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Japanese are very cautious about vaccines because historically there have been issues about potential side effects. The government has been involved in several lawsuits which adds to people's deep caution.

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Haruka Sakamoto, a public health researcher at the University of Tokyo. Japan has one of the lowest rates of vaccine confidence in the world, according to a Lancet study, which found that fewer than 30% of people strongly agreed that vaccines are safe, important and effective.

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historically there have been issues about potential side effects

Which issues are these?

10 ( +10 / -0 )

fewer than 30% of people strongly agreed that vaccines are safe, important and effective.

I find this interesting. I thought a majority of people got the flu vaccine every autumn/winter, but I must be wrong. What % of the population gets the flu jab annually, then?

7 ( +8 / -1 )

I got the flu vaccine every year.

No problem at all.

But everyone I am asking here in Japan are very cautious about the Covid Vaccine. All my friends here want to wait for a while and want to see how it goes in Europe and the US.

6 ( +7 / -1 )

Smart Japanese.

My own highly specialist doctor told me honestly that flu vaccinations don't work well anyway because the strains are always evolving.

-9 ( +5 / -14 )

My own highly specialist doctor told me honestly that flu vaccinations don't work well anyway because the strains are always evolving.

This is not a professional secret. Viruses evolve, it’s what they do, hence the need to have a different type of flu vaccine every year. Flu vaccines are very effective, offering between 69 to 70% protection most years.

People don’t vaccinate here because the government doesn’t promote them, there are no clear and coordinated public health campaigns and you have to pay for even the essential ones. Every winter you hear of schools closing due to flu epidemics, or measles etc. It’s shameful in a first world country.

6 ( +10 / -4 )

Ma-hu - one example is the cervical cancer vaccine. The rate in Japan is perhaps the lowest in the developed world.

An extract from The Lancet

"..Funding for human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination in Japan began in 2010 for girls aged 12–16 years, with three-dose coverage initially reaching more than 70%. On June 14, 2013, 2 months after formal inclusion in Japan's national immunisation programme, proactive recommendations for the HPV vaccine were suspended following reports of adverse events since found to be unrelated to vaccination, but which were extensively covered in the media. Vaccine coverage subsequently dropped to less than 1% and has remained this low to date. We aimed to quantify the impact of this vaccine hesitancy crisis, and the potential health gains if coverage can be restored.."

Full article here - Impact of HPV vaccine hesitancy on cervical cancer in Japan: a modelling study - The Lancet Public Health

10 ( +11 / -1 )

Surprising giving the amount of x-rays they submit themselves to every year. Where I come from, x-rays are only given when absolutely necessary.

9 ( +9 / -0 )

Vaccine uptake in the U.K. is high, despite all the lies and scaremongering.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/29/covid-vaccine-uptake-high-despite-concerns-over-hesitancy

3 ( +5 / -2 )

Japan is a very special case well known internationally, for Japanese people is much more easier to accept having problems for not doing something than having problems for actually doing it. Thanks to this, public officials have a very easy choice, a million people dying for something not done will never have the negative effect in their careers as 100 people dying because they approved something. Promoting these irrational fears in the population has become a very important part of their jobs.

Because of this Japan no longer leads in production of anything for health, be it vaccines, drugs, therapies or surgeries. Even approval of things of proven safety and efficacy overseas only moves at terribly low speeds.

Anyone got data on animal 'challenge trials' for this new vaccine? With SARS-Cov-1 they gave up because it actually caused increased sensitivity to the virus(!): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0035421

What? you think only a few candidates were ever produced? that is completely out of reality, there has been dozens of candidates tried on animal models for both SARS and MERS, and most of them do not cause any special problems because inactivated virions are no longer the first option to produce vaccines, its been a long time since it was discovered that the presence of intracellular viral RNA balances the immune reaction towards Th1 type, eliminating the observed side effects from your old reference.

Obviously for clinical studies with much more strict standards than just histopathology are required for the pre-clinical animal studies, but at this point we have even better data. Phase III human clinical trials data from tens of thousands of volunteers that show without doubt that "viral sensitivity" was not observed. If that were the case obviously the vaccinated group would have much more problems after infection, the opposite of what has been observed.

