I have taken both shots. But I wouldn't call them "safe", as they are young and approved under emergency guidelines. They are probably safe, but nobody knows that right now.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the covid vax. I got Pfizer myself as soon as it was available. But there is still room for doubt.
No one has said the vaccine is 100% safe, it does list side effects after all, but this whole notion of "I'm waiting until all the data is out/it's only approved for emergency use" is just nonsensical.
The cognitive effects of COVID alone (discussed recently at [0]) are probably much more harmful in expectation than the vaccine side-effects, even accounting for the relatively high likelihood that those effects are not real, not causal, and/or reversible.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/oq4vho/cognitive_d...
The causality could of course be going in the opposite direction from what you are implying (lower IQ -> more likely to get COVID).
Then, there seem to be long term side effects from having the Covid-19 disease that one would not risk having from the vaccines. Because this is such a sensitive topic, I will refrain from sharing more information or links.
But, between the known problems of Covid, including risk of death and risk of infecting other potentially more vulnerable people on one hand, and no evidence of serious problems from the vaccines on the other hand, the choice is simple, in my books. I may be proven wrong in the future, but I have to act based on information I have currently, and I have to act relatively fast.
Maybe we'll realize in a couple of years that even asymptomatic covid harms your heart so much that affected people lose years of their lives? The vaccine seems like the safer choice to me.
- Lipid nanoparticle delivering mRNA expressing 1 protein (vaccine)
- Lipid nanoparticle delivering mRNA expressing many proteins (virus), that has severe short term side effects
Odds are much higher than the virus has worse side effects, but we will not be able to wait and see. Waiting just defaults to the second option (with all of its known negative externalities).
(yes, there are other types of vaccines too, and a discussion of which vaccine to take seems completely rational)
That's the only excerpt I was able to find wrt that. Is there more?
If you don't get the vaccine, unless you become a shut in, you're going to get COVID eventually (and being a shut in will probably become less and less tenable the farther we get from the peak). I highly doubt the vaccines have additional long term side effects that the actual disease doesn't have.
The situation with an Anthrax vaccine is different, because it's very unlikely for someone to get exposed to Anthrax.
For example, once you get over chickenpox, the virus remains dormant in your nerve cells and could rear its head in the form of shingles later on in life. Who knows what long-term effects COVID will have? History shows for the overwhelming amount of vaccines no random side-effects after ~3 months.
There are outliers, of course, but since Delta looks like it will makes its rounds and infect many people, it's not quite the same in terms of anthrax exposure which is why I'm cool with Google mandating the COVID vaccine from a risk/benefit perspective.
Frankly, in the entire history of vaccination, this has proven so extremely rare as to be a non-factor, especially given how these mRNA vaccines work.
This really sounds like FUD at this point...
Do you have a source? Paul Offit, at least had said that we don't see vaccines causing long-term harm which aren't apparent within the first couple weeks. (In his interview on Oh No! with Ross and Carrie.)
Not necessarily long-term. I would suggest that short-term effects such as thrombosis of myocarditis, however rare, are also a valid cause for concern.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266633762...
Last year a Red Sox pitcher missed an entire season due to myocarditis caused by COVID-19 infection.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/30929594/red-sox-p-eduar...
Three weeks I think? So the vaccine raised my chance of thrombosis in the next two weeks by 50%, but cut my chance of thrombosis in the next six weeks by 50%. Pick a number according to the conclusion you'd like to see.
Is anyone putting up a real argument that the vaccines may have long-term harm that outweighs the harm done by the risk of the disease in the same timeframe? Say 20 years. Compute the risk of getting covid over 20 years based on, say, the risk seen in North Dakota over the last year and estimate a health outcome based on that. Is anyone putting up a real argument that any of the vaccines might have a comparable outcome?
what i hear is, they genuinely not know.
(I also hear lots of non-argument, such as "I don't know what's in…" from people who didn't say that about aspartame or other additives. My question was strictly about whether anyone is advancing a real argument that the risks may be comparable.)
obviously COVID is bad, no one is denying that. no one is denying that the vaccine is good. but to say that the vaccine cannot be bad ever or ever have potentially negative side effects is being misleading at best and disingenuous at worst. this is why people who are concerned about these tradeoffs should consult a medical professional.
Known how, exactly. The only way that would be known is via official statistics, but the only sources of such data have serious reliability problems. Additionally any paper that tries to use these stats to do any analysis struggles to get published or gets immediately retracted because some people don't like the conclusions.
One thing that's undeniable though is that earlier vaccines had their approvals pulled after fewer reported deaths than these vaccines have racked up from just single causes of death alone. The same safety standards as before are not being applied. Thus it cannot be said that these vaccines are "safe", compared to earlier vaccines.
Some key points i) we have more data on these vaccines than any other in history ii) though we don't have long term data, there has never in the history of vaccines been side effects that wouldn't be detectable at this stage iii) the FDA is really dragging its feet and should have given approval by June, latest. Vaccine companies have submitted all the data for review a long time ago and previous FDA commissioners generally agree it's taking far too long. The current FDA commissioner said approval will take until January next year!
> there has never in the history of vaccines been side effects that wouldn't be detectable at this stage
In Europe several years after the H1N1 Pandemic, it was found that people who had received the vaccine for it were contracting narcolepsy, especially children[1].
Research[2] into it has been unable to determine the exact cause[3], but the conclusion of the CDC is still "An increased risk of narcolepsy was found following vaccination with Pandemrix, a monovalent 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine that was used in several European countries during the H1N1 influenza pandemic".
[1] https://sciencenorway.no/childrens-health-diseases-sleep/chi...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
[3] https://www.statnews.com/2018/07/05/flu-vaccine-2009-pandemi...
Sure - that's true of any source though, including those links you just posted. I included the podcast link because it was informative and the experts are trustworthy, whether you agree with that is up to you.
You're completely right about there being risk albeit small - but it's important to weigh up the risk on both sides which is why I think FDA emergency approval is important.
That no one mentions each shot may be different is more proof (to me) that there is a lot of politics (as opposed to thoughtful analysis) going on here.
So has Pfizer and Pfizer is in the process of preparing an application for EUA for boosters.