Manufacturing matters, and six years ago, I said that one side effect from the pandemic is that mRNA technology, which had been lab-scale stuff, suddenly had dump-trucks full of money appearing to help them scale their manufacturing.
They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
> They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist.
No no. They had a candidate for the vaccine. Scaling manufacturing is hard, sure, but the actual barrier was proving the candidate worked. We conducted (by far) the most time-efficient clinical trials in history to prove the vaccines were safe and effective.
Until that happened, we could not have known the candidate drug was actually correct.
Serious question in good faith: what was the deal with the “calamari” (clots?) the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?
> Now an international team, led by Flinders University, have found that in a small number of people, the immune system can accidentally confuse a normal adenovirus protein with a human blood protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4).
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.
IIRC the vaccines were provably linked to the death of young people who had blood clots they shouldn't have had.
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
Society is the trolley problem. The balancing act between individual and collective rights is the lever being thrown every time we pass a law or make a regulation.
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
For the record, this comment is not arguing against vaccines or their veracity, there seems to have been confusion about that. I am specifically arguing against vaccine mandates.
Let's not forget that Norway was heavily criticized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and several international health experts for its decision to permanently drop the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
I know that it was uncommon but that's not the point. Imagine if you had lost a son or daughter due to this. You thought you were doing the right thing for your child, you did what you were told to do. They died, and now you can't even sue the manufacturer. The UK compensated some families £120k under the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, but would that be enough for you to accept the loss of a loved one?
A tiny fraction of infants react to infant vaccinations.
But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations.
It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.
No, they did the best for their child. They had no way of knowing their child would react before they gave the vaccine. The harms and risks of illness prevented by vaccination are far greater than the harms and the risks of adverse reaction.
Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.
> it's a trade off but it's one that must be made.
It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.
If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well.
My cousin died in 2021 at the age of 28 after AstraZeneca vaccine. Quite unfortunate, they starter increasing the age group of people receiving that vaccine literally days after he got it. His parents obviously are obviously still struggling with it and will never really accept it.
Healthy children and young adults were at very little risk from COVID though. Seatbelts are a safety measure that applies almost uniformly across age groups.
But the trolley problem doesn't make sense here. The statistically correct thing to do, in nearly all cases for nearly all people, both for themselves and for their community (separately!), was to get vaccinated.
It does though. A government mandate is the same as pulling the lever, it’s trading who lives and who dies. Even if more people survive as result, just like in the original trolley problem, the one who pulls the lever becomes responsible for the exchange.
I’m not even arguing the government shouldn’t pull the lever, I just want people to be held accountable for the lives lost as a result, and for the families to be treated with compassion.
Healthy individuals spread the disease to others, ultimately killing more people than the infinitesimal odds from getting vaccinated at the height of the pandemic
> Healthy children and young adults were at very little risk from COVID though.
People repeat this but there is no validation of this.
Sure, children and young adults mostly weren't at risk of dying. It is not at all clear that there are not bad side effects from getting an active Covid infection. We're still crunching the data.
We're just now beginning the process of correlating virii and bad latent effects many years later. HPV -> Cervical Cancer. Epsetin-Barr -> MS. And, of course the one we have known about for a while: Chicken Pox -> Shingles.
> Imagine if you had lost a son or daughter due to this
And imagine if you lost a son or daughter due to not doing this.
You are making a choice either way. If the opposite choice was made there are different consequences. Its not like you can opt out of consequences by not choosing.
Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person. At that point its a matter of risk assessment for yourself. Take a 2% chance of dying, a slightly higher chance of reduced quality of life (long COVID), or take a lottery-winning chance of dying to this blood clot. It is appropriate to do the math correctly to decide if this makes sense, but to claim that scientists and advocates did not do this personal risk assessment math and merely went off the benefits of herd immunity is a lie and anti-vaccine propaganda.
>Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person.
I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID.
Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits.
2% chance of death? A quick google shows it to be around 0.16%, and the deaths seem to be allocated to people who are older or just have other comorbities. I think the scientists in retrospect just didnt want hospitals to get full honestly, since they dont have the capacity for it as it is — atleast here in Canada.
Dismissing people like this is part of what fuels the antivax movement. Vaccines are generally effective, but they're not perfect and have side effects, and failing to acknowledge that when someone is asking in in good faith polarizes people and makes it look like someone's trying to hide something.
Those people are going to be polarised regardless. If you don't give them a reason to be polarised they'll invent one because they want to be polarised.
It was a nothingburger. It wasn't even a side effect of the mRNA vaccines.
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
Good faith isn't enough. I just reread some tweets, and there were multiple people who in completely good faith (from their point of view) were protecting their community by claiming everybody who took a vaccine would be dead by June 2026.
It is okay to dismiss negligible things. People sustain a lot of injuries and die in their bathrooms but it would be insane to both-sides somebody’s campaign against taking shits
I'm not sure this information will sway very many people. I have relatives who are all getting tested for t-cell counts related to mRNA because they are convinced they are the cause of any and all health problems they are facing. It seems like the medical professionals who are administering the tests are at least somewhat responsible for their misapplication.
