A medicine that sometimes stops a bad thing from happening is hard for people to appreciate, because if it works you'll never know it, and it might have some side effects.
We need to improve public education about why we believe these medicines work. I want to see the studies presented on social media: "We gave 30,000 people this drug and you won't believe what happened!" Less censoring people and more presenting the studies in a way people can understand. Less appealing to authority and more appealing to observations; yes, you observed your 2 relatives, and I observed 30,000 people, judge for yourself which is more persuasive.
Most people aren't going to read your 3 paragraph abstract, let alone the the full paper. You have to tell them the observations in a few sentences, preferably with minimal added interpretation.
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
It was pretty clear that vaccines had been oversold early on. The opposite happened with masks, where the experts pooh-poohed them, then backtracked.
It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten.
(I have had 4 doses by the way, I'm not going to cut my nose to spite my face: knowing that vaccines were oversold is not the same as believing they're useless).
I didn't know that my heart pain was related to the vaccine until I noticed the same pain during the third shot.
The Moderna CEO is at least honest enough to say by now it should be treated the same as a flu vaccine. If you want to you can get your yearly dose and if you don't up to you. Pfizer on the other hand was actively whining about how they created too many doses and how they can't milk it any more.
If it was up to me I wouldn't have gotten the third one, but the fact that they've intermingled it with travel restrictions when it does not in fact prevent spread is quite infuriating.
It seems that people have also forgotten that the antibodies compared to other vaccines(which can be in decades for hepatitis for example) fade rather quickly and that if you got infected quite far out from your last shot, and were only mildly symptomatic it might not actually have been the vaccine that protected you but rather your own immune system and the fact that the whole thing isn't as deadly anymore.
Exactly what part of the scientific process involves locking people up, stripping them of their jobs, splitting families apart?
Admitting past errors without also acknowledging the current knowledge is just as fallible is nothing but empty words. It's also a very rose tinted interpretation of what has been happening. The messaging has always been "These are this week's truths. They are absolute truths, and we'll enforce these truths at gunpoint, for these truths are infallible, and The Science is settled."
I see that you're not the person that I was replying to, I see that you are attempting to change the subject, speak in extremes, and and to use emotional language, a common tactic to derail logical processing. Writing this doesn't help anyone, not even you.
I fully understand that the science wasn’t settled. It was a new disease, and guidance was going to change.
What I didn’t expect was the overconfidence and then reversals, without missing a beat, and without acknowledging “hey, we were wrong”. The stuff around masks… first ”they don’t work”, “they make it more likely to get infected”, “people won’t know how to use a mask”, “masks are a superstition” then switching to mask mandates, without admitting that those who expressed those views got it wrong.
The reason I used “mainstream” was to show that these were people in positions of trust. News outlets with editorial controls, public health officials, elected politicians. Or doctors. It happened both on traditional, and social media and IRL. The term was not meant to be pejorative, but descriptive.
Vaccines are similar: there are many clips that show pundits, media figures and public health officials overselling vaccines. Instead of later saying “the preliminary data looked good so we assumed they would stop transmission and infection, but it turns out that these vaccines reduce serious illness and death. We were wrong, but it’s a new disease and we are all learning, that’s how science works” we got “we ALWAYS said that vaccines were meant to reduce illness and death and not infection and transmission”.
Maybe I hate being gaslit more than most. My mother, an intelligent woman who I love and respect, in an effort to spare my feelings as a young child, would try to warp reality: “oh you never had the toy that’s missing”. She probably thought I wouldn’t remember, but did. She continued that pattern throughout my childhood. Whatever the reason, I intensely dislike that sort of manipulation, and I think it’s corrosive.
I think that your conception of "we" in "hey, we were wrong" is perhaps too monolithic and simplistic. "show pundits, media figures" are mere conduits, they "get the message out" but they are never subject matter experts, you should not assume that they originate any message, have an authoritative truth or do any scientific study at all.
You are starting to run into No True Scotsman fallacy territory at this point. Everyone from the Surgeon General of the United States to random GPs on Twitter were vilifying masks.
There are a lot of Scotsmen in Scotland, and in my experience they are diverse: I have met socialists and internationalist Europhiles there, and also ethnonationalist racists. Point is, monolithic assertions about "we" or "they" aren't ever completely true.
I'm not in the USA, I got onto masks quite early. But I think that we still lag badly in anti-covid ventilation systems, while still over-emphasising hand-washing.
Some of the best people on the topic (of our evolving understanding of COVID, not of Scotsmen) have in fact been relative outsiders (i.e. neither medical researchers nor crazed conspiracists). I'm thinking particularly of Zeynep Tufekci on Airborne transmission, e.g.
How effective? You realize they never tested the major vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna) for transmission or a reduction in ability to get infected?
You can access the clinical trial protocol by googling it. They never regularly tested patients in the trial, only when they were symptomatic. There is no clinical trial data to prove a reductions in infection or transmission.
There's a very simple reason the vaccines weren't tested for reduction in transmission: that sort of test is much more difficult and takes much longer. When the virus is killing thousands daily just in the U.S., you use the most obvious data to demonstrate effectiveness (or not) and hope that deeper analysis down the road will show other benefits.
But if you mandate vaccines, because "if you're not vaccinated, you'll infect grandma", somehow testing if vaccinated people can transmit it, should be a priority.
If this was some non-mandatory voulountary vaccine.. sure, test one thing, then another,.... If you were put in a position where you were effectively forced to get it (or else you'd eg. lose your job), such things should be tested first.
They are testing whether vaccinated people can transmit. That research is ongoing. Again, if they had started with that, we might just be rolling out the vaccines now, which would have cost additional millions of lives.
Vaccines suffer from their effectiveness. For comparison with covid, measles killed only a few hundred each year (in the US). Vaccination to the level of herd immunity was required to reduce that number; if only half the population were vaccinated, we'd see half those deaths. Covid is still killing roughly the same number of people each day as measles killed in a year, yet people resist getting vaccinated. It's objectively stupid.
To your exact point, your employer should be entitled to set the safety protocols that are necessary to ensure the health of their workforce.
There wasn't no data, just not specific statistical data from experimentation with these vaccines. Experts had data on previous vaccines, general knowledge of symptomatology, contagion, etc. It's only reasonable that reasonable experts might differ on the specifics given the level of extrapolation, but that's not "no data".
TLDR: We knew the mRNA vaccines were effective at preventing serious disease in late 2020. We didn't know for sure (publicly) if the mRNA vaccines reduced transmission rates until mid 2021, as more research concluded. Mid 2021 is when it was demonstrated that mRNA vaccines reduce transmission of the variants of SARS-CoV-2 at the time. As SARS-CoV-2 continues to mutate, more research needs to be done.
Delta was named at the end of May 2021 and started to become the dominant strain worldwide in the following months. As shown in the chart under ”Prevention” (and described in the linked pages), Delta significantly reduced vaccine effectiveness against infection and symptomatic disease, though not against severe disease.
However, it’s also true that vaccine effectiveness, regardless of variant, significantly declines over the months following the dose - again, much less so for severe disease than for any symptomatic disease.
It depended on the day of the week. Sometimes it was slow the spread, sometimes it was to prevent getting covid, other times it was to reduce the severity if you got it.
I think a big part of it is that COVID has become an attention point in our lives, it entirely dominated the media cycle for months. There's something everyone wants to hear about and _we just don't know that much about it_, so the media increasingly plays telephone with itself in an attempt to report anything.
