If you had infinite time and resources, you’d ideally test for all conceivable outcome variables when designing clinical trials for anything. Of course there’s always a chance that something was missed in the trials, but it certainly matters what that chance is. Do we have reason to believe it to be non-negligible, now that more than enough people have been vaccinated for even the tiniest of risks to manifest themselves?
In any case, if someone is specifically worried about the novel mRNA vaccines, they can take one of the classically produced vaccines instead.
There’s no good reason to use a new and risky process like the mRNA process.
… there’s no reason to take that risk with a speed up approval process.
… What about the higher efficacy of the mRNA vaccines?
(I also tried to look up a timeline of manufacturing volume by vaccine type, but unfortunately couldn’t find anything useful. I had had the impression that the mRNA vaccines had been quicker to manufacture.)
An omniscient being could make a full cost-benefit analysis on this kind of stuff, but we have to reason under uncertainty, and things certainly don’t look so clear-cut to me.
Do we have reason to believe it to be non-negligible, now that more than enough people have been vaccinated for even the tiniest of risks to manifest themselves?
How would we notice if the lowest night heart rate goes up for everybody who takes the vaccine by one point?
How would you notice if the IQ of everyone who takes the vaccine goes down by one point?
How would we notice if 0.5% gets a depression half a year after receiving the vaccine? (Brain trauma doesn’t produce depression immediately but has lag time)
If someone gets a depression half a year after receiving the vaccine, why would they think that they should tell VEARS about it?
We know that the mRNA vaccines produce some brain damage, because we find the vaccine in the brain and the it gets cells to produce the antigen and then the immune system kills those cells. What we don’t know is how much damage that it. If the damage would be enough to reduce IQ by an average of 10 points we likely would notice. I don’t think we would have noticed if it’s 1 point.
Myocarditis that’s strong enough to produce clinical effects seem to happen enough that it’s flagged as a risk to investigate. Most cases of myocarditis caused by the vaccine are likely not strong enough to be clinically noticeable. If someone has myocarditis that raises their lowest nightly heartrate by one, they are not going to put anything into VAERS. As a patient non-clinical side-effects matter.
Look at a discourse of side-effects of something like microplastic. Such a discourse takes decades to come to good conclusions about what the side-effects are.
… What about the higher efficacy of the mRNA vaccines?
I don’t think there’s evidence that shows mRNA vaccines outperforming Novavaxx currently. Even if two doses of Novavaxx would give less immunity there’s less risk in simply giving more shots.
Novavaxx uses a patented adjuvant instead of a well tested one, but it’s the choice that’s available for classically produced vaccines.
I think you can make a good argument that in the shitty situation we are in it still makes sense to get vaccinated but pretending that we have strong evidence of lack of side-effect stretches it because we have not studied relevant outcomes to an extend where we would see the effects.
Epistemically, this kind of argument reminds me of god-of-the-gaps or shrinking parameter spaces in string theory. That doesn’t make the argument wrong, but it means that I don’t really see a fruitful way to engage with it.
I suppose that if one’s prior is that this kind of risk is negligible, the argument will sound unconvincing, whereas if it sounds plausible a priori, then lack of such studies seems concerning? Let’s leave it at that. Though I could be convinced otherwise if I learned that this concern was taken seriously by a significant fraction of doctors or other public health professionals.
Though I could be convinced otherwise if I learned that this concern was taken seriously by a significant fraction of doctors or other public health professionals.
If you learn anything about a rationalist is that knowing things is hard. If you look at the replication crisis we see that it’s hard to know things even when there are studies that intend to measure an outcome.
Claiming strong evidence for something should require evidence and not just lack of concern.
Why is the prior that a drug that causes brain damage should have a negliglible risk of causing brain damage that’s relevant reasonable?
How is it a god-of-the-gaps argument to ask for checks to see whether the brain damage is large enough to cause problems? If you haven’t check claiming you have strong evidence that there are no side-effects seems to me very unfounded.
I had a doctor tell me that removing a rib of me is no problem because there’s no evidence that it produces any problems. While that evidence isn’t in the clean form that doctors like, I do feel like it makes the some things in my body more complicated.