It's not about swaying individuals. Let people believe their stupid stuff.
It's about swaying investors and regulators. And yeah, we need to make sure we excise our regulators of crazy people, but that's cyclic. And next cycle, we'll get vaccines for a lot more.
Point taken, but it isn't just a matter of individuals, it is a popular movement that has captured a significant part of role of regulators. The research is still valuable, but its lack of influence is not a problem that is safe to dismiss.
Two things can be true: Big Pharma can be evil, and their products are much better vetted for safety and efficacy than random peptides sourced form mystery factories.
and do you really think a significant percentage of forced vaccination detractors are taking mystery peptides? have there been studies, or are you vibing this guess off snarky reddit comments?
Anecdotally I know several people who would fall in the camp of anti vax but openly use peptides.
And intuitively it makes sense we’re talking about groups of people who are skeptical of main stream institutional health recommendations but trust specific personal sources for medical advice.
I’m vibing but it feels like there is a pretty clear intersection of peptides and the fringe science health community no?
Nobody's used state power to mandate peptides and social media censorship to reports of adverse effects.
As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.
The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.
Having read it, he does cite something for almost every claim. Although almost every source also contradicts his conclusions on some basic, logical, statistical, mathematical, or humane level, if you bother to fact check them. So it’s quite hard to quantify what it means to say it has good citations.
RFK's reliance on terrain theory, disproved continually since some five hundred years ago, does much to assist in citations - it is common to cite bad science as evidence where we need to improve public comprehension.
I don't approve of the downvoting and flagging, if there's anywhere on the internet that conspiracy ideas can be constructively pushed back on it should be here.
That being said you're not making very detailed defences of RFK's book and ideas. Can you be more specific on some ideas or claims from his book that you believe in and how they're supported?
I really feel that many of the issues with mRNA vaccines and health studies in general are generalizations like “safe and effective”. Everything has statistical risks and benefits, and we should just share those front and center with people. Eg test results for X mean you have a Y% chance of having X, given your history and symptoms and other results. Here are low cost low risk marginal things you can do to improve statistical significance.
Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
This bypasses regulators from having to make claims beyond “we reviewed the data and agree with these numbers and feel that this should not be banned.” I do think it would also help to separate something “not banned” and being “required to be covered by insurance” or “required for professions like the military”. I think trying to simplify things makes things worse, because this abstraction is not real.
Sounds like a oppurtunity for health educatation.
99%+ of people dont know they can look in the USPI for this data.
However, it isnt the best and most up to date, which the regulator and FDA would have and are unlikely to share.
100% of people who Google something like "how do we know the covid vaccines are good" would discover that the tool we use to figure that out is called a "clinical trial." Then they can look up "covid vaccine clinical trial results."
The reality is none of these "do your own research" or "just asking questions" people are actually curious whatsoever. Curiosity requires more than zero effort. Simply saying you're "doing your own research" and "just asking questions" while regurgitating the last thing you saw on your TikTok feed is super easy and gives you all the same sense of intellectual superiority.
The rushed clinical trials were only done with 122 people and a control group. During the very short trial, 1 person died in the first group, 2 in the other. The “conclusion” was its better to be vaccinated and it protects you better. 12 months later AstraZenica vaccine pulled from market everywhere ….
Yep, those regulated marketing terms could use an update.
Regulators don’t make cures. There’s room to improve on that side of the system.
Especially as emerging approaches seem to be trending more systems-thinking-oriented, eg “this will strengthen your immune system to fight lots of diseases.”
They were never meant to prevent people from getting COVID.
They were meant to prevent people from dying due to COVID.
The fact they were able to tell you they had COVID means it was a resounding success (not dead).
You see, this kind of lying and gaslighting is exactly what feeds the distrust in the government and scientific establishment in general public. No number of studies is going to reverse that any time soon.
If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
I think it’s the opposite. The _distrust itself_ was pushed by those looking to stir up outrage, generate engagement, and turn it into votes.
Case in point: look at all the people who’ve now built their entire political identities atop this unfalsifiable distrust. They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
This is the crux. Outrage spreads way faster than the boring truth.
> They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
They shouldn’t believe it no matter who says it. The entire concept of “social distancing” was completely made up and had no science behind it. It belongs in the same bucket of nonsense as “mask up between bites.”
Well, I think it’s pretty clear for starters that politicians lie (and yes this holds for both left and right; although indeed some presidents more than others), and that this isn’t helping trust.
One word, transparency. Being open about the research and outcomes. This is a situation good science communicators can help with.
Engage the skeptics in open debate and address their concerns, not censorship and embarking on cancellation campaigns.
However uncomfortable it seems, the median person in society isn't going to do a thorough literature review to make up their mind, they'll do it based on personal instincts.
If the “do their own research” people don’t manage to kill their kids and family through complete and utter idiocy, those kids and family will 99.99999% of the time continue their idiocy.
We should hope they manage to end their idiocy lineage.
