Here’s an interesting observation from the current early trials of both US & Chinese vaccines. And perhaps from European ones too; I’m not 100% up on which companies are based where.
Anyhow, the message is that these trial vaccinations produce obvious redness, swelling, & discomfort at the injection site and mild but obvious flu-like symptoms. Both of which last at least a couple of days. This occurs in just about all of the experimental subjects.
The professional commentaries I’ve read says all that’s totally unsurprising given their mechanism of action, various technical details I don’t understand, etc.
But you can rest assured the anti’s will take that completely predictable and tolerable 2+ days of flu-like symptoms as proof, PROOF I TELL YOU SHEEPLE !!!1!!!, that this injection is really Bill Gates giving all the non-rich people delayed-action COVID to kill them all off. Or some other equally non-fact-based narrative.
A second challenge is that the early returns suggest that 2 smaller doses a couple months apart will be more effective than a single larger dose. It’ll also require much less total quantity of vaccine: like 1 shot of 50 units vs 2 shots of 5, for an 80% reduction in vacine consumed. Of course going with 2 shots needs twice the manpower, needles, clinic visits, etc. to deliver both doses.
Given the near universal unpleasant reaction to that first shot, consider how many special snowflakes will decide the second one is just not for them. “I’m too busy”, “I must be allergic; I nearly died last time”, etc. The list of excuses will be monumental. And all trumpeted self-importantly on TwitFace
Consider what will happen when all masking and social distancing stops as soon as a vaccine that’s only 50% effective has been given to 5% of the population.
No I raised the possibility. By denying the possibility, you display a lot ignorance. Ignorance you shockingly seem proud of because it puts you in the anti-anti-vaxxer club. Pretty sad.
That’s when I take this attitude: I got my shot and I’ll still wear The Mask and keep my distance for a while longer. So I’ve got myself taken care of (well, probably). And everyone else likewise, likewise. So all the rest can fuck themselves, which they will already be doing.
So for the record, you’re saying a rushed vaccine with serious side effects is similar to a unicorn in some way? Like, you’re saying it’s impossible, basically?
Here’s what bugs me: you are acting like you are schooling a nutjob. What you’re actually doing is railing against heresy. You are religiously an anti-anti-vaxxer. There’s no thought involved. Your tribe decided anti-vaxxers are bad and your simple understanding of thatt leads you to think anyone who wonders about a particularly vaccine’s safety is a heretic. Regardless of what your priests tell you, a vaccine can actually be more dangerous than the disease. A rushed vaccine most certainly.
Btw, my 1/100,000 get nerve damage comment wasn’t randomly chosen. That was about the number of people who got Guillain-Barré syndrome from America’s rushed influenza vaccine in '76.
Don’t know where you get that in that case the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. From the report you cited:
It is important to keep in mind that severe illness and death are associated with influenza, and vaccination is the best way to prevent influenza infection and its complications.
BTW the lessons from 1976 are not forgotten, it was thanks to the rushed aspect of that vaccine that experts now are not so ready to claim that a vaccine will be ready this year. More testing will be required before it will be available to everyone.
Q: Why was the response to the ’76 swine flu outbreak deemed a failure?
A: In the decision-making, the fundamental strategic flaw was combining all aspects of response into a single “go or no-go” decision – the decision to proceed with characterizing the virus into a vaccine, to produce the vaccine, to test it and to deliver it to every man, woman and child in the USA – that was all decided and announced in March ’76 in one fell swoop. This big lesson has been absorbed by policy-makers: separate what needs to be done to prepare for future decisions from reaching conclusions and announcing them, before relevant information is at hand. For example, you can proceed to develop a vaccine, but you do not simultaneously need to decide whether to proceed with immunization, what its scope will be and who priority recipients will be. In the coming months, we will learn a lot from the circulation of the virus in the southern hemisphere or lack of it, from studies of the age distribution of the current outbreak, in field testing about the immunogenicity of the vaccine, and more – all relevant to informing policy choices about a vaccine.
Q: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lost credibility over the ’76 swine flu affair, not only due to about 30 deaths from adverse vaccine reactions?
A: Once set on its course, CDC did not establish a basis for review and reconsideration of the situation. As facts evolved, such as the absence of further cases, CDC’s pursuit of the original strategy to immunize everyone became more and more controversial and costly in terms of long-term credibility. From technical, political and policy points of view, it is very difficult to deal with low probability–high consequence events – events that are relatively unlikely, but that would have catastrophic consequences should they occur. When you have such an event in prospect, the naysayer who argues that you are over-reacting is more likely to be right than wrong. It is just like the person who says, “Don’t buy insurance for your house this year; it’s not going to burn down.” At the end of the year, for most of us in most years, that would have been an economical decision, but its wisdom can be judged only in retrospect. In prospect, it’s foolhardy not to have the insurance. This is a fundamental challenge for policy-makers in the face of many threats of this type, including natural pandemic threats.
Q: What other challenges did the ’76 response face?
A: Legal liability issues arose when insurers refused to insure vaccine manufacturers against lawsuits. Field trials suggested children would need two shots to gain adequate protection, complicating the logistics. Administrative problems abounded because states varied tremendously in their ability to deliver vaccines. If you immunize very large numbers of elderly people, inevitably some will have a heart attack the next day, so you have to prepare the public for such coincidences. In one city, a few elderly people died of heart attacks soon after being vaccinated and immunizations were temporarily suspended. By the end, there were dozens of cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome. That wouldn’t have been a blip on the screen had there been a pandemic but, in the absence of any swine flu disease, these rare events were sufficient to end the programme.
