That's true, but from the data I've seen, the risk to under 18s of Covid is still higher for both hospitalization and death than that of the vaccine heart inflammation potential rare side effect. That said, compared to over 18, I admit it is not as clear cut, and I can understand being more hesitant.
I don't know about this specific case but previously (e.g. with AZ) the concern was not that a specific vaccine had worse side effects on younger people.
It was a balance of the risks of the vaccine pretty much in general versus the risks of Covid by age range.
So basically if the risk of Covid is high it makes to get any vaccine available. But if the risk of Covid is very, very low then you may start considering what the risks of getting the vaccine are.
But isn't the whole original point of the vaccine to protect those that are older and less healthy? Younger and healthier are at less risk to serious adverse reactions to Covid, having less comorbidities. Besides that, it seems that adverse reactions to the vaccine tend to skew younger, with the risk of heart issues going up, relative to a covid infection, the younger you are.
I'm not offended by it, but as a 41 year old, it was (and continues to be) pretty obvious to me that risking covid infection was a lot more dangerous than the vaccines.
The risk from infection isn't super high for me, but the risk from the vaccines is considerably lower, even with the relative lack of long term information (I got my first shot in late March, when there was roughly 10 months of data from the first rounds of the trials).
COVID is much less dangerous to younger people but there are still very real risks involved, especially non-lethal ones. Assuming a 25% probability of catching it, how are you coming to the conclusion that the risk of the vaccine is higher?
I don't necessarily disagree that the known risks outweigh the known benefits for that age group, but your numbers are way off.
You also have to consider that the absolute risk (the risk of catching Sars-Cov2 multiplied by the risk of COVID) is far lower with current prevalence.
In the end, you arrive at a low known risk either way. It then depends on how you weigh the unknown risks. There's a strong incentive to downplay risks of vaccination "for the public good" while simultaneously exaggerating the risk of infection. By posting these inflated/deflated numbers, you're playing your part, knowingly or not.
Dangerous? I think you need to be a great deal more specific than that, since the risk tranches of Covid-19 are highly variables based on obesity, comorbidities, and age.
At a very young age, mortality from vaccine side effects (~200 to ~700 peri/myocarditis per 1M) is greater than mortality from covid itself (1 per 1M for a healthy young male no comorbidities 18 yo not obese), depending on comorbidities.
The risk profile for all the age groups is wildly different. I don't think its a bad idea for people > age X to get this vaccine, one because they have a much higher risk of serious harm from corona _AND_ perhaps less risk of long term affects. But for someone who has very low risk of serious harm from corona, perhaps it makes sense to wait a little bit?
There are safer vaccines so there is little point in risking this one. That said, it depends on how many future infections people that age face.
If this vaccine is causing at most 4 deaths per million people* vs 648 recorded US covid deaths 15-24 out of a population of 43.5 million. 4 * 43.5 = ~174 < 648. So, it would have been noticeably safer for a random 20 year old American to have taken it Jan 2020 than risk covid. https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/topics/Dem...
So if the total future infections are say 1/4 the total infections up to this point then their roughly equivalent risks. Tipping one way or the other based on actual number of infections.
* It’s rare enough that actual risks aren’t clear, but assuming the vaccine is the cause we can assume the risks are at or below that level.
First, those claims are speculative as they admit. Second, you cannot generalize from one or two small studies; for instance, other studies (the much-touted Israeli study) have found that natural immunity actually provides much greater protection.
We'll only figure out the truth long after it matters, so the question being debated is the risk of complications from the vaccine compared to the risk of complications from COVID. Given younger populations have very, very low risk from COVID, this is a subtle and complicated question to answer.
Also, no, it’s not necessarily low relative to the vaccine adverse event risk. Here’s research showing it’s multiple times the risk of hospitalization due to COVID itself for young people (males in particular): https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...
If you live in the US or in Europe, I don't think the chance to contract COVID-19 is low enough to get anywhere close to where you could make that kind of argument. We're really good at developing vaccines, and they're a category of drugs that is by far the most sensitive to any kind of side effect. This disease is dangerous enough and also widespread enough that I don't see any plausible argument that would make the vaccine more dangerous than the disease.
And the risk is actually almost entirely age-dependent, the other risk factors weren't that significant in studies.
It also seems like, in the absence of assurance of long-term safety, you would recommend the vaccine for at-risk groups only. It's known now that the risk to young people (under 19) is minimal: IFR < 3/1,000,000. And that was during the much more dangerous early strain of Covid-19, not the ones circulating now. Yet here we are in 2022 with a recommendation from the CDC to vaccinate ages 5 and up, regardless of health condition.
> even less likely that they'll die from a vaccine side effect
My understanding is that there've always been risks associated with vaccines, and they were always relatively small risks. What I can't find any unbiased information about is how the risks of the Covid vaccine compare with the risks of, say, the mumps or rubella vaccines.
Since the risk of COVID varies wildly by demographics, this leaves open the possibility that the vaccines are a poor risk/reward tradeoff for large numbers of the people it's being recommended to (essentially, everyone over 6 months old). And since they don't prevent COVID infection, "risk of vaccination" vs "risk of a COVID infection" is the wrong comparison to make in the first place.
That really depends on the age group. The chances of someone under 30 having any real negative effects to Covid is virtually 0, while there is some evidence pointing to males under the age of 30 having issues with the vaccine.
What makes you think it isn't worth the risk for young people i.e. what are the risks of the vaccine that you are worried about compared to the risks of covid for a young person?
Based on Israel's vaccine data, we would need to see 2/100k 20-29 year olds or 6/100k 30-39 year olds die or experience side affects worse than severe covid for it to make sense to avoid the vaccine.
I think his point is that the immune response from the vaccine is lower than from just getting covid and the risks from getting covid for children are really low.
Still, I don't think it makes much of a difference either way, especially for kids who don't have much to fear from covid.
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