Its not quite apples to oranges as many of the dangers of aspirin (e.g. stomach ulcers or liver damage) are due to long term exposure or over dosing, neither of which can easily happen with a vaccine.
Risk is proportional to usage. My point was that using aspirin (or driving, since you brought it up) is more common and more easily to use incorrectly than a vaccine.
Cars still weird me out. Cars are incredibly dangerous, even with all of the safety that goes into them. People don't treat them with the respect they deserve or demand.
Edit: I was specifically referring to how the danger of everyday things are under estimated by people. That people e.g. text while driving a 1½ ton vehicle at 55+ mph is a great example of that. The danger isn't high enough to be "common" but definitely higher than people estimate it to be.
I'm pro vaccine. I hope everyone who can gets one. These are just my thoughts on why we see skepticism.
The more the media treats covid vaccines like they're marketing the latest iphone release the more skeptical I become. It's very unsettling to me personally.
Black people in this country have the Tuskeegee experiment as a huge reason to be skeptical of vaccines.
Over the course of the last year the sense-making organizations have lost a ton of credibility by lying to get the outcome they wanted instead of educating us. The most blatant examples are probably when the surgeon general and WHO told us wearing masks would kill us because they didn't want us to buy masks that would save our lives, they wanted to save those for healthcare workers. Fauci has recently admitted he lied about his estimates for herd immunity because he believed it would aid compliance. Birx told us not to mix family and then had a mixed family Thanksgiving. The list of governors/congress/media personalities hypocritically breaking the rules they push feels unending. Fourteen days to slow the spread turned into shut down everything until there's a cure. These things have a cost, and we are seeing it.
Given that I have a higher likelihood of getting killed by a bolt of lightning than by undergoing a number of medical procedures, I'd say the bar is pretty high.
Any procedure involving any invasive (derm-piercing) tool, you're one human/process mistake away from getting exposed to super-resistant bacteria via contaminated tooling. Any procedure involving body manipulation/massages, you're one human/process mistake away from getting paralyzed neck to toe or worse. Any procedure involving anesthesia, you're one human/process mistake away from dying right here and there due to OD or allergy.
If your life comprises undergoing a million medical procedures involving any kind of invasive tools, anesthesia or surgery, you'll die from human-caused complications way before you get randomly hit by lightning.
Nah, the numbers are pretty firmly on my side. I picked a fairly 'risky' procedure as far as the routine ones go to make the comparison really conservative.
I'm still more likely to get fried to a crisp by Lightning than die by the procedure.
That should give you an idea for how safe most procedures are.
No, I'm not saying I have a higher chance of dying IF I get hit by a bolt of lightning.
I'm saying I have a higher chance of dying by getting hit by lightning going about my life as normal than dying by getting a whole slew of routine medical procedures done.
I’m not completely sure what the parent meant, but dying IF you get hit by a bolt of lightning is not the same as dying to a bolt of lightning. I think they meant the latter.
Vaccines are very safe because they are required to be very safe by law, if a vaccine is not shown to be very safe, it is pulled from production. They are not intrinsically safe.
Isn't this the case for all medicines? Vaccines mechanism of action makes it safer than any other medicine as they are harnessing the bodies own immune response system.
I don't know how often this occurs. I know a specific case was Pandemrix, the vaccine administered in a few European nationas during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, which seems to have increased the risk of narcolepsy especially for children [1,2].
If you restrict your interest into people with pre-existing conditions, the death rate of COVID is even higher and any danger posed by the vaccine is even less relevant to them.
Maybe all ten children killed in the Cutter incident had pre-existing conditions. Most people have a pre-existing condition of some sort or another. It was an effort to inoculate generally, so that's why I used the death rate of COVID in the general population as a comparison.
It has to do with your argument being a bad argument.
> Only 10 in 200,000 died from a vaccine
This doesn't negate the fact that vaccines can be dangerous. This just happens to be the number for that particular vaccine.
> 10 in 200,000 deaths is better than 1 in 100
The 10 could have been fine without the vaccine. Who knows, it's just speculation; maybe they had pre-existing conditions, maybe they did not. But comparing numbers like this knowing that the 10 in 200,000 are drawn from a different population from the 1 in 100 is being disingenuous.
I never said vaccines can't be dangerous. I was talking about the relative danger of a vaccine. A plausible upper bound on the absolute risk is the Cutter incident. Covid is way above that. Even a shitty vaccine that occasionally kills people at a rate of 10 in 200,000, it would still be a better bet than COVID.
The people getting the Polio vaccine (children) were the general population of people at highest risk of death by polio. The same is true for the Covid vaccine, at least for the next few months. Both are mass vaccination campaigns.
As a class of biologically active agents, vaccines are incredibly mild. This is because rather than throwing a wrench in the gears of how cells work (the usual mechanism of action of drugs), they tell your immune system to do what it does every day, but just to include this one new target.
The definition of "intrinsically safe" doesn't even sound like a consistent bar. Nearly every aspect of living involves risks, even if that risk is of falling and hitting one's head.
There's no wrench in the gears, no mucking up of the normal function of enzymes. It's just ribosomes translating like they normally do, and then the rest of the immune system going after the translated peptides.
Anyone knows if the small number of people who do get side-effects from a vaccine would have been been likely to get a severe form of the disease if infected?
The effects are too mild and short term to pose an interesting research question, I would think.
For the more sever side effect of swollen lymph nodes, it has not been investigated, though that might provide enough immune system insight to be an interesting question to pursue.
The only other adverse event, Bell's Palsy, is currently indistinguishable from the background rate of occurrence, so I would doubt that anybody is investigating that.
There's a big methodological problem too: you can either get an extreme reaction to COVID-19, or you can have side effects from the vaccine, but a person going through one would poison the results of the other. So to come up with some sort of experiment, you'd need some sort or prognostic based on biomarkers that was strong and convincing enough to think it was related to what you're predicting, which we definitely don't have yet. Then you'd need to cross tab between effects. Potentially possible, but it relies on a pretty big discovery that would have better uses!
Agreed. This debate over the covid vaccines is getting weird. Especially when it comes to the HN demographic, I'm pretty sure 99%+ are perfectly fine with vaccines in general. As I am. Vaccines and a lot of modern pharmaceuticals are awesome and save many, many lives. However, I'm super against rushed, politicized pharmaceuticals. Especially when there are hundreds of millions of dollars in profit to be made. Big pharma isn't exactly known for doing the right thing when big money is on the line... ever.
As you mentioned, vaccines are not safe because they are vaccines. They're safe because of the exhaustive testing trails. A majority of the forced vaccines have been tested for many decades, those are fine (speaking from a USA perspective). The problem we face now, the anti-vax idiots muddied the waters of actual problems of some vaccines. It's hard to determine what's true and what's just stupid. This is why it's important not to overblow anything. It makes it harder to weed out true, legit problems that can be legitimately fixed.
