Also, at least one study has hinted that the second dose may reduce humoral immunity.
> Also, at least one study has hinted that the second dose may reduce humoral immunity.
I don't think we can base current best choices upon things which are merely hinted, especially when they are so counter intuitive, and as far as I'm aware, outside of our experience with other vaccinations.
It also highlights that we still don't know everything, and I'd definitely make decisions based upon an abundance of caution, leaning towards more protection.
For example, a hundredth of a percent improvement is 1 in 10k. And an already exposed person would be expected to have a less severe reaction if exposed again.
Also some people worry about certain aspects of the vaccine. Did you know that it took over 25 years to develop a lipid delivery system for mrna vaccines that wasn't toxic in animal tests? Or that they have concerns about accumulation of these lipids in organs like the liver? Or that getting sick after the vaccine may not be healthy? Or that they don't do a great job of looking for auto-immune reactions when it comes to vaccines?
It's a lot to think about. I'm a numbers guy and am happy with my conclusions on this. But I don't think it's right to force anything on others. The media often seem to do a better job of coming to conclusions for people rather than educating them.
I'm not sure why the length of time it took to reach an accomplishment should undermine said accomplishment. They killed a lot of animals before they landed on the moon.
> Or that they have concerns about accumulation of these lipids in organs like the liver?
Who is they? How can you quantify and qualify this risk? Being "a numbers guy" why did you weight the odds of this potential issue as being more important than the known death risk and long term complications from COVID itself? Given the sheer number of immunized individuals we should be seeing hundreds of thousands of cases now, shouldn't we?
> Or that getting sick after the vaccine may not be healthy?
I mean, by definition being sick is not being healthy. You'll need to expand this a bit for it to make sense. What type of sick, what type of unhealthy. Why? What evidence do they have for such a concern?
> Or that they don't do a great job of looking for auto-immune reactions when it comes to vaccines?
Again, you're not saying who it is that doesn't do a great job, nor why this is important to be concerned about, or indeed if this concern has any sort of precedence. And again, why are you not concerned that COVID may introduce similar auto-immune reactions?
I listed questions some people may have. I don't have all the answers. I consider that running numbers for stuff like this involves a certain amount of guesswork, things that can't be well qualified.
> I mean, by definition being sick is not being healthy. You'll need to expand this a bit for it to make sense.
I was thinking of the many healthy people who got very sick (collapsing, bedridden, etc) for a short time (24-36 hours) after getting the vaccine. Does that mean their immune system was already primed and went on the attack? I've heard that can cause autoimmune reactions - the immune system attacking something that is part of the body accidentally (collateral damage).
> How can you quantify and qualify this risk?
I did the best I could for myself, trying to prioritize. I may be more comfortable than most working with ambiguity. The biggest factors obviously were known covid risks based my age and health, numbers from the vaccine trials (which I wish were more easily available) and an awareness of all these other less quantifiable things (a lot of reading and learning).
EDIT: If I had confirmation that I already had covid my calculations would have changed. I don't know by how much, to be honest! I certainly would have felt substantially less need to get a vaccination, and it looks like science is bearing that out. If I have to deal with a lot of unknowns for a 1 in 10k improvement in my odds after I already have the better natural immunity, I might rather not deal with the unknowns.
There were some adjustments made by authorities, like those around the AZ risk for young women, because the odds didn't favor that treatment for those people. This is all new, and still developing. The number of breakthrough infections in Israel is interesting, for example. Hopefully that doesn't lead to any kind of weird/bad evolution of the virus.
> auto-immune reactions
You are certainly correct that covid includes the risk of autoimmune reactions, also! And other risks. As time goes on we have better numbers for covid, and better numbers for the vaccines. I made my decision with the best numbers that I could find at the time.
On the topic of vaccine autoimmune reactions in general, I looked into it and it was difficult to find good data, it looked like the immune system was complicated enough that science doesn't have stuff like that all figured out.
> Again, you're not saying who it is that doesn't do a great job
I'm not saying that I have the answers. These are questions that some vaccine-hesitant people have. Ideally the experts would do a good job of answering them, including admitting where they don't have good answers. Lots of people are resistant to being forced into something through social/financial/government pressure.
I personally assume this is going to reverberate around the world a bit more, waves of decreasing intensity until most of us have been exposed, becoming endemic and not so big a deal (like the other coronaviruses that are endemic). It might be hard to know how much of anything we did made a difference.
I appreciate posters who are willing to go ahead in these scenarios instead of self-censoring. When these individuals give up on this site, what will we be left with?