complexintentions wrote: ↑Sun Jun 13, 2021 8:21 pm
RedAndWhiteBaron wrote: ↑Sun Jun 13, 2021 7:26 pm
photofly wrote: ↑Sun Jun 13, 2021 6:29 pm
It's hard to imagine there have ever existed in the history of medicine any substances
more highly researched than the various COVID19 vaccines at present. The entire world is doing nothing else but research, at present.
The smallpox vaccine and the Bomb might have something to say about that.
A direct comparison of modern research methods to that of the smallpox and Manhattan Project era isn't really valid at all. Original "smallpox research" consisted of infecting people with cowpox to stimulate an immune response. Things have come a little ways since then. They mapped the genome of Covid-19 in less than 48 hours. Production of mRNA vaccines doesn't even need the actual live virus.
Which leads to the second point, this idea that "less than a year's research" has been done on these vaccines. What ignorant nonsense. To calculate the man-years of R&D of something you have to consider the total number of people working on something at any one time, the level of expertise being brought to bear, the financial resources being deployed to enable the latest, most advanced research techniques to proceed at the highest speed possible, and so on. It isn't like "10 months ago there was no vaccine, now there is, so that's a vaccine with 10 months of research". Good god.
The amount of sheer resources poured into these vaccines dwarfs any other pharmaceutical intervention in history. Period. Multiple teams of the top professionals in the fields of medicine, biology, virology, immunology, working on multiple types of vaccinations simultaneously, with limitless financial backing. Much of the tech was adopted from already-present flu vaccines. mRNA technology itself isn't "new", it's been around for over 30 years.
It's no miracle they developed something so "quickly", it would have been more miraculous for them not to have.
Sure, keep "waiting and seeing" but spoiler alert: vaccination numbers go up = infection and mortality rates go down. Same as every vaccine in history. I'm just curious, is there a number of day/months/years, or how many hundreds of millions or billions of people vaccinated with a positive outcome, that the people using this line have in mind where they'll decide it's good enough for them too?
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/06/brazilian-town-experiment-shows-mass-vaccination-can-wipe-out-covid-19
And this was with the Chinese vaccine, and the crappier one at that. It's all about numbers, and even the lesser vax'es reduce them. What a shocker.
It's complete bullshit to claim previous vaccines are completely safe because they've been around longer. Small numbers of people have drastically bad reactions to vaccines all the time. And the Covid-19 vaccines have PLENTY of data to properly evaluate their safety and efficacy, "thanks" to the sheer numbers of both infected and vaccinated. The determination to cling to stats that show the side effects are statistically less than many commonly-taken drugs such as birth control pills, in the case of blood clots for example, is dishonestly alarmist. Context is everything: risk management is not risk elimination. I would have thought pilots, of all people, could grasp this basic distinction.
It's like we're racing backwards from the Enlightenment to only trust superstition and gossip. Where once we celebrated the achievements of humanity's best and brightest minds to solve medical disasters, now we're doubtful because, well, y'know /reasons. Huddled fearfully around our little glowing screens like we once did around fires in dirt huts. Amazing, really.
But hey I don't care. If vaccination becomes a requirement for employment, the doubters just open more opportunities for the rest of us.