It seems that you have concerns about the recently approved covid vaccines, at least from allusions such as "I'm super against rushed, politicized pharmaceuticals" and "A majority of the forced vaccines have been tested for many decades".
To address those two points in particular:
The trials for these FDA-approved vaccines were not "rushed". They included all the usual phases for their usual durations. That's why we only get the vaccines now (even though developing them took far less than a month). What made the trials faster is that they started preparing the next stage while the previous one was still ongoing - which is not normally done, so as to not waste money in case problems are found.
As for the duration of testing: As mentioned, the set of stages before approval was not reduced. Vaccines are indeed monitored after being cleared for use, but having to wait decades would not make sense. I understand that this is different for other vaccines that are "forced", but you admit yourself that this is not true for all of them in the first place.
Talc baby powder is very safe because it is required to be safe by law. If talc baby powder is not shown to be very safe, it definitely will not be allowed to stay on the market for decades after the government learns it is giving us cancer.
Several of those aren't treatments (colonoscopies, x-rays, ultrasounds don't actually aim to treat or change anything) and actually the whole statement could be considered tautological -
Every treatment is aimed at an existing pathology, by definition, otherwise can we really call it a "treatment"? For what does it treat?
Circumcision is not really preventative of anything much, it's a cultural thing at this point.
Colonoscopies do create an opportunity for treatment, the removal of polyps.
It's among the most effective anti-cancer interventions we have, so worth being clear that there is potential to benefit from treatment during a colonoscopy.
Vaccines are not treatments ether if you want to be strict about the definition. You can't treat something you don't have, right? They are medical procedures that have a risk/benefit ratio.
As someone who had been suffering from persistent balanitis and phismosis for over a year until getting a Circumcision which magically fixed all my problems, I disagree vehemently.
While I agree with the broader point you're making, circumcision is an odd addition to the list of preventative medical procedures. It may offer mild benefits for reducing transmission rates and infection time for STDs later in life, but it also comes with risks.
If I didn't see the above, my intuition would have made me guess that 90%+ of medical professionals get flu shots. It turns out I was way off.
However, the reasons don't appear to be safety like this thread's article. One doctor said he doesn't get flu shots because the CDC makes a guess for what goes into the next season's flu shot and they're only ~50% correct. Since he got sick from the flu shot (even with the weakened virus) many years ago, he now avoids them. He still believes in the science of flu shot and not anti-vaxx but he personally chooses to not take it.
EDIT: Apologize for posting bad statistic. Is the UK NHS statistic accurate? If so, why do most UK health workers avoid it?
This is because the MLM/anti-vaccine market penetration into healthcare professionals (nurses especially) is unfortunately really high. As it turns out, not even a lifetime of training and knowledge can prevent being suckered by grifters.
I've met quite a few doctors that believe in homeopathy, being a doctor doesn't guarantee a strong statistical background or critical thinking unfortunately.
Easy to explain: being a doctor means understanding the dirty insides of profession thus know it is mostly bs. So naturally they don't trust it. Just like developers who do outsourcing, never do their own products because they know it's bs, and priests usually don't believe in God because they know dirty insides of the Church. In general, it is very hard to sell stuff if you buy into your own bs. Many otherwise great people failed for that, like Hitler - he lost because he started to believe his own propaganda.
I was seeing a specialist once who was being shadowed by two med students on rotation, and the doctor started talking about chemtrails. The look on the med students' faces when he started going into that...
Med school requires good analytical smarts and an excellent ability to retain information, but I'm quite convinced at this point that raw analyical ability has almost nothing to do with the ability to think critically to avoid insane beliefs. It's just not something that humans come built-in with.
Friend in SoCal recently called his primary care physician to ask about COVID testing because he and his wife had some possible symptoms (persistent cough). The doctor prescribed him a steroidal inhaler (he's had asthma before) and told him not to worry about it, but that symptoms persisted more than a week he could do an in person consult after he got back from vacation in Cabo.
They got tested and quarantined anyway... and came up negative, but are still changing PCP.
Yes, exactly. It is often required as a condition of employment and (pre-COVID) in the hospital I am aware of, if you would/could not get the flu shot then you were required to wear a surgical mask at all times during that year.
"By occupation, flu vaccination coverage was highest among physicians (98.0%), nurses (92.0%), pharmacists (90.6%), and nurse practitioners and physician assistants (88.8%)
Flu vaccination coverage was lowest among other clinical health care personnel (81.7%), assistants and aides (72.4%), and nonclinical health care personnel (76.7%)."
> Since he got sick from the flu shot (even with the weakened virus) many years ago, he now avoids them
As most/all flu shots don’t contain weakened virus (FluMist, the nasal spray, does contain weakened virus, but the shot uses either inactivated virus or viral proteins), this doctor seems a bit out to lunch?
Moreover, it’s possible to get sick from another strain of flu or because the vaccine hasn’t yet become effective - it takes a week or two to be useful so an anecdote of getting sick before then doesn’t indicate anything about the flu shot.
>(FluMist, the nasal spray, does contain weakened virus, but the shot uses either inactivated virus or viral proteins), this doctor seems a bit out to lunch?
As personal anecdote, I get flu shot from Costco every year but this year was the first time I got nasal FluMist because they ran out of the needle version. This was also the only time I've gotten sick from it. Immediate runny nose and headache even before I left the store.
Those side effects are apparently listed as normal, though it’s interesting to learn they can come on that quickly! I would have thought the immune system would take some hours to respond.
Not saying this is good, but one should be aware that the flu shot is a bit of a special situation. Unfortunately it's a really poor vaccine compared to other commonly given vaccines, but it's an exception. The calculations how much the flu shot helps aren't pretty. You can also see this by the fact that in many european countries flu vaccination is not recommended for the whole population.
Most vaccines have amazing effectiveness. If you take something like measles, it's basically "take 2 shots and you have a more than 90% chance of being protected for a lifetime". This is a much easier win than "you need to have a shot every year and the effectiveness is varying somewhere between 40-60%".
Luckily it seems Covid vaccines are more like measles vaccines than like flu vaccines - at least in terms of effectiveness.
The average efficacy isn't necessarily high, but I don't see how that is enough to call it really bad. That gets balanced against the benefit it does have, the cost, the safety, etc.
(the study evaluates medical costs and productivity, it's not doing a sentimental analysis to get to the savings)
Of course there is lots of room to improve a vaccine that is sometimes only 10% effective, but a reduction in costs to society by operating a vaccination program is a pretty good place to be starting from.
>CDC makes a guess for what goes into the next season's flu shot and they're only ~50% correct.
I hear this argument a lot and it doesn't make sense to me. If the CDC predicts strain A will be dominant and vacinates against it, shouldn't we expect strain A to be supressed?
