Personally, I am glad to see it. I definitely got vaccinated as soon as I could, but I was also still nervous as there did seem to be some level of reasonable doubt. I would be happy to see more studies confirm what many consider to be obvious.
> before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe
In case this comment has you temporarily hallucinate like it did me, I just looked and was able to confirm what I remembered: the vaccines did undergo trials for efficacy and safety before being approved.
I think the part that people doubt is the highly compressed timeline for approval. Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time. Also during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”. It is actually crazy to think about in retrospect.
> during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
This line of thinking is so odd to me. Would you have preferred communications to use inaccurate, outdated points for the sake of consistency?
When honest interlocutors learn more about something, they communicate details more accurately. What would you have suggested they do instead? Keep in mind that Covid-19 was as new to them as it was to the rest of the world, and they were also learning about it in real time.
> Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time
This also applies to Covid infections in immunologically naive people! The two choices were unvaccinated Covid exposure or vaccinated Covid exposure. It's folly to pretend an imagined third option of zero Covid exposure. Comparing to that fake third option does not make any sense.
I'd like accurate communication from the beginning.
>> “you won’t get sick or spread the disease”
I read that many times. It was a totally unrealistic promise, because not even all the other vaccines do that, even after years of research and improvements. (In particular, here is a big trade off in the inyectable vs oral vaccine for polio.)
Who is the highest ranking person that said it? I guess it was not one of the researchers. Perhaps it was a politician that is probably a lawyer and not a medical doctor, or perhaps a tv show host, or perhaps a random internet commenter. Who hallucinated that?
>> “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
Actually that was what the trials show before the vaccines were approved. I think they had like 50k persons each. The number of deaths was too small to have a statistical significative result in the death toll. It was enough to have a statistical significative reduction of hospitalizations, like a 60% reduction in old style inactivated virus vaccines to 95% in the new style mRNA vaccines. And remember that hospitalization+ventilator is really bad.
> I'd like accurate communication from the beginning.
So you want magic. Got it.
In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.
Even more, perfect understanding of how good our information is at any given point in time is not always going to be available.
There were definitely some failures to communicate well with the public during that time, but demanding that only definite information be communicated, and then never be contradicted, is asking the impossible.
It also really doesn't help that there are so many people who were (and are) just so scared of everything during that time that any information coming out that wasn't 100% unquestionably positive about any new measure to try to improve things would cause them to shun it forever as too dangerous to try.
> In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.
Even five years ago, everyone that has a minimal knowledge about vaccines understood it was an unrealistic claim, because many of the vaccines don't provide that level of immunity. If you have some free time to go down the rabit hole, you can try to count them in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_policy_of_the_Unit...
I think instead of „magic“ what we should have more of is honesty about uncertainty. The public discourse would be much less toxic if people honestly said that they’re not sure about something and that the policy they advocate might fail to deliver. However such rhetoric is immediately exploited weakness and strongly selected against.
Comparing accurate communication with magic is nonsense.
Both in Europe and the US, the government screwed up badly both mask strategic stockpiles and procurement. Therefore, the official message was that “masks don’t work”.
After they were finally able to procure masks, they magically started working.
That is the real magic, not demanding competence for people whose jobs were literally not fucking this up.
Meanwhile China and South Korea were producing and using masks as was normal.
The second magical part is the gaslighting about the performance of institutions tasked with pandemic preparation and about the exaggerated and incompetent government measures like fining people for going outside, forbidding people from going to work without being vaccinated or mandatorily tested each day, etc.
Vaccine safety issues were consistently downplayed by the media and in internet forums like this one. In the end, the EU-CDC published clear information on the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and it was much worse than for mRNA vaccines. One mRNA vaccine was worse than the other.
Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.
> seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease
not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
> not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first.
This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)"
If you look at case rates, hospitalization load, and death rates for summer/fall/winter 2020 pre-vaccine, and compare to the load on the system in summer-2021 and later when people were far more social and active, the economy was starting to recover, then the efficacy of the vaccine was pretty obvious in letting people get out of lockdown without killing hugely more people and overwhelming the healthcare system. And it was tested pre-rollout in double-blind fashion and rolled out in a phased way to the most needy groups first, with monitoring and study of those groups.
What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?
Did you even follow the link provided? It leads directly to an informed consent page for the study, which was voluntary. You're probably thinking about what happened _after_ these studies found the vaccine to be safe and effective. If you're a doctor or a nurse, you work in a special environment, and if you are turning down a safe and effective vaccine, you are putting your patients at risk. It means that you are unqualified for your job, so yes, you should be fired.
