The biggest reason the under 5s vaccine is taking so long is that they don't suffer severe enough symptoms that they can easily test the efficacy of the virus. The same issue was there with the 5-11s but pharma, CDC, & FDA just glossed over that to approve the vaccines.
>The biggest reason the under 5s vaccine is taking so long is that they don't suffer severe enough symptoms that they can easily test the efficacy of the virus.
How does anyone convince themselves that this is actually a problem?
Especially when the vaccine no longer prevents catching the virus or transmitting it.
What remaining benefit are people so eager to confer upon their toddlers?
And of course you don't want to infect your child with a disease that has long term consequences which we are still learning about. Diabetes hit the news recently in the US, but it is actually been known for a while in other countries.
Not for kids under 5. That's why it's not approved.
>And of course you don't want to infect your child with a disease
Breakthrough cases are so common now that the media refuses to use the term anymore. That (lack-of) "preventing-infection" efficacy is baked into the <5 study that showed no benefit.
>that has long term consequences which we are still learning about.
Why is this a valid concern, but potential long-term effects of the vaccines aren't? Especially the known risk of inflammation in still-growing bodies and especially in developing hearts.
>>Vaccines still lower disease severity.
>Not for kids under 5. That's why it's not approved.
Wrong. Per the Pfizer press release [0], the immunogenicity analysis of the trial failed in children ages 2 to 4, but succeeded in children ages six months to two years. Given the small dose (3ug) in that study cohort, there was probably not enough rna in the vaccine for the 2-4 age group to show any effect.
>Why is this a valid concern, but potential long-term effects of the vaccines aren't? Especially the known risk of inflammation in still-growing bodies and especially in developing hearts.
The risk of developing myocarditis from the vaccine is about 100-150 in 5 million [1]. The risk of developing myocarditis from COVID-19 is about 150 in 100,000 [2]. I know I'm picking the vaccine for my child.
And what’s the likelihood of a young child developing myocarditis from COVID? You can’t apply whole population statistics to children blindly. If COVID has shown us anything it’s that diseases can discriminate.
I’m all for getting kids vaccinated when it’s deemed safe and effective (my daughter got vaccinated the first week it was available). But the risk to kids is quite low.
The first diagram in the first study you referenced [1] puts the observed rate of myocarditis among patients -without- COVID at 450 per 5 million (9 per 100k). That is much higher than the rate of myocarditis among the entire vaccinated Israeli [2] cohort (125 per 5 million) you mentioned.
The issue is that you're not comparing apples to apples. The Israeli data is looking at the entire population that received the vaccine. The COVID study is only looking at hospitalized patients with/without COVID which is a subset of the entire population restricted entirely to those experiencing the most severe symptoms.
This is not an easy problem to solve. A more apples to apples comparison [3] puts the COVID:vaccine myocarditis ratio at about 6:1, but it also suffers from a bias. In order to measure those rates they relied on the population that tested positive for COVID. This excludes the population of individuals which were infected with COVID but did not received a diagnosis who presumably also had a near 0 rate of myocarditis. This bias [presumably] becomes more pronounced at lower age groups where COVID displays milder symptoms making it less likely to end up diagnosed.
Finally, there is also the consideration that while the vaccines have not yet changed - COVID has. And its likely that the omicron strain will have a different distribution of side effects. It's a difficult problem to solve, and conflicts of interest abound make it all even more challenging.
To be legally 2g compliant I need to boost every 4 months. Apparently the risk for inflammation might even get higher with each boost. If I'd catch COVID every 2 years or so how much does my risk rise for every infection?
We do have knowledge about long-term effects from other coronaviruses (SARS-CoV-1 and MERS).
Despite its name, SARS-CoV-2 is not strictly a "respiratory virus". While it is spread airborne, it attacks multiple tissues besides the respiratory system, and causes multi-system dysfunction (including but not limited to MIS-C, type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, acute kidney injury, erectile dysfunction, ...). Many of the damages are immune-mediated, which is in line with what we know about T1D and celiac as autoimmune disorders.
Case in point: fully vaccinated boys without medical comorbidities in the US between ages 12 and 17 from January to June 2021 got myocarditis at 370–610% (ages 12–15) / 210–350% (12–17) higher rates than their risk of COVID-19 hospitalization.
