That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be your choice, but it does mean that there is a public stake in whether people get vaccinated. Certain people have medical reasons for opting out. I could see you having psychological reasons for the same. But that doesn't necessarily extend to "anyone can refuse vaccines for any reason".
How do you feel about inadvertently infecting others who are at high risk from Coronavirus? That's the big factor why people are angry about anti-vaccers. They are a danger for others who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons.
I personally will be getting whatever comes first for the general population, on day one. But it'd be dishonest if I didn't admit having concerns over safety we might not be aware of at the time this is administered that would only be known many months or years later.
That's overridden by the fact that I lost one family member to the virus and another who survived it but is already seeing long-term effects in her lungs from when she had the virus. She was just hospitalized again for those effects. If folks have more info about measuring long-term impacts of a vaccine, I'd love to hear it for the peace of mind. Again, I'll be getting the vaccine regardless, because of very clear long-term effects of the virus.
Could somebody just explain how scientists know decades-long effects after only months of research? I'm taking a vaccine, 100%, no matter what. I'm pro-vaccine. And even if we're unsure, what we know is the massive numbers of deaths we'll have without a vaccine.
I'm asking because I want more peace of mind about it.
Any long-term effects from a vaccine seems unlikely to be as bad as the virus itself.
But still, is that really the answer? That there's no way to know about long-term effects until it's been out there for decades? I was kinda hoping there was an answer like "what we know from other vaccines is that any bad effects almost always show up in first few months -- never, or almost never, many years down the line."
that's why there is a lot of concern about their potential long-term side effects. in animal models, one of moderna's older vaccines (not for covid) was found to cause severe liver damage... likely as a result of the nanoparticle formulation they were using, rather than the mrna itself, but who knows.
personally, given the data that i've seen so far, i'd be more comfortable with taking the pfizer mrna vaccine than the moderna one. especialy when you add in moderna's reputation for peak sleaziness and non-transparency, it seems especially risky to be one of their guinea pigs in the general population.
ps I didn't downvote, and upvoted because downvoters didn't identify the reasons why they did.
Afair mRNA and DNA based vaccines are being studied since about 1999 without ever finding side effects that stem from the method itself.
The way it works is actually safer than "traditional" vaccination via dead pathogens, mostly because only a tiny and harmless part of the actual pathogen is used.
The testing is done mainly to make sure that it actually works and the "harmless" bit is actually harmless...
So while a Phase 3 trial is still sensible to make sure that all assumptuions hold, I would argue that the expected side effects of these kind of vaccines are close to zero.
And honestly, even traditional vaccines have very little side effects... Neutering pathogens so that they stay neutered is a pretty well understood technique, and these new techniques basically do that on a genetic level by removing the neutered parts altogether.
That’s patently untrue. We have data, from the phase III trials. Is the data final? No. But it’s good evidence for general safety. As for long-term problems, we have good theoretical reasons (based, in turn, on experimental data) to suspect that no such risks exist. In fact, we know quite a lot about how foreign RNA behaves in cells and while there are potential mechanisms to cause issues (most importantly strong immune reactions), there are no known plausible mechanisms to cause long-term problems.
We can’t fully exclude the possibility of long-term averse effects, but we do have data supporting the vaccines’ safety (both direct and indirect, experimental data), and most experts are confident that there won’t be any such effects — confident enough to put their own health on the line: many are enrolled in the ongoing trials.