Not good.
Drug testing spergery incoming.
When you test drugs, or vaccines, you test several things but basically you’re looking at two main metrics:
1. Does it work?
2. Is it safe?
you can break those down further. ‘Does it work?’ Can mean a lot of different things. Some tests look at equivalent workingness but with a cheaper drug, and easier drug etc. So for example, there are anti clotting agents that are only as effective as warfarin but don’t need to be titrated all the time, or don’t interact with foodstuffs. You could even have a drug pass that doesn’t work as well as warfarin but was safer in terms of side effects.
Or you could have say a therapy that is very low efficacy but there is literally nothing else out there so it may as well be used (Milwaukee protocol for rabies for example.)
Then you’ve got ‘is it safe?’ And again that’s relative. A chemotherapy drug does damage, but versus a currently untreatable cancer that might be acceptable. If your drug is to treat headaches, obviously your bar for ‘safe’ is way higher.
so our mRNA vaccine. Does it work? I think yes it does. The data seems to show it significantly lowers the chances of death/serious illness from covid. The dataset is sufficient to show that because it’s a simpler question.
But is it safe? That’s a much much harder question to say yes to. Normally trials last many years partly to answer this question. Long term follow up is needed. Adverse events are collected and scrutinised. Samples are taken for exploratory work sometimes. Data on subsequent pregnancies. Data on where the stuff goes and what it does in the body and how it’s eliminated
What worries me is that almost none of this has been done. The feline Coronavirus vaccines and the sars vaccine (ferret model) both caused antibody dependent enhancement in animal tests. That has not been explored here becasue as far as I can see, they haven’t looked. Their patient pool was immune naive people.
Nobody has looked in detail at what happens as an immune response - there simply hasn’t been the time to do these analyses. There are some worrying patterns across trials as well. The Bell’s palsy, the transverse myelitis and the guillain barre syndrome events seen across vaccine types suggest to me that there are autoimmune nerve targeting events that need to be ruled out with corona vaccines as a broad class.
So is it effective? Yes. Is it safe? I don’t think we can say that by a long way. I hope it is, but watching closely.
![:\](/styles/custom/emotes/svg/chris-confused.svg "Confused :\")
