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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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More effort than this please.

Its the small scale thread

My mistake! Warning rescinded.

You know how every week there's a new "racist, homophobic hate crime", or "beloved tv star Guy Dickinson accused of disgusting sex crimes", or "latest: republicans literally genociding poor refugees to own the libs", but if you look into it for a few hours, or just wait a month, it was just not true - that hydra head crumbles to dust, only to be replaced by five more when you turn around?

The same is true of "vaccine sterilizing your ovaries with lipid nanoparticles", "blood clots killing millions", or "covid destroying the immune system", or a thousand others. The first dozen times I saw something, I looked into it, but that was two years ago. And it's from both sides! Unvaxxed sperm's left-wing mirror is amateur virologists on twitter speculating about virus-induced organ-failure because the hateful neoliberal right-wing won't let us enter our third year of lockdowns.

tl;dr I’m not worried

The simple reason vaccination correlates with mortality is that vaccination correlates with age. (Insert caveats about youth vaccination tradeoffs here.) Last I heard vaccination was still protective against hospitalization and mortality from C19, which seems the most relevant metric here, tho I’m happy to update if you have new data.

Vaccine protection has been fading since V1, but my priors are that immune evasion is more important than diminishing immune response. But… mRNA vaccines are brand spanking new, so we don’t know fully understand their limitations and possibilities fully. If mRNA approaches linger and cause a different type of immune response than traditional vaccines then maybe we can’t use them for longer term protection. Or, maybe we can use this vector to inhibit certain types of autoimmunity; a cure for rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis would be tremendous. It’s still very early days so I take quite seriously the possibility that mRNA vaccines have serious problems, but the stuff I’ve seen to date, including the links above, have yet to convince me of this thesis.