[HN Gopher] Vaccines, past and present
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Vaccines, past and present
Author : etiam
Score : 24 points
Date : 2024-10-04 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| Terr_ wrote:
| To prebuttal a few of the just-sane-enough-to-be-facile claims
| I've found vexing during COVID:
|
| 1. Yes, the COVID treatments we're using today _are_ vaccines.
| The word has _never_ meant Perfect Forever Invulnerability, we
| have a 200-year history of things labeled "vaccine" even when it
| didn't remove _all_ symptoms, cover _all_ strains, or need only
| one shot, etc.
|
| 2. No, the "normal" vaccines "back in your day" _do_ have
| problems, and there are very good reasons we 're pursuing new
| types like mRNA. For example, live-virus vaccines (containing a
| weak relative) can sometimes start their own spreading infection,
| and inactivatived-vaccines (with blended-up chunks of virus)
| require more doses and can sometimes mis-train your immune
| system.
| outworlder wrote:
| I don't know where people got the idea that vaccines prevent
| all infection, transmissions and symptoms. They were never
| about that. If you can achieve it, fantastic! But not all
| pathogens are this easy.
|
| Vaccines are not a force field. All they are doing is training
| your immune system so that it can respond faster if it
| encounters the actual pathogen (antibody production takes
| days). Your immune system has to reach the pathogen to fight
| it, which means you got infected already. If it is destroyed
| quick enough, you won't notice, but you still got infected.
|
| I really love the XKCD on mRNA vaccines:
|
| https://xkcd.com/2425/
|
| title="To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying
| a second Death Star some time after the first."
| Terr_ wrote:
| I just wish one of the first few panels conveyed that the
| construction-plans were deliberately-incomplete and only
| described the outer shell.
|
| Yeah, there's exposition later about the laser not being
| wired up, but it's a little late in the framing and suggests
| it _could_ be wired up, as opposed to impossibly absent.
| ralph84 wrote:
| > I don't know where people got the idea that vaccines
| prevent all infection, transmissions and symptoms.
|
| The government propaganda when the Covid vaccines were
| launched said exactly that. Sure, people shouldn't be so
| stupid to accept government propaganda at face value, but we
| know where people got the idea.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > The government propaganda when the Covid vaccines were
| launched said exactly that.
|
| [Citation Needed]
|
| Give us some links to clear examples, if you're right it
| should be super-fast and easy. (As opposed to the unfair
| task of proving a negative.)
| ralph84 wrote:
| Sure.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-
| governm...
|
| https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/21/politics/walensky-
| comment...
| Terr_ wrote:
| So the "government propaganda" is... unprepared
| statements by individuals being live-interviewed, which
| were so unusual and against accepted-truth that they
| provoked immediate and public correction from mainstream
| news outlets, as well as corrections (or at least
| distancing) by the rest of the government?
|
| Even a brief look at the context shows those are
| "exceptions that prove the rule."
|
| I'm sure that _for some people_ those incidents defined
| "what [they knew] the government said", but that would
| probably be because they put themselves into media-
| bubbles which excluded the greater mass of nuanced (and
| boring) health information, allowing only the "OMG look
| at this" scornful submissions by their Facebook friends.
| ralph84 wrote:
| > So the "government propaganda" is... unprepared
| statements by individuals
|
| Yes, when those individuals are the president of the US
| and the director of the CDC presenting half-truths and
| exaggerations to further their agenda, that is textbook
| government propaganda.
| barbazoo wrote:
| For context, that was in June 2021, in August 2021 he
| said this:
|
| > Let me be clear: There are cases where vaccinated
| people do get COVID-19, but they are far less common than
| unvaccinated people getting COVID-19. And most
| importantly, their conditions are far less severe.
|
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-
| remarks/20...
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > I don't know where people got the idea that vaccines
| prevent all infection, transmissions and symptoms. They were
| never about that. If you can achieve it, fantastic! But not
| all pathogens are this easy.
|
| Well the COVID vaccines were presented to the public as a
| panacea that would end the pandemic. While many of the
| scientific discussions were more nuanced, headlines in the
| popular press announcing vaccines were close to euphoric in
| many cases. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/vaccin
| es-...
| Krssst wrote:
| In my understanding the COVID vaccines were quite efficient
| against infection for the original strain. But then the virus
| mutated and it lost a lot of that (still a very efficient
| against ending up in an hospital bed).
|
| Vaccine deniers seem to often forget about the timeline.
