EDIT: thanks for the answers, exactly the info I needed to update my prior beliefs.
2. It can mutate in people that catch it to avoid vaccine / cause other issues. Imagine if it started causing blindness... would you care then of being forced to take a 5-10% / 50% chance of catching it?
3. No chance of wiping it out without everyone vaccinated.
4. Some people can't get vaccinated or it wont work on them. They will catch it and die if others are not getting it / spreading it.
I think that needs to be highlighted more. It's like wearing seatbelts, but for other people. I would consider that the fabric that most societies are made of, taking care of the people that can't for themselves, and in many cases through no fault of their own (e.g. genetics).
That's part of the reason debate over seat belt laws is often misguided under the guise of being only about self inflicted harm. It's also to protect you from others becoming a meat torpedo.
Which circles back to the crux of the original post. At what level does a society have the right to self assemble and govern and protect itself from others. Is it at the block level, the city level, the county level, the state level? Should people be able to go move to an empty spot in the desert and say "vaccinated people only" OR "unvaccinated people only." If those people only want to be around those people, are they allowed to carve out a space for themselves somewhere? When that area starts to rely on the infrastructure of others, how does that relationship change?
>That's part of the reason debate over seat belt laws is often misguided under the guise of being only about self inflicted harm. It's also to protect you from others becoming a meat torpedo.
Additionally, if the driver is belted in they are likely to have a higher chance of maintaining or regaining control of their vehicle if they aren't tossed around inside, allowing them the chance of preventing further harm to others due to a completely out of control vehicle.
Which is why there's still debate about motorcycle helmet laws. A motorcycle helmet basically only protects the person wearing it.
Unfortunately, public health officials have admitted in public they are lying about the thresholds (e.g. Dr Fauci said he gave different numbers depending on what opinion polls were saying). However it's likely to be about 70%-80%, perhaps less because those numbers assume no pre-existing natural immunity, which doesn't seem to be correct. That means there is scope for very large numbers of people do decide not to take it if they don't want to, before herd immunity is threatened at all.
Double unfortunate, I feel like nobody cares about these things, because they see it as a chance to enforce collectivist decision making on people in the name of "society". The actual group safety arguments never come with concrete numbers to assist with the underlying intuitions and that is suspicious.
That is correct, allergies are very rare. I'm talking about patients whose immune system is weakened, either on purpose, e.g. transplant patients, or because they have an auto-immune disease (HIV etc.) or simply because their immune system is weak as a result of another disease (e.g. cancer) or they were simply dealt a weak immune system at birth (genetics) or their immune system is weak because they are very old.
Then add infants, children and pregnant women who can't get vaccinated in the majority of cases.
Now add the whole anti-vaxx crowd, people who became the victim of FUD, people who simply don't care, people who don't get their second shot, and it doesn't look very good, does it?
> The actual group safety arguments never come with concrete numbers to assist with the underlying intuitions and that is suspicious.
There are plenty of models to give you concrete answers, but there is even more uncertainty in the model assumptions, so we simply don't know with certainty. In any case we are already starting to find out in different countries.
As for the sizes of the other groups, you'd have to argue they make up more than 30% of the population for there to be real concerns. 30% of the population is a lot of people. There's plenty of room for people who don't want the vaccine in such a large slice.
False. Pfizer alone will manufacture 2.5 billion doses this year, 3 billion next year. Considering EU/US already at 50-60% vacicnated, there are a lot of doses for the rest of the world.
Moderna will likely have similar production. The other simpler ones even more.
> If it is true that only unvaccinated people generates new dangerous versions of the virus
You get infected, virus can mutate, it's that simple.
> which is completely false since leaky vaccines can cause enhanced versions of the virus
You do realize you are not on reddit or an anti-vax forum?
If yes, please back up this statement with proper scientific sources.
If in good faith, for your own well-being please get out of that conspiracy theory rabbit-hole
Anyway I am sorry I didn't share an article about what I mentioned, I thought it was known enough to not need an article. (I might say the same about your numbers)
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.13...
