Thanks to Jim Lewis for his rebuttal of nonsense with fact.
I have one minor quarrel with his posts and one humorous anecdote to relate as well as one suggestion for this thread. I’ll do the last first:
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It’s not yet known whether vaccination prevents infection. That’s actually hard to determine, because detecting the virus itself requires doing testing of a nasal swab or saliva for the presence of the virus itself. The vaccines have been shown to prevent symptomatic DISEASE in the vaccinated person, but we’ll accumulate evidence as to whether they prevent INFECTION by followup blood tests of the phase 3 trial participants to see if they’ve developed antibodies against viral proteins OTHER than the spike protein that almost all of the vaccines available at the moment are designed to deliver to our immune systems. There is now some population based evidence from Israel that the vaccines are actually preventing INFECTIONS and therefore reducing transmission as well, but one of the difficult problems with our response to this virus is that infections are often totally asymptomatic. Just because a person hasn’t been sick in the past year does NOT mean that said person has never had SARS CoVid-19 infection.
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All these anecdotes about whether or not one got knocked on one’s keister after the first or second dose make for a long thread, but they’re virtually useless in comparison to the proper accumulation of carefully recorded data in properly blinded and randomized clinical trials. When the results of the Pfizer Phase 3 trial were reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, I spoke a few times with one of the trial participants, who actually felt GOOD about waking up at 2 am the morning after her second injection with a temperature of 104°F, because that “meant” she’d received vaccine, not placebo. However, properly done clinical trials record EVERYTHING, and while fever and chills were dramatically more common among vaccine recipients than among placebo recipients, among the 40,000 trial participants only four had very high fevers in the seven days after the second injection, and two of those were in placebo recipients. Translation: just because something odd happened to YOU doesn’t mean that it was DEFINITELY caused by the vaccine.
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I spent forty years practicing nephrology, but as a young boy I was ABSOLUTELY terrified of needles. I have vivid memories of being told that I’d need to receive 3 injections of the Salk poliovirus vaccine, then learning that the world had lied to me because I’d actually need a fourth, and then (another LIE, this one rising to war crime severity) a FIFTH. One through 3 were given at school, but for some reason 4 & 5 by my family doc, who had to chase me around the room to administer it. I also had a younger sister, and I blamed HER for being 5 years younger for quite some time, because when SHE was due for the lethal injections, all she had to do was swallow a sugar cube (live, attenuated virus vaccine). Of course, there were some tragedies associated with that.
In summary, there’s an answer to the question of whether the mRNA vaccines can worsen hearing loss, but it cannot be inferred from a few dozen anecdotes. There’s actual EVIDENCE, and it’s recorded in the voluminous tables of the appendices in the randomized trials publications. I’m not claiming that people should “suck it up” and not report adverse occurrences, but establishment of causality isn’t based on anecdote. Famous example, the vaudeville joke (“I had a friend who ate carrots. They KILLED him!” question: “My god, that’s awful! What happened?” answer: “He stepped outside and got run over by a truck.”