Thread by @forrestmaready

1. A couple of dirty little secrets about how vaccines are typically made and tested.

If you've never studied how vaccines work, these may surprise you.

If you're waiting to leave your house until a coronavirus vaccine, it's probably not going to sound encouraging.

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2. New vaccines are typically tested on animals first. Obviously, vaccines can cause lifelong problems, so it makes sense to not test them on humans.

Unfortunately, these tests don't really tell us if the vaccines WORK, just how often they may cause problems (in animals).

3. Scientists developing the diphtheria shot in the early 1900s discovered a particular creature COULD give them some sense of whether the shot worked or not.

The best part: they were small and cheap. They were a rodent called the domestic cavy. Otherwise known as Guinea pigs.

4. Viral and bacterial infections which cause humans problems often don't affect animals at all.

It is poorly understood how animals are affected by the coronavirus. This will make animal testing useless for anything other than some semblance of safety.

5. Ideally, a vaccine is administered, the subject is then purposefully infected with the microbe in question and monitored to see if they get sick. If they don't, it's assumed the vaccine worked.

If an animal can be sickened by the microbe, this works.

But what about humans?

6. PURPOSEFULLY infecting humans to see if a vaccine worked or not is not considered ethical.

So vaccines are never really tested on humans to see if they actually work. They ARE tested to see if they cause problems, but not if THEY ACTUALLY WORK.

7. Normal drugs are monitored for months, sometimes years, to see if they are safe. Vaccines are treated very differently.

In a normal scenario—with no coronavirus panic—just routine vaccine development, they might observe the patient for problems for as little as 48 hours.

8. With this new coronavirus vaccine, nearly all caution is being thrown to the wind. Normal safeguards may need to be skipped.

It's difficult to imagine looking for problems less than 48 hours after the injection, but perhaps this is what they will do.

9. So the obvious question: If scientists can't test whether the vaccine actually works in animals, & they can't test if the vaccine actually works in humans, how do they even know it works at all?

The answer is one of the more disturbing secrets about how vaccines work.

10. Vaccines are almost never tested to see if they actually work. Instead, scientists analyze your blood to determine if you've developed specific antibodies in a response to the vaccine.

Decades ago, this seemed like a good idea. Antibodies mean your body has immunity, right?

11. It makes sense that if you can measure antibodies in someone's blood to a specific microbe, you should be able to believe they have immunity.

Unfortunately, we have since discovered that measuring antibodies is a very poor indicator of actual immunity to a disease.

12. The immune system is the last frontier of understanding in the human body—even more poorly understood than the brain.

Scientists who develop vaccines are VERY smart, but unfortunately they have to rely on measuring antibodies to determine if a vaccine works.

This is bad.

13. Antibodies, it turns out, are a horrible indicator of actual immunity. Some people seem to have complete immunity to a certain disease but their antibodies are poor.

Others have good antibody readings, but still get infected.

Measurements can change from week to week.

14. Scientists KNOW this & of course would prefer to actually test to see if a vaccine works. But it's considered unethical, so they don't.

As a result, any coronavirus vaccine approved will be hailed as a success without EVER having been tested to see if it ACTUALLY WORKS!

15. If you are a child or pregnant, we can also guarantee a new coronavirus vaccine was not tested on someone in your particular situation. Why?

It's considered too DANGEROUS. Vaccines aren't tested on pregnant women or children, despite being administered to them daily!

16. Normal people aren't usually enrolled in vaccine safety trials. They work real hard to find superhumans—people who have zero health issues and aren't likely to complain about anything that happens during the safety trials.

Who did they use for the current coronavirus trials?

17. Whomever is currently being safety tested with coronavirus vaccines, we can guarantee they are going to try really hard not to notice any problems.

They will be considered heroes if all goes well. Failures if not.