> If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
Hogwash. Wakefield predated anything Covid. And measles vaccines aren't mRNA and people would rather let their children die.
Had Trump and Co called the vaccine part of the second coming, people would be lining up at their churches to get them.
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
I dont think people's motivations are to kill their children, but the opposite.
I think this is the starting point for developing cognitive empathy and an accurate model.
> But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
In the case of COVID, the effectiveness of vaccines was quite exaggerated at first[0]. That absolutely didn't help government rebuild the trust.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
At this point, quite sure more reviews will only trigger people's confirmation bias and make those who already don't trust vaccines trust them even less.
Vaccines were very effective against the first variant, and got less effective with later ones. People forget about the timeline. Article mentions the delta variant at which time vaccines were still very effective IIRC. There were some breakthrough cases as the article mentions but that's to be expected with anything short of 100% efficacy.
One's model of "statement made by the POTUS" should be more like 'statement made by mildly likeable (to some segment of the population) boomer dad who probably doesn't know what he is talking about.' It'd be a different thing if a public health official said something like this (and I don't know if they did, but I certainly wasn't left with the impression that it was impossible for me to get vaccinated and still get covid).
The Covid vaccines were and continue to be VERY effective at preventing you from winding up on ECMO.
Yes, you may still get Covid, but you don't die from drowning in your own body fluids anymore.
Of course, this only attends if you got the damn vaccine. All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) were anti-vaxxers. But, hey, we know that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Apparently they live in a nursing home in 2020 still, because no one else is dying of covid anymore. Especially not young or healthy people within the last few years.
The link in the article does not show the study, just a list of references, a summary and the researchers who published it. How many of the researchers who published this study have conflicts of interest? Where is the full study for review?
Yes, I've been very excited about that for more than 10 years. It may not pan out, it's far more speculative than infectious disease prevention, but when combined with checkpoint inhibitors, and I fear they may not do the bold thing and do fully personalized therapeutic vaccines, but it does provide a great deal of hope.
> The researchers emphasize that, like all vaccines, mRNA vaccines can have side effects. They found that serious adverse events—such as myocarditis, which occurs more frequently in younger males—are rare and consistently outweighed by the vaccines’ protection
reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!) for whatever the vaccine did, it would apply to a broader population due to covid exposure
> reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)
I want to empathize with you, plenty of medical professionals used really reductive and inaccurate language that should be rightfully criticized. stopping people from getting covid being one of those things
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
We don’t know the actual numbers as pericarditis and myocarditis can occur asymptomatically, and people truly need to be under very active medical surveillance to detect it
We synthesise evidence on vaccine components, manufacturing quality controls, and regulatory standards that underpin safety, alongside data from randomised trials, post-authorisation surveillance, and active pharmacovigilance systems.
"synthesize???"
With almost 200 references and the use of "synthesize???" it sound like AI generated slop.
The article is behind a paywall in any case so why so many positive comments about it?
This administration literally fast-tracked the original covid vaccines for approval.
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
My understanding is that vaccine research and production is almost never profitable and depends on government support. Either grants, guaranteed purchases, or both.
Yeah that's called survivorship bias. The ones that make it to market can be wildly profitable to manufacture. Doing all the work to sift through what does and doesn't work to discover new vaccines wouldn't happen without public funding.
No, that’s called pharmaceutical development. That’s the business.
We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:
> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.
We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.
No. Pharmaceutical companies love vaccines. They’re relatively easy to make, they’re indemnified against harms, they cannot be generic, and they are wildly profitable. And on top of all of that, they often get mandated by schools, ensuring a captive market.
If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.
*Pre-mrna* vaccines couldn’t be generic since it was impossible to have an exact copy of a vaccine [1], because they were created from living organisms.
It is not yet clear whether mRNA will be treated like generics.
That "Vaccines are not profitable" is a misinformation put out there by...I don't know who, but it is out there somehow...
It is really weird that even here in HN where everyone is aware of corporate greed and corruption, corporations becomes the good guys when it comes to vaccines.
Now you might think of bringing up regulators and checks and balances at this point...
But imagine this. If approving a vaccine, or like here, a vaccine technology could unlock 1 Trillion dollars in revenue, imagine how much of that can be paid politicians/regulators/scientists/thought leadrs to act favorably?
How many of those regulators, who are just average human beings, can resist that?
Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.
Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.
The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!
The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.
It's not dissimilar to oil & gas (energy) and mineral resources ... the outgoings on exploration are a cash bloodletting that often has no return.
The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.
> Trump one had a sane cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This is absurdly revisionist. The first administration’s cabinet/staff was a reality show and a merry go round of people like Anthony Scaramucci and Ryan Zinke. If anything “controlled” it, it was just the chaos of incompetence.
As far as loyalty goes, I suppose it’s worth reminding you that Kennedy was a Democrat, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary, and routinely criticized Trump.
OP is saying Trump has demanded loyalty as a condition of serving in his administration. As HHS Secretary, RFK caved on Roundup, something he famously won a case against as a lawyer[1]. That even lost RFK support from some of his MAHA fans.
