Comments
I found the intro very confusing, tbh.
Particularly the "no increased risk of all-cause mortality". I mean, if we assume the vaccines worked, we'd certainly expect a decreased risk of all-case mortality (because "all-case mortality" certainly includes "covid mortality"). Reading "no increase" seems to imply "it doesn't change anything". Yeah, technically, the sentence does not say that ("no increase" can mean "no decrease" or "no change").
You have to read further below to get what should be the real message on all-cause-mortality: "Vaccinated individuals had [...] a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality". I think that should've been in the first 1-2 sentences.
By eddieroger 2025-12-0515:582 reply Frame it as the safety of the vaccine, not the efficacy of it. If it was about efficacy, it would lead with the 25% lower risk because of COVID safety. But, these days, there are people who think vaccines are dangerous just because, so saying that taking the vaccine or not has equal mortality puts that to rest (or at least does for those who find science real).
The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths.
Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.
This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.
Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.
The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors.
Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.
People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.
Another factor that may play a role: the people who chose not to take the vaccine may be prone to taking bad decisions more broadly, leading to a higher mortality rate.
By oldgradstudent 2025-12-0620:15 If true, that means the groups are different in many other aspects other than the vaccine.
The study does not control for the differences. No causality can be inferred.
By disgruntledphd2 2025-12-0611:00 I mean, it's plausibly something around trust in medical authorities which correlates with both vaccine and other treatment refusal.
Covid hospitalizations where half in the vaccinated group (as % of pop) than unvaccinated. That's extremely desirable when you're in a situation where you have do dedicate whole wings (and then some) of hospitals to a singular disease.
Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.
I am speaking about what the paper shows.
There are other sources of evidence for efficacy. This paper is not a very strong source of evidence for efficacy due to some obvious uncontrolled difference between groups.
By gopher_space 2025-12-0518:321 reply I wouldn't bother critiquing methodology without current, masters-level experience in the domain. I make incorrect assumptions when I'm even narrowly outside my own lane, and end up asking questions that clearly demonstrate e.g. my inability to parse fig. 4a.
By zosima 2025-12-0519:17 I wouldn't bother commenting if I were hallucinating figures. There is no figure 4a.
If you look at figure 4 in the supplemental material you also see, per your expertise, that covid vaccine protects against traumatic injury. However even adjusting for the protective effect against traumatic injury there is still quite a large protective effect against all-cause mortality. So the beneficial effect of the vaccine is not solely caused by its protective effect against traumatic injury.
Or it could be, bold proposition I know, that there is a difference between the groups that both protects against traumatic injury and protects against all-cause mortality, independently of the vaccine.
By _DeadFred_ 2025-12-0518:16 OP's point was more 'How would you measure unvaccinated people that lived because vaccinated people weren't filling the ER, so there were beds/staff to spare'?
That unvaxed outcome would need to go in the 'vaxed lives saved' column somehow, or else it looks like 'outcomes were the same either way' because the lives saved from vaccination spill over into the non-vaxed group because the vaccine prevented the healthcare system from melting down.
By stocksinsmocks 2025-12-0517:471 reply I don’t think it’s possible to know anything conclusive about the safety for a few decades and a generation or two of affected kids can be observed. Given that finding harm would embarrass important aristocrats, I don’t think that evidence would ever be found in the foreseeable future. That mRNA and lipid nano particles were never found to be safe until the exact moment of crisis is awfully convenient for its investors.
I say decades because of the study below. Certainly, the authors could have published it for engagement bait or malice or some reason.
https://www.gavinpublishers.com/article/view/detection-of-pf...
By vineyardmike 2025-12-0517:572 reply Where do you get decades? That study says 200 days.
I interpret this as the comment saying "we won't know how this affected things until decades from now." Which can likely be attributed to existing vaccine skepticism and is unlikely to result in them changing their opinion in the next ever.
What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID. They feel like they're being asked something risky in a vacuum, when in fact, they're being asked for something with (as best as we can tell) limited risk against a backdrop of a dangerous virus that killed millions and caused a global pandemic.
Even if they could demonstrably prove the vaccine created a higher risk of outcomes for people who took it, the risk compared to getting COVID is de minimus, and the likelihood of getting COVID is high. I would be surprised if there was a significant population of people who had avoided it at this point.
By ifyoubuildit 2025-12-0523:193 reply > What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID
Why do people still frame this as either/or? How many people out there didn't get covid after they got some number of shots?
The only real scenario is covid with n shots, where n >= 0. In other words, when you got covid, how many shots had you gotten.
(Not anti vax myself, though generally avoid whatever drugs I reasonably can)
By array_key_first 2025-12-060:58 We know that the vaccines lower your risk of bad outcomes if you get covid.
By blackqueeriroh 2025-12-065:12 Many people have never had Covid.
By stocksinsmocks 2025-12-0518:071 reply You really aren’t going to know how this MRNA in egg and sperm cells are going to affect offspring until you have offspring to observe. Effects like wolbachia could take multiple generations to observe.
mRNA can't cause wolbachia. Wolbachia is a bacterium that actually lives inside cells and gets transmitted through eggs to offspring. it's a persistent organism that reproduces. There's not a way for mRNA to grow bacteria.
mRNA is just a molecule that breaks down, and the mRNA in these vaccines is extremely fragile and temporary. Once injected it enters whatever cells are nearby (muscle cells)and ribosomes read it to produce the inert spike protein. The mRNA itself is gone within hours. Your cells have enzymes specifically designed to break down RNA because cells naturally produce and dispose of mRNA constantly as part of normal function.
The mRNA in vaccines never enters the cell nucleus where DNA is stored, so it can't integrate into your genome or affect reproductive cells in that way. And it doesn't replicate itself either.
And millions of babies have been born to vaccinated parents by now. If the effects you are talking about were even possible they would definitely have shown up by now.
By stocksinsmocks 2025-12-0521:222 reply I’m not suggesting comirnanty is wolbachia. If there is reproductive harm, or reproductive harm passed on to children, then we will not know for a long time.
I believe that you’re well read on the CDC’s messaging on this topic. I’d like to bring to your attention that glyphosate was scientifically shown to pose no harm, but that key paper was retracted 25 years later. Pfizer is making over $10B/yr on comirnanty and at one point it was over $50B. Would you lie for that kind of money? Could you imagine someone who would?
By array_key_first 2025-12-061:001 reply Yes, but imagine how much money hospitals can make if they can convince idiots to skip affordable preventable medicine and instead pay tens of thousands for hospital stays.
The money arguments are a double edged sword.
By stocksinsmocks 2025-12-080:391 reply Hospitals were paid much more for the Covid patients that died than those who lived. There’s some very strong circumstantial evidence about this driving treatment protocols.
By array_key_first 2025-12-0820:56 Right, okay, according to who? Because this doesn't make any sense with how insurance works.
By velcrovan 2025-12-0719:24 For any given reality, someone will benefit.
I too despise the existence of a profit motive in public health, the sane (not perfect) alternative is to nationalize medicine, not to ban it because the profit motive makes it suspect.
I'd like to bring to your attention that many people on the internet have made claims which were later retracted, thus your comment is unreliable.
By rainsford 2025-12-0614:50 Obviously there are confounding variables besides vaccination status, but I find it pretty compelling that the decrease in COVID mortality among the vaccinated group was significantly larger than the decrease in all-cause mortality of that group. This suggests whatever the difference was between the two groups, besides vaccination, either had a much larger impact on COVID than other causes of death or that the vaccine had some positive impact.
One example of the former explanation I could imagine is that people who got vaccinated against COVID were probably also more likely to take other preventative measures, like wearing a mask or avoiding larger crowds of people. Those precautions would be more likely to be effective against a contagious disease like COVID but less likely to protect them against some other causes of death like heart disease.
I'm not sure how likely I find that as an explanation compared to the alternative that the vaccines provide at least some level of protection. My observation was that widespread measures specifically meant to defend against COVID, like masking and social distancing, largely went away well before the end of the time period covered by this study, at least in the US.
Amusingly, I suspect the anti-vax contingent would likely be bothered by data suggesting anything the COVID vaccinated group was doing differently protected against COVID, since their position seems to largely be that not only is the COVID vaccine useless, but so are any other measures meant to reduce the spread.
By disgruntledphd2 2025-12-0610:56 I think that's mostly fair, but given that we can't randomly assign vaccine administration this sort of study is the best we're gonna get.
Like, the major takeaway is that the vaccine is safe, I think that we've already established that it works to reduce Covid hospitalisations.
By jmull 2025-12-0517:38 > but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious
That’s directly contradicted by the results of the study. E.g.,
“Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76])…”
It’s pretty clear a lot of unvaccinated people who died of covid would be alive today had they gotten vaccinated.
