I'm in Pfizer's COVID vaccine trial, ask me anything.

[Carp]

Ah...Whatcha know ah-boot that? You and your universal free health care....😋
I'm still trying to get an appointment with my local PCP....😖

[MAr]

I want to commend Axel for his job moderating this thread. Having missed several of these posts, I wish I had been here first.

Some of you know better, and that makes it worse.

[Diomedes]

Fubarious specifically responded on early treatment. The fact is we’ve gotten a TON better at treating covid in the last year and a half.

Past infection confers resistance that is much weaker than the vaccine, especially against variants different from the one you were infected with.

more specifically, a single infection let’s you respond effectively, but doesn’t confer *protective* immunity (explained above).

We know there are long term effects of covid. We’ve been working on this type of vaccine for a decade or more, with no documented long term side effects.

[sniper97]

How do we know the vaccine is safe? It has been tested for 9 months. How do we know there are not long term affects?

Having actually had covid, pretty sure I have immunity and am not spreading the virus.

I hope the vaccines work..

No one has touched on the US neglecting early treatment options.

And I am back to looking at paintball markers

[Axel]

The cognitive dissonance required to latch onto every obscure side effect and breakthrough case as an excuse to refuse vaccination while simultaneously ignoring 600k dead Americans, plus untold serious cases and hospitalizations--alongside the well-documented long-term effects of the actual virus--simply demonstrates an acute case of confirmation bias and an inability to grasp cost/benefit analysis or risk mitigation strategy.

Anyone claiming the vaccines are untested and ineffective, against stacks of published data to the contrary; or questioning the need to research and vaccinate against a pandemic that has killed tens of millions globally, is an intellectual lost cause. You guys are here in this thread arguing with an actual phase 3 trial volunteer that the vaccines are "untested". Incredible.

[Diomedes]

the vaccines are not keeping people safe

The risk reduction of symptomatic infection is 95% two weeks after the second shot. The risk reduction of hospitalization and death is even greater.

One common mistake people make is called the “base rate fallacy”, which is ignoring the % of people in different groups when saying “X percent of people in group A were whatever”. So like if 75% of the population is vaccinated, if the vaccines did nothing, what % of cases would we expect to see among the vaccinated? Should be about 75%. If instead we see, say, 5%, or 10% of total cases are among the vaccinated (it’s a lot lower than that, but just for example), that shows how effective the vaccine is at preventing infection.

So yes, there are breakthrough cases. On average they are less severe, but they occur. No vaccine prevents 100% of infections. But these are particularly, fantastically effective.

[Fubarius]

From the article:

According to the Israeli Ministry of Health registry, by the end of April 2021, a total of 397 fully vaccinated patients were hospitalized with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) after their second vaccine dose – with 234 of them suffering severe COVID-19 and 90 of them succumbing to the disease.

Hospitalized after 2nd vacine dose. Also strange that the articles coming out of Israel don't match what is happening in the US.

No, these are breakthrough cases. As in people who got the vaccine (which isn't perfect of course, nobody says it is), who had underlying conditions and compromised immune systems (as clearly stated in the article), and then afterwards caught the virus from the outside.

Which really drives home the importance of herd immunity to drive down the overall infection rate to protect these people with underlying conditions and compromised immune systems where the vaccine will be less effective.

Also, why are we not treating covid early to reduce the death rate?

Simple, we are. Heck, I remember seeing some article about it last week. But from an infection spreading point of view at that point the damage is already done. It's not when someone ends up in the hospital that they're spreading the disease around, it's the week or two before when they feel just a bit under the weather.

[sniper97]

Dude, did you even READ that article? No where at all was there even a suggestion that vaccines were a cause of death in any of those cases.

That entire article is really about comorbidities, as in preexisting conditions that makes someone more susceptible to diseases anyways. "hypertension, diabetes, heart failure, chronic kidney diseases, chronic lung diseases, dementia and cancer" for example, and that was copy/pasted directly from the article. Also in the article, 40% of the cases studied were immunocompromised. The kind of thing that makes a vaccine, which triggers an immune response, less effective.


Remember folks, everything shared on social media is a lie.

From the article:

According to the Israeli Ministry of Health registry, by the end of April 2021, a total of 397 fully vaccinated patients were hospitalized with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) after their second vaccine dose – with 234 of them suffering severe COVID-19 and 90 of them succumbing to the disease.

Hospitalized after 2nd vacine dose. Also strange that the articles coming out of Israel don't match what is happening in the US.

Also, why are we not treating covid early to reduce the death rate?

[lew]

Please get vaccinated, y'all. Keep yourself safe, keep the people around you who can't get vaccinated safe.

