If many people do what you are doing, some percentage can get the virus and allow it to mutate further, reducing the vaccine efficiency, putting others to risk.

Prisoner's dilemma at play.

meta edit: I don't like your post becoming completely gray and therefore up-voted you. It's a view that many people hold and it needs to be answered not by screaming "down-vote the selfish!" but rather with good arguments.

Realistically, there's basically no chance of vaccinating enough people fast enough on a global scale to stop the virus mutating further and reducing the vaccine efficacy, probably not even of reducing the odds of it that much, and it's not even clear that the countries with the best vaccine rollouts will manage to stop it spreading at this point. And that's despite vaccination on an unprecedented speed and scale for a disease this new, using technology that didn't even exist a few years ago.

Oh 100%. It's a selfish play I admit. But if there's greater than zero risk of any long-term unknown effects from a vaccine, the number of people already vaccinated means the expected value is probably negative for anyone who hasn't been vaccinated yet.

Ignoring the blatant disregard for the safety of others, your calculations are off the mark.

The Delta variant is the only one you should be concerned about from here on. And a single dose of vaccine only provides minimal protection against it.

For your scheme to be safe, you would need about 80% of people around you to have 2+ doses of a high-efficacy vaccine, and ideally all with Pfizer over Astra, given their relative efficacy.

There's a greater than zero risk you're going about this wrong and will end up catching a new variant. Vaccination works, if you ACTUALLY GET THE SHOTS.

Cheers

There seems to be a sizeable number of people who don't want to vaccinate, plus children under 12 won't be, and also the pandemic will survive in developing countries and travelers coming from them for a while.

So I think the risk of getting infected in fall may well be significant enough to make taking the vaccine a good decision.

Plus of course by vaccinating you no longer need to worry about minimizing infection risk, you don't need to get fake certificates to access things that are restricted to vaccinated people, you are free to travel to developing countries without risk.

Also if you don't vaccinate now and the pandemic somehow has a resurgence you will have to rush to vaccinate then and stay at least month in full isolation while others who are vaccinated are freely going to events instead of doing the isolation now that events haven't fully resumed yet.

Vaccination has its risks too. Long-term pain in the vaccinated shoulder, that will eventually spread to the other arm (due to sudden overuse), will not make you enjoy your life either.

Having to test regularly may be less of a bother in life, if you lose this stupid vaccination lottery..., if you want to play on the convenience note.

Your very high probability rides on the virus dying down. Which will happen after enough people get vaccinated to bring Reff < 1. Which with the original variant required 50% of the population and probably only adults counted. With the newest variant, that threshold grows to about 80% and probably needs to involve children. The longer we wait, the higher the chance it will never die down.

People who have got Covid are also immune - there is a paper published in Nature which showed that even people who had mild cases of Covid have long-term (possibly) lifetime Covid immunity.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4

Except that Covid isn't just one disease, and immunity is a moving target. If you got the original variant back in February 2020, that may or may not protect you from a new variant with new mechanisms for evading/suppressing immune response.

I’m not sure which child to respond to, so responding here.

I’m pretty well aligned with this and I’m not sure why it’s getting the downvotes.

COVID has never been communicated to me as something serious for my age group. Maybe I’m misinformed, but I’ve never feared getting COVID. I was _terrified_ of needing hospital care _during a hockey stick_.

COVID was communicated to me as a hospital killer. I was terrified I’d have a bad time and not get the care I needed or, worse, steal care from someone else in a zero-sum game. And it wasn’t just COVID during that window. If we “hockey sticked” and exceeded hospital capacity, any care I needed (heart problems, broken bones, different virus, etc.) would all be wrapped up in the same zero-sum game.

I quarantined for months, then socially distanced, and now I’m pretty much back to life as normal. What changed for me: my perceived risk of my local hospitals getting knocked over by COVID is now close to zero. In my eyes we’ve weathered the storm.

Am I missing something?

Long covid. I'm 28, fit and healthy, and I had covid that wasn't bad enough to require hospital treatment, but left with me with fatigue, shortness of breath and heart arrythmias that are only just improving 12 months later and are still not back to full fitness.

I am 42, fairly fit and healthy too, and I still suffer from minor heart arrhythmia and an occasional fatigue 6 months after contracting a mild case of covid.

Several folks at my gym have said similar. They’re still at 80% capacity after 6+ months of contracting COVID, and are in their 20s and 30s. Sorry this is happening to you…

Thanks for your kindness. I am slowly coming back. Let us hope that none of those aftereffects are permanent.