The journal you reference studies Marek's disease in chicken. The vaccine does not prevent transmission (which farmers found good enough). As such, all vaccinated chicken can get the virus but dont get sick and still transmit it.
That is irrlevant since, its a study on chicken, with a vaccine that wouldn't be approved for humans. Also all vaccines stop transmission with 90-95% or less for poorer vaccines (you are 95% less likely to catch it)
All the study shows is the need to vaccinate everyone and extinguish the virus same as polio before it evolves.
As for numbers source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/biontech-...
As for difficulty distributing vaccines in Africa. Where there's a need people will figure out a way.
But you are correct that the lower the transmission rate from vaccinated people, the lower the risk of enhanced viruses.
But your 95% is debatable. The number goes drastically down depending on which vaccine you use, the new strains, and probably time.
My point is that the myth that unvaccinated people are the part of the population creating enhanced variants is false. Before the vaccination propaganda started it was known to everyone that isolating the sick tends to forces the virus to evolve in less dangerous strains.
Incorrect. By logic, 95% (or whatever % you want) of the vaccinated population will not catch virus. As such, virus cannot evolve in them. Logical right?
This is what they study says.
> ... anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission ...
The vaccines we have PREVENT transmission with various effectiveness. The vaccine in study did NOT. Since viruses could still infect vaccinated chicken, it evolved.
But the final point I was trying to pass is that isolation of the sick will slowly push the virus to evolve in more contagious but less risky variants. Undetected infections in the vaccinated might cause strains that evade the vaccine and possibly be more dangerous (because of the lack of symptoms and isolation.)
I bet you would like to go back in time and tell the people that vaccinated against polio that they were doing it wrong too?
We are vaccinating to stop the pandemic.
India is an example what happens without vaccines btw
tot cases/1M pop -> usa 104525 india 22200 deaths/1M pop -> usa 1872 india 295
There is no single country in asia that did as bad as the USA in the deaths department. What's now your next extravagant excuse? That the usa has been overcounting its deaths to scare its people into covid mrna therpies?
I know people that have lost family members there. They were struggling to get them spots in hospitals, everything is mess of corruption, under reporting, overflowed hospitals.
They're not even testing properly... See the airplane full of corona positive people with negative 'PCR' tests.
I can't tell how much of it is undercounting in India, how much is overcounting in the USA, and how much of it is that the friends and family networks in India count hundreds of people as opposed to the westerner ones.
It's also easy to have good numbers if you issue negative results without doing the actual tests and if you count the deaths as that of something else.
Hints of the false tests are:
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/20/49-passengers-on-in...
- all of the ones that were positive had negative PCR tests... done in india
Similar things were happening in Communist Romania, hence my skepticism of India's number (back then - record "harvests", everybody well fed and happy, etc, meanwhile everyone was starving as crops were sold off on external markets)
Either way, best of luck, this discussion was fun for a while.
I mean, I agree that official data can be forged and should be taken with a grain of salt but come on. You can do better than this.
Also it has been proven that there is a strong inverse correlation between vitamin D levels and covid severity. If we assume that you are right and many more people died in India, how can you prove that it's because the vaccine that in Europe the mortality is so much lower?
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/cl... + https://revista-fi.com.br/upload_arquivos/201606/20160600681... + https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24054...
In April 1955, soon after mass polio vaccination began in the US, the Surgeon General began to receive reports of patients who contracted paralytic polio about a week after being vaccinated with Salk polio vaccine from the Cutter pharmaceutical company, with the paralysis limited to the limb the vaccine was injected into. The Cutter vaccine had been used in vaccinating 200,000 children in the western and midwestern United States.[76] Later investigations showed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, killing 10.[76] In response the Surgeon General pulled all polio vaccines made by Cutter Laboratories from the market, but not before 250 cases of paralytic illness had occurred. Wyeth polio vaccine was also reported to have paralyzed and killed several children. It was soon discovered that some lots of Salk polio vaccine made by Cutter and Wyeth had not been properly inactivated, allowing live poliovirus into more than 100,000 doses of vaccine.
