Why are so many sceptical about a vaccine?

[larrygrylls]

There are currently in excess of 170 vaccines in development against SARS-COV-2 virus, 37 in human trials, 6 in phase 3 trials and one actually approved for limited use (to vaccinate the Chinese army).

Most immunologists expect we will have a vaccine by mid next year latest, and the U.K., at the forefront of vaccine development, has bought 90 million plus doses.

And yet, in thread after thread in this topic, people are saying that we should not continue to take precautions against Covid 19, as we will all ‘eventually get it anyway’.

Is this some form of status quo psychological bias that makes otherwise intelligent people not believe that one day (and not so far away) we will all get vaccinated and normal life will resume?!

www.gov.uk/government/news/millions-could-be-vaccinated-against-covid-19-as-uk-secures-strong-portfolio-of-promising-vaccines

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.amp.html

It was back in the 1960s that we first became aware that a Coronavirus had jumped the species barrier to humans. Since then a number of other coronaviruses have done the same. Some have devastating results of a 30% death rate in affected humans. Fortunately most of these were contained e.g. SARS, MERS, Ebola. The one that caused worldwide deaths was HIV.
Scientists have been working since the 1960s to find a suitable vaccination for all the coronaviruses and after 60 years there is not a single vaccine for any coronavirus.
All these positive statement from researchers and drug companies simply raise the share price and attract money to fund the research.
If they haven't been successful in 60 years of trying it is reasonable to believe a vaccine isn't going to be found any time soon.
It's being realistic, not negative.

@Comicstar

Redolent could you explain what you mean by "modify behaviour" please.

Key bit in parentheses below. The Oxford vaccine was keen to NOT simply use a saline solution as placebo so that al participants could experience the common side effects of a vaccination.

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“ Blinding the participants and the researchers further does away with bias because the participants are not aware if they are receiving the real deal (thus making them less likely to underreport or overreport outcomes) and the researchers also don’t know (thus making them less likely to more closely observe one group over the other). At the end of the study, the number of outcomes are counted in each group and the resulting rates compared. Only then are the groups “unblinded,” allowing for the researchers to know which group had the better or desired rate of outcomes.”

Ebola is a filovirus, and HIV is a retrovirus. Neither is a coronavirus

@Esspee I’m sorry but you are completely wrong! We didn’t discover that coronaviruses have jumped the animal-human species barrier in the 60s.

Most coronaviruses are not worth worrying about, and those that are a real threat to humans (MERS and SARS) are already undergoing vaccine development in Oxford - and this work has led to Sarah Gilbert being able to push ahead with this new vaccine too.

Oh right so results are flawed then aren't they, because the placebo group isn't really a placebo group. The only study I have found that had a "real" placebo group showed a higher number of deaths in vaccinated infants...food for thought.

Thanks for the explanation Rodant 👌

"I will be completely devastated if it doesn’t go ahead for any reason, as it’s basically keeping me going through all of this."

I think this is at the heart of dismissing a vaccine for a lot of people - they don't want to hope. Which is quite sad, really.

@Comicstar

Oh right so results are flawed then aren't they, because the placebo group isn't really a placebo group. The only study I have found that had a "real" placebo group showed a higher number of deaths in vaccinated infants...food for thought.

Oh I see. You’re an anti vaxxer spouting common tropes about vaccine not being compared to saline solutions. Which is simply untrue. I would link to the website Virology Down Under but I know you won’t read it.

Also, the Oxford vaccine is the only front runner that ISN’T using a saline solution as control. So there go the rest of your conspiratorial ramblings.

Yes, it's a real placebo group, unless you are going to try to insist on a non-standard set of definitions.

If you want to postulate that there are more adverse outcomes in vaccinated DC than those who have received nothing, then you also need to look along the challenge trials (level of harm once exposed to the disease-causing agent) or, as that wouid be totally unethical in children, known outcomes of adverse effects in vaccinated group (who do not catch the wild disease) and the unvaccinated group based on the proportion expected to succumb were the disease in circulation.