In the US at least, most people are employed "at will" [1], which means that you can be fired for reasons far less egregious than actually putting your patients at risk. Most of the libertarian types here cheer firings for lots of reasons, but for some reason being fired for actually being a health risk is not one of those things. That just makes no sense.
Besides, homeopathy has been studied for ages with tons and tons of quality studies.
Did it get rid of all the homeopathic quackery?
They will always have an excuse. If all else fails it'll just be a vague generic "oh yeah, it's just something deeper your science can't measure yet" or something along those lines. The Queen was an amateur hand-waver in comparison.
Never mind it was never very likely to work in the first place, on account of defying basic logic on several levels: like cures like, the whole water memory business, the more you dilute the stronger it becomes – nothing about this makes any sense.
I miss the days when worry about the adverse effects of homeopathy was the top concern...
most of the critics of this particular vaccine are the ones that took it. either the people who got covid anyway or were injured by it.
it was incredibly destructive for trust in the medical establishment to oversell / mandate it and market aggressively as "safe and effective". while most vaccine risks are in the 10s per 100k or 1M, nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.
nearly everybody observed that you still get and spread covid anyway. that is disconnected from the aggressive messaging from the CDC and the fear and shame campaign from the last US administration.
criticism of a specific vaccine or policy does not make someone an anti-vaxxer that moves goalposts. the establishment is responsible for the skepticism it engendered against itself by its hubris
I took it in 2020, and have taken booster shots. I got COVID... This year. I felt like shit for two weeks, was fatigured for a month, and had a lingering cough for two.
Nobody's promised them that they won't get COVID after taking it. What is promised is that on the whole, they'd be less likely to get sick, get milder symptoms if they do get sick, and be less likely to require hospitalization or a mortician if those milder symptoms are still serious.
It was and is safe and effective. You're doing exactly what I'm talking about - moving the goalposts.
If you think they need to be moved some more, I'll point out that the vaccine didn't come with a free pony, either, and that airbags and seatbelts kill ~50 people/year, and that you might still get ran over by a bus even if you look both ways before crossing the street.
Perhaps any statement in that context should be assumed to be oversimplified; but I don't think I can fault someone for taking words to mean what they literally say. The COVID vaccines look great so far on balance, but they absolutely were oversold to the public. We'll pay the price in public confidence for at least a generation.
Could you give the whole paragraph, and not just the last sentence in it?
Ah, heck, I'll do the work of pasting it in.
> But again, one last thing. I — we don’t talk enough to you about this, I don’t think. One last thing that’s really important is: We’re not in a position where we think that any virus — including the Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non — unvaccinated people — the vi- — the various shots that people are getting now cover that. They’re — you’re okay. You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations. -Biden
I'm not sure why out of all that Trump-lite-contradictory rambling (and the massive amounts of other words and ink spilled by both the 2020[1] and the 2021 administrations on this subject), that sentence is the singular, unqualified, pinky-swear blood-pact promise that you think the medical community made to the public regarding the vaccine.
---
As for Walensky:
> Three days later, on April 1, a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments, telling The New York Times “Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during this interview” adding that “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get Covid-19. The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”
If you're only going to listen to the first thing that's said on a subject, and ignore everything that follows, I don't think that sort of approach will serve you very well. For one thing, it'll probably mean that you'll think that people who correct themselves are idiots.
---
[1] Which, if I may remind you, developed, recommended, and rolled out the vaccine and had nothing to do with Biden.
I'm not sure what the rest of the paragraph adds here? Nothing in that qualifies or contradicts the absolute that I quoted. Are you just saying that the statement was so generally inarticulate that any reasonable person should have ignored it completely? That was true here, but that's not great for public confidence either.
I'm aware that the scientific literature told a more nuanced and accurate story, but only a tiny fraction of the population have the skills and time to study that. I don't think you can fault people for trusting their elected leaders; and if you do, then who are you expecting them to trust next time?
> a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments
So after widespread criticism by actual scientists, she didn't even correct herself in her own voice, instead sending an unnamed spokesperson to smooth it over without explicitly acknowledging error. I can't believe you don't see how the damage is done.
In a March 29 2021, MSNBC interview, Rochelle Walensky stated publicly that CDC data suggested "vaccinated people do not carry the virus" and "don't get sick". a knowingly false statement at the time and at best an inexcusable error from the head of that agency.
I also had covid this year, zero boosters, had a mild fever and sniffle for two days. not sure what you are demonstrating with this anecdote. or what goalposts you think I moved. the "milder symptom" stuff all came long after it was obvious that the covid shots were not doing what had been promised. that is what I would call moving the goalposts
“nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.”
