As someone who was trying to conceive while the vaccine rolled out, this isn’t surprising. People were regularly reporting basal temperature spikes, delayed ovulation, and delayed periods. This is a community that is extremely data-oriented, since with the right measurements you’re able to predict your fertile (or non-fertile) window.
I was disappointed to see how little research there was into menstruation at the time. We were told that the vaccine was perfectly safe, and even questioning the vaccine made you ‘anti-vax.’ Now over a full year later the scientific community is confirming what random message boards have been saying all along. It may be safe, but nobody really cared to look at the impact on menstruation or pregnancy beyond confirming that the rate of miscarriage is unchanged.
I think (at least) three big problems intersect here:
1. the sci/med establishment seems to have some ongoing ~bias issues that I don't fully understand when it comes to listening to and taking lay people seriously (especially women)
2. it's hard to do complex synthesis of relative risks and rewards across different studies measuring different things for different reasons
3. we've had a lot of uninformed and malicious actors splashing about in the information ecosystem
It's a two-way street. Researchers and public health officials both need to take women seriously and they need to have faith that they can research or discuss details like this frankly through their normal semi-public publication channels without people who don't grok or don't care about the nuance of their research using it as an info-cudgel to induce FUD that ruins lives.
To toss in the requisite anecdata, my sister got pregnant this past fall. She was due for a booster but FUD about it hurting the baby swayed her mind. She got omicron in late December, post-covid complications nearly took her and the baby in late February, and she had to live in the hospital until she delivered in June.
I have a lot of unvaccinated friends, some of whom have now had COVID. Their experience is not any different to those who were vaccinated. Bear in mind, Omicron emerged in 25% vaccinated South Africa and the reports from there were that it was so mild people didn't even realize they had COVID.
The problem with your view about "uninformed and malicious actors" is that this is how public health describes anyone who points out their mistakes. It's a cliché they use to shut down debate and opposition. I've read a lot of material about vaccines now from non-public health sources and never seen any that could be described as malicious or uninformed. Indeed, they are usually way more informed than those who simply "follow the science". And the idea they're malicious is pure Hollywood fiction. None of them ever are. They just want to know what's true about the disease and vaccines. You could though, argue that about the public health officials who constantly lie to the public about scientific topics in order to generate compliance.
This is just an anecdotal experience, but I was living amongst an international coworking community of a few dozen people in South Africa when omicron first broke out, and the vaccination status of people did not seem to have any observable effect on the prevalence or severity of the contracted disease.
That is to say that your sister may have experienced the same effects even if she had taken the booster.
I remember outright lies coming out of the WHO and governments regarding the usefulness of masks (out of a fear of running out of stock for health professionals), and regular exaggerations of the benefit of vaccines coming from politicians (at least in France), where they were drawing a stark black and white picture of a much more nuanced reality.
However, I don't remember seeing false epidemiological data coming out.
Many examples here but “97% of hospital admissions are unvaccinated” was a complete fabrication. Basically they used statistics from when 97% of the population was unvaccinated and kept using them for months longer than they should have. When that wasn’t feasible anymore, they started counting unknown vaccination status as unvaccinated to keep the 97% lie going.
Ironically select ICUs report 90% of their cases are from fully vaccinated now.
We didn't have that kind of discourse here in France AFAIK.
Given that the vaccine is not 100% efficient, past a vaccination rate threshold, it is inevitable to see a majority of hospitalized people being vaccinated.
When the vaccine was first rolled out, official communication was indeed built around P(vaccinated|ICU) but they soon switched to P(ICU|vaccinated) when P(vaccinated) grew high enough to make the first figure misleading.
> To toss in the requisite anecdata, my sister got pregnant this past fall. She was due for a booster but FUD about it hurting the baby swayed her mind. She got omicron in late December, post-covid complications nearly took her and the baby in late February, and she had to live in the hospital until she delivered in June.
The tricky thing with this though is that, what if there is an unknown side effect due to lack of research that could have hurt the baby (how many years of research have boosters had?), and she didn't experience that side effect but unwittingly chose a different evil?
To put the exclamation point on it, she went into respiratory distress, was within minutes of death and was saved by a week on ECMO.
Until the vaccine kills more pregnant women than covid, it's not tricky. (Spoken, as before, as a selfish older brother who almost lost one of the few people who'll ever think I hung the stars.)
You can't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong or bad another comment is or you feel it is.
You also don't need to post flamewar comments or name-calling attacks of this sort—it actually weakens the case you'd prefer to strengthen. A reply like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32132621 does the job vastly better.
Many people had concerns about the vaccine rollout. Not because we were worried about some 5G nanoparticle Bill Gates conspiracy nonsense but because of the potential unknown side effects. Doing a trial on a few hundred thousand and then rolling out to billions is like testing your changes locally and then pushing them straight to production.
"But human bodies are not anything like software dev" I hear you say. You're right. Biology is way more complicated and we know less about the mechanics of our own bodies than the computers we designed.
If we go forward assuming everything we do is infallible and silencing anybody with concerns, someday we will have a real disaster.
Without trying to inflame the rhetoric in this discussion (I feel like HN is one of the few places that this is possible) – will this be your stance on new vaccines and medicines going forward?
"Potential unknown side effects" is a critique that can be levied against almost any medical approval process, but the FDA has had an excellent track record with vaccine safety over the last ~70 years.
Just anecdotally I can only speak for myself but I have stayed clear of vaccines for 29 years after the military used experimental vaccines on me and I never doubted or regretted my decision. I instead focus on keeping my innate and adaptive immune systems incredibly strong. This requires discipline and dedication to a strict diet and moderate exercise and is why I suspect that many people are opposed to this way of life. There are a million rabbit hole arguments for and against what I am doing but I am happy with the path I am on.
I had adverse reactions to their vaccines. When I inquired as the ingredients I was advised it was classified. I ran into the "It's classified" wall a few times.
Again, not to further inflame, but no corners were cut for the trials. The only thing that happened was the Federal government covered the costs to do all parts in parallel (for Moderna, kinda also for Pfizer with the APA, but more complex). Typically longer is between the safety trial and the efficacy trial, but almost all side effects ever observed for previous vaccine trials show up within 6 months of the phase 1 trial.
Reproductive toxicity was not studied. At vaccine rollouts, reproductive toxicity was only studied on rats, then about a year later there was finally a single very narrow study of a few dozen women, after billions of doses were administered.
More generally, the control group was lost during the trials (they vaccinated the control group).
I don’t have time at the moment to dig up my sources again (I posted all the relevant studies in my previous comments over the past year), but I assume you won’t mind too much since you also didn’t provide evidence for your claim that corners weren’t cut.
"Cut corner" means skipping a step that normally happens. I couldn't find out if the CDC usually does reproductive toxicity studies for vaccines, and if "only studied on rats" is usually sufficient.
> about a year later there was finally a single very narrow study of a few dozen women
> These findings indicate that male SARS-CoV-2 infection may be associated with a short-term decline in fertility and that COVID-19 vaccination does not impair fertility in either partner.
Probably not a "cut corner," as that's unfortunately normal[0][1] (people have been trying to change it for decades now).
Happily Pfizer and Biontech have had extensive clinical trials ongoing for pregnant women since February 2021[2][3], and there was a preliminary analysis done across 35,691 recipients that had good findings[4]. It's something that regulators have paid a lot of attention to, with tens of thousands enrolled in the V-safe COVID-19 Vaccine Pregnancy Registry.[5]
Here's a short list of some aspects of the vaccine trials that most people would find surprising and out of step with how safety is described:
1. More people in the vaccinated arm died than in the unvaccinated arm.
Effectiveness against death = negative. This was ignored because, they said, the difference was too small to be statistically significant. That's not a logical way to use the concept of statistical significance. What these results meant is that the vaccines might kill more people than they save, or it might be a statistical fluke. A normal person would expect such a result to drive demand for more data to resolve the question definitively, but that didn't happen and now heavily vaccinated countries have non-COVID excess death that started at the time of the rollout. The goal of the vaccines was to save lives but now people are dying of non-COVID causes at a greater rate than expected.
2. At least one of the deaths in the Pfizer trial was advertised as non-vaccine related even though it was.
Anonymized study subject C4591001 1162 11621327 was found dead in his apartment several days after taking the first dose, likely time of death was only one or two days after the first dose given that police were called due to a welfare check and his body was found cold. The coroner didn't know he was in a vaccine trial and ruled the death cardiac/arteriosclerosis related, no autopsy was done and this report was then presented as evidence that the death wasn't vaccine related despite the obvious temporal association.
3. No studies of the effects on pregnancy at all. This is normal and to protect babies.
Now we have the birthrate figures for the first quarter 9 months after the vaxx rollout reached mothers of childbearing age and they are down 15%-25% which is a huge difference, quite unprecedented. In Taiwan births are down 27%! So it looks a lot like the vaccines have trashed our already low fertility rates, which is a catastrophic outcome especially as they should never have been administered to women of that age to begin with (look at excess mortality by age for before the vaxx rollout, there's none under 45 for all of Europe and in some places like Sweden, none under 75).
3. The placebo arm received another vaccine, not saline as you would expect.
This is because the bad reactions would unblind people otherwise, so you have to give people something that will give them equally bad reactions. There are two problems with this: (a) the counter-factual in reality is not some random other vaccine but rather no vaccine at all, so they weren't testing against what would actually happen in the real world, and (b) although the trials are advertised as the pinnacle of scientific rationality there is absolutely nothing rational about the placebo effect. Think about it.
