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An official of the Yokohama city government. Municipalities in Kanagawa Prefecture said they may have to discard a large amount of vaccine for the coronavirus, as the expiration date is approaching on some of their Moderna vaccine, partly because fewer people are getting a booster shot, and because many prefer the Pfizer vaccine.
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quote of the day
If the current inoculation rate continues, we’ll have no choice but to dispose of some of the vaccine.
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Mr Kipling
Simple answer... just open up the vaccinations to all that want them. Allow anyone to turn up 3-6 months after their last one. If you don't want one fine.
theResident
No @Rawbeer: Its of YOUR opinion that these tests were designed to fail. The 'experts' that you CONSTANTLY refer to have been discredited many many times over the last two years now, so much in fact that they have become ignored by a great deal of the anti-vax community as not helping their cause, but in fact, hindering it.
virusrex
Yes, the same that you linked at and were already openly discussed from November of 2021, also the same documents that talk about thousands of vaccines instead of the Billions that have already been vaccinated and whose data is not controlled by any company whatsoever and that clearly show the vaccines are safe and effective.
What information from a tiny microscopic subset do you think would be enough to contradict the data from a population many orders of magnitude bigger?
Well, since the experts are talking about the same rates of adverse effects and deaths that are found in unvaccinated people there is no surprise they are not being mentioned. Nobody expected the vaccines to protect people of advanced age and mutiple preexisting conditions from their expected health problems, so it is perfectly normal to keep finding those problems also in vaccinated people (the same as in unvaccinated ones).
theFu
Japan could offer them to NK. Not that they'd take them, but the offer would be nice. Vaccines that aren't used where needed, are worthless.
virusrex
On every institution of the world involved? about something supposedly unsafe being used in their family and friends? not believable.
Some people would be willing to put at risk the health or life of their family to keep their jobs, so they think every other person in the world is the same, but for anybody with common sense it is easily understandable this is not something people could even consider, much less participate in a world conspiracy to do.
virusrex
All kinds of dosages were tryied with HCQ, and it was demonstrated it was worthless against covid by groups all around the world, one single study from a group you don't like does nothing to negate the results from the rest of the researchers that support the same conclusion. "wrong dose" "wrong time" is always the excuse of antiscientific people when contronted with evidence that disprove what they want other people to believe.
Again, bring any institution of the world that disagrees. You can't find any? that is because they are all against your personal belief, there is no need to "choose" institutions to prove the point, any recognizable institution (the kind that publishes scientific studies regularly) can be included and the point will be still maintained, that is the whole point of recognizing a consensus.
The experts are not talking about them now because the documens were not "recently" released, they were openly discussed half a year ago, the information found to be congruent with the conclusion that vaccines are safe and do not increase significantly the risk of problems over the normal incidence in the non-vaccinated population. The problem is that antivaxxer groups refuse to accept this so they continuously "rebrand" the information, even censoring parts of it and pretending it was released a short time ago so they can try and convince people it demonstrate something that is not there.
In reality is old news and do not prove in any way nothing contradictory about vaccines, specially because by now we have data from literally billions of vaccinated people that is not controlled by any pharmaceutical company and that proves the vaccines are effective and safe.
JeffLee
Blame me. I got a third Pfizer because my friends were getting nasty side effects from Moderna.
virusrex
It is terribly irrational to think people working in every institution of the world would agree to keep doing it if they had opposite views to what the institution does, specially about something as serious as vaccines that are supposedly not safe and that will be used in their families and friends, it is not believable. If every institution of the world agrees on something that means there is a consensus, unproven claims of this being false are not an argument.
But institutions are much less likely to make rushed, badly sustained declarations based on flawed studies, individuals do that all the time. Pretending all the institutions of the world are wrong, but one person without the data to prove what he says (even if that data should be readily available if it was true) is right, is not logical.
Yes, it does. Because the institutions only reflect the results of the scientific discussion much more closely than the unavoidable exceptions you will always find, if you counted rare exceptions between doctors or scientists as prove there is no consensus then there would not be any consensus about anything, because there are always people that insist on contradicting well stablished knowledge even if they can be proved wrong.
For that you need to desmontrate the risks are higher than NOT doing the medical interventions, that is something that has not been done with the boosters (for the population for which they have been recommended) nobody is "assuming" things works, studies prove it. You on the other side are assuming unexpected problems will happen that make the boosters a risk, even when such problems should have been already evident by now.