This is a straight up lie - because “adverse reaction” does not mean “I felt achy for a couple days and maybe had a little fever,” it’s actually a VERY specific term.
But you are trying to peddle falsehoods.
Most people know nobody who “had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots”
respectfully it is not a lie, and more than a half a dozen people I know personally lost function of their hands, legs, were hospitalized with myocarditis, had local paralysis/palsy. I personally lost the use of my hand for two months and it took two more years to recover.
and when people like me say things like this, inevitably someone like you comes along to tell them they are dangerous for saying it out loud. In fact, the government was actively censoring people from being able to express this on social media.
I did read the book, and the takeaway is that causal disentaglement is hard and a high bar, with even the causal link between cigarette smoking an cancer hard to "prove" until recently
The case fatality ratio for measles infected children in high-income countries is also low. Nonetheless, we vaccinate children for this infectious disease because morbidity is also bad.
The Covid deaths were measured in thousands before they could find a single individual under 18 yrs old who died from it. The only reason to vaccinate kids was to try to prevent them from spreading it to adults. Right from the beginning (eg. With the cruise ship that was infected), it was extremely obvious that the main factor in survivability was age. The younger you were, the safer it was. Weight was also very important but we learned that later
Considering there have been over 7 million deaths directly from covid, saying "covid deaths measured in the thousands before X" is another way of saying "X happened right at the beginning of covid".
Plus, there's a big difference between "young people tend to have less risk of death" and "young people have a 0% chance of death" like the person I replied to claimed.
No, we also vaccinate children to prevent non-fatal illness, which is a reasonable choice to make if adverse effects of the vaccine are very small (they are). People get flu shots annually for this same reason.
Edit: I would also add that parents regularly make choices for their children that involve larger amounts of risk.
Also, what's the overlap here between people who believe a) the unborn have a "right to life" (or forced birth as some others call it, where the parent has no choice but to take the pregnancy to term and give birth), and b) those who think the parents have every right to decide not to vaccinate their children? If you believe (a), shouldn't you believe (not b)? And if you believe (b), shouldn't you believe (not a)?
Indeed. A lot of antivaxxers mockingly say "my body, my choice" but they are highlighting their own hypocrisy, not anyone else's. One critical difference between the cases is that pregnancy is not contagious.
For a lot of people these aren't rational beliefs, they're beliefs based on appeals to emotion. They will only rationally re-evaluate those beliefs if you change the kind of media they consume.
Another thing that seemed to work is the unvaccinated getting sick themselves.
2/3 of the unvaccinated COVID patients who were admitted to hospital regretted their decision, declared they would promote the vaccine post-discharge, and declared they would get it post-discharge.
Although from this study the global vaccine output is positive, the personal one seems negative for a lot of people.
Many still got COVID19 and the bleeding issue, but they can't compare to what would have happened without the vaccine.
Notably many for whom the basic understanding of "25% lower risk of all-cause mortality" doesn't mean anything.
- "What is it ? I had 1 chance to 1 million to die but with the vaccine it's 0.75 to 1 million ?"
- "No, out of 22 million vaccinated, 0.4% died but out of 6 million unvaccinated, 0.6% died !"
> The availability of COVID-19 vaccination was not associated with a change in incidence of medically attended abnormal uterine bleeding in our population of over 79,000 female patients of reproductive age. Additionally, among 2,717 patients with abnormal uterine bleeding diagnoses in the period following COVID-19 vaccine availability, receipt of the vaccine was not associated with greater bleeding severity.
I think people throw these accusations around way too broadly.
There is a small subset of weirdos who think the Covid/mRNA vaccines contain microchips or were designed kill off some percentage of the population.
But I think there's another, much larger group who might care a lot about their health to the point where they don't even drink from plastic bottles, and who when presented with a novel vaccine which was developed and rolled very quickly were hesitant...
Rightly or wrongly, I think these health-conscious people were concerned during Covid by mainstream media orgs frequently broadcasting what can only be described as pro-vax "propaganda"[1], and in some cases state compelled vaccination.
I'm very pro-vax, but I remember at the time (2021) being a bit torn on what I should do. I was in my twenties and already contracted Covid. Did it really make sense for me to take a vaccine when my risk was so low and there were some reports that young men were suffering from myocarditis post-vaccination?
I guess what I'm saying is that I think most reasonable people who may have initially been nervous about the vaccine can look at data like this and feel much more comfortable with the risk profile today. This is exactly the kind of data a lot of people (including myself) wanted when their governments were trying to force them to take these newly developed vaccines.
