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Comment by ktybdr | Hacker News Reader

There are definitely people with the view that they should be mandatory and I've personally started to encounter social pressure to get vaccinated, which I don't want to do, because I lead a low-contact hermit's life and the odds of dying from COVID which I probably won't catch if I maintain my lifestyle a few more months appears to be lower than the chance I'll die from a vaccine that I definitely get

For my age cohort the chance of death from either is infinitesimal but because of Bayes it might make sense to continue to avoid both, but if I try to explain that to my peers they might think I'm a Trump supporter, and as everyone knows, Trump supporters should be shunned from polite society (especially since the "insurrection"), so I see this as a choice between social excommunication and a questionable injection I don't want

Fun times

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I’m curious as to why you find the injection questionable? From my understanding, all of the vaccines approved in the US followed the same path every other vaccine follows. The difference was that Covid is everywhere, so stage 3 went really quickly, where it could normally take many months or years for the requisite amount of people to catch the disease in question.

To me, these vaccines have been as rigorously tested as they could be, and none of this was really ever about people in your health category anyways, so that seems irrelevant in the “utility of vaccination” argument.

I could be incorrect though, so I’m interested in your unease and rejection of what I find to be sound science.

For what it’s worth, the vaccines have been released under Emergency Use Authorization, not the normal approval process. The EUA still requires safety data etc.. but isn’t as rigorous as the full process. Here’s a decent write up: https://theconversation.com/what-are-emergency-use-authoriza...

Not that guy, but I'll give you one viewpoint.

>To me, these vaccines have been as rigorously tested as they could be

Not for me. The fact is, the vaccines have been pushed through faster than any vaccine before. Anything foreign entering the body should be tested and based on solid evidence. Doesn't matter if it's an artificial heart, stent, prosthetic, or a biological agent like a vaccine. If decades of medical research shows determining a vaccine's safety takes years because of ethical protocols, then it takes years. The present vaccination campaigns are performing more comprehensive stage 3 trials on the general population because the risks are deemed acceptable. As other people have said in this thread, a person under the age of 18 is 50% more likely to die of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine complications than from SARS-CoV-2. The risk isn't worth it at this time.

Additionally, the technologies being used for the vaccines is still deemed experimental, specifically the mRNA ones. No mRNA vaccines have been deployed before, but now it's being deployed on the general population without public knowledge of any potential risks of this unproven technology ("unproven" meaning lacking a prior real-world deployment effort; a rocket engine is only proven when it flies, not in simulation). One risk with the mRNA vaccines is that they need to be kept extremely cold to preserve the mRNA sequences [1]. If the dose warms, good mRNA sequences break down into junk mRNA, which for all intents and purposes are random nucleotide chains. That ties into an above point: no rational person wants random mRNA pieces put into their body. Again, while all risk is relative, for my age group, the risk is not enough.

If you're well-versed in the science, I recommend reading this complaint [2] filed with the EU regarding Pfizer trial safety.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-mrna-vaccine-s...

[2] https://2020news.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Wodarg_Yeadon...

> The risk isn't worth it at this time.

This pandemic was never about the risk to this cohort that continues to be brought up. The point is that taking the vaccines reduces deaths. In places where these vaccines have been deployed widely, you cannot refute that statement. Just because the people who are dying don’t look like you does not diminish the utility of the vaccine.

I’m so tired of hearing that young people shouldn’t take the risk of vaccines because the risk to them of the virus is less. That is not why anyone at all is urging you to get the vaccine, or why we did any of this at all for a year.

A society is built on mutual trust and actions and speech like this shatter it; the selfish arguments seem to know no bounds in this pandemic. I did not sit in my damned house for a year because I was afraid for my own safety!

Furthermore, The article linked claims PCR testing isn’t good enough for efficacy and from what I understood had nothing to do with safety at all. In fact, the title of that submission includes “... REGARDING CONFIRMATION OF EFFICACY” and no mention of safety, but maybe I’m not “well-versed in science” enough to understand it. Thank you for talking down to me though, we would not want me to leave this conversation with a sense of self worth.

It seems to me like you’re unintentionally spreading disinformation. I assume you don’t want to be doing that, so you should probably check your priors here, as they seem to be outdated.

It is impossible to study the long-term effects of any vaccine within a year. Impossible. Unless you are elderly or immunocompromised you are almost certainly exposing yourself to more personal risk by being vaccinated.

Assuming your odds of catching COVID is 1 in 1,000 that’s still a higher risk for any adult age group than the vaccines. I doubt your risk of catching covid is actually that low.

More importantly it’s not just about avoiding death, a bad case of COVID is terrible even if you survive. On top of this you reduce the risk of spreading it to someone else.

vaccines aren't only about your safety

They're firstly about one's safety and the rest is a bonus.

I don't agree. Vaccines are about group immunity. The disease is pretty harmless to young people. We are vaccinated them to stop the pandemic in general.

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