Relatively speaking Trump 1.0 had a sane cabinet. Yes, there were some crazies, sure, but relative to the people he has around him now, they seem sane.
It's literally not the same administration. Also yeah he wants private companies to stop "wild" profits while he grifts the nation with crypto, hosting UFC on white house? You have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to think the current administration gives a single f about unchecked profits or the people's general wellbeing.
Not many people know that Trump had a hand in starting the pandemic.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
Not sure what is partisan about this. Some facts were presented. Not opinions, facts. If you dispute any of the above is factual please back up your assertion with citations.
If the President hires someone who then restarted research that previous admin stopped for being too dangerous, does the President get no part of the blame? The buck stops with the President. If he hired the wrong person--and he has hired plenty of wrong people this time around--he gets the blame for the disasters they cause.
> The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
The WIV is 20km from the Huanan market where the pandemic started. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[0] The evidence for zoonotic origin with multiple spillover events at the Huanan market is overwhelming.
No that was a conspiracy theory fueled by Russian disinformation, the scientists and experts testified that there was no gain of function work being done and debunked it.
You really believe some billionaire oligarchs propaganda corporation over foremost self-proclaimed expert Anthony "I am the science" Fauci? Something an agent of Putin would say.
Right now, we'd be better off if we even had politicians who could manage an actual debate. Seems like we can't get anything other than mudslinging and strongarming right now.
do those exist anymore? any publication that accepted the revised definition of natural immunity during the global push for this untested gene therapy mrna injection seems to be discredited. i remember when natural immunity went from being a normal concept to a right wing conspiracy theory.
They had done safety and effectiveness testing before deployment back then. These are retrospective studies using a real large dosing and placebo population.
The closest to “untested drug matter” that existed was the antibody cocktail that might have kept Trump alive.
They did all the normal steps in the US. It was faster because they had the full attention of the FDA (so zero admin delays), and they did some parts in parallel, risking wasting money if things did not work out.
The mRNA approach already had years of work prior to COVID, and was already reviewed for safety.
It's worth highlghting the importance of years of basic science-research and testing, all little pieces which were mostly there when we finally needed them, work that was always under-threat from people saying "what use is this, why would we ever need that?" (For which the pandemic is an implicit answe the pandemic answered: "Stuff like this!")
Among many of those collective small contributions that create a practical and effective outcome, one example of work thankfully done in advance:
> But the thing is, our vaccine is only generating the spikes itself, and we’re not mounting them on any kind of virus body. It turns out that, unmodified, freestanding Spike proteins collapse into a different structure. If injected as a vaccine, this would indeed cause our bodies to develop immunity.. but only against the collapsed spike protein. And the real SARS-CoV-2 shows up with the spiky Spike. The vaccine would not work very well in that case.
> In 2017 it was described how putting a double Proline substitution in just the right place would make the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS S proteins take up their ‘pre-fusion’ configuration, even without being part of the whole virus. This works because Proline is a very rigid amino acid. It acts as a kind of splint, stabilising the protein in the state we need to show to the immune system. The people that discovered this should be walking around high-fiving themselves incessantly. Unbearable amounts of smugness should be emanating from them. And it would all be well deserved.
The world was lucky the omicron mutation chose virulence over lethality - it could outcompete the older, more “effective” strains. This coupled with vaccines, isolation and antivirals (and treatment changes) kept the count down.
A different roll of the mutation dice might have made a sars that spread easily. That would have thinned out the middle aged folks.
people indeed were dying in droves. based on the study in sweden the vast majority of those deaths (>90%) were in the age bracket of 70 plus. aged care is already a massive issue thanks to money making being more important than having families and being human - our aging population could have been addressed here. obviously the immunocompromised and the elderly did benefit alongside pharma execs. still this seems like a 'protect the kids' type of excuse. why should I be happy that swathes of the youth had to sacrifice their bodies just so that their grandparents could live a few more years of luxury ? I'm saying this because I know multiple people that were affected negatively by coronavirus vaccines and they were all young.
> Even during the pandemic response it was eventually acknowledged that early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
To the very best of my knowledge this is just misinformation. If you have a citation here, please provide it.
Is your concern with what the studies tested or whether it was acknowledged?
I can find you links, though it will be directly to the original studies done for the covid vaccines. The studies were well written and clearly called out their methodology. The problem was with how the studies were interpreted and explained to the public, not with the studies themselves.
early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
Who made such stupid claims and __why__? My own recollection, from Australia watching the US, was the the US political administration of the time turned any scientific based discussion into a complete shit show - many images of cowered CDC employees sucking their faces in while Trump v1.0 babbled on about bleach and sunlight.
From my first free of politics encounters with world class epidemiologists in 1980 or so I've not heard one claim that any vaccine had a 100% efficacy rate for both disease prevention and for eliminating spread - it has _always_ been a numbers game, like seat belts, of statistical reduction.
Your own link agrees:
Conclusions: A two-dose regimen of BNT162b2 conferred 95% protection against Covid-19 in persons 16 years of age or older.