6 ( +9 / -3 )

But Japanese are very cautious about everything

2 ( +4 / -2 )

Smart Japanese.

Yes!

I got the flu vaccine every year.

No problem at all.

I haven't had a flu vax in ages, no problem.

I guess the Japanese are not as indoctrinated as ...

-7 ( +3 / -10 )

And when countries around the world require evidence of vaccination they will not be able to travel or they will have to rush to catch up anyway!

If an irrational fear promulgated in the face of the evidence is indoctrination then yes the Japanese ere indoctrinated.

4 ( +5 / -1 )

I see Japan becoming a bit of a pariah among other G12 countries when they are the only one not vaccinating, I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point other countries ban travel from Japan.

5 ( +6 / -1 )

If by summer Japanese are not Covid-resistant, and then people abroad (who are by then Covid-resistant and thus won't be social-distancing) arrive for the Tokyo Olympics

It'll be like the Spanish conquistadors vs. the Aztecs all over again, lol (look it up)

3 ( +4 / -1 )

Ma-HuDec. 29  06:53 am JST

historically there have been issues about potential side effects

Which issues are these?

https://www.laguardia.edu/maus/files/Ethics-ch-16.pdf

Issues like the Green Cross' involvement in the HIV-tainted blood scandal in the 80s, as well as the Japanese National Institute of Health's involvement in coercing hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki into cooperating with their unapproved vaccine studies without their consent.

Of course it didn't help that these organizations were largely led and staffed by alumni of biowarfare units like Unit 731 during WW2. So there's a certain irony in that the lack of the Japanese public's trust is itself a side effect of the country's evasion of war responsibility, both to foreign countries as well as to its own domestic victims.

-3 ( +2 / -5 )

A studying evaluating where a human was infected with the coronavirus after being infected, either as part of a trial or in the real world

What are you talking about? you know how vaccines work right? they do not stop people from getting a new infection, that is realistically impossible, they stop people from getting the disease after getting the natural infection. That is literally what clinical trials search for in order to evaluate efficacy.

For example https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577

The results completely contradict the "virus sensitivity", vaccinated people had LESS symptoms than not vaccinated people, if they were sensitized by the vaccine you would observe precisely the opposite.

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

It would have helped if you'd done the proper thing and linked to something in the first place then eh. Proper empiricism demands evidence of something not happening and absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence...

This is not any kind of insider information, it has been in the news constantly as the justification for approval for a safe and effective vaccine, it would be insulting to expect anybody (especially if that person is in any way interested in the vaccine) not to know this information.

Nevertheless, now you know why the "increased sensitivity to the virus" possibility can be discarded, I recommend to you that you will get better sources of information that do not so obviously cherry pick partial results not applicable to the currently approved vaccines.

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

All 'the science' people are asking these questions though:

https://twitter.com/Thomas_Binder/status/1345326734187573248

Nothing should be taken for granted, it's not cherry picking when we're talking about absence of evidence of either hmmm

A badly loaded question about a different disease, describing a mechanism very well known and specifically avoided for the mRNA vaccines? that is definitely misleading and manipulative. You really need to better your sources, it appears as if you were actively looking for the worst quality possible.

Even a first year postgraduate student knows that antigen only vaccines tend to produce an immune response biased towards Th2, and depending on the antigen this could cause problems. On the other hand vaccines that include "infection" step (attenuated viruses, plasmids, pseudoviruses, etc) activate the innate immune response and balance the immune response between Th1/Th2, thus making it much more benign and long lasting. mRNA is this, just safer.

And again, human trials demonstrate this simply did not happen in the volunteers, the vaccines could have been antigen only and still they would be safe and effective because they have been already tested and proved so.

Even if someone says something you ignore, that does not mean that professionals are in the same situation as you, as in this case it may be that the "secret" that this someone is talking about is something terribly obvious, that can be considered and discarded immediately because it does not apply.

Also anybody trying to use the Nurenberg code against a technology that has been used for more of a decade on literally hundreds of human trials, all approved by the best ethical committees, should be considered with a lot of care, because not everybody can make an accusation so easy to prove false. I would not be surprised if this is not the only conspiracy theory he likes to support.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

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