That, right there, is the key: between the low efficacy rates and the limited clinical testing, the vaccines ARE NOT keeping people safe, nevermind what health risks may arise out of this.

Last year, something like 87,000 papers and studies appeared about COVID. Seems a bit out of proportion when there are FAR more serious diseases to tackle. All those resources devoted to a lame virus with a paltry mortality rate, even less amongst those without comorbidities? We'd have malaria eradicated in no time using a small percentage of those resources.

[Fubarius]

https://www.news-medical.net/amp/new...mpromised.aspx

Deaths from the vaccine...

Dude, did you even READ that article? No where at all was there even a suggestion that vaccines were a cause of death in any of those cases.

That entire article is really about comorbidities, as in preexisting conditions that makes someone more susceptible to diseases anyways. "hypertension, diabetes, heart failure, chronic kidney diseases, chronic lung diseases, dementia and cancer" for example, and that was copy/pasted directly from the article. Also in the article, 40% of the cases studied were immunocompromised. The kind of thing that makes a vaccine, which triggers an immune response, less effective.


Remember folks, everything shared on social media is a lie.

[sniper97]

https://www.news-medical.net/amp/new...mpromised.aspx

Deaths from the vaccine...

[sniper97]

I have a friend, his wife is a speech therapist at a local hospital, she has applied for a religious exemption,. if denied, she is going to resign. I asked why, her reply was an uptick in stroke patients in the last 3 months, all vaccinated.

Vaccinated are getting covid again, in Israel, 50% of Vaccinated are getting covid again

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bus...e-2021-6%3famp

And in the US

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/17/3-fu...for-covid.html

Bottom line: untested and health risks are unknown. To get emergency use approval, there can not be any other means to treat, this is why early treatments that could save lives are/were ignored. Johnson and Johnson chose to not go with a mRNA vaccine.

[Fubarius]

I sometimes wonder if we need to shift the marketing on the vaccines a bit. Right now it mostly Defensive. Get the vaccinated to protect yourself and those around you.

But some people do seem to react negatively to defensive measures. They're "strong", so they don't need protection. Suggesting they do need protection is taken as an insult. Only the "weak" need to be protected. The second part of the current marketing might convince them, but the first part actively pushes them away.

Others are assholes, and of course don't care about other people so the second part has no effect on them.

So lets market vaccines as a strong Offense. This is viral Target Practice. I've already gotten my second batch of targets injected* and my Fully Armed and Operational immune system is all primed up to Viciously Slaughter any poor weak viruses that dare violated my Personal Perimeter. Boo fricken Yah.



*Technically it's instructions for my body to make it's own targets, but you get the idea.

[Diomedes]

New post because different thing, but Abby and I crossed over to the booster trial, and we both got our first shots this week. Judging by how I'm feeling today, I got the real deal, and my B cells are NOT happy about it. The point of the booster trial is to determine if a booster between 6 and 12 months from the 2nd shot reduces risk of infection compared to just the first two shots.

Read on for some fun biology.

When you get a first vaccine dose, or an actual infection, your body activates B cells, which make antibodies (your body does other stuff, too, but for now we just care about the B cells). That takes a couple of weeks to ramp up, which is why you get sick the first time you're exposed to something. But then you have memory B cells on hand, so the next time...

When you're exposed again, you respond faster - days instead of weeks to pump out those antibodies (thank you, memory cells). But you probably didn't have any antibodies already hanging out, so you're kind of racing with the virus - do you ramp up the antibodies before it gets a toehold or not? So it's possible to get sick after that first dose or exposure, but will very likely be less severe. But! After that second vaccine dose, you make a TON of antibodies, and the thing is they don't dissipate after a few weeks. Instead, the actual antibodies stick around for months, or even years. And *that's* awesome, because it means as soon as the virus gets into your body, it's immediately swarmed by antibodies, which means the chance of getting an infection after that second does is WAY lower compared to just one dose.

In general, the antibody levels will drop off over time. But since we've never vaccinated against this virus before, we don't know what that timeframe is. Is it 6 months? Probably not - it seems like antibody levels stay pretty high. 12 months? Not sure yet, since we don't have very many people 12 months past their second shot. So what we're doing with the booster trial is giving a 3rd dose in that 6-12 month range to determine 1) if that leads to a bump in immune response, specifically the level of protective antibodies present, and 2) if a booster reduces the infection rate among vaccinated people. We'll know soon! And that that'll guide how we design the vaccine regimen going forward.

[Diomedes]

The first reason the vaccine is necessary is that we're in the middle of a global viral pandemic, millions of people have died, and the way to stop it is for everyone who can get vaccinated to get vaccinated. Treatment is fine but it doesn't actually solve the provlem, Preventing infections in the first place is how we end the pandemic, and only vaccines do that.

