@Pezevenk @TheOneTrueChapo and @ClimateChangeAnxiety
:chavez-salute:
every time I see anti-vaxx shit posted here at least one of you is already in the comments, fighting the good fight.
@admins please reconsider chapo's site-wide tolerance of anti-vaxx/vaccine-skeptical/vaccine-hesitant rhetoric
The only "anti-vaxx" post that seem to get any traction around here are ones where people are skeptical about the covid vaccine. And personally the more I read about it the more skeptical I am.
Declaring that you, as someone who has read news articles here and there, deserves to be skeptical is a declaration that you have an understanding of covid and the vaccine that an entire global network of scientists, review boards, and clinics trials does not have. So would you like to share with the rest of the class?
This is the problem with vaccine skepticism, and being afraid and not knowing everything and latching onto a gut feeling is the very foundation of anti-vax rhetoric and I'm not gonna let it slide, sorry
I have lost people in my life because Purdue Pharma got FDA clearance to legally deal opiates.
"An entire global network of scientists, review boards, and clinics trials" does not mean shit when there is a profit incentive.
Opiates have legitimate medical usage which is why they have been approved by the FDA. A private company paying off doctors, pharmacies and insurance companies to push their drugs is not comparable to this, which is just a drug approval process. If Pfizer is caught pushing covid vaccines on people that don't need them and lobbying against vaccine laws to keep the cash flow going you're welcome to dunk on me
The biggest difference I see is that the private company does not need to pay people off this time. They have a monopoly on a drug we all need. I doubt the US will be importing the Russian or Chinese vaccines any time soon.
Besides that, I have nothing to say on the COVID vaccine. I'm saying that an appeal to authority is not convincing.
Medical skepticism exists because the medical industry in the US has a long history of doing incredibly fucked up shit for profit, and often burying it for decades.
That skepticism will carry over to the most profitable drug in human history. The medical industry brought this on itself.
If "anti anti-vaxx", or whatever, people were serious about addressing skepticism, we would hear louder voices against medical profiteering. Instead, they just want to punch-down at people who are rightfully afraid.
I'll stop "punching down" then. If people want to buck medical science out of fear and nothing else, fine
As you said, most people are not doctors. Describing the minutiae of medical science will only convince people who are trained to understand it. I do not understand it. I need to trust medical experts to explain it to me.
Medicine requires public trust. Our problem is that The US medical system has been selling public trust for profit. Now there is none left.
Over half this country does not plan to get the vaccine. That is a reality we have to grapple with. Telling people "this for-profit company is actually right this time" will not convince anyone.
Here’s what I’m basing my skepticism on.
So we have-
Pfizer didn't make exclusion criteria accessible (but it was able to be found, author had to make an edit)
Fever of 104+ not being in this particular paper even though this side effect has been noted enough that casual journalism has shared this fact
And that Pfizer had a direct hand in writing/publishing the paper the author is responding to.
So I ask out of curiosity, what this article does for you and what you're skeptical about? Does an imperfectly written paper on the topic discredit the vaccine in your eyes?
It doesn't discredit the vaccine but it raises enough concern to be skeptical. I almost definitely will get it (or a another covid vaccine) at some point, I'm up to date on all my other vaccines, I get my flue shot every year but until there is some more mature research on this I'm going to continue isolating and wearing my mask every time I go out.
I didn’t see the update—thanks for pointing that out. I’ll await the author’s analysis of those criteria.
The collapsing of the age categories was also concerning.
My understanding is that this is the paper proving the Pfizer vaccine’s safety, not ‘one of a dozen papers analysing it.
Realistically, I’m young and don’t have any allergies (that I know of). If I end up stuck with the Pfizer vaccine, I’ll bite the bullet and take the fever. But I think it’s reasonable to critique it.
I have no such concerns for the other vaccines, for the record.
I'm kinda curious.
Could anything make you skeptical? Would there be a boundary limit?
Sure lot of things would, largely if there was any (ideally per-reviewed) takedowns of the trials, how they were conducted, who they tested on, the timeline of it, control groups, what the vaccine is comprised of etc etc
This was a wall of text that amounted to having problems with a paper on the vaccine and I do not understand how a couple minor issues extend to feeling vindicated about the vaccine itself
3 people having allergic reactions is not enough for me to be skeptical. Finding out they only tested it on white women between the ages of 32 and 35 or something absurd would. Lastly, whenever I'm a little uncertain about covid vaccines I look up stuff about the flu vaccine as a comparison point and if anything stands out I'll consider it more
The issue with whether or not people who have received the vaccine can still transmit the disease is known and from what I know it is normal that it wouldn't be known so soon, because it is harder to test.
I did find a very lengthy document that details the trial protocols of the Pfizer vaccine. It does say they excluded pregnant women, people who had recently received a transfusion, immunosuppressed patients and some other groups so that answers the concern of the author for these groups. I am not sure if it included the allergy thing because it is extremely long and I'm not gonna go through the entire 197 pages. If it doesn't include people with strong allergic reactions to other vaccines, that's weird and irresponsible and I don't even understand why they would do that (when they do mention other excluded groups) but it's not an instant disqualification either.
EDIT: So I just noticed that the author does mention in an edit to their article that they DID eventually find the paper I talked about, and they raise the concern that it wasn't adequately cited so they could find it earlier. Maybe they have a point there, although I found it pretty easily.