That is not the argument, the professional opinion of every organization of the planet being the same is simply a much better indication of the state of the scientific discussion than lone dissenters.
Each vaccine is new, so no, they have not been around for a long long time, they consist on new antigens and each can produce problems, influenza vaccines can also be a requirement (for some jobs for example) so they are not 100% optional either.
No, it is not. If you compare the number of hospitalizations and deaths on children covid produces more, what you are comparing are rates of problems for covid under life changing measures to avoid contagion with influenza numbers without those measures, which makes no sense. Comparing numbers of both during the same year proves influenza is a lesser risk.
That has been already proved with scientific studies that clearly show that, why do you think the second booster is not recommended for young healthy people? what you argue at the beginning is that this scientific proof is not enough, but you make no argument to consider it so.
professionalextra
Seven pages of text just to say everybody must be wrong but you.
virusrex
As already explained the argument used does mean that, which is why it can be proved illogical, the problem was failing to understand the consequences of what the argument necessarily means.
virusrex
Pretending omicron is not much more infective is a terribly obvious invalid argument, vaccines work very nicely in reducing the burden infections mean, which is one of the most important reasons why infection is nowhere near the same risk to the health as it was before they were used. This completely contradicts your position.
The experts of the world say the oposite, what arguments do you have to say they are wrong?
virusrex
If institutions of the world adheres to the safety and efficacy of boosters for people with special vulnerabilities it is perfectly valid to say this is the general opinion about it. You can link to any source you have where an institution say the boosters have no efficacy or have unjustified risks for their use in the indicated population. For healthy young people that already had a third booster there may not be a need for another (for now, hopefully this will continue) but for the vast percentage of the Japanese population that are considered at elevated risk because of their age or health conditions it is indicated.
I have presented many different studies to prove the consensus, you can simply bring examples of well recognized institutions of science or medicine that say the opposite to prove there is no such consensus, but you never do.
He is just describing what happen with booster for other vaccines as well, once there is evidence to prove the antigens are safe to be used the boosters have a much lower requirement of evidence, because possible negative effects would be an increase of the occurrence presented on the priming shots. There is no scientific justification to consider the same antigen as if it was a completely new thing to be tested from zero. This is why in general all the organizations that deal with vaccination and control of epidemics are on board with the boosters as long as evidence of efficacy is obtained. The same lower standard of proof is used for example for influenza vaccines, and they are actually new antigens every season.
So what? people can have different opinion if they want, but unless they provide evidence of specific risks from the boosters (specially risks that can be confirmed in the ever growing number of people being boosted) then they have no argument to say the boosters are not to be used.
As usual, vaccines and boosters do not require to be absolutely perfect and without any negative effect, they just need to demonstrate to be safer than not using them.
virusrex
This is what you are saying means, professionals are trained to examine scientific evidence in detail and make decisions about it If you think it is common for these people to disagree with the official position of the institutes they are working at (and so the official position would not represent the consensus) this necessarily means the would be aware of important risks to them and their families and friends. It is not believable that these professionals (that work precisely to reduce risks) would commonly keep silent about the issue.
Professionals do talk about vaccines and boosters, and they have concluded in general that they reduce the risk for the populations they are indicated for according to the evidence available.
theResident
Does seem a very common theme that Pfizer is just preferred. I know numerous examples of this - NOT as @wobot would have us believe that they don't work. He obviously didn't read the article as it clearly states that it is quantities of Moderna that are approaching expiry.
I had all 3 Moderna and yes, Was dreading the third as I had a pretty bad experience with my second Moderna. it was however incredibly more convenient for me and quicker to obtain. Useful now that we won't need a TOA from June if triple vaxxed from most destinations!
It is indeed a terrible shame that North Korea wound't even accept them even if offered free of charge.
virusrex
You are the one saying that professionals are able to know their institutions are wrong but keep quiet even if that puts their family and friends in danger by doing it. Is your new argument that they are incompetent to a criminal degree and not being able to understand what their job is? that is even more irrational.
And what importance would that have if true? does that makes the argument less valid? did your mistakes suddenly become less false?