4. Cases of severe cardiac damage were fraudulently recorded.
Study subject C4591001 12312982, now known to be a 35 year old Argentinian lawyer named Augusto Roux, started to immediately feel unwell and developed a high fever on his way home after taking his second dose. A couple of days later he fainted and went to hospital where a CAT scan revealed heart inflammation; the doctor concluded vaccine damage. Augusto was told by nurses that there had been a huge influx of patients coming to the hospital from the trial. One nurse estimated maybe 300 people which would have been 10% of the patients from that part of the trial alone, which is why they were able to quickly identify the likely cause.
When he contacted the trial operators to inform them of his hospital visit they wrote down that it was not vaccine related, in contradiction to the diagnosis by the hospital, and that he'd been admitted for "bilateral pneumonia". Later on they updated the diagnosis to be COVID-19, which wasn't even then counted against vaccine effectiveness because he had a negative test.
Even worse, Roux appealed through the regulator to get the trial operators to unblind him (which they falsely claimed they could not do). Immediately before the appeal was due to be heard, the lead trial doctor (a pediatrician!) put in his trial record around the time of the regulatory appeal that Augusto was mentally ill, due to supposed "anxiety". No actual medical work was done to establish this fake diagnosis. It simply appeared.
The vaccines were heavily politicized and the politicizing of them was not coming from a place of legitimate concerns, clearly shown by the same groups embracing snake oil cures with the only info backing them making the vaccine studies look like the most thorough studies ever done in the history of humanity. There were No worries about side effects for the sketchy snake oil.
What if you know that prod has a huge vulnerability actively being exploited. Will you wait for the QA to finish manual testing of the UI, or push the solution ASAP after the CICD pipeline turns green?
Still not a good analogy, but perhaps closer to the case.
>If we go forward assuming everything we do is infallible and silencing anybody with concerns, someday we will have a real disaster.
And if we go down this road hopefully it's sooner rather than later. The people responsible should have to live (or not) through the suck rather than having some yet unknown future generation be saddled with cleaning up the mess.
From a throwaway because of the potential backlash...This paper is pure bull. They did a survey of 30k people and asked them about their experience and then said that the vaccine didn't cause anything and that we should trust our institutions. They didn't even have a control (unvaccinated) group! Just 30k vaccinated folks who responded to a survey about whether they perceived more/less bleeding, and such.
I'm actually working (as a computational mathematician) with an OBGYN and a few other doctors on a paper on this topic right now. We're using real data and a control and doing real Bayesian stats and all of that. But the tragic thing is, we don't need to get fancy. There's so much signal that the vaccine is bad for women's reproductive health that it really is obvious. I hope we can find an uncaptured journal to get it published in.
This paper is pure propaganda that's toeing the line about vaccine safety. It's idea laundering so they can later point to an article in "Science" showing that it's safe.
I'm so sad that Science (the journal) as fallen so far and is so captured.
How bad is it for health? This paper also notes that the virus itself is of great concern foremost, so any conclusion must be in comparison to the alternative (aka the control group): “Studies and anecdotal reports are already demonstrating that menstrual function may be disrupted long term [by the virus], particularly in those with long COVID (32–35)”
It seems so many commenters here miss that sentence, and live in a mental world where viruses are mostly benign but healthcare is mostly deadly.
Therefore, a statistical control group for such a trial as you describe doing is not an unvaccinated cohort for the same time period, but rather for infinite time. Thus your results will require substantial adjustment for the eventual rates of encountering COVID (and the estimated rates of equivalent adverse effects), since your trial will presumably be of finite duration.
It is possible to take a finite duration and look at the unvaccinated+covid, unvaccinated+no-covid, vaccinated+covid, vaccinated+no-covid and see differences. And the signals a so large between unvaccinated and vaccinated you don't need much in the way of fancy stats.
Also consider that it wasn't until the late 90's that the flu vaccine was approved for pregnant women and they were still worried about it. So we have the original adverse event studies post flu vaccine and compare them to post covid vaccine.
You are right, there are lots of confounds and interactions, we are careful to handle that properly. We're a bunch of nerds who don't have a dog in the political fight, we just want to show the data.
Good, that is what I was hoping to hear. Looking forward to seeing it published. Though unvaccinated+no-covid does not exist in steady state, so any signal that includes them cannot be extrapolated into the future. But it is seeming like vaccinated+no-covid won’t exist either in the long term steady-state. So we might eventually be having to deal statistically with considering frequency of infection instead of binary yes/no. Lots of math to consider. Best wishes to you in this.
> It seems so many commenters here miss that sentence, and live in a mental world where viruses are mostly benign but healthcare is mostly deadly.
Viruses are indeed mostly benign. Medical malpractice is a leading cause of death. In any case, it is not an either or. This vaccine does not prevent infection, the risk reduction for an otherwise healthy person, especially with the new variants and boosters, has never been established in a scientifically rigorous fashion. Yet, it is being recommended even to healthy children. You can hope and speculate that it has a benefit, but “the science” does not say so.
Show me the clinical trial that shows a benefit for administration of a Booster, or even just two doses, providing a net benefit for a healthy young person, after accounting for hazards like Myocarditis, with an Omikron infection.
It doesn't exist, nor does anyone "in charge" want it to exist, or so it appears. The FDA waved through a trial for children with a sample size of about 1000, almost guaranteeing that a rare side effect like Myocarditis would not show up. That's a clear signal of regulatory capture, if you ask me.
The data that does show a benefit generally does not stratify across factors like age and risk factors, or if it does, extremely coarsely. That's, of course, misleading - perhaps intentionally so. In general, the paucity of meaningful data is just staggering.
Over 50s effect of vaccination on hospitalization. If it is protecting older people against hospitalization then we can expect it to protect younger people from severe effects too. Unless you think the over 50s are some sort of frog vs the younger tadpole.
Plenty more everywhere.
So why would some of us be so vehemently anti-vax?
1) Belief in 'natural'. This has been a common marketing ploy since 'green' became a thing if not before. Of course the world we actually live in is entirely artificial - just as well as our 'natural' lives were nasty, brutish, and short.
2) Attempting to assert 'independence' or 'agency'. Again another marketing ploy, really we have very little agency or independence - however it is useful to make us believe we do and we should exercise it with our credit cards.
3) Attempting to be contrarian or a 'free thinker' in order to impress (ourselves? others?). Much much more humility is required before starting down that path.
4) Ideological/political propaganda/pressure from our peers. Belief systems have a tendency to become pathological when contained within a tightly delimited group. Probably this is a very great danger to our social discourse at present - though whether worse than before is unclear.
> Over 50s effect of vaccination on hospitalization.
This sort of population-level data is bogus. The data is usually fudged in some way, for example by making it difficult to get counted as "vaccinated" after infection.
The source you quoted (at the end of '21) claimed a factor of 18x to 52x difference in hospitalization rate, but the current data has that down to a factor of 2.7x to 3.8x:
Did the vaccine really lose that much in potency? Do the boosters work at all? That data can't tell us and this is why we need trials.
> Over 50s effect of vaccination on hospitalization. If it is protecting older people against hospitalization then we can expect it to protect younger people from severe effects too.
We may expect that, but we can't know. We do know that the infection risk is massively lower in the younger age groups. We also know the risk for Myocarditis after vaccination is massively higher in the younger age groups, particularly in males. We don't know why that is, however. Remember, we're not just looking for a risk reduction for one particular disease that many people already had anyway, we're looking for a net benefit of further administrations.
> So why would some of us be so vehemently anti-vax?
All irrelevant to the lack of scientific data. For you to cough up some "business insider" article tells me you haven't exactly followed the relevant publications (or lack thereof) either.
No actual professional would do something like what you’re doing here. Very hard to believe this is anything but pure bullshit.
Edit: it’s pretty sad that there are people who have such an ingrained agenda that they have convinced themselves that, yes, this IS how a professional involved in a scientific public health study behaves.
It wasn’t clear, but the edit wasn’t in reference to the parent commenter. But now that you mention it, yes, for them I’m leaning toward “agenda” rather than the alternative of “non-existent professional ethical standards”.
Well, I'm not a doctor, just someone doing stats for doctors...but I think we're going to start seeing it as we're reaching the 9-month mark from the big push for child-bearing-age vaccination. It's starting to show up in Sweden and (I think) Taiwan, but it's not something I'm really studying.
Didn’t the 9 month mark (since delta’s effect on vax rates) pass about 3 months ago in the US (referring to parent)? Or what time/mark event are you looking for?
Well, now we're just getting May data and maybe June data. So that would be conceptions starting in August 2021. Here's a really lame screen capture of a visualization I just made with the CDC data. The August time frame is where we're passing 50% of the 25-39 year-olds getting vaccinated. So that would start to show up in the May 2022 birth data.
This could just as easily be related to increased infections among young people at this time. You have no reason to pin this specifically on vaccination.
The timing is a very obvious reason to pin it on the vaccine because that's what was changing at that time. Omicron emerged later (end of 2021) and is much milder.
But yes, one way to answer that question definitively would be to do a cohort study on conception rates. Split the data by vaccine status. This can't be done because public health agencies systematically refuse to do this sort of study, nor do they expose the necessary raw data. They don't want anyone being able to answer these sorts of questions. Most data that is available has to be forced out via FOIA requests and the courts.