(I would point out the current yearly vaccine they are putting out is potentially a different story since covid is changing and so is the vaccine. I’d talk to my dr about whether to get that or not.)
The simple explanation is that the causal agent for the excees of the non-covid deaths is the same SARS-CoV2 virus, but death comes later and not at the acute phase of the disease.
By underlipton 2025-12-0516:50 There was a study that showed that cancer patients who receive a MRNA COVID vaccine live longer. This could also be for extrinsic reasons, but IIRC the study considered the reason to be a pronounced immune response that also attacked cancer cells.
So there's a chance that the vaccine provokes a general immune response that's protective against a number of mortality-causing issues.
By DebtDeflation 2025-12-0516:313 reply A 25% reduction is huge, even if you account for the fact that people who get vaccines tend to be more health conscious to begin with, when you consider that outside of the very sick and very old Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.
1 out of 100 when billions are getting it is gonna be a large number. Mortality rate has gone down substantially since the vaccines.
By altcognito 2025-12-0516:35 > Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.
I hate it when blanket statements like this creep in.
Which Covid? The initial version was definitely more deadly than later versions.
What about future covids? Are you willing to guarantee every version of covid from here on out will be less deadly? It is the general case to be true, but it is not some sort of law.
By a_cardboard_box 2025-12-0516:141 reply Yes, but they incorrectly called it all-cause mortality under Findings. "Mortality" on it's own would be fine. "Mortality from other causes" would be better.
By disgruntledphd2 2025-12-0611:051 reply It's a term of art. The audience for this paper would understand, rather like many denizens of HN know what TDD is.
By a_cardboard_box 2025-12-0615:061 reply The paper doesn't even use it consistently. At first it uses "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID", and then in the results section it uses the same phrase to mean "all causes including COVID". The whole purpose of terms of art is to increase the specificity of language, but they're not doing that here. Their usage of the term is confusing.
Edit: I'm wrong. I could have sworn it said that the groups had similar all-cause mortality, but it doesn't.
By Timon3 2025-12-0615:35 Where do you see them using "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID" in the beginning? I skimmed over all uses of the term before the "Results" chapter, none of them seem to exclude COVID deaths?
By groestl 2025-12-0516:23 A common pattern you'd find in reliable research papers is that authors tend to understate their findings, which in practice strengthens the impact of their conclusions.
The problem is that 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality is too big to be explained solely by the vaccine. The reduction is similar when excluding deaths due to COVID-19, and is probably driven by people who got the vaccine being different in some ways that the observational study isn’t controlling for.
By hannob 2025-12-0518:08 Yeah, but there's a plausible explanation for this: Likely, people who get vaccinated also are more likely to do other things to improve their health.
By bluGill 2025-12-0517:30 If you don't get the covid vaccine you probably do other risky things. Not get other vaccines, don't see the doctor about various issues...
By TheBigSalad 2025-12-0517:52 Could it mean that lots of Covid deaths are being attributed to other things?
By bloqs 2025-12-0520:34 Not getting the vaccine is statisically correlated with distrust in traditional medicine, and suceptibility to giving undue attention and credit to unfounded and unsound practices.
This is a general problem in many technical fields.
People in a technical field, learn to "chunk" complex phrases. Their natural communication style becomes complex. Which makes them hard to understand to those outside of the field. If they want to be understood, the solution isn't to try to educate the world. It is to educate themselves. To learn how to write simply and directly.
Depending on the readability test used, the section up to "Introduction" - which is supposed to be readable - is somewhere between advanced high school and university. See https://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_... or other free tools to test it. That's bad. The percentage of Americans who can read this text is below the percentage who could read, say, a plain language version written in Spanish. We should expect people to misunderstand. We should not expect this paper to convince.
By acjohnson55 2025-12-0519:331 reply Papers like this are designed to fit into the conventions that allow knowledge to compound. Not that the conventions are perfect at doing this.
I would suggest that rather than changing this convention in a big way, there needs to be good pathways for communicating the most important takeaways to the general public. Unfortunately, there's kind of a chasm between academia and popular science.
With all due respect, I disagree.
You are providing the standard excuse. It is our job to advance knowledge. It is someone else's job to communicate it to a broader audience. It's just too bad that nobody is stepping up and doing that other job.
I don't buy it. In my experience, most scientific papers can easily be rewritten into simpler language. The act of trying to do so often catches mistakes - thereby immediately improving how well we are advancing knowledge. The resulting paper is easier to read. This makes it more likely to become better known. Both within its subfield, and in a broader audience.
The habit of doing this makes us better communicators. Which also helps academics in various other parts of their job. Including teaching the next generation.
Furthermore, easier to read papers are easier for science popularizers to understand. Which makes it more likely that the work will be popularized.
Yes, it is tempting for academics to deflect responsibility for their role in being understandable. But it is a mistake for them to do so. Their ability to communicate in an understandable way is their responsibility. The few that take up that responsibility benefit themselves.
By acjohnson55 2025-12-0523:24 I'm not saying it's someone else's job to communicate to a lay audience. Simply that a research paper doesn't have to be a self-contained device for doing that and accurately describing the research to people who already have a lot of background knowledge on the topic and methods.
I guess I will say that I have thought for a long time that serializing research into linear documents seems archaic at this point.
By creer 2025-12-068:51 It would be nice if academics would move to BOTH publishing the technical write up, AND a more understandable write up of their interpretation of the result (in more detail than the one liner which is in all abstracts.)
The technical writeup is necessary. It's what spells out what they specifically claim to have done, and the specific results. "Specific" being highly technical and fundamental in the scientific community understanding the paper correctly. In particular, the in-depth statistics of many such papers is simply too complex for most of the population to understand, and that's fine. The technical write-up uses terms of art which do not mean what civilians read in them. (And while it's hard to do studies larger than this one, this is all the more essential in smaller studies.)
The interpretation would be useful because it's just plain dangerous to let your PR department write that. Even if they consult you. And it is interesting to focus on what the scientists themselves think they achieved. Both what they deliberately went for, and any ancillary result they think they notice. In this case in particular, they are very focused on this safety aspect, and they seem to not want to give too much attention to the efficacy aspect (which they probably did not plan for and is then suspect.)
Eh, it's an important point. "It made COVID things much better, and it didn't make other unrelated things worse."
Looking at Table 2 and as the name suggests, COVID is included in "all-cause" mortality. Your statement does not follow because it could have made COVID outcomes better yet "all-other" causes worse for a neutral "no increase in all-cause". If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases. That being said, as much as I think this is over-stated, this is very much a correlation thing because we all know that unvaccinated individuals live their lives differently compared to vaccinated individuals. Even accounting for similar statistics, the one group is prone to higher death rates not because they are unvaccinated but because of the reason they are unvaccinated.
Read again.
> After standardizing the characteristics of vaccinated individuals to those of unvaccinated individuals, we observed a 25% lower standardized incidence of all-cause death in vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated ones…
> Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
> All-cause mortality was lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination, regardless of the dose administered, compared with the control periods...
You should read my statement again.
If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%, you will still have a reduction in "all-cause" mortality yet your chances of dying by anything else has increased. I already said Table 2 does not show this is happening and in fact vaccinated individuals have better outcomes across the board. However, people are drawing this conclusion (even though they are correct) incorrectly without looking at the data.
> If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%…
But you already agreed this is not the case, in your comment:
> If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases.
GP is saying that indicates there is some other factor involved in reducing all-cause mortality, since it is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases, and that therefore the sampling of these populations is not random.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164643
By velcrovan 2025-12-0518:44 > It is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases,
By now, this is not a reasonable belief. We know that COVID can cause cardiovascular damage, kidney injury, diabetes, neurological problems, and systemic inflammation, all of which increase mortality risk from other causes. It only makes sense that preventing or reducing the severity of COVID infection prevents those downstream complications and reduces all-cause mortality.
By purpleflame1257 2025-12-0516:361 reply It's interesting that they leave things at 18-59. Do they later stratify into 18-28, 29-38, 39-48, 48-58?
By amluto 2025-12-0519:00 > "no increased risk of all-cause mortality"
My take is not quite as charitable as most of the comments, although my objection only barely applies to this particular paper. Biomedical research has long tradition of a very specific type of analysis: hypothesis testing. Roughly speaking, you make a hypothesis and test your data for compatibility with the hypothesis. In this paper, the authors are comparing two hypotheses: (a) there is an increased risk of all-cause mortality or (b) the increase in risk is zero or negative [0]. And the statement you’re quoting from the conclusion section sure sounds like it’s saying that the authors found that the data was consistent with (b) but not with (a).
Researchers love this. There are lots of papers with fancy-named tests with which one can do this analysis. Regulators often demand it.
