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Lets take a quick look at what experts have been saying about COVID vaccines throughout their development:

icmra.info/drupal/covid-19/sta

and

ema.europa.eu/en/news/global-r

"EMA has endorsed a statement by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) that urges all stakeholders, including vaccines researchers and investigators, academia, regulators and the pharmaceutical industry, to continue COVID-19 vaccine trials"

"This can provide important additional and more precise information on longer-term safety and efficacy of a vaccine against COVID-19."

"The development of a joint statement on continuation of vaccine trials followed a series of meetings and discussions among ICMRA members on regulatory requirements to enable rapid assessment and authorisation of vaccines against COVID-19."

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/

" To shorten the time and for the larger interest of humanity, some routine yet essetial processes like animal trials are bypassed in the process of development of vaccine and drug development."

"Moreover, agencies like WHO and FDA have already given a green signal for clinical trials of vaccines bypassing the regular process of animal trials."

"the decision of bypassing the animal model needs to be taken with utmost caution. "

"Further, saving time should not cost a large number of human lives as a failure of the drug/vaccine could have devastating consequences."

jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/

" Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine development project announced by President Trump, has advocated for a vaccine to be made available in the US by the beginning of 2021.1 But for scientists and physicians, the term “warp speed” should trigger concern."

"But what cannot and must not be allowed is for desperation to result in the suspension of scientific principles and ethical research values. Physicians should not administer inadequately vetted vaccines; researchers should not endorse them without sufficient data. The scientific community has only one chance at winning public acceptance of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. The likelihood of achieving that goal will depend on convincing evidence of vaccine safety and efficacy."

chemistryworld.com/news/what-a

"The accelerated speed of development has public health experts concerned that vaccines might be approved with incomplete data and analysis." (yup I'm one of them)

"At least one candidate has skipped animal testing, for example."

"The concern intensifies when no vaccine against a coronavirus has ever been approved before, while many of the vaccine platforms in development against Covid-19 are unproven new technologies. ‘Developing a vaccine in about a year is unprecedented,’ says Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who has received Covid-focused funding to develop a new vaccine platform. ‘As a scientist with expertise in the field I am personally concerned that conducting science too fast could risk compromising the rigour needed to properly assess vaccines. A vaccine that is ineffective and/or unsafe will not be useful.’"

"Among the top concerns is the potential that a fast-tracked vaccine will have unintended side-effects. No vaccine is 100% safe, but if a billion people are vaccinated, a one in 10,000 serious adverse event will affect 100,000 of those people."

"In May, it was revealed that four out of 45 people in Moderna’s Phase 1 vaccine trial experienced ‘medically significant’ adverse events."

"One potential adverse event is antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a type of immune reaction where vaccination makes subsequent exposure to the virus more dangerous. "

"According to Bridle: ‘There is definitely a risk of ADE; how much of a risk cannot be stated with any certainty though.’ Yet the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) Vaccine Research Centre, which is collaborating on Moderna’s vaccine, has downplayed the possibility of ADE in a Covid-19 vaccine.

Hmmm, not a fine conclusion but important to know. Thanks for those thoughts.

I will consult my specialist who has all my medical data about this too.

@freemo @Science

> No vaccine is 100% safe, but if a billion people are vaccinated, a one in 10,000 serious adverse event will affect 100,000 of those people."

Do you know of anyone trying to compare such risks against risks of delaying?

If we assume a 1% chance of contracting Covid-19 in half a year, 0.1% infection mortality rate, and 50% effectiveness of the vaccine, the vaccination removes a 5*10^{-6} risk of death over a half a year.

This is 20 times smaller than the hypothetical 1/10,000 serious adverse event chance. At a first glance, this would indicate that for anyone who values life quality after a serious adverse event at >=95% of life quality now should get vaccinated without waiting for more data/interpretation thereof, assuming no better vaccine becomes available within half a year.

My estimates above are crude and make assumptions based on what I remember reading, so I'm pretty sure they are off, possibly by an order of magnitude. I also might be missing something qualitatively.

Do you know of any research trying to express vaccination costs/benefits in similar terms? Or maybe of a reason why doing it in these terms is not useful?

@robryk

Do you know of anyone trying to compare such risks against risks of delaying?

I do not, and to be fair the things I posted arent really assessing the risks at all. the issue here is “this is alll a big unknown since we havent done the proper tests. So we dont KNOW the risks, could be massively deadly could be perfectly safe”..”

the issue is no one can assess anything, we dont have the data to assess safety. Its literally a random drug someone cooked up, tested on a handful of people, seemed to work sorta ok over the course of a few months, and now they want to give to the world. We are so blind on this one no one can do any real risk assesment of any kind, that IS the risk, the lack of being able to assess the risks.

