Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate you didn't have to take the time to reply to a random stranger on the internet :)
Regarding side-effect-free - not sure anyone ever claimed that? I understand that the relative risk is very low when compared to the risks associated with the disease itself - even for those that might expect milder symptoms from covid. I think people (myself included) are just really really bad at assessing these kind of risk/reward equations - I don't think we have the right tools for it, and our assessments are polluted by our personal history/culture/biases (in every direction).
I can't agree with your assessment of overstating the danger - the full hospital wards and large death numbers at the height of the pandemic before vaccines are enough reasons for me to accept that the costs are high enough for the small risk/inconvenience I'd pay personally.
I also know personally people in public health and can vouch for the sincerity of their (very) educated advice. If anything they have been consistently critical of governments being too slow to accept their recommendations (due to political pressures). I'd feel foolish for thinking I would know better than they who have spent their entire career in this area. I know that's an appeal to authority which isn't always warranted - but I'm comfortable with landing on that side of the fence.
Thanks, that is a much more reasonable statement, and I agree. On the one hand we don't know, but on the other hand a lack of knowledge does not mean everything has equal probabilities.
I personally don't see any good reason to think that the risk for long term side effects from the vaccine is higher for the vaccine than for COVID itself.
Not disagreeing with your general message regarding individual risk assessment based on age, sex, health etc. What I will say though is that you seem to be comparing to the baseline scenario "Covid stops spreading".
After one year of Covid (and its mutations) that baseline simply doesn't exist (any more). Instead we are in a no-win situation:
(a) We keep lockdowns/non-pharmacological measures and border closures,
(b) We let Covid spread slowly,
(c) We vaccinate.
Each scenario has associated cost. Now back to your point:
> But because everyone gets vaccinated, we require exceptional proofs of safety.
Safety is neither binary (exceptional/not exceptional) nor absolute and always relative to Covid. Each and every vaccine up to now is orders of magnitude safer than Covid for the vast majority of people (YMMV!).
Not an expert, but what's even more interesting is that among the already very few severe side effects, even fewer are due to the 'vaccine ingredients' (e.g. allergic reactions incl. blood clots) and many are conjectured to be due to the 'SARS-Cov-2 ingredients' (e.g. myocarditis). Heuristically speaking you can choose between Covid or a very very very mild version of Covid.
Yes but what is known is the number of deaths from covid, currently standing at 4.4 millions worldwide and 600k and counting in the US vs. very few if any attributable to taking the vaccine.
So I would argue any reasonable measure of risk is pointing to the vaccine being absolutely the safer alternative (also taking into account that vaccines have been around a very long time, the long term risk is not likely to be high).
And thats is before taking into account the fact that no matter how isolated you are, unless you never interact with anyone, you will likely come into contact with the virus sooner or later.
The same argument can be made for Covid itself too and is also an anti-vaxx argument.
Everything we do has risks and we determine whether or not they're reasonable.
With vaccines, enough countries have said some have acceptable risk profiles (Pfizer and Moderna) and some are too risky (AstraZeneca).
Well said, and pretty reasonable numbers over all.
The one point I'd add some clarification to is your .0001% chance of the vaccine having worse short term health effects. It's not that the number is wrong, exactly, it's that it's an average. It's contingent on a host of factors, but once you learn how rare side effects are, it's tempting to rhetorically bludgeon people with concerns over the head with this, even though in some cases they don't deserve it.
To give the most obvious example [1]:
> Some advisers were concerned that young and healthy Americans who don’t need a booster might choose to get one anyway. Side effects are uncommon, but in younger Americans they may outweigh the potential benefits of booster doses, the scientists said.
> “Those that are not at high risk should really be thoughtful about getting that dose,” said Dr. Helen Talbot, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University.
That's pretty strong language suggesting that if you are (1) young, (2) healthy, (3) already vaccinated, the risks might outweigh the benefits of getting vaccinated again (getting a third shot). That's extremely limited, of course, but it's important not to neglect the striking degree to which contingent facts can modulate the cost / benefit analysis.
I think it's reasonable to do a personal assessment of the risk. Yes, COVID can have very negative short and long term effects. BUT, what are an individuals chance of getting COVID? Quite a bit less than 100%.
That's not the same math as the vaccine.
There is truth to your comment, but don't expect people to validate your idea.
It's in our best collective interest for everyone to take this vaccine even if there's a 0.01% chance it has negative side effects.
Even on an individual level, the cost-benefit of taking the vaccine is a no-brainer. Even if there's a 0.01% chance of negative side effects, the individual benefit of re-opening society far outweighs that risk.
It's true you can freeload and reap the benefits without the small risk, but if everyone thinks this way, there are no benefits to go around. Can't you just be a team player?
To put things in perspective, a 0.01% risk is like going skydiving once, or getting out of bed and doing your usual routine for a week.
It goes without saying that if the general public doesn't get vaccinated, you should definitely get vaccinated because the risk of catching COVID is worse than the risk of this vaccine.
Yeah, I don't agree with this assessment of the risks there.
The more people that are vaccinated, the shakier his argument becomes.
Covid19 has very real, well documented risks. The common vaccines have very low known risks by comparison. The space for unknown risks shrinks by the day.
That's the danger inherit with being a contrarian. Mostly you end up being wrong. It's a very important role though, to challenge accepted beliefs and create a dialog around them.
> Aren't the side-effects of covid well established, on average more severe, and much more common?
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.