95% protection is pretty good, but for all manner of reasons it's unusual to expect any vaccine to prevent 100% of all infections across millions of people or animals.
Typically, in educated countries, phrases such as "prevent infection and spread*" are understood to mean that in the same manner as "seat belts prevent death and injury*"
In the end, do facts even matter in politically charged discussions?
This sounds a bit like providing evidence for global warming, gun control or evolution. The "skeptics" just want to remain ignorant. No amount of evidence will change them.
The silver lining about vaccine skeptics, though, is the Herman Cain award[1]. What this means is that conservatives die more than liberals from preventable diseases [2].
You mean the stuff the whole world got injected with in 2020? Good to know!
Seriously though, I am very pro-vax, but the fact that studies like these come out now is just confirmation that people had the right to doubt the safety of mRNA back then. Many people shamed others for being anti vax but everyone has the right to be careful.
Why would repeating a study now and getting the same result as when it was first measured in 2020 be a reason to doubt the safety?
I’m also pro-vax, so I don’t think it is correct to equate ignoring the preponderance of current evidence (in 2021 or 2026) for vaccine protection as being careful. That just seems the logical fallacy sold by “vax hesitant” and social media influencers to make people feel smart to ignore statistics and “make their own choice based on intuition”
By late 2020, when they got approved, the vaccines were not scientifically proven safe for mainstream use. No other mRNA vaccine had been through all the trial stages, and certainly not those COVID ones.
Could the vaccines have side effects that became visible after 6 months? Yes and we couldn’t have known that they didn’t.
Could the vaccines have side effects on people with rare conditions? Sure, and we couldn’t have known that either.
My point is that in 2020, the decision to approve the vaccines and pretty much force everyone to get it was a risk tradeoff. It was way more risky to let the disease continue spreading and mutate than it was to release the vaccines. mrna vaccines had been in trials and there was no reason to believe they could have been harmful. But the reality is that we just didn’t know. Biology is complex enough that you can’t just assume everything will be fine without proper testing. And what we deem proper testing is a process that these drugs hadn’t gone through.
I happily got vaxed in early 2021, and did it again 4 times , so I was willing to trust the tradeoff.
But ignoring that it was a tradeoff and hiding behind a sign that says “science” is just taking people for dummies.
How large a trial do you want to run to capture "rare conditions"? Millions? Billions of participants? How long do you want to run trials? Years? Decades?
No, it is not about large trials. It is about changing the attitude of medical practitioners and the media that refuse to acknowledge a vaccine could have caused an adverse effect.
I understand that this is to not feed the vaccine hesitancy. But to anyone observing carefully, this is a crucial break in the information chain that can feedback any ill effects of any vaccine back to the creators.
There is a process in place that’s meant to capture a certain number of potential problems. I didn’t make that process. The people who are making drugs safe designed the process. There is never zero risk of a treatment behaving badly, of course but when a drug gets fast tracked and doesn’t go through the regular approval process, it just hasn’t been proven to be safe by the regular standard of what experts deem safe.
That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?
If you don't believe every developed countries’ medical bodies on vaccines, where do you get your info on this? (As to the ‘pro-vax’ question, I'd define it as someone who is open to listening the medical bodies of every developed country on the planet.)
If the only entity that you can get information from is an entity that is known to lie, you can trust this entity?
It is not that we know for a fact that X is not safe. It is that we have no reason to believe that the powers that can ensure that, does not have an incentive to do it, and a large financial incentive to NOT do it and instead grease a lot of palms and get it mandated.
This is particularly relevant when the cost to grease the palms is minuscule compared to the profit that can be made by the approval.
And it is particularly relavant when the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
We are sitting ducks here. But people apparently does not notice.
I think your own logic supports the opposite from your conclusions?
I'm saying that every developed country's medical bodies support that these vaccines are safe.
Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines? That they will be too cautious because they are afraid of approving something that turns out to be unsafe, or the opposite that they have no fear of approving something unsafe?
Are there any examples you'd point to of where developed countries' medical bodies approved something unsafe because they were bribed, as you imply is the norm today?
But most importantly, if you think every developed country's medical bodies should not be used as the source of info about safety vs benefits, what should be?
Or what should be the system even if it doesn't exist today?
> is an entity that is known to lie
What are you referring to?
> the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
The common man is inundated with info about vaccines from other sources, although much of it is misinformation, etc.
It probably means that you take the statistical evidence produced by massive double-blinded placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials as actual evidence
People have rights but they also have the responsibility to be scientifically literate enough to know that analyzing data about the vaccine was prudent regardless of anything and does not suggest their prostration to antivax demagogues was smart.
Both economies have massive drug industries and China in particular has advanced manufacturing processes for decades. I suspect they made an economic/risk decision and will be reviewing it in the light of mRNA production lead time.
We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.
Really glad they confirmed this, about 5 years after I was forced to take one at threat of job loss despite 1) already having had natural Covid and 2) working a fully remote job.