When you look at the challenge/outcomes then the vaccinated group is substantially lower in terms of numbers and severity of adverse events

Espee, I'd love to know where you got your information from. Did you copy and paste from somewhere. It's very clear you have no expertise in the field. These types of posts are misguided and dangerous. And all over the internet

I am not a conspiracy theorist. Everything I have stated are facts. Other medications have a placebo group not given the medication or anything else throughout the study. I'm not anti vax, I'm anti anything that has not been tested properly. You're obviously pro anything that has been tested even if it hasn't been tested properly.

@Comicstar

Oh right so results are flawed then aren't they, because the placebo group isn't really a placebo group. The only study I have found that had a "real" placebo group showed a higher number of deaths in vaccinated infants...food for thought.

I find it absolutely terrifying that we live in a world where people think like this. Like they know more than people who spend their entire lives studying and building upon the layers of knowledge laid down by previous generations.

What is the world coming to? Seriously.

You're entitled to your views as I am mine. I'm not terrified, life is a beautiful amazing thing regardless of people's differing opinions ✌ peace and love to you all ❤

@Comicstar

I am not a conspiracy theorist. Everything I have stated are facts. Other medications have a placebo group not given the medication or anything else throughout the study. I'm not anti vax, I'm anti anything that has not been tested properly. You're obviously pro anything that has been tested even if it hasn't been tested properly.

You claim that none of the coronavirus vaccine candidate are being tested against ‘true’ placebos.

That’s simply untrue. The ad5-vectored vaccine (China) was compared with a saline solution in its Phase II trial. Results in The Lancet.

www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31605-6/fulltext

There are successful vaccinations for coronaviruses in animals for the millionth time . They have been developed and are used because it is economically expedient to do so; animals are valuable to the food industry. We haven't had such a devastating virus causing a worldwide pandemic in a long time. Other viruses have been more fatal in recent times but were less dangerous to large portions of the world's population because people were not asymptomatic/symptomatic almost immediately, before they could spread to the community.

Although HIV is devastating, there are good treatments these days, and ways to avoid becoming infected.

I didn't say Covid I said vaccines and is this the only study that has had a saline placebo group? I will read in the morning, thanks for sharing and a healthy debate. 🤗

I’m not sceptical about potential vaccines, I’m confident safe vaccines will be found. I am sceptical about when they might appear, when they might be widely available, whether the government can actually properly distribute them and what the plan actually is (has there actually been a plan since we squashed the sombrero?!) The range of dates for a vaccine has been summer, September, October, November, Christmas, early 2021, mid 2021, 2025, never.... all said by apparently qualified people, many of whom I suspect have vested interests. Who am I meant to believe? Add to that a flurry of apparently promising treatments that no one seems to want to put a timeline on either (and why are so many countries simultaneously testing the same things?!) and for someone with a non scientific background it’s all quite frustrating. Maybe we could have a series of science briefings, where instead of Boris/Matt we could get some scientists and medics to give some straightforward information and allow public questions.

Redolent had a quick scan over the study and I can find what the placebo group were given. It reads like they were given a milder dose of the trial vaccine, but I might be wrong. If you could quote where it states the placebo group were given saline solution that would be great. As I said I have an open mind to facts.

There are very good reasons why a date for any vaccine cannot be predicted. Largely it is because, in the final phase, it relies on people in the trial going about life normally and getting exposed to the virus naturally. There need to be enough numbers of people on the trial in the different age ranges etc. Just when the Oxford trial was getting to that phase numbers in the U.K. were comparatively low. So they had to set up trials in South Africa and Brazil where numbers were higher.

Sometimes trials speed this up by deliberately exposing people to a virus (or whatever). This has been debated for Covid due to the urgency. However, it is seen by many as unethical, as there is currently no fail safe treatment for Covid.
Incidentally, the vaccines being developed have different ways of working. For example the one from Imperial is, I believe, an entirely new method.

I think because it's looking like a yearly vaccine type deal. Ideally it would be a once and done type vaccine and then we can all carry on as normal, that's what a lot of people were thinking when talking about a vaccine.

