>>>Putting aside the fact that not being vaccinated is a horrible selfish act that hastens the evolution of a more virulent strain and more death.

Rhetoric like that is almost as bad as the conspiracies floating around. Brow beating someone with legitimate concerns is not right.

Im social distancing, wearing a mask doing all the things necessary and successfully I might add to not aquire or transmit the virus. So please dont call me horrible and selfish for contemplating getting an vaccine that has been rushed through trials with no long term data and worse hearing the powers that be, say "It doesnt matter which one you get just get the first one You are offered", how is that a reasonable statement ever?

If You want to know more in depth what my concern is, I wrote it in another comment. Im going to unplug now as my head is spinning and I need to "relax a bit" obviously.

ThankYou everyone for having this frank disussion and not canceling or censoring it(even though it has cost me quite a bit of karma it has given me more perspective and I appreciate that)

> Im social distancing, wearing a mask doing all the things necessary

Those things are emergency measures, that are important, but not anywhere near as effective as vaccines are. They stop things from rapidly spiraling out of control so instead they just slowly spiral. Its a holding action, one with a pretty high cost, not a solution.

> that has been rushed through trials

They've had the same amount of safety testing as other vaccines. With the rollout, they've probably had more real world testing than many vaccines.

> So please dont call me horrible and selfish

You're taking an action that threatens the lives of other people based on fears about personal safety that don't seem based in reality (at least for the pfizer vaccine. If you want to argue that the blood clots for AZ are scary regardless of their rarity, fine by all means).

Most people use the term selfish to describe someone who puts their own well being ahead of the group even when their concerns for personal safety are valid. If their concerns are largely made up, i can't help but think the adjective fits.

Thank you for being better at words than me.

I got the vaccine for solely practical reasons(it's becoming a requirement for international travel). Im not a hero, I didnt do it to save anybody. It has nothing to do with denying science and more to do with the fact that we can look at the same statistic and what you consider an existential threat and what I consider an existential threat are different. I still dont think accusing someone of selfishness is the proper way to go about it.

> what you consider an existential threat and what I consider an existential threat are different

You're argument that not taking the vaccine is not being selfish is that the risk you are taking by forgoing the vaccine is only a threat to other people not a threat to yourself??

> Im not a hero

Obviously not. Nobody here is a hero. We're talking about an injection with extremely low risk of serious side effects, not storming the beaches of Normandy.

They're choosing to become immune naturally instead of pumping an experimental drug into his body.

If they're under 55 and healthy they're actually doing a good thing by letting people who actually need the vaccine get it.

It's arguable that actually getting the vaccine if you're healthy and young is selfish by stopping someone who needs it from getting it.

Think if all the people in India and Brazil had the vaccines the young and healthy are taking in America.

Do you think India has time now for “natural immunity”?

Think if all of the young people in Western countries didn't get vaccinated and we distributed those vaccines to the grandmother's in India who need them.

> legitimate concerns

FWIW, I didn't see any legitimate concerns. I would love to hear a legitimate concern.

All I see is "but I don't know... I'm not sure...". And I just don't get it. facepalm I fully admit this could be due to a lack of imagination on my part. I often suffer from that, especially when it comes to empathy.

> Thank you everyone for having this frank discussion and not canceling or censoring it(even though it has cost me quite a bit of karma it has given me more perspective and I appreciate that)

Bravo, solidly agree. Things will only be broken more when we can't even talk with each other. Glad we can still do that. Whew. And I'll upvote your comments, should you care about the points. :)

You can't really test these things for long term side-effects/damage. Pretty legitimate concern in my book.

Short term side-effects and effectivenes and such are pretty well known by this point

A legitimate concern? Is not knowing or not understanding NOT a legitimate reason for concern? Would blind trust be better? I started my comments on this thread because I found much of the information I have been seeking is a direct result of an almost dogma being thrust upon society on what is OK to say and what is not regarding Vaccines, and when someone does say something wrong they are silenced by bans or deleted/moderated posts.

Cutting out a persons tongue doesn't make them wrong or prove You right, unless the argument is over who has a longer tongue.

> Is not knowing or not understanding NOT a legitimate reason for concern?

No. Because trustworthy information is easy to find and because "I don't understand X" can be used to argue against doing literally everything, including completely ridiculous things like insisting that wifi towers be taken down due to "wifi allergies". Making a decision that harms other people because of your own personal ignorance is not free from criticism.

