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[Neonivek]

I love how you're pointing at formaldehyde in horror when our body actually makes it and degrades it naturally in a fairly efficient process. Plus, it's not even an active ingredient. It's used to break down some viruses and then diluted to tremendously trace levels. Buzzwords ftw.

Did you look at the data? It doesn't say people DIDN'T melt into a pile of goo.

So clearly they could have melted into a pile of goo.

[Shinotsa]

I love how you're pointing at formaldehyde in horror when our body actually makes it and degrades it naturally in a fairly efficient process. Plus, it's not even an active ingredient. It's used to break down some viruses and then diluted to tremendously trace levels. Buzzwords ftw.

Did you look at the data? It doesn't say people DIDN'T melt into a pile of goo.

So clearly they could have melted into a pile of goo.

Well we haven't tested the entire population, so it's fairly likely that a few people will melt into goo and we just don't have the statistical power to prove it.

[GavJ]

I love how you're pointing at formaldehyde in horror when our body actually makes it and degrades it naturally in a fairly efficient process. Plus, it's not even an active ingredient. It's used to break down some viruses and then diluted to tremendously trace levels. Buzzwords ftw.

I was under the impression that it was sometimes also used as an intentional adjuvant in a subset of vaccines. I may have misread, it is mainly beside the point, because you can feel free to swap out the example for alum or any other plausible allergen ingredient from the dozens and dozens of different ingredients across various types of common vaccines.

[Putnam]

IIRC they don't even use most of that shit anymore and that most of it is anti-vaxxer propaganda/ignorance at this point.

[GavJ]

I'd like to point out, by the way, that you don't HAVE to go and justify a full on crazy 10,000,000 person clinical trial or something all at once. You can start by saying "hm, tiny bit suspicious circumstantial stuff, let's do 50,000 instead of 2,000" THEN if that shows some positive trends, even if maybe not fully significant in severity (or statistics), you might feel justified going to 500,000
etc. etc.

We do this all the time, and you can scale your resources to what seems to be useful or if situations change (such as "oh hey we might be in range of eradicating now all of the sudden!").

IIRC they don't even use most of that shit anymore and that most of it is anti-vaxxer propaganda/ignorance at this point.

Most of what shit?

They definitely use alum. And other aluminum salts as well. Formaldehyde is there, and I seem to have been mistaken about it being used as an adjuvant (if only diluted leftover, fine not a big deal). There are also various other things, transit mediums, albumins, leftover cells of many species human and animal that they used to culture the virus (in the case of viral vaccines), preservatives such as thimerosal (it is not used in child vaccines I don't think, but is in adult flu vaccines and tetanus and one or two others) and other preservatives, blah blah. Sometimes chemicals that alter the consistency in necessary ways (I don't know if technically detergents, but similar roles). Lots and lots of things. Of varying threat and data.

I'm not saying that this is ridiculous stuff. I'm not saying they have heroin or crushed up bedbugs or whatever in there. All of it has a logical purpose. But most of it can still be potentially quite allergenic to rare people.

[Shinotsa]

The problem is that it's impractical to do a 50,000 person clinical trial in any appreciable amount of time with any normal amount of money. An n of 100 is big enough to generalize about many populations, and an n of 2,000 is large enough for much greater populations. Anything over that would take so long and be followed so loosely that I honestly can't see much benefit between that and a post-marketing study, which can analyze millions of people for general trends. I'm not even sure what they'd be checking in a clinical trial vs a post-marketing study when it comes to vaccines, since it's not like there's a constant serum level of a drug to be maintained or whatever.

[GavJ]

I'm not even sure what they'd be checking in a clinical trial vs a post-marketing study

You don't check anything different. The crucial differences are the setup: random recruitment, random assignment, and blindness to condition. And I do not see why a 50,000 person study is impractically impossible at all. It's no more effort or bookkeeping per person or anything than a 2,000 person study. And they can be as short term as you're planning to watch symptoms for. Typically is a month. I'd prefer more like 6 months, but whatever. Definitely NOT talking about years long longitudinal studies here.

[Shinotsa]

I'm not even sure what they'd be checking in a clinical trial vs a post-marketing study

You don't check anything different. The crucial differences are the setup: random recruitment, random assignment, and blindness to condition. And I do not see why a 50,000 person study is impractically impossible at all. It's no more effort or bookkeeping per person or anything than a 2,000 person study. And they can be as short term as you're planning to watch symptoms for. Typically is a month. I'd prefer more like 6 months, but whatever. Definitely NOT talking about years long longitudinal studies here.

I really, 100% do not mean to be rude, but have you ever worked with human subjects? It is a royal pain in the ass. It took four years and millions of dollars for my old lab to get 400 people to agree to come in and have completely benign tests run on them. I can't imagine the amount of money it would take to randomly find, recruit, vaccinate, and follow 50,000 people with a vaccine that has not yet been FDA approved. It'd be far easier to simply analyze people that have been vaccinated and check if any deaths happened in the time following their vaccinations. You lose the random assignment, sure, but when 90% of people are vaccinated you've still got a very large sample to work with. And clinical trials are plagued by pseudo-random assignment. You presented this earlier when pointing out that many people of poor health are excluded from trials, and many people are excluded without reason. A lot of the times you also attract a certain kind of people to clinical trials - those who have signed up to be notified of them, those who are poor and need the money from them, etc.

[GavJ]

My lab is funded at around $300,000 a year and runs ~300 toddlers a year, although with non invasive cognitive testing and single visit. They are recruited pretty randomly from county birth record phone numbers, though of course not everybody agrees (they tend to be too RICH actually, not too poor in my case).

I'm not sure how you're managing to spend 1,000's of times more money per person, but okay, sure. Never done injections or whatever, maybe it is that much more. Even still, if it's say $1,000,000 for 100 subjects, 50,000 = $500,000,000.  Which is like, less than 1/6th of what we spend on developing and distributing every typical vaccine. Seems worth doing by comparison at least once.

But alternatively, sure, more extensive post marketing studies are better than nothing if that's all I can get. Even those, we could be doing far better. The biggest I've seen are like ~1-2 million people, and usually 1/3 to 1/2 of those studies included in meta analysis are ones exclusively looking at autism (eyeroll), so more like 0.5 to 1 million for what we want. Where the hell is everybody else? If nothing else, the government could at least mandate simple records of this crap so that we could have hundreds of millions instead of 1... It doesn't even have to be identifiable data at any level of the database. Private doctors could keep their own records of actual people like they do already and then submit summaries yearly or whatever and the very first thing the government gets at all is already aggregate anonymous data with privacy intact.



Edit: Locking topic because I'm tired of it and apparently so are other people since nobody has participated in 2 days. Also more and more frequent circles. Thanks everybody for an awesome discussion, though. Only one flamer post really in 30 odd pages! Lots learned all round I hope, myself included.