Various people gave their hopefully somewhat informed opinion at the time to different members of the media, who reported on it with different levels of accuracy, attributing often undue levels of confidence to it. And that quickly mutated into "the media's trusted sources can confirm that the experts definitely know the vaccine will have exactly these effects and will be effective for these specific cases"
I think it's worth questioning what influence there was in which narratives did or didn't get pushed, but I also think it's worth keeping in mind that the media is also just... fallible.
I mean... if the director of CDC says it directy... you cannot blame misreporting, and someone in that position should know the level of confidence to use when saying such stuff.
I understand if some random chiropractic from alabama says something, that the data is probably questionable... but the director of CDC does carry some authority.
If if _we don't know something_, isn't mandating that something (vaccines in this case) somehow a bad thing? On one side... "take this, and you won't get sick"... who is responsible when that person gets sick? Or infects grandma? Or actually gets a clot?
I agree that there has been bad communication and wrong communication.
That said, a doctor never says “you won’t get sick”. Medicine is never certain, the human body is too complex to generalize and say “this will cure you 100% sure, no bad reactions possible”. There’s always a chance that something will go wrong. Clinical essays are what makes possibility go down, but it is never 0.
If you want absolutes, go to a priest. They will give you an absolute that matches your own pre assumptions and if it turns out wrong later, well God wanted it this way, He works in misterious ways.
"our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data."
That's not bad communication it's an outright false statement.
Of course it's not certain and 100%... i'm too lazy to find our local propaganda now, but when i got it, the numbers were in the rage of 96% efficacy (for not getting it and not transmitting it) with minimal chances of side effects.
But in my country (slovenia), at the height of pressure to get vaccinated, if you were a young girl/woman (15-24 age bracket), the "96%" from above turned to "you'll probably still get covid, you'll still spread it, if you do, not one girl in your age bracket died yet because of or even with covid, but one girl died due to the vaccine... but, if you don't take the vaccine, you'll have to get tested every 48 hours or you'll be unable to go to work (oh, no testing center in your village, and you're not allowed to take the bus to the closest test location without a test)".
I don’t understand. People who were not vaccinated had worse effects on average, including dying (painfully and slowly azfixiating as your lungs collapsed). This was common at the beginning of the pandemic, and extensively documented. Millions of people died this way.
It’s choosing between that and … “a girl who died in Slovenia”. How are those two things equivalent?
Even if you can spread COVID, if the effects in your body are lowered, chances are that you will remove the virus it from your body earlier (it can dedicate more resources to winning the battle instead of … breathing), so you will be effectively less contagious.
The message absolutely depended on time. But that's because the virus mutated, and the vaccine went from preventing illness and lowering spread rates to only preventing severe illness.
My point was that should not be the message. Promising people the vaccine will save them is a false hope, people look around and find someone who got vaccinated but still died and now the trust is broken.
Instead, tell people about the trial control group vs treatment group, let people see that there is risk on both sides, but that the treatment group was ultimately better off. Use minimal interpretation. I'd like to see so much focus on the trial outcomes that the number of people who died in both groups is a household fact that families talk about.
Presumably more people are getting sick and dying in the control group. People can understand "more people dead" even without taking a genetics course.
>Presumably more people are getting sick and dying in the control group.
In the Pfizer mRNA vaccine clinical trial there were actually more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group, but the sample size wasn't large enough to draw any conclusions from this.
We've had 4 vaccines available in my country at the beginning (astrazeneca, moderna, pfeizer and J&J). Astrazeneca killed a few people in neighbouring countries (clot issues), so we stopped using that. J&J killed a young girl in my country, so we stopped using that too. Moderna killed people in northern/scandinavian countries, and we got a recommendation not to use it on people below 50yo.
So, 3/4 vaccines went from safe to "clot shots" in just a few months.
> Simonovič presented the composition of the five-member commission, namely, three doctors (neurologist, infectologist and vascular specialist), a pharmacologist and Zoran Simonovič, a representative of the epidemiological profession. The commission reviewed the medical records of a 20-year-old patient who developed thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome following vaccination. The documentation included a treatment procedure as of the admission to the Clinical Department of Neurology in Ljubljana and a health record obtained from the patient’s personal doctor.
> The commission confirmed thrombosis with thrombocytopenia or vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia. All criteria were met for the fulfilment of the diagnosis. Upon examining the medical records before the vaccination, the commission established that no conditions had been identified in the patient that could indicate problems after vaccine administration. “The commission unanimously assessed that there was a direct link between the vaccination with Janssen Johnson & Johnson and the tragic complication, i.e. the onset of the syndrome”, said Simonovič.
You would be surprised: At the 6-month followup in Pfizer's trials, there were more dead in the vaccine group than the control group. It was very low, like 18 vs 15 IIRC in 40,000 who had been given the shot, but it's still enough to question the official claims.
That said they also lost track of or dropped 500-1000 people from that 40,000 sample.
Right now more people are getting sick and dying more often in areas with lower vaccination rates. That information has been available for well over a year, and yet the vaccination rates haven't increased. What makes you think people don't understand, rather than that they just won't be convinced?
Medical studies are immediately ended when someone dies in a group. So it is impossible for a study to determine a danger of death because the study will always be halted upon anyone's death. It's rather atrocious, but that's the way research works on willing human subjects.
In general, what you claim would seem both surprising and impractical to me. There are many studies on very seriously ill groups, where the death of a large portion of participants is expected.
Even when walking around eating ice cream. Death is everywhere. Capitalistic america hides it in hospitals and hospices. Our culture needs more visibility into the process of life to death. Instead, we have to learn it by watching one of our loved ones die, and hell, we don't even know if they are being treated right -- because no one ever tells us how death should go. It's all siloed. Fuck America.
I think the whole ordeal just reminded me how strong grip the mass media has on the general public. Fearmongering is a strong weapon. Peak of covid was some of the most depressing time to me seeing people tear each other apart.
We had them before too. A girl died in my country due to a J&J shot, autopsy was done by a whole panel of doctors, we officially stopped using J&J vaccine, our minister of health made an apology (while not admitting that she got vaccinated due to his mandates), official reports were published...
...and people here got all snarky when I mentioned her death, and attacked me with stuff like "what are your qualifications to rule her death as caused by vaccines?" and "i'm guessing you did the autopsy yourself?"
And also be transparent about the pros and cons. One of the mistakes with covid is having made all sort of false statements about the efficiency of the vaccines (like it stops infections, the virus would be gone if everyone was vaccinated, kids are at risk of covid and must be vaccinated, etc) while the actual merits of the vaccine (dramatically reduces deaths and hospitalisations) should have been enough to convince the population at risk. Once you lied to people once, it takes a lot of time to re-establish trust.
do need masks we lied because we think you’re stupid and would hoard all the masks
now you don't believe we need masks because we said prevent instead of reduce, and nothing was prevented
now you bolstered your opinion because we said “no evidence” instead of “the study hasn't been completed”
yes we said it affects young people and that caused a panic as if it was 1918 all over again, but you have to understand that 50 year olds are young to us and we are always speaking in a health professional context that nobody else knows even during the one time the public needs clear communication
A) This is acting under the belief that if told the truth (healthcare workers need the masks and they need us regular people to make the sacrifice of not using those so that healthcare workers get them) that they would not made that sacrifice in great enough numbers.