Are we looking at the same graph? Vaccinations were well past the inflection point in August in the data you are responding to, so the vaccine affect would have already happened if we make the bad simplifying assumption that the population is homogeneous. But Delta was drastically increasing infections in August, leading to a proportional much smaller increase in vaccination then.
Well, for me there's no real need to try and divine it from some rough and ready study. I already know that the vaccines drive this because so many of my girlfriend's social groups reported disrupted cycles immediately after taking the shots, and for some the doctors said specifically it seemed to be vaccine caused. Seemed for them actually mostly that the periods vanished, rather than unexpected bleeding.
How would you have a control for a study like this when vaccinations were all but mandatory for large swathe of the population? You’re going to give a placebo vaccine and placebo vaccine card?
The problem now is that so many people, in so many fields, relayed that "everything's safe, if you disagree or dare casting doubts you're an a ti-science sociopath", that it's going to be super super hard for them to admit they were wrong.
Mishandle? They got the vaccine rolled out by August and September to start production.
One of the few things Trump did correctly was the early pandemic handling while the cries of "stop travel from China" was called racist and unnecessary.
There was nothing else that could have been done except fire the head of the CDC after their flip flop politics instead of science.
> One of the few things Trump did correctly was the early pandemic handling while the cries of "stop travel from China" was called racist and unnecessary.
Except it was because by that time the horse was long out of the barn and the China ban failed spectacularly. cases were already here and also coming in from Europe. If it didn’t fail why did we get a Covid pandemic?
At that point what was needed was massive testing rather than the denialism the trump admin presented. And they failed massively at testing and public education.
The whole point of what was being messaged at the time, and why we went in to hard lockdowns, was to slow the spread. It makes sense to restrict travel from the place that probably had the most infections at the time if that’s your goal.
It was literally everything else he did, and more importantly things he DIDN'T do that were terrible.
Remember that "smart people" warned Trump when he came in that this was something they expected for a while now, and that we had experienced very lucky outcomes in the close scares we had in the early 2000s. Obama warned Trump coming in to be ready for this. What was Trump's response to all these warnings from experts? He sold off the United State's strategic reserves of PPE to hucksters he knew that set up shell companies and fired all the "pandemic quick response" teams that had been set up by previous administrations
This study began in April 2021 and the paper was published in July 2022.
Presuming that the amount of time spent was necessary to thoroughly gather, review and document the findings, what would you have wanted done differently?
Not taken the vax if your health and age profile didn't merit it, given the unknown unknowns and lack of long term testing, which many people highlighted endlessly for the past year or so.
Public concessions exactly to your point that long term testing takes time, and assertions to the contrary that tere are no risks of x, y, z were blatant sophistry intended to silence legitimate criticism. These vaccines were mandated at threat of loss of careers for crying out loud...people are still getting fired for not taking them long after covid is any sort threat whatsoever or where there can be plausible deniability about claims the vaccines actually prevent contracting covid etc.
(lot of "trust the experts", "you sound like one of the ignorant rubes" type of replies at those links, devoid of any sort of critical thinking, blindly trusting authorities without any acknowledgement to potential downsides outweighing limited upside of vax for many cohorts)
I work in healthcare and life sciences, I am vaxed, and I can say I fully believe you are correct.
I have to attest and show my vax cards to keep my job or get a new one and - of all things - we had to show vax cards to go to a behind the scene animal encounter at a zoo. Does the vaccinne stop us from catching it or from giving it to others? There is no evidence, yet, that it does.
Am I having to weasel word my post here in the concern that my account will be banned from hacker news even though this is literally what I do for a living? Yes. Yes I am.
We ban accounts for breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), not for being wrong or having a minority or contrarian view. If you present your contrarian view in a substantive, respectful, curious way and avoid flamewar tropes, you should be fine.
That's not easy, though. The temptation to lash out at users representing the majority view is really high (edit: especially when one notices them posting aggressively or with lazy arguments, which is always easy to do when speaking for a majority view). It looks to me like you're succumbing to that a bit—though not so much that we would moderate or ban you.
It's a hard problem. When people feel surrounded and picked on (and may be surrounded and picked on), they have a tendency to lose it (I'm not talking about you here) and go into fulmination, wake-up-sheeple rants, and so on. Then we moderate or ban them, because protecting the container is more important than rightness or wrongness on $topic. Inevitably they conclude that we banned them because of their views, which is usually not so. (I say 'usually' because nothing is 100% true about moderation and because there exist genuinely extreme cases, which have to be handled differently.)
Past explanations about this if anyone wants to read more:
With all due respect, not knowing your exact position, working in healthcare may not be more relevant to the topic the same way an average software dev would have a hard time fixing a deep-lying race condition in the database software.
Healthcare is a huge field, an orthopedic surgeon’s opinion for example should hardly matter over that of a virologist.
These side effects are not rare at all. These side effects should have been caught in the original vaccine trials.
The fact that it comes out now tells you something went very wrong in the trials. In a functioning science, a careful postmortem of the vaccine trials would be in order.
Perhaps you already know, but initial vaccine trials are not performed against menstruation age (aka likely to become pregnant) women. It is considered medically unethical to do so. That is an obvious double edged sword:
1. It prevents birth defects from occurring with trial participants, because this product has not yet been fully studied and approved.
2. It reduces the initial knowledge of any female-specific issues with the product, and particularly limits knowledge around pregnancy issues.
This also affected postmenopausal women who were included in the trials. To quote the paper: "66% of postmenopausal people reported breakthrough bleeding."
Then of course, menstruation age and pregnant women should not be told the vaccine is safe for them, as it was never tested on them. Similar to other pharmaceuticals, it should only be recommend after very careful consideration.
For example, the Tick-Borne Encephalitis Vaccine has a track record of decades, but still, the recommendation in pregnancy is [1] "The vaccine appears to be safe during pregnancy, but because of insufficient data the vaccine is only recommended during pregnancy and breastfeeding when it is considered urgent to achieve protection against TBE infection and after careful consideration of risks versus benefits."
Perhaps we wouldn't have had the news, pretending that there was no effect, and if there was, correlation is not causation, and then saying as little as 5 months ago that there may be an effect but that any effects on menstruation only lasted one day at the most [1]. Just be honest - dishonesty like this breeds anti-vaxxers.
[1] https://youtu.be/TWk2Z6mzZUU?t=60 (Good Morning America and ABC News talking about menstruation side effects 5 months ago and basically saying the opposite of this study)
Yeah my SO had a very regular cycle before getting the vaccine (Pfizer). After the first shot it got totally out of whack. The doctors say they don't know why that is yet immediately follow up by saying "but the vaccine is completely safe".
I'm no anti-vaxxer, but that trips my BS alert bigtime. All I hear is "duck and cover".
I’ve been too afraid to post this but you’ve inspired me.
I (a male) have always been super horny ever since I hit puberty. I woke up nearly every morning with an erection as long as I can remember. I’ve never had problems with erections with my wife.
I got the first Pfizer vaccine last year when it became available. The next time I was intimate with my wife, I lost my erection during sex - the first time it has ever happened in my life. “Normal” side effect they said.
Things got a little better so I was encouraged. I got the second vaccine as scheduled. The next two times we had sex I completely lost my erection during sex.
I’ve been searching to see if other men have had the same problem but either I am the only one, or everyone just sweeps it under the rug.
It’s been almost a year and I rarely have random erections. I thankfully don’t lose erections during sex, but I am no longer horny. I used to be the one to initiate sex through our marriage but now my wife usually does. My sex life has taken a huge hit since getting the vaccines. Of course I can’t blame the vaccines, but you will not be able to convince me that this is a coincidence.
The reason I am writing this is in case there are other men like me who think they are the only ones, because anyone who even thinks the vaccine could cause problems gets labeled an anti-vaxxer nut job. I was pro vaccine (I got my series right away) and still think the vaccine is important, but I think it’s a shame that no one is “allowed” to talk about side effects.
Consider things that can also de-regulate a woman's cycle:
Stress, eating different food, eating foods at different times, gaining a couple pounds, losing a couple pounds, getting sick, not sleeping enough, sleeping too much, etc etc etc.
The menstrual cycle is often a very sensitive system, and one I would argue most people are very unfamiliar with.
My SO has tracked her cycle in detail for years. Nothing else has changed significantly compared to that period. Her cycle is still not back to normal, 9 months later.
I get that it's a sensitive system and it can be affected by a lot of benign factors. But if you don't know why your car is misfiring, how can you say with 100% certainty that there's not an issue with the engine?
Quick Googling shows that the cold and flu can impact ovulation. So it is not a surprise that Covid or its vaccines can as well, since it often presents as more severe.
It was still the correct choice of action for you to get the vaccine and potentially delay conception. It is safer for you and the baby if you are vaccinated.
This study is just providing confirmation to something that all medical professionals likely assumed is true, based on the common knowledge that the flu and cold and other illnesses can also affect fertility.
My wife and I are at the end of our child-capable years. A delay, even of a year or two, is likely to leave us without.
I know you didn't mean this the way it sounded. I know you are probably well educated and think your choices are obvious. I will only state that I have very strong feelings towards someone who tries to force a decision like this on someone else.
I did - nothing personal obviously, but the problem is that ultimately no matter which side you pick you will have tradeoffs that some people will agree with and some who'd suffer disastrously as a result - just like the flip-side (assuming the initial theory is correct) could potentially involve a lot more deaths and cause just as much grief to families/etc.
