Covid is a lot nastier by the sounds of it. And much more likely in an unvaccinated population. I still fully stand by my decision to get it the very day it became available to me.
Not related but a very slow biological process (prions): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27982991
Broadly: you seem to be implying that you think a ~0.5% fatality rate just "takes a long time to develop". Even if you posit 100% infections in the US (laughably wrong given the trajectory of outbreak, but whatever), you have to accept an IFR almost 0.2%.
Given the ~170M Americans already vaccinated, any side effect worth discussing would need to be at least as bad as killing 334000 of them. And needless no vaccine in history, maybe no widely prescribed drug of any kind, has turned up a long tail side effect analysis like that. Remember when everyone lost their shit about Vioxx? Best estimates are that 38k people died; an order of magnitude lower.
Ebola or smallpox are very dangerous disease. COVID has much lower negative impact on lives/health, it is more like flu or risk of stroke, very dangerous only for specific subpopulations, mostly old / unhealthy people with preexisting conditions.
Covid is a pandemic, literally killing millions of people. You don't think that's relevant to a discussion about vaccination policy?
BTW: that "smallpox" idea you threw out? Give you two guesses as to how it was eradicated.
Again, imagine if people successfully deployed your logic against the smallpox vaccine. We'd still be getting sick with smallpox.
You got confused with the smallpox. I mentioned smallpox as an example of what COVID isn't. Not every disease warrants mass vaccination, and this depends also on efficacy of the vaccine.
COVID may warrant it for specific subpopulations. But we don't have good enough vaccines yet to eradicate COVID. "Getting rid of COVID via vaccines", "vaccines is the only way" is just fantasy/propaganda tactic to increase vaccinations.
People are free to eat themselves into metabolic destruction just as people are free to partake or not partake in the emergency use authorization vaccine experiments.
thalidomide is harmless... "On October 1, 1957, the company launched thalidomide and began marketing it under the trade name Contergan. It was proclaimed a "wonder drug" for insomnia, coughs, colds and headaches... In late 1959, it was noticed that peripheral neuritis developed in patients who took the drug over a period of time, and it was only after this point that thalidomide ceased to be provided over the counter. ...Despite the side effects, thalidomide was sold in pharmacies in Canada until 1962." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide]
the industry doesn't turn on a dime due to adverse effects when there is money to be made
Of course, people tend to only make those arguments for things they don't really want to be done.
I, as an untrained and uneducated individual, find it almost impossible to imagine a drug / technology / mechanism which could be applied "once" (i.e. only one time, even if over a few doses spaced out in time) that would not present any population effects after 1y / 1billion people that would then proceed to be even within one order of magnitude as deadly as COVID. Hell, two or three even...
The vaccines are a lot better understood than the virus. We don't know of any long-term issues so far.
It's still a much safer bet to get the vaccine IMO. And it will also help with the societal problem around the covid measures. We can't keep going on lockdowns for years to come. It will destroy the economy which has its own associated health risks.
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2021/july/cov...
The relevant chart is on page 27 of the paper here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...
Also note that they call out the weird results with PhD's as an outlier without an explanation (other education metrics show less hesitancy with more education monotonically), and call for further research.
To wit: you're spinning like crazy here trying to make this data say something its authors expressly disclaim.
For what it's worth, I did end up getting vaccinated recently (J&J, not mRNA-based) after quite a few unpleasant conversations with my spouse that I was endangering our children on the presumption that unvaccinated people more easily spread the virus. This assertion has been thrown into doubt, however, by the CDC's Barnstable study [1] suggesting viral numbers between vaccinated and unvaccinated are similar (among people tested). Consequently, I'm just staying home these days.
I'm a little horrified that you cite your academic credentials and then misread that conclusion so badly. Viral load and infectiousness are equivalent between vaccinated and unvaccinated INFECTED PEOPLE in that study, not overall. The vaccinated are, obviously, much less likely to get sick in the first place.
Your wife was right and you were wrong, basically.
Even the Israel data you cite, which is an outlier, measured 39% effectiveness, which is STILL twice as good as being unvaccinated.