B) This burns credibility by saying an obvious lie. People aren't just gonna immediately forget that the government just lied to them because "they couldn't handle the truth".
That would most likely been true given the fact that most emergency stock had been severely undercut before to the gospel of "fiscal responsibility and efficiency".
That there is confusion just emphasizes that the term therapeutic vaccine needs more education around it.
When I think of vaccines, I think of something that’s preventative - regardless of the mechanism. Even the coming “Lyme Disease” vaccine is still preventative though it’s more of a tick bite vaccine.
Someone please school me.
Why is it a therapeutic vaccine - what’s wrong with calling it a treatment?
> A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease.
While most are prophylactic, it's not a requirement to be considered a vaccine. Vaccines are not "meant to prevent a disease". They're meant to provide immunity to the disease, whether that be before (prophylactic/prevention) or during (therapeutic/treatment).
But before symptoms you still have it so it's not only for preventing disease.
Vaccines are used to teach/modify your immune system to fight something. Whether you have it or not is not part of the definition[0].
[0] a substance used to stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against one or several diseases, prepared from the causative agent of a disease, its products, or a synthetic substitute, treated to act as an antigen without inducing the disease.
Every antivaxxer I know is skeptical because it ties into their existing beliefs of some hidden overarching power-system trying to control them.
Censorship and hiding criticism (informed or not) ‘for the greater good’ is like throwing gasoline on the fire. I have a family member who was merely just a lightweight New Age/holistic type of…skeptic. But the whole COVID response made it way worse. She doesn’t watch videos about why vaccines are bad, 90% of them are how the virus government/billionaires/big tech did x shady thing, so therefore don’t trust the vacinnes.
It’s really easy to spin that sort of thing into “they must have something to hide”.
I highly doubt all of the effort Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc put into silencing dissent really did anything to promote better science or quell the fringes.
I don’t think anyone even cares if it did or
not after-the-fact.
I'm a relatively well educated and informed person about STEM topics, but I grew up in a family full of modern medicine skeptics, and living in TX am surrounded by many more. You have it exactly right, trying to censor the COVID misinformation(problem: do you trust who defines that) made it these people FAR more paranoid than they were before. I've actually had quite a bit of success listening to these people and addressing their concerns point by point with citations to studies. They may be less educated and informed, but they're not blithering idiots and will come around if you engage in a good faith discussion with them.
The other problem is resorting to force. If you mandate something to a Texan, you better believe they're resist the hell out of it, even if they know it's in their best interest otherwise. I have several friends that knew it was in their best interest to get the vaccine, but their libertarian values/morals drove them to take a stand against their companies who tried to compel them to take it. Medical freedom, which I largely agree with, but I was first in line to get the shot voluntarily.
> The other problem is resorting to force. If you mandate something to a Texan, you better believe they're resist the hell out of it, even if they know it's in their best interest otherwise. I have several friends that knew it was in their best interest to get the vaccine, but their libertarian values/morals drove them to take a stand against their companies who tried to compel them to take it.
It is immensely satisfying to see people finally, finally saying this on here.
Somewhere around a year ago in one of the covid vaccine posts, the top post was something along the lines of "Fine, I don't care anymore, I'm done trying to help these people" in reference to mandating/coercing people to take the shots. I responded with "And their response will be 'Finally! That's all we've wanted this entire time!'. People on here [HN] don't seem to realize just how much 'these people' value freedom over safety."
My comment did get a lot of upvotes, but the large thread that generated had so many people who just didn't understand the sentiment at all, it was an amazing demonstration of the bubble HN exists in.
That's the primary reason I did not get the shots. After so long of the government exerting force they had no right to use, I was not going to give into something they said doesn't take away that force, and would lead to a vaccine passport "show me your papers" society.
In Arabic we have the saying "just to spite you, toilet, I decided to shit in my pants". Your comment reminded me a lot of it. My grandma use to use it a lot on me when I was a teen because I had a contrarian phase.
I made the right choice. That's a terrible analogy to use in regards to standing up for freedom. Especially when the shots actually did turn out to be less than worthless
If you are young and healthy and not in contact with elderly or severly sick, there was never any point to take a government mandated vaccine with dubious upbacking, surrounded by lying, and the contents of which have been deemed a military secret.
It was not good for me though. The shots were harmful and the risk was not worth it. I'm also more than willing to take a bigger risk even if there was one to stand up for freedom, which is important
My relative is super anti-vaccine but she still got vaccinated because she would have lost her job otherwise. She's already low income, so that was never an option.
That's a poor stat for measuring ideological adherence when anyone who travelled over 1.5yrs+, worked a job with people, worked in gov, etc or lived in a place with mandates and wanted to go to retail stores or any public event was forced to take it.
We aren't debating their reasoning to get the vaccine? Or whether forcing people to get the vaccine works or not? Of course threatening people's jobs works.
If the overreaction to dissent ultimately played a bigger role in fueling - rather than preventing it - then it's not a worthy 'greater good' (Streisand effect en masse). Playing a central part in turning millions of people from harmless 'alternative health' skeptics to hardcore anti-gov is something that will have long term consequences.
If we're gonna assume vaccinated/not vaccinated defines their viewpoint, then around 1 in 3 people is a pretty massive group to flippantly dismiss like that.
Around 80% have received one dose at least, that leaves 20% who at this point seem to be making an ideological stand. 20% of the any population can have absolutely fringe views that shouldn't be given ideological affirmative action for their views.
>I've actually had quite a bit of success listening to these people and addressing their concerns point by point with citations to studies. They may be less educated and informed, but they're not blithering idiots and will come around if you engage in a good faith discussion with them
Would they have been so receptive if it was a stranger rather than a family member feeding them the same information?
The example I was thinking of wasn't a blithering idiot. He was an engineer who was afraid of needles. That kind of turned him into an idiot with respect to vaccines.
Friends, family, and acquaintances, basically anyone with some basis for trust, it works. With strangers there is much less success, but Socratic questioning often leads them closer than they were. It's a much longet long whittling down process in the latter case.
Every anti-vaxxer I know has a totally different reason for ignoring their own self interest but they all seem to have one thing in common, they are absolutely not thinking for themselves. To the last one, they all regurgitated to me something they heard from one of the various celebrities they worship. They are all sheep following one or more of the dozens of victimization cults that have become so popular over the last two decades. "We're being repressed and misled and we're fed up. We're gonna stick it to the consensus by contracting preventable diseases!"
I'd actually be OK with letting Darwin run his train on those populations, if they weren't also recklessly causing the illness, disability, and death of their innocent neighbors who for age, health, or other legitimate reasons cannot get a particular vaccine. Should a child that's allergic to the MMR vaccine experience encephalitis and face possible lifelong disability or even death because his schoolmate's mom or dad worships a blathering radio host or a washed up model peddling conspiracies for profit?
I suspect most of you grew up in clean western neighborhoods. I grew up with a schoolmate and a member of my household, each severely disabled by polio. They drew a short straw and weren't lucky enough to have well functioning healthcare apparatuses in their birth countries. And for that crime, they were robbed of significant bodily mobility forever. That so many in the US would have us move toward that awful state of affairs instead of away from that is disappointing but I suppose not terribly surprising.
When I was younger, I thought only the simple minded were so easily conned and steered by hacks and hucksters but the last 20 years or so have demonstrated that many intelligent and educated Americans are just acutely gullible.