And it produces papers that are correct in a fairly literal sense but miss the point entirely. For example, “we found no evidence that vaccines increase the risk of autism”. I, too, can look under my bed or study four people and find no evidence of anything at all about vaccines and autism, and I would be more or less justified in making that claim.
And because of this, you need to read papers very carefully to see what you can actually conclude. “No evidence” means a lot more in a large (“high powered”) study than in a small, weak study.
The right way to do this is something like “we looked at such-and-such data and found, with 95% confidence, that the increase in risk of X is <= 0.2%” or even that “the change in risk is <= -25%” (check out that minus sign!). If I look under my bed, I will find evidence that the increased absolute of autism caused by vaccines is <= 100%, and I didn’t need to study anything to confirm that :)
Fortunately, this particular paper has the silly throwaway starting you’re complaining about in a few places but is otherwise mostly on the right track. Quoting from the Results section:
> Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76]), with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause.
IMO that should have been the headline. The latter sentence there is giving some indication that the result is robust and that the researchers didn’t flub it or get unlucky in quality of their data.
P.S. The fact that the vaccines seemed to reduce the risk is death from causes other than severe covid is interesting. I wonder how much is reducing death from complications of COVID other than “severe covid”, how much is behavioral changes (vaccinated whole socializing more and leaving their houses more), and how much is bizarre off-target effects of the mRNA vaccines. Here’s an example of a surprising off-target benefit that no one understands well:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccines-and-...
[0] I think. I didn’t reread it enough times to rule out the other common test: is the data consistent with the hypothesis that the risk didn’t change at all, which is also sadly common. But I’m moderately sure I’m right in the context of this paper.
By exceptthisthing 2025-12-0516:025 reply Because this whole paper is bullshit and is a bias confirmation report
It assesses persons "who were alive on November 1, 2021"
That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"
Can you see how ridiculous that sounds?
By biophysboy 2025-12-0516:48 No, because the same conditional is applied to both participant groups. Its good to specify a time frame.
While you are being downvoted, this is actually an astute observation. However, your point is working against you in this case. If the vaccine was actually deadly, the unvaccinated individuals who survived the pandemic would be having better health outcomes. This is not what they found. If they included the pandemic in this study, the deaths by COVID would be much worse in the unvaccinated group.
By dwroberts 2025-12-0516:41 > That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"
That’s a nonsense comparison because the thing they are studying is the vaccine, not COVID itself. The vaccine was available at minimum, what, end of 2020? Exposure being defined as first dose May-October 2021 does not seem unreasonable at all (and probably not arbitrarily chosen right - it’s probably something to do with the availability of data)
By gus_massa 2025-12-0516:37 It's a good observation, but I expect that even considering only people alive in 1950, survivors of the Hiroshima bombing or concentration camps (or a few other events), still have long term problems that increase mortality.
By SketchySeaBeast 2025-12-0516:20 I honestly wonder if it's better to flag and downvote into oblivion rather than to engage in good faith. The sibling didn't seem like they were trolling, just misguided, and shutting down discussion doesn't allow for any reflection.
I suppose the problem is that it was unlikely to be productive.
Unfortunately, I don't think any additional evidence will convince vaccine skeptics of the safety of mRNA vaccines
Personally, I am glad to see it. I definitely got vaccinated as soon as I could, but I was also still nervous as there did seem to be some level of reasonable doubt. I would be happy to see more studies confirm what many consider to be obvious.
It's not obvious at all. Many vaccine candidates about previous covirus were rejected because they didn't pass the safetly trial.
The "secret" part is that before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe.
This is discussed too few times.
> before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe
In case this comment has you temporarily hallucinate like it did me, I just looked and was able to confirm what I remembered: the vaccines did undergo trials for efficacy and safety before being approved.
I think the part that people doubt is the highly compressed timeline for approval. Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time. Also during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”. It is actually crazy to think about in retrospect.
> during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
This line of thinking is so odd to me. Would you have preferred communications to use inaccurate, outdated points for the sake of consistency?
When honest interlocutors learn more about something, they communicate details more accurately. What would you have suggested they do instead? Keep in mind that Covid-19 was as new to them as it was to the rest of the world, and they were also learning about it in real time.
> Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time
This also applies to Covid infections in immunologically naive people! The two choices were unvaccinated Covid exposure or vaccinated Covid exposure. It's folly to pretend an imagined third option of zero Covid exposure. Comparing to that fake third option does not make any sense.
I'd like accurate communication from the beginning.
>> “you won’t get sick or spread the disease”
I read that many times. It was a totally unrealistic promise, because not even all the other vaccines do that, even after years of research and improvements. (In particular, here is a big trade off in the inyectable vs oral vaccine for polio.)
Who is the highest ranking person that said it? I guess it was not one of the researchers. Perhaps it was a politician that is probably a lawyer and not a medical doctor, or perhaps a tv show host, or perhaps a random internet commenter. Who hallucinated that?
>> “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
Actually that was what the trials show before the vaccines were approved. I think they had like 50k persons each. The number of deaths was too small to have a statistical significative result in the death toll. It was enough to have a statistical significative reduction of hospitalizations, like a 60% reduction in old style inactivated virus vaccines to 95% in the new style mRNA vaccines. And remember that hospitalization+ventilator is really bad.
> I'd like accurate communication from the beginning.
So you want magic. Got it.
In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.
Even more, perfect understanding of how good our information is at any given point in time is not always going to be available.
There were definitely some failures to communicate well with the public during that time, but demanding that only definite information be communicated, and then never be contradicted, is asking the impossible.
It also really doesn't help that there are so many people who were (and are) just so scared of everything during that time that any information coming out that wasn't 100% unquestionably positive about any new measure to try to improve things would cause them to shun it forever as too dangerous to try.
By gus_massa 2025-12-0616:13 >>>> “you won’t get sick or spread the disease”
> In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.
Even five years ago, everyone that has a minimal knowledge about vaccines understood it was an unrealistic claim, because many of the vaccines don't provide that level of immunity. If you have some free time to go down the rabit hole, you can try to count them in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_policy_of_the_Unit...
So the questions are:
Is that quote real?
Who said that?
---
I was going to hit the "reply" button, but I decided to look in Goggle and found https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/21/politics/walensky-comment... Like 10 worse than what I expected.
By adrianN 2025-12-065:05 I think instead of „magic“ what we should have more of is honesty about uncertainty. The public discourse would be much less toxic if people honestly said that they’re not sure about something and that the policy they advocate might fail to deliver. However such rhetoric is immediately exploited weakness and strongly selected against.
By blub 2025-12-068:17 Comparing accurate communication with magic is nonsense.
Both in Europe and the US, the government screwed up badly both mask strategic stockpiles and procurement. Therefore, the official message was that “masks don’t work”. After they were finally able to procure masks, they magically started working. That is the real magic, not demanding competence for people whose jobs were literally not fucking this up.
Meanwhile China and South Korea were producing and using masks as was normal.
The second magical part is the gaslighting about the performance of institutions tasked with pandemic preparation and about the exaggerated and incompetent government measures like fining people for going outside, forbidding people from going to work without being vaccinated or mandatorily tested each day, etc.
Vaccine safety issues were consistently downplayed by the media and in internet forums like this one. In the end, the EU-CDC published clear information on the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and it was much worse than for mRNA vaccines. One mRNA vaccine was worse than the other.
By vkou 2025-12-0518:13 The timelines were compressed because instead of doing all the safety trials one after the other, they were all done concurrently.
The only people that puts at risk are the trial participants.
By laichzeit0 2025-12-0515:574 reply Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.
doing a double blind study of a vaccine that seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease seems morally questionable
> seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease
not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
By majormajor 2025-12-0516:381 reply > not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first.
For instance, here is the enrollment page for a double-blind study from 2020 for those between 18-55: https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-st...
This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)"
If you look at case rates, hospitalization load, and death rates for summer/fall/winter 2020 pre-vaccine, and compare to the load on the system in summer-2021 and later when people were far more social and active, the economy was starting to recover, then the efficacy of the vaccine was pretty obvious in letting people get out of lockdown without killing hugely more people and overwhelming the healthcare system. And it was tested pre-rollout in double-blind fashion and rolled out in a phased way to the most needy groups first, with monitoring and study of those groups.
What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?
we could let people choose whether to participate, with informed consent. instead of getting them fired for not participating in the experiment.
By raddan 2025-12-0518:06 Did you even follow the link provided? It leads directly to an informed consent page for the study, which was voluntary. You're probably thinking about what happened _after_ these studies found the vaccine to be safe and effective. If you're a doctor or a nurse, you work in a special environment, and if you are turning down a safe and effective vaccine, you are putting your patients at risk. It means that you are unqualified for your job, so yes, you should be fired.
