Unfortunately due to my job, I was an A-1 priority and received the Pfizer vaccine today. Initial effects are similar to the flu shot so far. Will keep updated as far as progress goes.
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (36)
sorted by:
All the mainstream media and usual "fact checkers" started parroting the same "It's just the same as normal incidence" at once, so naturally I believed it less after that and went to double check.
The trial size was 30,000 - 44,000 participants large (pharma companies are always dickishly cagey with publishing trial data, that's not just a problem for this one). So that's an incidence rate of 0.009 - 0.013% in the vaccine trial group.
National incidence rate is allegedly 40,000 per year in the US, so 40k/330mil = 0.012% incidence rate. And this isn't one of the diseases that disproportionately affects the elderly, the peak occurrence is in the 15-45 age range, so we shouldn't expect a lower than average incidence in trial participants who are generally restricted to healthy adults.
So in this case the bullshit merchants weren't full of shit, just this once.
Now this isn't a new concern, there was an old flu vaccine that was pulled because it showed an actually significant chance of increase in bell's palsy, and there's always been people checking to see if there might be a slight risk with other flu/viral vaccinations but never finding enough of a difference to be statistically significant. The reality is there may still be a particularly small risk of bell's palsy caused by any vaccine, it's just too small to reliably detect without increasing trial sizes by an order of magnitude or a better understanding of and accounting for bell's palsy risk factors. All we really know is that getting a viral respiratory infection is a common trigger outside of vaccines.
Still, even if we take the worst case scenario for this trial though and just ignore the probability of natural random variance, 0.013% incidence minus the 0.012% base national rate leaves us a 0.001% increased chance of bell's palsy. I.E. 1 in 100,000. At that point, as mild as the common commie cough is, you're more at risk of being hospitalized for covid than actually getting bell's palsy from the vaccine. Hell you might be more likely just to get bell's palsy from the coof too, since it's exactly the kind of virus that tends to trigger it in a small number of people.
For the all justified worry over the speed of the vaccines being produced, they are in all likelihood no more dangerous than the flu jab. They wouldn't be shoving it into the arms of front line medical staff otherwise.
It is naive to fully trust in these rushed vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna just because they are giving it to healthcare workers first.
Who knows what side effects it will cause in the long term?
Why would anyone under the age of 65 with no serious pre-existing conditions take a vaccine for the Chinavirus which has about a 99 percent survival rate for this age range?
The only reason I think it's probably as safe as the flu vaccine is because they've been testing Covid19 in a lab for who knows how many years, and they most likely already knew how to make a vaccine. They probably slipped "hints" to their contacts within Big Pharma about how to make it, but did so slowly enough that the vaccine wouldn't be available until after the election.