If we assume a 1% chance of contracting Covid-19 in half a year, 0.1% infection mortality rate, and 50% effectiveness of the vaccine, the vaccination removes a 5*10^{-6} risk of death over a half a year.

Except those numbers are based on completely fictious numbers with no basis in reality… thats the problem, we have no actual numbers we can stick in to create math like that, its far too soon to know anything in the way of numbers.

Or maybe of a reason why doing it in these terms is not useful?

I think there are plenty of explanation why its not useful the ones I already linked do exactly that.. .we havent done the safety studies, we dont know anything, and the potential risks like ADE can be devastating.

Imagine a worst case ADE scenario, for example… in a year after the immune system has settled and everyone is in a state where theya re on long-term antibodies rather than short, now everyone getting COVID all of a sudden starts dying at 10x the rate as before due to ADE.. what was meant as a vaccine has now turned the disease into a far more lethal killer (basically how ADE plays out)… while we dont have the data to know this will be so, and we are completely blind as to its possibilities, the fact is, that is one worst case that could be absolutely horrific if it plays out.

There is a reason we never release drugs on a fast tracked plan of this scale, particularly vaccines.. you cant be completely blind to long term effects and just tack a crap shoot on it, i dont care how bad the disease is.

@Science

@freemo

Except those numbers are based on completely fictious numbers with no basis in reality…

I admit I haven’t tried to look them up now, these are just ballparks of lower bounds that I kind-of believe within the order of magnitude.

However, I realized that we should have a better way of estimating the risk of “dying from covid over a period of time”: we know (for many areas) how many people were diagnosed with covid and died as its result (for some definition thereof). For example, ~1/1300 of Switzerland’s population died of Covid since the beginning of the pandemic according to the official stats (covid19.admin.ch/en/overview?o gives the number of deaths as 6003, population is ~8M).

Imagine a worst case ADE scenario, for example… in a year after the immune system has settled and everyone is in a state where theya re on long-term antibodies rather than short, now everyone getting COVID all of a sudden starts dying at 10x the rate as before due to ADE.. what was meant as a vaccine has now turned the disease into a far more lethal killer (basically how ADE plays out)… while we dont have the data to know this will be so, and we are completely blind as to its possibilities, the fact is, that is one worst case that could be absolutely horrific if it plays out.

Aren’t we similarly blind to the possibility of a Covid infection causing similar effects (á la Dengue fever)?

It seems to me that you’re suggesting that in face of two alternatives with unknown outcomes we should default to doing nothing. Do I understand correctly, or are you using some more specific principle? If so, why should we consider the “do nothing” alternative specially preferred?

I believe that there’s a good reason to treat “do nothing” as the preferred option when the alternatives are presented by an adversary (e.g. when someone gives us a “lucrative” offer under time pressure, a reasonable default action is to refuse; the “do nothing” alternative is the only one the adversary cannot fail to include). This obviously doesn’t apply here and I don’t think that outside of adversarial context this is a good principle.

@robryk the risk of dying from covid over time we can kinda estimate with some level of reason.. thats not the issue.

the issue is that the risks fromt he vaccine in terms of long term effects are a complete and utter unknown.

So while we can access the fallout from letting COVID continue without a vaccine (to some extent) we are completely blind to whether a vaccine will have lower risk or if in fact may make things far worse and result in more people dieing, not less.

What im suggesting is we have have two alternatives.. 1) a disease we know a little about and have some sense of its risks, but not much.. and 2) a random drug someone cooked up that we have virtually no idea what the risks are.

Also keep in mind that more often than not logn-term trials of vaccines cause them to fail the trials far more often than it causes them to pass. So the likelihood the vaccine will cause mroe harm than good is probably higher than the inverse.

What im arguing is we shouldnt be injected untested chemicals with no history of safety into our veins in the off chance it might help and be safe, that is reckless and not something we have ever found acceptable in modern science really.

You have to remember the IFR of covid right now is estimated around 0.23%, which is high and worthy of concern, but hardly so high as to warrent taking untested drugs that could prove to be fatal or make the risks worse. COVID is a serious disease and anyone who says otherwise is a fool, but serious enough to start cooking up vaccines and mass administering them eithout any of the usual long-term safety studies, particularly on a new class of virus using a totally new and untested technique… hell no thats just wreckless in the extreme.

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