My risk model treats all the available vaccines as “drug that was developed under political and financial pressure and whose trials ended much sooner than is normally the case”.
I think we can do better than that, even in the current information climate. Drugs can be almost anything and have almost any goal. Vaccines are a pretty narrow class of treatment that are attempting to do one thing- give you an immune memory that will trigger if infected by a disease. They do that by exposing you to some part of the disease. The natural cap of badness of that attempt is giving you the disease itself- anything more needs an explanation.
Some examples off the top of my head where a vaccine caused effects you wouldn’t get from the disease itself (not all of which rendered the vaccine net negative):
certain adjuvants encouraged cancer (e.g. some pet vaccine)
the vaccine triggered an immune overreaction that left people worse off if actually infected (there was an STD vaccine that did this, and I believe SARS-1)
Allergy to something else in the vaccine (e.g. eggs in the flu vaccine).
Of these, we’d expect #3 to show up nigh immediately upon immunization, and is not dependent on how many people were exposed to actual covid, so we have a fairly large sample size. I vaguely recollect that where #2 was a factor, it was pretty universally true, not a rare reaction- so the sample size is probably large enough for that too.
This is complicated by the fact that at least one of the covid vaccines is using an entirely new mechanism. This could leave us vulnerable to certain problems like the adjuvants, that take a long time and large sample size to catch.
Certainly some people are very sensitive and medically excused from vaccines- but those people are pretty screwed if they catch the actual disease too. The only reason not getting the vaccine is viable for them is herd immunity.
I’m not an expert and I haven’t looked into this very long. But there are mechanistic models that can help us predict the risk here, and I think it’s a mistake to use the entire collection of FDA-monitored treatments as a reference class.
I think we can do better than that, even in the current information climate. Drugs can be almost anything and have almost any goal. Vaccines are a pretty narrow class of treatment that are attempting to do one thing- give you an immune memory that will trigger if infected by a disease. They do that by exposing you to some part of the disease. The natural cap of badness of that attempt is giving you the disease itself- anything more needs an explanation.
Some examples off the top of my head where a vaccine caused effects you wouldn’t get from the disease itself (not all of which rendered the vaccine net negative):
certain adjuvants encouraged cancer (e.g. some pet vaccine)
the vaccine triggered an immune overreaction that left people worse off if actually infected (there was an STD vaccine that did this, and I believe SARS-1)
Allergy to something else in the vaccine (e.g. eggs in the flu vaccine).
Of these, we’d expect #3 to show up nigh immediately upon immunization, and is not dependent on how many people were exposed to actual covid, so we have a fairly large sample size. I vaguely recollect that where #2 was a factor, it was pretty universally true, not a rare reaction- so the sample size is probably large enough for that too.
This is complicated by the fact that at least one of the covid vaccines is using an entirely new mechanism. This could leave us vulnerable to certain problems like the adjuvants, that take a long time and large sample size to catch.
Certainly some people are very sensitive and medically excused from vaccines- but those people are pretty screwed if they catch the actual disease too. The only reason not getting the vaccine is viable for them is herd immunity.
I’m not an expert and I haven’t looked into this very long. But there are mechanistic models that can help us predict the risk here, and I think it’s a mistake to use the entire collection of FDA-monitored treatments as a reference class.