> The inactivated polio vaccines are very safe
2. Do you have to worry about polio now?, no, why?
3. We have processes in place to verify vaccines, that's why you got news about janssen or whatever throwing away millions of doses due to contamination.
These are not vaccines but gene therapies that have never been tested. History proves risks do exist when new therapies are given to people.
I suppose when a normal vaccine like the novavax is coming out there won't be as much opposition.
Alas... not my business... I took the vaccine and there are no side effects. Same for all people I know. Same for countless others.
If you bring up risk, I think a much bigger risk is the virus destroying a good part of your lungs/kidneys/heart/etc... Ending up in ER and dieing...
And without everyone vaccinating it won't disappear. Either way, good luck
There are big doubts about it.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.20240309v...
Also: many people that look into the data of how therapies are going, have high hopes for Novavax, which seems very promising and works in a more "classic way". Sure some people will never get inoculated with anything but that's a different story.
> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/
This in essence states that given a immune population (either vaccine or natural), virus will evolve strains to escape anti-bodies... which is logical... if one such variant evolves, it will have a huge potential for multiplication.
It then states that strategies for viral elimination should be diversified... I would argue vaccinating everyone will lead to viral elimination... Otherwise virus is free to mutate in non-immune people.
> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33688681/
It's a study on the viruses natural mutation potential... and it's worrying... nothing regarding vaccines and so on... it's basically a warning that it can evolve to bypass vaccines and we'll be back to square one...
Again... nothing to help your argument about 'leaky' vaccines...
Have you read them yourself?
2)Wrong again: "In the presence of mixed sera from multiple previously infected and/or vaccinated individuals these infections would create the appropriate conditions both for genetic recombination to occur, and for selection to rapidly sort multiple recombination-generated combinations of input immune evasion, cell entry and replication impacting mutations."
My original point is that people that made use of covid mrna therapy can be the source of new versions of the virus (because the therapy doesn't prevent infection nor spreading of the virus).
While it's true that the second study talks about mutations in both vaccinated and unvaccinated hosts, the first is clearly looking into the spike protein based therapy:
"The spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2 is the molecular target for many vaccines and antibody-based prophylactics aimed at bringing COVID-19 under control. Such a narrow molecular focus raises the specter of viral immune evasion as a potential failure mode for these biomedical interventions."
Here's the flaw in your argument. All vaccines provide immunity so the study does not apply.
> because the therapy doesn't prevent infection nor spreading of the virus)
Wrong. Biontech - 95% of the population is immune. It prevents spread to 95% of vaccinated people. The rest for some reason or another it doesn't work.
So you build your whole argument on a logical fallacy.
I think I repeated this a few times so no point in continuing if you can't wrap your head around this.
95% is based on faulty/old data.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Oh man... so you do agree with me it prevents infection...
You are contradicting yourself...
So, its not 95 its 64, it still gives immunity... check mate?
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm
If it prevents infection in 64% of cases it doesn't grant immunity.
64% or 95% or whatever of the population are IMMUNE.
It's not 'prevent infection 64% of the timr' as you would in a videogame... It's 'get vaccinated and you have X% chance to develop antibodies, if you do, you are immune.'
And this sentence is from the study. A study about Covid "vaccines". Not me.
And those vaccines are which?, does the study allege any of the current vaccines does not provide immunity?, is so please put the quote and the study for that.
Otherwise this is a hypothetical... if x then y... when x is false in reality...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.20240309v...
47 in link above is a study of the cruise ship, not what you think.
If you meant the actual link above, it clearly states vaccines give immunity but it might be waning, i.e: won't last, same as natural immunity
Best of luck, thought I might help with your logic, but I admit defeat there.
