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Don’t get me wrong. I’m a compliant, rule-following Asian, so I got my two shots despite having natural immunity. But it’s pretty wild that we forced everyone and their kids to get a novel vaccine—the first commercial products in a whole new class of vaccines—in response to a poorly understood disease that wasn’t a significant threat to young and middle aged people. Like, it wasn’t polio or smallpox which could routinely cripple or kill kids.
The emphasized part is you moving the goalposts. If you want to assert that already low-risk individuals can further reduce their death rate using the vaccine (undoubtedly true), then it's entirely fair to ask whether doing so creates unknown, long-term risks.
For your younger people--who are unlikely to die from either COVID or the vaccine--the long-tail risks of a brand new category of vaccine are meaningful. My kids shrugged off COVID (before the vaccine was available) in half a day. We gave them the vaccines anyway, because we're sheeple. Hopefully, these new mRNA vaccines behave just like traditional vaccines and don't create any additional long-term risks. But let's not pretend we have decades of experience with these vaccines to prove that fact.
Hard disagree. Unknown, long-term risks apply equally to both. However, I'd agree to mutually change the goal posts. Do deaths and long term damage for both vaccines and COVID-19 in the cohort.
> But let's not pretend we have decades of experience with these vaccines to prove that fact.
We also don't have decades of experience with COVID-19...
And if you're risk of death is low enough that swamps the third term. But I think you're modeling this incorrectly. It's actually [value of vaccine] = [reduction in death] - [unknown long term risks of vaccine] + [unknown long term risks of novel virus]
And this case it almost always makes sense to take the vaccine.