Can someone explain to me why the vaccine is safe even though it’s “experimental”. I got it, but I have family members that I’m trying to convince and their biggest fear is that it’s going to hurt them long term.
An expert (can’t remember) explain why one shouldn’t be afraid of long term adverse effects of the vaccine: basically it has only two periods of operation: short term you can be affected by anything in the shot which contains all kinds of lipids and stuff used to create a vaccine. You can be allergic to one of these substances, for example. But if you didn’t have a short term effect from the vaccine, the long term effect is just the immune response. Nothing else. That immune response would come from the disease too. There is just no mechanism that would create a long term adverse effect. BUT there are tons of ways in which the virus could!
You should ask the vaccine sceptic which long term effect they would rather have: the virus or the vaccine. Because it’s not about getting vaccine or not at this point. It’s about getting immune from the vaccine or from the disease. There just is no benefit of getting immune from the disease.
In New Zealand since they had elimination they didn't do emergency approval. They expedited their normal process, but since there were literally no people dying in New Zealand of COVID-19 they weren't losing anybody by waiting for their medicines agency to complete all the steps it would usually take at the pace necessary.
They're currently vaccinating their general population, having at first prioritised health workers and those at the border who might meet infected people in the course of their duties.
Obviously things look a bit different when you've got people dying every day, but the vaccine is the same, so if you'd be more confident that it was assessed without worrying about all the people dying meanwhile, New Zealand did that. Months ago.
The standard (reasonable belief that the medicine "may" be effective) for EUA is lower than for approval (satisfactory proof that the medicine is effective) reflecting the emergency situation.
Hydroxychloroquine had EUA for COVID-19 until it was withdrawn. It remains an FDA approved medicine for malaria prevention, because the evidence showed it works for that and that did not change, but it did not have proof that it was effective when it received EUA for COVID-19, and it still didn't have such proof when the EUA was withdrawn.
New Zealand's medicines authority did not need an emergency process because New Zealand's civil government had resolved the emergency, albeit at considerable cost. They concluded that the vaccine under consideration (the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine) did by that point have proof of effectiveness.
In one sense our loss is their gain, they were able to guage the effectiveness of the vaccines on other people, who were in danger of death from COVID-19, to establish that it was safe to use on their own people who faced much less danger.
Have gotten the shot, but have heard this question from parents and it is completely reasonable IMO.
A year ago when we though a fraction would be infected it was understandable to be cautious with giving vaccines to young people that probably wouldn’t even be infected (and not severely ill if they did get infected). But now chances are good that nearly everyone will be infected, which changes the risk balance.
It's very hard to reach them. I have trouble reaching my otherwise reasonable friends and family. They are not flat-earthers nor alt-right or whatever. Most were not even anti-vax before this. The most common argument is that since their government is full of incompetent and corrupt people (and they adduce a dozen of examples about anything random that happened before and after the pandemic, including bridges collapsing to whatever scandal du-jour happened five years ago or some illogical covid rules they made in the past years, or that some expert is scaremongering everybody in TV every day and acts a bit like a jerk), then "it follows" that the whole thing cannot be trusted and perhaps whoever is saying the opposite may be right (which easily becomes "must be right").
I think these people are beyond rescue. The period for trying to appeal to people or convince them to take the shot is over. Now we should simply let whoever doesn’t want the shot (completely valid position to take! Their body after all) not participate in anything like events, education, workplaces, restaurants…
People are free to choose to participate in society. Importantly, in the US insurers need to bump premiums to insane levels - or simply not cover Covid treatment for voluntarily unvaccinated.
Once people pay through the nose to avoid it, or can’t go to a restaurant, I think it’ll turn out they weren’t very hesitant to begin with, it was all just political.
Luckily these people could get an antibody test instead of a vaccine pass soon - because they’ll all get it eventually.
It's a direct result of the toxic "every opinion counts" culture that is so pervasive in the United States (this isn't obvious to insiders, but quite clearly evident to immigrants and people who come from different cultures).
