Vaccine fears remind us that "views differ on shape of the Earth"
What the hell, AP?
The companies were required to do massive, months long tests under close scrutiny. The world's best experts have gone over it with a fine toothed comb. Everything suggests it's extremely safe...but let's broadcast the doubts of some low-information people.
I won't even link to the story.
Informed consent only works if people are actually informed, not listing to bull site hype rhetoric.
Gardasil has been proven to be very effective with one of the lowest side effect rates of most vaccines. It’s adverse reactions (the serious ones) happen rarer than the flu vaccines adverse reaction rate......and yet if you ask the general population if it safe, huge amounts will tell you it’s not. Our culture of pretending everyone is informed is why huge swaths of the American population think this virus is the just flu and refuses to wear a mask.
Our media has to stop letting uninformed idiots control the narrative around things that can, should be, and is scientifically verified.
Getting from concept to stage 1 success was amazingly fast, and that may be more common in the future. (A whole bunch of tech came together that wouldn't have been an option 10 years ago.)
It used to take 5 years and millions of dollars to sequence a simple virus. We now do it in hours for $50.
We clearly don't have the long-term data on safety or duration of effect for these viruses. But there's very little reason to expect a problem and huge evidence that thousands of people are dying from it every day, and even larger numbers having long-term impacts from it.
If it were a disease killing 30 people a day in the US, it might be smart to take six more months and follow up on phase 3. But at 2-3k/day, it would be stupid to wait.
All that said, we should definitely be tracking who takes how many doses of which vaccine, both to understand long-term effectiveness, and to spot any rare side effects that the trials couldn't show. We're generally pretty weak in that regard with vaccines overall, even the ones that take 10 years.