Nobody has said it is seniority based, there is a consensus precisely because there is evidence that support it, something that you have been unable to disprove. It is also "right" in the sense that it is what the experts in the world consider valid according to that evidence, and arbitrarily saying it is wrong just because you would like it to be different is not valid, for that you would need more and better evidence that contradicts what support this consensus. Also, If you think administrators are the ones giving public declarations you are the one that have no idea about the topic, search for the communications/recommendations of institutions that have to do with vaccines and related topics, "administrators" are not the ones putting their names in them.
The consensus is there because the discussion has been made, the evidence examined and confronted and conclusions made with a valid method, sorry if you are unable to accept it, but it is there and there is nothing you can do to deny it without the evidence necessary to disprove it. The consensus contradicts your beliefs.
The evidence that this has been done is there and you could not do anything to refute it, that means your argument has been proved wrong. And no, just because there is a consensus this does not mean there is a monolithic dogmatic truth that can't be changed, that is all your idea. The reality is that enough evidence against it can change it, but without that evidence (of which you bring nothing) calling for a change is not valid.
Yes, that is called validating a surrogate for protection and it is what is normally used for everything in medicine, it is not just arbitrarily deciding a level of antibodies but demonstrating it can be correlated with protection scientifically, so decisions can be made without delaying decisions since by definition it has been proved the value can be interchanged with protection. Once the risks of the boosters are quantified they can be compared with the known risks from the infection, that means it can be proved they are lower, thus it was shown in the booster studies as well. Since boosters have been demonstrated to lower the risk for the population they are recommended for that means they are still justified.
The risks from the infection are several orders of magnitude higher, that means if the risks of vaccines are not different from other vaccines they are justified as the much less risky option. Your position now contradict what you originally defended.
Yes they are, for every new version of the vaccine, and antigens are what frequently produce problems with vaccines, so you are wrong in both things.
The COVID vaccines still work by the use of antigens, the only difference is where they are created.
I specifically said your argument is invalid because you compare problems with influenza without life altering measures that greatly reduce them up to the point where they almost disappear, and against that you bring COVID while in the middle of those measures. You are making the same invalid comparison but now after being clearly told why it is invalid.
Why don't you compare hospitalizations and deaths on 2020 or 2021? that is precisely how the experts prove COVID is a much higher risk for children than influenza.
Yes, that is what evidence based medicine does, but you did not answer the question, if your whole point depends on boosters being indiscriminately recommended the fact that they are not for young healthy people clearly demonstrate this is false.
Luis David Yanez
Never said that. You just keep throwing strawmans left and right, instead of actually engaging in the points I said or asking for clarification if you are not sure what I said.
Professionals ARE talking about these things, there are discussions happening RIGHT NOW, like that fact that the
virusrex
Repeating antivaxxer disinformation does not make it less false, the vaccines work according to the scientific and medical consensus, the lives saved because of them are not a waste even if you consider them so.
painkiller
True; otherwise there wouldn't be a large increase in infections in people who already received the vaccine like we see in the US, New Zealand (one of the highest positivity rates in the world) Australia and Canada.
Not enough data out there to make a case for the necessity for the 4th shot for the majority of people.
Luis David Yanez
I find always funny how you continue to talk about "experts" and some sort of "scientific consensus" without actually naming any specific expert and still claiming consensus when, if you just look at scientific journals, you can clearly see how vast and all over the place the opinions are on the matter.
People like Dr. Vinay Prasad, who has pushed against medical reversal (bad medicine, non-evidence based medicine) way before this whole Covid situation, have done essays pointing out the problems with how the boosters are just not receiving the same degree of scrutiny and do not follow the same degree of evidence as the original shots.
I mean, last year 2 top FDA experts left the organization exactly because they were against steamrolling the first booster, and claimed there was political interference in the usual approval process from the White House.
But yeah, let's continue to talk about nameless "experts" and this supposed "consensus" made out of saying it is so, while not taking a serious look at the data and aby criticism that goes against your beliefs.
Luis David Yanez
Institutional approval, like for example universities, only tells you what the administrators of those institutions agree with, which is usually way more politically motivated. Those aren't really "experts".
I don't know if you are aware of this, but studies are usually not institution based, but based by scientists. Evidence quality should be the standard to follow in science, not if the administration of institution X or Y have some opinion on the matter.