> and when someone does say something wrong they are silenced by bans or deleted/moderated posts

You've got dozens of posts in this thread that are not deleted and have dozens of people trying to provide you with accurate information to help. There is no conspiracy here. You aren't being silenced.

If variants or strains existed that could avoid the immune system surely it would be evading the immunity of the people in Texas, Florida or the over 50% of other states that have had no Covid restrictions for months... infection rates would be skyrocketing instead of lingering at record lows.

Stop fear mongering.

It is an emergency authorization vaccine. We haven't had the full trials. No one can honestly claim these are safe long term. In fact, they don't. The manufacturers do not assume any liability for you choosing to consume their experimental product.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...

If you're in the US, this is one of the dumbest reasons to use against COVID-19 vaccines, since all vaccines have had the same treatment since 1986 via the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.

The article I linked discusses the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program at length. Would you care to discuss the claim in the article that this program has paid very few claims in the decades since it was created? I checked: it is the exact program created by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. We're talking about the same thing.

tl;dr: the pharma companies don't have to pay you and the government is extremely unlikely to.

That depends a bit on your country.

Assuming you live in the West, we are all taking the same few vaccines. The trials are not complete for any of the big 3. The specifics of the legality vary from country to country. It typically takes nearly a decade to approve a new vaccine.

A major portion of that typical 10 year approval process is running a clinical trial where enough people get sick to have statistically significant results. When the trials for all the EUA vaccines were run last year, COVID was extremely widespread. That dramatically shortened how long trials needed to run to prove effectiveness.

If the trials were comprehensive enough to prove both efficacy and safety, why did they not catch the AZ & JnJ blood clotting issues? One theory is that these problems primarily afflict those under 40 and this population was not adequately represented in the clinical trials.

Blood clots happen at a rate of something like 1 in 100,000 people, the trial had something like 20,000 people getting the vaccine in it. Statistically its not surprising it wasn't caught. That the risk is probably not equally distributed just furthers that.

For the trial to pick up the blood clots, it would probably have to administer the vaccine to at least half a million people if not more (and you would need other people for the placebo arm). If the size of your trial is a significant portion of a medium sized country, you are not really running a trial but just giving out a vaccine.

The trial established it works, and any safety concerns are rare enough that the risk of not just getting covid but getting covid and having severe illness or dying from covid, is higher for most people. There is no 100% garuntees in life, the best we can hope for is showing that the risk is less than the alternative.

Many of us have preexisting immunity. For that population, the marginal benefit of vaccination is zero. People should be informed about the risks.

Not really. If you are talking about pre-existing immunity from prior infection, the benefit may be less, and in fact it is recommended not to vaccinate within 6 months of infection.

If you are talking about innate immunity or cross-immunity from SARS-Cov-1 it's super rare and hasn't been shown to be relevant in most Western countries.

To see the (reduced) benefit even with prior infection just look at the numerous reports of re-infection, be it with a mutated version or otherwise, as well as the numerous reports of prior infected subjects with no or very little antibodies after a couple of months (not the full picture but still).

> People should be informed about the risks.

Show me one vaccine/medication where people were more informed than about the current Covid vaccines. We are at the point that for most folks it's riskier to drive to the vaccination appointment by car then the actual vaccination.

> it is recommended not to vaccinate within 6 months of infection.

24/7 ads and encouragement for people to get the vaccine, almost to the point that it's a moral virtue means that tons of people are getting the vaccine, even having recently caught covid-19.

You can't get the vaccine without anamnesis/checking your medical history, and one item is prior infection.

Not in the US. I got my first vaccine shot, Moderna, with no medical consultation at all. Nobody asked me if I'd gotten Covid already.

And I had never heard about this six month interval until this moment.

Interesting, could you elaborate more?

The six month interval is not a universal truth but the recommendation by the German regulator [1].

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50476/do-the-co...

What would you like me to elaborate exactly?

Just interested how the vaccinations were done where you got it, small/big city, who administered it etc...

In New York City, at a large pharmacy chain, administered by a pharmacist. They're done like this, or at government run centers. The cost is handled by the government.

It's also riskier for most folks to drive a car than to catch Covid. I agree that people should look at their specific case and do honest risk/benefit analysis.