It doesn't do as good a job as it used to, but we never had a vaccine that was 100% effective at doing either of those things. It's always been a numbers game where vaccines simply increased the odds in your favor. Before delta the vaccines gave a huge boost to your odds of not catching covid at all, but now with omicron vaccines only provide a small boost. Even now it's still better to use vaccines to increase your changes against catching the virus even though the vaccines are most effective at preventing death and hospitalization.
I was responding to a comment which said "the fact, that the 'Vaccine' no longer prevents catching the virus or transmitting it."
My problem with that statement is that it wasn't a fact. The vaccines do prevent catching the virus, just no where near as well as they used to and even at their best they never eliminated the risk of catching and transmitting the virus.
It sucks that the new variants are able to overcome so much of the protection we had from vaccines, but we always knew there was a risk that would happen if we allowed the virus to spread uncontrolled. We didn't do enough to keep the number of infections down and evolution did its thing resulting in poorer vaccine performance.
I really hope that adjustments are able to made to existing vaccines to compensate or new vaccines are developed which do a better job, but it's going to be an arms race until people stop passing this virus around by the millions every day giving it more opportunity to mutate and spread again.
Right now, the vaccines are still the best defense we have. 30% is a hard number to hear when we had 90% but 30% of 7.9 billion people is 2,370,000,000 so it can still prevent a whole lot of infections in the world and if we work harder to bring the number of infections down hopefully we can prevent things getting much worse. My biggest fear was that some variant would evade the protections we have entirely and negate the lessons we've learned in treating the sick and we'd be right back to where we were early 2020. That's still a possibility we have to be ready to face.
If you're concerned about the long term effects of the vaccine, you should be double concerned about the long term effects of the much more complex and much less understood virus.
Not necessarily, there have been reports of people being infected via central air units in large building (apartments, condos, etc.).
Albeit, I do not believe it is that common, it's still possible. However, if you isolated in a remote location in the woods miles away from humanity, then perhaps you'd be safe, I suppose.
It’s pretty uncommon for multi tenant dwellings to share a common air ducting system, at least in newer buildings. I live in an apartment and my “across the hall” neighbors did get COVID, no issues for me.
I accept that it's entirely possible that 30 years down the line we'll discover some horrific thing we've all done to ourselves by taking the vaccines. What I can say however is that we don't have any evidence that suggests that we will see major problems in the future caused by the vaccines.
What we do have evidence for are future problems caused by these coronavirus infections along with a long list of immediate problems like deaths, severe (sometimes life altering) symptoms which can at times persist for weeks, months, and years, healthcare systems being overwhelmed preventing or delaying access to care and making accessing health services more risky, etc.
If you have to choose between getting a vaccine which appears to be perfectly safe but maybe could cause harm at some point in the future, and not getting it which we know does cause harm now and is very likely to cause harm in the future the choice is pretty clear. We can only deal with the evidence we have today and our best understanding of our current situation.
Especially when the vaccines benefit us not only by keeping us healthier and helping to eliminate the strain on our healthcare systems, but they are also our best bet to help reduce the need for social restrictions and disruptions in education and the economy.
There's still always that chance that the vaccines will have some negative impact on us later, but anyone in the future looking back and seeing our current situation won't have to wonder "What were they thinking taking their chances with this new vaccine!" It should be very clear to them that because we had no indication that there would be problems with the vaccine and because the vaccines were our best option to keep ourselves and each other healthy in the face of current problems and known future problems caused by the virus it was perfectly reasonable to take the chance on the vaccines and that doing so saved many lives and prevented many problems.
And I hope that should we have to deal with any future consequences from these vaccines that we can once again turn to medical science to find the best available option to treat those problems using the best understanding of them we have at the time. A huge percentage of the global population will be impacted after all so once again we'll be in a position where the entire world has an incentive to work together to find a solution which will hopefully go even smoother next time following the lessons learned here and now.
With more research and time things could change, but until there are indications that the vaccines could cause more harm than the known harms of the virus the vaccines will remain the smartest option we have today, no matter how tragic things turn out decades later.
> I accept that it's entirely possible that 30 years down the line we'll discover some horrific thing we've all done to ourselves by taking the vaccines. What I can say however is that we don't have any evidence that suggests that we will see major problems in the future caused by the vaccines.
This is enough for me to avoid them. I didn’t read the rest because it’s a short essay.
I suspect that these numbers are probably correct for Delta. For Omicron, the active cases are nearly uniformly distributed with respect to vaccination rates. It still helps to reduce hospitalization rates however which is good.