Maybe you responded to the wrong person. I am in no way suggesting it is better to not take the vaccine, or that there is good reason to think that the risks posed by COVID are less dire than those posed by the vaccines.
That's reassuring from a public health perspective, not so reassuring from an individual perspective. When it comes to one's personal risk, you have a sense of control over not getting COVID, and/or are personally at low risk of severe complications, which can weigh in favor of avoiding a vaccine with extremely rare but serious side effects.
That is of course true, and you're free to weigh up the risks however you like. Also true that there are unknowns. But the benefits of the vaccine are known too, and the risks of COVID include death and long covid, which also has unknowns and does not look nice.
Let me try one more way I have been thinking about it. I'm also weighing up whether I should get the vaccine and TBH made this site as much for myself as anyone else.
The point of the site is really to show the fallacy of there currently being zero risk in your life. Comparing 'none' to 'additional' isn't really what is happening. You have risks in your life every day, every time you do anything.
On any given day you already have about 1 Micromort's chance of dying from any unnatural causes. So that's 365 a year. So getting that vaccine puts it up to 366.
That's an increase in risk of just under 0.3% for the year, from an already pretty low baseline of likelihood of dying that we enjoy these days.
This way of thinking helps me. I'm hoping it might help some others too.
I assume people remember that damn near everything that can be injected or applied has measurable yet small side effects. They do clinical or safety trials for meds and cosmetics to measure them, and many are far higher than COVID vaccines. Many physical activities have significant yet rare risks, childbirth or pregnancy for example. But you can also buy stuff that is not tested, which means you have no real idea of the contents or risks.
The goal now should be to keep the hospital beds available for other things, the reefer trucks doing other things and to remove the naive hosts so that COVID turns into a seasonal concern rather than a pandemic. This will require lots more vaccination, or just the willingness to plow under those whose immune system is too weak or too strong. And those in foreign lands are people also, and they can board planes…
The vaccine does carry the risk of side effects and adverse reactions. That risk, for most, is VERY small.
But if the person in question also has very low risk of contracting or spreading Covid (works from home, rarely goes out, young, healthy) and if being vaccinated doesn’t actually enable you to live any differently than you already are, then there’s no compelling reason to get vaccinated and assume the risk of side effects, no matter how small.
Of course you can't exclude the risk, but there is _no_ usable information in that fear. Just because something can happen down the line, doesn't mean it's actionable. What if these vaccines start giving us super human strength in a few years? Can we discount that possibility? Why or why not? Should I act on that possibility today?
All we can consider is _actionable_ information. All information so far points to the side-effects of the vaccines causing problems at negligible levels compared to the the side-effects of getting covid. That is information we can use and it really only supports one conclusion.
Honest question: why do you say the risk of COVID is known, while the risks of the vaccines are not? Both have been around and exceptionally well studied for more than a year. We have pretty thorough data on the risks of both, don't we?
You have to compare the risks to the risks of the disease and the likelyhood of contracting that disease. And for COVID-19 the risks are very high. It doesn't make much sense to me to trade the very high known risks of COVID-19 against the relatively low risk of rare side effects in a vaccine. These vaccines have been tested in ~40,000 people each, so we do know quite a bit about their safety.
The fatality rate of COVID-19 and the rate of serious complications is high enough that it easily dwarfs the chance of any potential rare side effects of the vaccines.
His concern is that there could be long term side effects. You claim that if there were, they would already have shown up. Why do you think that? And why doesn't he accept your reasoning for that belief? You are wasting your time reading papers that don't find anything in my opinion. That wouldn't convince me.
The things that I would have an issue with are:
1. Is there an effective treatment that's less risky than the vaccine (e.g. Ivermectin)?
2. Can we safely assume that adverse effects of the vaccines have been properly tracked and investigated since vaccinations began?
3. Is there any historical precedent for vaccine side effects becoming known after this time period (since Covid vaccinations began)?
A rational person will get vaccinated if you can settle these questions in favor of the vaccines. Note, I'm assuming that the person takes the threat of getting covid seriously. There's a common misconception that everyone who doesn't want to get vaccinated thinks that it's all a big joke and covid is no worse than the flu. This is not true. Lots of vaccine-hesitant people take covid seriously.
For my age/health group, I view this risk of Covid to be less than the risk of the known issues with the vaccines and the unknown long term risk factors that aren’t yet fully known.
Do you fly on planes with a known safe takeoff statistics but no one has ever landed it before? It’s hard to quantify unknown risk, and I don’t trust people that safe don’t worry about this shot and we aren’t liable if there are side effects!
Regarding side-effect-free - not sure anyone ever claimed that? I understand that the relative risk is very low when compared to the risks associated with the disease itself - even for those that might expect milder symptoms from covid. I think people (myself included) are just really really bad at assessing these kind of risk/reward equations - I don't think we have the right tools for it, and our assessments are polluted by our personal history/culture/biases (in every direction).
I can't agree with your assessment of overstating the danger - the full hospital wards and large death numbers at the height of the pandemic before vaccines are enough reasons for me to accept that the costs are high enough for the small risk/inconvenience I'd pay personally.
I also know personally people in public health and can vouch for the sincerity of their (very) educated advice. If anything they have been consistently critical of governments being too slow to accept their recommendations (due to political pressures). I'd feel foolish for thinking I would know better than they who have spent their entire career in this area. I know that's an appeal to authority which isn't always warranted - but I'm comfortable with landing on that side of the fence.
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