Prospects for a safe COVID-19 vaccine
Now that we're more than a year out after calls like the one below to have well-designed clinical trials and follow up for COVID-19 vaccines, it'll be nice to know what the data begins to indicate about various unknowns. Overall, the development and roll out of vaccines has been a success, but there are a lot of different angles from which to view it all. The link below specifically mentions one risk of (all) vaccines that a vaccinated individual could actually find themselves at greater risk of disease than they would have been if unvaccinated. This paper notes that the condition, known as Vaccine-associated Enhanced Disease is a rare incident, it's important to perform long term studies of vaccinated individuals to begin to calculate the actual risk.
How do you handle the risk calculations of such things? Are you looking forward to more information about VAED specifically?
(4 Nov 2020; Science Translational Medicine)
Rapid development of an efficacious vaccine against the viral pathogen severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, is essential, but rigorous studies are required to determine the safety of candidate vaccines.
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Vaccine-associated enhanced disease has been rarely encountered with existing vaccines or viral infections. Although animal models of SARS-CoV-2 infection may elucidate mechanisms of immune protection, we need observations of enhanced disease in people receiving candidate COVID-19 vaccines to understand the risk of immune enhancement of disease... Rigorous clinical trial design and postlicensure surveillance should provide a reliable strategy to identify adverse events, including the potential for enhanced severity of COVID-19 disease, after vaccination.
Read the rest from science.org: Prospects for a safe COVID-19 vaccine) (abstract only; full version with a free sign up), or find the full download hosted by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health at https://www.fnih.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/eabe0948.full_.pdf
I did not get any dose of the vaccine and I am fine, I follow the protocol, I think that what is lacking is discipline, we are going for two years with this problem and I have had nothing but colds, so the vaccine is more of an experiment that deserves much more research is my opinion
It makes sense to be hesitant. Other protocols are certainly helpful, too. The vaccine has had lots and lots of research though. What's your benchmark for how much research a vaccine requires?
The problem is not the real vaccines, the problem is the current geopolitical context, everyone believes what they want to believe!
You can be a thermometer, and simply register that.
Or you can be a thermostat, and get the gas pumping to respond and make a change.