For it to be a reasonable choice to not want to take the vaccine wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid?
There seems to be a lot of "aha I knew it" whenever any side-effect of the vaccine is found, but aren't the side-effects of covid well established, on average more severe, and much more common?
Also by their stats, more than 1 in 2000 4-dose mRNA vaccine series have resulted in a serious adverse event reported by a health professional.
Then, factoring in the additional risk of acquiescing bodily autonomy to an opaque bureaucracy — considering what herding behaviors have been blatantly manufactured over the last few years, and the conflicting interests involved.
I think declining is a very reasonable choice.
The serious adverse event definition and rates are defined here: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/ut...
1 in 9000 doses reportedly results in a SAE, so if you are mandated to take 4 doses, your risk becomes ~0.04% or ~1/2500.
This also does not factor in the risk of "adverse events of special interest", which can be serious or non-serious (though neither seems great for the end user).
And looking at how this page has been updated since the last time I saw it, another red flag is how they separate those out - with a dead link to boot. In my opinion a continuation of efforts that seem intent on obfuscating the ability to make individual risk calculations through this pandemic.
That sounds like motivated bad assumptions.
Seems highly plausible that those who would get the reaction in the 1/9000 would select out the sensitive individuals so the rate would be less for subsequent shots on the other 8999. It seems very unlikely it will be a constant rate.
Anecdotally, I had the same reaction to all four shots. Mild symptoms the lasting 24 hours. With your comment’s assumption that’s pretty statistically unlikely, statistically it would have been likely that one would have been less or more, since by your comments logic it’s completely random.
Also more conspiratorially, because I think they would have provided the age-stratified data if it supported their objectives of improving lagging uptake among younger cohorts.
Reasonable is subjective. I got the covid vaccine and had no concern for side effects. But I, like most people, don't bother getting the flu shot every year and I think that's perfectly reasonable despite me having no qualms about side effects. I simply don't care about the flu. Not getting the flu shot is one less reoccurring chore in my life that I don't have to bother with.
The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare has been producing thorough public statistics over the situation in Sweden ever since the COVID outbreak began. The statistics are accumulated on a weekly basis and cover the number of confirmed infections, number of mild and severe hospitalizations, and the number of deaths. All of it is broken down in age groups as well as grouped according to prior underlying health concerns of the patients.
The statistics accumulated up to the same week the general availability vaccinations began - covering two waves and approx. 14 months of COVID - revealed that for their age group (age 35-45) and with no known underlying health problems, there had been a total of 11 deaths. It's fully understandable that they don't feel threatened by this virus.
And what about those?
Total number of hospitalizations, age group 40-49: 4281
...of which had one or more prior health problems: 65.5%
Total deaths, age group 0-49 (reported as "below 50"): 121
...of which had one or more prior health problems: 85%
No.
Reasonable people make choices all the time that don't bear out under a cost-risk-benefit analysis like you propose. Those choices are still reasonable, despite perhaps not being strictly rational.
And certainly not as a matter of public policy. The value of individual freedom of choice is inherent unless there's an overwhelming and compelling reason to violate it.
There is far, far greater danger in society forcing issues of bodily autonomy to a vote than there is in someone eating too much sugar.
> For it to be a reasonable choice to not want to take the vaccine
"Basically everyone should get the vaccine" is a meaningfully different statement from "we should force people to get the vaccine".
Also, whether a person can be reasonable while making unreasonable choices isn't really the point either. The most reasonable option on this particular choice for the overwhelming majority pretty clearly seems to be to get the vaccine. It is similarly disingenuous to move the goal posts from "the most reasonable decision is to get the vaccine" to "you are an unreasonable person to not get the vaccine".
It's true that the post didn't mention mandates, but any time a group of people are putting themselves in the position to decide whether a person's individual choice about their own body is "reasonable" or not, you are pretty damn mandate-adjacent.
> The value of individual freedom of choice is inherent unless there's an overwhelming and compelling reason to violate it.
This is a slippery slope easily. People should be given the choice.
And as people we have also the choice to judge people on their choice's results.
Especially if it causes other people to die. Right now we have failed as humanity at least 6,637,512 people and counting.
a huge chunk of the population already got covid during the entire year no vaccine existed and have natural immunity, so that's not really a factor at this point. The risk of getting covid for them is already baked into the calculation because they got it when there was no other option. They can now decide whether the additional risk of the vaccine is worth it
you can't even make the case for mandates based on "stopping the spread" anymore because the vaccines failed at that as well, so it's no longer a public health issue and becomes a personal health decision. Or at least it should be
The new variants are effective at evading immunity from earlier variants so, no, that's not moot. Even without evasion you'd still need to consider how quickly immunity wanes, too. The vaccines are holding up well for avoiding hospitalization but you're still looking at multiple per year given how much COVID has been mutating.
That's not true anymore. Recent variants dont induce a lot of immunity that s why reinfections are common. In fact the opposite is true in some cases
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq1841
That said, the vaccines don't prevent infection either
I don't think it's the correct question to ask.