You're exactly right, and all the propaganda efforts just made it worse. Now I'm even more convinced that it's all about people seeking to exert more control over others.
I do however, consume lot's of media on how the vaccines are bad, and I'm skeptical of media that glosses over the science aspect and focuses on far fetched control conspiracies only. Limited hangouts and poisoning the well are misinformation tactics fwiw.
I know a bunch of anti-vaxxers in New Zealand, and they notably each had a different stated reason for being antivax. Perhaps because we don’t have the same political partisanship in this country (although partisanship was still a factor: it was interesting hearing right leaning people here reproduce sound-bites that I thought were American Republican political cliches).
Political issues being global is not a new phenomenon. Hyper-partisans and fringe groups have always sought out a broader set of sources when they don't find it in their immediate local range.
Which is why local censorship is becoming dumber than ever with a global internet, something I saw often here in Canada.
Although I guess some people hope their views become a part of some global cohesive overton window. Maybe with some super-efficient global media/internet moderation system it will finally stop people like my conspiracy relatives. But so far they've only made it worse.
I hope this technology, if successful, doesn’t get stuck in the land of very expensive, exotic cancer therapies. Epstein-Barr virus, for example, is nasty, and if you are over the age of 20 or so you probably have a latent EBV infection. A safe vaccine that could clear an existing EBV infection has the potential to prevent quite a large set of nasty conditions, cancer and otherwise. Think of it as something like the shingles vaccine, but a bigger deal.
It with also be interesting to see if the technologies used could lead to dramatically better vaccines for ordinary acute conditions. There is some evidence that people with pre-existing cellular immunity to intercellular antigens expressed very early in the lifecycle of a Covid-infected cell confers very strong immunity. The current vaccines don’t provide this sort of immunity, but the cancer vaccines are mostly targeting cellular immunity to intracellular antigens.
A very expensive and exotic treatment is still better than no treatment I guess. At least we have a starting point of knowing that something works, other people can hopefully come along and cut the costs down.
That being said, we still have cost problems even for not-so exotic treatments like bio-similars drugs (the generic equivalent for biologic drugs such as insulin). A lot of these drugs are off patent but still highly difficult and expensive to produce. Solving this bottleneck will be hugely beneficial to a lot of people
These are therapeutic vaccines customised to each case. My father is heavily involved with this working on one targeting brain cancers.
It's not a silver bullet but it will help if the patient responds and the cancer is not aggressive enough to kill the patient before the immune system is reactivated to fight the cancer successfully.
If it does work it looks very likely there will be no relapse.
> For instance, numerous monoclonal antibody trials failed to show reproducible efficacy for nearly 20 years before the eventual success of rituximab in 1997 (ref. 7); anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) antibody data lacked clinical efficacy for years before the first nivolumab data were published8; and many years of ineffective chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T cell) clinical data prefaced their eventual success.
This is a bit disingenuous. The mentioned therapies were developed from scratch in those time frames, whereas vaccine technology has been around for over 3 times as long. CART cells are also a much more complex and difficult therapy than vaccines…
This is like preventively giving broad spectrum antibiotics to animals raised in super dense cage farms. You wouldn't need most of them if you weren't raising them in hellish conditions, and the long term consequences are dire
There are many different kind of cancers, and metastasis' complexity further complicates the treatment. I guess the best hope is to get a bleeding edge medical treatment by joining a clinical trial, (and hoping to not be in the control arm).
We are learning more each day but i would never take anything like this. Preventing cancer without understanding the causal/morphological underpinnings seems like stopping kitchen fires by removing all the air in the room. Side effects would/could be significant.
>> Effective vaccines are likely to be combined with other immunostimulatory approaches including adoptive T cell therapies and to be deployed in postsurgical adjuvant settings to prevent relapses.
Mostly post-surgical, but I wouldn't be surprised if eventually used for metastatic as well. Good luck to all involved.
I'm pretty sure anything over 100% implies some sort of necromantic rising of the dead. An infinity would surely lead to collapse into blackhole and I think we'd know.
No, but they will decrease the severity of the disease and you will be more likely to survive, maybe. Also, know that a shot will provoke a small tumor that should go away by itself after a few days.
I'm curious to know if the anti-vaxxer community continues their crusader once a cancer curing vaccine is wildly available. Seems to me it would be pretty hard for them to stick to their guns while cancer eats away at their insides.
Cures for cancer aren't allowed. They would hurt the research and grant-receiving community far too much. The FDA would never approve a cancer cure. So don't worry too much about an... acceptable... cure for cancer emerging.
A medicine that sometimes stops a bad thing from happening is hard for people to appreciate, because if it works you'll never know it, and it might have some side effects.
We need to improve public education about why we believe these medicines work. I want to see the studies presented on social media: "We gave 30,000 people this drug and you won't believe what happened!" Less censoring people and more presenting the studies in a way people can understand. Less appealing to authority and more appealing to observations; yes, you observed your 2 relatives, and I observed 30,000 people, judge for yourself which is more persuasive.
Most people aren't going to read your 3 paragraph abstract, let alone the the full paper. You have to tell them the observations in a few sentences, preferably with minimal added interpretation.
> I want to see the studies presented on social media: "We gave 30,000 people this drug and you won't believe what happened!"
We've had two years of that... get vaccinated and you won't get it, also get vaccinated and you won't get your grandparents ill!
Somehow all the censoring was done on people who didn't believe these claims.
I guess we were hearing different messages?
I thought the vaccine message was "get vaccinated so you won't die when you get it."
> DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...
In April 2021 the original strain was still dominent if I record well, against which the vaccines were much more effective against getting COVID.
It was pretty clear that vaccines had been oversold early on. The opposite happened with masks, where the experts pooh-poohed them, then backtracked.
It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten.
(I have had 4 doses by the way, I'm not going to cut my nose to spite my face: knowing that vaccines were oversold is not the same as believing they're useless).
I didn't know that my heart pain was related to the vaccine until I noticed the same pain during the third shot.
The Moderna CEO is at least honest enough to say by now it should be treated the same as a flu vaccine. If you want to you can get your yearly dose and if you don't up to you. Pfizer on the other hand was actively whining about how they created too many doses and how they can't milk it any more.
If it was up to me I wouldn't have gotten the third one, but the fact that they've intermingled it with travel restrictions when it does not in fact prevent spread is quite infuriating.
It seems that people have also forgotten that the antibodies compared to other vaccines(which can be in decades for hepatitis for example) fade rather quickly and that if you got infected quite far out from your last shot, and were only mildly symptomatic it might not actually have been the vaccine that protected you but rather your own immune system and the fact that the whole thing isn't as deadly anymore.
> It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten.
To be clear, are you saying that this is bad? "mainstream" and "rewritten" are loaded words usually deployed as insult.
But the scientific process is one of learning from reality, and admitting past errors, so isn't an increase in knowledge a good thing?
Exactly what part of the scientific process involves locking people up, stripping them of their jobs, splitting families apart?
Admitting past errors without also acknowledging the current knowledge is just as fallible is nothing but empty words. It's also a very rose tinted interpretation of what has been happening. The messaging has always been "These are this week's truths. They are absolute truths, and we'll enforce these truths at gunpoint, for these truths are infallible, and The Science is settled."
I see that you're not the person that I was replying to, I see that you are attempting to change the subject, speak in extremes, and and to use emotional language, a common tactic to derail logical processing. Writing this doesn't help anyone, not even you.
Fair point.