This results in people believing obviously junk sources on information - because they aren't discounting them, and treating them as equal in value to scientific articles. E.g. treating someone's personal blog that cherry picks statistics from random countries worldwide and a PubMed Meta-analysis of 10+ articles with equal weight.
Or treating the opinions of friends and family above expert recommendations.
I don't understand it and never will, so I don't know how to solve this underlying issue. My guess is by investing heavily in education and teaching kids critical thinking skills, and shaming those who disregard experts.
Yeah, it's silly isn't? The logic goes something like this:
"They (politicians) control which doctors go on TV to speak and control which doctors are allowed to work in state hospitals, thus there is a selection bias in what we refer to as scientific consensus"
I noticed that the harder you try to counteract this with arguments, no matter how good, the argument veers towards the good old self-fulfilling conspiracy thought process.
I watched this conversation happen in otherwise reasonable people, in real time, people who otherwise didn't buy into consiparacy thinking about other topics.
Is there something special about vaccines that triggers people? Something psychologically deeper than other things?
Are they religious?
The vaccine contains mRNA, which is basically like DNA (in layman terms). The mRNA is from covid and it's what gives it its 'spiky' structure. When the mRNA is injected your body uses it to generate those spikes - that's just a normal function of your body. Your immune system learns how to attack those spikes, and so it'll recognize covid in general. mRNA is very short-lived so it breaks down, the end result being that your body gets some covid proteins for a little while and your immune system cleans them up.
I think a really simplistic breakdown like this goes a long way to helping people feel comfortable. They're no longer wondering "what's in this thing? how does it work?" and instead it's like "oh ok yeah, I have at least an extremely basic understanding of DNA, and this is just a tiny little piece of DNA stuff that breaks down super fast".
My understanding was that the main benefit was that it's easier to produce in large amounts (and faster to go from sequence -> vaccine?), and the main downside is that it's harder to store (since it breaks down so easily).
But I'm not a doctor, and I generally try to not tell people what they should do, shouldn't do, or what the risks are - just give them the info and help them understand what's going on. Most people are just afraid of the unknown, and if no one's giving them an explanation they can understand they'll go with the simplistic, albeit incorrect ones that they can ("microchips are a thing I know about - they put those in animals to track them, maybe they're putting it in the vaccine").
It's like trying to describe how safe a substance in a shot is by describing the needle. mRNA is HOW you deliver the spike protein. But the safety of the vaccine is related to WHAT the mRNA creates. If it were a human protein, we would all develop auto-immune diseases of some sort.
mRNA vaccines are the cleanest, and in a round-about way, simplest delivery mechanisms, (simple in that there arent as many precursor steps as something like a viral vector vaccine and simple in that its not a full attenuated virus) but its what they deliver that the conversation should be about.
As for the vaccine, the fallacy of most people’s logic here is thinking that not getting the vaccine equates to risk avoidance. In fact based on all we know it’s quite the opposite. The risk of not getting the vaccine vastly outweighs any potential risk of getting the vaccine. With the Delta variant if one isn’t vaccinated it’s increasingly very likely you’ll get COVID. The short and long term impacts of COVID are well known to have a high risk of being severe. From a risk standpoint it’s a no brainer.
The media doesn’t help here at all. One person has a reaction from the vaccine and they’re all over it. Meanwhile thousands more die from not getting the vaccine. Opting out of the vaccine increases your risk, not decreases it.
I've thought about this a lot; for me, it's not the mortality rate that bothers me the most.
It's the method of passing. Having been in a plane experiencing a serious issue it was a lot scarier because of the duration than the traffic accidents I've seen which were basically over immediately.
Car accidents are less instantly fatal, instead you tend to suffer for some while you bleed out, or the car slowly begins to burn as you're trapped.
Even worse in my eyes is a car accident is far less fatal... leaving huge numbers of people with a lifetime of crippling injuries.
At least anecdotally, the people I know that are vaccine-averse have the same fear of airplanes, etc.
It might just be the way they reason, fixating on worst-case outcome instead of a more balanced view.