They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized. And as part of every drug, there's continual, ongoing, review of the data to ensure that safety is maintained, and that nothing has changed about the drug and its manufacturing. This is the "phase 4" of a drug, continual ongoing monitoring.
> They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized
No. They didn’t. They said it.
You were the Phase3 trial. You can probably debate the ethicality, the decisions made, but do not pretend they had 5 year data before deploying to the entire world.
You're aware that most drugs are approved without 5-year data, correct? Why did you draw the line there? Why not wait for 10-year data? What about 20- or 50- or 100-year data?
They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
No no. They had a candidate for the vaccine. Scaling manufacturing is hard, sure, but the actual barrier was proving the candidate worked. We conducted (by far) the most time-efficient clinical trials in history to prove the vaccines were safe and effective.
Until that happened, we could not have known the candidate drug was actually correct.
Not sure if you mean nobody wanted to develop mRNA flu vaccines, but at least Moderna and Pfizer are:
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/18/nx-s1-5863570/flu-vaccine-mrn...
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
https://www.flinders.edu.au/research/articles/covid-vaccine-...
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
There is remedy against vaccine harm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compen...
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
The statistics on men under 25 are still horrific and suggest this was in fact the latter category: atrocity masquerading behind that euphemism.
But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations.
It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.
It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.
If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well.
And what I said is in a global context.
It was and remains statistically correct to vaccinate young people.
I’m not even arguing the government shouldn’t pull the lever, I just want people to be held accountable for the lives lost as a result, and for the families to be treated with compassion.
People repeat this but there is no validation of this.
Sure, children and young adults mostly weren't at risk of dying. It is not at all clear that there are not bad side effects from getting an active Covid infection. We're still crunching the data.
We're just now beginning the process of correlating virii and bad latent effects many years later. HPV -> Cervical Cancer. Epsetin-Barr -> MS. And, of course the one we have known about for a while: Chicken Pox -> Shingles.
And imagine if you lost a son or daughter due to not doing this.
You are making a choice either way. If the opposite choice was made there are different consequences. Its not like you can opt out of consequences by not choosing.
I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID.
Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits.
https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6022a1.htm
You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place.
It's about swaying investors and regulators. And yeah, we need to make sure we excise our regulators of crazy people, but that's cyclic. And next cycle, we'll get vaccines for a lot more.
And intuitively it makes sense we’re talking about groups of people who are skeptical of main stream institutional health recommendations but trust specific personal sources for medical advice.
I’m vibing but it feels like there is a pretty clear intersection of peptides and the fringe science health community no?
As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.
The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.
Proceeds to raw dog a bunch of “research chemicals” cause some roided up bro talked about it on a podcast…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo
They’re not vaccines though.
This book pushes Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine as "miracle cures", thanks to that idea my relatives also have a stockpile of both.
There are, unfortunately, many examples of your doing this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47756136 (April 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745846 (April 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47053228 (Feb 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46755775 (Jan 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605417 (Jan 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522898 (Jan 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988414 (Nov 2025)
This is not a comment about any of your views on vaccines or anything else. But you can't post like this regardless of what your view is on any topic.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
That being said you're not making very detailed defences of RFK's book and ideas. Can you be more specific on some ideas or claims from his book that you believe in and how they're supported?
Tailored vaccines for things like cancer are a game changer.
I live in hope of a semi-universal flu+related vaccine.
I live in fear of the measles induced "immune amnesia" effect.
Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
This bypasses regulators from having to make claims beyond “we reviewed the data and agree with these numbers and feel that this should not be banned.” I do think it would also help to separate something “not banned” and being “required to be covered by insurance” or “required for professions like the military”. I think trying to simplify things makes things worse, because this abstraction is not real.
You are aware that literally anyone can go and literally find exactly these numbers, correct?
The trial results are published!
The reality is none of these "do your own research" or "just asking questions" people are actually curious whatsoever. Curiosity requires more than zero effort. Simply saying you're "doing your own research" and "just asking questions" while regurgitating the last thing you saw on your TikTok feed is super easy and gives you all the same sense of intellectual superiority.
Regulators don’t make cures. There’s room to improve on that side of the system.
Especially as emerging approaches seem to be trending more systems-thinking-oriented, eg “this will strengthen your immune system to fight lots of diseases.”
"COVID-19 vaccination will help keep you from getting COVID-19" - https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/97780/
You see, this kind of lying and gaslighting is exactly what feeds the distrust in the government and scientific establishment in general public. No number of studies is going to reverse that any time soon.
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
Case in point: look at all the people who’ve now built their entire political identities atop this unfalsifiable distrust. They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
This is the crux. Outrage spreads way faster than the boring truth.
They shouldn’t believe it no matter who says it. The entire concept of “social distancing” was completely made up and had no science behind it. It belongs in the same bucket of nonsense as “mask up between bites.”
Well, I think it’s pretty clear for starters that politicians lie (and yes this holds for both left and right; although indeed some presidents more than others), and that this isn’t helping trust.
Engage the skeptics in open debate and address their concerns, not censorship and embarking on cancellation campaigns.
