All of CharlieMarr@protonmail.com's Comments + Replies

I've been putting off answering this, because a proper answer would require diving into a lot of disparate evidence for some background models. But developments over the past few weeks have provided more direct data on the key assumption, so I can now point directly to that evidence rather than going through all the different pieces of weaker prior information. The key assumption underlying my belief (and, presumably, most other peoples' belief) in the efficacy of the commercial vaccines is that the data from the clinical trials is basically true and representative. If we believe the data, then the health risks are trivial (compared to COVID), and the effectiveness is decent, and our certainty about these two facts is very high. The vaccines are not "lightly tested" in any epistemically-relevant sense, only relative to the frankly-unnecessary extreme over-testing typically used. (Zvi's posts frequently provide helpful snapshots of the relevant data/analysis.) The question which you seem to be interested in is whether the data is trustworthy. The key model here is that, if there were anything even remotely suspicious in there, then regulators and the media would absolutely freak out over it. That's exactly what we've seen over the past few weeks - first with the AZ clotting thing, then with AZ calling their vaccine "79% effective" when the regulators thought it only merited "69 to 74% effective". The clotting thing in particular is a clear case where there was absolutely no real, important problem, and regulators/media freaked out over it anyway, because they are super-over-sensitive to even the tiniest hint of a problem. That follows directly from their incentives: regulators do not get punished for delaying good vaccines, but if a bad vaccine gets regulatory approval, then there's a scandal and an Official Investigation and "heads will roll".

Good questions. First, I expect a disproportionate number of vaccine trials are for "unusually difficult" viruses, like HIV. After all, if it's an "easy" virus to make a vaccine for, then the first or second trial should work. It's only the "hard" viruses which require a large number of trials. I expect this is still mainly a result of regulatory hurdles. Clinical trials are slow and expensive, so there has to be a pretty big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to make it happen. Also, companies tend to do what they already know how to do, so newer methods like mRNA or peptide vaccines usually require a big shock (like COVID) in order to see rapid adoption.

At this point in the game, things like "advancing knowledge" and "I really want to know if it was actually this easy all along" are at least as big a factor as the object-level benefits. If this were last July, or if I lived in Europe, then it might be a different story, but at this point I'm likely to get vaccinated within a few months anyway. On your specific points: a) COVID still sucks, I don't want my food to taste like nothing for six months, etc, but I'm definitely not at any significant risk of death from COVID. b) I definitely do not expect that sleep/exercise/vitamin D/etc would achieve anywhere near the degree of risk reduction that a vaccine provides, and I do expect preventative to be way better than treatment here. c) I certainly would not consider "vaccine experts" reliable, as a category. I do think that I am extremely unusually good at distinguishing real experts from fake. Indeed, there's an argument to be made that this is the major thing which we should expect rationalists to be unusually good at. In the case of RadVac specifically, I think it is considerably more likely to work than a typical vaccine trial, and typical vaccine trials have ~40-50% success rates to start with (the highest success rate of any clinical trial category). d) Not sure what you mean by this one. Sounds like you're making a generalized efficient markets argument, but I'm not sure exactly what the argument is. e) Antibody test results would be the goal here. Though in practice, most governments seem so incompetent that they're not even actually looking at antibody test results or vaccination, so it's not a very large factor.