Society bends over backwards to accomodate ever-increasing levels of obese people. The majority of baseline hospital "stress" is due to morbidities caused by, and strongly associated with, obesity.
Why are we shunning the unvaccinated, a rapidly decreasing proportion of the population, but promote plus-size models, build ever-larger movie theater seating, and denigrate "fat shaming" in response to a problem that 1. exists largely as the baseline hospital "stressor", and 2. increases among the population monotonically?
Now as to the body positive trend. I don’t quite agree with it, but there is a current belief that body shaming tends to backfire with individual weight loss, and that being pro body helps lead to better general health.
Personally I think much of the obesity epidemic is more a mental health epidemic. There are a lot of people who use food as a short term mood enhancer, and I’m reminded of experiments with rats showing that rates of drug addiction go way down when the rats are provided with an environment that better suites their needs.
That said, the current over abundance of highly processed food is probably the hardest thing to overcome in terms of obesity. Processed foods tend to act in the body quicker than our feedback mechinisms can handle, short term feelings of full happen too late, and long term satiation is harder to maintain. I’m not sure that fat shaming isn’t in the same category as victim shaming, the real vitriol should probably be pointed at much of the food industry instead.
Sure, but it's far less likely to be severe even if you're in an at-risk group.
> 3. No chance of wiping it out without everyone vaccinated.
Until it burns through the unvaccinated population and people build up natural immunity. I'm not arguing against vaccines, I got mine and I encourage everyone else to, but don't act like vaccines are the only way to get immunity or that they're enough to get rid of it entirely.
I don't know who people have this kind of narrow (and a little bit selfish) idea that it's only about 'them' and 'if they catch it'.
COVID is not that deadly on a unit level. It's dangerous because of how incredibly viral it is, then it becomes 'net scary' for the community.
By being unvaccinated - even if you survive - which you likely will you are passing it to others and you become a propagating agent of death.
Take the purely libertarian perspective of 'my body my choice' - well in that view, you'd have to be responsible for your actions as well, and therefore arguably liable for everyone you infect and all the damage you cause.
It's not going to work.
If we're going to live as a community and share services, resources and spaces ... then we have do adjust our behaviour at least temporarily so that this diseases doesn't kill a lot of people.
It's very troubling to me that this isn't obvious to every adult.
Secondly, I'm getting the COVID vaccine not because they believe that there is a high risk of getting serious COVID myself, but to help others -- some at-risk people can't get the vaccine at all, and immune-suppresed people are still at significant risk post-vaccine (although still lower risk than without).
People not getting the vaccine who are able are being incredibly selfish. They are exercising the opposite of personal responsibility. It's your personal responsibility not the harm those around you as much as possible. I know they are mostly ignorant, but frankly I find them to be disgusting people.
Especially if you consider the social landscape in the USA, where having beliefs misaligned with your in-group's is extremely damaging. It doesn't leave a lot of room for people to exercise independent thought and climb out of their ignorance.
As an aside, I never called you (or anyone else I was referring to) a bigot.
I didn't mean to claim that you did, but after re-reading the two sentences, I can see how it could be read as such. Sorry for the confusion!
Sure. But there is also a bigger responsibility to oneself. To not do things that might harm themselves.
So with that conflicting forces, it becomes a matter of opinion and perception. So it becomes no longer selfish, and just common sense.
All information points the disease being worse than the vaccine. It's not common sense to avoid it. It's highly irrational. If people are really concerned with not harming themselves, they _will_ get vaccinated.
No, at some point you are trusting some external entities. You trust the information because you trust the entities that provide it.
When you say that someone else is irrational, you are doing that because that person does not share your trust. And to that person, in all probability, what you are doing might be irrational.
In the end, I think no one have the right to impose their standard of trust on to anyone else.
But I guess believe whatever you want if it makes you feel better.
Replace "research" with "stuff a bunch of people you believe say", and the situation will become much more clear.
