Quote Originally Posted by upthemaggies View Post
I'm getting frustrated with people asking for evidence when there's no disputing these vaccines were given emergency use to be rolled out, if they were safe they wouldn't have needed that to get the green light and they would have not needed to prove there was not one single treatment available. They were rushed out with a trial cut short at the early stages, wasn't it called "operation warpspeed"?

No side has any proper evidence because there is no long term data, I'm sick of going round in circles with this, the onus is on the vaccines to prove their safety and all we've got for now is noisy data 2 years into the experiment (since younger people were given it) and we're all trying to look for patterns or avoid seeing them which are dismissed as more noise from those who don't want to see it and conclusive evidence by those that do. It's early warning signals for now which could become too obvious to dismiss later down the line.

There is no doubt people have died of this vax but what about the injuries and the long term effects of those injuries? What about cell damage from manufactured spike that repair in organs other than the heart? We can't see that problem until later because with each repair you lose capacity to repair in future.

Vaccines have been taken off the market for far fewer deaths and deemed unsafe and I think they aren't withdrawn on a ratio basis, x number of deaths should deem it unsafe regardless of how many doses are given, but they got away with it because "there was no other treatment".

The other main evidence was all the false claims that then had to be down-graded and down graded again - stops spread to limits spread to doesn't do anything within 3 months, same with severity. They simply cannot be trusted.
I don't blame anyone for being alarmed at the speed at which the vaccine was developed compared to how long normal vaccine development takes. However, there were trials of the vaccine and it was developed using an established platform that had been tested. It's not like it was created completely from scratch - there was plenty of prior work on the coronavirus 'family' and vaccine development in general to build upon.

As I understand it, there were two significant factors in speeding up vaccine development, which I think everyone can relate to. I'm not a specialist in this area, but I work in an area related to research (without being a researcher myself) and have listened to some longform interviews with those involved. But we have at least two people more informed than me in this thread who can put me right.

The first is that when you're developing a vaccine (and especially getting funding) you can't get funding for C before you've shown results in B, and you can't get funding for B before you have results in A. Under normal circumstances that's perfectly sensible, because we don't want to waste money (either pharma's money or government research budgets distributed through the Research Councils) on things that won't work. With COVID, the nature of the emergency was such that development was done in parallel rather than sequentially - everything everywhere all at once. And that's why it was called 'warpspeed'.

The second is that a vaccine became everyone's number one priority for everyone involved. No matter what field you work in, imagine how quickly you could get X done if everyone agreed that X was the absolute top priority, that everyone should drop everything except X, and ££££ was... if not quite no object, but let's say no longer a problem. Could be a building project, could be a football transfer (see also: deadline day!), could be conveyancing on a house, could be building a house, whatever. Pick the thing in your field that needs a lot of input from a lot of people who don't all give it the highest priority and imagine how quick it could be done in an emergency.

It's certainly true that we don't know the long term impact of the vaccine, and I'd be amazed if a few people haven't been harmed by the vaccine. But the signs at the moment look pretty positive, as I don't see any evidence of waves and waves of problems. Compare this with the damage from 'long COVID'. Vaccines always and everywhere are a question of balancing competing risks - as is everything in life to a greater or lesser extent.

Seems to me that some people who have a problem with the COVID vaccines also have a problem with vaccines in general. If someone has a problem with vaccines in general, then I'm not sure why it makes any difference if the COVID vaccine was produced quickly, 'cos they presumably wouldn't be happy with it, no matter how long development took. I strongly suspect that if there was an issue with the vaccines, we'd know about it by now, and by "know about it" I mean something that's beyond dispute, rather than cherry-picked by some fringe blogs.

Vaccine development and rollout was an extraordinary scientific and logistical achievement, which could have been even better if the Global North didn't overorder and stockpile, rather than distribute to poorer countries.