I wonder if the early data has been proven wrong or if something is wonky about Alberta. At even 30% effectiveness you’d expect to see a big gap between unvaccinated and vaccinated new cases.
Weirdly near the bottom of your link they show nearly 90% effectiveness against all the variants of concern, but omicron isn’t listed. It seems like the vaccines would have to be negatively effective against omicron for all the other data to work out, though.
That certainly used to be the case. In mid December for example (i.e. around the time the PBS article was written) active cases were roughly evenly split between unvaccinated and vaccinated. This is in a highly vaccinated population (85% of 12+, 73% total - out of 4.5M) so prevalence in the unvaccinated group was 3-4X higher than vaccinated at that time.
It seems unlikely that the Alberta population is experiencing a significantly different pandemic than neighbouring regions (demographics and responses are largely the same). I also wouldn't conclude from this data that vaccines are negatively effective as hospitalization rates are lower in the vaccinated group.
> It seems like the vaccines would have to be negatively effective against omicron for all the other data to work out, though.
If you search hard enough (and quickly enough, they’ll likely be removed soon as they’re anti-narrative) you’ll find articles of people discussing exactly this. That the vaccine actually increases your chance of infection.
You can find anything online if you search hard enough. That doesn’t mean it’s true. It probably means you’re actively seeking out bias-confirming articles.
> (and quickly enough, they’ll likely be removed soon as they’re anti-narrative)
And now it’s full on conspiracy theory. This stuff is nuts. People like Alex Jones loudly put forward blatant lies that are “anti-narrative” and no one shuts them down. Why does every group imagine they are persecuted?
> you’ll find articles of people discussing exactly this. That the vaccine actually increases your chance of infection.
I would be interested in any relevant reputable articles showing this, but I’m pretty certain there are none.
It's not conspiracy theorist BS to suggest Google shapes search results for various reasons, to include politics. They been forced to admit as much. And before you use the confirmation bias argument, I'm pro-vax and all in favor of as many boosters as they offer.
It’s conspiracy theory to suggest without evidence that “anti-narrative” information is being “removed”. Yes, big tech is certainly shaping results, but they’re doing that in both directions. They aren’t simply suppressing data they (or the hypothetical overlords) disagree with. They are feeding the info that people want. (Which is still bad)
The existence of that article in the New York Times would certainly seem to indicate a lack of suppression.
I do appreciate the link, though. That’s interesting and I hadn’t heard that was a concern. I wonder if there is science evidence that or if it’s hypothetical. The article doesn’t indicate one way or the other unless I missed it.
I will note it took me some time to find the article (I knew it existed because I'd read it when it came out). Google very nearly refused to do anything but send me links about how important it is to get boosters.
I don't know a ton about the science behind it other than some teams in Israel seem to have pretty strong feelings about it (more pointed than what's in the NYT article), but in my quick search I didn't see them in the search results.
With regards to search shaping, it's pretty easy to see: just Google image search "black inventors" then "white inventors". Also try "black family" then "white family". I'm not claiming any kind of oppression here, just noting that one of the sets of results looks like a Benetton-style diversity ad, while the other just has black people. I find it difficult to believe this was an organic result that wasn't explicitly influenced behind the scenes.
> With regards to search shaping, it's pretty easy to see: just Google image search "black inventors" then "white inventors". Also try "black family" then "white family". I'm not claiming any kind of oppression here, just noting that one of the sets of results looks like a Benetton-style diversity ad, while the other just has black people. I find it difficult to believe this was an organic result that wasn't explicitly influenced behind the scenes.
You could be right. I certainly see that “white family” involves a fair number of pictures of non-white folks. Individually the results all make sense (one from an article called “my white family”, stock photo “interracial black white family”, another about from an article about adopting a white child), but it’s odd that “black family” doesn’t have the same.
At the same time, it’s entirely plausible that this is just surfacing biases in the input. Maybe articles about families that aren’t just white have higher page rank? Maybe it’s something else. It’s interesting, but I’m doubtful it’s intentional (but it could be). If Google wanted to push a bias, it would make a lot more sense to push it on the unqualified “family” or “inventors”.
“White inventors” showing some black inventors makes a lot of sense given popular articles like “The iconic American inventor is still a white male” that specifically discuss non-white inventors.
> Especially when the vaccine no longer prevents catching the virus or transmitting it.
