If your wife has had COVID before she got pregnant, or during and recovered just fine, then that's a very different proposition to my wife who has not had COVID. You're burying the lead hard and frankly if you want to argue against the CDC and ATAGI[1] (the Australia advisory board) then the onus is on you to provide the extraordinary evidence that they shouldn't be believed.
Your proposition is "a virus many times deadlier then the flu in a target group who have more serious outcomes from anything, what could go wrong?"
And your evidence is: "well for someone who currently has effective natural immunity.."
"Even so, given the reassuring safety and efficacy profiles of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines that have gained UK/US regulatory authorization to date, the known risks of COVID-19 likely outweigh the unclear risks of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for pregnant and breastfeeding people."
What are you advocating for? Your own Source Two backs me up here - we have plenty of reason to conclude that Covid is the bigger risk despite the lack of studies. It's right there in the "Conclusion" section.
Covid (and illness in general, but covid specifically) seems to have a huge range of severity across population. The severity is generally dependent on age, obesity and a couple of other factors we know, but also some other factors we don't.
That's why we cannot predict with 100 percent certainty how bad is it going to be for a specific person, but we can do it for bigger populations (as those other factors tend to cancel out in that case).
Your wife could have had it much worse without vaccination. Or better. We can't test this case specifically, because everyone only has one go of getting COVID for the first time.
Research on bigger population samples, with proper sampling, controls and double blind setup tells us that vaccination is effective and safe.
Anecdotal stories of sample size 4 are not rationally sound counter-arguments.
Yeah, but in the absence of better information, we make do with what we have, and pregnant people get vaccinated, right?
I see your point that more research is better, but given the current uncertainty you still have to decide whether Covid or Vaccine is the bigger risk, and all the science says that Covid is the bigger risk.
With all due respect, I am not attempting to be rude with you and it would be nice to be afforded the same courtesy.
As bluntly as I can say it - it will be years before we have peer reviewed studies published that detail the effect (or lack thereof) of the vaccines on pregnancy. It is an unknown and to pretend otherwise is dishonest. What we do know, though, is the outcomes of people who have covid stratified by age/race/sex/etc.
What we find is that covid is heavily impacted by age and existing comorbidities. If you look at the mortality rate stratified by age alone, you will see drastic outcome differences between < 40 women and > 60 women. To suggest that an injection is always better than possible infection, when we know the outcomes of possible infection on the average person in the 'having a child' demographic, seems disingenuous.
Losing a child is a hard thing, losing a child in the womb is hard as well. Trying to have a child before age takes it from you is difficult. Some of us have went through this pain. To laugh off the risks in a group that was not well tested during the vax approval process does not really make me feel good.
You are ignoring the difference between a disease which is highly contagious (therefore difficult to avoid) versus pregnancy complications that are easy to avoid because they aren’t contagious diseases.
You are also projecting typical ethical concerns around medical research on pregnant women and the mounting body of evidence that COVID vaccines are safe for women who get pregnant after vaccination. It turns out it is easy to study this after billions of doses are administered. The CDC is currently studying the effects of these vaccines on pregnancy: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...
“That’s just one among many”
Perhaps some of the “many” might stand up to scrutiny…
What distinctions between men and women are being denied that you feel need to be made?
Have you done any work to asses your biases along these fronts? What makes you think that the immunity after getting infected from covid is better than getting vaccinated and not getting sick at all? I know I don't personally have the time to be sick, I have a family to feed.
Given the booster programs currently being recommended in Australia, it is entirely possible that I will be getting 3x vaccine doses before being exposed to COVID. 25% chance of getting myocarditis would make the risk comparable to normal COVID for me.
And that is assuming the vaccine is highly effective. There do seem to be questions about that, given the ongoing mutation and variants. I'd still rather get vaccinated, but I do question whether people are being obstinate about seriously discussing the pro- and con- on this topic.
a) We do not have sufficient data, and threat of sterility is a serious concern which is yet to be ruled out
b) Thats your choice. I've never opted for the flu vaccine because the lack of accountability of its efficacy and profit incentives don't make sense as far as motivating any belief that that sort of thing is designed to be good for me
c) Examine the numbers of actual confirmed deaths from COVID vs comorbidities. Yes, it still is more deadly, and I clearly say that, but its not enough more to justify how its being treated.
It's not even close, for women age 20-29 the risk of fatal thrombosis is 1:250k, while Covid is somewhere around 1:25k [1]. That's a whole order of magnitude.
The risk/benefit ratio of AZ vaccine is only poor when the risk of exposure is very low [2].
> The only difference to the population that I see is that vaccines for COVID have less efficacy than those for influenza.
So far COVID vaccines seem to confer protection for longer than flu ones, and the initial protection is generally higher.
Not sure if it's your case, but people often forget that every year there's a new flu shot per hemisphere, and its effectiveness generally hovers at around 40-60%.
> Getting infected, using early treatments (even controversial ones) and recovering with a dose of natural immunity is probably better
Citation needed, as you appear to be saying that a COVID infection is preferable to a vaccination, and that is an extraordinary claim. Bonus points for using " natural immunity", a loaded term.
> Without vaccination, the average person's risk of dying of COVID is approximately 0.5%. The vaccine trial showed that it is 98% effective, so it cuts your risk by another factor of 50. As a point of comparison, if you are unvaccinated then COVID is ~10x more dangerous than the flu.
Also covid is heavily weighted towards the elderly, the flu is not (or at least not as much). IIRC ages 30-50 have around the same risk as the flu, and under 30 have more risk from the flu.
a) But then why be afraid of the vaccine? We have sufficient data to tell its it's much less deadly than the flu.
b) I do get the flu vaccine every year, even though it's not very efficacious. Having the flu is awful, even if it's unlikely to kill me.
c) Your notion that COVID is mildly more deadly than the flu seems wildly off base. Despite all our efforts to contain the spread (which were sufficient to drive flu cases to effectively zero this season) it has killed > 500K in the U.S., 10-20x a typical flu season.
Both my wife and I are vaccinated. She caught COVID about 3 weeks ago. I had quite a few reasons to assume I'd catch it as well, but I never did (tested twice during the course of her infection)
That is a very weak rebuttal and does nothing to address that fact that risk from COVID once you are vaccinated falls below the other accepted risks of society.
Care to address that or do you just want to keep building strawmen?
You shouldn't insult people just because you disagree with their point.
Your anecdotal experience isn't exactly meaningful here, especially when that's the only 'evidence' you include instead of the 'few hundred references' you supposedly have (read?).
I got 2 mRNA vaccines, and I got non-asymptomatic covid twice after getting the vaccines.
I'd like to see more discussion on this topic in an open, respectful manner. Your comment is the opposite of that.
Your proposition is "a virus many times deadlier then the flu in a target group who have more serious outcomes from anything, what could go wrong?"
And your evidence is: "well for someone who currently has effective natural immunity.."
[1] https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2021...
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