I fully understand that the science wasn’t settled. It was a new disease, and guidance was going to change.
What I didn’t expect was the overconfidence and then reversals, without missing a beat, and without acknowledging “hey, we were wrong”. The stuff around masks… first ”they don’t work”, “they make it more likely to get infected”, “people won’t know how to use a mask”, “masks are a superstition” then switching to mask mandates, without admitting that those who expressed those views got it wrong.
The reason I used “mainstream” was to show that these were people in positions of trust. News outlets with editorial controls, public health officials, elected politicians. Or doctors. It happened both on traditional, and social media and IRL. The term was not meant to be pejorative, but descriptive.
Vaccines are similar: there are many clips that show pundits, media figures and public health officials overselling vaccines. Instead of later saying “the preliminary data looked good so we assumed they would stop transmission and infection, but it turns out that these vaccines reduce serious illness and death. We were wrong, but it’s a new disease and we are all learning, that’s how science works” we got “we ALWAYS said that vaccines were meant to reduce illness and death and not infection and transmission”.
Maybe I hate being gaslit more than most. My mother, an intelligent woman who I love and respect, in an effort to spare my feelings as a young child, would try to warp reality: “oh you never had the toy that’s missing”. She probably thought I wouldn’t remember, but did. She continued that pattern throughout my childhood. Whatever the reason, I intensely dislike that sort of manipulation, and I think it’s corrosive.
I think that your conception of "we" in "hey, we were wrong" is perhaps too monolithic and simplistic. "show pundits, media figures" are mere conduits, they "get the message out" but they are never subject matter experts, you should not assume that they originate any message, have an authoritative truth or do any scientific study at all.
A lot of doctors jumped on the anti-mask bandwagon. It wasn’t just pundits and media figures.
What kinds of doctors, that you interacted with: Your GP? Those seen on TV who work in media roles? None of those are the researchers.
You are starting to run into No True Scotsman fallacy territory at this point. Everyone from the Surgeon General of the United States to random GPs on Twitter were vilifying masks.
There are a lot of Scotsmen in Scotland, and in my experience they are diverse: I have met socialists and internationalist Europhiles there, and also ethnonationalist racists. Point is, monolithic assertions about "we" or "they" aren't ever completely true.
I'm not in the USA, I got onto masks quite early. But I think that we still lag badly in anti-covid ventilation systems, while still over-emphasising hand-washing.
Some of the best people on the topic (of our evolving understanding of COVID, not of Scotsmen) have in fact been relative outsiders (i.e. neither medical researchers nor crazed conspiracists). I'm thinking particularly of Zeynep Tufekci on Airborne transmission, e.g.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent... https://sils.unc.edu/news/2021/tufekci-lancet
How effective? You realize they never tested the major vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna) for transmission or a reduction in ability to get infected?
You can access the clinical trial protocol by googling it. They never regularly tested patients in the trial, only when they were symptomatic. There is no clinical trial data to prove a reductions in infection or transmission.
There's a very simple reason the vaccines weren't tested for reduction in transmission: that sort of test is much more difficult and takes much longer. When the virus is killing thousands daily just in the U.S., you use the most obvious data to demonstrate effectiveness (or not) and hope that deeper analysis down the road will show other benefits.
But if you mandate vaccines, because "if you're not vaccinated, you'll infect grandma", somehow testing if vaccinated people can transmit it, should be a priority.
If this was some non-mandatory voulountary vaccine.. sure, test one thing, then another,.... If you were put in a position where you were effectively forced to get it (or else you'd eg. lose your job), such things should be tested first.
They are testing whether vaccinated people can transmit. That research is ongoing. Again, if they had started with that, we might just be rolling out the vaccines now, which would have cost additional millions of lives.
Vaccines suffer from their effectiveness. For comparison with covid, measles killed only a few hundred each year (in the US). Vaccination to the level of herd immunity was required to reduce that number; if only half the population were vaccinated, we'd see half those deaths. Covid is still killing roughly the same number of people each day as measles killed in a year, yet people resist getting vaccinated. It's objectively stupid.
To your exact point, your employer should be entitled to set the safety protocols that are necessary to ensure the health of their workforce.
I agree. It wasn't a criticism of the trials, but rather the officials making claims for which there is no data.
There wasn't no data, just not specific statistical data from experimentation with these vaccines. Experts had data on previous vaccines, general knowledge of symptomatology, contagion, etc. It's only reasonable that reasonable experts might differ on the specifics given the level of extrapolation, but that's not "no data".
Do you have a source for this?
Here's a great retrospective that covers the timeline and the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgrMzvasrm8
TLDR: We knew the mRNA vaccines were effective at preventing serious disease in late 2020. We didn't know for sure (publicly) if the mRNA vaccines reduced transmission rates until mid 2021, as more research concluded. Mid 2021 is when it was demonstrated that mRNA vaccines reduce transmission of the variants of SARS-CoV-2 at the time. As SARS-CoV-2 continues to mutate, more research needs to be done.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Delta_variant
Delta was named at the end of May 2021 and started to become the dominant strain worldwide in the following months. As shown in the chart under ”Prevention” (and described in the linked pages), Delta significantly reduced vaccine effectiveness against infection and symptomatic disease, though not against severe disease.
However, it’s also true that vaccine effectiveness, regardless of variant, significantly declines over the months following the dose - again, much less so for severe disease than for any symptomatic disease.
Kind of ... Suggests ... And it was true at the time, for the strains we had.
It depended on the day of the week. Sometimes it was slow the spread, sometimes it was to prevent getting covid, other times it was to reduce the severity if you got it.
I think a big part of it is that COVID has become an attention point in our lives, it entirely dominated the media cycle for months. There's something everyone wants to hear about and _we just don't know that much about it_, so the media increasingly plays telephone with itself in an attempt to report anything.
Various people gave their hopefully somewhat informed opinion at the time to different members of the media, who reported on it with different levels of accuracy, attributing often undue levels of confidence to it. And that quickly mutated into "the media's trusted sources can confirm that the experts definitely know the vaccine will have exactly these effects and will be effective for these specific cases"
I think it's worth questioning what influence there was in which narratives did or didn't get pushed, but I also think it's worth keeping in mind that the media is also just... fallible.
I mean... if the director of CDC says it directy... you cannot blame misreporting, and someone in that position should know the level of confidence to use when saying such stuff.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33736959
I understand if some random chiropractic from alabama says something, that the data is probably questionable... but the director of CDC does carry some authority.
If if _we don't know something_, isn't mandating that something (vaccines in this case) somehow a bad thing? On one side... "take this, and you won't get sick"... who is responsible when that person gets sick? Or infects grandma? Or actually gets a clot?
I agree that there has been bad communication and wrong communication.
That said, a doctor never says “you won’t get sick”. Medicine is never certain, the human body is too complex to generalize and say “this will cure you 100% sure, no bad reactions possible”. There’s always a chance that something will go wrong. Clinical essays are what makes possibility go down, but it is never 0.
If you want absolutes, go to a priest. They will give you an absolute that matches your own pre assumptions and if it turns out wrong later, well God wanted it this way, He works in misterious ways.
"our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data."
That's not bad communication it's an outright false statement.
You are going over an already covered point. I said “bad and wrong communication”.
My point was specifically about the expectation of fail proof medicine. It doesn’t exist.
Well then we agree there.