Read again and think a little about this statement. First, it is biased: risk of getting vaccinated is "potential", but the other risk is not denominated this way. Second, this risk comparison is obviously not true for every person.
In fact, both risks are individual and depend on several factors and weights of those factors, and those weights depend on person's values. You didn't mention data you are basing this statement on and for which combination of those factors and weights it is true.
Also, besides the risk analysis, getting the vaccine is a political decision for many people. Most people I know got it to avoid repression from state and to get preferential treatment from authorities when travelling. Other people refuse the vaccine because they don't trust the source, the evangelist and the administrator.
You can't mandate or dictate people's political stances nor medical treatments. That's a definition of totalitarian power.
> Meanwhile thousands more die from not getting the vaccine.
You meant to say some people died because they refused the vaccine and then got killed by COVID. Yes this is sad but those people died as free people.
As for "shortcuts" being taken in the approval process, the normal process is intended for situations where there is less urgency. The combination of a high infection rate and relatively high mortality rate has a large social impact and it has a large economic impact, regardless of whether anything is done to mitigate spread. The provisional approval is necessary, it still reflects high standards for safety, and it does not imply a lack of safety.
Edit: for clarity.
Can you quantify that? How many people died from COVID vs. cancer or transport accidents?
Anywhere from 6,000 to 30,000 deaths a WEEK in the US alone between May 2020 and May 2021 [1]
Or in other words, enough to put it as the third leading cause of death globally[2] and the NUMBER TWO cause in the United States.
Now some people can and will argue that COVID deaths are misattributed because of co-morbities. However, the excess death statistics pretty clearly suggest that to not be the case.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
[2] https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/just-how-do-deaths...
I only did a few minutes of searching so I'm not sure how accurate thinkglobalhealth.org but I trust the CDC numbers quite a bit.
Also curious if their fear of long-term vaccine side effects has been their line since April? I'm seeing a few anti-vaxx friends switching to this line of anti-reason in the last few weeks, now that the FDA approval is right around the corner.
Psychological effects of past medical disasters that caused irreversible harm and went under the authority's radar shouldn't be discounted, many people cling to that to justify their fear of the unknown.
So how do we set up a discourse that takes this type of fear into account? What are the tricks or strategies to help people overcome their fears?
If this was truly the fear, we would see these types of people wearing masks religiously. But we don't, which means it's not a medical fear, it's a political one.
These are also the same people that won't get a flu vaccine, and resist getting the vaccines for all but the most deadly of diseases.
Another comment in this submission mentioned being bad at evaluating risk, perhaps that's what it is. They fixate on the unknowns of a vaccine, but they aren't able to compare it effectively to the risks of the virus.
This is not even remotely the common case. Overall, the overlap between anti-mask and anti-vaccination individuals is massive:
https://biomedicalodyssey.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2020/09/...
The core of both is the same: anti-science and anti-society.
The more time you spend thinking about a possible negative outcome, the more likely your intuition will believe that negative outcome to be. This affects everybody, even people who ought to know better, like scientists. It's a shockingly strong effect, too.
If you don't couch your logical discourse inside a procedure that translates its outcome directly into action (like an approval process), attention bias is almost guaranteed to override the outcome, no matter how good your reasoning. Since better reasoning takes more time, this leads to the unfortunate circumstance where better, deeper arguments are less likely to be effective that shorter, weaker arguments.
Compare this to the probability of getting Covid (~100%) and having a “bad outcome”.
This let me confidently say things like, “getting vaxxed is 2-5x safer than not” and ending the argument (whatever the actual figures were when I got vaxxed).
The real answer isn’t technical though —- we need public health authorities to learn post-Internet PR. I’m cribbing Eric Weinstein here.
75% of unvaccinated adults are "not worried about getting seriously sick"...
50%+ are not worried "about the Delta variant worsening the pandemic"...
50%+ say "getting vaccinated is a bigger risk than getting infected", and...
75% don't think the vaccines are effective.
