed to offer some efficacy. But as usual, if I am not 100% cheerleading them, I am anti vax.
Lame.
Why would you want conventional vaccines to replace mRNA vaccines when we already have evidence that the mRNA vaccines work better? Both the Chinese vaccines are inactivated whole virus. I guess you could consider moving to Shanghai if you’re keen, I think it has reopened now.
I mean, people can read. Do you imagine that your earlier posts asserting that the mRNA vaccines don’t work have vanished?
Moderator Note
You say you are not anti-vax, but then most of what you post can be found on the “myth” side of Covid fact-checking sites. You are pretty far beyond just not 100% cheerleading. You are actually repeating anti-vax nonsense fairly consistently throughout the thread.
If you want to dispute the numbers given in the OP, please provide a cite showing the statistical analysis that contradicts those numbers. Otherwise, repeating anti-vax nonsense is off-topic for this thread. Please do not continue.
Okay.
It is no use to discuss with people who are without any ability to entertain doubt.
May all your decisions be perfect.
Some degree of healthy skepticism about mRNA vaccines would have been appropriate in January 2020.
Maintaining “doubt” in the face of the mountains of evidence that have accumulated since then about the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines then is not a virtue, it is willful ignorance.
I have never posted antivax. I have always noted vaccines as great.
My skepticism is directed at mRNA treatment for Covid. Not vaccines in general. At one point I posted an admission that I was probably wrong about total efficacy of the mRNA treatment. Noting it may lessen some symptoms and help, particularly in the aged.
Homeopathy is recognized by Canadian health authorities. So I cannot doubt it?
You keep saying that you are not anti-vax, and yet you have literally posted at least half a dozen common anti-vax myths in this thread, to the point of hijacking the entire thread.
If you want to dispute the moderation, feel free to open a thread in ATMB.
You are hereby banned from this thread. If you post in it again, you will receive a warning.
Respectfully.
Expressing doubt about one very particular formulation/treatment used for a medical condition, does not mean one is expressing doubt about all other methods/formulations of treatment.
But I am happy to exit the thread. I only made a reply when I noticed it was a moderator comment that had been made.
I look forward to future data on this subject.
From the original article:
“The development of covid-19 vaccines was a scientific triumph. Converting it into medical benefits has required getting shots into the arms… a process fraught with political and logistical hurdles. Nonetheless, a new study finds that jabs cut the disease’s death toll by 63% during their first year.”
…”The study also found that vaccines helped rich and poor alike. Rich countries gobbled up 2.5 times as many doses per person as did the poor ones covered by COVAX, a jab-distribution scheme, but the paper found that nearly as many deaths were prevented in [poorer] countries (around 7m) as in rich ones (roughly 8m).”
…”The paper makes some tenuous assumptions [extrapolating from the difference in recorded and expected deaths and]… [assuming] that people’s behaviour and the evolution of viral variants would have been identical in a vaccine-less world. In fact, without the jabs, individuals might have taken more precautions… [and governments] imposed longer lockdowns… [still, the numbers, which exclude China due to unreliable data, as well as countries with few people, suggest an additional 170% benefit].”
Why would future data interest you, when the mountains of data that we have already accumulated about the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines apparently does not?
Moderator Note
Since Kedikat is no longer permitted to participate in this thread, please do not attempt to engage them here. You may however spin the conversation off into a new thread, if desired.
Sorry about that, I didn’t notice the thread ban.
On a personal note:
- I am 68 (and live in the UK)
- I got two inoculations, followed by a booster
- I self-isolated for 2 years (I’m retired)
- on my first trip out, I caught Covid
- my only symptoms were a heavy cold and some lethargy
- I have now tested negative.
I despise anti-vaxers.
Hopefully this isn’t too off-topic, but this seems like a good place to quickly review the history of vaccines and how the mRNA vaccines work.
The first vaccine-like activity that I know of was intentionally exposing people to a small amount of smallpox. The practitioner would collect some scab/pus/whatever from a pox of a person who didn’t have too horrible a case. Then they would carefully dry it and age it – weakening the virus in a non-specific way. And then they would carefully place a tiny amount of that material in a scratch in the skin of an immunologically naive person, or blow it up their nose.
This procedure had a fairly high mortality rate, but smallpox was so deadly and so terrifying that a lot of people did it, because it was a lot safer than a natural smallpox infection.
Then some doctor listened to the anecdotes that milkmaids who had had cowpox were protected from smallpox, and did a formal test of this. I bet that test wouldn’t pass ethical muster today. He probably talked some poor guy into “volunteering” a not-overly-wanted child.
Vaccine Development - Immunisaton Advisory Centre.
Edward Jenner is considered the founder of vaccinology in the West in 1796, after he inoculated a 13 year-old-boy with vaccinia virus (cowpox), and demonstrated immunity to smallpox.