The vaccines never stopped catching or transmission... they lessen the chances of you developing severe symptoms, your immune system still has to work.
Vaccines were more effective at preventing infection, but their effectiveness in that area has declined with newer variants. Lessening the length and severity of symptoms also plays some role in reducing transmission since coughing, sneezing, and runny noses are a great way to spew virus into the world around you.
Although I hope we will see vaccines that do a better job at preventing infection and transmission the benefits we're getting from them right now are enough that everyone who can should be vaccinated and boosted as needed to maintain those benefits.
Well Virtue with a capital 'V' is one big one! And of course they're an excellent source of revenue for Pfizer et al. You wouldn't want to risk it would you?
-- writing this while my toddler is banished from daycare for 10 days because a single kid there tested positive.
Having your children’s lungs scarred to 20% function and not getting to realize it’s even happened until they start a sport or something doesn’t sound fun to me, perhaps that’s why.
Citation please. What children had this happened to? You can’t throw out fear mongering claims about terrible outcomes with no data.
Also, are you aware that children sometimes die from RSV and even the common cold? The problem COVID vaccines for kids are facing is that the problems from COVID in that age are so infrequent that they are essentially in the noise.
I think the very young child (<18 months) is at higher risk, though.
The success we’re talking about was an analytical measurement of the antigen response in the body. It wasn’t lack of symptoms which ruled that phase a failure.
That is incorrect, the decision making numbers used to test vaccine effectiveness having nothing to do with lab antigen numbers, they are based on how much symptomatic illness is avoided. All of the results such as as 95%-96% efficacy for Phizer and Moderna and 66% for J&J are based on the % reduction of symptomatic illness only. Not the reduction in actual illness or based on lab tests of antigen response.
I believe you are incorrect. What you say was true for the initial adult trials but many recommendations for boosters and lower age groups have been based on antibody response, not clinical outcomes.
Correct or incorrect is sort of irrelevant, because it's a problem itself if they aren't including severity of symptoms in the study.
If they are ignoring symptoms to approve a vaccine who's primary remaining benefit is ... reducing severity of symptoms ... then how exactly has the trial proved anything?
Since antibodies are no longer a reliable indicator of immunity or of preventing transmission, then reduced severity is the primary remaining benefit.
Ideally they'd be looking at a cumulative risk/prevention assessment, but I don't see how they do that while excluding observed symptoms.
If they are using antibody levels as a proxy for this when they could just ... directly observe symptoms... then there would be a bigger problem with the study than just a failure to show sufficient efficacy.
It's just a fine line between arguing what would justify FDA "approval" vs what merits have changed that actually increase the risk-versus-reward assessment.
Put another way, when the biggest excuse for not getting vaccinated was "it's experimental and not approved", it became a straw-man-esque "gotcha-trap" of a battle to achieve "approval", even though that approval process looked nothing like any before it (no matter how many times "full fda approval" is repeated).
When the metric becomes the goal, it's no longer a metric, and all that.
We get bogged down arguing whether criteria of a definition or standard are being met, while the regulators end up just redefining things.
And we're supposed to pretend the teacher applying a curved grading scale actually represents a difference in the students performance.
I've read that the pfizer study compared rates of positive test cases between the two groups.
BUT, the tests were administered based on self-reported symptoms which were then evaluated by a staff member to decide whether a test was warranted. This absolutely blew my mind.
This kind of avoidable subjective decision making should not be happening in a clinical trial. All participants should have been tested at regular intervals.
Equally... that when they repeat it and get different numbers, the failed trial will be ignored in favor of the passing trial, without first invalidating the previous results[0], and without using any increased burden of proof.
Passed+Failed = "Passed!"
[0] There will be a reason given to ignore that first trial, it just likely won't be a good one.
> The biggest reason the under 5s vaccine is taking so long is that they don't suffer severe enough symptoms that they can easily test the efficacy of the virus.
Do you have a source on that?
My understanding is the reason it's taking so long is 1) an abundance of caution because the risk/reward calculation is different and 2) young children's immune systems don't work the same as adults').
Don't have nordic study but here's NEJM Israeli one from the other day:
"In our study, definite or probable cases of myocarditis among persons between the ages of 16 and 19 years within 21 days after the second vaccine dose occurred in approximately 1 of 6637 male recipients"
"In our study, definite or probable cases of myocarditis among persons between the ages of 16 and 19 years within 21 days after the second vaccine dose occurred in approximately 1 of 6637 male recipients and in 1 of 99,853 female recipients."
