Young people shouldn't be getting the vaccine period. There is no reason to give every single person who will have children in the future an experimental vaccine for a virus they are at no serious risk from. The long tail risk on that is absolutely insane.
Not exactly sure what procreation has to do with anything.
Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax. Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.
Total COVID deaths for people aged 0-17 in the USA are 246 so far.
That's not that many. Despite my wife and I getting vaccinated, I'm not completely sure what the correct answer is for our kids.
To put those numbers into perspective, more kids die from the flu in any given year (despite vaccination!). And far more kids die from car related accidents, and cars are a daily fact of life here.
I'm also interested in the other longer term effects of COVID on kids, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there about it.
You talk as if it's a clear cut answer. Given the numbers involved I don't see how it can be.
(Not the one you responded to) I know what an mRNA vaccine is and the only clearcut answer is that "yes, obviously the long-tail risks of mRNA vaccines could outpace the long-tail risk of COVID-19". The statement is also true when you say "...COVID-19 could outpace...mRNA vaccines" as well, if that's not clear.
BTW the "long tail" of COVID-19 in children is totally unproven and the whole "long haulers" phenomenom is likely (a) a small part normal post-viral fatigue which we see with basically any virus, and (b) mostly psychosomatic/psychogenic illness.
That uncertainty is exactly the point. It's possible that the cure could be worse than the disease, but we have every reason to believe that it won't be in the long-term, and that in fact the long-term prospects from COVID-19 are probably much worse than any of the vaccines. And in the short-term the question is decided quite clearly.
So when faced with the choice of vaccine or virus, it should be a foregone conclusion.
> Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.
It absolutely could, and that should be self-evident.
> Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax.
This is just not true. The risk of death in children from COVID-19 is so low you literally should not ever worry about it. If you want to compare numbers in an academic sense go ahead, but the fact that actual adults are wasting valuable cognitive and emotional energy worrying about their kids is a great tragedy.
The recorded COVID-19 deaths in children are, by the way, using the absurd definition of a COVID-19 case/death that most of the western world is using; a definition where having PCR-confirmed SARS-2 infection means that ANY death is classified as a COVID death. This is not how this is supposed to work; there is supposed to be a distinction between the virus and the disease, but we define the disease as merely having the virus! It's completely absurd. Indeed I'm writing an article about this concept (pathological vs physiological) right now
Yes we do? The mRNA vaccines cause your body to produce the coronavirus spike protein. That is the beauty of an mRNA vaccine – the cure literally cannot be worse than the disease, because the cure is just a subset of the disease. Anything these mRNA vaccines do to your gametes would also be done (and worse) by COVID-19 itself, so... definitely get vaxxed with an mRNA vaccine if you're worried about long-tail risk. Also this is the J&J vaccine which is viral vector, not mRNA (Moderna/Pfizer).
We don't know that it has no other effect. We don't know all of the circumstances where reverse transcription can happen in the human body. This kind of epistemic arrogance is dangerous and is how we ended up with thalidomide causing mass birth defects and other such disasters.
This is not, in any way, similar to thalidomide. Thalidomide was an issue because it is enantiomeric and different effects were caused by each enantiomer, only one of which was noticed. That is not an issue here, as we are talking about proteins. The primary difference though is that there was no treatment imperative with thalidomide, but there is with this.
Again, we are talking about introducing something that is guaranteed to be in your body anyway if you contract COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 is viral to the point where, without perpetual lockdowns/mask-wearing/vaccinations, you will get it. So it is still definitely better to get vaccinated, at least with an mRNA vaccine – please stop spreading FUD. Your concerns could be more warranted for vaccines like J&J which use modified viral vectors, but again, exceedingly unlikely that this could be any worse than the virus itself.
You're talking what we learned after the fact about thalidomide. And I'm obviously not saying thalidomide and the mRNA vaccines are similar in their actions in any way. I'm just saying we don't know what injecting a bunch of synthetic spike protein mRNA (a huge percent of which has errors) into your body might do. The same way we didn't know what thalidomide might do, we don't know what this might do. We are not at the level of knowledge about the human body where we can rule out unexpected effects. That is why we have a very stringent drug and vaccine testing regime.
I think the point parent is making is slightly different. Let me try to re-phrase it negatively: What we don't know about mRNA vaccines we don't know about SARS-CoV-2 either. Our state of knowledge of the effects of SARS-Cov-2 will soon be eclipsed by our knowledge of the effects of mRNA vaccines. SARS-Cov-2 is only 6 months older than the mRNA vaccines. There will always be unknown unknowns for both mRNA vaccines and SARS-Cov-2.
We’ve given the mRNA vaccines to enough people to be highly confident that your fears are ungrounded. The mRNA doesn’t linger more than a few hours. People received the vaccine a year ago.
The US has administered 250 million shots, of which 7 million were J&J. These numbers, and the fact that the mRNA started trials earlier makes me proportionately less worried about surprise side effects for the mRNA shots.
Probably none, the tricky part is how it affects an embryo because that's an known unknown of a lot of this molecular biology/medicine things. It's already counter-indicated for pregnant women though.
I'm not qualified to comment on whether or not that is a valid concern, but the vaccine we're discussing here (J&J) uses a modified viral vector, as do the AstraZeneca and Gamaleya vaccines.
Correct. I meant the mRNA vaccines. The AZ & J&J vaccines don't have that same concern, but I'd still worry about an untested vaccine. There is really no good reason for the young and healthy to get the vaccine yet or any time soon.