> Most healthcare workers do not get annual flu shots.
> And 2 articles from a quick Google search coincidentally show the same ~60% skip flu shots for both USA and UK:
You've said "healthcare workers", but your link about the UK (it's about Scotland only) talks about all NHS workers. That's cleaners, accountants, cooks, etc. People who don't necessarily have any patient contact and it's not what we'd normally call a healthcare worker.
For England, for frontline healthcare workers, the number was 78% for sept 2019 to feb 2020.
Some NHS trusts do better than others. One got a rate as high as 94%.
A dilemma. Years and years of propaganda towards capitalism have trained people that individualism is the holy grail. Even the american dream basically says that you as an individual can change things because your perspective is unique.
And now, pieces like this need to be written to re-educate people about group behaviour and essentially socialism. The very thing that america even went to war against.
Weird world. And everyone not agreeing immediately is a heretic. Yeah. Talk about confusing messages.
In what way did this article allude to anything remotely describable as "socialism"?
Literally the only part of the article that is not 100% directed at the individual reader is "(and others)" in the very last paragraph.
It is mind-boggling to me that parenthetically mentioning the single word "others" is enough to provoke "but that's socialism" responses. And let me be clear that there is a mile-wide gap between "socialism" and "the opposite of pure individualism".
Wait, "just go with the flow and at least pretend you believe what the masses are supposed to believe" is not socialism? C'mon. The whole "better fake believe then be sorry" thing is pretty much the antithesis to individualism.
You shouldn't be downvoted. It's reasonable to be anxious.
A few weeks ago, a prominent and "mainstream" French doctor said that he wouldn't get an mRNA vaccine shot until he had access to the corresponding scientific publications (not available at the time). In the meantime, he said he wouldn't be able to make an informed decision.
Personally, I mostly trust the medical institutions of my country and I'll probably follow their recommendations without second-thoughts. Yet, it never hurts to have some doubts, especially in this context.
EDIT: It's one of these topics where you're not allowed to express the slightest, tiniest, doubt.
> EDIT: It's one of these topics where you're not allowed to express the slightest, tiniest, doubt.
It's a bit disappointing, since neither of us are particularly advocating any resistance to vaccines. HN is one of the last larger forums to properly dissect topics, ask questions (even difficult ones), and try to understand root causes & effects, second-level effects and so forth.
Unfortunately lately it seems the twitter/reddit culture has taken a bit of a foothold - cheap, popularity-seeking comments void of any substance are spammed into anything remotely relating to politics or breaking news. And questions/comments like ours are vehemently downvoted. Let's hope the trend breaks down rather than grows.
There's a very simple argument to counter this thought.
It's true mrna vaccines are new, but also the sars-cov2 virus is new. Your question shouldn't be if you're worried about mrna vaccines, your question should be if you should be more worried about mrna vaccines than about getting infected.
Serious long term sideeffects from mrna vaccines? Possible, but very unlikely. Serious long term sideeffects from covid-19? Absolutely, and there's a lot we still don't know.
One is a virus that’s ostensibly handled fine by practically any healthy immune system, whereas the vaccine is a novel gene therapy.
It seems to be fine and without any noticeable side-effects, but the “how dare you even slightly doubt it, you monster” tone is frankly absurd and authoritarian.
> handled fine by practically any healthy immune system,
Except for nearly 2 million dead people so far and many millions with long term adverse effects.
> vaccine is a novel gene therapy.
And those are just wrong words.
> "how dare you even slightly doubt it, you monster”
Given that at some point supply of the vaccine will exceed the demand and planting seeds of doubt in other people will reduce demand further and cause them to loose health or life ... yes, voicing uninformed concerns is acting like monster.
It's fine to have concerns but just go and read science quietly till they are resolved instead of voicing them.
> Can you imagine the pretentiousness required to say this?
I'm just advising what I'm doing myself. Without pretence.
Ignorance is not a sin, but some forms of ignorance in our highly connected society become very dangerous when voiced. And since asking is not the only way to learn, other methods are preferable in those cases.
Personally I do not have a question whether to vaccinate, for me it is more like when COVID-19 is going to be available for me (non-essential worker, no underlying conditions, middle-aged) and the differences between specific vaccines.
In Canada, if all goes well, I should be able to get access to vaccine around middle of 2021 (unclear which one). As a Russian citizen - if pus really comes to shove - I can go there and get their adenoviral vector vaccine with unclear efficiency pretty much right now - but is it wise? That is my wager.
Flying to Russia from Canada would increase your risk of getting covid prior to receiving the vaccine (and the 10 days or so that is needed to build any kind of immunity).
They are supposed to vaccinate essential workers and seniors first, but the interest is so underwhelming they basically vaccinate everyone with Russian health insurance (Russia is single-payer).
One of the only reliable ways I know to convince people of anything is:
1. Make them implicitly commit to finish the conversation and not run away
2. Explain how the X thing works and how it doesn’t, to eliminate strawmen and educate (eg mRNA vaccines inject RNA into cell, not DNA into nucleus... masks reduce R0 by massively reducing the momentum of the airflow that carries particles going out, they don’t prevent particles from coming into your eyes etc.)
3. Ask them, given the information in 2, what they are still worried about. Really listen and understand their points.
4. Present them with a double standard where in other areas they do Y but here they do the opposite where the criteria are met at least as much
5. When they say “it’s totally different”, explore how, and be prepared to genuinely have your own mind changed if it turns out they don’t have a double standard
Use the seat belts analogy for example, when asking about vaccines. Seat belts can harm in certain rare cases, but if the “bad” stats are higher for seatbelts, why do you use them?
What do you mean by getting people to implicitly commit to finish the conversation?
Do you just ask them explicitly to spend the time with you? I’m confused by the word “implicit.”
Intuitively that seems a great way to reach a productive point of the conversation, since it forces both of you to seek resolution so that you can go do your laundry after.
I was under the impression that adverse reactions to vaccines are pretty common actually? Many of the times I have gotten shots I had to wait in the room for 10-20 minutes afterwards so the nurse could verify I wasn't allergic. I think everyone should get vaccines, and they are more than safe enough for most people, but they aren't as safe as this article is implying. There are also historical examples of vaccines that caused non-trivial medical issues with segments of the population (the narcolepsy issue that occurred with a vaccine in Sweden a few years back comes to mind).
Serious adverse reaction are incredibly rare. And the fact that they keep you for a moment after giving you a dose just shows how seriouse even very minor risk of serious reaction is treated in context of vaccines. But you took it as indication of highly probable danger.
I wonder if there are parallels with flying. All those behaviors that ensure incredible safety of traveling just make people think it's dangerous.
The Moderna and BioNTech COVID vaccines doesn't have any adjuvants, which is what cause the adverse reactions. You can experience symptoms (fever etc.) the next day, which are a good sign that the vaccine is working.