I referred to a specific flu and a specific vaccine. Why try to muddy the waters with that first quote? Seriously, why did you do that? I can think of only one reason: you assume you must defend the idea of vaccines, regardless of what is actually under discussion. Despite the fact that I have explicitly said I believe in the current roster of childhood vaccinations. Because despite the fucking words I have wrote, you want to argue with an anti-vaxxer, so you just pretend I am one. Blech.
In reality there was no need to go for that bit you cited, unless it was to repeat a bit that usually is repeated by anti-vaxers that omit the context and the lessons learned because: recalling what you did with no updates or context is just falling for anti-vaxxer talking points.
Fie to that. Because not mentioning what I did just assumes that nothing was learned by the experts, or that they will not take that past lesson into account.
I would guess my career doing that has been longer than yours, and that I have spent much more time and energy convincing the vaccine hesitant to get their kids immunized as well. With some success. Go ahead, call me an anti-vaxxer.
And yup, proving a SARS-CoV-2 to be safe enough for kids will be a very tall order.
Across the country there have been at most several dozen deaths in children associated with COVID-19. That includes those from the multi-system inflammatory syndrome of children. Out of nearly 75 million children in the country. Less than one per million at least so far. Will total be ten times that? Maybe maybe not. Say it is. Less than one per 100K Many many many fewer seriously ill than in adults as well. Initial trials are not even including children and you cannot safely extrapolate safety data from adults to children in this case given how differently kids respond to this germ. So let’s imagine a separate 30K trial of kids. Is that big enough to find something that kills kids at that rate or even three times as often?
No. It is not reliable for finding something that kills even one out of 30K.
It will only be after a vaccine is used post approval on millions of kids that something that kills kids more often than COVID-19 does can show up.
The first Rotavirus got pulled due to post-marketing surveillance that raised the question of a rare serious adverse outcome. It happens. If it happens for this one it would be not good.
For influenza there is solid evidence that kids directly themselves have more benefit and risk reductions by being vaccinated than they have risks of adverse consequences. If that was not clearly and solidly the case then approval of an influenza vaccine program targeting children would not be approved or supported despite the unquestionable fact that children are for influenza (very unlike for COVID-19) huge amplifiers of spread to more vulnerable populations, major drivers of its spread through communities.
Completely ridiculous. If you are waving away concerns about a rushed to production Chinese vaccine as “anti-vaxx” then you are useless for rational discussion. Good fucking day, sir.
Hey, no worries. It’s only bad to volunteer old people to die. k9bfriender doesn’t see a problem volunteering children for vaccines trials. That would be anti-vaxxer!
I will have to say that this is what anti-vaxxers do, make retorts like that one as if nothing was said that already took care of that straw man that assumes that k9bfriender is a monster when that is not the case.
The last couple things I posted were kinda inflammatory but I am honestly a little pissed about how casually I’m being accused of being a callous conspiracy believer.
There it is again, I still do think that you are still missing that many of the early studies that are telling us about children being like in a bubble and not getting others infected can be missing some things.
In the heated debate over reopening schools, one burning question has been whether and how efficiently children can spread the virus to others.
A large new study from South Korea offers an answer: Children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often than adults do, but the risk is not zero. And those between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do.
The findings suggest that as schools reopen, communities will see clusters of infection take root that include children of all ages, several experts cautioned.
“I fear that there has been this sense that kids just won’t get infected or don’t get infected in the same way as adults and that, therefore, they’re almost like a bubbled population,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.
Up to this point, the pandemic seems to have energized the antivaccine movement. The spread of conspiracy theories, disgust with government/public health missteps (real and imagined) and worries about an as-yet unavailable coronavirus vaccine (with or without Bill Gatesian tracking chips) is right in their wheelhouse. How else would a self-serving discredited ex-scientist and nutcase like Judy Mikovits have a N.Y Times bestselling book (“Plague of Corruption”) and viral video*? Other celebrity antivaxers like Andy Wakefield and RFK Jr. have been having a field day spreading FUD. In uncertain times, a sizable chunk of the population eats this up.
We can hope that a good vaccine arrives in due time, fast-tracked but with appropriate safeguards. If/when that happy event occurs, antivax conspiracy theorists may well get trampled in the rush to get immunized, especially when people see that both their livelihoods and safety depend on it. Not everyone is going to be able to work from home and get essential supplies delivered.
Kimera757:
“In the end, the disease won’t wipe out even 1% of the population, probably, so they’ll claim that this wasn’t nearly as bad as we were told. (Most people would consider over 140,000 people dead to be a big deal, but they’ll compare it to a population of over 300 million and think it’s not a bit deal.)”
Remember that with antivaxers, you’re dealing with people who think the bubonic plague was no big deal despite killing up to a third of the world’s population in the Middle Ages, since humanity survived.
*she and her co-author (who bills himself as “America’s #1 Antivaxer” have a new book due out next month (“The Case Against Masks”). It’s like these people want the pandemic to go on indefinitely.