Re: Pfizer or Oxford?
Ok, so apparently I can't resist this thread.
First: regular non-MRNA vaccines typically work by taking a version of the pathogen itself, modifying it not to be harmful, then giving it to you. As in, there's a needle, it contains influenza or covid or whatever, and we made it not harmful by modifying it a bit. The MRNA vaccine doesn't even go that far. If you're afraid of MRNA vaccines because they're somehow like HIV and might make you sick you should also be afraid of any new traditional vaccine because it literally contains a version of the disease, and technically we haven't given it lots of time to prove that we got the modification right. The MRNA vaccines aren't going to suddenly have your body spitting out covid or anything like that, and trying to equate this to HIV shows a gross misunderstanding: HIV does have somewhat similar proteins, but the problem isn't that it penetrates cells with it, the problem is the tons of other stuff that come along for the ride. This is like saying "here's the installer for NVDA, wonder if this will manufacture a virus randomly because I ran it", only you personally got handed the installer from NVAccess and it got independently verified by everyone on the face of the earth first.
Second: the vaccine wasn't developed too quickly. For any non-MRNA vaccine the technologies are super super well understood including the risks. The MRNA vaccines already had years of work put into being able to do it before Covid. But the real problem is the trials.
We could have taken 100 or 200 volunteers, vaccinated them all, then tried to give them Covid. After that worked, we could have done the same but as a bigger trial. It would have taken maybe 2 or 3 months *total* to know if they worked. We might have possibly killed, let's say the worst case is 30 people, because if you're getting covid in a laboratory setting with the best healthcare man can possibly provide then even for a couple thousand unvaccinated people you're going to be fine. Only in this hypothetical universe you'd have vaccinated them all. Challenge trials (the name for this) barely even need a placebo group. Instead, we did exactly the same thing as this, only we had to recruit 50000 people and wait for them to spontaneously get covid, rather than just saying here's a cotton swab with some covid on it, let's get this over with. This wasted something like 6 to 8 months, during which time tens of thousands more died. Maybe hundreds of thousands more honestly, but I'm not going to go examine data when even the smaller number makes my point, since that's more people than would have even been in the trial in the first place.
Then after all that? After all that we did stupid shit like the FDA taking weeks to approve anything rather than locking all the doctors and etc. in a room and saying "examine this data, it's an emergency". And then we said "well actually, I'm country Y, and even though country X did a good trial I'm going to make you also do your expensive and time-consuming trial in country Y". So even if you say "well you can't be too careful, better do those long trials instead of the fast one" we still wasted at least a month beyond that per vaccine.
Yes. Vaccines take 10 years ordinarily. But that doesn't mean it *should* take 10 years. It means that medicine started being so careful that if the choice is between letting a very small group of volunteers risk their lives or letting literally millions of people get sick and die, medicine will always let the millions die. Then this got enshrined in law. If we could let people volunteer for something that's even a little bit risky, we could go *much* faster, because we could ensure that you got exposed to the pathogen.
But the actual vaccine tech? You can design new vaccines in a couple weeks, now. Then, in any time but an emergency, you'll spend those 10 years jumping through hoops and spending billions to get it to market. You'll know it's safe by the 3 year or 5 year mark, or at least safer than getting Malaria for example, but nope, can't actually stop there. Have to spend the next 5 years convincing people like all of you on this thread who want to play armchair biologist that really it's fine, shame about all the people we could have saved in the meantime who would have been willing to take it.
Again: 1000 people died maybe because of the Covid vaccine. Some of those were certainly "I was allergic to latex and I lied" etc. We've given 30 million at least, I think a lot more. It's safer than walking across the street. But we're still going to do "omfg new tech MRNA it's like HIV" fearmongering. Please. Just, stop. If you're afraid of it, then that's fine, but don't open your mouth until you're damned sure that whatever you have to say is grounded in fact and worth scaring other people. I promise that whatever you might think the risks are, convincing a bunch of people not to get vaccinated by going "but MRNA is new" is going to kill a hell of a lot more even in the worst case where the MRNA summons Satan into your blood because it's arranged into a pentagram or something else equally inane.
I don't like Russia or China, but in this case they did the right thing in the end. They said "well fuck, it's a pandemic" and then went off and got it done instead of letting all the people who think they know what they're talking about but haven't ever seen a college biology textbook set policy. Maybe they're going to find out their vaccines have a side effect worse than Covid but I highly, highly doubt it. The U.S. couldn't even get as far as saying "here's a couple trillion dollars, manufacture your thing even though it hasn't been approved", let alone really expediting the trials. Even without expediting the trials this could have been done months ago just by saying "we literally print money, let's just spend more". Instead we just kept doing nothing and now instead of printing money to get the vaccines produced before approval, we're printing the same amount of money for a second stimulus package, maybe more.
Maybe, maybe MRNA vaccines or whatever turn out to be a problem. But maybe next year's flu shot kills us all. We do flu shots with basically no testing, certainly less than the covid vaccines got. There's lots of ways the world can fuck you over. Most of them are more likely than Covid vaccines killing you, by a lot.
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