| outworlder wrote:
| > The populations of the industrialized nations have forgotten
| (or never known at all) what all these diseases used to do, and
| imagine things like measles, pertussis, and rubella to be breezy
| little fevers that used to make kids miss a day or two of school
| before they were all good as new.
|
| By being old enough and being born in a developing country I was
| able to witness some of those diseases. Pertussis and measles
| were still around when I was a kid.
|
| Polio was the worst. There were plenty of survivors so, if we use
| the modern discourse that focus on deaths, Polio was fine. Except
| it was not fine. People with limbs so atrophied that they were
| skin and bone. Not even quadriplegics look so emaciated; I don't
| know what the mechanism is. Those were the lucky ones.
|
| I was vaccinated, thankfully. I was also vaccinated for smallpox
| and I have the scar. Can you imagine a modern vaccine that leaves
| a scar? People would go apeshit. Except that everyone had it, it
| would be odd if you didn't, so no one gave it a second thought.
| The polio vaccine could even, in rare cases, cause polio. And yet
| people were lining up to get it early in the morning as soon as
| the government-run clinics opened. Why? Because they witnessed
| first hand how bad it was.
|
| I can't even think of any medications that are more scrutinized
| than vaccines. If we applied the same rules everywhere else, we
| would have no medications available for headaches. NSAIDs are
| awfully dangerous compared to vaccines, and yet they are
| available over the counter. People seem to think their risk is
| worth it to get rid of pain. I don't know why vaccines are viewed
| differently.
|
| > The HPV vaccination campaign was the subject of a dramatic
| recent report from Scotland, showing that not one single case of
| cervical cancer has been diagnosed so far in women who got the
| shots at a young enough age
|
| Holy crap.
|
| Side note: it's been approved for people up to 45 years of age.
| I'm going to look into that while I still can.
|
| The article also did not touch on the new research on mRNA
| vaccines for other conditions, including some forms of cancer. We
| now have a very precise instrument we can use to create all sorts
| of therapies. The idea of using chicken eggs looks kinda barbaric
| in comparison.
| nop_slide wrote:
| I got Pertussis at 16 (DTaP only lasts 10 yesrs), it was the
| scariest disease I've had in my 30 year life.
|
| I coughed so hard I cracked ribs, and also couldn't catch my
| breath after coughing (hence "whooping cough") that I passed
| out a few times.
|
| Shit lasted for almost a month. Get vaccinated!
| orwin wrote:
| Lucky you, I got it at ~5. My mother reacted badly to
| hepatitis vaccine, decided her children won't be vaccinated
| (had to do the measles one), I got the whooping cough, passed
| out after a week, got diagnosed, I think it lasted 3 months
| but honestly the only memory I have left is passing out in
| school, then being alone in my bed, quarantined. All of us
| got our vaccine after that.
| ClownsAbound wrote:
| Brett Weinstein posted this in X / Twitter recently: "They love
| the mRNA technology because, A, it's cheap to produce. I mean,
| basically, you can produce a new vaccine by typing a sequence
| into a computer. Yeah. Right? B, it allows them to take a bunch
| of shots that are arduous to produce, streamline their production
| so it's economically tremendously efficient. C, you can produce
| shots for a whole bunch of new things without having to come up
| with some uh new protocol for producing them because it's all the
| same. D, you can tell the FDA well this is the same shot you've
| already authorized. So we're just gonna. It's already been proven
| to be the same technology. Yeah, we'll just test the antigen this
| time, see if the antigen causes any special problems. So your
| control group and your treatment group are both gonna have the
| pathologies of the mRNA platform. They're gonna disappear because
| you get the same amount of pathology in both groups. So anyway,
| it's a dream come true for the ruthless bastards in pharma. It's
| a nightmare from the point of view of patients. Absolute
| nightmare"
| ClownsAbound wrote:
| Another good quote from Bret Weinstein a few days ago: "There is
| a, and the oldest vaccine technology involves using an attenuated
| pathogen, that is to say a relative of the thing that actually
| threatens your health and giving you an infection. Your body
| responds to infections. It's one of the things it does very well.
| So if it has an infection, it can learn the antigen that it is
| supposed to be targeting. Now vaccine manufacturers do not like
| this technology. And there are reasons they don't like it. One,
| it's cumbersome, right? You have to actually cultivate these
| organisms and because you're cultivating them, they can evolve.