Of course in retrospect the point is moot because in practice the majority of countries mismanaged their Covid response and we ended up with the worst of both worlds - the negative effects of lockdowns/mandates/etc without them being followed/enforced enough to actually have any significant effect at eradicating the disease.
Again, no offense intended (and you have the right to be angry), just trying to explain the other side of the debate; there's a tradeoff to be made and either side will have downsides (though IMO in retrospect neither was enforced well enough and as a result we ended up with the worst of both sides without any of the benefits). Ideally there would just never have been a virus and then we wouldn't have to think about these trade-offs at all, but now that it appeared, those decisions had to be made, rightly or wrongly.
With all due respect, at the time the vax were being pushed on everyone as 'safe' and 'trust the science' - we were not sure what impact it would have at all.
There were several posters on HN pointing out menstrual cycles anecdotes last year and they were largely down voted and possibly shadowbanned. You don't even need censors anymore when the majority decides what is acceptable thought.
I work in healthcare and life sciences research and I have to censor myself because my account will be banned if I don't. I literally do this for a living, but if I say something a moderator or admin doesnt like or that they feel 'awkward' about I would be gone.
Long in the future, when people can admit they are wrong, we will look back on this period with disgust. But, for now, carry on everyone - just a few more people banned and finally we can stop the spread.
Animals studies (made IIRC by Pfizer or BioNTech, and using GFAP mRNA, not the spike protein) had shown that while most lipid nanoparticles stay at the injection sites, (quoting from memory) ~10-20% end up in the blood stream, then enter myocardial, hepatic, adrenal and gonadic tissues. In other words, organs that consume a large amount of cholesterol.
My informed guess would be that the nanoparticles combine with HDL/LDL in the blood stream, and end up in the cells that consume these, but this is speculation.
This would end up disrupting the ovarian endocrine cells (cholesterol is the chemical precursor of sex hormones), which can regenerate once the RNA and its product has been eliminated. The future egg cells should not be affected (and AFAIK the ovarian reserve is not damaged by the COVID vaccines), and neither is sperm production.
> but nobody really cared to look at the impact on menstruation or pregnancy beyond confirming that the rate of miscarriage is unchanged.
It's hard to blame them for not spending a ton of time before approving the vaccine considering safe changes to menstruation when they were working to do something about the dead bodies which were piling up so quickly they had to be stacked into semi trailers and dumped into mass graves. People were dying in vast numbers and we needed something safe and effective at preventing those deaths and the vaccines were exactly that. Safe and effective.
Obviously, they were very much concerned with pregnancy and miscarriage. A vaccine that makes people infertile or causes them to miscarry would never have been approved, but it's pretty reasonable that every possible impact wouldn't be noticed and deeply studied before getting it out to people.
Especially those side effects that only impact women since women (especially pregnant women) tend to be underrepresented since they're much more hesitant to enter drug trials in the first place leading to limited data. You can't blame the women for that. If it's unknown if a drug has a negative impact on fertility signing up to try it out on your body or your baby is taking a huge risk. The FDA's policy used to be to exclude women from the earliest trials to protect them for this reason, but that too caused problems to be missed. Adding women in early means it's more likely that a problem that affects only a small percentage of women will be caught, but there are no certainties.
For what it's worth, the menstruation issue wasn't ignored by science either. Covid infection also causes changes to menstruation and there was some evidence and concerns that infections may impact fertility in some cases. All of this has been looked into as reports came in. That's the process working. Vaccines are shown to be likely safe so they go out to the public, then doctors and patients continue to report issues that arise to gather data on side effects.
Some early papers about the impact of the vaccines on women (and pregnancies) include:
This lack of foresight is not something specific to this vaccine. It is the male bias ingrained in most western medicine. Due to fear of how experimental medicines will impact fertility and pregnancy, males are usually overrepresented in clinical trials which makes female specific side effects much harder to detect.
I'd accept the male bias approach for almost anything except the Covid vax.
There was a huge segment of society angrily screaming at everyone that everything was perfectly safe, if you didn't take it you were anti-vax and wanted to kill grandma. It was absolutely insanity on every social media channel. I'm sure some nuanced bits were lost in the noise, but it was virtually impossible to openly discuss even hesitation to vaccinate, much less complications.
We've heard from 2 local people in our small community who had family members die within 24 hours of vaccination. They were afraid to talk about it because of the blow back that came from anyone mentioning complications. A scary side of a lot of people came out and it's permanently affected my perception of a great many.
Maybe there was a male bias in the clinical trials, but I have a hard time believing any information about complications would have been released or accepted at that time.
> There was a huge segment of society angrily screaming at everyone that everything was perfectly safe, if you didn't take it you were anti-vax and wanted to kill grandma. It was absolutely insanity on every social media channel. I'm sure some nuanced bits were lost in the noise, but it was virtually impossible to openly discuss even hesitation to vaccinate, much less complications.
Except when it came to people who were pregnant or hoping to get pregnant. There was relatively open discussion of the potential health impacts in those situations because those were not well understood due to the previously mentioned bias.
The general consensus at the time was to get the vaccine, because the thought was that any side effects would be less severe than potentially getting Covid without that extra protection. But those recommendations usually came with a lot more “discuss it with your doctor” disclaimers than the overall “just get it” recommendations for the rest of the population who wasn’t thinking about pregnancies.
That slight reservation shows that it wasn’t just a huge coverup to get people vaxxed. It was a genuine lack of knowledge because of how these medicines are almost always tested.
In my social circle it was women that were the most vocal on both sides of the issue. The men were mostly quiet and going along with whatever the wife or whoever wanted.
Important to note that longer-term studies happened before full FDA approval:
> More than half of the clinical trial participants were followed for safety outcomes for at least four months after the second dose. Overall, approximately 12,000 recipients have been followed for at least 6 months.
But also "Phase 4" clinical trials are where the study of long-term effects occur. Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J are all doing those today. Here's a Jan 2022 paper that has some information on current-ish specifics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8665991/
Given that the vaccine itself is out of your system within a few days, and if effective begin triggering an immune response, I don’t think there’s not much reason to monitor for safety beyond that point.
Thalidomide caused birth defects because it is in your system during pregnancy. Thalidomide is still in use to treat leprosy. Thalidomide does not cause second-generation birth defects.
The poster I responded to wrote: "Thalidomide is out of your system by your first grandchild." Actually, Thalidomide is out of your system within days. Quite a bit less time than it takes to have a grandchild.
The poster implies that there could be unknown long term effects of a vaccine, and conflates long term effects with birth defects, which, of course, appear only after a fetus has developed enough to spot defects in a sonogram or other imaging. It's a scare tactic.
You call it a scare tactic because you believe in medical interventionism. I respectfully point out one of the massive numbers of unexpected side effects of medical interventions.
Believe what you like. A thoughtfully considered medical intervention rescued my health. While patients need to be vigilant for errors and the best treatment is sometimes a matter of good fortune. there is no such things as "belief" in "medical interventionism." It makes as much sense as "weather forecastism" or "speed limitism."
... you go to a doctor to have it set and casted. Unless the break is so minor that you can self-treat with RICE. You don't have to be a passive recipient of a medical treatment flowchart.
It is a permanent change to your immune system which lasts forever. There is no "undo" button to getting these vaccines.
Remember when it was claimed the spike protein is out of your body in 48 hours? This study found the spike protein persists in the body for at least 16 days and the antigen can be found for at least 60 days.
I find this hard to believe. It’s beneficial for everyone including manufacturers for their products to be proven safe.
If we assume manufacturers are intentionally malicious, what prevents them from outright submitting a dummy saline shot for testing instead of the real thing, guaranteeing absolutely zero side-effects?
>It’s beneficial for everyone including manufacturers for their products to be proven safe
Yes, and to many on here, "they were"...and the company benefited from that. Make sense?
It would also benefit the company to cut corners, do as much as they can but not stop the rollout for more, which would take years to be "proven" beyond some threshold as safe.
Much of this proof would require long term testing, impossible to do up front so they would benefit from just releasing them anyways.
>what prevents them
Perhaps there is some optimal range, within which they benefit from best-effort (in a given period of time) attempt at producing what they think does something, what they think doesn't do bad things, and then releasing in full volume to cash in. Everything I'm saying doesn't require them to be nefarious either, even just a little negligence can result in "not actually safe".
If they have cover from government, media, and a willing populace ready to assume safety and efficacy, then what do they have to lose?
It's not so much lying as it is a nefarious combination of motivated reasoning, plausible deniability, blind compliance, responsibility dispersion, greed-motivated short-term thinking, etc.
Exactly, yes. Through phase 3 according to your link would have been about 2 to 6 years. Testing for covid vaxes was nothing of the sort, additionally millions of people have received multiple doses as the drugs are in wide release, whereas normally Phase 2 would be maybe a few hundred and Phase 3 several thousand.
And every step of the way through those layers of filters, many drugs are rejected. Exactly what I was getting at.
It is certainly not your contention that COVID vaccines went through 3 or 4 phases of long term (years) of limited FDA trials is it lol?
1000s in 6 years = millions in 6 months? I think not, and I don't think you do either.
Having been able to circumvent long term FDA trials, obviously.... obviously.... It made it more likely than it otherwise would have been for the drugs to be approved.