I don’t have the expertise or training to evaluate detailed medical claims myself. I wasn’t even able to find sources for the blood-brain-barrier thing (neither claims nor rebuttals), except for this thread on askreddit which I was too exhausted to peruse. In any case, at this point the discussion is not about medicine but about epistemology.
I have not yet been convinced that the vaccine causes brain damage. I think that at the very least, that argument requires sources for both a link between mRNA vaccines and an inflamed brain, and for the claim that this is an exceptional occurence / that this is something worse than what happens in e.g. an average fever.
I guess my prior is that bodies are pretty robust, and that most contrarian claims are wrong. Identifying correct contrarians is hard.
My god-of-the-gaps comment was directed at what I perceived as a complex hypothesis which looked like it was (over?)fitted to the available evidence. In such a situation, one can’t falsify the hypothesis without new evidence, even though one figures there should be plenty evidence regarding most conceivable side effects by now.
I do agree about the issues with doctors, though. I have had several suboptimal encounters with the medical system, which have left me rather unimpressed with medical care (diagnosis in particular). I have an essay draft on this topic, but it’s going to be a long while until I get to it.
The EMA is the EU equivalent of the FDA. When they approved the drug the wrote a report indicating all the risk related information about the COVID-19 Vaccine from Moderna.
In it they say:
Low levels of mRNA could be detected in all examined tissues except the kidney. This included heart, lung, testis and also brain tissues, indicating that the mRNA/LNP platform crossed the blood/brain barrier
The fact that your sources don’t tell you about this tells you how much they are interested in having a serious discussion about side-effects.
Generally, there are a lot of possible side-effects a drug could potentially have.
There are many situations where people claim to know more then they actually know for political reasons. A claim like “I know that the mRNA that’s found in the brain produces significant problems” is one that needs a lot more evidence then one that says “It possible that this happens but we don’t know”.
You have presented evidence that the mRNA vaccines “cause brain damage” to, let’s say, the same extent as drinking a glass of wine “causes brain damage”. That is, you can trace a sequence of events likely to kill at least one brain cell.
You haven’t shown any evidence that mRNA vaccines do anywhere near enough damage with anywhere near enough probability to be cause for concern.
The fact that the EMA report says what it does but doesn’t say anything at all like “the risk of brain damage is a downside to using these vaccines” seems to me to indicate that the people who wrote that report don’t think that what they found about small numbers of lipid nanoparticles crossing the blood/brain barrier is cause for concern. This means that either they don’t think brain damage would be a problem (which seems … unlikely), or else they don’t think the danger is substantial enough to be worth worrying about.
The comments from user yesitsnicholas in the Reddit thread linked above by MondSemmel seem to be (1) written by someone who actually knows something about this stuff, and (2) very confident that there’s no danger to speak of.
Now, whether or not yesitsnicholas is an expert, I am not, and maybe I’m failing to recognize the dangers here. I’m willing to be persuaded. Do you have any evidence that goes beyond “look, at least one lipid nanoparticle will get into the brain and that may lead to the death of at least one brain cell”?
I am not disagreeing with the narrower point that what we know at present about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines—or, in fact, pretty much any drugs—or in fact, pretty much anything at all—is not enough to be very confident that there aren’t very small adverse effects. Or indeed very small beneficial effects; we wouldn’t have noticed if getting the Pfizer vaccine raises your IQ by one point, either. Identifying very small effects is difficult.
But you go further and say e.g. that there was no point in trying novel approaches (with, therefore, more scope for wholly unsuspected adverse consequences) like mRNA vaccines. But available evidence suggests that the mRNA vaccines happen to be the most effective against COVID-19. A policy for which we can see with hindsight that it would have stopped us finding the most effective vaccines is, it seems to me, not obviously correct. “But for all we know Novavax’s vaccine is just as good as the mRNA ones”, I hear you say. Maybe it is. But it’s still in trials and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been widely available and widely used for months.