[1] https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-vaccines-pfizer-moderna-de...
Get. Your. Vaccine.
Edit: yep, lol. To clarify,I don’t think your wife does not have a phd in some field related to pharmaceuticals, I think the two of you are hesitant because you are socially conservative and/or general covid contrarians.
> Generally, COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy was higher among young (ages 18-24), non-Asian people, and less educated (≤ high school diploma) adults, and those with PhDs, with a history of a positive COVID-19 test, not worried about serious illness from COVID-19 and living in regions with greater support to Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
No, their hesitancy didn't increase, every other group's decreased, making the hesitancy percentage among PhDs (since it remained mostly constant) to be the highest by May.
To put it in 5th grader terms, if Alan had $30, Beth had $20 and Charlie had $15 at the beginning of the year, and Alan"s and Beth's savings decreased to $13 and $5 but Charlie's only decreased to $14 by May, Charlie is now the richest of the group.
I’ve gotten COVID so I don’t feel like I need the vaccine. I have a REAL problem with mandatory vaccination for a virus I’ve already gotten and would gladly contract again if it means I get to retain my agency.
But for someone who has not yet had COVID, why would you suggest they should be uniquely concerned about hypothetical unknown long-term side effects from the vaccine, and not COVID itself?
That being said, my biggest problem is the proposed loss of agency. Let me be the master of my fate.
Since we know the vaccine doesn’t prevent you from contracting or spreading the virus—it should not be mandated. Period. If this actually had to do with people’s safety, an argument COULD be made. But that’s not the case, so I think it’s preposterous that would should be forced to take a vaccine that’s solely for one’s “own good”.
As an aside, any group-think situation where people start being concerned about “my own safety” is not an experiment I’d like to be a part of.
And how am I misinterpreting your comment?
Vaccines are not the only possible way to behave responsibly, there are several strategies, let people find and follow their own. It's better even for the society, in case the vaccines turn out to not be the silver bullet the media and chinless spivs in governments told us (which it seems is getting more likely these days).
We're just discussing "I want my agency!" vs "You still want to be a part of society right?" around here.
For someone who regards himself to have an independent streak, I'm interestingly agreeing quite a lot with the government full of "chinless spivs" about this. If they turn out to be wrong about the vaccine, well, there'll be hell to pay. Or maybe many of the vaccinated will think "I decided, I'll live with the consequences"?
No. You claimed that not submitting to the vax agenda makes them a selfish person who refuses to contribute. Without any evidence.
You were talking down and guilt-tripping people who express concern, arguments or opinions in opposition to yours.
I believe your comment about losing agency by wanting to be in society was a misinterpretation. My indication was clearly that agency == not taking the vaccine in this case. I realize that by participating in society I can’t run around with an AK-47 shooting whomever I please—while technically that IS a loss of agency that’s clear not the kind of agency I was talking about. I was talking about the benign agency to simply say “No” to the largest medical experiment in recent memory—literally modifying the way our DNA replicated as a vaccine delivery system.
There has always been inherent risk in the freedom to live as one chooses. But that I’ll happily assume that risk, and I’ll take full responsibility for the consequences of my choices.
It's not like COVID is any safer or well-understood. This is a false dichotomy.
I didn’t have a choice to get COVID, I DO have a choice to not get the vaccine.
That said, I hope Twitter et al don't knee jerk react-to this and block discussion just because it would counter their preferred narrative.
or drugs in general. Just look at adverse effects of Ibuprofen. Common drug, but unlike vaccines, it is not used for whole population at once. So adverse effects even if more common are not that visible.
If these were serious and common however, really the hospitals would be so busy by now taking care of all of them. The number of people that got the vaccine here in europe in the space of the last few months is enormous. We started much later than the US but have caught up in a really short time. And with the exception of the UK most countries have used mostly mRNA types and very little AstraZeneca. As a result we had (and probably still have) higher numbers going through vaccination per month than the US.
Even the tiniest percentage of serious complications would have been flooding the hospitals which were already at high pressure due to covid.