The second reason is that *millions of people* cannot get vaccinated, many of whom are immunocompromised and therefore at extremely high risk from COVID? What of them? Too bad? No. The way to protect the most vulnable populations is for *everyone* to get vaccinated, preventing the virus from propagating through the population. You've all probably heard the phrase "herd immunity" by now. That's the endgame. Once we hit herd immunity, the virus peters out because it simply can't spread. That protections *everyone*, whether you're healthy or not, vaccinated or not. That *ends the pandemic*.


I'll address of couple of specific points here as well.

I don't get a flu shot, why would I get this new unvetted flu shot?

1. You should get a flu shot, to protect yourself and the vulnerable people from influenza.

2. This isn't "unvetted". The clinical trials involved hundreds of thousands of people around the world. And prior this these specific vaccines, we'd been working on, testing, and vetting mRNA and viral vector vaccines for a decade. The fact is, in terms of side effects and reactions, they're the safest kinds of vaccines we've yet developed.

3. This isn't a flu shot. Completely different technology. Not only do the new vaccines elicit a more robust immune response (leading to more robust protection), they do so with few side effects, because the way the vaccines are made just involves fewer components than inactivated or subunit vaccines.

So Id rather personally take my chances with the virus that has a 1% kill rate, vs the vaccine that isnt clinically tested.

Already covered "isn't clinically tested" above. I would love to know where people got that idea. I'm hoping this one goes away once Pfizer and Moderna get full, non-emergency approval later this year.

But to the first point, don't forget the significant percentage of COVID patients who recover from the acute illness but have significant long-term symptoms. And that over the same time-frame, there are *not* long-term side effects from the vaccines. So you shouldn't be comparing "zero death rate and unknown long-term rate" to "1% death rate". The relevant comparison is "zero death rate and no known long term effects" to "1% death rate and significant chance of documented long-term effects".

But the fact that unvaccinated people are told to continue wearing masks is only proving to be punishme t to try to force more vaccines.

Unvaccinated people are spreading the virus around, of *course* they ought to continue wearing masks. This is common sense. Part of the upside with the vaccines is that you *don't* have to mask anymore because of the vastly reduced change of contracting and spreading the virus. Not zero, but significantly reduced.

At this point, in the U.S., we have 2 types of people, vavcinated people ( supposedly immune and free to run around) and people willing to take the risk, so why the need to keep putting one of those in groups down?

The unvaccinated are not just putting themselves at risk. They're putting cancer patients at risk. They're putting organ recipients at risk. They're putting *my young children* at risk. That's the big thing - consenting adults can take whatever risks they want when it comes to vaccination. But that does *not* give them a green light to put *other people, who cannot consent to the risk, at risk*.

As someone whos worn a mask for 10+ hours a day, 5 days a week at work, Im pretty burnt out on this whole thing. My work has recently allowed unvaccinated people to remove their masks, but threatened termination if unvaccinated people remove their masks. I dont understand it. Feels pretty discriminitory to me, and the tone of society isnt helping. Im just burnt out on this hyper fearmongering crusade.

It's not fearmongering, it's epidemiology. If you don't want to wear a mask all the time (and who does?), the solution to that problem is available in just about any CVS, Walgreens, etc. But if you don't want to do that, then that's a decision you can make, but recognize that you're potentially able to spread the virus to other people, so there are rules in place to reduce that likelihood.

If the vax works, then who cares about the unvaccinated?

Let's start with this: The vaccines work, *really* well. That out of the way, who cares about the unvaccinated? Well, first, how about people who have friends, family, loved ones, etc, who *cannot get vaccinated*, even if they want to? Remember, even if 100% of people who could get vaccinated actually do, there'd still be millions who cannot. Who cares about them? Everyone, hopefully.

But there have been some really crazy side-effects associated with this mRNA one that makes me hesitant.

The rate of side-effects have been lower than most other vaccines, and most haven't been severe at all.

I've made it this far without catching covid. So, do I really need it?

Haven't been in a car accident yet, do I really need to wear my seatbelt?


One more thing I want to note: Almost every COVID hospitalization and death right now are among unvaccinated people. For the most recent reporting interval from Maryland (I forget if that's the month of June, or two week, or whatever), for example, 95% of cases, 93% of hospitalization, and 100% of deaths (and that's not rounded, it's literally 100% of deaths) were among unvaccinated people. In LA right now, every COVID patient in a county hospital is unvaccinated. So at this point, if you are eligible for vaccination, this pandemic is optional. But it's *not* optional for people who can't get vaccinated. Keep that in mind.

Please get vaccinated, y'all. Keep yourself safe, keep the people around you who can't get vaccinated safe.