Of course it's not certain and 100%... i'm too lazy to find our local propaganda now, but when i got it, the numbers were in the rage of 96% efficacy (for not getting it and not transmitting it) with minimal chances of side effects.
But in my country (slovenia), at the height of pressure to get vaccinated, if you were a young girl/woman (15-24 age bracket), the "96%" from above turned to "you'll probably still get covid, you'll still spread it, if you do, not one girl in your age bracket died yet because of or even with covid, but one girl died due to the vaccine... but, if you don't take the vaccine, you'll have to get tested every 48 hours or you'll be unable to go to work (oh, no testing center in your village, and you're not allowed to take the bus to the closest test location without a test)".
I don’t understand. People who were not vaccinated had worse effects on average, including dying (painfully and slowly azfixiating as your lungs collapsed). This was common at the beginning of the pandemic, and extensively documented. Millions of people died this way.
It’s choosing between that and … “a girl who died in Slovenia”. How are those two things equivalent?
Even if you can spread COVID, if the effects in your body are lowered, chances are that you will remove the virus it from your body earlier (it can dedicate more resources to winning the battle instead of … breathing), so you will be effectively less contagious.
The message absolutely depended on time. But that's because the virus mutated, and the vaccine went from preventing illness and lowering spread rates to only preventing severe illness.
My point was that should not be the message. Promising people the vaccine will save them is a false hope, people look around and find someone who got vaccinated but still died and now the trust is broken.
Instead, tell people about the trial control group vs treatment group, let people see that there is risk on both sides, but that the treatment group was ultimately better off. Use minimal interpretation. I'd like to see so much focus on the trial outcomes that the number of people who died in both groups is a household fact that families talk about.
Just give angry religious zealots a crash course in genetics and epidemiology, its so easy! Why isn't the CDC doing this? /s
Right, instead they made false statements and overpromised which gave the anti-vacciners even more ammo.
It was a massive cock-up by the government.
Presumably more people are getting sick and dying in the control group. People can understand "more people dead" even without taking a genetics course.
>Presumably more people are getting sick and dying in the control group.
In the Pfizer mRNA vaccine clinical trial there were actually more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group, but the sample size wasn't large enough to draw any conclusions from this.
You'd be surprised. The data is overwhelming, and this group of highly trained techies still contains many who call the COVID vaccines "clot shot".
There is nothing so obvious that people cannot fail to understand if sufficiently motivated.
We've had 4 vaccines available in my country at the beginning (astrazeneca, moderna, pfeizer and J&J). Astrazeneca killed a few people in neighbouring countries (clot issues), so we stopped using that. J&J killed a young girl in my country, so we stopped using that too. Moderna killed people in northern/scandinavian countries, and we got a recommendation not to use it on people below 50yo.
So, 3/4 vaccines went from safe to "clot shots" in just a few months.
Link to the J&J story?
https://www.gov.si/en/news/2021-11-30-expert-commission-conf...
> Simonovič presented the composition of the five-member commission, namely, three doctors (neurologist, infectologist and vascular specialist), a pharmacologist and Zoran Simonovič, a representative of the epidemiological profession. The commission reviewed the medical records of a 20-year-old patient who developed thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome following vaccination. The documentation included a treatment procedure as of the admission to the Clinical Department of Neurology in Ljubljana and a health record obtained from the patient’s personal doctor.
> The commission confirmed thrombosis with thrombocytopenia or vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia. All criteria were met for the fulfilment of the diagnosis. Upon examining the medical records before the vaccination, the commission established that no conditions had been identified in the patient that could indicate problems after vaccine administration. “The commission unanimously assessed that there was a direct link between the vaccination with Janssen Johnson & Johnson and the tragic complication, i.e. the onset of the syndrome”, said Simonovič.
Thanks
You would be surprised: At the 6-month followup in Pfizer's trials, there were more dead in the vaccine group than the control group. It was very low, like 18 vs 15 IIRC in 40,000 who had been given the shot, but it's still enough to question the official claims.
That said they also lost track of or dropped 500-1000 people from that 40,000 sample.
Right now more people are getting sick and dying more often in areas with lower vaccination rates. That information has been available for well over a year, and yet the vaccination rates haven't increased. What makes you think people don't understand, rather than that they just won't be convinced?
Medical studies are immediately ended when someone dies in a group. So it is impossible for a study to determine a danger of death because the study will always be halted upon anyone's death. It's rather atrocious, but that's the way research works on willing human subjects.
Do you have a source for this?
Multiple people died over the course of the efficacy study for the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, and yet they completed the study: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
In general, what you claim would seem both surprising and impractical to me. There are many studies on very seriously ill groups, where the death of a large portion of participants is expected.
That is completely false. 18 people died in the Pfizer vaccine study and it went to completion.
You realize people die all the time? Even when participating in clinical trials?
Even when walking around eating ice cream. Death is everywhere. Capitalistic america hides it in hospitals and hospices. Our culture needs more visibility into the process of life to death. Instead, we have to learn it by watching one of our loved ones die, and hell, we don't even know if they are being treated right -- because no one ever tells us how death should go. It's all siloed. Fuck America.
That was the updated messaging from DNC HQ because the first one was clearly wrong.
because there were a lot of different, often contradicting messages
I think the whole ordeal just reminded me how strong grip the mass media has on the general public. Fearmongering is a strong weapon. Peak of covid was some of the most depressing time to me seeing people tear each other apart.
To be fair we also now have stories that some people were injured from the vaccines ?
We had them before too. A girl died in my country due to a J&J shot, autopsy was done by a whole panel of doctors, we officially stopped using J&J vaccine, our minister of health made an apology (while not admitting that she got vaccinated due to his mandates), official reports were published...
...and people here got all snarky when I mentioned her death, and attacked me with stuff like "what are your qualifications to rule her death as caused by vaccines?" and "i'm guessing you did the autopsy yourself?"
And also be transparent about the pros and cons. One of the mistakes with covid is having made all sort of false statements about the efficiency of the vaccines (like it stops infections, the virus would be gone if everyone was vaccinated, kids are at risk of covid and must be vaccinated, etc) while the actual merits of the vaccine (dramatically reduces deaths and hospitalisations) should have been enough to convince the population at risk. Once you lied to people once, it takes a lot of time to re-establish trust.
dont need masks
do need masks we lied because we think you’re stupid and would hoard all the masks
now you don't believe we need masks because we said prevent instead of reduce, and nothing was prevented
now you bolstered your opinion because we said “no evidence” instead of “the study hasn't been completed”
yes we said it affects young people and that caused a panic as if it was 1918 all over again, but you have to understand that 50 year olds are young to us and we are always speaking in a health professional context that nobody else knows even during the one time the public needs clear communication
>> do need masks we lied because we think you’re stupid and would hoard all the masks
People panicked and hoarded toilet paper, of course they would also have hoarded masks and deprive healthcare workers of them.
A) This is acting under the belief that if told the truth (healthcare workers need the masks and they need us regular people to make the sacrifice of not using those so that healthcare workers get them) that they would not made that sacrifice in great enough numbers.
B) This burns credibility by saying an obvious lie. People aren't just gonna immediately forget that the government just lied to them because "they couldn't handle the truth".
Not even sure that concern was legitimate. Do healthcare workers get their masks from the local supermarket?
That would most likely been true given the fact that most emergency stock had been severely undercut before to the gospel of "fiscal responsibility and efficiency".
Cancer vaccines would be given to someone with cancer. These vaccines would not be preventative
That there is confusion just emphasizes that the term therapeutic vaccine needs more education around it.