So definitely a "PR problem" is those figures differ from reality. But you read these figures, and the outcome is obvious: "I'm not going to get seriously sick, the long-term effects of the vaccine are unknown, and the vaccine doesn't work anyway... so why should I get it?"
[1] https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-co...
And since individual data and personal values and political stances are involved, they got a different result from yours.
Even if the rate of people having these long covid-like symptoms is lower than that of people who get covid it's still not riskless even though the risks are lower.
citation needed
Let us know what and where you're reading about these vaccine-induced long covid symptoms
It is very hard to find this number. I know a person who got bad reaction to the vaccine, heart and brain aches. Their doctor turned them down, saying "that's normal, that's what vaccine does" a didn't even do ECG. How many people got treated this way?
If there was a significant risk in the short-term, we’d be seeing those cases already.
At some point, you throw up your hands, wave, and wish them luck.
Frankly, these vaccines have tons of data behind them, with the exception of long-term results [0].
Here’s how I would frame it: would you rather take a chance on a vaccine or getting Covid? Remember, Covid has many worse short term effects than the vaccine, and long term effects from it are truly understood yet either. So the vaccine is the more rational choice, despite the unknowns.
Hope that helps.
[0] - https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro...
I refuse to get any virus that has not passed rigorous Stage 3 and Stage 4 safety trials. Worse yet, this so-called Delta variant has been rushed into production without even the most basic studies, even though it's clearly not the same thing as the original virus!
1. The fact that the vaccine only has "emergency-use authorization" rather than full FDA approval is best explained by the fact that the FDA is a dysfunctional bureaucracy motivated primarily by CYA rather than rational cost-benefit analysis.
2. The vaccine isn't 100% absolutely safe, but neither is anything else in life. The proper question to ask isn't whether the vaccine is safe in some absolute sense, but whether it is safer than going around unvaccinated. The evidence indicates that getting vaccinated is significantly safer than regularly breathing the same air as other people while unvaccinated. And although healthy non-elderly people are unlikely to outright die of COVID-19, there is evidence that infection often causes long-term effects, including cognitive deficits [1, 2].
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
[2] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/07/29/covid-7-29-you-play-...
2. You missed the fact that risks depend on personal data, factors, weights of those factors. Also, cheap treatments are available and effective which push the risk of bad COVID to such small number it's immaterial to most anti-covidism people (a political stance).
That it's still on emergency use in the US is puzzling. But as anyone who's been through a formal approvals process knows, these things can drag out forever. Approving bodies are all about CYA, they just don't like to commit to anything being satisfactory.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/EPAR/comirnaty#...
Also it is in pharma's interest to have this as long as possible. They like their immunity from prosecution.
I don't know anyone obsessed but: the issue is present. The rollout was quick and we don't have 10 years of data and the pharma got their immunity. If pharma isn't confident in safety of their product, it's safe to assume they know or are afraid that some significant percentage of nasty cases will happen.
> There are no examples of vaccines with long term side effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillain%E2%80%93Barr%C3%A9_sy...
If there can be bad effects like GB syndrome as far as in 6 weeks, there can be longer term effects as well.
With COVID vaccines it hasn't been very long yet. Standard studies of vaccines take 10 or more years. I like that cautious approach.
> Sars-cov-2 is a new virus. Nobody knows its long term effects.
Yes, the same as for vaccines. Hopefully we will know in the future.
> Even asymptomatic covid cases may have damage to their lungs. Given how contagious covid is, the choice really is between covid and the vaccine, and the vaccine definitely looks like the safer choice.
COVID is very contagious if you believe that positive PCR test means you have COVID. Of course, that's not how disease in general is diagnosed; symptoms are the telltale of sickness, and based on those, COVID is not that bad. Of course, there is the possibility that prolonged presence of virus in these OK persons will wreak havoc with their health in the coming years. But this is hypothetical now and not enough to scare major part of the population.
> COVID is very contagious if you believe that positive PCR test means you have COVID.