An allergic reaction to a vaccine is extremely rare but extremely serious. They don't have you stick around for 20 minutes because of the likelihood, only because of the consequences of something going wrong.
You don't consider sore muscles after coming back from the gym an adverse reaction?
I don't consider it an adverse reaction, nor do doctors/scientists, because it is part of the exact process that vaccines aim to encourage: building immunity. It is anticipated, expected and, frankly, desirable.
They are basically completely different substances? Unless you wish to reduce your model to such an extreme low-resolution view of the facts as to call all substances sharing the name "vaccine" as being the same thing.
For Moderna and Phizer, even the technology of producing the vaccine is completely new and different. The specific genetic contents are different regardless of the technology anyway.
Difficult to say broadly, since there are quite a few different vaccines each with their own ingredient. The biggest difference is probably the lack of ingredients in the mRNA vaccines. They're incredibly simple and contain basically mRNA, some fat to encase it in, and a few substances that allow it to survive.
Is there an open source covid vaccine? One that publishes the commented mRNA code for example. I don't use proprietary software on my computer so the notion that I would inject some in my body seems weird to me.
Eating something is different to putting it directly in your blood. Kinda like the difference between running a program as an unprivileged user and as root. Regarding your question I avoid them, and it is surprisingly easy to do so, most chefs seemed happy to share their recipes with me. As for drinks the ones that I drink tend to be simple (water, carbonated water, alcohol, etc).
Most that were eager will probably go on to use it. I suspect that some were eager so that others would vaccinate and that they themselves would be protected due to "herd immunity" but I doubt that there are many of them. I personally was eager for an open source vaccine, not any vaccine at all. Saying that everyone has been eagerly waiting for a vaccine is not very accurate, after all there are also the antivax people and these that simply do not care.
Serious question: What do you consider an "open source" vaccine? To what degree do the current vaccines not fulfill this? What specific concerns are the result of this difference, beyond principles?
I would say that for a vaccine to be open source there should be exact instructions on how to create it along with a justification for each step, it should list the exact contents of the vaccine (preservatives, etc), as well as any genetic code included (along with a justification for each part of it). In addition it should be legal for someone to create their own vaccines by following said instructions.
The part regarding legality of making your own copies would help with the vaccination of poor regions such as africa, while transparency could be used by researchers in order to find ways to improve it, or to create new vaccines for other viruses, or for students to learn more about it. In addition it would increase the trust of the general public for the vaccine.
The wager I am making here: If I'm in the first hundred million doses somewhere as an essential worker, if it has an unintended side effect, there's going to be 100 million reasons for them to fix the damage.
This will likely be the best most widely distributed medical treatment in history, so if something is wrong with it, the medical industry will be pushed as hard to develop a treatment as it was to develop the vaccine in the first place.
The riskiest treatment you can take is one for a rare disease or narrow use case. Because there's less financial incentive to fix it. When trying to divine any businesses' priorities, follow the money.
This is the problem with the CDC’s plan. 40% of people said they will get the vaccine but “wait a bit”. So starting in phase 1 (demand exceeded supply) is the wrong strategy. That’s one reason why states have administered so few vaccines, even doctors and nurses don’t want it.
Start with administering to anyone who wants it, and restrict once demand exceeds supply.
Common sense (if 40 percent of the general population don’t want to go first, why would medical personnel be much different). It seems the truth is even worse
“The National Association of Healthcare Assistants surveyed more than 3,100 Certified Nursing Assistants last month. Around 71-percent indicated they wouldn't take a COVID-19 vaccine, while just over 22-percent said they would.”
Created an account just to answer this. I'm a nurse. Most nurses and nursing aides that I work with do not wish to take the vaccine, worried about it being "rushed". There is also worry about the claims that vaccine recipients developed Bells palsy. Even though a good number of healthcare workers have the option to take the vaccine right now, few are doing so -- at least from what I'm seeing.
I find this absolutely insane, and I know that you are right because there is a cluster of nurses in a nearby county with the same attitude. It is a sever cultural problem with the nurses. They should be more educated than this. Specifically if they have been snowed about Bells Palsy, that's just them believing BS anti-vaxxers bad data interpretation.
>It is a sever cultural problem with the nurses. They should be more educated than this.
Well, I think nursing culture is very difficult to understand from the outside. It was for me before I went into nursing school. Also, it is not exactly about education. For example, in nursing, there is a great focus on having initiative. I remember that in nursing school it was much more praiseworthy to have done many skills during clinical time (e.g. inserting a urinary catheter, inserting an NG tube) than to be able to enumerate the safety risks associated with those very same skills. It was very odd to me, but it was the way things were. Even working in the field there is always a great focus on "getting stuff done", so to speak.
Therefore, although I think education is a natural thing to bring up when one wishes to argue that x should be happening, it doesn't really apply in the bigger context of the profession. I believe this also has to do with a lot of other "why aren't x people doing y thing" types of arguments. In nursing, practice - and the willingness to do things - will always be more important than any deep understanding of theory. Also, let me add that I don't mean to say that every nurse is reckless. Still, this doesn't change the fact that there are some really strange aspects of the working environment. No matter how well one practices one's individual role or how knowledgeable one is, they will still be there. And, ultimately, I think these things have to be taken into account when we want to understand what is driving a group of people to make certain choices.
Since this article is written from a COVID-19 perspective on vaccines, and since I had a pretty nasty case of Coronavirus this past summer, I thought I would give my opinion.
1) Most (all?) humans on planet Earth are going to produce antibodies to COVID-19, or die. It's highly contagious and getting worse with new variants.
2) Given this, we have a choice: get the antibodies the easy way (take the vaccine), or get the antibodies the hard way (catch the virus).
For some people, the virus is no big deal. For me, it meant suffering for 2 weeks, and to others it is way worse, getting sent to the hospital, and some (a tiny percentage) not surviving it at all.
Given the risk of a new vaccine vs the risk of getting COVID and suffering, I would take the new vaccine 100 out of 100 times. I tell people that had I known how bad catching the virus was, I would have taken BOTH vaccines at the same time to avoid having to go through that. (Also, I'm under 40 and very healthy/athletic.)
I'm also highly averse to "optional vaccines" in the first place, and only give my children the absolute required vaccines to keep society and themselves safe.
Just my perspective on this, but I come across so many people who do not see things the same. In the end, a lot of people are going to suffer with the virus due to applying their fears to the wrong thing.
Let say I'm a healthy 20 years old. What are the odds of me getting infected from covid and suffering bad consequences (death or chronically ill). How does it compare with a "bad" vaccine in recent history? I'm curious about the order of magnitude of risks involved.
According to this [0] recent (Dec 8) meta-analysis, infection fatality rate at 20 years is around 0.01%, with prediction interval about 0.003% to 0.03%. See Fig. 3 (note logarithmic scaling).