In my mind it's those on the extreme pro-vaccine and extreme anti-vaccine side in 2021-2022 that were the ones lacking critical thought. The reality was that as a society given the absence of long-term data like this, we were taking a calculated risk. Because even if mRNA vaccines slightly increased all-cause mortality that wouldn't mean the vaccine rollout was a bad thing... Similarly chemo probably great for you either and I'm sure people who undergo chemo unnecessarily suffer from increased morality risk. But if you have cancer or if you're in the middle of a pandemic risk calculations change a little.
The problem with the myocarditis risk in young men is that they undergo exactly the same risk from the actual covid infection. And given the fact that it was already obviously going to be endemic it really wasn't much of a calculation. It was basically: You either roll the dice now or you roll the dice when you inevitably get covid.
I assume that you mean "censored" and not "censured" (different thing), but it was not, in fact, censored. It was entirely in the open.
However, the information was definitely not distilled effectively for the average layperson. I remember thinking at the time that the CDC was seriously ham-handed when it came to communicating with the general public. I even initially blamed the Trump administration, but when the Biden administration took over, they did not improve communication either. My conclusion since then is that the CDC is dominated by academic types--which is largely appropriate given their mission--but that they also put academic types in PR roles, which was a disaster.
Hardly. I heard this “questioning the dominant narrative” over and over again. Disagreement is not censure. As far as I am aware, the only people who faced any penalties at all were doctors who went so far outside the realm of evidence-based medicine that they caused demonstrable harm and therefore had their licenses revoked. Which is good.
I believed in the lab leak theory so for me getting the vaccine was a no brainer. I could get infected by one of two things developed in a lab, only one of which had clinical trails on humans. I went with the clinically tested option.
perfectly understandable and you’ve described a reasonable decision-making process
any reasonable person should be able to recognize that the alternative hypothesis was not an equally accepted decision
many people chose severe penalties rather than participate in a sudden worldwide field trial of mRNA vaccination by indemnified pharmaceutical companies, and in some parts of the world were not even given that choice.
We were also subjected to a sudden worldwide field trial of a novel coronavirus, so it makes sense that it requires a similar response to combat it. I think in any other decade this would've been celebrated as a major scientific achievement.
If the moon landing happened today people would just be cynical about it just being an arms race with the Soviet Union to develop better ICBMs. This is of course true, but it doesn't make the achievement any less impressive.
It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy.
I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
"bUT wE StILl DoN't KnoW tHe LOnG TeRM EffECts oF ThE VacCInES."
I swear these folks will be on their death beds 50 years in the future claiming this. There will be no amount of evidence or time that matters to them.
Someone can prove me wrong, and tell me exactly what evidence would convince them that the vaccines are safer than the alternative.
This is the wrong attitude to take to the problem.
While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat.
Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.
Completely wrong about the facts. Long COVID is real and not restricted to those on the left. Right wingers constantly "lament" over all sorts of bogeymen, rarely anything from personal experience. Most talk about vaccine injuries is based on misuse of VAERS.
> lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging
Yes, from right wing media ... which you are echoing. Dead bodies were overflowing and public health officials were acting in good faith to try to deal with it. Right wingers and good faith are complete strangers.
Worse it will be used to produce even more disinformation. Most of the stuff I've encountered takes studies like this, misrepresents or outright lies about the findings and includes a link (sometimes working) to the paper which nobody consuming the slop will ever check.
“Why didn’t doctors listen to my completely unsourced opinion in their field?! I can write computer programs, don’t they know that!”
You have absolutely no idea what you saw. Sometimes, it’s ok to not have strong opinions about things you know you’re completely unqualified to understand or diagnose.
> If the results of this specific study were the opposite, would you behave any different than a skeptic?
This study supports all the other bits of evidence in the same direction; it's consistent with what we know.
Similarly, I'd be somewhat more dubious about even a very well constructed study that declares "there are no people in New York City" than one that found some people there.
The problem is that most people are bad at risk assessment. If COVID-19 vaccine increased their risk of premature death by .0000001% they point to that and say sure not taking my risk! Despite the fact that they'd be at much more risk of dying by getting the disease, or just hopping in their car and driving down the street to get a loaf of bread of whatever.
If you showed say, a 1% uptick in mortality that you could attribute to the vaccine, yea that would be a different story. But guess what? We wouldn't* release such a vaccine.
* I add an asterisk here because if it was a 1% uptick in mortality you can think of scenarios like a disease which kills you 50% of the time or something around that range as being a worthwhile trade off for a 1% rate.