We can calculate the upper bound of risk from the document you provided. Moderna says 2% of plasma level of LNP ends up in the brain. There are 10 billion LNP in each shot of Moderna vaccine and at most 10% goes into general circulation unless nurse made a mistake and put it in your vein. So, 2% of one billion is 20 million LNP, that is the maximum that will end up in a person’s brain following a vaccine shot. So, maximum 20 million brain cells are at stake after each shot. Not all of them will be neurons.
If you had infinite time and resources, you’d ideally test for all conceivable outcome variables when designing clinical trials for anything. Of course there’s always a chance that something was missed in the trials, but it certainly matters what that chance is. Do we have reason to believe it to be non-negligible, now that more than enough people have been vaccinated for even the tiniest of risks to manifest themselves?
In any case, if someone is specifically worried about the novel mRNA vaccines, they can take one of the classically produced vaccines instead.
… What about the higher efficacy of the mRNA vaccines?
(I also tried to look up a timeline of manufacturing volume by vaccine type, but unfortunately couldn’t find anything useful. I had had the impression that the mRNA vaccines had been quicker to manufacture.)
An omniscient being could make a full cost-benefit analysis on this kind of stuff, but we have to reason under uncertainty, and things certainly don’t look so clear-cut to me.
How would we notice if the lowest night heart rate goes up for everybody who takes the vaccine by one point?
How would you notice if the IQ of everyone who takes the vaccine goes down by one point?
How would we notice if 0.5% gets a depression half a year after receiving the vaccine? (Brain trauma doesn’t produce depression immediately but has lag time)
If someone gets a depression half a year after receiving the vaccine, why would they think that they should tell VEARS about it?
We know that the mRNA vaccines produce some brain damage, because we find the vaccine in the brain and the it gets cells to produce the antigen and then the immune system kills those cells. What we don’t know is how much damage that it. If the damage would be enough to reduce IQ by an average of 10 points we likely would notice. I don’t think we would have noticed if it’s 1 point.
Myocarditis that’s strong enough to produce clinical effects seem to happen enough that it’s flagged as a risk to investigate. Most cases of myocarditis caused by the vaccine are likely not strong enough to be clinically noticeable. If someone has myocarditis that raises their lowest nightly heartrate by one, they are not going to put anything into VAERS. As a patient non-clinical side-effects matter.
Look at a discourse of side-effects of something like microplastic. Such a discourse takes decades to come to good conclusions about what the side-effects are.
I don’t think there’s evidence that shows mRNA vaccines outperforming Novavaxx currently. Even if two doses of Novavaxx would give less immunity there’s less risk in simply giving more shots.
Novavaxx uses a patented adjuvant instead of a well tested one, but it’s the choice that’s available for classically produced vaccines.
I think you can make a good argument that in the shitty situation we are in it still makes sense to get vaccinated but pretending that we have strong evidence of lack of side-effect stretches it because we have not studied relevant outcomes to an extend where we would see the effects.
Epistemically, this kind of argument reminds me of god-of-the-gaps or shrinking parameter spaces in string theory. That doesn’t make the argument wrong, but it means that I don’t really see a fruitful way to engage with it.
I suppose that if one’s prior is that this kind of risk is negligible, the argument will sound unconvincing, whereas if it sounds plausible a priori, then lack of such studies seems concerning? Let’s leave it at that. Though I could be convinced otherwise if I learned that this concern was taken seriously by a significant fraction of doctors or other public health professionals.
If you learn anything about a rationalist is that knowing things is hard. If you look at the replication crisis we see that it’s hard to know things even when there are studies that intend to measure an outcome.
Claiming strong evidence for something should require evidence and not just lack of concern.
Why is the prior that a drug that causes brain damage should have a negliglible risk of causing brain damage that’s relevant reasonable?
How is it a god-of-the-gaps argument to ask for checks to see whether the brain damage is large enough to cause problems? If you haven’t check claiming you have strong evidence that there are no side-effects seems to me very unfounded.
I had a doctor tell me that removing a rib of me is no problem because there’s no evidence that it produces any problems. While that evidence isn’t in the clean form that doctors like, I do feel like it makes the some things in my body more complicated.