That is only fatality rate.
I don't see a good way to aggregate vaccination harm, especially with qualifiers such as "bad" and given the priors we have about the particular vaccines in question. However, let's take the narcolepsy issue that has been mentioned multiple times in this thread. According to [1]:
> During the first year after vaccination, the relative risk of narcolepsy was increased 5 to 14-fold in children and adolescents and 2 to 7-fold in adults. The vaccine attributable risk in children and adolescents was around 1 per 18,400 vaccine doses.
That puts the rate at 0.005% for a prominent "bad" vaccine. I will note that this disease is not exactly comparable to death.
Considering that ~70% of e.g. the US population are older than 20 (with COVID-19 infection fatality rate increasing exponentially with age, e.g. 1% at age 60) and that you are expected to pass it to about one person, you may want to include the assessment of risks not only to yourself but to everyone around you in your considerations.
Chances of you getting Covid are very hard to estimate because there are so many factors (where you live, your personal health history, your behaviour, your workplace...), but contingent on getting it, you can estimate IFR (fatality rate for all infections, approximate, as it tries to account for conversion rate to known cases) or CFR (fatality for known detected cases) from many sources. Here is one [1].
Probability of chronically illness - I do not think anyone has enough data yet.
Worst vaccine we know, developed more than 200 years ago, has a chance of severe adverse effects of 15 per million and one in a million chance of killing you.
Getting sick with Coronavirus for a person of your age can kill you in at least 30 cases per million. Chance of severe long term effects is way higher.
Thanks, this is the type of information I was looking for.
People get very defensive when we ask questions like this as they think it has an anti-vaxxer agenda. But I think having this order of magnitude in mind is the best way to argue with people who don't want to get vaccinated. Just trying to ridicule them isn't the solution.
For an individual patient in that group there is still a lot of variance based on age and co-morbid conditions. For a 49 year old with hypertension, diabetes, and morbid obesity then their risk will be significantly higher. For a 20 year old with no co-morbid conditions then their fatality risk is virtually zero.
That's only for fatalities. We don't have solid data on long term symptoms (those that last more than a few months), but those appear to be very rare among healthy 20 year olds.
I was talking to 20 year old person who said that her sense of smell didn't come back perfectly even after 6 months. I'm not so sure that long term effects are very rare.
Science is predominantly occupied with death due to COVID, not long COVID. We'll probably hear more information about it after we have widespread vaccination, after more studies regarding it, and after people recover from long COVID (assuming that they ever do).
Currently it looks like it could be anywhere from 1 to 10 percent of people who have recovered from COVID.
A recent study by Ohio State University found that nearly 50% of athletes who'd had mild covid showed some evidence of heart damage (specifically myocardial inflammation) afterwards. It's a small study and so shouldn't be taken as conclusive, but it's worth considering. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
Would anyone be able to point me to research about how the body reacts to the vaccination if it has already come into contact with the virus (assuming survival)?
For example, from a layman pov I'm assuming if I've had an asymptomatic case of covid-19, and get injected with an mRNA vaccine, my body would simply fight it off in the same way it would to any other exposure to the virus, and this wouldn't count towards an increased amount of "viral-load" that's been spoken about online.
One reason people are suspicious of the vaccine is because major network and cable news told them that the government's time line for getting a vaccine was a lie.
Now that the government's time line is proven true, people have to figure out if the news lies or the vaccine is a fraud.
> major network and cable news told them that the government's time line for getting a vaccine was a lie.
The White House and Trump repeatedly claimed, publicly, that the vaccine would be available before the election in November 2020. That turned out to be very false.
The media called out the lies and now you’re blaming the media for the administration’s lies and empty hope?
Here is a link to remind you.
* https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/516855-meadows-d... The administration was attacking its own expert timelines from the CDC and FDA. Of course that made the media and other observers suspicious. “Meadows told reporters that the Trump administration is aiming to have 100 million vials ready for distribution to vulnerable populations, namely the elderly, by the end of October”
In the end, the vaccine came out on the FDA timeline, rather than Trump and Mark Meadows successfully pressuring the FDA to release the vaccine early like Russia did with Sputnik V. Edit: added another supporting link.
Yes, the first vaccine was found to be effective on November 9th, 6 days after the election making it clear that anyone that believed it would be released before the election was a fringe crackpot lunatic that deserved to be derided by the media.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 87.8 ms ] threadI can’t make sense of what you’re even trying to say:
1. That the mechanism of harm is different tells us nothing about the relative risks. I don’t OD on cars, but cars are riskier than Asprin.
2. You can have long term negative impacts from, eg, vaccine carriers. (Which is why we stopped using some....)
3. Overdosing a live virus vaccine happens all the time, the result being you get the illness. A flu shot can kill you by giving you a deadly flu.
Edit: I was specifically referring to how the danger of everyday things are under estimated by people. That people e.g. text while driving a 1½ ton vehicle at 55+ mph is a great example of that. The danger isn't high enough to be "common" but definitely higher than people estimate it to be.
The more the media treats covid vaccines like they're marketing the latest iphone release the more skeptical I become. It's very unsettling to me personally.
Black people in this country have the Tuskeegee experiment as a huge reason to be skeptical of vaccines.
Over the course of the last year the sense-making organizations have lost a ton of credibility by lying to get the outcome they wanted instead of educating us. The most blatant examples are probably when the surgeon general and WHO told us wearing masks would kill us because they didn't want us to buy masks that would save our lives, they wanted to save those for healthcare workers. Fauci has recently admitted he lied about his estimates for herd immunity because he believed it would aid compliance. Birx told us not to mix family and then had a mixed family Thanksgiving. The list of governors/congress/media personalities hypocritically breaking the rules they push feels unending. Fourteen days to slow the spread turned into shut down everything until there's a cure. These things have a cost, and we are seeing it.
Any procedure involving any invasive (derm-piercing) tool, you're one human/process mistake away from getting exposed to super-resistant bacteria via contaminated tooling. Any procedure involving body manipulation/massages, you're one human/process mistake away from getting paralyzed neck to toe or worse. Any procedure involving anesthesia, you're one human/process mistake away from dying right here and there due to OD or allergy.
If your life comprises undergoing a million medical procedures involving any kind of invasive tools, anesthesia or surgery, you'll die from human-caused complications way before you get randomly hit by lightning.
Nah, the numbers are pretty firmly on my side. I picked a fairly 'risky' procedure as far as the routine ones go to make the comparison really conservative.
I'm still more likely to get fried to a crisp by Lightning than die by the procedure.
That should give you an idea for how safe most procedures are.
I'm saying I have a higher chance of dying by getting hit by lightning going about my life as normal than dying by getting a whole slew of routine medical procedures done.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847694/ [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2020.572681
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/
Maybe all ten children killed in the Cutter incident had pre-existing conditions. Most people have a pre-existing condition of some sort or another. It was an effort to inoculate generally, so that's why I used the death rate of COVID in the general population as a comparison.
