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It might not be a big deal if you get COVID but it would suck to be the immunocompromised individual (or a friend/family relation to the individual) who might get COVID from you.

That person would presumably be vaccinated, thus they wouldn't get the virus from him. Why does everyone talk about how the vaccine works, but then use this argument against people that don't want to get the vaccine?

Immunocompromised might not be able to get a vaccine because the mechanism for vaccines is the immune system, which tends not be be working so great in the immunocompromised.

Yep, that would suck for them. Anyone who is fearful of getting covid should get the vaccine. If they get vaccinated and I still end up transmitting it to them, then that sucks, but again, people get sick and that's life. I'm willing to acknowledge my selfishness in this matter.

I empathize with most of what you wrote, but there are two errors:

"I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times."

No one whom I know who has had COVID describes it like any normal respiratory virus, and it attacks multiple systems. I'm terrified of brain damage, and before-and-after MRIs shows brain damage in >10% of people who contract COVID19.

"If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life"

And if you kill a loved one by sharing COVID19? Or give them brain fog? That's not something I could live with.

The deeper argument, though, is about herd immunity. If we don't stop the spread, really bad things happen.

I'll mention: Do you use proper masks? N95 and proper nanofiber masks are widely available, and appear to do more to stop the spread than the vaccine. They're also risk-free.

>And if you kill a loved one by sharing COVID19? Or give them brain fog? That's not something I could live with.

The odds of this are far less than the odds of me killing my wife by taking a drive with her. In the same way that I can live with the risk of driving a car with her in it, I can live with this risk. Of course if that actually happened I would feel terrible, in both cases. But life is about weighing risks, and for now I'm comfortable with the risk of remaining unvaccinated.

No, I don't wear masks. That's a different ethical discussion. I don't feel or accept a moral burden for potentially spreading a virus in any case. I wouldn't walk about while sick of course, or have uninformed sex if I had an STD, but if I'm asymptomatic and end up accidentally giving someone an illness in the course of normal life, sorry, but that's just life. People who spread the flu accidentally are not immoral people, whether they get the flu shot or not. Likewise here.

Your numbers are way off, as is your moral compass. I hope I never meet you, or anyone like you. To use your driving analogy, the way I respond to your message is if someone told me they drove around drunk and high, without headlights, and without really doing any car maintenance, and didn't accept any moral responsibility if they hit someone because car accidents happen, and sorry, that's life.

As a baseline number, about a half-million Americans died of COVID already. For comparison, there were about 40k car deaths in the US. For someone like yourself, taking no precautions, the odds of catching COVID19 are way more than 10x of a fatal car accident.

The more critical problem is a systemic one. If no one takes precautions, nearly 10 million people in the US will die. If everyone does, virtually no ones needs to die. It's like polluting or littering.

And COVID19 isn't flu. The flu doesn't leave a quarter of people with brain fog 9 months later.

I know a fairly large number of people who have had it. Zero hospitalisations, zero deaths, zero long term effects.

The amount of cognitive dissonance here is intense.

>I can only make this decision based on my own research.

>Unfortunately I am not qualified to interpret the data meaningfully,

You do your own research but admit that you are unqualified to do that research.

> and I truly believe that if there was data suggesting that the vaccine was equally dangerous to the virus, it would be suppressed.

You believe institutions are untrustworthy yet somehow all of them are able to perfectly coordinate to suppress data.

>The publicized numbers for covid give me essentially a zero risk of any problems, because I am young, fit and healthy.

Nothing about your youth or fitness reduces your risk of transmitting this virus.

>I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times.

It's clear you either do not know nor desire to know how to protect yourself and others from respiratory viruses. This is a new virus that seems like it jumped to us from bats.

>There is also the aspect of direct action. If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life. If I get some bad side effects from an untrusted injection, I did that to myself and it will feel mentally much worse. All of this is to say, I don't care at all if I get covid, because I'll be fine.

You live in a society. Delta is looking to have an R0 of 4-9, that means if you are infected, on average, you will infect 4-9 new people with the virus. If you are infected and suffer long-term damage to your brain and lungs that makes you unable to work, you will qualify for disability, which is paid for by everyone.

> Nothing about your youth or fitness reduces your risk of transmitting this virus.

This one surprised me. Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic, and the viral load you're carrying, affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others? That was my understanding, along with young fit people having shorter, milder bouts.

Not sure about the exact answer but wanted to note:

> Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic... affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others?

Infected people transmit the virus for a number of days prior to when they first (or ever) show systems.

Edit: following up, I found a recent study[1] that used a pretty extensive contact tracing effort to find

> Most transmission events occurred during the pre-symptomatic phase (59.2%). SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility to infection increases with age, while transmissibility is not significantly different between age groups and between symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals.

Your likelihood to become infected does depend on your age, but once you are infected your likelihood to transmit the virus is the same as everyone else's.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21710-6

This all makes sense if you are

- less than 18 years old. For everyone older, all countries in the world have come to the conclusion that vaccination is safer than staying without vaccination.