At the moment we're shitting on the younger generation even harder than usual, by denying them the opportunity to go out, meet people and generally enjoy their youth. Doing that for a year was maybe justified, but it is just totally unfair to carry on for an extended period.
To open up again we need to bring the demand on healthcare services down and we need to do it sustainably, i.e. in a way which prevents another exponential spike. If we can achieve that aim without mass vaccination of healthy young people then great, of course, let's do that. But: if the only way to squash this thing and return everyone to a somewhat normal life turns out to be to keep vaccinating until we get right down to the twenty year olds, shouldn't we do so -- for their sake as much as everyone else's?
In my neck of the woods, kids are in school and going to wrestling tournaments and before that hockey tournaments that got to be superspreader events. We're certainly not denying kids sports where I am, or the opportunity to infect their older family members (yay!).
False dichotomy. If the 20 year olds all get covid, almost nothing bad will happen. So just let them catch it. If the at-risk people are all vaccinated, then it's not a big deal.
Almost nothing bad will happen—with the current variants. Uncontrolled spread in a sub population will almost certainly lead to new variants emerging. Given the reduced effectiveness of current vaccines against certain variants, this is reckless.
Very true! But that is no different than flu and cold mutations year to year. The only reason we are worried about covid is the high death rate for some populations. Otherwise, we would not have done any lock downs or mask mandates.
Continuous mutation of common viruses is the background risk that human beings have evolved over three billion years to withstand as a species. That is different than a completely novel man-made intervention.
This sounds like special pleading to me. We have two new possible things that could be introduced to your body - a vaccine or the virus.
In neither case is it possible to know what hidden long-term effects they could have on you. But the virus is known to kill and maim people in the short-term at a much higher rate than the vaccine, which is known to protect you from the virus.
I don't think it's a special pleading. Covid is a nasty coronavirus but it is ultimately an incremental change in a very widespread kind of virus that humans have coexisted with forever. Human beings have evolved to survive this kind of thing as a species. This is the kind of risk that a species has to be equipped to survive to have made it this far. Which is not to say that a virus can't come around and wipe us all out, but it would be a truly extraordinary event.
For all we know, mRNA vaccines can alter your gametes. We don't know because this is the first time we ever use them. They aren't like viruses or weakened viruses. They are just a massive injection of genetic material (much of it deformed) that encodes a single foreign protein. No human being has ever had such a thing done to them until very recently. mRNA vaccines are not part of any natural process that modern humans or our ancestors have had to withstand to get to the present day.
Viruses are like super mRNA vaccines. They commandeer your cells not to just create a single protein, but to create a bunch of proteins in order to form new viruses. And unlike mRNA, they reproduce and can stay in your body for months or years. I don't see the huge new risk.
I don't know why you have this special concern about the gametes. In any case, if there's a significant bump in miscarriages / infertility from the vaccine, we'll probably know very soon, now that lots of younger people are being vaccinated.
The fact that the vaccines create just a single spike protein and the real virus creates much more is actually one of the issues.
First: does the rate at which the cells are made to artificially produce spike protein follow a different curve than the rate at which SARS-2 would? i.e. could mRNA vaccination cause a much more aggressive "inflammatory cliff", thus the huge percentage of "mild" adverse reactions (mild meaning, you feel like death for a day but end up fine with no detectable long-term issues)? It's possible.
And switching to efficacy, while personally I think resistance to the spike protein alone will be sufficient, because SARS-2 does not have the same ability to mutate/evolve the way Influenza does (for example, I can't imagine SARS-2 evolving away from the spike protein), it's very possible that the diverse epitopes produced by real SARS-2 infection give a much more robust and enduring immunity.
Your point about efficacy is not currently born out by the data, AFAIK. Seems like re-infection after COVID is much higher than infection after vaccine.
I have special concern about gametes because it’s one thing to risk the health of currently living people, but it’s another to risk the gene pool going forward into eternity.
> Difference is that I know person that got COVID in November and now has issues with memory.
> I don't know a single person that has that after flue and cold - and those are with us much longer.
Look into ME/CFS, whose existence is still contested (or rather I should say, whether it's a physical or psychogenic illness is disputed). I know you're just speaking anecdotally but just wanted to mention that post-viral issues (fatigue, memory, etc) absolutely does happen.
> As for viruses mutations etc. do we for sure know that this one is not man made?
At most SARS-2 is the result of extensive gain of function research on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13. I don't know any credible individual that thinks it's fully artificial / manmade (and to be clear, my definition of "credible" is not the "anyone who agrees with the WHO/CDC and nobody else" definition that the establishment relies on).
Personally I think it's more likely that SARS-2 was GoF'd into existence rather than was a purely natural zoonotic leap, whereas I think the probability that it was fully artificial is almost zero.
If we pick the 25-29 year olds and an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.01% [1] it's still 13.5M x 0.01% = 1,350 deaths. It's not a lot by any means, but it's not 'almost nothing' either.
This is the worst case scenario of cause, sibling comment has already mentioned long Covid, where we don't know prevalence precisely.
I'm aware I've picked the 'worse half' of the 20 year olds, 20-24 will fare better obviously.
No, and no one had any reason to think that thalidomide would cause mass birth defects. This is why we have such long testing periods for vaccines and drugs in general. We also go through extra testing before approving things for pregnant women. We don't know what we don't know. Modern medicine is impressive, but we must maintain epistemic humility.
