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.
"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.