Most of what I've seen, however, feels more like herd mentality behavior based on one's political leanings. Or people feeling they genuinely don't have a choice, given impending requirements and restrictions from their local governments and employers.

Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted. It should be common knowledge at this point that people in their 20's, 30's, and 40's have a higher risk of automobile accident, suicide, drug overdose, etc, than of covid death.

As a European I do not understand what vaccination has to do with political leaning. It's even stranger that in the US pro-life (abortion) seems to correlate with pro-choice (vaccines)?

I do understand however that society as a whole says "if you are not willing to take a negligible risk for us, we are not taking risks for you".

We are in an unfortunate state of hyper-polarization where, if one side advocates something, the other side feels compelled to reject it. Unfortunately, this has even extended into medicine. Many such cases! Sad!

I estimated that my risk from getting infected was similar to the lifetime risk of driving.

If I could get a shot that protected me from car accidents, I'd do that too.

The shot doesn't last a lifetime. You'll need two shots a year, at minimum. Third and fourth booster shots needed in the fall are already being discussed.

People are informed about the risks.

You can't know what kind of pre-existing immunity, if any, you have against covid.

Including after vaccination? If no, why is that different than infection?

No, not including after vaccination. When people speak about pre-existing immunity, it's most of the time covid deniers saying there "natural" immunity and vaccines are useless or harmful.

(Of course there is also valid discussion of pre-existing immunity, but the more nuanced messages are not as common.)

Vaccine advocates like yourself can never explain why infection doesn't imply immunity while vaccines do.

Sinovac, the Chinese vaccine, is only 50% effective. Pfizer and Moderna are much more effective. J&J is somewhere in between. This is widely accepted but no one seems to ever ask: if I was sick a month ago, where does it fall in that scale?

The point of vaccines is to give your immune system a good enough idea of the pathogen, so that your body produces antibodies. Actually contracting the disease does the same thing, unsurprisingly.

So the question is how effective is natural infection of COVID-19 at preventing future infection? Surely it's better than Sinovac, a coin flip. No? Do you have any scholarship about this I can look at?

What? Of course infection induces immunity in case of covid, about on par with mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...

You don't have similar immunity efficacy studies for actual covid as hou have for vaccines, because infecting people on purpose would be unethical.

Note that your wording "coin flip" isn't right for Sinovac, either. 50 % efficacy is not huge but it is still beneficial on population level.

> WTF? Why? You have a free, safe, live-saving vaccine being offered to you! Why would you not take it??

People have real distrust of the system that produced the vaccine and even distrust of the media that purports this disease is so deadly.

I know from your perspective scepticism is hard to understand, but it's not that God tells me science is fake or anything so outlandish. I genuinely don't trust the corporations and government selling me the story of the disease and now the vaccine, and it should be allowed that people question these institutions.

> People have real distrust of the system that produced the vaccine and even distrust of the media that purports this disease is so deadly.

WHY??? Why do they distrust the vaccine?? Anything? Any possible reason? It's probably the safest vaccine ever made. I. DON'T. GET. IT.

Do others not hear the ambulances? Do they not see the overflow from the hospitals? Are the dead bodies some sort of elaborate deep fake?? Has the whole world gone mad???

Brother, I love skepticism. It's healthy. It's *good*. I don't blindly trust corporations or the government, as far as I'm concerned the former only wants profit and the latter only wants power.

But that's got nothing to do with it, from my perspective.

When your house is on fire you don't debate the motivations of the fire department. You put out the fire first, and THEN have time for dithering and analysis.

> WHY??? Why do they distrust the vaccine?? Anything? Any possible reason? It's probably the safest vaccine ever made. I. DON'T. GET. IT.

I'm getting my 2nd shot this week, but both mRNA and modified adenovirus vaccines have never been used for mass vaccinations before. The history of medicine is litered with interventions that were seen as totally safe and wonderful and lead to terrible consequences after some time. Push towards massive adoption of an intervention sets off my alarm bells.

All that said, personally, it seems the unknown long term risks of vaccination outweigh the more or less known risks of covid both on an individual level (I don't want to get it) and a community level (I'd rather like community spread to stop, so I can go back to being a hermit by choice); but if community spread wasn't happening near me, I would be happier not trying new medicine within a year of development.

