Display MoreJed,
I have not been following this forum lately. Can you provide a quick link to Mizuno's recent results?
Question to the members:
Assume that a vaccine is 100% effective. Also assume COVID-19 kills 1% of those that are infected (it may be 3% in the US). However, the vaccine kills 1 in 1000 individuals. Would you take it? If it kills 1 in 10K, would you take it? What level of safety is necessary for you to accept the vaccine? The MERS vaccine had issues in animal testing and I am told by reliable sources that it had problems in some human early trials that caused substantial health problems. In that case, MERS disappeared but was about 10% fatal so a vaccine was important.
Statistically, anything less than a 1% death rate would be taking the vaccine is the best bet. The difference in many minds is that getting a disease is never 100% (for COVID19 is will likely be in the high 80s) and unknown but the risk of a vaccination is known and voluntary (or should be). You can play with the numbers of risk of disease vs. vaccination vs. efficacity and decide when you get the vaccine or take the risk of the disease. Always remember you have about a 1% chance of dying in a traffic accident by commuting to work by car over a 40 year period.
BTW: Some military vaccines are labeled "experimental" as they are not FDA cleared "approved" and I think they are mandatory (there were court cases on this aspect).
The bar for vaccine safety is very high indeed. 1 in 1000 would be completely unacceptable for any vaccine. Serious adverse events are on the order of 2 per million (anaphylactic shock, live influenza vaccine). And that is not the same as deaths.
As for what society might tolerate in a rushed through COVID vaccine - 1 in 100,000 severe adverse event causally linked? I doubt very much the vaccine companies will apply for approval with anything higher than that, even though politicians will want it.
What would I personally be comfortable with? The thing about COVID is that 50% of those serious enough to be hospitalised have continuing effects after 6 months, so you need to add to the low death rate the "long-term effect" rate when considering the perils of COVID. That is maybe 5X higher - we cannot yet tell. The cytokine storm (sure, rename it bradykinin deregulation) bit is very nasty throughout the body, much worse than Flu.
I am in a fortunate position where I can live and work with a very low COVID risk with little inconvenience and maintaining good social connections. Where I to go to work I'd estimate my chance of getting COVID over the next 12 months as 5% - but it depends entirely on the epidemic rate in London - difficult to tell what that will be, maybe it will stay low. At my age (the consequences are highly age dependent) I'd put death chances from COVID at 1% and nasty long-term effect chances at 5%. So that is 1 in 400 chances of something nasty without vaccine. Moving to 1 in 1000 chances of something nasty if aI take a 60% effective vaccine (maybe a significantly better because a vaccine can reduce severity even when you still catch COVID). So on those figures it is strongly in favour for even a 1 in 10,000 adverse event vaccine.
Remember though that the population has severe adverse events anyway at higher levels than that even without COVID.