In a country of over 300 million people it indicates a fairly low risk of death from covid for most of the population. Low enough that i think people could reasonably opt out if I they were worried about potential long term side effects from a first generation mRNA vaccine. I rolled the dice and got vaccinated, along with my whole family, but we didn’t need it. We had all had covid already with no drama. So I’m going to be pretty angry if we find out there are even mild long term side effects from it.
Maybe they mean "mRNA vaccines"? COVID vaccine is the first of this kind, so some side effects, especially long term ones, are still unknown. It's still unlikely that they would be very serious but we won't know for sure until 10 years from now.
> it's the first vaccine of its kind. It induces side effects that are not normal.
It wasn't clear that you were specifically talking about the mRNA vaccines (or maybe just the Pfizer vaccine) as the comment I was replying to mentioned both this and the AstraZeneca one. Also, I'm not sure what non-normal side effects you are talking about WRT the mRNA vaccines. Israel basically ran a huge trial for Pfizer with several million people. I'm pretty sure we know (or will have the data very soon) for all the possible side effects.
> But I still don't see a huge upside to someone like me who's relatively young, fit and who's had tons of relatives,
That's a different question. As I said (maybe in a different comment) you should calculate the probabilities yourself. What you feel doesn't matter. Also, what you see around yourself doesn't matter. What you call a huge upside is up to you, but it's hard to imagine that there is anyone who doesn't get at least a 10x upside. But again, look at the statistics, there are some that tell you how likely you are to die from covid based on your age.
I don't know how old you are, I don't remember all the numbers, but e.g. with the AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK they estimate that 40 out of 17M people had blood clotting problems. (And it's being investigated, which is good.) I don't think there is a single age group with lower COVID mortality than that. Definitely not among adults. So it's worth checking the numbers.
A second thing is that since the vaccines don't provide a 100% immunity, it's never just about yourself, of course, and the circulating virus can (and does) mutate and it may do so in the wrong direction. (It may also mutate towards a simple common cold.)
But since older people have a higher risk of dying from covid, the younger you are the longer you can wait, which means the better you will know the safety because the more people will get it before you. So your best strategy is convincing older people to take the vaccine, because it's what's best for them and you. And then if a few months you'll know better. (I'm pretty sure it will take months until you can get a vaccine if you are that young and healthy. Wherever you live.)
Normally you won't have an incidence rate this high, therefore you need to run the trails for longer to get enough people in the control group sick. Massive amounts of volunteers and a high prevalence made sound statistics possible in a relatively short amount of time.
"Long term" side effects mean weeks or few month later, not years as many people assume. In the past things like rare autoimmune disease associated with vaccination appeared within weeks after the dose, but it may take years to pick up the statistical signal, which may explain this belief. There is literally no reason to assume the mRNA vaccines will cause side effects 5 years later or something.
We've given literally billions of vaccine doses at this point. The post-vaccination tracking has been able to pick up side-effects affecting 1/100k patients. Those side-effects have also been made public by the relevant authorities immediately when concerns were raised. This tracking has not produced any kind of evidence for auto-immune disease for the mRNA vaccines.
And no, it cannot be that the side-effects you're worried about haven't happened yet. If they happened, they'd happen within weeks of the vaccination.
Look, the position that you don't think the risk-reward ratio is good enough for somebody who has recovered is pretty reasonable. But for some reason you're not satisfied with that, and are instead making factually incorrect statements both about the benefits and the risks. That makes it pretty hard to believe you're actually making that argument in good faith.
That changes a lot of things. For one, this side effect was neither known nor documented, so people could not make an informed decision before getting the vaccine.
Then individuals have a quantifiable risk of dying from COVID vs. dying from the vaccine. Depending on age/sex/comorbidities/medication/etc. one of the other may be higher.
Also from a public health perspective, if these CVST cases are known to be mostly limited to a particular group (women under 50) and the vector vaccine, then this group could be vaccinated with other types like mRNA vaccines.
Having some amount of caution for a novel vaccine for a novel disease with novel vaccination types seems reasonable. These vaccines are the first mass vaccinations with mRNA or the first mass vaccination with modified adenovirus, depending on which one you get. Personally, the risk from the disease outweighed the risk from the vaccination, but I also wasn't anywhere near the front of the line to get one.
