Not enough to know with absolute certainty what will happen when millions of people get it. Especially unforeseen reactions that take several years to appear.

As much as you trust each of the (5?) vaccines, you yourself can not know for certainty.. there is some doubt. You may judge that that uncertainty and risk is minimal and well worth taking the vaccine, another completely rational person may decide that it is not worth the risk.

The point of my post was that there is real and legitimate risk, be it ever so small. Anyone who pretends there is zero risk to the vaccine is misrepresenting the truth and doing a disservice in the effort of persuading rational adults that vaccine delivery is being lead in an honest and forthright way.

Well luckily we _do_ know what happens with a great deal of certainty when you get actually infected with covid, and it turns out it sucks pretty hard.

i find this "better the devil you know" mindset really weird when the "devil you know" is an extremely infectious virus that has killed _three hundred thousand_ americans (not to mention more worldwide), and thousands more by the day.

these hypothetical vaccine side effects that have not come up during any of the trials that have been going on for _months_, across thousands and thousands of participants, would have to be pretty insanely bad in order to outweigh the negatives of millions more people contracting the actual virus.

A large portion of those who get COVID19 do not even feel any symptoms.

Those are certainly arguments you can make.

But you have to acknowledge that there are huge incentives for the drug manufacturers to have a successful test and a healthy scepticism until they have been truly independently verified isn't unwarranted.

Also a pure, as tested, vaccine doesn't magically appear for your inoculation, there is manufacturing, and delivery, and other potential contamination points along the way. It means what goes into your system isn't necessarily what has shown to be safe; not a huge risk, but a risk nonetheless.

It would have made me feel better if you had started out your reply by saying.. "yes there are risks to this vaccine, but..". That way I would know we're working from the same starting point and I could trust that your views are calm and considered, and that you accept the reality that there is indeed risk to taking a foreign substance into your bloodstream.

Many of us know people who have had Covid, and it wasn't a very big deal. Even fat old Donald Trump shrugged it off in a few days; granted he had the best medical care possible. That's not to diminish the loss of loved ones that have surely been taken by Covid. But it can make one question the statistical importance of Covid in the larger scheme of things.

Again, i'm not really arguing with your points, just that they need to be presented with honesty, we shouldn't put a religious halo around vaccines; we should be clear about the risks too.

Trump received the Regeneron antibody treatment. He did not shrug it off. There aren't enough such treatments for everyone who would benefit from it.

That's really not the point.

Regardless, for some rich people those treatments _are_ available. And that may well lead them to the completely rational choice of avoiding the risks associated with a vaccine.

Everyone is different, and can arrive at different decisions completely rationally.

You have a 0.5-1.0% chance to die from COVID-19, a higher chance to be hospitalized and experience serious consequences from that. And the chance to contract the disease is very, very high in many countries right now.

The vaccines have been tested in 30-40,000 people each. The typical serious side effects for vaccines are something like 1 in a million or 1 in a few hundred thousand. Even if the vaccine had an usually high level of side effects, odds are it's still far, far less harmfull than contracting the actual disease.

0.5-1.0% chance to die from COVID-19 assumes an even distribution across all people infected. Which just isn't true, it very much depends on your current state of health.

And again, my main point is that we should be honest about the risks and not pretend they're zero.

I looked this up for a comment some time ago, and for someone in the 20-30 years range, the chance to die was somewhere aroun 1:10,000. That's still far above what you would usually expect for serious side effects of a vaccine (and I'm comparing death with serious side effects right now, so the actual comparison would be even more favorable to the vaccine).

I'm not in the risk group, and I would take the vaccine right now if it was offered to me. Even in the worst case the potential risks are below what a real COVID-19 infection would entail.

It's not just age range, it's individual health, down to the specific person, not a group. Also you have to multiply the risk by the chance that you will actually contract Covid-19, which is very dependent on lifestyle etc.

I'm not trying to talk you personally out of getting the vaccine, I don't think it will turn you into a zombie or some foolishness. I'm just asking you to understand that it is a rational decision for some people to arrive at a different answer.

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's not the age of somebody that determines how the virus reacts. The statistics you're referencing categorize age as a proxy for some real-world vulnerabilities that vary in significance by age. That is, worse outcomes due to Covid exposure tend to be more prevalent as age advances.

But that says absolutely zero about any single individual. Each individual, regardless of age group, can have more or less susceptibility than their age group. It is an _individual's_ health and other risk factors that decide the outcome for that individual -- not their membership in an age category. Therefore, each individual must decide their own risk tolerance and remediation plan.

CDC best estimate IFR for COVID-19 is as follows:

0-19 years: 0.00003

20-49 years: 0.0002

50-69 years: 0.005

70+ years: 0.054

So only age 50+ have at least 0.5% chance to die from COVID-19. These numbers also include everyone in that age range, e.g. the obese, diabetic, immunocompromised. If you know you are healthy, your odds are better. As a healthy 27 year old and something of a fitness fanatic, my odds appear to be 99.98% of surviving at minimum. Due to the reasons I just mentioned, in addition to being on the younger end of the 20-49 age range, my odds are actually quite a bit better than 99.98%, although I don't know the exact number. I'll roll those dice over a vaccine that has been rushed, and will get the vaccine some years in the future if no problems emerge.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Sure that's possible and you are well within your rights to choose this path of action.

But – excuse me for putting this bluntly – it is obviously very selfish. If everybody calculated their risk like you do, the result would be that the pandemic drags on for a few years, a lot of preventable deaths happen + probably a terrible economic downturn. You have the choice to sacrifice a little bit (meaning a tiny chance of vaccine complications) of your own health for the greater good – or you can slack of others doing it for you. Because that's what's going to happen, most people voting "yes" on this thread are making the same calculation you are but deciding to sacrifice a little bit of their own health.