| They can evolve once the patient has the infection. So it's a
| little bit scary, that technology. But what they've replaced it
| with is an inferior technology where they separate the antigens,
| where you're getting something inert and dead and the body does
| not respond to it like an infection and therefore does not
| develop the immunity, right? They're weak is what they are. And
| as a trick to trigger the immune system to react as if it has an
| infection, they're basically giving you a chemical sickness,
| right? They're tricking your body into thinking it's sick so that
| the body then is in surveillance mode trying to figure out which
| of the particles that are present are actually hostile with no
| mechanism for telling it how to distinguish between ragweed and
| some antigen of a virus. So of course this would cause autoimmune
| disorders, allergies, it will cause dysregulation of that entire
| extremely elegant system. So I guess what I'm realizing, and I'm
| still somewhere in this trajectory, is that much of what allows
| us to protect our own health are based on assumptions that simply
| are not met by the mechanisms that are being employed, right? You
| think that there is a system that tests vaccines carefully to
| make sure that nothing is injected into you for which the benefit
| does not exceed the cost. That is simply not true. These things
| are being created because they're profitable. They are being
| created in ways that are economically efficient at arbitrary cost
| to human health."
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The big three reasons infectious disease isn't keeping human
| populations at 1850 levels are: (A) soap and disinfectants across
| the board, (B) vaccines and (C) antibiotics.
|
| Yes, there have been problems in all these areas - some cleaning
| agents turned out to be carcinogenic or caused liver damage and
| other issues, overuse of antibiotics gave rise to antibiotic
| resistance in many infectious microbes, and some vaccines have
| been ineffective, induced too many negative side effects, or were
| subject to contamination due to poor manufacturing and
| distribution policies.
|
| With Covid vaccines, looking at the references in the above
| publication is illuminating. Here's an inital 2020
| safety/efficacy claim:
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
|
| > "BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95%
| credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6). Similar vaccine efficacy
| (generally 90 to 100%) was observed across subgroups defined by
| age, sex, race, ethnicity, baseline body-mass index, and the
| presence of coexisting conditions."
|
| By 2023, it was clear the rapid mutation rate of the virus had
| lead to many infections of fully vaccinated individuals, indeed
| it may have become entirely ineffective in preventing infection,
| though possibly reducing symptom severity:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482361/
|
| > "...the bivalent-vaccinated group had a slightly but
| statistically significantly higher infection rate than the
| unvaccinated group in the statewide category and the age >=50
| years category. However, in the older age category (>=65 years),
| there was no significant difference in infection rates between
| the two groups. This suggests that while the bivalent vaccine
| might offer protection against severe outcomes, it may not
| significantly reduce the risk of infections entirely."
|
| Since many health professionals and affiliated media were
| initially claiming that only the unvaccinated were at risk for
| Covid infection, this later reversal understandably may have
| reduced public trust in future pronouncements about vaccine
| efficacy, which is unfortunate. (IMO side effects were mininal
| compared to eg smallpox vaccine, claims of widespread vaccine
| injury seem grossly overblown)
|
| The lesson is that rushing vaccine development in response to an
| emergency didn't work out quite as advertised, and really isn't
| the best way to develop vaccines.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > That's what makes anti-vaccine activism so frustrating.
|
| People are quick to label others "anti-vaxx" but it ain't always
| so. A friend of mine got, on purpose, several vaccines when Covid
| hit, as a middle finger to those prone to call others "anti-
| vaxx". But he did _not_ get the Covid "vaccine". A smart guy
| btw: several of you here have worked for him and he did a nice
| exit in 2022 (before the tech crash).
|
| I deeply regret conceding to peer pressure and getting that mRNA
| shot: _" we lied about just about everything, and conveniently
| didn't tell you there were nano structures forming from the mRNA
| vaccine after it got injected"_. There are many studies on the
| subject. This was _not_ mentioned.
|
| Covid-19 is not just a lab leak: it's man-made using gain-of-
| function research.
|
| They lied about that. They lied about masks not working "so that
| people wouldn't all go out and buy all the masks" to then force
| us to wear masks for months.
|
| And the "Covid is going to mutate into a yet more deadly virus"
| never happened either.
|
| So lies, lies, and more lies.
|
| Thankfully there are still a few real investigative journalists
| out there. The fiasco and the coverup were insane. Several people
| lied in front of congress and belong in jail.
|
| So proponent of that horrible, totalitarian, nano-structure-
| assembling mRNA vaccine (which, once again, I got): get lost.
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