62 votes
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Why will there be vaccines first before a cure for COVID-19?

Your question contains a lot of misconceptions. A cure is definitely possible A cure could be found, proved, and proved safe, more quickly than a vaccine People and firms that could be working on ...
Kate Gregory's user avatar
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61 votes
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Is it advisable for a healthy male in his early 40s to take the influenza vaccine?

In general, the benefit of flu shots is to the general population. Taking the cited value of 40%-60% from the CDC, we can say that it might be a coin toss for you personally to be protected from ...
StrConDexWisIntCha's user avatar
49 votes
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Is SM-102 a safe ingredient in the Moderna vaccine, despite these safety warnings?

The MSDS linked to is for a product sold as a solution of 10% SM-102 in 90% chloroform. It's listed as "SM-102" because that's the interesting/useful thing that the company is selling. It's ...
Bryan Krause's user avatar
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46 votes
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Are Covid-19 vaccines much more deadly than people (and scientists) think?

https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html provides a useful guide for interpreting these data. VAERS deaths are not causal reports, they're just a report where someone (doctor, family member) decided ...
Bryan Krause's user avatar
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41 votes

Is it advisable for a healthy male in his early 40s to take the influenza vaccine?

Tackling your points in turn, in inverted order: flu is an irritant but nowhere near deadly You are probably confusing the flu (influenza) with the common cold, which is colloquially often called “...
Konrad Rudolph's user avatar
37 votes
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Why is the rate of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus disease booming?

The short version is that in 2016 the polio vaccine changed. A more thorough explanation requires some background on the immunology of polio and its vaccines, which is not straightforward. Polio virus ...
timeskull's user avatar
  • 486
34 votes

Father gets chickenpox, but doesn't infect his two children. How is this possible?

If there was close contact, if the 90% rate is accurate, and if occurrence is independent in related individuals, then you would expect 0.10 * 0.10 = 1% of contacts with 2 potentially vulnerable ...
Bryan Krause's user avatar
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23 votes

Why will there be vaccines first before a cure for COVID-19?

Drugs are typically small molecules that interfere with some chemical process in the disease causing microbe, and therein lies the rub. Bacteria, fungi, protozoa, worms, etc. are sustained by their ...
Charles E. Grant's user avatar
21 votes
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Why hasn't Russia's daily COVID-19 cases decreased as a result of its vaccine?

The initial Russian announcement was bluster. From the NYT's vaccine tracker: On Aug. 11, President Vladimir V. Putin announced that a Russian health care regulator had approved the vaccine, renamed ...
Bryan Krause's user avatar
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19 votes
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A cheap and easy inactivated vaccine for COVID-19

The only approved inhaled vaccine is the flu vaccine delivered intra-nasally. It uses a live attenuated virus. There are a whole list of people who should not receive it because it's a live virus, ...
Graham Chiu's user avatar
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17 votes

Is it advisable for a healthy male in his early 40s to take the influenza vaccine?

Influenza deaths are not specifically tracked in those over the age of 18 but they can be estimated from death certificates. CDC estimates that from 2010-2011 to 2013-2014, influenza-associated ...
Graham Chiu's user avatar
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17 votes

How many people end up needing medical attention during the 15 minute window after receiving the Pfizer vaccine?

The most noteworthy complication, and most heard about in the news, is anaphylaxis. This article breaks down cases of anaphylaxis nicely: Reports of Anaphylaxis After Receipt of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines ...
JonathanReez's user avatar
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15 votes

Is it known how often unvaccinated children are contagious with symptom free diseases?

Unvaccinated members of a population contribute to the susceptibility of the rest of the population to disease, especially vulnerable people who cannot be vaccinated. This fact is true whether or not ...
DoctorWhom's user avatar
  • 5,754
14 votes

Is it advisable for a healthy male in his early 40s to take the influenza vaccine?

Influenza vaccines do not have satisfactory effective rates of preventing flu. Flu vaccination reduces the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% Vaccines aren't meant to stop diseases by making ...
Alexander's user avatar
  • 249
14 votes
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Father gets chickenpox, but doesn't infect his two children. How is this possible?