In the US at least, most people are employed "at will" [1], which means that you can be fired for reasons far less egregious than actually putting your patients at risk. Most of the libertarian types here cheer firings for lots of reasons, but for some reason being fired for actually being a health risk is not one of those things. That just makes no sense.
By biophysboy 2025-12-0517:33 morbidity is also bad and should be prevented
By arp242 2025-12-0516:35 Besides, homeopathy has been studied for ages with tons and tons of quality studies.
Did it get rid of all the homeopathic quackery?
They will always have an excuse. If all else fails it'll just be a vague generic "oh yeah, it's just something deeper your science can't measure yet" or something along those lines. The Queen was an amateur hand-waver in comparison.
Never mind it was never very likely to work in the first place, on account of defying basic logic on several levels: like cures like, the whole water memory business, the more you dilute the stronger it becomes – nothing about this makes any sense.
I miss the days when worry about the adverse effects of homeopathy was the top concern...
most of the critics of this particular vaccine are the ones that took it. either the people who got covid anyway or were injured by it.
it was incredibly destructive for trust in the medical establishment to oversell / mandate it and market aggressively as "safe and effective". while most vaccine risks are in the 10s per 100k or 1M, nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.
nearly everybody observed that you still get and spread covid anyway. that is disconnected from the aggressive messaging from the CDC and the fear and shame campaign from the last US administration.
criticism of a specific vaccine or policy does not make someone an anti-vaxxer that moves goalposts. the establishment is responsible for the skepticism it engendered against itself by its hubris
> who got covid anyway
I took it in 2020, and have taken booster shots. I got COVID... This year. I felt like shit for two weeks, was fatigured for a month, and had a lingering cough for two.
Nobody's promised them that they won't get COVID after taking it. What is promised is that on the whole, they'd be less likely to get sick, get milder symptoms if they do get sick, and be less likely to require hospitalization or a mortician if those milder symptoms are still serious.
It was and is safe and effective. You're doing exactly what I'm talking about - moving the goalposts.
If you think they need to be moved some more, I'll point out that the vaccine didn't come with a free pony, either, and that airbags and seatbelts kill ~50 people/year, and that you might still get ran over by a bus even if you look both ways before crossing the street.
Here's Biden in 2021:
> You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-...
Perhaps any statement in that context should be assumed to be oversimplified; but I don't think I can fault someone for taking words to mean what they literally say. The COVID vaccines look great so far on balance, but they absolutely were oversold to the public. We'll pay the price in public confidence for at least a generation.
Could you give the whole paragraph, and not just the last sentence in it?
Ah, heck, I'll do the work of pasting it in.
> But again, one last thing. I — we don’t talk enough to you about this, I don’t think. One last thing that’s really important is: We’re not in a position where we think that any virus — including the Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non — unvaccinated people — the vi- — the various shots that people are getting now cover that. They’re — you’re okay. You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations. -Biden
I'm not sure why out of all that Trump-lite-contradictory rambling (and the massive amounts of other words and ink spilled by both the 2020[1] and the 2021 administrations on this subject), that sentence is the singular, unqualified, pinky-swear blood-pact promise that you think the medical community made to the public regarding the vaccine.
---
As for Walensky:
> Three days later, on April 1, a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments, telling The New York Times “Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during this interview” adding that “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get Covid-19. The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”
If you're only going to listen to the first thing that's said on a subject, and ignore everything that follows, I don't think that sort of approach will serve you very well. For one thing, it'll probably mean that you'll think that people who correct themselves are idiots.
---
[1] Which, if I may remind you, developed, recommended, and rolled out the vaccine and had nothing to do with Biden.
By tripletao 2025-12-065:00 I'm not sure what the rest of the paragraph adds here? Nothing in that qualifies or contradicts the absolute that I quoted. Are you just saying that the statement was so generally inarticulate that any reasonable person should have ignored it completely? That was true here, but that's not great for public confidence either.
I'm aware that the scientific literature told a more nuanced and accurate story, but only a tiny fraction of the population have the skills and time to study that. I don't think you can fault people for trusting their elected leaders; and if you do, then who are you expecting them to trust next time?
> a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments
So after widespread criticism by actual scientists, she didn't even correct herself in her own voice, instead sending an unnamed spokesperson to smooth it over without explicitly acknowledging error. I can't believe you don't see how the damage is done.
By trts 2025-12-0522:07 In a March 29 2021, MSNBC interview, Rochelle Walensky stated publicly that CDC data suggested "vaccinated people do not carry the virus" and "don't get sick". a knowingly false statement at the time and at best an inexcusable error from the head of that agency.
I also had covid this year, zero boosters, had a mild fever and sniffle for two days. not sure what you are demonstrating with this anecdote. or what goalposts you think I moved. the "milder symptom" stuff all came long after it was obvious that the covid shots were not doing what had been promised. that is what I would call moving the goalposts
By blackqueeriroh 2025-12-066:011 reply “nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.”
This is a straight up lie - because “adverse reaction” does not mean “I felt achy for a couple days and maybe had a little fever,” it’s actually a VERY specific term.
But you are trying to peddle falsehoods.
Most people know nobody who “had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots”
By trts 2025-12-0617:38 respectfully it is not a lie, and more than a half a dozen people I know personally lost function of their hands, legs, were hospitalized with myocarditis, had local paralysis/palsy. I personally lost the use of my hand for two months and it took two more years to recover.
and when people like me say things like this, inevitably someone like you comes along to tell them they are dangerous for saying it out loud. In fact, the government was actively censoring people from being able to express this on social media.
By biophysboy 2025-12-0517:48 Establishing a causal graph like this is not realistic for medical studies. Luckily we have multiple RCTs
By LarsDu88 2025-12-0519:00 I did read the book, and the takeaway is that causal disentaglement is hard and a high bar, with even the causal link between cigarette smoking an cancer hard to "prove" until recently
Are there really antivax people that would know the word "covariate?" That's gotta be a small Venn diagram overlap.
By dghlsakjg 2025-12-0518:23 They might know the word. Understanding what it means in context is a different matter.
You see this all the time where people will pick up niche jargon and misapply it.
By biophysboy 2025-12-0516:491 reply Antivaxers surpisingly know quite a lot of lingo. What they lack is an understanding of experimental methods.
I'm fine with vaccines, i just dont want my kids to particpate in the experiemnt for a disease that they have 0% chance of dying from.
By biophysboy 2025-12-0517:39 The case fatality ratio for measles infected children in high-income countries is also low. Nonetheless, we vaccinate children for this infectious disease because morbidity is also bad.
By margalabargala 2025-12-0518:241 reply Which disease is that? I'm not aware of any disease that's commonly vaccinated against that has a 0% death rate in children.
The Covid deaths were measured in thousands before they could find a single individual under 18 yrs old who died from it. The only reason to vaccinate kids was to try to prevent them from spreading it to adults. Right from the beginning (eg. With the cruise ship that was infected), it was extremely obvious that the main factor in survivability was age. The younger you were, the safer it was. Weight was also very important but we learned that later
By margalabargala 2025-12-0520:56 Considering there have been over 7 million deaths directly from covid, saying "covid deaths measured in the thousands before X" is another way of saying "X happened right at the beginning of covid".
Plus, there's a big difference between "young people tend to have less risk of death" and "young people have a 0% chance of death" like the person I replied to claimed.
By biophysboy 2025-12-0520:47 No, we also vaccinate children to prevent non-fatal illness, which is a reasonable choice to make if adverse effects of the vaccine are very small (they are). People get flu shots annually for this same reason.
Edit: I would also add that parents regularly make choices for their children that involve larger amounts of risk.
By ceejayoz 2025-12-0517:08 Sovcits similarly use lots of complicated legal terms.
They just don't use them correctly and/or appropriately.
Unfortunately, one of the only things that is proven to convince vaccine skeptics is when someone from their community dies of a preventable illness.
This is a great book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinforme...
Also, what's the overlap here between people who believe a) the unborn have a "right to life" (or forced birth as some others call it, where the parent has no choice but to take the pregnancy to term and give birth), and b) those who think the parents have every right to decide not to vaccinate their children? If you believe (a), shouldn't you believe (not b)? And if you believe (b), shouldn't you believe (not a)?
Indeed. A lot of antivaxxers mockingly say "my body, my choice" but they are highlighting their own hypocrisy, not anyone else's. One critical difference between the cases is that pregnancy is not contagious.
By mritterhoff 2025-12-0520:47 Agree. Also I don't think any adults were forcibly vaccinated again their will, they just lost out on certain societal privileges.
It seems like even that's not good enough. I have a few skeptics in my family and have had family members die from covid.