The thing is people 'on the other side' think exactly the same, but come to different conclusions. For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? And what do you think his chances of suffering a significant case of myocarditis or pericarditis from the vaccine is? By "significant" I mean a case that's significant enough to result in active diagnosis - in other words somebody being diagnosed after a visit to an emergency room, as opposed to passive diagnosis where you assess each vaccinated individual to find cases that would otherwise go undetected.
Obviously I'm not comparing apples to apples (side effects from vaccine vs death from COVID) but this again is as explained by your own logic. If we were having a smallpox outbreak (with some strains having upward of 30% mortality rates across all demographics), I'm not going to be concerned about side effects of vaccines short of death. But with the rather low risk profile of people in favorable health/age demographics, the side effects of vaccination become quite relevant. Another issue is that early on it became quite apparent that the vaccines were not stopping people from getting COVID, so it's not like you can really compare vaccine vs covid effects, because the reality is you're probably still going to get COVID (and repeatedly, as it turned out) regardless of vaccination status.
> For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are?
Much more likely than dying from the vaccine.
Also, and this is very important, at the time the vaccine was developed and released to the general public it was even more unknown what the fatality truly would be. We weren't totally sure as a species how the virus might mutate... maybe it would become more deadly? Maybe it would kill young people specifically even if they were otherwise healthy? Maybe by not getting the vaccine with less risk to you as the healthy 20 year old means you get COVID-19 and get "long COVID" (which I'm not sure is a real thing anyway, but I digress) and sure you didn't die but now your life sucks some.
The problem with "the other side"'s line of reasoning is that there was a specific concern with "risk" of the COVID-19 vaccine that didn't translate into practical reality and wasn't being assessed relative to the broader risk of getting COVID-19 itself or other general risks we undertake everyday.
Another way you can slice this up is, well, there's no risk of getting the vaccine, but getting sick sucks so even one day of being sick is well worth getting a shot for just to not get sick. "What about the risk" there's no real risk. If you think there's a risk, the risk is higher for getting COVID or whatever.
It all comes back to this perceived risk of COVID-19 vaccines (thank you to China, Russia, Iran, etc.) and improper assessment of risk.
Relative to getting COVID-19 there was no risk. Relative to the dumb risks people take everyday it is even less risky. The only difference is people are sitting around reading about it on social media and being stupid.
But don't you see that you're immediately resorting to the somewhat misleading arguments that I already preempted? You're engaging in the typical fallacy of vaccine OR covid. When in reality it was clear rather early on that the vaccines were not particularly effective at preventing people from getting COVID, meaning you need to look at getting the vaccine and covid, or covid alone.
And yes the risks are very real. Vaccine induced myocarditis and pericarditis rates in young males are very high, and they can result in heart failure, life long damage, early mortality, and more. And for young males you're looking at multiple significant cases per 10,000. [1] For all cases of myocarditis/pericarditis the rates would be substantially higher yet still since most cases will go undiagnosed. For some contrast, the normal rate of significant side effects in vaccines ranges in the 1:100k to 1000k range.
No, that's a straw man you made up. You very well could not have gotten COVID-19. I didn't get it for about 4 years. Well, at least a symptomatic version. But the chances of getting it were quite high, and you are still neglecting the timeframe in which decisions would have been made based on preliminary data. In other words, it wasn't get vaccine or get COVID-19. It was get the vaccine and most likely prevent getting a very severe bout of COVID-19 if you did in fact get COVID, which the vast majority of Americans did get, or something similar, including those in the age range you specified. Frankly, it seems to me that just not being sick was well worth the risk.
I'm not going to pull a number out of my hat here but I bet the number of people who were in the 19-20 year old range who died from suicide or something after losing their job from getting sick from COVID-19 and not having sick days to take is higher than the number of folks who died from the vaccine.
Even if it turned out that COVID-19 wasn't a big deal for 19/20 year olds and taking the vaccine might cause negative effects, it still doesn't mean that getting the vaccine at the time wasn't the best risk-based decision.
All in all though even if we took at face value your 1:10,000 number that still would be tangential to my original post because you're focusing on one small segment of the population and as folks get older (or younger) their risk profile changes.
What's a straw man? Following the vaccines, vaccinated people were still getting COVID and indeed dying of COVID. Early on that was disproportionately the elderly as they were who the vaccines were rolled out to first, but nonetheless it was clear that the shots were much more akin to flu shots than e.g. smallpox or polio type vaccines. This is what led to those silly things like the CDC deciding to redefine vaccine on their website to shift vaccination language away from immunity and towards a poorly define "protection" instead.
And the 1:10,000 is not my number. It is the repeatedly verified rates of significant myocarditis and pericarditis, and it's much lower once you filter it down to just younger males since the 1:10000 is for both male and female across a relatively wide age range. It's not tangential, because the entire point of our discussion is that there were rather large groups of people for whom vaccination was, at the bare minimum, an extremely debatable decision.