I'm startled. Are you nitpicking over covid (the disease) vs sars-cov-2 (the virus)? Of course if you have a positive PCR test it means that you are infected by the virus. Whether or not you have symptoms is irrelevant when we are talking about long term side effects. Think about HIV or the cancer inducing HPV strains. Again, even if you are asymptomatic you may get lung damage from covid. I am not saying that there are long term consequences to that, but you do not know that, and there are no less reasons to believe that than to believe in any long term side effects of the vaccine.
edit: typos
I agree with you that long-terms effects are unknown at this point, both for the virus and the vaccine. The important point is I can't choose to not get the virus, but I can choose to not get the vaccine.
I disagree. You can choose not to be affected by the virus by taking the vaccine. That's the whole point of the vaccine. So the question really is: what are the odds that something bad happens to me with the vaccine and with the virus. Since there are no reasons to think that there will be long term effects with the vaccine, and at worst, no more reasons than with the virus, one has to look at the short term and this clearly favors the vaccine.
Vaccine isn't 100% protection from being affected by the virus. Even if you take it, you can still get the virus and you can still get bad COVID. With much less probability, but the probability is low already without the vaccine, with vaccine you do make it substantially lower, but not zero. So I was right, you can't choose to not get the virus, unless you self-isolate till the end of life.
> Since there are no reasons to think that there will be long term effects with the vaccine, and at worst, no more reasons than with the virus
There are reasons. Vaccine brings in risk: from long-term effects of modified spike protein and vaccine components, from vaccine breakthrough cases which put selection pressure on the virus, and possibly other mechanisms which are unknown. Yes, I do not trust pharma scientists to have all the answers about future effects of their vaccines. Their owners required and got immunity from prosecution and that tells me a lot.
> one has to look at the short term and this clearly favors the vaccine.
Independent doctors without conflict of interest say that for some people yes (simplistically old, unhealthy), for others not (young, healthy). This is also highly individual.
True, but I don't care about that. It is a bit as if you were arguing that I should not fasten my seat belt because it is not 100% effective at saving me in a car accident. The protection against infection provided by the vaccine is real. The risks associated to a covid infection are real. Some of them (loss of smell, long haul covid) are not as unlikely as you suggest. On the other hand, the risks associated to the vaccine are completely fictive.
> There are reasons. Vaccine brings in risk: from long-term effects of modified spike protein and vaccine components, from vaccine breakthrough cases which put selection pressure on the virus, and possibly other mechanisms which are unknown.
To me, that's medecine fiction. None of that is real. I don't know of any other vaccine for which that happened. Note that my original point stands: people invent all sorts of possible long-term side effects for the vaccine, but not for the virus whose infection can be prevented by the vaccine. And I still don't see why I should expect any long-term side effect from the vaccine.
> Yes, I do not trust pharma scientists to have all the answers about future effects of their vaccines. Their owners required and got immunity from prosecution and that tells me a lot.
Sounds like business as usual to me. Scientists never have all the answers. Corporations are always covering their back. Your argument here has a bit of a naturalistic fallacy. Somebody got immunity for their vaccine and that worries you. However, you cannot have a symmetric worry for the virus because it is natural and nobody is responsible for it. Who are you going to sue for its long-term side effects? Thus, independently of the facts on the ground, if you think like that, you can only be more worried about the vaccine than the virus, and that's a bias.
Risk of GB syndrome, clots, bad immune reaction in heart and brain, death from vaccine are not fictitious. They did happen and are still happening. I can choose to nullify this risk for me.
> To me, that's medecine fiction. None of that is real. I don't know of any other vaccine for which that happened.
Mutating viruses isn't fiction. Selection pressure is real, search for antibiotic resistance. Also see example of bad vaccine results:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...
> but not for the virus whose infection can be prevented by the vaccine.
You can't prevent infections with current vaccines. Neither we need such a miracle. We can decrease infections to such a level that COVID becomes a mere low-incidence sickness like flu. In many countries in Europe this is already the case but of course this may change in autumn/winter.