> Only 10 in 200,000 died from a vaccine
This doesn't negate the fact that vaccines can be dangerous. This just happens to be the number for that particular vaccine.
> 10 in 200,000 deaths is better than 1 in 100
The 10 could have been fine without the vaccine. Who knows, it's just speculation; maybe they had pre-existing conditions, maybe they did not. But comparing numbers like this knowing that the 10 in 200,000 are drawn from a different population from the 1 in 100 is being disingenuous.
The people getting the Polio vaccine (children) were the general population of people at highest risk of death by polio. The same is true for the Covid vaccine, at least for the next few months. Both are mass vaccination campaigns.
The definition of "intrinsically safe" doesn't even sound like a consistent bar. Nearly every aspect of living involves risks, even if that risk is of falling and hitting one's head.
Or if the side-effect subset is random.
* Injection site pain * Fatigue * Headache * Muscle pain * Chills * Joint pain * Fever
The effects are too mild and short term to pose an interesting research question, I would think.
For the more sever side effect of swollen lymph nodes, it has not been investigated, though that might provide enough immune system insight to be an interesting question to pursue.
The only other adverse event, Bell's Palsy, is currently indistinguishable from the background rate of occurrence, so I would doubt that anybody is investigating that.
There's a big methodological problem too: you can either get an extreme reaction to COVID-19, or you can have side effects from the vaccine, but a person going through one would poison the results of the other. So to come up with some sort of experiment, you'd need some sort or prognostic based on biomarkers that was strong and convincing enough to think it was related to what you're predicting, which we definitely don't have yet. Then you'd need to cross tab between effects. Potentially possible, but it relies on a pretty big discovery that would have better uses!
As you mentioned, vaccines are not safe because they are vaccines. They're safe because of the exhaustive testing trails. A majority of the forced vaccines have been tested for many decades, those are fine (speaking from a USA perspective). The problem we face now, the anti-vax idiots muddied the waters of actual problems of some vaccines. It's hard to determine what's true and what's just stupid. This is why it's important not to overblow anything. It makes it harder to weed out true, legit problems that can be legitimately fixed.
(In the western world. Russia's Sputnik approval did skip steps. Which has probably saved a bunch of lives there, but it was riskier than ours).
To address those two points in particular:
The trials for these FDA-approved vaccines were not "rushed". They included all the usual phases for their usual durations. That's why we only get the vaccines now (even though developing them took far less than a month). What made the trials faster is that they started preparing the next stage while the previous one was still ongoing - which is not normally done, so as to not waste money in case problems are found.
As for the duration of testing: As mentioned, the set of stages before approval was not reduced. Vaccines are indeed monitored after being cleared for use, but having to wait decades would not make sense. I understand that this is different for other vaccines that are "forced", but you admit yourself that this is not true for all of them in the first place.
Really?
prenatal care, circumcisions, postnatal care, colonoscopies, x-rays, ultrasounds (to name a few)
Are all preventative/diagnostic procedures that may not accompany a disease.
Every treatment is aimed at an existing pathology, by definition, otherwise can we really call it a "treatment"? For what does it treat?
Circumcision is not really preventative of anything much, it's a cultural thing at this point.
It's among the most effective anti-cancer interventions we have, so worth being clear that there is potential to benefit from treatment during a colonoscopy.
As someone who had been suffering from persistent balanitis and phismosis for over a year until getting a Circumcision which magically fixed all my problems, I disagree vehemently.
And 2 articles from a quick Google search coincidentally show the same ~60% skip flu shots for both USA and UK:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdandFluNews/story?id=641897...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-42634781
If I didn't see the above, my intuition would have made me guess that 90%+ of medical professionals get flu shots. It turns out I was way off.
However, the reasons don't appear to be safety like this thread's article. One doctor said he doesn't get flu shots because the CDC makes a guess for what goes into the next season's flu shot and they're only ~50% correct. Since he got sick from the flu shot (even with the weakened virus) many years ago, he now avoids them. He still believes in the science of flu shot and not anti-vaxx but he personally chooses to not take it.
EDIT: Apologize for posting bad statistic. Is the UK NHS statistic accurate? If so, why do most UK health workers avoid it?
Somehow you can make the same answer without denigration.
I don't believe in "anti-vaccine market penetration".
My model I use is that ALL people are ignorant of most things that happen around them and only SOME people are knowledgeable about SOME of the things.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/healthcareworkers.htm
Med school requires good analytical smarts and an excellent ability to retain information, but I'm quite convinced at this point that raw analyical ability has almost nothing to do with the ability to think critically to avoid insane beliefs. It's just not something that humans come built-in with.
They got tested and quarantined anyway... and came up negative, but are still changing PCP.
"By occupation, flu vaccination coverage was highest among physicians (98.0%), nurses (92.0%), pharmacists (90.6%), and nurse practitioners and physician assistants (88.8%) Flu vaccination coverage was lowest among other clinical health care personnel (81.7%), assistants and aides (72.4%), and nonclinical health care personnel (76.7%)."
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....
I always get it because even 10% is better than zero and it doesn't seem to cause me any serious side effects.
The data cited in that ABC article, published in 2008, is taken from the 2006-2007 flu season. Over the last 14 years, much has changed.
For example, in 2019-2020, over 80% of healthcare workers received the flu vaccine, including over 90% of those who work in hospitals.
Source: CDC https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/healthcareworkers.htm
As most/all flu shots don’t contain weakened virus (FluMist, the nasal spray, does contain weakened virus, but the shot uses either inactivated virus or viral proteins), this doctor seems a bit out to lunch?
Moreover, it’s possible to get sick from another strain of flu or because the vaccine hasn’t yet become effective - it takes a week or two to be useful so an anecdote of getting sick before then doesn’t indicate anything about the flu shot.
As personal anecdote, I get flu shot from Costco every year but this year was the first time I got nasal FluMist because they ran out of the needle version. This was also the only time I've gotten sick from it. Immediate runny nose and headache even before I left the store.
Those side effects are apparently listed as normal, though it’s interesting to learn they can come on that quickly! I would have thought the immune system would take some hours to respond.
Most vaccines have amazing effectiveness. If you take something like measles, it's basically "take 2 shots and you have a more than 90% chance of being protected for a lifetime". This is a much easier win than "you need to have a shot every year and the effectiveness is varying somewhere between 40-60%".
Luckily it seems Covid vaccines are more like measles vaccines than like flu vaccines - at least in terms of effectiveness.
The average efficacy isn't necessarily high, but I don't see how that is enough to call it really bad. That gets balanced against the benefit it does have, the cost, the safety, etc.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4521706/
(the study evaluates medical costs and productivity, it's not doing a sentimental analysis to get to the savings)
Of course there is lots of room to improve a vaccine that is sometimes only 10% effective, but a reduction in costs to society by operating a vaccination program is a pretty good place to be starting from.
