Alright. As an exhausted 37 year old, I'm going to stick my neck out and explain why I've chosen to put myself at the back of the queue for vaccines this time around. I'm sure the authorities will find some way to force me to take it at some point, but refusing these vaccines is a rational position. You may not agree with it, but it's based on rationality and logic. So here are my reasons.
Firstly, I don't believe COVID related science is reliable. This isn't some conspiracy theory I picked up from YouTube. I developed this belief by actually reading a lot of scientific papers, or perhaps I should say "scientific" because it turned out that on close inspection almost all the papers I chose to study carefully were pseudo-scientific and sometimes fraudulent. I can count the ones that had no obvious errors or deceptive practices on the fingers of one hand. In no cases have there been any consequences for the perpetrators and in some cases the scientific establishment came together to cover up what happened.
At first I couldn't quite believe it and thought maybe there was some selection bias in the papers I was being exposed to, so I went back in the archives to review older papers from the world of public health (Zika, Swine Flu, AIDS). It turned out they were just as bad. I've written quite extensively about the problems in my prior comments here on HN [1], [2], [3], [4] and I also wrote a report that ended up being sent to the British Cabinet [5], so won't go into detail again, but suffice it to say I now have a large set of go-to examples for cases where scientists have been acting in ways scientists aren't meant to act.
A very small number of these problems are now coming into the public eye. For example in recent weeks a whole lot of people were surprised to see the lab leak hypothesis go straight from "debunked conspiracy theory" to Biden ordering it to be investigated, apparently without any intermediate points. Fauci has admitted on record (in the New York Times) that he lied in order to manipulate people's behaviour at least twice (masks, HITs) and thus he's very likely to have done it more often. These aren't actually my go-to examples of academic fraud because I tend to focus on the UK, where things are just as bad, but I'm sure every country has equivalents at this point because the issues aren't specific to Fauci, they appear to be cultural within public health.
A good example of this problem with vaccines specifically is the way the CDC is inflating their apparent effectiveness by changing the definition of COVID itself for vaccinated people [6]. That is, if someone took a test and presented the results twice in succession, and told one official they had been vaccinated and the other that they hadn't, the first could say they didn't have COVID and the second that they did. This sort of data manipulation is rampant, it's just one example.
So the scientific estabishment is not produced reliable knowledge. Many people still disagree with this, but they are going to eventually lose that debate because the evidence of problems is overwhelmingly strong.
Now, to vaccines. The risk of serious problems from taking these vaccines is low in absolute terms, clearly, as otherwise we'd be seeing mass die-offs by now given the very high speed and rates of vaccination. However, to make a rational decision you have to compare that to the risk of suffering serious problems from COVID. Even if the risk of both is low, if the risk of a cure is (for example) 50x higher than the risk of a disease, then the cure is worse and it's rational to take your chances with nature. For people in our age range this is especially important because the risk of suffering badly from COVID is negligible. There are far more dangerous things out there in our daily life. Average IFR estimates have converged on around 0.1% to 0.2%, which is already around the same area as seasonal flu, but those estimates must be multiplied by the chance of actually becoming infected in the first place and ideally age adjusted. I've been through multiple waves of COVID by now and not only never been infected, but nobody I know has caught it either. It seems quite plausible I will never catch it, vaccine or not. Many models were based on the assumption that nearly everyone will be infected sooner or later but those models fell apart under even the tiniest inspection, even before vaccines. And finally, it must be noted that the IFRs of 0.1-0.2% are based on a definition of death that is wrong and guaranteed to inflate the values (i.e. a virus that had been engineered to be entirely inert would still "cause" millions of deaths given how COVID deaths are defined).
All this added together means the risk of COVID to people like us is extremely low. And the risk of the vaccine?
Well, unfortunately we don't really know that. Knowing the risk relative to the risk of COVID for 30 year olds requires a level of data robustness and trustworthiness science has been unable to provide. For example VAERs is not a comprehensive database of all reactions, because reporting rates are much lower than 100% and it's unclear what the current highly politicized atmosphere is doing to reporting rates (probably suppressing them). What we do know is that there are simple and (by now) well understood mechanisms by which mRNA vaccines could create severe reactions.
The spike protein is, let's be clear about this, a toxin. If you were injected with sufficient amounts of mRNA vaccine for long enough you would die. Normally we're exposed to a dose of a virus that has spike proteins and causes production to start, but the virus gets stuck in the lungs and finds it hard to escape. Also, the dose may well be quite small. With the mRNA vaccines they're meant to stay in the shoulder muscle and eventually drain to a lymph node, but it seems that in some cases the person doing the injection may nick an artery by accident and end up injecting the vaccine straight into the bloodstream. Note that this is not meant to happen and studies into what does happen if this occurs have been occurring after the mass rollout of the vaccines. It appears the lipid nanoparticles also capable of crossing the blood brain barrier, where they may cause brain cells to start expressing spike protein and be destroyed - again, no studies of this have been done because both the mRNA adjustment technique and, more importantly, the lipid nanoparticles, are quite new. The trials were not completed, etc. The few studies that do exist are mostly in animals. At any rate, it can cause cells to be destroyed in places respiratory viruses would normally find hard to reach. [7] [8]
Is it possible vaccines are a lot more dangerous than we're being told? Yes, absolutely. No doubt at all. The standard retort to this is that it's a "conspiracy theory" but so what? Public health research is absolutely overrun with conspiracies, many of them aren't even well covered up. Certain specific subfields are nothing but conspiracies (looking at you, epidemiology). Lab leak hypothesis was described as a conspiracy theory, which thanks to China's evidence destruction it actually is by this point, but it's also almost certainly true. I hate to think about how many conspiracies there must be that don't get detected. The sort of people who try to deflect arguments by claiming they're "conspiracy theories" have come to look dumb and naive, because the things supposed "conspiracy theorists" say keep turning out to be true. Meanwhile the people who sacrificed every high minded principle to protect scientists from criticism are discovering they've been played.
Fundamentally, if someone is going to inject me with an extremely complicated substance that's specifically designed to make my body produce a toxin, after the normal safety studies have been bypassed, I want to double check what they're doing. If I can't because their work is filled with errors, it's perfectly understandable to conclude that maybe I'll put my faith in Mother Nature instead. Other people who have more trust in institutional competence can decide differently, and that's fine.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27231636
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26769138
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27245283
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26836661
[5] https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27366386
[7] https://trialsitenews.com/the-covid-19-spike-protein-may-be-...
[8] https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/06/03/covid19-the-spike-p...