Also, my child participated in a "long term" study on a childhood vaccine reformulation, and long term just means one year. So, if there were side effects outside of that period, it wouldn't be found from long term studies, it would have to come from some other research. Of course, small effects that show up years later is going to take a long time to pin down, and would have required a very large study group to notice statistically.
Realistically, if there is some negative side effect that takes years to develop and only affects a very small fraction of people, we won't know that it's related to any particular vaccine for a long time. And we'll figure it out from epidemiology studies, not from safety studies.
The mechanism of action is known, so potential side effects are largely predictable. I'm not an expert, but I don't see any reason to think there would be unexpected long term side effects from this sort of vaccination. Is there reason to think otherwise?
You're confusing Austria and Australia, but hey, it's par for the course for the dumpster fire level of comments currently on this thread...
I'm going to trust the statistics that the vaccines work, and aren't deadly. The numbers seem to speak for themselves, thousands of samples and you can see any region with higher vaccination rates have lower infection and death rates (well, I guess until the efficacy wears down and boosters are needed...). On the topic of long term effects, I'm going to trust this scientist (of course at the end of the day, that's what it ends with isn't it, what statements do each of us trust):
> Unlike many medications, which are taken daily, vaccines are generally one-and-done. "Medicines you take every day can cause side effects" that reveal themselves over time, including long-term problems as levels of the drug build up in the body over months and years, Goepfert said. But "vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body," he said. "This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn't expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine."
> Long term side effects won't be known for 5-10 years, especially as vaccinated people have kids.
Good news, then. Viral vector vaccines (like the J&J version) have been studied and tested since the 1970s, and mRNA vaccines (like Pfizer) have been studied since the 1980s[1][2].
What ingredient in Covid vaccines do you suspect will become the new thalidomide?
We know that the actual viral vector and mRNA components of the vaccines will degrade and disappear from the body in the short term[3], so it must be one of the other ingredients, right?
It's also important to weigh the completely unknown long-term effects of Covid against the well-known long-term effects of training an immune system with a vaccine.
Has there ever been serious long-term side effects caused by vaccines? Yes, a tiny number of people have had serious short-term complications from them, but I'll take five deaths over 3,000 deaths a day.
mRNA vaccines have been well studied - from a scientific standpoint it's hard to imagine how it even could cause problems.
If all mRNA have side effects like the current crop of COVID vaccines I’m honestly not sure they are worth it as a seasonal flu shot.
I’m not talking about the scare mongering of long term effects. Just the immediate.
The day after my second moderna shot was worse than any flu I can remember and many of my friends in their 20s and 30s had to take a day off after their shot. I know several people in their 60s who had to take several days to a week in bed from vaccine side effects.
That’s fine for ending a pandemic or curing HIV, but for seasonal flu?
In terms of lost labor days, my anec-data points to this vaccine seeming worse than a seasonal flu.
What I wonder with this (and other warnings about vaccine safety)
mRNA vaccines have been administered to millions of people around the world. A sizable percentage had the first shot six months ago or longer.
The effects the author is warning against also occur supposedly with high probability and across age groups and sex. (He makes no mentions about pre-existing conditions, which would probably be important: usually, you visit a cardiologist for a reason)
If there was actually an increased risk of e.g. ACS, shouldn't we have seen a significant increase in actual ACS cases among vaccinated by now? Wouldn't this have been detected during the clinical trials?
Well, 0.4% of trial participants actually did have life-threatening reactions, so there's that. The risk is small, but not zero.
As far as mild side-effects go, another way of putting it is that at least as many kids will experience side effects from the vaccine as from Covid itself.
...and millions of kids are going to get this vaccine in the coming months.
Every single person I know has gotten the vaccine at least twice, some three times, and not a single person has had any persistent side effects.
I think the problem with saying the vaccine has all these side effects is that in placebo controlled trials a lot of people also get “side effects” from the placebo, either by random chance or they make it up. There really isn’t any evidence these vaccines (mRNA at least) have any serious level of side effects above background noise.
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