> rates of significant myocarditis after vaccination
Absolute straw man, deceptive and one-sided.
> Young people’s risk of developing myocarditis is higher and longer lasting after covid-19 infection than after vaccination against it, the largest study of its kind suggests.
I again don't know what you mean. Are you stating that you don't believe that the CDC chose to redefine vaccination to move away from immunity and towards "protection"? Or do you think it had nothing to do with the low efficacy of the vaccines in preventing infection?
The paper you linked to studied a much wider age group and assessed the odds of heart issues from vaccination as being about 1/3rd as high as those from infection. Their estimated rates of vaccine induced heart issues are more than an order of magnitude lower than those for the study I referenced earlier which instead was an overview of studies with more of a focus of vaccination's impact on vulnerable groups.
I'd also add that, as is typical, the study you linked to failed to assess the odds of heart issues were when one was both vaccinated and then later infected, as that is a rather more realistic scenario.
Well blow me down, people being skeptical of a study that defied basically all other Science and goes against our entire understanding of how vaccines and immune systems work? Yeah, of course I'd be skeptical. I'd be interested and I'd read it (!) but yeah, I'd seriously question what was wrong with the study.
If the results showed that mRNA vaccines had negative health outcomes, then the obvious next question to ask is "are they worse or better than COVID's health outcomes?". If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot.
The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone. Very similar to the general vaccine skeptic position. It ends up being a moving goalpost as well.
A truth seeking individual realizes that very few things in the world are black and white. They avoid trying to frame things as a black and white. Nobel and villainous framing. If you are truth seeking, you won't try to turn a non-binary evidence into binary thinking.
The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone.
That's not what I've seen. I live in very-red Tennessee. What I see is more like what you said yourself:
If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot.
The conclusion to this (within my bubble) being: since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
It's common enough that there are state legislatures trying to ban mRNA vaccines all together. [1]
> since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
Kids spread covid and no vaccine is 100% effective.
I've not seen any evidence that the vaccine is dangerous to any age group. There is plenty of evidence that COVID is deadly to the very young, the very old, and a bunch of other people (including those with compromised immune systems).
It's exactly the same reason kids should get the flu shot.
That said, there's no requirement anywhere for kids to get either.
The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism.
It can be really hard to abandon a false belief. Especially if you take the time and effort to shore it up with bad data. It starts with recognizing that everyone, including yourself, is wrong about something.
> The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism.
My opinion is that on the specific topic at hand of COVID-19 vaccine "scepticism", we are far past the point of rational scepticism being sustainable.
If the results were the opposite they'd be shockingly in conflict with what we've already learned and observed, so yes, we would of course react differently.
One of the upsides of being evidence-driven is it's harder to paint yourself into a corner and put yourself at high risk of having your entire worldview flipped upside down by run of the mill, predictable scientific results.
By and large, consensus views are correct. Only a true idiot would make an identity out of disagreeing with consensus by virtue of it being consensus.
If the results were that getting the COVID vaccine was going to give you a 70% increased chance of death from COVID I would be outraged, and also quite confused as the real life evidence definitely doesn't point in that direction.
That's the problem with conspiracy theories, as the evidence piles up against them the counterfactual becomes increasingly ridiculous until you're out in the cold with a bunch of nutjobs.
People who believe in baseless conspiracy theories have to convince themselves that people who don't are operating in the same epistemic mode, picking and choosing what to believe in order to reinforce their prior beliefs, because the alternative is admitting that those people are operating in a superior epistemic mode where they base their beliefs on most or all of the available evidence (including, in this case, the fact that the """vaxxed""" people they know are all still upright and apparently unharmed after years of predictions to the contrary).
Your comment is a manifestation of this defense mechanism. As real evidence piles up that you've been wrong, you retreat into these bizarre imaginary scenarios in which you've been right the whole time, and by projecting that scenario onto others you imagine yourself vindicated. But the rest of us just think you're nuts.
And if my grandmother had wheels then she'd be a bicycle. You're still trying to spin it as "but you won't be convinced no matter what!" on a story that demonstrates the exact opposite. This is just a pathetic round-about personal attack questioning someone's integrity using a bizarre hypothetical that's the exact opposite of what was actually found.
No not really, since there are other studies that answer the question of vaccine safety and effectiveness in the more emergency scenario of <= Nov 1 2021.
Spoiler: They were also extremely safe and extremely effective then, too.
