Thread by @ewanbirney

Vaccine safety thread - briefing to journalists as much as anyone else as ever, and an offer.

Vaccines are safe. They are safe principally because of the extensive and multiple testing that happens before they are licensed, and that ultimately is due to 100,000s of people who volunteer for trials to assess and quantify safety. I am a scientist and one of these volunteers

"Safe" here of course can never mean never - strange things happen in life, healthcare and biology and like many things we do in life - crossing roads, going biking, drinking wine - we have constantly do things which are safe but have some small risk of something going wrong.

The extremely large number of people on trials means the scientists who run the trials (I am not one of these scientists - here I am just a volunteer) can estimate even quite rare events. So they know. They do these trials with squeaky clean "no cheating" ways to be sure.

For some of the vaccines to COVID-19 we know they are briefly unpleasant- really quite unpleasant fever+aches for some people. This is those people's immune system reacting appropriately to this disabled virus and learning about it. It's a sign of a healthy immune system.

(In my case, as I am on a clinical trial for the vaccine, I don't know if I got the COVID19 Vaccine or the other "mock" treatment which was in fact a different vaccine to a different disease. My arm ached for a day, like I hit a wall hard with my shoulder. No fever for me).

At this point one could dive more into the science, clinical trial protocols, statistics of rare events and the reasons people who do this alot really think these things are safe. For some people this will be reassuring.

But I think a lot of fears of the vaccine are simpler than this; it is a dislike of hospitals, medicine and needles - a desire to live life independent of this all for as long as possible - and a mistrust sometimes of these very systems that say "safe" with freaky confidence

Just to say straightforwardly I get the dislike of hospitals and needles - I am not a fan of either (I have to look away when I get injected or people take blood - I am really not good there!) and I also would like to live a healthy life on my own terms.

But, I know that taking a vaccine is far far safer than most of the other things a regularly do, and furthermore I know that by volunteering for this trial I can give other people the confidence of this particular vaccine being safe.

The freaky confidence you will hear more and more about is due to the 100,000s volunteers, like me, who had to take a marginally higher risk (because we didn't know the safety aspects) so people *can* be confident about the safety.

This argument about whether vaccines are safe is starting now; the precise details of how they work is still hot news (and it is very exciting), but it is really important to get this confidence about safety to people in an appropriate, empathetic way

(editorial note: I am not a fan here of a shock-and-awe on statistics or science - this is not where the challenge lies - it is the emotional distrust and disconnect people feel in my view).

Finally - an offer to journalists - I and probably other trial participants I am sure are happy to be interviewed and provide that human view of this (other trial participants on twitter happy to be interviewed - perhaps respond here so journalists have smorgasbord of options)