By CrossVR 2025-12-0517:40 For a lot of people these aren't rational beliefs, they're beliefs based on appeals to emotion. They will only rationally re-evaluate those beliefs if you change the kind of media they consume.
By tedd4u 2025-12-0519:10 For example:
Parents of Texas child who died of measles stand by decision to not vaccinate
https://abc13.com/post/texas-measles-death-parents-child-die...
By Esophagus4 2025-12-0518:29 Another thing that seemed to work is the unvaccinated getting sick themselves.
2/3 of the unvaccinated COVID patients who were admitted to hospital regretted their decision, declared they would promote the vaccine post-discharge, and declared they would get it post-discharge.
By stackedinserter 2025-12-0516:11 I give you this pill that makes you suffer for a year, but you will not die in 4 years. If it's safe to you, then alcohol and smoking are safe too.
Edit: OTOH that pill will reduce your chance to suffer even more or even die, which is a good thing ofc
By whynotmaybe 2025-12-0516:501 reply I can understand skepticism, notably from a woman I know that had many unwanted bleeding and it seems she was not alone : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584
Although from this study the global vaccine output is positive, the personal one seems negative for a lot of people. Many still got COVID19 and the bleeding issue, but they can't compare to what would have happened without the vaccine.
Notably many for whom the basic understanding of "25% lower risk of all-cause mortality" doesn't mean anything.
- "What is it ? I had 1 chance to 1 million to die but with the vaccine it's 0.75 to 1 million ?"
- "No, out of 22 million vaccinated, 0.4% died but out of 6 million unvaccinated, 0.6% died !"
By magicalist 2025-12-0519:24 > I can understand skepticism, notably from a woman I know that had many unwanted bleeding and it seems she was not alone : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584
From that study:
> Conclusions
> The availability of COVID-19 vaccination was not associated with a change in incidence of medically attended abnormal uterine bleeding in our population of over 79,000 female patients of reproductive age. Additionally, among 2,717 patients with abnormal uterine bleeding diagnoses in the period following COVID-19 vaccine availability, receipt of the vaccine was not associated with greater bleeding severity.
By add-sub-mul-div 2025-12-0515:441 reply Exactly. The "skepticism" was always the point, always the tail wagging the dog.
By exceptthisthing 2025-12-0515:53 [flagged]
By trts 2025-12-0517:10 you never get a second chance to make a first impression
By rich_sasha 2025-12-0517:12 Ultimately, natural selection might do it.
I think people throw these accusations around way too broadly.
There is a small subset of weirdos who think the Covid/mRNA vaccines contain microchips or were designed kill off some percentage of the population.
But I think there's another, much larger group who might care a lot about their health to the point where they don't even drink from plastic bottles, and who when presented with a novel vaccine which was developed and rolled very quickly were hesitant...
Rightly or wrongly, I think these health-conscious people were concerned during Covid by mainstream media orgs frequently broadcasting what can only be described as pro-vax "propaganda"[1], and in some cases state compelled vaccination.
I'm very pro-vax, but I remember at the time (2021) being a bit torn on what I should do. I was in my twenties and already contracted Covid. Did it really make sense for me to take a vaccine when my risk was so low and there were some reports that young men were suffering from myocarditis post-vaccination?
I guess what I'm saying is that I think most reasonable people who may have initially been nervous about the vaccine can look at data like this and feel much more comfortable with the risk profile today. This is exactly the kind of data a lot of people (including myself) wanted when their governments were trying to force them to take these newly developed vaccines.
In my mind it's those on the extreme pro-vaccine and extreme anti-vaccine side in 2021-2022 that were the ones lacking critical thought. The reality was that as a society given the absence of long-term data like this, we were taking a calculated risk. Because even if mRNA vaccines slightly increased all-cause mortality that wouldn't mean the vaccine rollout was a bad thing... Similarly chemo probably great for you either and I'm sure people who undergo chemo unnecessarily suffer from increased morality risk. But if you have cancer or if you're in the middle of a pandemic risk calculations change a little.
The problem with the myocarditis risk in young men is that they undergo exactly the same risk from the actual covid infection. And given the fact that it was already obviously going to be endemic it really wasn't much of a calculation. It was basically: You either roll the dice now or you roll the dice when you inevitably get covid.
some people might like to quantify the risks that may or may not be associated with both in order to make informed decisions
unfortunately that line of reasoning was so censured that people started weaponizing it
I assume that you mean "censored" and not "censured" (different thing), but it was not, in fact, censored. It was entirely in the open.
However, the information was definitely not distilled effectively for the average layperson. I remember thinking at the time that the CDC was seriously ham-handed when it came to communicating with the general public. I even initially blamed the Trump administration, but when the Biden administration took over, they did not improve communication either. My conclusion since then is that the CDC is dominated by academic types--which is largely appropriate given their mission--but that they also put academic types in PR roles, which was a disaster.
By raddan 2025-12-0522:06 Hardly. I heard this “questioning the dominant narrative” over and over again. Disagreement is not censure. As far as I am aware, the only people who faced any penalties at all were doctors who went so far outside the realm of evidence-based medicine that they caused demonstrable harm and therefore had their licenses revoked. Which is good.
I believed in the lab leak theory so for me getting the vaccine was a no brainer. I could get infected by one of two things developed in a lab, only one of which had clinical trails on humans. I went with the clinically tested option.
perfectly understandable and you’ve described a reasonable decision-making process
any reasonable person should be able to recognize that the alternative hypothesis was not an equally accepted decision
many people chose severe penalties rather than participate in a sudden worldwide field trial of mRNA vaccination by indemnified pharmaceutical companies, and in some parts of the world were not even given that choice.
We were also subjected to a sudden worldwide field trial of a novel coronavirus, so it makes sense that it requires a similar response to combat it. I think in any other decade this would've been celebrated as a major scientific achievement.
If the moon landing happened today people would just be cynical about it just being an arms race with the Soviet Union to develop better ICBMs. This is of course true, but it doesn't make the achievement any less impressive.
By binary132 2025-12-0715:26 this doesn’t address my point
again, it is perfectly valid to use this line of reasoning
but we aren’t acknowledging that the alternative hypothesis was not at all tolerated and was heavily penalized for a great many people
By garyrob 2025-12-0516:43 It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy.
I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
By xracy 2025-12-0522:13 "bUT wE StILl DoN't KnoW tHe LOnG TeRM EffECts oF ThE VacCInES."
I swear these folks will be on their death beds 50 years in the future claiming this. There will be no amount of evidence or time that matters to them.
Someone can prove me wrong, and tell me exactly what evidence would convince them that the vaccines are safer than the alternative.
This is the wrong attitude to take to the problem.
While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat.
Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.
By jibal 2025-12-0520:16 Completely wrong about the facts. Long COVID is real and not restricted to those on the left. Right wingers constantly "lament" over all sorts of bogeymen, rarely anything from personal experience. Most talk about vaccine injuries is based on misuse of VAERS.
> lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging
Yes, from right wing media ... which you are echoing. Dead bodies were overflowing and public health officials were acting in good faith to try to deal with it. Right wingers and good faith are complete strangers.
By jmye 2025-12-0516:21 > punitive limitations on dissenting speech
Rank bullshit or whining that people aren’t forced to associate with others against their will - not sure which basis for your statement is worse.
By tjpnz 2025-12-0516:41 Worse it will be used to produce even more disinformation. Most of the stuff I've encountered takes studies like this, misrepresents or outright lies about the findings and includes a link (sometimes working) to the paper which nobody consuming the slop will ever check.
By anthem2025 2025-12-0516:57 [dead]
By drcongo 2025-12-0516:07 [flagged]
By exceptthisthing 2025-12-0515:521 reply [flagged]
By lesuorac 2025-12-0515:58 Your argument is what exactly?
Covid vaccines are unnecessary because we can just infect everybody with covid and the ones that survive don't need one?
By jmye 2025-12-0516:22 “Why didn’t doctors listen to my completely unsourced opinion in their field?! I can write computer programs, don’t they know that!”
You have absolutely no idea what you saw. Sometimes, it’s ok to not have strong opinions about things you know you’re completely unqualified to understand or diagnose.
By liveoneggs 2025-12-0515:55 [flagged]
By infamouscow 2025-12-0515:4412 reply [flagged]
By ceejayoz 2025-12-0516:03 > If the results of this specific study were the opposite, would you behave any different than a skeptic?
This study supports all the other bits of evidence in the same direction; it's consistent with what we know.
Similarly, I'd be somewhat more dubious about even a very well constructed study that declares "there are no people in New York City" than one that found some people there.
Yes, but it would depend on the results.
The problem is that most people are bad at risk assessment. If COVID-19 vaccine increased their risk of premature death by .0000001% they point to that and say sure not taking my risk! Despite the fact that they'd be at much more risk of dying by getting the disease, or just hopping in their car and driving down the street to get a loaf of bread of whatever.