We can decrease infections with other measures as well, with similar efficacy as current vaccines and none of their risk.
> However, you cannot have a symmetric worry for the virus because it is natural and nobody is responsible for it. Who are you going to sue for its long-term side effects? Thus, independently of the facts on the ground, if you think like that, you can only be more worried about the vaccine than the virus, and that's a bias.
We do not know whether this virus is purely natural. There are indications it may have been intentionally enhanced in bio-labs and then escaped from there.
However yes, I cannot have a symmetric worry, because risks and available information are very different for the COVID and for the vaccine. I do not worry about getting COVID much. I worry much more about vaccines and the socio-political impact of forced vaccination.
Actually, the origin of the virus is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. In my experience, people opposed to vaccination are often biased against it by the fact that it is man-made, or perhaps more vaguely, that it is some sort of human intervention. I called that "a bit of a naturalistic fallacy". Maybe that's a poor choice of words, but I stand by my point. Our little discussion has multiple examples of that.
* You said previously that "I can't choose to not get the virus, but I can choose to not get the vaccine". Sure, but what if it is a better idea to get vaccinated? Vaccines are approved by government bodies (at least in Europe where I live) based on scientific evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks. In other words, it is a better idea to get the vaccine. You somehow ignore that and focus on the fact that the vaccine requires human intervention, which biases you against it.
* You talked previously of "long-term effects of modified spike protein" of the vaccine. What about the long-term effects of the unmodified spike protein? What about the delta variant? I think it is remarkable that you are not worried about the modifications in the delta variant (which happened randomly), but worried about the modifications in the vaccine (which is man-made). To me, that is again a bias. One that is all the more remarkable since the modifications to the vaccine spike protein were made to prevent it from reaching its fusion form (required to infect a cell) based on research done years ago on MERS.
* You mention that the vaccine makers required and obtained legal immunity. Nobody asked for government aproval for the introduction of the delta variant. It just happened. Nobody is responsible for it. The virus is natural here in the sense that it only submits to the laws of nature, not to human laws. Its actual origin is irrelevant.
> However yes, I cannot have a symmetric worry, because risks and available information are very different for the COVID and for the vaccine.
I don't know what you mean here.
No vaccine (or please tell me one) ever showed any "long term" effects in that sense that bad things showed up > 3 months after the vaccination, actually almost all side-effects happen instantaneously.
The reason talking about "long term" side effects is that you usually need to reach very high numbers on your studies to e.g. correlate one in a million side effect to a medication, and thus need very "long term" studies.
However, for those vaccines we are now MUCH beyond these numbers already! That is also what people mostly don't get in general right now: (In the very beginning maybe yes, but now not anymore)
Those studies are NOT! pushed anymore with shortcuts and exceptions, the contrary, because due to the pandemic situation the necessary numbers (get x people of test persons infected) were so quickly passed now.. similar now for those side effects. It just doesn't make any sense to pull that argument anymore (though science vs belief is hard).
And if you are really like "Meh.. but these totally new mRNA vaccines will grow me horns" => Comparing mRNA vs old-school vector vaccines is maybe like comparing LDC TVs of today vs old tube TVs that even bombarded you with little xrays... it is just such a technology jump.. and if you are into the topic and really concerned about that this mRNA will inject something into your cells/genes.. then you actually should be much more afraid of vector vaccines or just some viruses out there like Corona doing the same but much more reliably..
- Full FDA authorization takes time
- We know a lot more about how these vaccines work than other vaccines so we're less nervous about them, but that doesn't mean full FDA authorization doesn't still take time
- Since temporary authorization was granted, a huge number of people have gotten the vaccine, which gives us a lot of confidence since we effectively have a lot of case studies to look at. However, doesn't change anything about the fact that full FDA authorization still takes time.
- If Covid wasn't Covid, even knowing the above we might not have allowed temporary authorization, but we're managing relative risk, and the risk for nearly every population from Covid dwarfs the risk that there's a side effect from the vaccine that's worse. But, FDA authorization still takes time, it's not based on how dangerous the alternative is, so full authorization is still only gonna happen once enough time has elapsed for the vaccines to be evaluated using the normal process.