> It is certainly not your contention that COVID vaccines went through 3 or 4 phases of long term (years) of limited FDA trials
It seems like you're changing the goalposts here, right? You said "if they tested for longer [than 7 days], they'd be less likely to sell their products." I don't think that holds water.
> additionally millions of people have received multiple doses as the drugs are in wide release, whereas normally Phase 2 would be maybe a few hundred
Each Phase has different goals in mind. Moderna, J+J, and Pfizer are all in Phase IV now. FDA approval for Pfizer came after 6 months of study of tens of thousands of vaccine recipients.
When people first talked about it, I was hearing scientists saying that both other viruses and vaccines often change periods, and thus it wasn’t surprising/alarming
Since the intent of the vaccination is to trigger an immune response very similar to the virus I think we should assume that all side effects the virus can cause could also be seen in vaccine trials.
The only symptom that I have yet to hear from the vaccination is loss of smell/taste.
> Since the intent of the vaccination is to trigger an immune response very similar to the virus I think we should assume that all side effects the virus can cause could also be seen in vaccine trials.
If you define “side effects the virus can cause” (a term that usually is meaningless, “side effects” are unintended effects of a therapy, and thus deoebd on both the therapy and what it is intentionally used for) to mean “effects associated with the immune response to the virus” this is true by definition, but if you mean “symptoms of infection” it seems improbable.
> The only symptom that I have yet to hear from the vaccination is loss of smell/taste.
A lot of what you hear is reports of events after vaccination that have very little effective filtering for whether they are caused by the vaccination
or some other cause (including COVID infection.)
> The nature of this survey means that we cannot compare the incidence of different experiences here with the general population (meaning, 40% of this sample having an experience does not mean that is the rate of that experience out in the world). The associations described here are not causal but provide evidence to better study these trends further. We emphasize that menstrual bleeding changes of this nature are generally not indicative of changes to fertility.
It’s so disturbing there are summaries like this that disregard the fact that this is self reported and there is a huge disclaimer that it is overly counting the incidents:
“Nearly half of the participants of a recent study who were menstruating regularly at the time of the survey reported heavier bleeding during their periods after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine”
The likely alternative is the people making the decisions knew it would harm or even kill some people, and still went ahead with it. And just set up a circle of deniability, and legal immunity in the event of any future litigation. This includes pfizer.
In Ontario the politicians said they are following the advice of chief medical officer in implementing the lockdowns. But there's a moment of dark political satire, when on hot mic one of the chief medical officers before a press conference say's "I just read what they tell me to".
"The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments in ethics and psychology, involving stylized ethical dilemmas of whether to sacrifice one person to save a larger number. The series usually begins with a scenario in which a runaway tram or trolley is on course to collide with and kill a number of people (traditionally five) down the track, but a driver or bystander can intervene and divert the vehicle to kill just one person on a different track."
-Wikipedia
Who exactly set the agenda? I would like to know. Because predictably the lockdowns caused world wide instability, that directly lead to record inflation and fertilizer shortages that will put millions of people into food insecurity and at real risk of going hungry. It's hard to believe that this price was worth it.
I have to wonder that the insistence of boosting so often might lead to the inverse effect desensitising the body to the proteins just like what happens when you vaccinate against allergies, possibly leading to worse illness than if you did not boost.
The weird insistence on anti-body levels is another weird thing, just plainly ignoring immune memory.
I suspect that we are not seeing grave illness anymore in most of the population due to the immune naive population being very low and the few people dying now are in the traditional old age and immune compromised categories that also die by other respiratory viruses under similar circumstances.
Reading the science so much is fumbling in the blind (over 2 years into this). They are still pushing for under 5s to be vaccinated in some countries even though at the efficacy of the vaccine is less than 40% something that would be considered a failure in any other vaccine development and knowing the groups it he lowest risk group there is.
And before you call me anti-vaxer I had two doses of Pfizer and have had covid 3 times.
Presumably that has not been a primary concern, since other vaccines also have historically had regular boosters and haven’t seen that happen (referring to Tdap, rabies, or flu shots)
Flu vaccine has historically also been around 25-50% effective, and is still recommended and paid for by insurance, since the benefit is measured positively to you. So there is some precedent for disappointing numbers still being promoted for their small estimated benefits in net.
Sure once a year for flu shots with different strains. This is the exact same protein again and again. Nothing like this has been done before outside of allergy vaccines from what my allergist told me who is to say at the very least skeptical about it.
Why would it be the same protein used then, if that happened? The booster trials for delta and omicron compared the advantages of changing the protein to using the same shot, and used the same shot because it was observed to work well in trials. Also, again, the tetanus and rabies vaccines have regular boosters, with exactly the same formulation. So what is it they claim hasn’t been done before and why?
They didn't work well actually. Effectiveness against Omicron of boosters was zero. The regulators and pharma firms did however redefine "work" to mean the generation of antibodies (against the long extinct 2019 strain spike protein). This is illogical and puts the cart before the horse; we only care about antibodies to the extent they stop people getting sick.
The reason they had to do this is because the vaccines cause fixation. The body can't tell the different spikes apart, so injection with mRNA coding for Omicron spike leads the body to create (not very effective) antibodies against the original spike from the first round of vaccines. Immune memory seems to lack resolution, or possibly Omicron evolved specifically to confuse it in that way, but whatever the cause is, the body just says "a spike! i know what to do!" and doesn't learn from the new round of adjusted vaccines.
Unfortunately this type of so-called biomarker study is now becoming commonplace. They are confusing the means for the end.
The current booster is still the same vaccine as before meaning a lot of people have had up to 4 shots of the same vaccine. The new variant shot is not generally available as far as I know at least in Europe
>I suspect that we are not seeing grave illness anymore in most of the population due to the immune naive population being very low and the few people dying now are in the traditional old age and immune compromised categories that also die by other respiratory viruses under similar circumstances.
I suspect part of the reason is hospitals are no longer killing their patients through ineffective protocols.
Remember the big shortage of ventilators, and how the government is going to get GM to build them. Then it quietly went away because ventilators were killing patients.
My understanding is that the mRNA vaccines, in a round about way, trick the body into thinking it’s infected with the spike protein in order to trigger an immune system response. Is it really so surprising that one of the body’s many responses to viral infection is to alter reproductive activities? Skimming the article, I don’t see reference to other vaccines, but wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume they also cause menstrual changes?
“gender-affirming hormone treatments” - How did we get to a point where double-speak was acceptable?
Here again a blatant lack of clarity around the issue. Who are dying and at what rate? What are their comorbidities? What is the vax status of those that are dying, presumably many have taken the vaccine anyways yes?
But you do you, is the point. I'm perfectly fine with my choice of not taking it: I'm not overweight, I lift weights and exercise regularly, have low bodyfat percent, I get plenty of sunlight for Vitamin D and immune support. I do not need the vaccine.
This mentality of extreme safetyism applied indiscriminately even now is insane. Are you going to take covid boosters for the rest of your life? The disease is going to be continually weakened and become just another coronavirus. The rest of us will move on with our lives. Quite simply, I'm not worried about Covid at all. Can you say the same about the long term prospects of endless boosters on your body? I sure couldn't.
Tell me now how 100% confident you are there are no side effects because the propaganda experts and drug companies told you so, so we can come back to it in 6 months when more side effects start being discovered and posted here on HN...
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
My under 40 triathlete friend with no comorbidities who wound up in the ICU for a month and needed two surgeries to drain his lungs would beg to differ. Or my buddy down the block under 40 with no cormorbities who is now on beta blockers for long term Covid. As would folks like my Dad who the vaccine and first booster didn't work on due to his suppressed immune system from receiving my kidney.
Careful with extreme endurance exercise, it can be immuno suppressive [0]
I would advise a balance between weightlifting, moderate cardio, lots of sunlight exposure for Vitamin D and testosterone support, and a balanced diet.
And yes there are instances of young, non co-morbid people dying from covid. Statistically, not that many, so I'm not worried about it.
>I would advise a balance between weightlifting, moderate cardio, lots of sunlight exposure for Vitamin D and testosterone support, and a balanced diet.
Yes and this insanity is literally keeping large numbers of people from engaging in parts of society. Some conferences, meetups, and events still require attendees to be fully vaccinated with no testing option. I was unable to attend an event just last week for this reason. It's stunning.
You weren't unable to attend anything. You had an option to attend the event - get vaccinated. You chose to not attend the event. The only thing "keeping you" from it is you.
That's a great point. Next up, we'll make sure Muslims can't go to the same conference because they chose not to go.
Maybe your next thought is the vaccine makes the conference safer. Let's play Choose your own Adventure. You have to sit next to someone on a crowded airplane in economy class for 3 hours and this person loves to talk. You get to choose that this person is either a) vaccinated, or b) tested negative for covid every day for the past 3 days. Which do you choose?
It's fascinating and scary that fear has led our society to let segregation creep in under the guise of public health.
There is no herd immunity in play with anyone vaccinated with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Please remove that from your vocabulary when referencing the vaccines for one reason: they do not provide immunity and never have. Hence there is not and will not be herd immunity from vaccinations alone.
Please, spreading this nonsense does not help anyone. You are lying which makes you look bad (or if you think it’s actually true, it makes you look stupid).
The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines do not contribute to herd immunity because they do not confer immunity. They don’t prevent transmission nor infection, hence herd immunity is not attainable from these vaccines alone.