You can see it unambiguously in county-level excess mortality metrics split by political affiliation in the US. The anti-science right wing political sphere gave us a natural experiment that produced very clear results: lots of people dying before vaccines, then across the board death reduction after vaccines, then a red-blue bifurcation later on, after vaccines were politicized.
> clogging the circulatory system (hence the uptick in myocarditis and such)
Do people really believe that the Covid vaccines effectively give people sickle cell?
Less snarky -- it has been known for quite some time that infections such as the flu can trigger cardio conditions such as myocarditis. Knowing that, it is unsurprising that people exposed to Covid (vaccinated or not, since a vaccine is never 100% effective) would show similar outcomes.
I respectfully disagree. VAERS can absolutely be used to establish causality when followed by proper expert investigation (which is exactly its purpose as a signal-detection system). The IOM has relied on VAERS data to confirm causal links in 158 vaccine-adverse event pairs, including rotavirus vaccine and intussusception.
Here, FDA career scientists conducted that follow-up: they reviewed 96 child death reports and concluded at least 10 were caused by COVID vaccine myocarditis. That expert finding, not politics, is what triggered the stricter protocols. Healthy skepticism means demanding the full data for review, not preemptively calling it invalid.
The FDA memo citing 10 vaccine-caused myocarditis deaths in kids came _after_ the Sept. 2025 ACIP vote. ACIP had already dropped routine vaccination for healthy kids 6 mo-17 yr and moved everyone under 65 to "shared decision-making" (high-risk only) [1]
The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.
Blame NYTimes for leaking the internal memo. In all honesty they should be fined for doing this.
We have no information about how highly motivated anti-vaxxers in positions of power over the FDA arrived at this conclusion except "the team has performed an initial analysis"[1]. That's literally it. Your claim that "FDA career scientists" conducted the follow-up can't even be based on this flimsy a statement. Moreover, these deaths have already been investigated by FDA career scientists and found these conclusions unwarranted.
Prasad spends the rest of the memo politically grandstanding (including claiming it was the FDA commissioner that was the hero here, forcing this issue, not FDA career scientists) and dismissing any objections to very obvious arguments against his claim (that have been made and published multiple times over the past five years) without any evidence, while providing no evidence of his own, in a memo addressing FDA career scientists.
Seriously, everyone should go read his memo. It's basically just a shitty antivax substack post, yet will apparently be FDA policy going forward. Another win for meritocracy.
> The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.
The only "claim" here just sounds more official because RFKjr got a bunch of his best antivax buddies to be in charge of the FDA (same with the ACIP). There's no way to even consider it without evidence, so there's nothing to dismiss. Come back when you have something real.
The NYT shouldn't get a free pass for publishing a half-baked internal draft memo that even says "initial analysis" and then framing it as settled science. That's how you create panic and confusion, not transparency. Leaking unfinished work and splashing it on the front page is reckless. This should not be allowed.
Calling everyone "anti-vaxxers" is lazy. Most people I know who are skeptical of the covid shots (including plenty of doctors and scientists) are fully vaccinated against measles, polio, tetanus, etc. They just don't trust a product that skipped the usual 5–10 year safety window and got pushed with emergency authorization. That's not "anti-vax", that’s pattern recognition.
The memo is short on data and long on rhetoric, sure. That's exactly why we need the actual underlying review released in full.
You sound really invested in keeping those covid shots on the childhood schedule. Got a big Pfizer position in the 401k? Kidding, obviously. But the "anyone who asks questions is an anti-vaxxer" reflex is exactly why people stopped trusting the institutions in the first place. I respect every real skeptic, on any side. Asking questions is what moves science forward. Blind trust is stagnation.
Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality and the 10 deaths are not real or not proven.
What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
If he just wanted to scare people for no reason, the rational move is to keep repeating “VAERS proves nothing” and change zero policy. That costs nothing and keeps everyone happy. Instead he’s taking massive heat, angering the entire medical establishment, and shrinking the childhood schedule.
Inventing a fake danger out of junk data brings him zero benefit and enormous political cost. That only makes sense if the internal FDA review actually found something real and alarming.
> Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality…
Don't assume. https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html "When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established."
> What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
He gets to restrict vaccines, which is a thing he's wanted to do for decades.
Duh. VAERS guide says raw reports dont 100% prove causality. Nobody claims they do. That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
They could've just said "VAERS proves nothing" and left the recommendation unchanged. Instead they wrote it up, leaked it early, and invited the exact scrutiny you're giving it now.
If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown. They only take that risk if the OBPV analysis actually held up internally.
> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
We don't actually know who at the OBPV did the review (Prasad only referred to the results coming from "the team") and the causal ranking they used included any case where causality was subjectively rated between "certain" and "possible/likely".