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I don't know if this will help with your family in specific, but I like to compare this to a change on a piece of software in an enterprise environment. Knowing for certain that the change is safe requires the change to be deployed on production hardware via a production build and run through a full set of full-stack tests, and then ideally monitored for a week to see if anything else jumps out as a regression.
So one day, imagine we notice a critical bug that's causing data loss for customers. I can argue:
- The change to fix this bug is in a part of the code that is well understood, all of our developers have looked it over and agreed that it's unlikely to have side effects.
- We've hotpatched this fix to multiple sites that were affected, and tested internally, and everything seems to be working well. We do have this code running in production for some customers, but we have not seen side effects.
- The risk of one of our customers randomly losing their data because of the bug is far higher than the risk of the fix causing additional problems, and it would be foolish for us to leave our customers in a state where they might lose data suddenly.
All of those are good arguments for bypassing the full set of tests and deploying the fix immediately (which is basically what the FDA did with the emergency authorization). BUT I still can't accurately claim that my fix has passed the full set of testing requirements. Independently of hot-patching sites and rolling out the critical fix, I also still want to run the full test suite and monitor the production hardware for a while longer.
That's basically where we are with the vaccine. We'd be foolish not to be deploying it now, but we still can't pretend or shortcut the process and just say that it's fully authorized (even though basically no one is expecting the authorization process to fail at this point). It hasn't passed the full test suite and sat on production hardware for a week yet. However, the risk of an issue at this point is small enough that for the vast majority of adults (even middle-aged and below), the risk of Covid complications are higher than the risk of vaccine complications.
The good news is that most timetables I've seen expect full authorization to be finished for Pfizer between September and December. I would not advise anyone to wait for that, but hopefully when it happens that will decrease vaccine hesitancy.
However, I am no psychologist nor an influencer, I too don't know what can be done to overcome the impasse. I'd be curious to know what strategies work.
The world is different now from 2019; history has forced on us the unfortunate choice between the vaccine and the novel Coronavirus. The idea that the vaccine might have unknown, rare, long-term side-effects isn't nonsensical per se; but you have to weigh the probability of that against the certainty of you and / or your loved ones getting the virus if you're not vaccinated.
What we definitely know so far is that such weird "dark horse" side-effects that only appear long after the actual studies are a very rare phenomenon for vaccines in general, there is no biological reason for why they should appear in this case, and none have been observed so far, even though the first people got these vaccines a year or so ago.
Probably the underlying problem is a general fear of vaccines or pharmaceuticals in general. Side-effects in general occupy a way too large space in people's imagination. It might help to consider the dangers inherent to common everyday activities to keep things in perspective.
Why do you say that's a certainty? I think it's still very uncertain how many people the virus will infect going forward.
And even if that was possible in some first world countries, that wouldn't be sufficient, it would simply be re-imported sooner or later. So there's really no way it's going away.
This is now an endemic human virus and, vaccinated or not, you'll be exposed to it many times over the rest of your lifetime. Barring some technological breakthrough in vaccine development and a big shift in people's attitudes towards them, it's with us forever.
You also don't have to take my word for it, this is an uncontroversial view amongst infectious disease epidemiologists.
Nothing will work to convince an unreasonable person. The next best thing to do involves blunting the impact of their dangerous choices, e.g. adding penalties and restrictions for the unvaccinated in society so they can't harm the rest of us.
The people I know are far from unreasonable, but they might be applying the wrong reasoning strategy or fixating on bad / outdated data, or worst case outcome only.
Nobody in the general population has the obligation to convince others, to be clear. I just wish the public discourse and institutions did a better job at educating and catering to those points of view instead of branding people by their against-vaccine stance only.
The COVID vaccines are a trade-off... possible but unlikely long-term consequences vs. definitive and massive long-term side effects of catching COVID.
Australia and New Zealand aside, if you are not vaccinated you will get COVID eventually.