Agree completely. That said, ideally I don't want either. Since a lot of people wanted to get vaccinated immediately, I can avoid that and the virus with very high probability. If needed, I'll take v3 or so of the mRNA vaccine.
Prisoner's dilemma at play.
meta edit: I don't like your post becoming completely gray and therefore up-voted you. It's a view that many people hold and it needs to be answered not by screaming "down-vote the selfish!" but rather with good arguments.
The Delta variant is the only one you should be concerned about from here on. And a single dose of vaccine only provides minimal protection against it.
For your scheme to be safe, you would need about 80% of people around you to have 2+ doses of a high-efficacy vaccine, and ideally all with Pfizer over Astra, given their relative efficacy.
There's a greater than zero risk you're going about this wrong and will end up catching a new variant. Vaccination works, if you ACTUALLY GET THE SHOTS.
Cheers
So I think the risk of getting infected in fall may well be significant enough to make taking the vaccine a good decision.
Plus of course by vaccinating you no longer need to worry about minimizing infection risk, you don't need to get fake certificates to access things that are restricted to vaccinated people, you are free to travel to developing countries without risk.
Also if you don't vaccinate now and the pandemic somehow has a resurgence you will have to rush to vaccinate then and stay at least month in full isolation while others who are vaccinated are freely going to events instead of doing the isolation now that events haven't fully resumed yet.
Having to test regularly may be less of a bother in life, if you lose this stupid vaccination lottery..., if you want to play on the convenience note.
I’m pretty well aligned with this and I’m not sure why it’s getting the downvotes.
COVID has never been communicated to me as something serious for my age group. Maybe I’m misinformed, but I’ve never feared getting COVID. I was _terrified_ of needing hospital care _during a hockey stick_.
COVID was communicated to me as a hospital killer. I was terrified I’d have a bad time and not get the care I needed or, worse, steal care from someone else in a zero-sum game. And it wasn’t just COVID during that window. If we “hockey sticked” and exceeded hospital capacity, any care I needed (heart problems, broken bones, different virus, etc.) would all be wrapped up in the same zero-sum game.
I quarantined for months, then socially distanced, and now I’m pretty much back to life as normal. What changed for me: my perceived risk of my local hospitals getting knocked over by COVID is now close to zero. In my eyes we’ve weathered the storm.
Am I missing something?
I don’t believe COVID has a monopoly on your narrative (chain of transmission leading to death). I’m asking if I should be special casing COVID, or treating it like any other virus.
You've asked "what am I missing?" and from your narrative I'm asking if you're missing the morality.
I live in a community that hasn’t taken COVID seriously. Any chain of transmission I carry on would likely be “fungible” in my mind - If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.
Strong anti-quarantine, anti-mask, anti-short-time-to-market-vaccine.
But mixed in are a lot of _strong_ pro-vaccine folks who collectively have offset the need for masks to keep the hospitals from falling over. They’ve carried the torch of public good in my mind. They’ve offset the primary risk of this pandemic.
I’m on the fence and it feels like my decision isn’t consequential beyond personal risk and daily interactions (friends/family). If I transmit, I feel like it would be in a hurd where transmission was likely anyways and I was a randomly selected path vs an amplifier.
I wore a mask to offset risk of transmission to keep hospitals online. But injecting myself with a novel vaccine… I feel like I’m better off rolling the dice on contracting COVID and re-rolling to get side effects, vs rolling the dice once for the vaccine.
My choice has been reduced to a personal choice. It’s the same choice I make when I travel for the holidays. Example: I get the flu vaccine when I go see elderly or young family members. But right now I don’t feel it’s a moral imperative for COVID where, if I pass on a vaccine, I’m a horrible person who doesn’t care about my fellow man.
Does that make sense or am I off base?
Would be nice to have some data, instead of a ton of articles that say the same old "most symptoms go away within a few days". How does one decide whether to vaccinate or not based on such information? What is most? What is few days?
Some side effects are extremely common, like shoulder pain. Acceptable if it goes away in a week, let's say. But if there's a risk I'll have it for 3 months or forever, I'd like to know how common is that to make a calculated risk assessment. < 1% probably acceptable. >2-3% probably not.
And this will only be more apparent with time and more studies. The study I managed to find tracked people only for 8 days, had a nice graph of symptoms fading away with time. Mind calming exponential decay. :) Good, but 5% still had some symptoms at day 8. How many do have them at day 60?
I don't understand why such information has to be so hard to find for normal people, who don't spend days searching around on google scholar.
The mRNA vaccines are designed to express the spike protein in a membrane-bound form; very little is found floating free. See https://www.deplatformdisease.com/blog/spike-protein-circula....
Additionally, the mRNA vaccines express a modified spike protein that is stabilized in its "prefusion" state (as seen on the virus itself before it binds with a cell), and the resulting complex seems to have somewhat fewer effects even when it does interact with a cell.
But, why not to be worried:
- It's a normal process and most cells will be replaced.
- The effects would be tiny, especially compared to an infection with the real thing. If this was causing widespread issues, we would know by now.
- All studies done so far indicate that only a very small amount will enter systemic circulation.
It's a classic risk tradeoff, and the risks of taking the vaccine are much smaller than the risk of getting the real infection (billions of viruses replicating vs. one-time dose, real spike protein vs. stabilized spike protein).
What is the significance of either of those?