We also know that two orders of magnitude more children died from covid than that, and we have strong studies suggesting that myocarditis from covid is both more common and more severe than the observed cases tied to the covid vaccines, two inconvenient stances that Prasad waves away as insufficiently studied, even as he bases his entire position on a subjective review of something by someone, and doesn't bother filling in those blanks.
> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown
He beclowns himself all the time. He himself walked back the Tylenol claim after convincing Trump to talk about it so publicly and standing by him while he did it. Clearly he's not bothered by it.
> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
And we're back at the "Hitler provided free things to Jews" technical truth again. This is likely an accurate statement!
But it'd deeply missing important context.
> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown.
This is likely meaningless to the guy who leaves dead bears in Central Park. The biggest political innovation in the last 50 years or so is the discovery that you can look like a clown without much consequence.
1. Hitler gave Jews free stuff (technical truth used to mislead)
2. Dead bear guy doesn’t care about looking like a clown
3. Therefore the OBPV causality review must be deceptive sleight-of-hand
That's literally a conspiracy theory.
On Tylenol, FDA did add a "possible association" warning in Sept 2025 (RFK’s call), but even the new label says evidence is only _suggestive_, not proven. Poop analogy fits the anti side better: no, avoiding fever meds won't prevent autism, but it could harm pregnancies.
"U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that since the start of the pandemic, more than 2,000 children age 18 and younger in the U.S. have died from COVID-19. Nearly 700, or about 33%, were less than 1 year old."
Given the effectiveness at preventing death, I'll happily trade 2,000 COVID deaths for 10 myocarditis deaths.
Once again, stricter protocols don't dismiss anyone, they adapt to 2025 realities: near-zero child covid deaths monthly vs. rare vax risks. Under the new FDA framework, kids aren't denied shots; they just require a doctor's consult for personalized recs. Your framing sounds like full denial, which is false and amps up the fear.
> What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
That's never bothered him before. Vaccines cause autism. WiFi causes DNA changes and opens up the blood-brain barrier allowing toxins into the brain. Chemtrails. HIV is not a major cause of AIDS, with lifestyle and drugs (particularly amyl nitrate) being the major causes.
> Inventing a fake danger out of junk data brings him zero benefit and enormous political cost. That only makes sense if the internal FDA review actually found something real and alarming.
Making fake dangers out of junk data is why he has political power in the first place.
You just listed a bunch of old-school RFK claims to dismiss him entirely.
That's exactly how people used to shut down anyone questioning:
- Vioxx
- lab leak
- opioids
- PFAS
...all “crazy conspiracy theories” until proven true.
I'm not saying vaccines cause autism (the evidence still doesn't). But stay skeptical, even of your own side. That's how science actually moves forward.
The point is that you were arguing the RFK Jr would not make claims unless they were supported by the evidence. The examples given show that he will in fact make such claims.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results: just because RFK Jr. has hyped weak claims before doesn't automatically make this OBPV causality review wrong.
The political appointees pushing this new policy have not presented any evidence of these deaths beyond a vague assertion in a leaked internal email. They have not provided that evidence to career staffers either.
And that is precisely why not-yet-finalized health-related leaks should not be shared publicly by mainstream media, given that the reaction here seems shaped far more by political allegiance than by the facts themselves.
Pushing covid-19 vaccinations onto kids was always controversial. Covid isn't smallpox, people under 30 only get a serious case very rarely, and the vaccine isn't sterilizing anyway.
If we want to use medications responsibly and rationally, we must be careful about the cost/benefit analysis to the intended recipient groups. It makes great sense to vaccinate old people against Covid and teenagers against HPV. The other way round, much less so.
Of course the vendors will push for blanket use, as they make more money, but that is also the problem.
Both of these are true: 1) Vaccines kill people. 2) Vaccines save lives.
That's why we evaluate relative risk. The vaccines that we recommend are significantly safer than not being vaccinated at all, for the population as a whole.
This isn't limited to vaccines of course. Everything from antibiotics to defibrillators to car airbags can kill people too, but it's extremely rare compared to how often they save lives.
“Doesn’t kill you” is the absolute bare minimum and a very low bar. Because the vaccines were so rushed, it’s still reassuring, but not at all a testament to the safety of mRNA vaccines.
The more interesting studies will be about non-lethal adverse reactions. Changes to menstruation, heart problems, lymph node swelling to name just a few.
Fortunately doctors and medical organizations usually take these matters seriously, unlike the average techbro. A good example is how the vaccination recommendations were changed to avoid Moderna for young men to reduce the risk of heart problems.