I've got two Pfizer shots but I know many vaccine skeptics who refused to take the shots and they aren't skeptics because of the risk/reward ratio of the vaccine vs covid. They're skeptics because the politicians and the media have repeated a great many different lies during this entire fiasco.
For a start if people were allowed to discuss the lab leak hypothesis without being called moon-landing deniers then maybe there'd have been way less skeptics.
It's the attitude of the politicians and the mainstream media that created the skeptics.
To me what the mainstream media were publishing about the Covid-19 during the outbreak and the first lockdown was approximately as correct as what they were publishing about SBF/FTX before his ponzi was exposed: a narrative they were fed.
That would not be a correct comparison, because the vaccine does not prevent you from getting covid. The risks to balance are:
A) The risk of myocarditis and other fatal and non-fatal side-effects from the vaccine, TIMES how many times you get the vaccine, PLUS the cumulative risks of COVID infections over time (which you can get despite being "vaccinated"). B) Just the risks of COVID infections over time.
A is strictly more dangerous than B no matter what the risks of COVID are. Every comment saying, "oh but COVID can cause X risk of death and Y risk of myocarditis and blah blah blah" is completely irrelevant, because all of these risks accrue just as much to the vaccinated. Even if the vaccine is, say, 15% effective, which is very generous given the evidence, then that means that if the risks of the vaccine are 15% as much as the risks of COVID, then (A) is still more dangerous. The risks of the vaccine are more than 15% the risks of COVID, as the evidence is piling up.
Then there's the little fact that the vaccinated are slightly more likely to be reinfected with COVID than the unvaccinated. But the studies on this are still being suppressed, so you can do the math without it and still come up with vaccination being more dangerous for much of the population.
You forgot to account for the risk of getting the virus. If you choose to get the vaccine, the probability is 1. But what's the probability of getting Covid? Definitely less than 1.
For certain age groups (young men), the risk of complications * probability of getting the vaccine (1) was more than the risk of complications from COVID * the probability of getting it (let's say 0.25 or so).
Remember, COVID hasn't been shown to be particularly dangerous to young people...
Having seen the impact of covid on young family members and others in my extended social circles, I believe that there's a long tail of effects that we won't be able to see the full picture of for years to come. There's a lot more that should be considered in the decision than just risk of death.
I'm not suggesting that long covid doesn't exist, but I wonder how much of that long tail of effects can actually be causally linked to covid infection (obviously not talking about things like lung damage, though I do wonder if stress and isolation could have affected previously healthy people's immune systems). My personal experience with mental health issues suggests that they can have severe and wide-ranging physical effects that are as bad as any disease.
As far as I know the leading theory is that damage to the circulation systems of some covid patients is causing a reduction in the quality of bloodflow in the brain which has obvious negative impacts on neurons.
> Compared to an unvaccinated individual, the risk of long Covid in a fully vaccinated individual was cut by only about 15 percent, the study found.
> Dr. Greg Vanichkachorn, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Covid Activity Rehabilitation Program in Rochester, Minnesota, who was not involved with the new study, said the results were not “too surprising.”
> “We know that the majority of folks with long Covid have not had severe infections,” he said.
Not very much help against long covid on average, nothing like the protection against hospitalizations in vulnerable populations.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccines-offer-li...
> wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid?
For certain demographics the probability of getting infected might be that low, but at least in every social young adult I know, the risk is averaged to well over 1.0. I've been infected twice, before and after the jab, and in both cases the infection was worse (months of recovery, VO2Max reduction) than the acute vaccine side effects (weekend of feeling shitty). Pre-vaccine I'd say it took around 5 months to fully feel recovered, e.g. able to run a 4-miler without feeling like passing out, where-as post-vaccine and prior infection I was well recovered at the 6-week mark.
But the rate of being vaccinated is also over 1.0, since people keep getting boosters.
It's 60%. Probably.
Meanwhile most vaccinated people have had 2-4 shots. Also keep in mind immunity doesn't last forever, so you need to balance the risk of the shot within a certain timeframe versus the risk of Covid times the risk of complications within the same timeframe. You also can't compare the lifetime risk of Covid versus only 1 shot, both occur within a timeframe since immunity from the shot isn't forever.
The risk comparison is indeed not trivial, but I think it's a safe bet that you're going to get covid.
There's ~3 possibilities after an infection happens:
* A person's innate immune system quickly fights off the virus. This is a generic set of defenses in our bodies that are always active, and if they succeed then you don't create antibodies in the first place.
* Detectable antibodies, meaning your innate immune system wasn't enough and your adaptive immune system took care of it.
* Antibodies have faded and are no longer detectable. You can still do a T-Cell test (more costly, may take longer?) to find out if you can rapidly create new antibodies, which would mean you're still good despite no longer having antibodies.
