Adjuvants in modern vaccines are extraordinarily well studied and safe. Current side effects include 6-24 hours of feeling totally crappy. Still beats Covid-19...
How modern is "modern" here? Because the whole Pandermix saga happened only a decade ago and some are pointing towards the combination of the adjuvant and antigen: https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3948/rr-22
Considering that this doesn't seem to be a settled question, I'm not so sure that it makes sense to blindly trust that everything will be alright in the current, rushed, case.
It's worth pointing out that the Pandemrix "saga" affected very few people.
According to [1], "The UK Health Protection Agency (now Public Health England) undertook a major study of 4- to 18-year-olds and found that around one in every 55,000 jabs led to narcolepsy."
Very rare frequency incidents that slip through testing shouldn't make us over-cautious to the enormous benefits of vaccination.
The whole Pandermix risk is much smaller than the risks in the current pandemics. Narcolepsy is very rare disease and even increased risk due to that vaccine remains very low as absolute value and it only appears high if it's expressed as a relative number.
In establishing the shorter-term safety nothing was "rushed" now compared to the processes performed before (it was tested on tens of thousands of people). Regarding the longer-term safety, who would be willing to wait e.g. two more years before any vaccine could be used?
As the vaccination will be voluntary for common people, as long at there are shortages, those who don't want to get it should indeed leave it to those who will.
To elaborate the absolute numbers: around 1 in 55000 vaccinated were affected by the side effects in two years, so even if everybody in the UK was vaccinated with something causing such side effects, that translates to 1200 with the side effects.
To compare, there were more than 70,000 excess deaths in the UK since start of pandemics. Around 60 times more deaths than, in the case of vaccine, those still living with side effects.
But these side effects were apparently the strongest in just a part of the population: 4-18, which is 11 million, resulting is estimated 200 people with side effects.
Covid-19 luckily affects exactly that part of population less, but even then I'd guess that Covid-19 already made more damage to more than 200 people in it.
And that small number of cases just can't be detected unless the trial covers enough of those affected. If the total effect is 200 cases in the whole population, a trial would have to be performed on at least one 20th of it: as much as 600,000 children would have to be a part of the trial to even detect that issue. Not to mention that it took two years to recognize the issue.
Now, for the trial to recognize the problem, half would have to be placebo group. That gives once all outside of the trial are counted 97.5% of people unprotected for two years.
In the case of whole population, and even waiting for only 10 months, there would still be 68,000 deaths more if that kind of trial would be a condition for the acceptance of vaccine.
They don't have adjuvants, but they do have lipid nanoparticles which allow the mRNA to breach cells. It's feasible that they could cause unexpected side effects.
NB: I'm personally going to get the first SARS-CoV-2 vaccine I can get, and I'm incredibly excited about mRNA vaccines in general. But, it's true that any time you inject a chemical into your bloodstream you're taking a calculated risk.
I know. I don't see how it refutes what I said. I'm not anti-vaccine, I was just replying to the parent comment suggesting that because these mRNA vaccines don't use adjuvants they wouldn't have side effects.
All medicines represent calculated risks -- risks that are often worth taking, but still risks.
No. I am not a mindreader. And “vaccines are injected into the bloodstream” is a standard antivax lie.
Yes there’s a risk in receiving a vaccine, just as there’s a risk in receiving any prophylactic/therapeutic treatment, but severe side-effects are closer to 1-in-100K to 1-in-a-million. Compared to a disease that is currently killing 2-in-100, with significant sequelae likely much higher.
I’m happy to accept that “bloodstream” was a slip of the tongue, but really try not to make those malignant lying bastards’ jobs any easier, when people die because of them.
If you had actually read what I wrote thoughtfully -- instead of falling over yourself to type a glib reply as fast as you could get it out -- it would have been easy to recognize that I am clearly not anti-vaccine, nor was I suggesting that side effects are common. I said both of those things explicitly.
If your goal is actually to educate others, then educate others. Replying with snark achieves nothing but temporarily boosting your own ego.