So the first “vaccine” was a primitive attenuated virus (smallpox) and the second was a sort of natural viral vector (a benign virus that carries markers similar to a dangerous virus.)
After that, there were a lot of dead-virus vaccines, and some weakened virus vaccines. But some of those are really unpleasant, due to reactions to unimportant parts of the dead virus. I think the first purified antigen vaccine (or subunit vaccine) was for pertussis. The dead-virus pertussis vaccine was extremely unpleasant to get, and was suspected (probably falsely) of sometimes triggering encephalitis. But even if it didn’t cause serious damage, it was routinely a really really unpleasant vaccine.
Vaccine Adjuvants: from 1920 to 2015 and Beyond - PMC.
Purified antigens tend to have much milder side effects than killed-virus vaccines. They don’t always work quite as well, but suitable adjuvants (an additive that triggers inflammation or otherwise alerts the immune system to problems) can make them superbly effective.
That describes most of the vaccines on the market until COVID. But there’d been a lot of other research. New tools in recombinant DNA allowed scientists to try to manufacture artificial viral-vector vaccines, by adding code for the antigen of something nasty to a harmless virus. The successful ebola vaccine was a viral-vector vaccine, so that technology (unlike mRNA vaccines) had been used in humans prior to the covid pandemic, but only barely.
The history of the ebola vaccine is really interesting, by the way.
As a new thing, there was some hesitancy of African nations to be guinea pigs, and test it, despite the urgency of the need. What saved it was that a white woman who was studying ebola in Canada accidentally stabbed herself with a syringe containing ebola, and had been given a dose of a prototype vaccine being tested in mice, and had only minor symptoms – and didn’t catch ebola. There was also a small safety trial in Switzerland and some efficacy studies in animals, but she was the first human subjected to an efficacy trial of the vaccine.
mRNA vaccines are sort of a viral vector vaccine based on an artificial virus, instead of a harmless natural virus. Instead of a chunk of viral DNA inserting itself into some cells and creating RNA to churn out the desired antigen, it’s just a lipid package of RNA that can slip into cells and churn out that antigen. It doesn’t have any of the machinery to reproduce itself (unlike a virus, which is designed to do that, even if the one chosen doesn’t succeed well in human cells) and RNA itself is very short-lived in the cell, so the effects are limited.
There was concern that mRNA by itself wouldn’t excite the immune system enough, (most subunit vaccines require an adjuvant) but it turns out that the foreign RNA itself triggers enough inflammation to attract the notice of the immune system – perhaps because that’s how viruses work and the immune system is designed to notice them.
I was worried about the safety of this brand new technology when it first came out, but (correctly) guessed that by the time I was eligible for vaccination, there’d be plenty of data to assuage my fears. I’m sympathetic with the front-line healthcare workers who felt uncomfortable being test-subjects, though. (I mean, the vaccines were tested of course, but only in a few thousand volunteers.) And the elegance of the design appealed to me. Not that that necessarily translates to a medicine working, but the theory seemed awfully clean.
As @Riemann points out, the data show that the mRNA covid vaccines are a lot more effective than the killed-whole-virus vaccines that China deployed. And this is a really exciting technology, because it ought to be generalizable to a whole lot of other diseases.
you have to be careful with the language here. They said…
and that is true, in that people who were vaccinated still got infected and still transmitted the virus. They just did so at a greatly reduced rate compared to the unvaccinated.
It would be better to say that the vaccines were very effective, but not infallible, at preventing infection and transmission.
Are you serious? Maybe think for 60 seconds before continuing this hijack with such a ridiculous - and very obviously incorrect - attempt to nitpick. I was perfectly accurate in my language. The disease did prevent infection in many people, and prevented many instances of transmission. The word “prevent” does not imply universal elimination in any medical context.
COVID-19 vaccines are working well to prevent severe illness, hospitalization, and death.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019ncov/vaccines/effectiveness/work.html
The good news is that COVID-19 vaccines are still expected to be effective at preventing severe disease…
Comparing the COVID-19 Vaccines: How Are They Different? > News > Yale Medicine
But the COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing severe illness.
Get the facts about COVID-19 vaccines - Mayo Clinic
the vaccines are also effective at preventing transmission
I am serious, and what I said is clearly not incorrect, and it is a nitpick with a point.
I work for a company that pioneered the first vaccines. As such I am very, very careful with the language that I use and urge other people to be careful with theirs as well.
Clarify what the claim is from the person you are speaking with.
If they are saying that the vaccines never stop infection and transmission then they are wrong.
If they are saying that the vaccines cannot be guaranteed to stop infection and transmission then they are absolutely correct. As your own cites state.
People who are fully vaccinated can get breakthrough infections and spread the virus to others.
Are you sure you know what position the poster was taking? I didn’t see anywhere that you clarified their position on that point.
Moderating:
As that poster has been asked to leave the thread, it’s not fruitful to discuss exactly what they might have meant. Please move on.