But in any case, the vaccine is out now. We can see the results. And so far, it's going... Fine? We saw hundreds of thousands of people get vaccinated and the worst adverse reactions were 3 non life threatening anaphylaxis cases which can now easily been addressed. The point about anaphylactic reactions in the countryside is kinda moot because it's gonna be a long time before the vaccine will reach people in the countryside who don't have access to hospitals, and so far there have been 3 such reactions out of a few hundred thousand. Vaccinations start from healthcare workers, who are the very definition of people who have access to hospital facilities.
The part that talks about headaches, chills and muscle pains is... Eh? Like, I really don't care if I have a headache for a couple days if it means I won't get covid ? Apparently it's more common than with other vaccines. I don't see why that should be a major red flag or unexpected, especially not "the whoppers". I read the report by that volunteer who got a high fever. But apparently that did not last very long at all and all side effects subsided after a day. That's... Not so bad, if it's only a rare case.
What I found really odd was this:
This is in relation to the fact that about half the people will experience some kind of side effect from the vaccine. What is implied here is that the vaccine will be... Worse than covid for some people because they may get some side effect? Sorry, but the most common side effects (namely the ones that a big percentage of people may get) are fatigue (by far the most common), chills and headaches. If some people who weren't going to have temporary headaches end up having headaches in exchange of... People dying or permanently scarring their lungs after torturous days in an ICU, that's certainly good, no?
The article also says this:
OK, but did the trial say specifically a 104.9 degree fever is a Grade 4 event, or did it just say Grade 4 events are life threatening or disabling? Because I'm not a doctor but a brief fever of 104.9 degrees (which subsided before she even called them to report it) isn't in general life threatening. If it persisted throughout the day then yeah, alright. If it was their policy that any fever of 104.9 should be reported, then there is something amiss here.
The final concern is also kinda silly. It's not a safety concern, it's a concern that we don't know yet if people who have received the vaccine can still spread the virus, and that if that is the case then apparently there is no point to it form a public health perspective. I'm sorry, what? This is obviously silly. Alright, let's assume that you can still transmit the disease even after being vaccinated. Now let's assume most of the population receives the vaccine. That STILL means hundreds of thousands of people will be saved from death, and the virus would no longer be a threat for anyone but the unvaccinated ones.
So overall there are some good points but it seems like the author is exaggerating some important things.
The concern he was raising here was not about their side effects from the drug on people who would otherwise have been asymptomatic, it was that they were only monitoring people with active symptoms, which tells us nothing about whether or not the people who received the vaccine even gained sterilizing immunity or whether they are still spreading the disease asymptomatically. Meaning we literally do not know if those people are capable of being infectious, if they are immune how long that effect would last, or whether or not they are still spreading the disease even if they are not experiencing symptoms. This is a not at all a silly concern if you're talking about rolling it out to the entire country where most of the spread is happening because of asymptomatic infections and don't know the answer to whether or not the vaccine stops that from happening.
I don't think this is what this was saying, because of in the context of where that is situated in the article. It says nothing about that subject in that part of the article.
Which is a concern that surfaced in an entirely different section of the article and which I addressed.
The reason I said it is silly is because the article states there is little to no public health benefit, and the only benefit is to the individual. If you do it to most individuals in the country (especially venerable groups), that's no longer just an individual, that's the definition of a "public health benefit". It's like saying "well, I found a cure for cancer and I'm giving it to everyone but it won't stop other people from getting cancer so it's basically only good for the individual and not public health". Like, yeah, IF it turns out that it doesn't stop the spread (which we don't know and not knowing is different from knowing it doesn't), that's not as good as we'd hope, and it won't stop COVID as fast as we'd want, but it will still be an extremely significant public health asset. The only argument I could see here is "maybe another vaccine would be able to stop the spread and so we should wait to see that". The issue is, I seriously doubt we'll see any credible results about whether any vaccine stops the spread any time soon, because it is a genuinely hard test to run in an appropriately controlled environment and we don't have the luxury of time. If it is safe and it saves people, people should do it.
First, you're a person on the internet not some authority on anything. Second, who cares what you view as valid or invalid skepticism? Who do you think you are? And you're not going to let what slide? What are you going to do? Post more? Grow up. Some of you have such internetbrain it's not even funny. Like your ass has read all the whitepapers and gone to medical school. Even people who are doctors don't stay current on all the research and journals. If you're going to do the DUDE SCIENCE shit then do it right.
lol
Yes, that is the vaccine skepticism I am referring to.
The fact that they didn't even test the vaccine to see if it stops the spread of covid is worrying. Elimination of symptoms is great and perhaps the most important part but they haven't even tested to see if it will stop the spread yet.
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This will be tested but unfortunately it is much harder to test it than just basic efficacy tests and it will take much more time. Like, in order to test that you have to have 1) someone vaccinated 2) that same person contracting COVID 3) confirming that that person has contracted COVID, 4) that person being in an environment where they can give COVID to other people, 5) determining if they ended up giving COVID to these people and 6) ascertaining that it was indeed them who gave the other people COVID. So that is a very non-trivial test. It is important though and I have even heard of some proposed tests to gather some volunteers and infect them on purpose after vaccinating them to see if they can transmit it to each other, how they cope etc. Which, like, sounds pretty scary and it will probably be some time before anything like that can happen, if it ever does. So it's not a trivial test and we shouldn't expect results like that to be confirmed any time soon.
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