However uncomfortable it seems, the median person in society isn't going to do a thorough literature review to make up their mind, they'll do it based on personal instincts.
Dear Previous Paragraph,
Couldn't many small published reviews which don't show a noticeable or measurable positive effect on their own build up over time to rebuild trust?
Sincerely, Your Reader
If the “do their own research” people don’t manage to kill their kids and family through complete and utter idiocy, those kids and family will 99.99999% of the time continue their idiocy.
We should hope they manage to end their idiocy lineage.
Hogwash. Wakefield predated anything Covid. And measles vaccines aren't mRNA and people would rather let their children die.
Had Trump and Co called the vaccine part of the second coming, people would be lining up at their churches to get them.
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
I see that your are yourself in a position you didn't reason you into.
Again, trust is a huge factor here.
In the case of COVID, the effectiveness of vaccines was quite exaggerated at first[0]. That absolutely didn't help government rebuild the trust.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
At this point, quite sure more reviews will only trigger people's confirmation bias and make those who already don't trust vaccines trust them even less.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...
One's model of "statement made by the POTUS" should be more like 'statement made by mildly likeable (to some segment of the population) boomer dad who probably doesn't know what he is talking about.' It'd be a different thing if a public health official said something like this (and I don't know if they did, but I certainly wasn't left with the impression that it was impossible for me to get vaccinated and still get covid).
Yes, you may still get Covid, but you don't die from drowning in your own body fluids anymore.
Of course, this only attends if you got the damn vaccine. All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) were anti-vaxxers. But, hey, we know that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Where exactly is this?
reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!) for whatever the vaccine did, it would apply to a broader population due to covid exposure
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/covid-19-vaccinati...
(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
We don’t know the actual numbers as pericarditis and myocarditis can occur asymptomatically, and people truly need to be under very active medical surveillance to detect it
Channeling Monty Python:
... I got better
"synthesize???"
With almost 200 references and the use of "synthesize???" it sound like AI generated slop.
The article is behind a paywall in any case so why so many positive comments about it?
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:
> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.
We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.
for the curious:
https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=5ec35bf87ec1fd63d28d...
Remember when everyone was contributing spare dimes to fund a vaccine?
If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.
It is not yet clear whether mRNA will be treated like generics.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X1...
It is really weird that even here in HN where everyone is aware of corporate greed and corruption, corporations becomes the good guys when it comes to vaccines.
Now you might think of bringing up regulators and checks and balances at this point...
But imagine this. If approving a vaccine, or like here, a vaccine technology could unlock 1 Trillion dollars in revenue, imagine how much of that can be paid politicians/regulators/scientists/thought leadrs to act favorably?
How many of those regulators, who are just average human beings, can resist that?
Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.
Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.
The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!
The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.
The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.
Trump 1 was a very different administration.
And Trump himself has publicly backed off what was probably his one major achievement after receiving pushback from his supporters.
Trump one had a sane (terrible, but sane) cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This time he went for loyalty above all else.
This is absurdly revisionist. The first administration’s cabinet/staff was a reality show and a merry go round of people like Anthony Scaramucci and Ryan Zinke. If anything “controlled” it, it was just the chaos of incompetence.
As far as loyalty goes, I suppose it’s worth reminding you that Kennedy was a Democrat, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary, and routinely criticized Trump.
1: https://apnews.com/article/maha-glyphosate-rfk-kennedy-trump...
Kennedy was a Democrat as a spoiler.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-t...
Most left-wing critics are still struggling with admitting that Anthony Fauci really did provide funding to EcoHealth, despite ample documentation.
For the record, I don’t care who gets blamed. I just think it’s a hilarious twist of partisan rhetoric.
The WIV is 20km from the Huanan market where the pandemic started. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[0] The evidence for zoonotic origin with multiple spillover events at the Huanan market is overwhelming.
This is just one review.
[0] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
There's a minimum level of actual competence needed for that job to not embarrass the Trump admin.
Thanks for the new toll in Hormuz though
Weren't the lockdowns supposed to go on forever and usher in the WEF Davos future? What happened to that?
The closest to “untested drug matter” that existed was the antibody cocktail that might have kept Trump alive.
The mRNA approach already had years of work prior to COVID, and was already reviewed for safety.
It's worth highlghting the importance of years of basic science-research and testing, all little pieces which were mostly there when we finally needed them, work that was always under-threat from people saying "what use is this, why would we ever need that?" (For which the pandemic is an implicit answe the pandemic answered: "Stuff like this!")
Among many of those collective small contributions that create a practical and effective outcome, one example of work thankfully done in advance:
> But the thing is, our vaccine is only generating the spikes itself, and we’re not mounting them on any kind of virus body. It turns out that, unmodified, freestanding Spike proteins collapse into a different structure. If injected as a vaccine, this would indeed cause our bodies to develop immunity.. but only against the collapsed spike protein. And the real SARS-CoV-2 shows up with the spiky Spike. The vaccine would not work very well in that case.