Being a part of a chain of transmission that kills someone, when you could have instead been the person who broke the chain and saved a life?

Are you advocating for full population vaccination of all contagious diseases with mortality rates (that have vaccines) or is there something special about COVID?

I'm introducing into your narrative a notion of morality in addition to your narrative (and the siblings narrative) of whether covid vaccination is in your self-interest.

It’s not purely self interest. If you note, my comment says my “or worse” outcome is that I steal hospital care from _someone else_ in a zero-sum game. I’m asking what is special about _this_ virus beyond being a “hospital killer.”

I don’t believe COVID has a monopoly on your narrative (chain of transmission leading to death). I’m asking if I should be special casing COVID, or treating it like any other virus.

On a per-vaccine basis, you could consider the advice of doctors and health professionals, plus the moral implications you're comfortable with, and balance those against self-interest.

You've asked "what am I missing?" and from your narrative I'm asking if you're missing the morality.

This is where I’m at too. I think we are on the same page, but saying it out loud to give you a chance to correct me.

I live in a community that hasn’t taken COVID seriously. Any chain of transmission I carry on would likely be “fungible” in my mind - If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.

Strong anti-quarantine, anti-mask, anti-short-time-to-market-vaccine.

But mixed in are a lot of _strong_ pro-vaccine folks who collectively have offset the need for masks to keep the hospitals from falling over. They’ve carried the torch of public good in my mind. They’ve offset the primary risk of this pandemic.

I’m on the fence and it feels like my decision isn’t consequential beyond personal risk and daily interactions (friends/family). If I transmit, I feel like it would be in a hurd where transmission was likely anyways and I was a randomly selected path vs an amplifier.

I wore a mask to offset risk of transmission to keep hospitals online. But injecting myself with a novel vaccine… I feel like I’m better off rolling the dice on contracting COVID and re-rolling to get side effects, vs rolling the dice once for the vaccine.

My choice has been reduced to a personal choice. It’s the same choice I make when I travel for the holidays. Example: I get the flu vaccine when I go see elderly or young family members. But right now I don’t feel it’s a moral imperative for COVID where, if I pass on a vaccine, I’m a horrible person who doesn’t care about my fellow man.

Does that make sense or am I off base?

Most of the arguments against accepting an mRNA shot read as “too new, do not want” to me. What are the specific long-term side effects that one should be aware of when accepting an mRNA shot?

This + side-effects not going away as advertised. Finding some longer term side effect studies is not that easy in general search engine, due to slew of regurgitated basic information about side effects.

Would be nice to have some data, instead of a ton of articles that say the same old "most symptoms go away within a few days". How does one decide whether to vaccinate or not based on such information? What is most? What is few days?

Some side effects are extremely common, like shoulder pain. Acceptable if it goes away in a week, let's say. But if there's a risk I'll have it for 3 months or forever, I'd like to know how common is that to make a calculated risk assessment. < 1% probably acceptable. >2-3% probably not.

And this will only be more apparent with time and more studies. The study I managed to find tracked people only for 8 days, had a nice graph of symptoms fading away with time. Mind calming exponential decay. :) Good, but 5% still had some symptoms at day 8. How many do have them at day 60?

I don't understand why such information has to be so hard to find for normal people, who don't spend days searching around on google scholar.

It’s more the effects of free circulating spike protein in the bloodstream than mRNA triggering ribosomes.

> It’s more the effects of free circulating spike protein in the bloodstream than mRNA triggering ribosomes.

The mRNA vaccines are designed to express the spike protein in a membrane-bound form; very little is found floating free. See https://www.deplatformdisease.com/blog/spike-protein-circula....

Additionally, the mRNA vaccines express a modified spike protein that is stabilized in its "prefusion" state (as seen on the virus itself before it binds with a cell), and the resulting complex seems to have somewhat fewer effects even when it does interact with a cell.

And cytotoxicity - with the second shot, the body will have cytotoxic T cells which could target some of the transfected cells.

But, why not to be worried:

- It's a normal process and most cells will be replaced.

- The effects would be tiny, especially compared to an infection with the real thing. If this was causing widespread issues, we would know by now.

- All studies done so far indicate that only a very small amount will enter systemic circulation.

It's a classic risk tradeoff, and the risks of taking the vaccine are much smaller than the risk of getting the real infection (billions of viruses replicating vs. one-time dose, real spike protein vs. stabilized spike protein).

I don't understand what you are saying.

What is the significance of either of those?