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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Some vaccines take years or even decades to show harm. See Air Force pilots and Anthrax vaccine history. Rare but devastating consequences.

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.

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Some viruses take decades to show harm as well, e.g. HPV, and there are theories that herpes is involved in Alzheimers.

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.

Yep, excellent point. We don't know the long term repercussions of getting covid either, so avoiding the vax because of unknowns may end up being the riskier position.

Agreed, there are only 2 options:

- 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)

Sure, but the harm from COVID is pretty evident in the 600,000 deaths in the states in the past 18 months.

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.

If you are young and in shape, then the likely hood of you dying is extremely low.

Except if there are severe consequences that will only arise years down the line, which we're already seeing, right?

Yeah, mortality risk is only part of the picture, and probably not the most relevant part for young and healthy people. But there are lots of other medium-term (at least) impacts of COVID that have already been observed, and at this point I think it's really unlikely that the expected long-term harm from the vaccine is anywhere close to the expected long-term harm from COVID even in young, healthy people.

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...

This study does not show a before and after cognitive decline from having COVID. It shows correlation between people with lower cognitive levels having COVID vs those who do not have COVID.

The causality could of course be going in the opposite direction from what you are implying (lower IQ -> more likely to get COVID).

Death is one thing.

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.

> Some vaccines take years or even decades to show harm.

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...

> Some vaccines take years or even decades to show harm. See Air Force pilots and Anthrax vaccine history. Rare but devastating consequences.

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.

I agree. Its a coin flip. We don't know what the long term effects of COVID are, we don't know what the long term effects of the vaccine are. I'd argue that we know more about what COULD happen with the vaccine long term and I'd rather place my bets on that. The alternative is hiding away for 20+ years and not getting vaccinated or contracting COVID, obviously not feasible.

Also, at least in some years, people who got the flu vaccine in previous years are more likely to die from the flu.

That tiny bit of room for doubt is still much smaller than that for the virus itself.

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.

> See Air Force pilots and Anthrax vaccine history. Rare but devastating consequences.

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.)

> The anthrax vaccines were receiving criticism in several scientific circles, because of both potency problems and allegations that the anthrax vaccine contributed to Gulf War syndrome.

That's the only excerpt I was able to find wrt that. Is there more?

I can't find anything about the Anthrax vaccine that shows it was problematic, just a a bunch of conspiracy theories.

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