If you showed say, a 1% uptick in mortality that you could attribute to the vaccine, yea that would be a different story. But guess what? We wouldn't* release such a vaccine.
* I add an asterisk here because if it was a 1% uptick in mortality you can think of scenarios like a disease which kills you 50% of the time or something around that range as being a worthwhile trade off for a 1% rate.
By somenameforme 2025-12-0516:531 reply The thing is people 'on the other side' think exactly the same, but come to different conclusions. For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? And what do you think his chances of suffering a significant case of myocarditis or pericarditis from the vaccine is? By "significant" I mean a case that's significant enough to result in active diagnosis - in other words somebody being diagnosed after a visit to an emergency room, as opposed to passive diagnosis where you assess each vaccinated individual to find cases that would otherwise go undetected.
Obviously I'm not comparing apples to apples (side effects from vaccine vs death from COVID) but this again is as explained by your own logic. If we were having a smallpox outbreak (with some strains having upward of 30% mortality rates across all demographics), I'm not going to be concerned about side effects of vaccines short of death. But with the rather low risk profile of people in favorable health/age demographics, the side effects of vaccination become quite relevant. Another issue is that early on it became quite apparent that the vaccines were not stopping people from getting COVID, so it's not like you can really compare vaccine vs covid effects, because the reality is you're probably still going to get COVID (and repeatedly, as it turned out) regardless of vaccination status.
Let's start with this question:
> For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are?
Much more likely than dying from the vaccine.
Also, and this is very important, at the time the vaccine was developed and released to the general public it was even more unknown what the fatality truly would be. We weren't totally sure as a species how the virus might mutate... maybe it would become more deadly? Maybe it would kill young people specifically even if they were otherwise healthy? Maybe by not getting the vaccine with less risk to you as the healthy 20 year old means you get COVID-19 and get "long COVID" (which I'm not sure is a real thing anyway, but I digress) and sure you didn't die but now your life sucks some.
The problem with "the other side"'s line of reasoning is that there was a specific concern with "risk" of the COVID-19 vaccine that didn't translate into practical reality and wasn't being assessed relative to the broader risk of getting COVID-19 itself or other general risks we undertake everyday.
Another way you can slice this up is, well, there's no risk of getting the vaccine, but getting sick sucks so even one day of being sick is well worth getting a shot for just to not get sick. "What about the risk" there's no real risk. If you think there's a risk, the risk is higher for getting COVID or whatever.
It all comes back to this perceived risk of COVID-19 vaccines (thank you to China, Russia, Iran, etc.) and improper assessment of risk.
Relative to getting COVID-19 there was no risk. Relative to the dumb risks people take everyday it is even less risky. The only difference is people are sitting around reading about it on social media and being stupid.
By somenameforme 2025-12-064:381 reply But don't you see that you're immediately resorting to the somewhat misleading arguments that I already preempted? You're engaging in the typical fallacy of vaccine OR covid. When in reality it was clear rather early on that the vaccines were not particularly effective at preventing people from getting COVID, meaning you need to look at getting the vaccine and covid, or covid alone.
And yes the risks are very real. Vaccine induced myocarditis and pericarditis rates in young males are very high, and they can result in heart failure, life long damage, early mortality, and more. And for young males you're looking at multiple significant cases per 10,000. [1] For all cases of myocarditis/pericarditis the rates would be substantially higher yet still since most cases will go undiagnosed. For some contrast, the normal rate of significant side effects in vaccines ranges in the 1:100k to 1000k range.
No, that's a straw man you made up. You very well could not have gotten COVID-19. I didn't get it for about 4 years. Well, at least a symptomatic version. But the chances of getting it were quite high, and you are still neglecting the timeframe in which decisions would have been made based on preliminary data. In other words, it wasn't get vaccine or get COVID-19. It was get the vaccine and most likely prevent getting a very severe bout of COVID-19 if you did in fact get COVID, which the vast majority of Americans did get, or something similar, including those in the age range you specified. Frankly, it seems to me that just not being sick was well worth the risk.
I'm not going to pull a number out of my hat here but I bet the number of people who were in the 19-20 year old range who died from suicide or something after losing their job from getting sick from COVID-19 and not having sick days to take is higher than the number of folks who died from the vaccine.
Even if it turned out that COVID-19 wasn't a big deal for 19/20 year olds and taking the vaccine might cause negative effects, it still doesn't mean that getting the vaccine at the time wasn't the best risk-based decision.
All in all though even if we took at face value your 1:10,000 number that still would be tangential to my original post because you're focusing on one small segment of the population and as folks get older (or younger) their risk profile changes.
By somenameforme 2025-12-0618:251 reply What's a straw man? Following the vaccines, vaccinated people were still getting COVID and indeed dying of COVID. Early on that was disproportionately the elderly as they were who the vaccines were rolled out to first, but nonetheless it was clear that the shots were much more akin to flu shots than e.g. smallpox or polio type vaccines. This is what led to those silly things like the CDC deciding to redefine vaccine on their website to shift vaccination language away from immunity and towards a poorly define "protection" instead.
And the 1:10,000 is not my number. It is the repeatedly verified rates of significant myocarditis and pericarditis, and it's much lower once you filter it down to just younger males since the 1:10000 is for both male and female across a relatively wide age range. It's not tangential, because the entire point of our discussion is that there were rather large groups of people for whom vaccination was, at the bare minimum, an extremely debatable decision.
By SideburnsOfDoom 2025-12-0713:521 reply > the CDC deciding to redefine vaccine
A ridiculous conspiratorial talking point.
> rates of significant myocarditis after vaccination
Absolute straw man, deceptive and one-sided.
> Young people’s risk of developing myocarditis is higher and longer lasting after covid-19 infection than after vaccination against it, the largest study of its kind suggests.
By somenameforme 2025-12-0717:43 I again don't know what you mean. Are you stating that you don't believe that the CDC chose to redefine vaccination to move away from immunity and towards "protection"? Or do you think it had nothing to do with the low efficacy of the vaccines in preventing infection?
The paper you linked to studied a much wider age group and assessed the odds of heart issues from vaccination as being about 1/3rd as high as those from infection. Their estimated rates of vaccine induced heart issues are more than an order of magnitude lower than those for the study I referenced earlier which instead was an overview of studies with more of a focus of vaccination's impact on vulnerable groups.
I'd also add that, as is typical, the study you linked to failed to assess the odds of heart issues were when one was both vaccinated and then later infected, as that is a rather more realistic scenario.
By titzer 2025-12-0515:58 Well blow me down, people being skeptical of a study that defied basically all other Science and goes against our entire understanding of how vaccines and immune systems work? Yeah, of course I'd be skeptical. I'd be interested and I'd read it (!) but yeah, I'd seriously question what was wrong with the study.
That's a false dichotomy.
If the results showed that mRNA vaccines had negative health outcomes, then the obvious next question to ask is "are they worse or better than COVID's health outcomes?". If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot.
The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone. Very similar to the general vaccine skeptic position. It ends up being a moving goalpost as well.
A truth seeking individual realizes that very few things in the world are black and white. They avoid trying to frame things as a black and white. Nobel and villainous framing. If you are truth seeking, you won't try to turn a non-binary evidence into binary thinking.
By CWuestefeld 2025-12-0516:192 reply The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone.
That's not what I've seen. I live in very-red Tennessee. What I see is more like what you said yourself:
If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot.
The conclusion to this (within my bubble) being: since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
By cogman10 2025-12-0516:25 > That's not what I've seen.
It's common enough that there are state legislatures trying to ban mRNA vaccines all together. [1]
> since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
Kids spread covid and no vaccine is 100% effective.
I've not seen any evidence that the vaccine is dangerous to any age group. There is plenty of evidence that COVID is deadly to the very young, the very old, and a bunch of other people (including those with compromised immune systems).
It's exactly the same reason kids should get the flu shot.
That said, there's no requirement anywhere for kids to get either.
[1] https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/idaho/proposed-idaho...
By stetrain 2025-12-0516:22 Who is requiring children to get the COVID vaccine?
By technothrasher 2025-12-0515:501 reply > would you behave any different than a skeptic?
It is unclear what you mean by "skeptic"? Are you speaking of rational skepticism, or reactionary denial?
By SideburnsOfDoom 2025-12-0516:291 reply What if only the second type exists, but they always claim to be the first?
The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism.
It can be really hard to abandon a false belief. Especially if you take the time and effort to shore it up with bad data. It starts with recognizing that everyone, including yourself, is wrong about something.
By SideburnsOfDoom 2025-12-068:471 reply > The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism.