A rolling vaccine still leaves us with infection and transmission problems, so although it's a big leap forward it won't be a total irradication of it.

Im simply not a fan of ANY medication that dont have years and years of testing behind it. Thats just not possible in 18 months, you cant predict what it could do to peoples bodies in 5, 10 years.

Could it increase cancer or other illnesses? Make kids sterile? They cant predict it. It may never happen and its all hunky dory which will be great but what if its not?

I was same with cervical cancer vaccine. No way would i have got it for dd in its first decade, especially when many girls in Aus went down, now we have long term use and documentation of it, im fine with it

@Comicstar

I am not a conspiracy theorist. Everything I have stated are facts. Other medications have a placebo group not given the medication or anything else throughout the study. I'm not anti vax, I'm anti anything that has not been tested properly. You're obviously pro anything that has been tested even if it hasn't been tested properly.

It's not a placebo in the most common sense, but it is a valid control group (which is the entire point of using a placebo). You have to compare the people who get the test vaccine with another group of people who get given something ineffective, indistinguishable from the test vaccine, so that you have a baseline against which to measure your results. Normally in a drug trial it's safest, easiest and cheapest to use a totally fake placebo that doesn't have any active ingredients at all. However, in this trial using a completely fake saline vaccine is likely to be noticeable to participants, because all real vaccines have common mild side effects, which the saline vaccine wouldn't. And if participants know which group they're in it could affect the results.

For example, in this stage of the trial they're giving participants the vaccine (real or control), sending them out to continue their lives as normal, and then studying whether there's a difference in how many people from the real vaccine group pick up the virus in their everyday life compared to the control group. However, if people know which group they're in, people who know they've had the real vaccine might take more risks and therefore be more likely to catch the virus, making it look less effective than it is. Or they might subconsciously downplay their symptoms because they want the trial to be a success, making their cases seem less severe compared to the control group. That might lead researchers to conclude that the vaccine makes symptoms less severe, when in reality it's just that the groups are reporting the same symptoms differently.

So instead they're using a real non-coronavirus vaccine as the control, so that participants can't tell which group they're in and there's no bias in the results. However, even though the control is a working meningitis vaccine it has no effect whatsoever on participants' immunity to COVID. Therefore you can still compare the results from the two groups and see whether there's an overall protective effect for participants who had the real coronavirus vaccine, compared to the ones who had some random other vaccine that doesn't give you any immunity to COVID. Does that make sense?

Because then we'd have to wait for a vaccine and people want reasons to do what they want to do right now. Easier to write off a vaccine then accept it will probably come but not in time to save their job.

No other vaccine has had this amount of money thrown at it.

But the biggest thing that sits uneasy with me is the Chinese opting to vaccinate their army first. Why not the hospital staff who are most likely to come into contact with it?

I think there are three things going on with the "there won't be a vaccine" people (an odd stance. There IS a bloody vaccine already. We're just waiting for it to be rolled out, more or less).

1. As a PP said, it's sometimes a stance connected with not wanting to modify behaviors. People who don't want to social distance or wear masks have a strong emotional incentive to decide that "There's no vaccine in the pipeline so trying to control the virus is a waste of time, let's just get it over with since we will have to let the thing burn through the population at some point anyway."

2. Some people love a good apocalypse. This sounds like an unpleasant personality trait, but I think it's common in people who feel trapped in a deeply unsatisfactory life and feel that anything that upends the status quo would probably be better than the present situation.

3. Some people's mental health has gone to pot and they are starting to spiral---believe that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. I think this is called catastrophizing. It's an awful state of mind to get into, but it's definitely happening with some people right now.

Even when the vaccine is rolled out, it won't do much to stop the above because the goalposts will get moved. Instead of "there won't be a vaccine," we will hear "The vaccine won't work" "The immunity won't last," "It's dangerous and is causing a whole bunch of vague health problems which I believe I am now suffering" "I am not having the vaccine and the government can't make me" etc.