When I think of vaccines, I think of something that’s preventative - regardless of the mechanism. Even the coming “Lyme Disease” vaccine is still preventative though it’s more of a tick bite vaccine.
Someone please school me.
Why is it a therapeutic vaccine - what’s wrong with calling it a treatment?
It's a vaccine because it doesn't work on the cancer directly but rather teaches your immune system to attack the cancer.
Thanks. That clears that hang up up.
Then these shouldn't be called vaccines.
What basis is there for saying that?
There are many vaccines that can be given after exposure, for example the rabies vaccine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies_vaccine
Vaccines are for preventing the disease. Even for rabies, if you get it after the symptoms begin, it's too late.
> A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease.
While most are prophylactic, it's not a requirement to be considered a vaccine. Vaccines are not "meant to prevent a disease". They're meant to provide immunity to the disease, whether that be before (prophylactic/prevention) or during (therapeutic/treatment).
Web search for "therapeutic vaccines." You're missing about half the picture.
You are conflating your personal definition with the medical world's.
But before symptoms you still have it so it's not only for preventing disease.
Vaccines are used to teach/modify your immune system to fight something. Whether you have it or not is not part of the definition[0].
[0] a substance used to stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against one or several diseases, prepared from the causative agent of a disease, its products, or a synthetic substitute, treated to act as an antigen without inducing the disease.
These are vaccines. They train the immune system to respond a particular way to particular proteins: that is a vaccine, full stop.
That's not true. They are therapeutics are reviewed the same as drugs. The FDA's vaccine division does not review these therapies.
This seems straight up false.
Giving HPV vaccines to teens (including boys) seems to be preventative.
Which is not the type of vaccine the article is about.
> "We gave 30,000 people this drug and you won't believe what happened!"
Lab coat Clickbait?
We need to improve public education
>more propaganda
No.. we need to improve transparency and actually do the studies?
>Less appealing to authority and more appealing to observations
Antivaxxers aren't exactly scientifically inclined skeptics who will change their minds if fed more objective, impartial evidence.
They probably can be reached but I'm certain this isnt the way.
Every antivaxxer I know is skeptical because it ties into their existing beliefs of some hidden overarching power-system trying to control them.
Censorship and hiding criticism (informed or not) ‘for the greater good’ is like throwing gasoline on the fire. I have a family member who was merely just a lightweight New Age/holistic type of…skeptic. But the whole COVID response made it way worse. She doesn’t watch videos about why vaccines are bad, 90% of them are how the virus government/billionaires/big tech did x shady thing, so therefore don’t trust the vacinnes.
It’s really easy to spin that sort of thing into “they must have something to hide”.
I highly doubt all of the effort Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc put into silencing dissent really did anything to promote better science or quell the fringes.
I don’t think anyone even cares if it did or not after-the-fact.
I'm a relatively well educated and informed person about STEM topics, but I grew up in a family full of modern medicine skeptics, and living in TX am surrounded by many more. You have it exactly right, trying to censor the COVID misinformation(problem: do you trust who defines that) made it these people FAR more paranoid than they were before. I've actually had quite a bit of success listening to these people and addressing their concerns point by point with citations to studies. They may be less educated and informed, but they're not blithering idiots and will come around if you engage in a good faith discussion with them.
The other problem is resorting to force. If you mandate something to a Texan, you better believe they're resist the hell out of it, even if they know it's in their best interest otherwise. I have several friends that knew it was in their best interest to get the vaccine, but their libertarian values/morals drove them to take a stand against their companies who tried to compel them to take it. Medical freedom, which I largely agree with, but I was first in line to get the shot voluntarily.
> The other problem is resorting to force. If you mandate something to a Texan, you better believe they're resist the hell out of it, even if they know it's in their best interest otherwise. I have several friends that knew it was in their best interest to get the vaccine, but their libertarian values/morals drove them to take a stand against their companies who tried to compel them to take it.
It is immensely satisfying to see people finally, finally saying this on here.
Somewhere around a year ago in one of the covid vaccine posts, the top post was something along the lines of "Fine, I don't care anymore, I'm done trying to help these people" in reference to mandating/coercing people to take the shots. I responded with "And their response will be 'Finally! That's all we've wanted this entire time!'. People on here [HN] don't seem to realize just how much 'these people' value freedom over safety."
My comment did get a lot of upvotes, but the large thread that generated had so many people who just didn't understand the sentiment at all, it was an amazing demonstration of the bubble HN exists in.
That's the primary reason I did not get the shots. After so long of the government exerting force they had no right to use, I was not going to give into something they said doesn't take away that force, and would lead to a vaccine passport "show me your papers" society.
In Arabic we have the saying "just to spite you, toilet, I decided to shit in my pants". Your comment reminded me a lot of it. My grandma use to use it a lot on me when I was a teen because I had a contrarian phase.
I made the right choice. That's a terrible analogy to use in regards to standing up for freedom. Especially when the shots actually did turn out to be less than worthless
"Shitting your pants" seems to connote very heavy consequences for... choosing not to take an arbitrary, unnecessary, low efficacy medication.
This is the mentality of a child. "I would have done this thing that I know is good for me, but someone told me to so I stubbornly won't!"
If you are young and healthy and not in contact with elderly or severly sick, there was never any point to take a government mandated vaccine with dubious upbacking, surrounded by lying, and the contents of which have been deemed a military secret.
This sort of grey area isn't tolerated with hard leaning ideologies.
You're either a good guy or villain.
It was not good for me though. The shots were harmful and the risk was not worth it. I'm also more than willing to take a bigger risk even if there was one to stand up for freedom, which is important
Given that a supermajority was vaccinated this time last year, I think one bubble is much smaller.
My relative is super anti-vaccine but she still got vaccinated because she would have lost her job otherwise. She's already low income, so that was never an option.
That's a poor stat for measuring ideological adherence when anyone who travelled over 1.5yrs+, worked a job with people, worked in gov, etc or lived in a place with mandates and wanted to go to retail stores or any public event was forced to take it.
Well, they got it, so whatever their reasoning for it is pretty irrelevant at this point.
We aren't debating their reasoning to get the vaccine? Or whether forcing people to get the vaccine works or not? Of course threatening people's jobs works.
If the overreaction to dissent ultimately played a bigger role in fueling - rather than preventing it - then it's not a worthy 'greater good' (Streisand effect en masse). Playing a central part in turning millions of people from harmless 'alternative health' skeptics to hardcore anti-gov is something that will have long term consequences.
If we're gonna assume vaccinated/not vaccinated defines their viewpoint, then around 1 in 3 people is a pretty massive group to flippantly dismiss like that.
Around 80% have received one dose at least, that leaves 20% who at this point seem to be making an ideological stand. 20% of the any population can have absolutely fringe views that shouldn't be given ideological affirmative action for their views.
>I've actually had quite a bit of success listening to these people and addressing their concerns point by point with citations to studies. They may be less educated and informed, but they're not blithering idiots and will come around if you engage in a good faith discussion with them
Would they have been so receptive if it was a stranger rather than a family member feeding them the same information?
The example I was thinking of wasn't a blithering idiot. He was an engineer who was afraid of needles. That kind of turned him into an idiot with respect to vaccines.
Friends, family, and acquaintances, basically anyone with some basis for trust, it works. With strangers there is much less success, but Socratic questioning often leads them closer than they were. It's a much longet long whittling down process in the latter case.