- only considering yourself and not the risk that you are part of the reason it spreads.

What lies at the foundation of all this is your distrust and I would suggest you consider how to deal with that. If you can't trust the media and governments (and you actually should trust them to a large part), how about following role-models or friends? Or best how about following data and science? If a whole nation such as Israel goes for a vaccine such as Pfizer don't you think they do their homework?

> If you can't trust the media and governments

Up until December we had the Pres/VP candidates saying they would not take any vaccine that Trump endorsed. Then they won, and were faced with convincing everyone to take those very vaccines. Do you believe them now, or then?

That’s out of context, the VP said she would take a Vaccine endorsed by medical professional not the president. It was and attack on Trumps trying to reduce red tape / rush things depending on perspective, not any specific or hypothetical vaccine.

It’s perfectly reasonable to agree or disagree with rushing vaccine deployment even further, but don’t attack a straw man.

Thanks. Anecdotally I've noticed that most people around me who refuse the vaccine more or less follow your argument, but you articulated it very well.

We humans certainly suffer from omission bias, it was probably safer in our selection environment.

Our everyday life is full of cases where we do dangerous stuff which we don't feel as dangerous because, everybody is doing that, since forever, so yeah you know some things may be dangerous but c'mon, it's not that bad, you don't want to miss out on life by being the only crazy person who doesn't get in a car or something.

When something totally new happens like covid vaccines, it's hard to get the right intuitions, and probably each will have their own, using their own biases.

My personal rules of thumb are:

1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).

2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy

3. I don't trust journalists to obey to the conspiracy; money in media is about attention grabbing, if there were serious side effects they would have ridden the tide (and probably even inflated it)

4. I personally know a few people who died of covid; I don't know anybody that had serious side effects of vaccines. Even if the media is hiding the problem, I would expect it to be visible in my direct experience (as it was for covid)

I don't take issue with your conclusions, but I do with your arguments. I think precision and correctness are important, since a lot of vaccine skepticism comes from people making incorrect arguments.

> 1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).

I do trust the authorities to be incompetent enough not to collect such data.

> 2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy

I do trust governments to engage in groupthink. That's kind of like the idiot's version of coordinating a conspiracy.

In the process, I trust authorities to "message" and dishonestly manipulate information going out in ways which appear coordinated.

Groupthink is indeed a real problem, but if you really believe all it takes is groupthink to hide severe side effects (possibly deaths) of vaccines that would compete in magnitude with covid causalities, you should entertain the possibility you're engaging in a groupthink of another polarity.

I mean, sure. Governments have been and will be dishonest and lying and have been and will be again caught red handed. They also have been and will be accidentally right about various things.

If whatever a government says is always the opposite of true, then it would be super easy to have certainties! I wish that were true. Unfortunately I don't think that works that way.

I don't think OP's logic requires side effects of vaccines to be anywhere close to COVID19 causalities. It's a personal decision.

Without vaccines, at present, my risk of COVID19 would be marginal at best:

- I live in an area with a high vaccination rate, and a low incidence rate

- I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks (which are probably more effective than vaccines), and pretty strong social distancing, which I can do working from home.

I'm vaccinated, but if I wasn't, my odds of catching COVID19 would be nominal at best.

That's different than, for example, a retail worker.

If I didn't believe vaccines were perfectly safe, OP's decision wouldn't be crazy. I am a general-purpose nerd, and I know enough biology to make an informed decision without relying on political authority figures. If that wasn't the case, I might make the same decision as OP.

Now, I can do the math on why, if many people make the same decision as OP, we'll have a serious problem, but again, most people (not OP specifically) can't do math.

You can have empathy without agreement.

> I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks

Will you take this strong precautions forever?

I may be wrong (because what do I know?), but my assumption is that COVID will become endemic and sooner or later we'll all get it. I don't know that for sure, I didn't spend a lot of time following the numbers and reading right and left about this topic. I just can't devote significant time into doing a "proper study" of the matter. So, instead I'm going to apply my personal heuristic, like everybody else.

In my previous comment I shared my personal heuristics about "can the government effectively hide the dangers of the vaccine?"

Here I'll respond to whether I believe it's rational to not get vaccinated because other people will be vaccinated and the problem will go away without me risking it:

From what I could see, COVID seemed to be very transmissible; despite strong social distancing and lockdowns the contagions kept going. The only way to stop it would be to either doing a prolonged and airtight global lockdown (hard to implement) or to have a vaccination rate that exceeds the herd immunity threshold.

And this vaccination level has to be maintained throughout the world, or else we have to lock down travel in perpetuity, which is again, IMO hard to implement.

Currently we do observe regional variation in covid spread; my intuition is that a lot that can be attributed to the "reverse tinkerbell effect": we're avoiding travel, in some cases forbidding travel, testing people who travels; we cannot reach the conclusion that if you live in an area where vaccination level is high you're going to be fine; as soon as travel resumes you'll encounter unvaccinated people more often.