I hear this argument a lot and it doesn't make sense to me. If the CDC predicts strain A will be dominant and vacinates against it, shouldn't we expect strain A to be supressed?
> And 2 articles from a quick Google search coincidentally show the same ~60% skip flu shots for both USA and UK:
You've said "healthcare workers", but your link about the UK (it's about Scotland only) talks about all NHS workers. That's cleaners, accountants, cooks, etc. People who don't necessarily have any patient contact and it's not what we'd normally call a healthcare worker.
For England, for frontline healthcare workers, the number was 78% for sept 2019 to feb 2020.
Some NHS trusts do better than others. One got a rate as high as 94%.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
And now, pieces like this need to be written to re-educate people about group behaviour and essentially socialism. The very thing that america even went to war against.
Weird world. And everyone not agreeing immediately is a heretic. Yeah. Talk about confusing messages.
In what way did this article allude to anything remotely describable as "socialism"?
Literally the only part of the article that is not 100% directed at the individual reader is "(and others)" in the very last paragraph.
It is mind-boggling to me that parenthetically mentioning the single word "others" is enough to provoke "but that's socialism" responses. And let me be clear that there is a mile-wide gap between "socialism" and "the opposite of pure individualism".
No, it is not? And - while it certainly doesn't help this discussion to point this out - the irony of you being led to believe so is incredible.
Anyone have a good writeup or similar to relieve a bit of fear?
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK0C5tFHze8
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
Not going into the safety side that much, but a lot of background and technical details.
A few weeks ago, a prominent and "mainstream" French doctor said that he wouldn't get an mRNA vaccine shot until he had access to the corresponding scientific publications (not available at the time). In the meantime, he said he wouldn't be able to make an informed decision.
https://www.sortiraparis.com/news/coronavirus/articles/23798...
Personally, I mostly trust the medical institutions of my country and I'll probably follow their recommendations without second-thoughts. Yet, it never hurts to have some doubts, especially in this context.
EDIT: It's one of these topics where you're not allowed to express the slightest, tiniest, doubt.
It's a bit disappointing, since neither of us are particularly advocating any resistance to vaccines. HN is one of the last larger forums to properly dissect topics, ask questions (even difficult ones), and try to understand root causes & effects, second-level effects and so forth.
Unfortunately lately it seems the twitter/reddit culture has taken a bit of a foothold - cheap, popularity-seeking comments void of any substance are spammed into anything remotely relating to politics or breaking news. And questions/comments like ours are vehemently downvoted. Let's hope the trend breaks down rather than grows.
It's true mrna vaccines are new, but also the sars-cov2 virus is new. Your question shouldn't be if you're worried about mrna vaccines, your question should be if you should be more worried about mrna vaccines than about getting infected.
Serious long term sideeffects from mrna vaccines? Possible, but very unlikely. Serious long term sideeffects from covid-19? Absolutely, and there's a lot we still don't know.
It seems to be fine and without any noticeable side-effects, but the “how dare you even slightly doubt it, you monster” tone is frankly absurd and authoritarian.
Except for nearly 2 million dead people so far and many millions with long term adverse effects.
> vaccine is a novel gene therapy.
And those are just wrong words.
> "how dare you even slightly doubt it, you monster”
Given that at some point supply of the vaccine will exceed the demand and planting seeds of doubt in other people will reduce demand further and cause them to loose health or life ... yes, voicing uninformed concerns is acting like monster.
It's fine to have concerns but just go and read science quietly till they are resolved instead of voicing them.
Can you imagine the pretentiousness required to say this?
We all know the reaction of this were the words spoken to some identity group X.
“Go read biology quietly.”
“Go read history quietly.”
> > vaccine is a novel gene therapy.
> And those are just wrong words.
Ok - RNA therapy... gene therapy and RNA therapy are separate but they're often discussed as related things.
> Can you imagine the pretentiousness required to say this?
I'm just advising what I'm doing myself. Without pretence.
Ignorance is not a sin, but some forms of ignorance in our highly connected society become very dangerous when voiced. And since asking is not the only way to learn, other methods are preferable in those cases.
Right out of 1984...make "ignorance" inexpressible!
Dystopian utilitarian analysis says certain words shouldn't be uttered.
In Canada, if all goes well, I should be able to get access to vaccine around middle of 2021 (unclear which one). As a Russian citizen - if pus really comes to shove - I can go there and get their adenoviral vector vaccine with unclear efficiency pretty much right now - but is it wise? That is my wager.
1. Make them implicitly commit to finish the conversation and not run away
2. Explain how the X thing works and how it doesn’t, to eliminate strawmen and educate (eg mRNA vaccines inject RNA into cell, not DNA into nucleus... masks reduce R0 by massively reducing the momentum of the airflow that carries particles going out, they don’t prevent particles from coming into your eyes etc.)
3. Ask them, given the information in 2, what they are still worried about. Really listen and understand their points.
4. Present them with a double standard where in other areas they do Y but here they do the opposite where the criteria are met at least as much
5. When they say “it’s totally different”, explore how, and be prepared to genuinely have your own mind changed if it turns out they don’t have a double standard
Use the seat belts analogy for example, when asking about vaccines. Seat belts can harm in certain rare cases, but if the “bad” stats are higher for seatbelts, why do you use them?
Do you just ask them explicitly to spend the time with you? I’m confused by the word “implicit.”
Intuitively that seems a great way to reach a productive point of the conversation, since it forces both of you to seek resolution so that you can go do your laundry after.
I think this post fails here and there despite trying really hard.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
I wonder if there are parallels with flying. All those behaviors that ensure incredible safety of traveling just make people think it's dangerous.
An allergic reaction to a vaccine is extremely rare but extremely serious. They don't have you stick around for 20 minutes because of the likelihood, only because of the consequences of something going wrong.
I don't consider it an adverse reaction, nor do doctors/scientists, because it is part of the exact process that vaccines aim to encourage: building immunity. It is anticipated, expected and, frankly, desirable.
For Moderna and Phizer, even the technology of producing the vaccine is completely new and different. The specific genetic contents are different regardless of the technology anyway.
Other than genetic material is there anything in these vaccines that doesn't have a long history of being injected into huge numbers of human beings?
This article breaks up the ingredients pretty well, although you'll have to scroll down a bit. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/what-e2-80-99s-in-t...
Everyone has been eagerly waiting for a vaccine, but now that it's here, most people don't want it?
The part regarding legality of making your own copies would help with the vaccination of poor regions such as africa, while transparency could be used by researchers in order to find ways to improve it, or to create new vaccines for other viruses, or for students to learn more about it. In addition it would increase the trust of the general public for the vaccine.