Every anti-vaxxer I know has a totally different reason for ignoring their own self interest but they all seem to have one thing in common, they are absolutely not thinking for themselves. To the last one, they all regurgitated to me something they heard from one of the various celebrities they worship. They are all sheep following one or more of the dozens of victimization cults that have become so popular over the last two decades. "We're being repressed and misled and we're fed up. We're gonna stick it to the consensus by contracting preventable diseases!"
I'd actually be OK with letting Darwin run his train on those populations, if they weren't also recklessly causing the illness, disability, and death of their innocent neighbors who for age, health, or other legitimate reasons cannot get a particular vaccine. Should a child that's allergic to the MMR vaccine experience encephalitis and face possible lifelong disability or even death because his schoolmate's mom or dad worships a blathering radio host or a washed up model peddling conspiracies for profit?
I suspect most of you grew up in clean western neighborhoods. I grew up with a schoolmate and a member of my household, each severely disabled by polio. They drew a short straw and weren't lucky enough to have well functioning healthcare apparatuses in their birth countries. And for that crime, they were robbed of significant bodily mobility forever. That so many in the US would have us move toward that awful state of affairs instead of away from that is disappointing but I suppose not terribly surprising.
When I was younger, I thought only the simple minded were so easily conned and steered by hacks and hucksters but the last 20 years or so have demonstrated that many intelligent and educated Americans are just acutely gullible.
Comparing polio to a flu virus is such a bad straw man. Almost as bad as forcing kids to take a covid vaccine with secret ingredients.
You're exactly right, and all the propaganda efforts just made it worse. Now I'm even more convinced that it's all about people seeking to exert more control over others.
I do however, consume lot's of media on how the vaccines are bad, and I'm skeptical of media that glosses over the science aspect and focuses on far fetched control conspiracies only. Limited hangouts and poisoning the well are misinformation tactics fwiw.
> Every antivaxxer I know is skeptical because
I know a bunch of anti-vaxxers in New Zealand, and they notably each had a different stated reason for being antivax. Perhaps because we don’t have the same political partisanship in this country (although partisanship was still a factor: it was interesting hearing right leaning people here reproduce sound-bites that I thought were American Republican political cliches).
Political issues being global is not a new phenomenon. Hyper-partisans and fringe groups have always sought out a broader set of sources when they don't find it in their immediate local range.
Which is why local censorship is becoming dumber than ever with a global internet, something I saw often here in Canada.
Although I guess some people hope their views become a part of some global cohesive overton window. Maybe with some super-efficient global media/internet moderation system it will finally stop people like my conspiracy relatives. But so far they've only made it worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
It's been my experience that people do not understand or care about what representative samples are.
I hope this technology, if successful, doesn’t get stuck in the land of very expensive, exotic cancer therapies. Epstein-Barr virus, for example, is nasty, and if you are over the age of 20 or so you probably have a latent EBV infection. A safe vaccine that could clear an existing EBV infection has the potential to prevent quite a large set of nasty conditions, cancer and otherwise. Think of it as something like the shingles vaccine, but a bigger deal.
It with also be interesting to see if the technologies used could lead to dramatically better vaccines for ordinary acute conditions. There is some evidence that people with pre-existing cellular immunity to intercellular antigens expressed very early in the lifecycle of a Covid-infected cell confers very strong immunity. The current vaccines don’t provide this sort of immunity, but the cancer vaccines are mostly targeting cellular immunity to intracellular antigens.
A very expensive and exotic treatment is still better than no treatment I guess. At least we have a starting point of knowing that something works, other people can hopefully come along and cut the costs down.
That being said, we still have cost problems even for not-so exotic treatments like bio-similars drugs (the generic equivalent for biologic drugs such as insulin). A lot of these drugs are off patent but still highly difficult and expensive to produce. Solving this bottleneck will be hugely beneficial to a lot of people
These are therapeutic vaccines customised to each case. My father is heavily involved with this working on one targeting brain cancers.
It's not a silver bullet but it will help if the patient responds and the cancer is not aggressive enough to kill the patient before the immune system is reactivated to fight the cancer successfully.
If it does work it looks very likely there will be no relapse.
> For instance, numerous monoclonal antibody trials failed to show reproducible efficacy for nearly 20 years before the eventual success of rituximab in 1997 (ref. 7); anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) antibody data lacked clinical efficacy for years before the first nivolumab data were published8; and many years of ineffective chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T cell) clinical data prefaced their eventual success.
This is a bit disingenuous. The mentioned therapies were developed from scratch in those time frames, whereas vaccine technology has been around for over 3 times as long. CART cells are also a much more complex and difficult therapy than vaccines…
Cancer is already preventable, the vast majority of them are lifestyle/environment related: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/
This is like preventively giving broad spectrum antibiotics to animals raised in super dense cage farms. You wouldn't need most of them if you weren't raising them in hellish conditions, and the long term consequences are dire
My father has cancer on stage 4, he probably will die soon, do anyone knows if there are treatment he can try ?
I am very sorry for your father.
There are many different kind of cancers, and metastasis' complexity further complicates the treatment. I guess the best hope is to get a bleeding edge medical treatment by joining a clinical trial, (and hoping to not be in the control arm).
Did you hear about CUSP9:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUSP9
We are learning more each day but i would never take anything like this. Preventing cancer without understanding the causal/morphological underpinnings seems like stopping kitchen fires by removing all the air in the room. Side effects would/could be significant.
> Side effects would/could be significant
Got to give it to the internet. Railing against a hypothetical cure for cancer.
It wouldn't be the first health scandal
>> Effective vaccines are likely to be combined with other immunostimulatory approaches including adoptive T cell therapies and to be deployed in postsurgical adjuvant settings to prevent relapses.
Mostly post-surgical, but I wouldn't be surprised if eventually used for metastatic as well. Good luck to all involved.
Immunotherapy is also being trialled as a neoadjuvant with promising results.
Armamentarium is a the word of the day for me.
huh?
Yes, if you're in close proximity with someone with cancer you will not get their cancer after getting the vaccine. Before too.
That's actually 0% effective.
I think 0 / 0 is more like infinity effective.
That said, dogs and tasmanian devils do have transmissible cancers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4698198/
I'm pretty sure anything over 100% implies some sort of necromantic rising of the dead. An infinity would surely lead to collapse into blackhole and I think we'd know.
No, but they will decrease the severity of the disease and you will be more likely to survive, maybe. Also, know that a shot will provoke a small tumor that should go away by itself after a few days.
I'm curious to know if the anti-vaxxer community continues their crusader once a cancer curing vaccine is wildly available. Seems to me it would be pretty hard for them to stick to their guns while cancer eats away at their insides.
>Seems to me it would be pretty hard for them to stick to their guns while cancer eats away at their insides.
Not if the cancer vaccines are as effective at preventing cancer as the covid vaccines are at preventing people getting covid.
Cures for cancer aren't allowed. They would hurt the research and grant-receiving community far too much. The FDA would never approve a cancer cure. So don't worry too much about an... acceptable... cure for cancer emerging.
Except we already have a number of cures for cancer, so your theory doesn’t check out.
Cures for a cancer.
They will because they’re getting old and some of them will get cancer.
Did you ever hear about the car that runs on water?!
Stanley Meyer’s invention. I think he found a way to shatter water molecules using a combination of ultrasound and AC electrolysis.