As I said, I don't know; it's just a heuristic. I think it's possible that I'll catch covid in the next few years. Let's put a generously low probability of 0.1%. Then let's attach a generously low probability of having serious problems if I do catch it, again 0.1% (probably higher than that, but lets be generious). With those number I'd have a chance of one in a million to get severe problems of covid in the near future.

There have been 3.4 billion doses of vaccine administered so far; if 1 in a million of them had severe side effects, that would mean 3.4 million people would be affected; I think somebody would have noticed. This is why I was focusing on addressing whether the governments can actively hiding this problem. That's the main counterarguments I hear to my heuristic about pros/cons of getting the vaccine now, namely that there are indeed million of people who're suffering from the vaccine but we don't know about them because the government is lying (I find this hard to believe; I cannot rule that out logically, but my credence in that proposition is quite low)

To be clear, it's not that I think people are dying en masse from vaccines and being covered up. What I'm mainly concerned about are permanent side effects and long term dangers.

Now, regarding long term side effects, there are a lot of "alternative news" sources, and random internet anecdotes, which claim relatively common heart problems following vaccination, and some stories of healthy people dying a few days later, though these deaths can't be explicitly linked to a vaccine necessarily. These sources are not more trustworthy than the mainstream media, but if the 2020 election has shown anything, it's that the media is willing to die on the hill for their narrative. These alternative sources are the same sort that were correct about Russiagate and other such media nonsense. So I can trust neither side, and there is at least some fringe evidence that the vaccines are worse than we know.

About long term effects appearing, I can't know if this is possible, and I can't trust anyone who says they do know, since it has been so politicized. There are actually medical doctors who say it could be dangerous in this way, so again, I can't know whether they're crackpots or if a large number aren't just fearful for their jobs and such. If you were a researcher right now and you had some evidence to believe this vaccine could be dangerous long after the injection, I find it hard to believe you could get your message out to any credible mouthpieces at this point.

If, in a couple of years, everything is still fine, then I may relent and get the jab. But right now there is just no way to trust it without trusting institutions which have proven themselves liars.

I'd like to disagree, but I can't. What I can say is:

1) I know enough about molecular biology to tell you the vaccine is safe. You pick up novel stuff all the time. In abstract, we don't know a pebble in your backyard doesn't have some odd chemical which will end humanity, but the odds of that are astronomically low. There just isn't any voodoo in the vaccine.

2) In this case, the claims from "alternative news" are nonsense. With hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine administered, there will be instances of virtually everything happening after the vaccine. That's not to say they're always nonsense -- I read a variety of media -- but in this case, they are.

3) Doctors who fear vaccines are crackpots.

4) You're absolutely right about institutions lying. You're not only right about researchers not being able to get a message out contradicting the party line, but worse, their career would be destroyed. It's the story of the boy who cried wolf.

I think I will take strong precautions forever, if needed.

I think COVID19 spread because, at every point, people said "It can't be that bad," and it turned out it was. Our response was characterized by wishful thinking.

People can and do catch COVID19 multiple times, and that will only increase as it mutates. Let's start with your assumptions and go one level deeper:

1. COVID19 is highly transmissible

2. COVID19 will become endemic

3. You'll be exposed to COVID19 multiple times

With vaccine breakthrough rates of 5% for the original, and perhaps 20% for delta, and more with growing mutations, you'll catch COVID19 multiple times. Each time, you'll lose a little bit of gray matter in the brain, and sustain other damage. By the time you're old, you'll be a drooling, exhausted zombie idiot.

This makes a lot of additional assumptions, a key one being that breakthrough and brain damage are random events (as opposed to e.g. at-risk individuals), but it is a plausible scenario. We can argue about whether it's 20% odds or 80% odds, but it's definitely not 5% or 95%.

From my perspective, social distancing, masking, and similar just aren't that bad relative to even a moderate risk of the alternative. Proper masks are $2 (ones that filter down to <300nm), mildly uncomfortable, and more effective than vaccines. If we assume independence, proper mask+vaccine+modest social distancing reduces odds of infection to be infinitesimal. I don't believe in independence, but they certainly reduce R0 below 1. Why not?

One amazing thing about this vaccine is that it is basically open-source. We can look at the genetic code so you know exactly what is going into your body if you choose to take it. This guy does an amazing job of breaking it down in detail: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

I agree the CDC has done a terrible job of representing science and establishing trust, but the virus is less politicized in other countries. Look at what those health institutions with better track-records are recommending.

How is it open source?

That may be a reasonable decision as an individual. I disagree because I think the risks from the vaccines are near zero (not actually, but near), while here in the UK most hospital admissions now are young people so clearly the risk to them is not at all zero. Still, you'll probably be fine.

The problem with that calculation though is that it doesn't take into account the increased risk to other people. If you do catch it you'll become a vector for infecting other people, some of which might be a lot more vulnerable or less lucky than yourself. Even if you only pass it on to other younger people, the odds of someone having a bad reaction still go up with infections.