E.g. here is a point you made that doesn't even remotely apply here:
> If you do an experiment that very few people in the world is able to replicate, because it is hard or due to lack of resources, then the rest of the world have to trust you.
These vaccines have been taken by _millions_ of people. They have been given by many different independent organizations. So yeah this doesn't even apply at all.
> The trust of people should be won, research by research, not authority by authority, and the non-requirement of mandates goes along automatically with that idea.
Essentially all the research points towards the vaccines being much much better than the disease. It's your choice to stick your head in the sand if you so wish, but no one need respect your decision. You're not somehow wise simply due to your being contrarian.
On the contrary being this naive...
Even today, in their newest letter, they are still trying to obfuscate the real situation and are certainly not apologizing for their prior stance.
At any rate, this claim that scientists are never dishonest or wrong, they just "update their beliefs" as more information becomes available, is getting very tedious. That's not what they're doing. "Science" is constantly bombarding our political leaders with wildly extreme statements delivered not just with 100% confidence, but the assertion that you aren't even allowed to disagree because it's a "scientific consensus". People read the papers and point out that they're making false assumptions or are otherwise pseudo-scientific, but they're suppressed and ignoring. Then when that "consensus" turns out to have been completely wrong a bunch of apologists appear to explain that scientists can never be wrong by definition.
Well, guess what? If a certain type of person constantly make confident statements as a group and insists reasoned disagreement is illegitimate, then is repeatedly proven to be wrong, all their statements become seen as less reliable. As a group.
> All information points the disease being worse than the vaccine.*
* : for the population cohort above approximately 50 years old or a BMI greater than 30.
For better or for worse (for society), it appears healthy-weight people under 50 making the choice to not get vaccinated on a calculus of myocarditis, menstrual complications, blood clotting, and various other longer-term risks are, in fact, not being "highly irrational"
I'd be curious to read source of the statistics you're referring to (i.e. what rates of these complications you see and how they compare to the complications of covid itself in the same age groups).
> Especially as we are now getting the fuller picture that covid can lead to last lung and brain damage.
Yes, we are just now getting the fuller picture of COVID-19 that it can lead to this and that. The very same can happen to the vaccines, and it is actually happening to some of these vaccines.
Inflammation/swelling of the heart, not enlarging, very rare given the number of shots that have been rolled out, and people recover pretty quickly. Definitely a concern, not a showstopper.
> We did not know this before either, nor did we know about the AstraZeneca's blood clots.
Again, an incredibly low risk and less risk than harm from the virus.
> we just simply have no idea.
This is not really true, we have a ton of data from this vaccine and from previous ones that can inform our expectations.
> A CDC committee will hear about reports of 300 cases of the heart enlargement that have happened after children were vaccinated against COVID-19. The ailment is fairly common and easily treatable.
The heart inflammation happens too, though.
---
> Again, an incredibly low risk and less risk than harm from the virus.
But that is not the point. The point is that we did not know this would be the case. Other side-effects may come up as time goes on.
> This is not really true, we have a ton of data from this vaccine and from previous ones that can inform our expectations.
Again, are you talking about the mRNA vaccines? I asked the question twice with regarding to it so I am not going to do it again here.
What source are you quoting there? I can find that line in an abc news feed, but no attribution and nothing much else about it. Every other source seems to be talking about inflammation of one sort or another (myocarditis or pericarditis), primarily in young men, very rarely and easily recoverable.
> The point is that we did not know this would be the case
We are learning all the time, that's true, but these side effects are very rare, and are becoming visible due to the large scale of the rollout. It doesn't fundamentally change the calculus, especially when we are now learning that the disease itself can cause lasting lung and brain damage.
> I asked the question twice with regarding to it so I am not going to do it again here.
See my other answers then.
I cannot find the source where I found it first, but that could be the case that they confused the two, I am not sure. Some are talking about hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. In any case, it can lead to chronically enlarged heart, which is dilated cardiomyopathy. Whatever.