I don’t have the expertise or training to evaluate detailed medical claims myself. I wasn’t even able to find sources for the blood-brain-barrier thing (neither claims nor rebuttals), except for this thread on askreddit which I was too exhausted to peruse. In any case, at this point the discussion is not about medicine but about epistemology.
I have not yet been convinced that the vaccine causes brain damage. I think that at the very least, that argument requires sources for both a link between mRNA vaccines and an inflamed brain, and for the claim that this is an exceptional occurence / that this is something worse than what happens in e.g. an average fever.
I guess my prior is that bodies are pretty robust, and that most contrarian claims are wrong. Identifying correct contrarians is hard.
My god-of-the-gaps comment was directed at what I perceived as a complex hypothesis which looked like it was (over?)fitted to the available evidence. In such a situation, one can’t falsify the hypothesis without new evidence, even though one figures there should be plenty evidence regarding most conceivable side effects by now.
I do agree about the issues with doctors, though. I have had several suboptimal encounters with the medical system, which have left me rather unimpressed with medical care (diagnosis in particular). I have an essay draft on this topic, but it’s going to be a long while until I get to it.
The EMA is the EU equivalent of the FDA. When they approved the drug the wrote a report indicating all the risk related information about the COVID-19 Vaccine from Moderna.
In it they say:
The fact that your sources don’t tell you about this tells you how much they are interested in having a serious discussion about side-effects.
Generally, there are a lot of possible side-effects a drug could potentially have.
There are many situations where people claim to know more then they actually know for political reasons. A claim like “I know that the mRNA that’s found in the brain produces significant problems” is one that needs a lot more evidence then one that says “It possible that this happens but we don’t know”.
You have presented evidence that the mRNA vaccines “cause brain damage” to, let’s say, the same extent as drinking a glass of wine “causes brain damage”. That is, you can trace a sequence of events likely to kill at least one brain cell.
You haven’t shown any evidence that mRNA vaccines do anywhere near enough damage with anywhere near enough probability to be cause for concern.
The fact that the EMA report says what it does but doesn’t say anything at all like “the risk of brain damage is a downside to using these vaccines” seems to me to indicate that the people who wrote that report don’t think that what they found about small numbers of lipid nanoparticles crossing the blood/brain barrier is cause for concern. This means that either they don’t think brain damage would be a problem (which seems … unlikely), or else they don’t think the danger is substantial enough to be worth worrying about.
The comments from user yesitsnicholas in the Reddit thread linked above by MondSemmel seem to be (1) written by someone who actually knows something about this stuff, and (2) very confident that there’s no danger to speak of.
Now, whether or not yesitsnicholas is an expert, I am not, and maybe I’m failing to recognize the dangers here. I’m willing to be persuaded. Do you have any evidence that goes beyond “look, at least one lipid nanoparticle will get into the brain and that may lead to the death of at least one brain cell”?
I am not disagreeing with the narrower point that what we know at present about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines—or, in fact, pretty much any drugs—or in fact, pretty much anything at all—is not enough to be very confident that there aren’t very small adverse effects. Or indeed very small beneficial effects; we wouldn’t have noticed if getting the Pfizer vaccine raises your IQ by one point, either. Identifying very small effects is difficult.
But you go further and say e.g. that there was no point in trying novel approaches (with, therefore, more scope for wholly unsuspected adverse consequences) like mRNA vaccines. But available evidence suggests that the mRNA vaccines happen to be the most effective against COVID-19. A policy for which we can see with hindsight that it would have stopped us finding the most effective vaccines is, it seems to me, not obviously correct. “But for all we know Novavax’s vaccine is just as good as the mRNA ones”, I hear you say. Maybe it is. But it’s still in trials and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been widely available and widely used for months.
We can calculate the upper bound of risk from the document you provided. Moderna says 2% of plasma level of LNP ends up in the brain. There are 10 billion LNP in each shot of Moderna vaccine and at most 10% goes into general circulation unless nurse made a mistake and put it in your vein. So, 2% of one billion is 20 million LNP, that is the maximum that will end up in a person’s brain following a vaccine shot. So, maximum 20 million brain cells are at stake after each shot. Not all of them will be neurons.