Is getting COVID safe long term? There are plenty of viruses that cause issues in the long term. HIV causes AIDS, HPV and Hepatitis cause cancers years later. We have no clue on the long term effects of SARS-Cov-2, other than that it causes COVID-19 in the short term.
It's a choice between the pest and the cholera at this point.
For most people yes
edit: so the whole world is studying this virus 24/7 for almost a year and nobody detected anything, yet you think it might give us aids v2 ? Feel free to link any study that hints to anything remotely going in that direction because I couldn't find anything at all.
We already know there is a strong possibility the virus has a negative effect on cognitive ability even in people who don't get any serious symptoms [0]
Those might go away. They might not. There could be other effects we're unware of. What we do know is that you're unlikely to find any expert on this who will unequivocally say "no longer term effects".
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.20.20215863v...
Pre-print or published or not, it presents evidence that shows it's incorrect to assert there are no longer term effects of COVID. Even if peer review shows flaws that invalidate this particular study, research into the full effects of COVID are still underway, and we simply don't have the data required to assert "no longer term effects for most people"
I think you might overestimate what we can detect, when it comes to how viruses interact with a living human body. Yes, the whole world is studying it 24/7, and we really do not have a clue on long term effects. Science is pretty good, but some problems are pretty difficult too.
30 years ago, we could not have this ubiquitous testing capability and probably could not develop these tests at all. 10 years ago, we would definitely not have this vaccine one year after patient zero. Today, we really have no clue on long term effects until they happen on a statistical scale. Science and biotech progress rapidly, but there are still a lot of things we can't do.
People have been getting infected with coronaviruses of various kinds for millennia. Nobody has ever linked a low severity cold-like infection with long term severe consequences, and given the sort of longitudinal study that would be required to establish such a link, any such claims would need to be treated very carefully.
Nonetheless, the original SARS-1 (which is way closer to SARS-2 than say OC43), is known to be causing long term, debilitating health complication among significant number of survivors.
Nonetheless, the original SARS-1 (which is way closer to SARS-2 than say OC43), is known to be causing long term, debilitating health complication among significant number of survivors
And yet it didn't turn into a worldwide outbreak, so one must ask how much value this classification scheme actually has, given that SARS-2 is really nothing like SARS-1 in either infectiousness nor severity.
Sure we do. mRNA vaccines have been under development for over a decade now. And while none have been approved for human use yet, it's not for lack of safety data. There have been zero serious adverse events reported in the Moderna or Pfizer phase 1, 2, and 3 trials. The only side effects are mild fatigue, headache, and soreness that you would associate with an immune response. Furthermore there is no possible way that the vaccine can even cause long term effects; the mRNA breaks down naturally in the body almost immediately. Any side effects will be immediately present and related to acute immune response. Worrying about some vague long term "what if" problems that have no mechanism for action is just non-scientific magical thinking.
Again, apples and oranges. This is a completely different class of drugs compared to SARS vaccines from a decade ago. Those were based on live viruses, which the mRNA vaccines are not.
It's kind of annoying to have to be fearful on public transport, having to avoid infecting older family members and therefore not seeing them, and much else. Then there's the risk to yourself with COVID, which varies based on your lifestyle, age, and good/bad genes. Clearly some percentage of the population die, and a bigger have long-term very unpleasant effects.
On the other hand, the vaccine can be discovered, 12 months from now, to cause an autoimmune reaction in some people and their immune systems attack their joints or something.
I think this pandemic teaches us all one thing - almost the entire world of understanding can be boiled down to probability.
I've never heard of such a thing, but then again I have only a surface understanding of vaccines.
If you are a doctor/nurse working in a covid ward we know for sure that the risk whatever happens long term is a lot less than the risk of getting covid. For someone like me who has no reason to go anywhere (I'm not even allowed in the office until this pandemic passes) I can afford to wait until there is more data - and I also have to because I'm low on the list of those who will be vaccinated because I'm relatively low risk of getting it.
I vaguely remember this story (from years ago) about a drug or vaccine during the 70s, where apparently everything was fine but then kids (or kids of kids, can't remember) ended up with birth defects.
The name of the drug was "Contergan" in german which german-speaking readers might recognize more easily.
A more relevant example is Pandemrix, a flu vaccine launched in the EU in 2009. A year later it was discovered that it seems to increase the risk of narcolepsy in teenagers sixfold. The vaccine was produced and licensed in an expedited fashion because of a "pandemic" (of swine flu), which used a then-new and slightly experimental technique (adjuvants) which interestingly, German doctors flagged up as a risk and suggested the German government use a different H1N1 vaccine that was less experimental.
Given that viral genome sequencing didn't even exist in 1976, I don't think it's a meaningful comparison.
id get this today if i could
There is no shortcut for that, and there is an obviously huge pressure to cut corners.
It's fair to be concerned, not anti-Vax.
Am I the only one here who doesn't want to get inoculated in basically the first batch?