Sadly there is no gcc for vaccines. Yet.
This will likely be the best most widely distributed medical treatment in history, so if something is wrong with it, the medical industry will be pushed as hard to develop a treatment as it was to develop the vaccine in the first place.
The riskiest treatment you can take is one for a rare disease or narrow use case. Because there's less financial incentive to fix it. When trying to divine any businesses' priorities, follow the money.
Start with administering to anyone who wants it, and restrict once demand exceeds supply.
What's the source on this?
“The National Association of Healthcare Assistants surveyed more than 3,100 Certified Nursing Assistants last month. Around 71-percent indicated they wouldn't take a COVID-19 vaccine, while just over 22-percent said they would.”
https://abc7news.com/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-survey/887...
Created an account just to answer this. I'm a nurse. Most nurses and nursing aides that I work with do not wish to take the vaccine, worried about it being "rushed". There is also worry about the claims that vaccine recipients developed Bells palsy. Even though a good number of healthcare workers have the option to take the vaccine right now, few are doing so -- at least from what I'm seeing.
Well, I think nursing culture is very difficult to understand from the outside. It was for me before I went into nursing school. Also, it is not exactly about education. For example, in nursing, there is a great focus on having initiative. I remember that in nursing school it was much more praiseworthy to have done many skills during clinical time (e.g. inserting a urinary catheter, inserting an NG tube) than to be able to enumerate the safety risks associated with those very same skills. It was very odd to me, but it was the way things were. Even working in the field there is always a great focus on "getting stuff done", so to speak.
Therefore, although I think education is a natural thing to bring up when one wishes to argue that x should be happening, it doesn't really apply in the bigger context of the profession. I believe this also has to do with a lot of other "why aren't x people doing y thing" types of arguments. In nursing, practice - and the willingness to do things - will always be more important than any deep understanding of theory. Also, let me add that I don't mean to say that every nurse is reckless. Still, this doesn't change the fact that there are some really strange aspects of the working environment. No matter how well one practices one's individual role or how knowledgeable one is, they will still be there. And, ultimately, I think these things have to be taken into account when we want to understand what is driving a group of people to make certain choices.
1) Most (all?) humans on planet Earth are going to produce antibodies to COVID-19, or die. It's highly contagious and getting worse with new variants. 2) Given this, we have a choice: get the antibodies the easy way (take the vaccine), or get the antibodies the hard way (catch the virus).
For some people, the virus is no big deal. For me, it meant suffering for 2 weeks, and to others it is way worse, getting sent to the hospital, and some (a tiny percentage) not surviving it at all.
Given the risk of a new vaccine vs the risk of getting COVID and suffering, I would take the new vaccine 100 out of 100 times. I tell people that had I known how bad catching the virus was, I would have taken BOTH vaccines at the same time to avoid having to go through that. (Also, I'm under 40 and very healthy/athletic.)
I'm also highly averse to "optional vaccines" in the first place, and only give my children the absolute required vaccines to keep society and themselves safe.
Just my perspective on this, but I come across so many people who do not see things the same. In the end, a lot of people are going to suffer with the virus due to applying their fears to the wrong thing.
That is only fatality rate.
I don't see a good way to aggregate vaccination harm, especially with qualifiers such as "bad" and given the priors we have about the particular vaccines in question. However, let's take the narcolepsy issue that has been mentioned multiple times in this thread. According to [1]:
> During the first year after vaccination, the relative risk of narcolepsy was increased 5 to 14-fold in children and adolescents and 2 to 7-fold in adults. The vaccine attributable risk in children and adolescents was around 1 per 18,400 vaccine doses.
That puts the rate at 0.005% for a prominent "bad" vaccine. I will note that this disease is not exactly comparable to death.
Considering that ~70% of e.g. the US population are older than 20 (with COVID-19 infection fatality rate increasing exponentially with age, e.g. 1% at age 60) and that you are expected to pass it to about one person, you may want to include the assessment of risks not only to yourself but to everyone around you in your considerations.
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847694/
Probability of chronically illness - I do not think anyone has enough data yet.
[1] https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ep...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-most-dangerous-vaccine/#app
Getting sick with Coronavirus for a person of your age can kill you in at least 30 cases per million. Chance of severe long term effects is way higher.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/10/06/what-i...
It seems that even the worst vaccine we use has orders of magnitude lower probability of causing harm then just getting sick with covid.
People get very defensive when we ask questions like this as they think it has an anti-vaxxer agenda. But I think having this order of magnitude in mind is the best way to argue with people who don't want to get vaccinated. Just trying to ridicule them isn't the solution.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
For an individual patient in that group there is still a lot of variance based on age and co-morbid conditions. For a 49 year old with hypertension, diabetes, and morbid obesity then their risk will be significantly higher. For a 20 year old with no co-morbid conditions then their fatality risk is virtually zero.
That's only for fatalities. We don't have solid data on long term symptoms (those that last more than a few months), but those appear to be very rare among healthy 20 year olds.
Science is predominantly occupied with death due to COVID, not long COVID. We'll probably hear more information about it after we have widespread vaccination, after more studies regarding it, and after people recover from long COVID (assuming that they ever do).
Currently it looks like it could be anywhere from 1 to 10 percent of people who have recovered from COVID.
[1]: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/long-covid-just-how-common...
For example, from a layman pov I'm assuming if I've had an asymptomatic case of covid-19, and get injected with an mRNA vaccine, my body would simply fight it off in the same way it would to any other exposure to the virus, and this wouldn't count towards an increased amount of "viral-load" that's been spoken about online.
Now that the government's time line is proven true, people have to figure out if the news lies or the vaccine is a fraud.
https://streamable.com/i4ziur (October)
The White House and Trump repeatedly claimed, publicly, that the vaccine would be available before the election in November 2020. That turned out to be very false.
The media called out the lies and now you’re blaming the media for the administration’s lies and empty hope?
Here is a link to remind you.
* https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/516855-meadows-d... The administration was attacking its own expert timelines from the CDC and FDA. Of course that made the media and other observers suspicious. “Meadows told reporters that the Trump administration is aiming to have 100 million vials ready for distribution to vulnerable populations, namely the elderly, by the end of October”
* https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/519929-trump-las... “ New FDA Rules make it more difficult for them to speed up vaccines for approval before Election Day. Just another political hit job! @SteveFDA” - Donald Trump tweet
In the end, the vaccine came out on the FDA timeline, rather than Trump and Mark Meadows successfully pressuring the FDA to release the vaccine early like Russia did with Sputnik V. Edit: added another supporting link.
If this is their best argument, I'm alarmed rather than reassured.
If we're betting, I want to know the odds. Where's the latest adverse reaction data?
cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2020-12/slides-12-19/05-COVID-CLARK.pdf
2.3% had significant side effects from the vaccine.
If new data isn't being released, that suggests the news is bad.