The vaccine has been well demonstrated to provide significant reduction of both of those, actually greater than any prior vaccine for the original strain of COVID.
The key infectious strains we see today are variants that, in no small part due to increasing herd immunity to prior strains, are microevolutionarily driven to evolve around the vaccines. The same way the flu develops strains that bypass vaccine protections throughout the year.
Even with the different variants, the vaccines have reduced the transmissibility and infection rates vs nonvaccinated individuals, with some allowance in limited datasets (ie. Ottawa) for behavioral changes between vaccinators and nonvaccinators.
Not sure where you acquired your misinformation, but you may need better sources.
“Herd immunity is the protection of an individual from infection by virtue of the other members of the population being incapable of transmitting the virus to that individual. Herd immunity can be achieved by immunizing a population with a vaccine that interrupts transmission, such as the live, attenuated polio vaccine, but not with a vaccine that does not interrupt transmission, such as the killed polio vaccine.”
Review of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, 13th Edition. by Warren Levinson. Page 259.
Furthermore, it is pretty obvious that a non-replicating fragment of a pathogen given even every 6 months is going to cause less damage than the real thing (also available every 6 months the way things are going). Luckily we've done extensive trials to back that up.
Mostly the very old, at this point; though I'm in my 40s where the rate starts to tick up. But beyond that, there's the risk of long term morbidity. My niece was early 20's, active, in good health, with no comorbidities and is now pseudo-disabled. The vaccine only removes about 30% of the risk of this type of outcome, but still that alone is worth it.
> What is the vax status of those that are dying, presumably many have taken the vaccine anyways yes?
Looks like people who have taken the vaccine have about 6-10% of the risk of death of those who haven't, controlling for comorbidities.
> Are you going to take covid boosters for the rest of your life?
A lot of us might-- though I've got a fair bit of hope that we come up with something better in the next couple of years. I will do my best to avoid infection in the meantime.
> The disease is going to be continually weakened and become just another coronavirus.
Viral selection is complicated. Yes, in the very long term, many viruses end up becoming less virulent, but others go in the other direction.
> Can you say the same about the long term prospects of endless boosters on your body? I sure couldn't.
I'm pretty dang confident that I can bound the risk from the vaccine to be much lower than the risk from COVID infection.
While I sorta tend to agree with you, this is a _RESULT_ of people refusing to take the vaccines (or do full lockdowns/wear masks/etc). Like the original SARs strains it should have been possible to eradicate through strong public health measures, one of which was vaccination.
So, we can shrug this one off, because in the end it _only_ kills a percent or so of people, overwhelmingly already infirm or elderly.
We may not be so lucky the next time, and this attitude _will_ get us in trouble when that happens.
China literally locked down Shanghai and millions of people in their homes, had police everywhere monitoring, had almost no exceptions other than for the police, and literally boarded people in their homes, engaged every spying mechanism they had, did mandatory testing, for more than six weeks, and it did not stop COVID - but it is increasingly clear it only delayed it from spreading inevitably. Even WIRED, pro-vaccine, has written articles about all the people who died from the lockdown and inability to get medical care due to the restrictions. It was the most full, most strict lockdown physically possible and it still did not work and China is looking at needing to repeat it.
After it already went endemic, and the transmissiblity went through the roof.
Not sure why that is hard to understand. If this virus killed 95% of people would you be arguing against lockdowns?
I think most people can agree that its one of those to little to late situations in china and they need to reconsider at this point, but that doesn't make what they are trying to do wrong.
People that think the spread of this coronavirus could ever have been stopped, let alone without destroying social fabric, mental health and causing an economic depression/hyperinflation are insane.
The 95% thing was a hypothetical. But lets rephrase it a bit.
Lets say another virus is discovered tomorrow, how high would the mortality have to be before you were to accept all those effects you list?
And lastly, how high would it have to be before you would accept actually shooting people who violated quarantine procedures? With the understanding that a statement like never, could mean the extinction of humanity (a valid choice I guess).
I shouldn't have even added them because I still don't think a coronavirus type of infection that is (or will evolve to become) so contagious can actually be stopped, and I'll stand by that main point.
Especially something that is so drastically over represented in the sick, old, and obese but not the young and healthy. Why is it justified to shoot healthy strong young people, privileging the interests of the comorbid group? In a situation where again, they're going to get sick anyways? What if we just shot the old and fat people and then everyone could stop worrying about covid?
To answer you, who knows, but much much much higher than 0.2% death rate for under 50's etc.
I think what China's doing is wrong and foolish, but maybe their citizens like being locked in their apartments for such a trivial disease, who knows?
> shooting people who violated quarantine procedures?
In the actual circumstance in the real world, animals would need to be culled because it passes between deer and cats and humans. Maybe we start shooting cats and deer now? No more pet cats.
>If this virus killed 95% of people would you be arguing against lockdowns?
This is the dumbest argument I've ever seen made on here. If it killed 95% of people, no sane person would be arguing because it becomes obvious that you are in danger. If 1.1% of the population dies and you don't have any of the health risks coinciding with mortality from the virus, then you have little reason to put your life on hold, unless you're unlucky and don't realize you have some unidentified health issue, which at that point, is a rounding error.
I guess if you're on the side doing the coercing then, yeah, at that point you probably think you're saving everyone from themselves.
This kind of skepticism goes both ways: you could get COVID next week and discover that you have a latent comorbidity that otherwise would never have affected you.
From a public health perspective, universal (or near-universal) vaccination is an unequivocal good. Given the sum of what we know about both COVID and any side effects of vaccination, this remains the case.
This is an abuse of language: "universal vaccination"
Is it a vaccine, or a therapy? Why does the supposed efficacy of the vaccines ability to prevent spread of covid wane so quickly? At best the vax is novel therapy that temporarily boosts immune system to fight the current strain. But whatever the side effects of this mechanism, they can accumulate with each successive round of boosters. Is it safe to keep taking these shots every 6 to 12 months? Who knows... but if they have to be repeatedly taken, they clearly do not effectively stop the spread of covid which the evidence shows.
I'll take my chances as having good enough genetics and lifestyle, and being young enough, in aggregate to tip the scales well past the point where getting covid and whatever natural immunity that it provides is just fine.
>latent comorbidity
Yea and I can get hit by a bus tomorrow. The main comorbidities that dominate the stats as present in over 80% of deaths are obesity and age. I have neither. We have to be realistic here.
Look at Haiti vs New Zealand regarding vax rates vs death rates. It is not unequivocally good.
These questions presuppose a false dichotomy: vaccines can be therapeutic, prophylactic, or both. Simultaneously, they can be either sterilizing or attenuating with respect to the immunity they provide.
The COVID vaccines are prophylactic and therapeutic. So far, they seem to be mostly attenuating with respect to their immunity, not unlike flu vaccines (in two regards: both weak cross-strain protection and much milder illness when infected with the targeted strain). Additionally, there's decent empirical evidence that "breakthrough" cases are generally less contagious.
"Being realistic here" means getting a free, readily available vaccine that reduces the risk of serious illness or death. Separately, it means doing your civic duty to reduce load on our medical institutions and lessen the latent risk to those around you (who may have comorbidities that you are not privy to and are not entitled to be privy to).
More to the point, these "but it's non-sterilizing" complaints NEVER came up about other vaccines before COVID was made a political point by one political party
The vaccine doesn’t stop you from carrying or transmitting COVID, it just lessens the severity the symptoms you suffer personally.
The people who don’t mask up, regardless of having taken the vaccine or not, are actually the biggest problem. I wouldn’t call them selfish because it is their ignorance of how disease works that is to blame. I wouldn’t even blame most of them in light of all the propaganda and confused public servants that say otherwise. I would reserve the selfish tag for the people who know they are carriers and continue to go maskless anyway.
The R number has never been that high, where did you get it from? If it were "2-3 people", every variant, except maybe the latest, would have infected every person on earth by now.
The R number depends on social practices as well. It was higher before lockdowns, but with masks and the eventual vaccine it got reduced to the 1-2 range, and later below 1. Or at least danced around that number depending on whether the lockdown was suspended temporarily or not.
> 1. Covid shots do not prevent infection or transmission.
It does look like there's about a 20-30% reduction of infection from random surveys of the population and from nucleocapsid seroprevalence assays; transmission-once-infected is very difficult to measure, but it would be surprising if it did not have some effect.
> 2. Since Delta, both vaxxed and unvaxxed cases have the same viral load.
There's a key fallacy here: we're looking at a population of cases detected by similar means and then found that they have similar viral loads. Not too surprising of a finding (survivorship bias, basically).
There's some data indicating that viral copy assays are not good proxies for finding true infectious shedding -- and that vaccinated individuals can be much better in this regard despite having higher loads. e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01816-0
> 3. Since December at least, boosted and vaxxed have higher RATE per 100k of covid infections.
This is absolutely and completely untrue. There's been a couple of times where the vaxxed have been higher in the data series, but the overwhelming trend in the data has been the opposite. e.g. right now in Santa Clara County, where I am, the unvaccinated case rate is approximately 268 per 100,000 per week; the fully vaccinated case rate is about 46 per 100,000.
Of course, people who elect vaccination don't behave exactly the same as those who don't... and so many people in S.C.C. are vaccinated that the exact number of unvaccinated has some uncertainty (but it's not off by a factor of 5).
> It does look like there's about a 20-30% reduction of infection from random surveys of the population and from nucleocapsid seroprevalence assays; transmission-once-infected is very difficult to measure, but it would be surprising if it did not have some effect.
