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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2840 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 17, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Can someone understand anti-vaxx perspective on this? Why vaccine lobby does not promote vaccines against HIV? Mainstream science position [is that] existing HIV vaccines are experimental and not effective, but if anti-vaxx believe vaccine lobby promotes ineffecient or harmful vaccines, why would it be an obstacle?

The influence of the vaccine lobby and big pharma is massive, but still far from total. With COVID vaccines, the vaccine companies were protected from any legal liabilty, so they didn't have to worry about little things like mrna vaccines leading to the unplanned production of random proteins that create risk of autoimmunity issues, as reported recently in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06800-3). However, pushing other unsafe vaccines without these liability protections is still risky for these companies.

Overall, these data increase our understanding of how modified ribonucleotides affect the fidelity of mRNA translation, and although there are no adverse outcomes reported from mistranslation of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in humans, these data highlight potential off-target effects for future mRNA-based therapeutics and demonstrate the requirement for sequence optimization.

That risk doesn't seem to have borne out.

No adverse events have been reported from mistranslation because the mistranslation has just now been discovered. But there's plenty to indicate mrna vaccines are not safe.

According to VAERS, the official US vaccine monitoring program, there have been more reported vaccine-related deaths since the introduction of COVID vaccines than from all the other vaccines in the 30 previous years of monitoring, combined. And while VAERS reports are not 100% accurate, they provide a clear picture of relative safety, and VAERS data clearly shows that COVID vaccines have led to more deaths than all other vaccines combined in the last 30 years (check total vaccine-related deaths by year for all vaccines at https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html EDIT: Select "Search CDC Wonder", "VAERS Data Search", under 1., group search results by "Year reported", under 5., select Event category "Death", press "Send" under 5. - the resulting table shows that 70.49% of all reported vaccine-related deaths since 1990 are in the years 2021 and 2021).

Based on clinical trial data, overall mortality in the vaccine group and the unvaccinated control group was statistically equal for mrna vaccines, as opposed to adenovirus vaccines where mortality among the vaccinated was lower, indicating a vaccine risk outweighing the protective effect for mrna vaccines (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37163200/). Put more simply, more people died among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated in the clinical trials used to approve the mrna vaccines.

Clinical trial data also shows increased risk of serious adverse events for mrna vaccines, outweighing risk of severe COVID in younger population groups: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283.

And that's just a few of the data points we now have that indicate that the mrna vaccines are dangerous, so I'd say the risk has definitely borne out.

Regardless, a medical product that leads to the unplanned production of random proteins within the body would put the company producing it at extreme risk of legal action without the immunities granted to COVID vaccine manufacturers.

VAERS doesn't report vaccine-related deaths. It reports post-vaccine deaths. The easiest way for those to skyrocket is to suddenly administer a lot more vaccines to a much older population.

I understand what you are saying, although I don't think it's completely true: the VAERS form asks you to report a vaccine-related adverse event, not simply that someone died post-vaccination. Also, old people were regularly given at least flu vaccines prior to COVID, so the effect you describe of old people coincidentally dying after vaccine administration was at least partially present before COVID, so I don't think that this is a sufficient explanation for the massive increase.

The current form specifically says "Please report all significant adverse events that occur after vaccination of adults and children, even if you are not sure whether the vaccine caused the adverse event." Healthcare providers are only "required by law to report to VAERS:

  • Any adverse event listed in the VAERS Table of Reportable Events Following Vaccination that occurs within the specified time period after vaccinations
  • An adverse event listed by the vaccine manufacturer as a contraindication to further doses of the vaccine"

(where that Table is basically "things we have a causal mechanism for, if seen within typically one week"), but are still "strongly encouraged to report to VAERS:

  • Any adverse event that occurs after the administration of a vaccine licensed in the United States, whether it is or is not clear that a vaccine caused the adverse event"

Also, old people were regularly given at least flu vaccines prior to COVID, so the effect you describe of old people coincidentally dying after vaccine administration was at least partially present before COVID, so I don't think that this is a sufficient explanation for the massive increase.

That's a very good point ... but the implicit assumption here is that healthcare providers were, for that vaccine, using VAERS that way. That's easy enough to check to back-of-napkin accuracy levels: in the US we administer flu shots to about 50% of the population each year, and we have around 60K deaths per week. Are we seeing the 30K "died within a week after a flu shot" base rate? Not only are we not within napkin-margin of that, we're a couple orders of magnitude too low. We're too low for the discrepancy to even be just "let's not give a flu shot to someone circling the drain" selection bias, which makes me suspect the alternative hypothesis: "nobody even thinks to blame the flu shot". But replace the flu shot with a brand-new politically-charged vaccine and it would be reasonable for the reporting rate to jump from negligible up to 30% - that'd be the responsible thing to do, even if you don't have any real suspicions, just to make it easier for researchers to possibly tease any signal out of the noise later.

the VAERS form asks you to report a vaccine-related adverse event, not simply that someone died post-vaccination.

There is no plausible way for an individual to distinguish between these two.

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