My opinion is that on the specific topic at hand of COVID-19 vaccine "scepticism", we are far past the point of rational scepticism being sustainable.
By cogman10 2025-12-0611:56 I agree.
5 years of vaccination of a large portion of the population with no negative signs in sight is long enough.
The only vapor keeping this alive is anecdotes from confused people or liars about "vaccine injury".
By add-sub-mul-div 2025-12-0515:51 If the results were the opposite they'd be shockingly in conflict with what we've already learned and observed, so yes, we would of course react differently.
By estearum 2025-12-0515:50 But the results weren't the opposite.
One of the upsides of being evidence-driven is it's harder to paint yourself into a corner and put yourself at high risk of having your entire worldview flipped upside down by run of the mill, predictable scientific results.
By and large, consensus views are correct. Only a true idiot would make an identity out of disagreeing with consensus by virtue of it being consensus.
By jandrese 2025-12-0515:54 If the results were that getting the COVID vaccine was going to give you a 70% increased chance of death from COVID I would be outraged, and also quite confused as the real life evidence definitely doesn't point in that direction.
That's the problem with conspiracy theories, as the evidence piles up against them the counterfactual becomes increasingly ridiculous until you're out in the cold with a bunch of nutjobs.
By caconym_ 2025-12-0516:27 People who believe in baseless conspiracy theories have to convince themselves that people who don't are operating in the same epistemic mode, picking and choosing what to believe in order to reinforce their prior beliefs, because the alternative is admitting that those people are operating in a superior epistemic mode where they base their beliefs on most or all of the available evidence (including, in this case, the fact that the """vaxxed""" people they know are all still upright and apparently unharmed after years of predictions to the contrary).
Your comment is a manifestation of this defense mechanism. As real evidence piles up that you've been wrong, you retreat into these bizarre imaginary scenarios in which you've been right the whole time, and by projecting that scenario onto others you imagine yourself vindicated. But the rest of us just think you're nuts.
By arp242 2025-12-0516:06 And if my grandmother had wheels then she'd be a bicycle. You're still trying to spin it as "but you won't be convinced no matter what!" on a story that demonstrates the exact opposite. This is just a pathetic round-about personal attack questioning someone's integrity using a bizarre hypothetical that's the exact opposite of what was actually found.
By exceptthisthing 2025-12-0515:551 reply [flagged]
No not really, since there are other studies that answer the question of vaccine safety and effectiveness in the more emergency scenario of <= Nov 1 2021.
Spoiler: They were also extremely safe and extremely effective then, too.
You can see it unambiguously in county-level excess mortality metrics split by political affiliation in the US. The anti-science right wing political sphere gave us a natural experiment that produced very clear results: lots of people dying before vaccines, then across the board death reduction after vaccines, then a red-blue bifurcation later on, after vaccines were politicized.
By wizzwizz4 2025-12-0517:08 Do you happen to have the metrics to hand? (Perhaps a visualisation, e.g. graphs?)
By ceejayoz 2025-12-0516:50 > MRNA technologies are not "vaccines" per se.
Define vaccine for us.
> The results would likely have been much better had they gone with more traditional vaccine formulations.
Several non-mRNA vaccinations were produced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novavax_COVID-19_vaccine remains available, if you want). They did not have better apparent efficacy.
By runako 2025-12-0517:08 > clogging the circulatory system (hence the uptick in myocarditis and such)
Do people really believe that the Covid vaccines effectively give people sickle cell?
Less snarky -- it has been known for quite some time that infections such as the flu can trigger cardio conditions such as myocarditis. Knowing that, it is unsurprising that people exposed to Covid (vaccinated or not, since a vaccine is never 100% effective) would show similar outcomes.
By on_the_train 2025-12-0516:471 reply Yeah maybe forcing people to get them triggered some kind of skepticism, how about that
By blackqueeriroh 2025-12-066:121 reply Who forced you to get one? Did they hold you down and shove it in your arm?
By on_the_train 2025-12-0714:57 No it was more devious, with the thread of economic annihilation and homelessness.
By bilekas 2025-12-0515:56 Exactly this. Science and evidence is not high on the list of priorities for most skeptics.
By sp4cec0wb0y 2025-12-0516:402 reply "Skeptics" is a very kind term for these people. I bet my life if you polled these people, they have not read any material on the matter.
By ohyoutravel 2025-12-0517:06 “Read?” No. But they probably spend hours listening to Joe Rogan and going down a YouTube antivaxxer rabbit hole.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0516:135 reply FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis [1].
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
By ceejayoz 2025-12-0516:16 FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to a long-term anti-vaxxer at the helm of HHS.
RFK Jr's FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0516:245 reply Are they lying about the deaths? I'm not following.
By carbocation 2025-12-0516:291 reply VAERS cannot be used to establish causality; it cannot correctly be used in the way in which they are purporting to use it[1].
1 = https://www.kff.org/quick-take/fda-memo-linking-covid-vaccin...
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0517:072 reply I respectfully disagree. VAERS can absolutely be used to establish causality when followed by proper expert investigation (which is exactly its purpose as a signal-detection system). The IOM has relied on VAERS data to confirm causal links in 158 vaccine-adverse event pairs, including rotavirus vaccine and intussusception.
Here, FDA career scientists conducted that follow-up: they reviewed 96 child death reports and concluded at least 10 were caused by COVID vaccine myocarditis. That expert finding, not politics, is what triggered the stricter protocols. Healthy skepticism means demanding the full data for review, not preemptively calling it invalid.
Where is that expert finding published?
As far as I have read about the ACIP decisions they didn't actually provide any real data to support this conclusion.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0517:281 reply The FDA memo citing 10 vaccine-caused myocarditis deaths in kids came _after_ the Sept. 2025 ACIP vote. ACIP had already dropped routine vaccination for healthy kids 6 mo-17 yr and moved everyone under 65 to "shared decision-making" (high-risk only) [1]
The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.
Blame NYTimes for leaking the internal memo. In all honesty they should be fined for doing this.
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/acip-recommends-covid19-vacci...
By magicalist 2025-12-0518:511 reply > Blame NYTimes for leaking the internal memo.
Blame them for what, exactly?
We have no information about how highly motivated anti-vaxxers in positions of power over the FDA arrived at this conclusion except "the team has performed an initial analysis"[1]. That's literally it. Your claim that "FDA career scientists" conducted the follow-up can't even be based on this flimsy a statement. Moreover, these deaths have already been investigated by FDA career scientists and found these conclusions unwarranted.
Prasad spends the rest of the memo politically grandstanding (including claiming it was the FDA commissioner that was the hero here, forcing this issue, not FDA career scientists) and dismissing any objections to very obvious arguments against his claim (that have been made and published multiple times over the past five years) without any evidence, while providing no evidence of his own, in a memo addressing FDA career scientists.
Seriously, everyone should go read his memo. It's basically just a shitty antivax substack post, yet will apparently be FDA policy going forward. Another win for meritocracy.
> The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.
The only "claim" here just sounds more official because RFKjr got a bunch of his best antivax buddies to be in charge of the FDA (same with the ACIP). There's no way to even consider it without evidence, so there's nothing to dismiss. Come back when you have something real.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-060:43 The NYT shouldn't get a free pass for publishing a half-baked internal draft memo that even says "initial analysis" and then framing it as settled science. That's how you create panic and confusion, not transparency. Leaking unfinished work and splashing it on the front page is reckless. This should not be allowed.
Calling everyone "anti-vaxxers" is lazy. Most people I know who are skeptical of the covid shots (including plenty of doctors and scientists) are fully vaccinated against measles, polio, tetanus, etc. They just don't trust a product that skipped the usual 5–10 year safety window and got pushed with emergency authorization. That's not "anti-vax", that’s pattern recognition.
The memo is short on data and long on rhetoric, sure. That's exactly why we need the actual underlying review released in full.
You sound really invested in keeping those covid shots on the childhood schedule. Got a big Pfizer position in the 401k? Kidding, obviously. But the "anyone who asks questions is an anti-vaxxer" reflex is exactly why people stopped trusting the institutions in the first place. I respect every real skeptic, on any side. Asking questions is what moves science forward. Blind trust is stagnation.
By carbocation 2025-12-0614:42 > The public database of reported post-vaccination health issues is often misused to sow misinformation.
They aren't lying, in the sense that "Hitler provided free food, transportation, and housing to Europe's Jews" isn't technically a lie.
They are using a technically correct piece of data to deeply mislead you. Other pieces of data readily available to us reveal the sleight of hand.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0517:163 reply Okay, let's run a proof by contradiction.
Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality and the 10 deaths are not real or not proven.
What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
If he just wanted to scare people for no reason, the rational move is to keep repeating “VAERS proves nothing” and change zero policy. That costs nothing and keeps everyone happy. Instead he’s taking massive heat, angering the entire medical establishment, and shrinking the childhood schedule.