There's also the issue of the type of antibodies. The mRNA vaccines are only coding for the spike protein, so your body only learns to fight that - but the virus has mutated away from what's currently in the vaccines. Natural/recovered immunity creates a variety of antibodies that work against different parts of the virus, so that's still effective even against "vaccine escape" variants.
I said within a certain demographic... For old people, the vaccine is obviously worth it. Boys/men from age 10-30, probably not. Hell, a bunch of EU countries literally stopped giving young people the Moderna vaccine:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/11/10/germany-f...
In the short term yes, in the long term, that is not known.
Same can be said about the vaccine. The full story has not been written yet.
Investigate everything, make it available to the public, let people decide for themselves what to put in their body.
Also, if you choose to get the vaccine, then the multiplier for vaccine risks isn't 1, it's 2, or 4, or 6, however many times you get the vaccine.
With environmental infections, it's possible that most people fight the virus within other parts of the body, with the vaccine it looks like the immune response occurred in the heart for many in this study, specifically right heart, possibly due to proximity or accidental intravascular injection:
>we recorded inflammatory foci predominantly in the right heart, which may suggest a gradual blood-stream derived dilution effect and based on this finding it is at least tempting to speculate that inadvertent intravascular vaccine injection may be contributive
Where did you get this data?
> Remember, COVID hasn't been shown to be particularly dangerous to young people...
What are the top 3 leading causes of health-related deaths in your choice of demographic (15-24? 25-49?) in your choice of 2020 or 2021?
Covid was only #3 for all age groups in the USA during the pandemic (and remember, old people are the mostly likely to die at any given point, because, well, they're old). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
Meanwhile, Covid is far behind accidents, suicide, drug overdoses and homicide for young people:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/levels-and-...
Yes, when including the elderly, cancer and heart disease are greater causes of health-related deaths. Is COVID-19 not the #1 health-related cause of death for "young" people?
> accidents, suicide, drug overdoses and homicide
Not long ago this discussion was about health risks, such as infectious diseases or medical complications. But yes, young people can be pretty reckless.
We were doing arithmetic, such as multiplying the risk of myocarditis and hitherto uncorrelated medical complications by 1.0, and then a number that is likely several orders of magnitude larger (death by COVID, not even the much, much more likely disablement of "long covid") by a number you erroneously claimed was 0.25 and was perhaps around 0.6 almost a year ago (anti-body study, 9/2021-2/2022).
I have friends in their early 30s who still haven't recovered their sense of smell. Knoew a 25-year-old who spent 4 weeks with terrible symptoms. I'm a marathon runner and lift and in my early 30s and this disease kicked the shit out of me and had 4 with reduced physical function.
It is very obviously worse than the worst flus almost everyone had and the flu is sufficiently dangerous that it has a nontrivial effect in human quality of life.
Curiously, probability of what specifically is 1 in that case? I am assuming by 1 you mean 100%, right?
There is no doubt that we'd have a lot more deaths without the vaccines. I suspect that is true for at least some of the lockdowns too.
In my experience, people aren't very good at assessing risks. Actively doing something that comes with a certain risk is often perceived as being more dangerous than passively hoping to avoid what is objectively known to be the greater risk.
If those risks are then contested or associated with a high degree of uncertainty, making an active choice often becomes a question of deferring the decision to someone you really trust. If you don't trust anyone, you're not likely to do anything.
An anecdote - I know a few people who didn't get the vaccine, or got it a lot later than everyone else, and more often than not they have had bad health care experiences in the past. When you've been on the receiving end of one or more mistakes of that kind, it isn't difficult to understand how waiting to see what happens seems like the smarter choice.
But to those that plan to get immunized by simply getting Covid again I 'd say "good luck" because they are going to need it
It doesn't affect you at all so why waste time thinking about others' cost-benefit analysis?
We all have our reasons. They're all unique and inevitably personal. For my part, standing my ground and resisting the pressure to get jabbed is one of my proudest achievements.
No they are not well COVID in my view. To me the complications that are supposedly attributed to covid are those of respiratory illnesses that have existed long before COVID came on the scene. In fact I have my doubts whether the whole COVID thing is a brand new disease.
As someone pointed out there are bigger issues: like trust in pharmaceutical companies and current science medical science. In my current view medical science is very primitive, while putting up a front of sophistication and accuracy, while being very crude.
And just so that you know that I'm not a perpetual skeptic, I will go along with Einstein's quotes:
“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”
Wouldn't you actually multiply by (the risk of getting covid without the vaccine, minus the risk of getting covid with the vaccine)?
covid is hurting/killing people who are weak, elderly, and immunocompromised. So covid is the bigger worry here, they should get vaccinated
young kids mostly don't even notice they have covid, and young people in general, ~<30 y/o, don't have any issues from covid. So the vaccine is a bigger risk, and the natural immunity they gain from getting the disease is more advantageous than the vaccine ever would be for their demographic
These protocols are what killed people mostly and ultimately they are what is being used to justify universal recommendations for a vaccine.