You are responding to a practical concern with a theoretical counter. But practically speaking the vaccine doesn't change the picture at all. The situation pre-vaccine was COVID was going to spread like wildfire after any lockdown attempt ended and everyone was going to be exposed to it. The situation post-vaccine, even with that reduction in infection rates, was the same.
Ditto speed, since this is an exponential process that reduction won't have an especially material effect on when everyone gets COVID.
We ran a natural experiment on this in Australia [0] - having a highly vaccinated population didn't appear to have any impact at all on COVID transmission rate or reach in who gets infected. The numbers are not convincing that the vaccine did anything for transmissions. The effect of personal protection seems to explain all the benefits of the vaccine.
1. That was only true before Delta. When Delta came, the viral load became the same between vaxxed and unvaxxed folks and combined with waning immunity of 3-6 months, most people were basically "unvaxxed" with respect to transmission by fall. Omicron took it even further where since December, in Ontario, boosted and vaxxed folks have had higher rate per 100k of covid infections.
Posting a disputed study that I criticized to try and refute me, when I posted important 2022 followup data to viral shedding based on actual infectivity rather than just RNA copies indicates you either didn't read my comment or didn't understand it.
> 3. It is true and the government admits that boosted and vaxxed have higher rates. Ontario source:
I just knew you were going to point to the Ontario data from Mar-Apr. This is why I said in a couple places they popped above for a couple data points. Are you deliberately being obtuse?
Compare to basically any other data series from any other time; e.g. my locale:
That study is not alone either. NEJM has similar studies too.
Your link seems to be an outlier. Denmark, UK, Scotland, and other provinces in Canada also show the same higher rates in boosted and fully vaxxed than unvaxxed. Walgreens data for US also shows this. Look at page 3 of:
Canadian government seroprevalence data also shows that between December 2021 and May 2022, there were at least 17.5 million infections. This is in a population of 38 million. This was despite extremely high vax rates.
So, how exactly did the vaccine prevent infection and transmission? Vaxxed folks were allowed to enjoy services with a false sense of security and spread Covid to others while unvaxxed folks were denied from society.
Please don’t resolve to ad hominem attacks on hacker news.
I have taken more vaccines than vast majority of the population due to my immigration status. Just because someone is criticizing the pros and cons of a medicine doesn't make them anti-vax. You are engaging in an ad hominem attack without knowing anything about me.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of how right they are or how wrong other people are or you feel they are. Following the site guidelines is more important, because the survival of the entire forum depends on that. We've also had to warn you repeatedly about this in the past, so it doesn't have just to do with this topic.
I think you may have missed the point a little bit. Being right, or feeling right, doesn't make ok to abuse the site. It makes it more important to follow the site guidelines, not less.
The way to "counter" a wrong view, or a view you feel is wrong, is with thoughtful discussion and good information. Pouring fuel and setting it on fire is not that.
Btw I posted lots of moderation replies in this thread, to people on both sides of the argument who were posting abusively. The community strongly expects us to be even-handed about that, no doubt including the vast majority of the users who agree with your positions. This is a basic principle and should be obvious.
You are consistently replying to my comments, calling me names and then getting mad at me in other comments for me replying back to you. You should read the hacker news guidelines.
It's common for people to feel like there must be brigading when downvotes etc. show up quickly, but a much simpler explanation is that this stuff happens all the time on divisive topics, with no coordination required.
It's also perfectly common for downvoted posts to get upvoted back to positive, as other readers come in. It's actually to be expected for unfairly downvoted posts, since readers will give corrective upvotes regardless of whether they agree or disagree.
If you break the site guidelines, though—which unfortunately you did in this thread, repeatedly—you're going to get downvoted and flagged regardless of whether people agree/disagree or your underlying view is right/wrong.
Of course it's very frustrating to see lots of wrong views, or views you feel are wrong, getting expressed in threads like this. But the site guidelines require all commenters to metabolize that frustration and to remain thoughtful and respectful and substantive in their comments, regardless of how right they are or feel you are.
I know there's volatility in voting, but the tone of discussion and vote patterns early in these discussions do not look at all like what happens later. It seems to happen repeatedly on topics of vaccines: thoughtful pro-vax stuff gets downvoted/gray.
There's one thing I particularly disagree with: I do not think labelling a user that posts large piles of anti-vaccine content as "antivax" is ad-hom.
You missed the radio button on page 3 which lets you see the test positivity rates based on vax status too. There too, the vaxxed and boosted score worst:
Please explain why does your data seem to be an entire outlier from Ontario, Alberta, Scotland, UK and Denmark data?
You also haven't explained how that Lancet study for UK has been disputed.
Nor have you explained how a highly vaxxed country like Canada had 60% of the population infected in past 5 months and how that reduced infection and transmission?
> You missed the radio button on page 3 which lets you see the test positivity rates based on vax status too. There too, the vaxxed and boosted score worst:
Again, --- any high school statistics students should know why that rate can be, and is completely decoupled from the actual case rate (non-uniform selection bias-- which is obviously present because the size of the strata doesn't equal their base rates in the population).
We have looked at the actual entire United States data. You are cherry-picking and Gish-galloping. You completely ignore the mountain of evidence that contradicts your view, but endlessly want to talk about specific datapoints which do (most of which you don't even provide). You bury the other side in citations but refuse to look at theirs.
This is not a means to actually reach consensus or have an honest discussion.
> You also haven't explained how that Lancet study for UK has been disputed.
My earlier citation, BEFORE YOU POSTED IT, showed that while viral fragments in plasma is equivalent, the actual transmissibility from shed droplets appears to me lower. Your study's primary argument is the opposite. Further, it discussions transmission dynamics in a household, as if this somehow has import on national case rates which is the assertion you made and keep galloping away from.
It's so thoroughly bogus that it's difficult for me to even engage with. In response to April 2022 data indicating that it is likely that transmission is reduced despite earlier data that viral copy fragments are high... you sent me the earlier data that viral copy fragments are high... and then repeatedly demanded to hear why I thought that the conclusions of that earlier study were disputed. Hello? Hello?
Please don't stoop to flamewar or personal attack, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Flamewar comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32139001 are definitely not ok. Not only is this against the site guidelines, it has the side effect of discrediting your position, which is really bad if you happen to be right.
2. Healthy young people under 50 or even 60 were not dying or getting hospitalized. Whatever risk they want to take, they should be able to take it without mandates. Since the vax does not prevent infection or transmission, one is only taking individual risk and not affecting others.
Even before the vaccinations, the pre-vaccine infection fatality rate in anyone under 50 or even 60 was absolutely tiny. Look at page 1475 of this which shows the IFR pre-vaccine based on each age year:
No. What I said applies to all cohorts. Take a look at the bar chart entitled "Percentage of deaths vs. population". That's not broken out by race or gender, only by age.
Below 35 deaths are underrepresented. When you hit 35+ the inner bar (percentage of deaths) becomes a larger part of the outer bar (percentage of total population), by 50 it's nearly equal, and for 60+ deaths are overrepresented.
If I had to guess I'd say that the generally worse health outcomes for Latinos means that things just don't have that much room to get worse as they age. In terms of COVID vax rates among blacks and latinos is lower than it is amongst whites and asians so that's not helping. Look at how much higher the mortality rate is for younger Latinos… yikes.
I live in Canada. Here, unvaxxed weren't even allowed to air travel domestically. Nor did they recognize a negative PCR test or past infection natural immunity.
Compassionate grounds such as taking care of sick family member, funeral etc were also not exempted.
Everyone who were COVID+ despite being vaxxed were allowed to fly, go to gym, restaurant etc. Meanwhile, an unvaxxed person wasn't allowed to do the same even if they could show a negative PCR test.
I am talking about Canada. We had one of the most draconian mandates. And these were enforced by Government orders, not simply businesses.
We still have them actually in July 2022. Kids aren't allowed to go to summer camp without being 2 dose vaxxed. Travellers who are unvaxxed need to show a negative test at airport, another negative test on 8th day and quarantine for 14 days.
i took all three shots and got covid about two weeks ago. it was HARSH. no sense of smell, no sense of taste, 3 days with high-ish fever (39C), the body ache was crazy bad and worse of all: brain fog. i managed to avoid going to the hospital, but barely.
and that's with 3 shots. i'm almost sure i would be in an ICU if i didn't get any shots.
I am 49yo, male. I'm healthy, but mildly overweight. I was very fit prior to the lockdowns (Melbourne, Vic, Australia), but I lacked the disciplinary wherewithall to maintain that fitness over the past couple of years.
I have chosen not to receive any Covid19 vaccinations and so I am "unvaccinated".
I thought it was never going to happen, but eventually I contracted covid19, over Easter period this year. I too experienced myalgia, a mild fever. I also had a sore throat for about 2 days. I didn't completely lose my sense of smell, but coffee (for example) didn't taste great. Same with wine. That anosmia, such as it was, persisted for a week or two.
But that's it really. It was all over in about 2.5 days. I would not describe what I experienced as "harsh". I've had Influenza, and that was harsh. Sat me on my arse for a solid week. But not this. By day 4, I was doing household chores and more or less back to normal (mild anosmia not withstanding).
My brother got COVID before he (reluctantly) got vaccinated. He was basically dead (not to the point of hospitalization) for several days.