Moderna shot is worse then for boys. What again is the rush to vaccinate the lowest risk age group?
You really don’t have time to wait 5 years for ”complete” results.
People don’t understand basic math and threat modeling.
How likely you are going to get covid and how serious it can be (for you and others)?
How likely you get something serious from vaccine (only you) but most likely avoid serious covid (and spread it less to others)?
Of course, forced vaccine might look bad from very selfish perspective, but benefits from bigger picture are obvious even with side effects.
> What again is the rush to vaccinate the lowest risk age group?
Because they still contribute to chain of transmission to the most vulnerable members of society, likely in a disproportional way since younger members of society tend to socialize more. Fighting a virus is a collective action. In order to stop transmission to the vulnerable members, you need to cut edges along all paths through the graph. Furthermore, additional spread, even among healthy people with no side effects, increases the probability of mutations that lead to more fit variants capable of causing even more sickness and death.
Vaccinated people can still get infected and transmit the virus to others, with or without mutations. The idea that vaccinated people are ‘safe to be around’ is an outdated fantasy.
I never said it stopped all transmission, but it will stop a large fraction of it. We're playing games of probability. Anybody that deals in absolutes is living in a fantasy world.
The theory of vaccinating people to protect others is taking another hit.
It looks more that we should focus on proposing the vaccine to the people at risk (clearly identified, >65 years old, or multiple co-morbidity) for their own survival
They have already mentioned they're looking to move their PC division, and transition towards a services model, a la IBM. I'm not saying this will all pan out, but that's what has come out.
The game. The hardware to run the game. ISP cost. The fees.
It all adds up. Not to mention Blizzard will be implementing their own restrictions (AH and $ limits) to choke and put up barriers for those that really want to make this a full time job.
No he means that if you sell them, you have to pay the due taxes. Zynga and Valve supposedly pay their taxes. The difference is that in this case it's the individuals who make a profit and the IRS (or other tax agencies) would make such a "virtual goods for real money public marketplace" more complicated.
I believe he means if you manage to make enough money with the auction house, the IRS will be curious if you're reporting this as income and paying taxes etc.
In perception, yes, but not in reality. If you want to be alive tomorrow, jumping off a tall building will be irrational even if you think it's the last step in a convoluted ritual to grant yourself immortality. That's an exaggerated example, but the principle holds in general: people's desires may differ, but the rationality of any actions taken in the pursuit of those desires is something you can evaluate objectively, at least in principle.
I am not sure there is a rational answer when it comes to possibly jumping from a building and breaking your legs or maybe even dying versus staying in the building and possibly dying from smoke inhalation or burning to death. It would be very hard, even in hindsight to figure out what was the more rational decision.
If you want technological examples, say someone calls someone else irrational for basing their website off PHP instead of Ruby. Someone calls the printer industry irrational for making it cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy ink cartridges or that someone buys a new computer because their computer is infested with malware instead of re-installing Windows. You could say those are irrational choices, but the people who are making those choices probably have reasons for doing so which may make sense to them. The person with PHP may not know Ruby and would have to invest significant time in learning it. The printer companies bottom line will make their decision rational to many. The person buying a new computer may not have the skills to perform the task, the local computer shop wants hundreds of dollars to do the work & the computer is old.
So on the surface we say "that's irrational", but then later after learning more, maybe our opinion would change to "that's actually rational".
Also this does bring up the point that we often have to make a choice on what to do without the power of hindsight or with incomplete data. This can make our choices look irrational to those who are not in our shoes.
It's a series of textbooks [1] based on lectures Feynman gave while teaching the introductory physics sequence at Caltech.
To my knowledge, no universities actually use the Feynman Lectures as a textbook for their introductory courses. However, some students who have already taken physics read the Feynman Lectures later and (self-)report a much clearer understanding.
FYI, the audio of the lectures is also available, but can be difficult to find.
Afair, some of its a little scrappy at the start (poor recording setup?) but his delivery is great. I wish there was video available.
This sounds exactly right. He was hired, in part, to make it more attractive for employees to work longer hours. He succeeded so it hardly seems unfair that he was well rewarded.
"He signed up, however, and started easing the computer engineers into the long hours culture with innovations including free beer and fortnightly "big ass" barbecues, and breakfast specials. He converted the "googlers" to a diet that ensured they kept working after lunch and weaned them off pizzas."