> We are learning all the time, that's true, but these side effects are very rare, and are becoming visible due to the large scale of the rollout. It doesn't fundamentally change the calculus, especially when we are now learning that the disease itself can cause lasting lung and brain damage.
I suppose continuing discussing this is not very useful. If there are long-term side-effects, then we will know about them. If there are no long-term side-effects, same story.
You're being irrational. It's true side-effects can take time to manifest. It's also true that problems due to the disease also can manifest. Taken together the fact that _something_ can possibly happen in the future gives you _no_ information today. For example, one of the side-effects of the vaccine that might manifest might be that you're _healthier_.
So yeah if you take the possibility of negative side effects, but not positive side-effects, you are being irrational. Said in another way, if you are taking statements devoid of information ("something can happen with some likelihood in the future"), you are being irrational.
All actual current information points overwhelmingly to the fact that the disease (even considering that not everyone will get it) is much worse than the vaccinations. That is information. That information points to one conclusion and it's not "wait forever and see what happens".
Plus I do not know if I was talking against getting vaccinated, I merely said that more side-effects may come to light, which I mention because many people seem to have excluded it from the list of possibilities.
There's nothing scientific about any of that. You could have some natural immunity. You could also simply have been lucky. You might never be infected. You might also someday die from the disease. This is entirely anecdotal and basically useless information.
> Plus I do not know if I was talking against getting vaccinated, I merely said that more side-effects may come to light, which I mention because many people seem to have excluded it from the list of possibilities.
People shouldn't exclude that from the list of possibilities. But people _should not_ take it into account with their decision-making. If they are going to give weight to the future possibility of negative side-effects coming to light, they should also give weight to the future possibility that positive side-effects may come to light.
Said simply, there's nothing very useful in the statement "we might know more in the future than now".
Not for me though it is not, and that is the only reason I mentioned it, that there are such occurrences, too. Whether or not you believe me, well, that is up to you, and you can do whatever you want with it. :) I did add "personal experience", so yes, of course, it is anecdotal.
> there's nothing very useful in the statement "we might know more in the future than now"
OK, time will tell regardless.
I never said I don't believe you. I just said there was nothing scientific in your reasoning. It's completely obvious that not all people get covid that are exposed to people. I've also been exposed to covid and not been infected. But it's just anecdotal information. I could get covid and die just the same. Drawing any conclusions off of these individual occurrence is not very intelligent.
Does it sound a good enough reason for not getting vaccinated?
But none of that has to do with the issue that something may happen in the future. You are making your choices with the information you have _now_.
By the way, something related: I cannot get a job because I am not vaccinated. No one cares here about people who cannot get vaccinated for health reasons. It is tough.
For Americans: https://www.axios.com/republicans-coronavirus-vaccines-discr...
> Republicans push to ban "discrimination" against unvaccinated people
I am sure many people are against it, but if we push people to get the vaccine because of society and its people, then surely they should care about those who cannot get vaccinated for health reasons. They are currently unable to get a job here.
I _do_ care. Which is why I find those who choose unnecessarily not to get the vaccine for unspecified and irrational fears all the more unforgivable. Their selfish irrationality is despicable.
In general people hates to accept that not everyone reasons in the same way. Many societies aren't as trustworthy as you are to whatever decision is taken by their elites (being either for historical or cultural reasons). You need to accept that many would consider something in front of them poisonous until the contrary is proven (as opposed to more trustworthy people who sees everything safe until proven poisonous).
> But in general the chances are much higher for a neutral/bad result in case of an external intervention for which our body was never put in contact before (not even in past generations as in the case of lipid nano particles).
What is this even saying? The virus is external to the body. The vaccines are external to the body as well. Study after study shows that the side-effects of the vaccine are lower than the issues caused by the disease.
> In general people hates to accept that not everyone reasons in the same way. Many societies aren't as trustworthy as you are to whatever decision is taken by their elites (being either for historical or cultural reasons). You need to accept that many would consider something in front of them poisonous until the contrary is proven (as opposed to more trustworthy people who sees everything safe until proven poisonous).