My girlfriend got vaccinated and boosted, caught COVID, was bed ridden for several days and then general malaise and tiredness for two weeks.
I got vaccinated and boosted, went to the same party my girlfriend was infected at, stood next to the same people that infected her, took her to the hospital to get tested because we didn't think it was COVID, and I never even got infected.
Anecdotes are literally useless when discussing these things. There's so many individual variations about how you respond to COVID, to the point where your experience is likely affected by how stressed you have been the month you caught it.
This is why the people who actually care about understanding the issue collect large amounts of data, and that data largely shows getting a vaccine to significantly reduce your chance of getting it, and your chance of dying from it.
The "39%" is a reference to the percentage of those on masculinizing hormones with breakthrough periods, not the percentage of females on masculinizing hormones.
In this study in particular, the fact that there was breakthrough menstrual bleeding for trans men and others who have been hormonally preventing their periods for years was one of the particularly interesting findings, imo.
It's the anglo-sphere they've lost the plot. It's hard to take a study that splits data into white and the rest seriously as a scientific study. I was unaware that africans, South Americans and Asians were significantly different to "white" people to make a difference needed to be pointed out.
What exactly are they suggesting. That the vaccine was engineered to have a more negative effect on non-white women?
Medical outcomes are substantially and consistently different for different racial groups in the USA. It's in part a proxy for economic status. It makes sense to control for it.
In any biostatistics project, we have to segment patient population into groups based on an amazingly large set of variables. race, sex, approximate age, approximate location, distance from doctor, economic status are just the first few. All of these can have an impact on outcomes that has to be managed.
Yes, a persons race does have an impact on outcomes regardless of economic factors.
Recently, a few conferences talked about us trying to ignore race and instead move to genetic haplogroups as (in essence) race was used just to get at these genetic conditions (from their haplogroup). Its too early to say if that will happen. I am guessing eventually yes but not in our lifetime.
I know of no variable we are trying to isolate with a 'white' vs 'everyone else' besides, perhaps, a hamfisted approach at trying to stratify over racism. Its very possible that the race of the healthcare provider has an impact depending on the race of the person receiving treatment, but I have no idea why they would make it 'white vs non-white' as the criteria.
Skimming the paper results, it might have been dredging for a significant effect showing that white people are less-badly affected. "The vaccine has racist side effects" is an eye-catching headline.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
Among others, but the thing I’d guess the parent was referring to is a specific kind of culture warrior who loses their absolute shit when anybody uses the term “people” in relation to any topic that primarily involves women; some trans men may menstruate or have done so in the past, for example, so there is a tendency in the field to avoid gendered terms unless it’s necessary.
Wait until you discover the fact that not all women menstruate so these results aren't applicable to all the even narrowest minded views of what makes a woman. And yes, you may be surprised to learn that pregnant people are indeed classified differently than the general term "woman" because they have conditions and restrictions which only apply while carrying a fetus. That would be why you might react differently to the statements "The woman got drunk" and "The pregnant woman got drunk".
>which produces a spike protein for a short time that your body then reacts against
It was claimed previously to be 48 hours. That always seemed extremely suspicious to me as the shot is permanently altering your immune system. What would make it suddenly stop producing spike protein?
They found the spike protein persists in the body for at least 16 days post-vaccination and the antigen can be found for at least 60 days. That is longer than getting covid via infection.
When I got my first shot, I was interested in the half life of the mRNA, because I understand how mRNA works and the concept of "how long is the spike protein being made vs how long I feel adverse effects from the shot" amused me.
I got my first shot in April 2021. What I found at the time was that manufacturers mostly did not provide that info, or when they did, it was vaguely given (usually described as "a couple weeks"). There are a multitude of potential reasons: They didn't know (unlikely), the PR people asked didn't know, it was different for different shot brands, it is probably variable person to person, and the most important one in my opinion, they were aware that it was a stupidly politicized issue and didn't feel that the specific info of "how long" would be useful to the community and un-useful to the vaccine skeptic community, and were very confident that an mRNA based solution would be 100% degraded "eventually" just because of how cells work.
My friend, I think you are assuming that everyone shares equal risk and that is simply and unequivocally untrue.
When biostats does a project, we have to stratify our patient comparison groups on age, gender, and sometimes even 'approximate cash' as all of these change risks and outcomes. The outcome for healthy < 40 year olds is vastly different than the outcome for healthy > 60 year olds.
The question is not 'is the vaccine better than the infection' - its 'for healthy women in child bearing age, is the impact of a vaccine better than the impact of an infection on their fertility.'
I am guessing that you don't have quite the eye roll for this more nuanced question.
With all due respect, I am not attempting to be rude with you and it would be nice to be afforded the same courtesy.
As bluntly as I can say it - it will be years before we have peer reviewed studies published that detail the effect (or lack thereof) of the vaccines on pregnancy. It is an unknown and to pretend otherwise is dishonest. What we do know, though, is the outcomes of people who have covid stratified by age/race/sex/etc.
What we find is that covid is heavily impacted by age and existing comorbidities. If you look at the mortality rate stratified by age alone, you will see drastic outcome differences between < 40 women and > 60 women. To suggest that an injection is always better than possible infection, when we know the outcomes of possible infection on the average person in the 'having a child' demographic, seems disingenuous.
Losing a child is a hard thing, losing a child in the womb is hard as well. Trying to have a child before age takes it from you is difficult. Some of us have went through this pain. To laugh off the risks in a group that was not well tested during the vax approval process does not really make me feel good.
There is simply no plausible way for the virus to be less harmful to the population, or even just the ‘having a child’ subpopulation, than the vaccine.
Please omit swipes and flamebait from your comments here. They break the site guidelines, and they also discredit what you're arguing for, which is really bad if you happen to be right. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
You wouldn’t happen to be anti-vax, would you? Because holy cow, you sure are allowing the anti-vax, fear-promoting front page posts to proliferate these days, which only encourages loons to brigade the site and downvote any comment that counters their bullshit narrative.
Your toleration for anti-vax nuttery serves to encourage it. It’s a variation of Popper’s maxim.
We moderate accounts that break HN's rules regardless of what they're arguing for, and regardless of how right they are or feel they are. Being right is no license to break the rules. Quite the contrary—the more right you are, the more responsibility you have.
Routinely, when people see moderation happening to accounts they happen to agree with, they overlook and excuse how those accounts were breaking the rules (no matter how extreme it was!) and jump to the conclusion that the mods must secretly be in cahoots with the other side. Of course, the other side feels exactly the same way. It's cognitive bias in both cases.
Dude, I ask not because I broke rules, but because there has been a LOT of fear-promoting bullshit being posted, by users who post a LOT of fear-promoting bullshit, and you allow it, and them, to remain active.
You normally have a very even hand on the tiller. Your words are always calm and rational. You frequently kill posts that delve into disinformation and nuttery. And yet you allow fear-mongering posts and fear-mongering nitwits to continue to harm the society in which you live and the site you moderate.
In my opinion, you should realize that your view of this is shaped by your own strong commitment on the topics you care about. Because of that, you're much more likely to notice the points you disagree with, to overinterpret them (as you've done with the link you mentioned in the sibling comment), and to weight them more heavily. It's the charge of your own view that attracts this view of moderation, like a magnetic field attracting iron filings into its own pattern.
Pretty much everyone with strong views feels this way about HN moderation, but the specifics of what they feel (and see) are as different and as disagreeing amongst themselves as their underlying views are. We get this sort of complaint from every angle under the sun, literally every day. When you're forced to look at the problem from every perspective, you realize that the dynamic at work is completely different than what each specific perspective thinks it is. But those perspectives are awfully convincing, because the force driving the perception is so intense.
The very same intensity, of course, is what leads people to break the site guidelines in the first place, while feeling entirely justified in doing so—because, after all, one is so right and other people on the internet are so wrong. This is the dynamic we're trying, to the extent possible, to nudge discussion out of.
How tiresome that you continue to scold me for the mocking message that initiated this thread, instead of addressing your nigh-complete lack of moderation of the fear-mongering fringe that have identified HN as a place where they can wield influence without consequence.
MuchoMaas, who you claim to have banned repeatedly, has made 62 posts in one month, nearly 10% of which you have seen flagged and then deleted, but you claim “Moderation is necessarily inconsistent because … we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.”
But… you have seen it: you’ve been active in squelching a repeat offender that you well recognize as persistently problematic.
Of course, in your view, it is my cognitive bias that is causing me to see this as a problem, and not your cognitive bias that is causing you to turn a blind eye to the problem.
I don’t think I’m over-or even mis-interpreting anything: the proof is shown in your words and your actions: you are not effectively moderating the users who are using your social media platform to promote an agenda of fear and doubt.
Have the last word, Dan, because it’s evident that I’m pissing into the wind here. If anything, I expect I’ve only managed to entrench you deeper into supporting the FUD crew. What a shame.
We've banned that user many times. Moderation is necessarily inconsistent because (a) we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, and (b) not everything we do is visible.
It's a huge non sequitur to go from seeing something like that to thinking that the moderators are secretly in cahoots with your enemies.
I was disappointed to see how little research there was into menstruation at the time. We were told that the vaccine was perfectly safe, and even questioning the vaccine made you ‘anti-vax.’ Now over a full year later the scientific community is confirming what random message boards have been saying all along. It may be safe, but nobody really cared to look at the impact on menstruation or pregnancy beyond confirming that the rate of miscarriage is unchanged.