What the administration of "well recognized" institutions say do not conform consensus. That is fabricated consensus. Actual consensus has to do with discussions based on the latest evidence by experts in the field.
The thing with many of these things is, there isn't even enough good evidence to have an actual valid consensus. There aren't enough trials, not enough data, which is exactly what actual experts on the subject have criticized of how the evidence bar for these processes has lowered for administrative approval.
Unnecessary medical interventions should be avoided at all costs, since ALL medical interventions have some risk factor allocated to them. The problem here is, there is no good enough evidence to justify the boosters as NECESARY for most of the population, specially when the lower risk populations have been proven to have higher risk factors over the interventions than lower risk populations.
What you are proposing is exactly why medical reversal happens, because people just assume that things should work and we shouldn't do any further analysis based in some belief that "things just work" and overconfidence on your own judgement.
Once again, the opinion of organization do not trump science. Not to mention that the administration of these organizations are more influenced by politics and are way more susceptible to community biases, which is why, once again, why medical reversal is way too common.
This isn't something new, but since Covid has been so heavily politicized, and there is so much mania around it, it has become almost a sacrilege to even suggest that we need more good quality evidence before giving authorization.
The influenza vaccines have been around for a LONG LONG time, and they are 100% optional, and rarely recommended to anyone who isn't an elder. Not to mention that there has NEVER been a hard push like with the covid vaccine to get very small children into the vaccination scheme.
Not to mention that there is also a lot of criticism against the flu vaccine in scientific circles for younger ages, specially it has been criticized to be "overpromoted and overhyped" since actually the efficacy is very low.
Now, COVID-19 is not influenza. COVID-19 risk is actually LOWER than influenza for children. So there is even less reason to push these vaccines so much, and without good evidence.
Once again, you are changing were is the burden of proof. It is not their place to "show that they do not work" or that "they do harm", that in itself has to be part of the scrutiny process.
It has to be shown that they are not only safe, but that they have a purpose. I mean, there are many medications and treatments that could be classified as "safe" or "mostly safe", but if they provide nothing of value to the health of people, they are useless treatments, and should not be approved.
AgentX
The experts of the world hold a variety of opinions on the matter. To say otherwise is simply disingenuous...
painkiller
An official of the Yokohama city government. Municipalities in Kanagawa Prefecture said they may have to discard a large amount of vaccine for the coronavirus, as the expiration date is approaching on some of their Moderna vaccine, partly because fewer people are getting a booster shot, and because many prefer the Pfizer vaccine.
Not a surprise; Japan also cancelled a large order of AstraZeneca.
Luis David YanezMay 23 07:55 pm JST
No, to the first two questions, and good point to the third question, for that poster.
Agreed.
Wick's pencil
Yes, considerable funding is often dependent on their getting positive results on certain products and negative results on others.
Raw Beer
Indeed, like Oxford U receiving large funds to develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and then carrying out large clinical trials (RECOVERY trials) on HCQ, using large toxic doses (4X recommended maximum ) administered at the wrong time.
No, just those you choose to include in you "consensus".
Just because the mainstream media do not talk about the recently released Pfizer documents does not mean the data does not exist, and it does not mean that experts are not talking about them.
Luis David Yanez
...What?, do you know every single person working in every institution of the world? Do you know they all agree to "keep doing it"? What are you even talking about?
With this statement I'm now sure you are not a scientist, nor you work in academia or anything like that.
You fundamentally do not understand the concept of scientific consensus. Scientific consensus is not the same as social consensus or political consensus, it is evidence based, and it is not seniority based.
Worst of all, you still believe that the ADMINISTRATION of institutions are the arbiters of scientific consensus. Listen to the researchers individual voices, not to what the administration say, that unlike actual scientists do not have to even disclose what are their conflict of interests.
We must note also that consensus also doesn't mean "right" in science, since, once again, it is evidence dependent. There are weak and strong consensus depending on the level of evidence. It is usually based on multiple studies on the subject that, and discussion around these studies as to what are they actually showing.
Your understanding of scientific consensus is really naïve and simplistic.
You are completely wrong here. Institutions are well known for making rushed decisions, and to hype some study that came from their institution just for the free publicity, because, once again, administrators are usually NOT scientists, at least not scientists with active research going on.
The way consensus work in academia is in the discussions there are around scientific circles. You can get a glimpse of some of them from letters to the editor in some journals, but that's not even all of the discussions.
