Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2021 July 27

Science desk
< July 26	<< Jun | July | Aug >>	July 28 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 27

COVID vaccinations

How can anyone be convinced to accept the immunization for Covid 19 if they have any knowledge of the history of the Unethical Medical Experimentation by the United States Government performed on both military and civilian personnel in the last 100 years and even in the last 20 years? Even if the vaccination appears to be safe for now, what about 10 years of 20 years from now. This virus inoculation was rushed through the testing process extremely fast. Can someone address my concerns of this vaccination?

Unethical human experimentation in the United States note: Please note the additional references listed in that article.Buddy L49 (talk) 14:55, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

• Despite the political/antivax slant, I think there are actual answerable questions here, so I reverted ApLundell's hatting. I have no objection if a third party decide to re-hat it.

So, I can see three questions here:

1. Why people (or more to the point US citizens) would accept instructions from the US public health, when the US government has demonstrably done unethical medical experimentation in the past,
2. Why were covid vaccines "rushed" through the process,
3. What about long-term effects of those vaccines.

I shall post an answer to each of these later in the day (if nobody else covered it in the meanwhile). Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 11:47, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

• Ok, I think the first can be dropped if not rewrited by Tigraan. Consequently, the other two can be dropped. No, we ( including OP themselves) are all today 20 years too young to efficiently address their concern and send them to their cruel destiny forward whichever they choose. --Askedonty (talk) 20:06, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

• Two points. Question 1 is specific to the US, but the decisions in question have been made in many countries.
• Question 2 has a simple, non-political answer. The vaccines were indeed rushed into use, in all the countries I've heard about: they were given "emergency use" authorization after relatively small-scale trials that would not allow rare side-effects to be investigated, which is why some effects turned up afterwards and even killed a few people. But this was done because COVID was already killing lots of people. So, as Health Canada put it, the benefits outweigh the risks. --184.144.99.72 (talk) 20:51, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

While EUAs were certainly implemented on short timelines, it's wrong to say that those authorizations were based on 'relatively small-scale' trials. The Moderna and Pfizer trials each enrolled about 30,000 participants, for example. For phase 3 studies, those are absolutely huge numbers.

Even for vaccine trials - which tend to enroll fairly large numbers of participants, to ensure sufficient sensitivity - these were hefty trials. (Compare the largest-ever HIV vaccine trial, RV144, which enrolled 16,000 participants. Or TIDES for den gue fever, with 20,100 participants. Or RTS,S/AS01 for infant malaria, which had 6,537 participants. The M-001 flu vaccine trial had 12,460 participants.)

No new therapeutic agent gets bigger trials than that. We accept that we just won't see super-rare one-in-a-hundred-thousand or one-in-a-million side effects or risks until post-approval. For any drug. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:45, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

The Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine, has still not been approved by the US authorities, despite having been in use in the UK and EU since January (I've had two doses and am still alive) and is in use in more than one hundred countries worldwide. [1] The US Phase III trials had 32,449 participants, [2] in addition to an earlier trial of 11,636 participants in the UK and Brazil. [3] This is hardly "rushing through" on the part of the US. Alansplodge (talk) 11:56, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Incidentally, that non-approval has created problems for travelers to the US who need to prove their vaccination status. At least some places that are asking for proof of vaccination aren't considering the AZ vaccine acceptable. --184.144.99.72 (talk) 05:25, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Another point is that although the approval process for the AZ and other vaccines was fast, it doesn't mean that the usual standards weren't applied. In the UK, the regulators gave vaccines a "rolling review", looking at the data as it became available rather than the usual practice of waiting for an overall presentation at the end of the trials process. This BBC article describes how the process was streamlined. Alansplodge (talk) 18:21, 31 July 2021 (UTC)