> I'm getting my 2nd shot this week, but both mRNA and modified adenovirus vaccines have never been used for mass vaccinations before. The history of medicine is litered with interventions that were seen as totally safe and wonderful and lead to terrible consequences after some time. Push towards massive adoption of an intervention sets off my alarm bells.

These events sadly happen and there will always be unknown unknowns, not only, but also because of human hubris. However, it seems you are overestimating the prevalence of such events and extrapolating that to the current situation. If you take a birds-eye view on medical progress over the last 50-100 years says, it's just incredible.

> All that said, personally, it seems the unknown long term risks of vaccination outweigh the more or less known risks of covid both on an individual level (I don't want to get it) and a community level (I'd rather like community spread to stop, so I can go back to being a hermit by choice); but if community spread wasn't happening near me, I would be happier not trying new medicine within a year of development.

Agree with you. From what we know today it seems that the unknown long term risks of the vaccines are a subset of the unknown long term risks of Covid.

I know this is an inflammatory topic that evokes visceral feelings but.. you should be aware that when you are trying to change someone's mind, aggressive arguing like this is much more likely to make the other person believe what they already believe more strongly (i.e. the opposite of what you want).

Go to your local hospital and see for yourself how deadly the disease is.

I can't just walk in.

That said I know several people that have had it. Some elderly with existing conditions. Worst case was my aunt who got pneumonia from it. She's in her mid sixties and diabetic. She was in the hospital for a week.

Was in the emergency room with my son a few months back, not overflowing or anything, but I wasn't there to track Covid cases.

In Germany they showed the whole shift of an covid nurse on tv. They really should show something similar in every country. Gives you a lot of perspective.

Do you know what the name of this program is? I'd be interested to see if I could find it online somewhere.

Pflege ist #NichtSelbstverständlich | Joko und Klaas

Edit: It's available on a german video on demand service maybe a vpn will work for you https://www.prosieben.de/tv/joko-klaas-gegen-prosieben/video...

my coworker's parents caught it. they were in their 50s. the mom became severely ill and was hospitalized for weeks. the dad died. my coworker himself got it and was mostly fine.

it's really hard to intuit how wildly variable this disease is when you only have a couple personal data points and distrust/feel detached from the statistics being reported, but it's real.

Going only off personal experience can really skew your perceptions. If I'd've been living away from home at the time, and thus avoided catching it, it would've completely changed the colour of our experiences:

* Mother, 50s - metallic taste for two weeks, loss of appetite, some fatigue * Father, 50s - sore throat for a week * Sister, ~20 / Grandmother, ~80 - both had similar symptoms of fatigue, body aches, sore throat, feeling hot/cold, some change to taste * Grandfather, ~85, multiple pre-existing conditions (COPD, heart failure, prediabetes, history of TIAs) - only reason we knew he had it was due to a positive test

Going off those alone, it seems unpleasant but not too dire. Then you add me in:

* Me, 30 - same symptoms as sister/grandmother for about a week, then ten days in the ICU after my O2 sats dropped to 78 overnight (and remained in the 80s on oxygen). Narrowly avoided ventilation as I responded to CPAP.

Suddenly it seems a lot more serious.

> Was in the emergency room with my son a few months back, not overflowing or anything, but I wasn't there to track Covid cases.

In most (all?) hospitals, Covid cases are separated from general emergency because you don't want your emergency room transformed in a constant cluster.

I think parent's advice is solid. Covid sits at this sweet spot where it's not that bad for young folks, but it's easily transmissible and mortality increases exponentially with age. Which means certain demographics will be hit disproportionally hard.

At the same time only a small fraction, say 10-20%, of the population has had a Covid infection. So while some are hit hard, at the same time it might not affect you and the people around you too much.

Maybe ask your family doctor/general practitioner, or you have a nurse in your network or wider family, or somebody working in a hospital or care home? Also speaking to older folks like parents or grand-parents can be helpful to get another perspective.

Well I've had two family members die from it and another on death's door in the hospital and now is losing her hair months after recovery, so anecdotes can go both ways.

I'm also not claiming anecdotes are what are making up my mind. I was simply responding to the suggestion that I walk into a hospital.

I too believe that anecdotes are poor evidence at best, and I completely believe others have had 180* experiences from myself.