It's been proven non-poisonous hundreds of millions of times already. But yeah if your point is that there are many people who for cultural/societal/ignorance/etc. reasons act irrationally, the of course that's true. I just don't understand why you're pointing it out.
Saying that the virus is dangerous doesn't make the vaccine safe in the long term. You might be right, but you have no basis to suppose it's safe in the long run. You are just betting it because tv told you so.
> It's been proven non-poisonous hundreds of millions of times already.
You are talking about possible future unknown effects. No it hasn't been proven at all. They aren't even looking for possible long term damage.
Anyway they downplay it in the leaflet but its there: "The COVID-19 vaccine has gone through the same clinical trials and safety checks as all other licensed vaccines, however the vaccine is new and long-term side effect information is limited."
https://www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/newsfeatures/covid19-up...
The bullshit you have to sign before receiving the vaccine here is not downplaying anything here at least, but not that it stops people from signing it; they might as well just sign their rights to health care away altogether.
We literally have to sign our rights away for compensation in case something happens to us due to the vaccine, ANY time in the future. If you have complications from the vaccine, you cannot sue anyone, and you cannot get compensation from anyone.
They tell you straight that it is a new vaccine and we have no information with regarding to its safety, especially long-term, and that you are receiving the vaccine at your own risk, and that you are on your own if something bad happens.
How sketchy is that? More than 5.6 million people signed it. If needed, I will dig it up and translate the entire thing, but I think it is obvious what it is about. :)
I'm not supposing it's safe in the long term. I'm supposing _nothing_ about the long term because we don't have that information. Maybe it is not safe in the long term. We'll find out some day I guess. Maybe it will lead to unexpected health _benefits_ in the long term? Who knows? So why would you weigh the potential dangers over any other potential advantages of taking it?
Anyway here are two serious questions to you:
1. Specifically how long is long enough before you'd consider the vaccine safe (compared of course to all the problems that can be caused by not taking the vaccine).
2. Do you feel ashamed allowing your fellow citizens to take on this potential risk and you forgoing when it helps end the pandemic for you and them? (Feel free to ignore this question if you are vaccinated, but are just being argumentative.)
2. You cannot force people into taking experimental therapies even if you tricked half of the population into taking them.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/17/1007447...
" 7 million U.S. teens and preteens (ages 12 through 17) had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine" [...] "more than 300 cases of heart inflammation have been documented [...] mostly in teens and young adults between 12 and 39 years old"
Assuming every single one of those 400 (rounding up) cases was between 12 and 17, that's 400 out of 7 million or 0.0057%.
"The rate seen after these vaccines is slightly higher than the "background" rate. [...] Many of the events reported turn out to be coincidental — not caused by a vaccine."
Which could well mean that only a handful of these cases are actually down to the vaccine, no?
And it's not even that drastic a problem; mainly just scary - "In a case study of seven teenagers who got myocarditis following vaccination published last week in the journal Pediatrics, all seven got better after routine treatment with anti-inflammatory drugs."
[edit: forgot to round one of my 300s up to 400]
If you look at VAERS then it's clear that this is by multiple orders of magnitude the most dangerous vaccine ever deployed.
https://swprs.org/us-vaccine-deaths-increasing-rapidly/
"The latest weekly US VAERS update added a shocking 2,083 post-vaccination deaths – by far the largest weekly increase to date – raising the total of reported post-vaccination deaths to 9,048. Not all of these 2,083 deaths occurred within a week, as there is a very significant reporting backlog. In total, close to 1,000 post-vaccination miscarriages, more than 3,000 heart attacks, about 7,500 disabilities, close to 20,000 severe allergic reactions, and close to 1,000 cases of heart muscle inflammation in people under 25 have already been reported to VAERS."