I really do not think you are actually aware of what kind of discussions are happening right now in academia around these subjects.
Never said that. I said that the administrators of an institution and their press releases or public announcements are not actual science, that you should listen to actual scientistS (emphasis on the S) on the subject
I wish that was actually true. Sadly, administrators usually care way more about their image, the founding of the institution than actual science. Once again, it shows just how little you actually understand of academia.
Once again, that is not how scientific consensus work. Consensus isn't about someone's opinion on some scientific subject, it is about trying to get to the truth of some subject via experimentation, data and discussions.
If there is not enough data, experimentation or discussions on the subject, trying to declare some sort of consensus is just dumb.
You are seeing science as this monolith that has answers for things, but that's not true, science only has more questions than answers in order to try to understand how the world actually works, so no, someone's opinion on the lack of data destroys the possibility of consensus, if there is actually lack of data, there cannot be consensus, or the consensus is a really soft one, which is basically a placeholder until we actually get more data on the matter.
I guess you tried to say "that has been done", because otherwise you are basically agreeing with me.
You said that "risks are higher than NOT doing the medical interventions", but that wasn't shown in the boosters studies, that was shown in the original vaccination studies.
For the booster studies there were just Antibody titers studies, and basically they created their own threshold in which if the Antibody titers reached a certain level, they declare the boosters as "good".
The actually NECESITY for boosters, sadly, has not been proven, and sadly, because the standards have become so low nowadays, they do not even try to make an study to try to prove this.
If the anxiety of the general population over COVID-19 is high, the next booster will get approved without any real discussion. I mean, in the US for the 4th booster there wasn't even a discussion panel of experts, nor a vote like it happened for the 3rd.
The requirements to getting boosters approved has become so low that government institutions are basically just releasing the press releases of the pharmaceutical companies almost verbatim as the reason why the booster was approved.
And just so you get what I'm saying, because I already saw that you believe I think they do not work or something like that, I never said that, the boosters might work and be necessary as they claim, but this has not been proven.
Never said that. The risks of the vaccination are actually already well known. They aren't that much different to other vaccines, but they still have risks, which is why you don't take vaccines you don't need.
Once again, jeez, administrators of an organization are not scientists. This is why I hate when people just say something like "an study from Oxford university" or something along those lines, because that wasn't done by the university itself, it was done by some research lab in the university, and there are many times that different labs and researchers from the SAME university disagree.
The Oxford name tells you nothing, you should see the name of the actual authors.
Antigens are usually not new, nor they usually cause any problems. For example, a quadrivalent vaccine for the flu have antigens for 4 different types of flu virus, which are believed to be the ones on circulation for that season.
The Covid vaccines are mRNA vaccines, they do not contain any antigens, that's the whole point of the vaccine. They contain a messenger RNA so that your body is the one that creates the antigens.
The mRNA vaccines were first approved LAST YEAR, so we are actually in pretty much uncharted territory, as there are no longitudinal studies on the matter, and it is not a bad idea to be a little bit more cautious in this case, but if anything, we are LESS cautious in the approval of COVID-19 boosters than the anual Quadrivalent vaccine for the flu.
Now, that is complete misinformation. Let's take a look at 2018. Deaths from Influenza and Pneumonia in ages 1-14 are 244 in the US.
These are 244 deaths from 1-14 in a single year.
Deaths from Covid-19 and Pneumonia in ages 1-19 in the US, between 2020 to 2022, are 279. The age range is wider, the time span is more than double, and the number is not that different, which means....
What you are doing is using the "All Deaths involving Covid-19" statistic, which count every single children that was diagnosed with COVID-19 and then died. They could have had a trafic accident. This statistic is not used to understand the death rate of the virus, it is used to try to understand the spread rate.
I mean, you can look at the latest Infection Mortality Rate meta studies based on serology studies. For young children COVID-19 is basically a none problem.
That is the actual scientific consensus on that subject.
For now. If you remember with the first booster, it was not recommended for young people at first either.
Raw Beer
Oh, I see, the secret documents that needed a court order to be released, and are only now being released in monthly batches (still in redacted form) were already being "openly" discussed.... Riiiight....
Those experts who are talking about those documents now are amazed at the high rate of serious adverse effects and deaths, but still no mention in the main stream media....