Regardless of the bad science, it just baffles me that Reform would think people still care about this in 2024. The pandemic was an awful time we all want to forget about rather than tediously relitigate.
It's a fair point! I suspect that for a certain percentage of their core vote this kind of stuff is appealing on some level, but I think you might be right that it might impose some sort of ceiling on their support (booster takeup remains pretty high, which doesn't suggest that too many people are too worried about the vaccines)
I too am concerned by the anti-vax rhetoric and also misinformation that is being peddled by Tice and also by Farage in their appearances whilst canvassing in the election. With such people I wonder if they genuinely lack an understanding of the facts and interpretations, or whether they think it is expeditious to their political aspirations to jump on a populist viewpoint, no matter how much of a misconception it is.
That's an interesting point as to how much they really believe it! I think Farage has got more than half an eye on the US, and in the circles he wants to be in then he's not going to get far being pro-vax sadly (which is kind of ironic, considering that they were developed on Trumo's watch). But of course it's hard to know how sincere all this
Hi Oliver, nice article. Suppose there are long-term harms of the vaccine that are currently unknown or poorly understood, this wouldn't necessarily be borne out in this data. As such, I am curious whether there are studies that are actively comparing non-vaccinated to vaccinated cohorts over time, or other study designs that provide evidence that the vaccine has no long-term negative effects. I am a bit confused as to why there is a resistance (not your own) to this general impetus, to closely monitor new medical interventions, employing all the relevant medical and statistical methods to ensure we know about any long-term impacts. The invocation of the excess deaths argument to me seems like a proxy for this impetus, people are concerned that what we all put in our body has other effects, and in the absence of any study supporting the counterfactual, they point haplessly at blunt instruments like excess deaths, which you've shown doesn't indicate the problem they propose exists.
Hi, it's a fair question I think. Personally I found this https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-long-term-safety-argument-over-covid-19-vaccines/ very helpful from Andrew Croxford (who is an immunologist and therefore understands this stuff much better than me!). It sets out very well which bits of the vaccines are actually novel, and what sort of mechanisms might cause problems and on what timescales. It personally reassured me a lot.
Hi, another immunologist here, and I can confirm that I would agree with Andrew Croxford's earlier commentary. The key point about a vaccine is that it isn't a drug which you are dosing on at high levels. Rather it's a relatively small dose of material that is designed to move your immune system from a naive status to a primed memory status, mimicking what would happen if you successfully fought off and recovered from an infection.
The small numbers of those suffering severe side-effects seem to be associated with the triggering of acute phase (shortly after injection) autoimmune reactions where the persons own immune system causes damage. However this is seen at a very much higher rate in natural infections. For the overwhelming majority of individuals receiving the vaccines they seem to be working exactly as expected, in that the individual's immune system is responding faster to future infections because it is able to recruit a memory response.
Regardless of the bad science, it just baffles me that Reform would think people still care about this in 2024. The pandemic was an awful time we all want to forget about rather than tediously relitigate.
It's a fair point! I suspect that for a certain percentage of their core vote this kind of stuff is appealing on some level, but I think you might be right that it might impose some sort of ceiling on their support (booster takeup remains pretty high, which doesn't suggest that too many people are too worried about the vaccines)
I too am concerned by the anti-vax rhetoric and also misinformation that is being peddled by Tice and also by Farage in their appearances whilst canvassing in the election. With such people I wonder if they genuinely lack an understanding of the facts and interpretations, or whether they think it is expeditious to their political aspirations to jump on a populist viewpoint, no matter how much of a misconception it is.
That's an interesting point as to how much they really believe it! I think Farage has got more than half an eye on the US, and in the circles he wants to be in then he's not going to get far being pro-vax sadly (which is kind of ironic, considering that they were developed on Trumo's watch). But of course it's hard to know how sincere all this
Hi Oliver, nice article. Suppose there are long-term harms of the vaccine that are currently unknown or poorly understood, this wouldn't necessarily be borne out in this data. As such, I am curious whether there are studies that are actively comparing non-vaccinated to vaccinated cohorts over time, or other study designs that provide evidence that the vaccine has no long-term negative effects. I am a bit confused as to why there is a resistance (not your own) to this general impetus, to closely monitor new medical interventions, employing all the relevant medical and statistical methods to ensure we know about any long-term impacts. The invocation of the excess deaths argument to me seems like a proxy for this impetus, people are concerned that what we all put in our body has other effects, and in the absence of any study supporting the counterfactual, they point haplessly at blunt instruments like excess deaths, which you've shown doesn't indicate the problem they propose exists.
Hi, it's a fair question I think. Personally I found this https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-long-term-safety-argument-over-covid-19-vaccines/ very helpful from Andrew Croxford (who is an immunologist and therefore understands this stuff much better than me!). It sets out very well which bits of the vaccines are actually novel, and what sort of mechanisms might cause problems and on what timescales. It personally reassured me a lot.
Thanks, I will check it out! Have followed you since 2020, thanks for the data rich takes :)
Hi, another immunologist here, and I can confirm that I would agree with Andrew Croxford's earlier commentary. The key point about a vaccine is that it isn't a drug which you are dosing on at high levels. Rather it's a relatively small dose of material that is designed to move your immune system from a naive status to a primed memory status, mimicking what would happen if you successfully fought off and recovered from an infection.
The small numbers of those suffering severe side-effects seem to be associated with the triggering of acute phase (shortly after injection) autoimmune reactions where the persons own immune system causes damage. However this is seen at a very much higher rate in natural infections. For the overwhelming majority of individuals receiving the vaccines they seem to be working exactly as expected, in that the individual's immune system is responding faster to future infections because it is able to recruit a memory response.
Thanks!