To add to @BryanKrause's answer re: rare events happen all the time, the children are not out of the woods yet. The mean incubation time for a primary VZV infection (the clinical syndrome known as ...
De Novo's user avatar
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13 votes

How can a school be getting an epidemic of whooping cough if most of the students are vaccinated?

Per the CDC: A: Pertussis vaccines are effective, but not perfect. They typically offer good levels of protection within the first 2 years after getting the vaccine, but then protection ...
ventsyv's user avatar
  • 231
13 votes

How many people end up needing medical attention during the 15 minute window after receiving the Pfizer vaccine?

The data on this aren't hard to find. Here are some more examples that specifically provide time frames to back up @A Rogue Ant's answer: For the Pfizer vaccine: During December 14–23, 2020, ...
Carey Gregory's user avatar
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12 votes

Is it advisable for a healthy male in his early 40s to take the influenza vaccine?

Other answers have explained why being vaccinated is generally a good idea, and I fully support the ones that do. That said, the article you've linked to does indeed present some very scary points, ...
ymbirtt's user avatar
  • 221
12 votes

Why hasn't Russia's daily COVID-19 cases decreased as a result of its vaccine?

Answering my own question since I believe I've found the answer. According to this source, The senior minister at the department, Mikhail Murashko, announced last week that a nationwide mass ...
Allure's user avatar
  • 618
11 votes

Do vaccines cause autism?

Perhaps the question should be asked, can vaccines prevent autism? One fact of note is that postnatal infections with the vaccine-targeted infectious agents, including measles, mumps, and rubella, ...
Graham Chiu's user avatar
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10 votes

Why is the new mRNA vaccine unable to modify human DNA?

Roman Zieliński seems to be intentionally misleading you by making an implausible circumstance that is technically possible sound like a likely outcome. This strategy is not unusual among people who ...
Bryan Krause's user avatar
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10 votes

BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine efficacy after 1st dose - explain the statistics

The paper itself describes how this is calculated (see the Methods section), but also see this Q&A at Biology.SE talking more broadly about how efficacy has been defined in these vaccine trials: ...
Bryan Krause's user avatar
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9 votes
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Medical relevance of tetanus vaccination

Clostridium tetani is the causative organism in tetanus. It requires an anaerobic environment to grow so is found in soil and in the gut of animals. Person to person transmission is not possible. ...
Graham Chiu's user avatar
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9 votes
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Delayed vaccination: effect on the immune system

The human immune system Basically, the human (and that includes all ages) immune system has two parts: The innate immune system is a very old part (which doesn't mean it's bad or superfluous, on the ...
YviDe's user avatar
  • 6,982
9 votes

What are the limits on the amount of pathogens that a body can be immune to at any given time?

Won't this (having a flu vaccine every year) put them in an uncharted territory as far as effects on the immune systems are concerned within a couple of decades? No You are exposed to and develop a ...
De Novo's user avatar
  • 3,188
9 votes
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Flu vaccine paradox

The paradox you describe is resolved if you think about the influenza vaccine that is approved as a procedure for making an annual vaccine. It is the procedure, repeated year-after-year, that has been ...
Bryan Krause's user avatar
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9 votes
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Is there a reason to be anxious about claim that COVID-19 vaccine could turn out to be inducing infertility in females?

This is probably as good as it gets for now, but experts quoted by AP have dismissed the idea as highly improbable, basically on the argument that the common sequence is too short to be of concern and ...
Fizz's user avatar
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9 votes
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Do mRNA Vaccines tend to work only for a short period of time?

Short answer - no, the mRNA vaccines specifically don't only work for a short period of time. Natural infection and all vaccines of different types against SARS-CoV-2 all produce similar durations of ...
bob1's user avatar
  • 3,016
8 votes
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Is there evidence that the over-avoidance of germs weakens our immune system?

The hygiene hypothesis For some reason I hold the opinion that the immune system needs to be kept busy so it wont get weak In scientific terms, this is known as the hygiene hypothesis. It was ...
YviDe's user avatar
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