Inventing a fake danger out of junk data brings him zero benefit and enormous political cost. That only makes sense if the internal FDA review actually found something real and alarming.
> Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality…
Don't assume. https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html "When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established."
> What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
He gets to restrict vaccines, which is a thing he's wanted to do for decades.
(And not just COVID ones; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-acip-vaccine-panel-hepatiti... happened this morning. Or the spurious claims about Tylenol and autism.)
What about this administration makes you think they care about having their false claims "shredded in 24 hours"?
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0517:412 reply Duh. VAERS guide says raw reports dont 100% prove causality. Nobody claims they do. That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
They could've just said "VAERS proves nothing" and left the recommendation unchanged. Instead they wrote it up, leaked it early, and invited the exact scrutiny you're giving it now.
If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown. They only take that risk if the OBPV analysis actually held up internally.
Edit: as for the Tylenol, see this https://x.com/HHSGov/status/1970868168995536978
By magicalist 2025-12-0519:10 > That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
We don't actually know who at the OBPV did the review (Prasad only referred to the results coming from "the team") and the causal ranking they used included any case where causality was subjectively rated between "certain" and "possible/likely".
We also know that two orders of magnitude more children died from covid than that, and we have strong studies suggesting that myocarditis from covid is both more common and more severe than the observed cases tied to the covid vaccines, two inconvenient stances that Prasad waves away as insufficiently studied, even as he bases his entire position on a subjective review of something by someone, and doesn't bother filling in those blanks.
> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown
He beclowns himself all the time. He himself walked back the Tylenol claim after convincing Trump to talk about it so publicly and standing by him while he did it. Clearly he's not bothered by it.
> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
And we're back at the "Hitler provided free things to Jews" technical truth again. This is likely an accurate statement!
But it'd deeply missing important context.
> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown.
This is likely meaningless to the guy who leaves dead bears in Central Park. The biggest political innovation in the last 50 years or so is the discovery that you can look like a clown without much consequence.
> Edit: as for the Tylenol, see this https://x.com/HHSGov/status/1970868168995536978
I don't recommend eating poop, but that doesn't mean it causes autism.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-060:531 reply Your arguments in a nutshell:
That's literally a conspiracy theory.1. Hitler gave Jews free stuff (technical truth used to mislead) 2. Dead bear guy doesn’t care about looking like a clown 3. Therefore the OBPV causality review must be deceptive sleight-of-handOn Tylenol, FDA did add a "possible association" warning in Sept 2025 (RFK’s call), but even the new label says evidence is only _suggestive_, not proven. Poop analogy fits the anti side better: no, avoiding fever meds won't prevent autism, but it could harm pregnancies.
What exactly is the "important context"?
The sleight of hand is pretending ten kids dying of a rare vaccine side effect is at all surprising when we gave it to billions of people.
Eating pretzels has a more dangerous safety profile than that. People choke to death.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0617:141 reply Is there a strong evidence that kids need it in the first place? A stricter protocol does not dismiss the kids, right?
> Is there a strong evidence that kids need it in the first place?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/fda-officials-have-said...
"U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that since the start of the pandemic, more than 2,000 children age 18 and younger in the U.S. have died from COVID-19. Nearly 700, or about 33%, were less than 1 year old."
Given the effectiveness at preventing death, I'll happily trade 2,000 COVID deaths for 10 myocarditis deaths.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0714:47 Once again, stricter protocols don't dismiss anyone, they adapt to 2025 realities: near-zero child covid deaths monthly vs. rare vax risks. Under the new FDA framework, kids aren't denied shots; they just require a doctor's consult for personalized recs. Your framing sounds like full denial, which is false and amps up the fear.
> What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit?
That's never bothered him before. Vaccines cause autism. WiFi causes DNA changes and opens up the blood-brain barrier allowing toxins into the brain. Chemtrails. HIV is not a major cause of AIDS, with lifestyle and drugs (particularly amyl nitrate) being the major causes.
> Inventing a fake danger out of junk data brings him zero benefit and enormous political cost. That only makes sense if the internal FDA review actually found something real and alarming.
Making fake dangers out of junk data is why he has political power in the first place.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-061:071 reply You just listed a bunch of old-school RFK claims to dismiss him entirely.
That's exactly how people used to shut down anyone questioning:
- Vioxx
- lab leak
- opioids
- PFAS
...all “crazy conspiracy theories” until proven true.
I'm not saying vaccines cause autism (the evidence still doesn't). But stay skeptical, even of your own side. That's how science actually moves forward.
The point is that you were arguing the RFK Jr would not make claims unless they were supported by the evidence. The examples given show that he will in fact make such claims.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0715:13 Past performance is no guarantee of future results: just because RFK Jr. has hyped weak claims before doesn't automatically make this OBPV causality review wrong.
By jibal 2025-12-0520:24 You have no idea what a proof by contradiction is.
By array_key_first 2025-12-061:07 It's RFK Jr., obviously he is lying. He's legitimately insane.
By biophysboy 2025-12-0516:44 They're lying about the risk-benefit. Myocarditis afflicts covid-infected people in greater numbers.
By doctorpangloss 2025-12-0516:381 reply Haha, who has claimed more victims, vaccines or Dunning-Kruger?
By thinkmoore 2025-12-0516:471 reply The political appointees pushing this new policy have not presented any evidence of these deaths beyond a vague assertion in a leaked internal email. They have not provided that evidence to career staffers either.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-0715:10 And that is precisely why not-yet-finalized health-related leaks should not be shared publicly by mainstream media, given that the reaction here seems shaped far more by political allegiance than by the facts themselves.
By inglor_cz 2025-12-0516:43 Pushing covid-19 vaccinations onto kids was always controversial. Covid isn't smallpox, people under 30 only get a serious case very rarely, and the vaccine isn't sterilizing anyway.
If we want to use medications responsibly and rationally, we must be careful about the cost/benefit analysis to the intended recipient groups. It makes great sense to vaccinate old people against Covid and teenagers against HPV. The other way round, much less so.
Of course the vendors will push for blanket use, as they make more money, but that is also the problem.
Both of these are true: 1) Vaccines kill people. 2) Vaccines save lives.
That's why we evaluate relative risk. The vaccines that we recommend are significantly safer than not being vaccinated at all, for the population as a whole.
This isn't limited to vaccines of course. Everything from antibiotics to defibrillators to car airbags can kill people too, but it's extremely rare compared to how often they save lives.
By andreygrehov 2025-12-061:10 Yes. +1. I don't disagree with you at all.
“Doesn’t kill you” is the absolute bare minimum and a very low bar. Because the vaccines were so rushed, it’s still reassuring, but not at all a testament to the safety of mRNA vaccines.
The more interesting studies will be about non-lethal adverse reactions. Changes to menstruation, heart problems, lymph node swelling to name just a few.
By jobs_throwaway 2025-12-0516:571 reply >lymph node swelling
you mean immune response? Which vaccines are supposed to induce?
By blub 2025-12-067:33 No, severe swelling and pain, which in the case I know about resulted in a hospital visit.
More info: https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055...
Fortunately doctors and medical organizations usually take these matters seriously, unlike the average techbro. A good example is how the vaccination recommendations were changed to avoid Moderna for young men to reduce the risk of heart problems.
> no increased risk of all-cause mortality
> study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals
These are the important bits for the non medical folks
By lentil_soup 2025-12-0515:51 And this bit:
"vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality"
> These are the important bits for the non medical folks
Also significantly: "vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause."
By attila-lendvai 2025-12-0516:531 reply that in itself could be healthy user bias (if a healthier subset was taking up the vaccine).
did they control for that?
By biophysboy 2025-12-0516:57 Its a cohort study, so you can only control for confounders. The 2nd paragraph of the discussion addresses the healthy-vaccinee effect you're referring to.
By blindriver 2025-12-0516:022 reply They define unvaccinated as anyone who wasn't vaccinated by Nov 2021. What if they got vaccinated afterwards?
By jmye 2025-12-0516:32 What specific impact do you think that would have on this study? Do you think vaccines prior to Nov-2021 were safe and they were unsafe after? Do you think short term results, captured after Nov-2021 are more relevant than inclusive results prior?
By biophysboy 2025-12-0517:261 reply This is specified as an exclusion criteria in the Supplementary.
By blindriver 2025-12-0517:561 reply No they didn't. They excluded those that got the vaccine pre-May 2021 or those that got another vaccine besides Pfizer or Moderna.
By biophysboy 2025-12-0518:05 The target trial emulation specifies "individuals deceased or vaccinated during the 6 month grace period between the index date and the effective start of follow-up" as an exclusion criteria