Even if all those deaths were directly attributable to the vaccine (and that is unlikely), the US has vaccinated 159M people - that's 0.0057% or 99.9943% safe.
If you want to include all the illnesses as well to bring it up to 41,500 incidents, that's still only 0.026% or 99.974% safe.
For what is almost certainly the single biggest vaccination project in human history, with more scrutiny than any other mass medical intervention, those are pretty damn good numbers.
But there's a deeper problem. Those are not good numbers because they are drastically higher than would be expected for a vaccine. A big part of the argument for getting vaccinated is that vaccines in general are "perfectly safe" and in particular that the vaccine is much safer than actually getting COVID. What this data shows is that these vaccines don't meet expectations established by prior campaigns, and that actually we have no real idea whatsoever of how dangerous they are, especially in the young.
Consider that US all cause mortality for the under 65s is still seriously above the expected baseline despite that COVID deaths have dropped to nearly zero. Something is raising mortality, and according to the largest virus surveillance programme in history combined with the laxest classification process imaginable, it isn't COVID.
I don't think anyone has ever said that, have they? They've said things like "vaccines are pretty safe" and "the risk of something going wrong is tiny compared with the risk of being unvaccinated", sure, but I doubt any medical professional has said "perfectly safe"?
> Those are not good numbers because they are drastically higher than would be expected for a vaccine.
Probably the smallpox vaccination program is the only one even vaguely comparable in size to this and, yeah, that had many fewer deaths (68 in the US in 10 years, I think, but I couldn't find out how many vaccinations were actually done.)
But then smallpox is a much easier thing to a) spot, b) treat, c) isolate people from, and d) create a vaccine for.
> Consider that US all cause mortality for the under 65s is still seriously above the expected baseline
Do you have a URL for that?
"These vaccines are perfectly safe and are extremely effective at preventing serious illness from these infectious diseases"
Pennsylvanian officials: [2]
"PA (WBNG) -- Despite natural concern and curiosity over the coronavirus vaccine, Pennsylvania officials held a scientific panel Thursday to explain the vaccines are perfectly safe, even for children."
A professor advising the UK government via the primary COVID vaccination committee: [3]
"There is the concern that what’s happening in Europe might make people in the UK less confident in the AstraZeneca vaccine, unnecessarily so, because it’s perfectly safe"
Maybe you don't consider an academic to be a medical professional, so here's a doctor in San Diego saying the same thing: [4]
"“There’s no reason to think that a 16-year-old or 17-year-old is going to have a reaction that an 18-year-old is going to have. I think it’s perfectly safe,” Sawyer told ABC 10News."
Re: mortality. Go to https://www.usmortality.com/ and click the 25-44 and 45-64 age check boxes, the graphs will then appear.
[1] https://www.immunology.org/celebrate-vaccines/public-engagem...
[2] https://wbng.com/2021/06/17/pa-officials-insist-vaccine-is-s...
[3] https://inews.co.uk/news/health/oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine-s...
[4] https://www.10news.com/news/coronavirus/san-diego-doctor-say...
[3] and [4], though, I stand corrected, they do say "perfectly safe".
A big part of the argument for getting vaccinated is that vaccines in general are "perfectly safe"
I was describing the scientific establishment's description of all vaccines, not just for C19.
You're right about [2], it may be an interpolation by journalists. Still, it's ascribed to them and I doubt any of those officials complained about this characterisation.
At any rate, this is a bit of an odd thing to be debating. "Perfectly safe" is a common turn of phrase in English. I doubt anyone who says it means it literally, and I didn't intend it to be read as such. It can be taken as a synonym for "so safe it's not worth anyone worrying about it".
If you are immunocompromised, or possibly allergic to the vaccines, then you may not be able to have one.
And as mentioned by the other poster, if the virus is still running rampant in the unvaccinated population, new variants may appear which skirt immunity.
Vaccination is a group effort, and while it's great that I am largely protected now, it makes a difference that society at large gets vaccinated too.