> In 2017 it was described how putting a double Proline substitution in just the right place would make the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS S proteins take up their ‘pre-fusion’ configuration, even without being part of the whole virus. This works because Proline is a very rigid amino acid. It acts as a kind of splint, stabilising the protein in the state we need to show to the immune system. The people that discovered this should be walking around high-fiving themselves incessantly. Unbearable amounts of smugness should be emanating from them. And it would all be well deserved.
[0] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
A different roll of the mutation dice might have made a sars that spread easily. That would have thinned out the middle aged folks.
/s
/S
No /s
To the very best of my knowledge this is just misinformation. If you have a citation here, please provide it.
I can find you links, though it will be directly to the original studies done for the covid vaccines. The studies were well written and clearly called out their methodology. The problem was with how the studies were interpreted and explained to the public, not with the studies themselves.
From my first free of politics encounters with world class epidemiologists in 1980 or so I've not heard one claim that any vaccine had a 100% efficacy rate for both disease prevention and for eliminating spread - it has _always_ been a numbers game, like seat belts, of statistical reduction.
Your own link agrees:
95% protection is pretty good, but for all manner of reasons it's unusual to expect any vaccine to prevent 100% of all infections across millions of people or animals.Typically, in educated countries, phrases such as "prevent infection and spread*" are understood to mean that in the same manner as "seat belts prevent death and injury*"
( * exceptions expected )
This sounds a bit like providing evidence for global warming, gun control or evolution. The "skeptics" just want to remain ignorant. No amount of evidence will change them.
The silver lining about vaccine skeptics, though, is the Herman Cain award[1]. What this means is that conservatives die more than liberals from preventable diseases [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain_Award
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9
Seriously though, I am very pro-vax, but the fact that studies like these come out now is just confirmation that people had the right to doubt the safety of mRNA back then. Many people shamed others for being anti vax but everyone has the right to be careful.
I’m also pro-vax, so I don’t think it is correct to equate ignoring the preponderance of current evidence (in 2021 or 2026) for vaccine protection as being careful. That just seems the logical fallacy sold by “vax hesitant” and social media influencers to make people feel smart to ignore statistics and “make their own choice based on intuition”
Could the vaccines have side effects that became visible after 6 months? Yes and we couldn’t have known that they didn’t.
Could the vaccines have side effects on people with rare conditions? Sure, and we couldn’t have known that either.
My point is that in 2020, the decision to approve the vaccines and pretty much force everyone to get it was a risk tradeoff. It was way more risky to let the disease continue spreading and mutate than it was to release the vaccines. mrna vaccines had been in trials and there was no reason to believe they could have been harmful. But the reality is that we just didn’t know. Biology is complex enough that you can’t just assume everything will be fine without proper testing. And what we deem proper testing is a process that these drugs hadn’t gone through.
I happily got vaxed in early 2021, and did it again 4 times , so I was willing to trust the tradeoff.
But ignoring that it was a tradeoff and hiding behind a sign that says “science” is just taking people for dummies.
I understand that this is to not feed the vaccine hesitancy. But to anyone observing carefully, this is a crucial break in the information chain that can feedback any ill effects of any vaccine back to the creators.
It’s not very complicated.
trials ok => drug most likely ok
trials not done => we don’t really know.
That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?
If the only entity that you can get information from is an entity that is known to lie, you can trust this entity?
It is not that we know for a fact that X is not safe. It is that we have no reason to believe that the powers that can ensure that, does not have an incentive to do it, and a large financial incentive to NOT do it and instead grease a lot of palms and get it mandated.
This is particularly relevant when the cost to grease the palms is minuscule compared to the profit that can be made by the approval.
And it is particularly relavant when the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
We are sitting ducks here. But people apparently does not notice.
I'm saying that every developed country's medical bodies support that these vaccines are safe.
Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines? That they will be too cautious because they are afraid of approving something that turns out to be unsafe, or the opposite that they have no fear of approving something unsafe?
Are there any examples you'd point to of where developed countries' medical bodies approved something unsafe because they were bribed, as you imply is the norm today?
But most importantly, if you think every developed country's medical bodies should not be used as the source of info about safety vs benefits, what should be? Or what should be the system even if it doesn't exist today?
> is an entity that is known to lie
What are you referring to?
> the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
The common man is inundated with info about vaccines from other sources, although much of it is misinformation, etc.
And we shouldn’t assume that all mRna vaccines are the same. The rna sequence that’s used potentially can matter as well.
But I'm not quite sure how that's relevant to the article...
We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.
But better late than never I suppose.
No. They didn’t. They said it.
You were the Phase3 trial. You can probably debate the ethicality, the decisions made, but do not pretend they had 5 year data before deploying to the entire world.
Facts matter.
Dec 11 2020- publication of phase 2/3 trial results, meaning not only was the study fully completed, but it made it through peer review too: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Dec 11 - 2020: first authorization https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/health/pfizer-vaccine-aut...
Do we need 75-year data for Viagra too?
30-year data for aspirin?
What's the logic tree here?