At this point hundreds of millions of people have taken the various vaccines. There clearly are no major short or medium term effects (other than the reported, rare side effects).
Also you can literally read all the documents provided to the FDA concerning the efficacy and safety of the vaccines. There isn't a giant conspiracy, all the original studies and data are in the open.
I don't think their decision is unreasonable. I'm personally not looking at the same factors, and think of covid vaccination differently. I'm guessing you do, also. I personally don't see a problem with that. Who am I to tell force someone else to my way of thinking?
The information is not hard to find. Yes, there are a lot of pro-vaccine resources and anti-vaccine resources as well, but it’s obviously not hard to find the source materials.
Lots of things harm us as a group, and we accept them. We don't, and can't, aim for zero risk.
I will not tolerate a society that does this, fortunately I'm in a position to hurt it by simply not getting vaccinated. I have no doubts that it's perfectly safe and I'd be fine, with the bonus of being more protected.
So yes. You are the reason I'm doing my part to ensure we'll never achieve herd immunity. Good job.
Don't think of it as hurting a society that upsets you, think of it as hurting the individual people who get a serious disease through no fault of their own and suffer and die from it. It's very unlikely you'll hurt any of the people who have upset you - they are probably all well vaccinated.
There are all sorts of actions you could take to promote bodily autonomy, and I'd support them, but if you're really choosing to do this one out of spite because some small section of society has offended you, then I would encourage you to find a different way to express your distress.
> So yes. You are the reason I'm doing my part to ensure we'll never achieve herd immunity. Good job.
Along with your old fashioned view on bodily autonomy, I'd suggest you take a old fashioned view on personal responsibility too and try to avoid blaming others for a choice that you are making.
Two outcomes: either my not taking the vaccine has no impact on society as a whole so it doesn't matter, or it helps having a negative impact in society as a whole and therefore it also directly or indirectly hurts the groups who upset me (be it via further restrictions, health or economic downturns), in which case I feel vindicated. Most importantly: in both cases my actions spite those who would pressure me into doing it which by itself is a good enough outcome for me.
That last argument goes both ways: people who feel it's acceptable to bully me out of my autonomy should take personal responsibility for the choice they are making, so dismissing that argument is effortless on my part.
edit: I should point out that for very personal reasons I won't be getting in to, autonomy over the self is something that I hold very close to my heart.
I phrased it that way because I worry that in seeking to spite society as a whole you're missing the fact that you'll likely hurt specific individuals. Most of whom have nothing to do with the reasons you want to spite society.
> in both cases my actions spite those who would pressure me
They really don't. The people your actions (and public support of them) will most likely contribute towards hurting (and possibly killing) are those who are sick in other ways, or those who hold similar views to yourself.
If you live in a democracy, there are much better, well tested ways for you to promote bodily autonomy without deliberately taking actions most likely to harm people you agree with or the sick and weak. I'd love to see the cause of bodily autonomy promoted in ways I could respect, but this action won't help with that.
> people who feel it's acceptable to bully me out of my autonomy should take personal responsibility for the choice they are making, so dismissing that argument is effortless on my part.
Well, I think it's a poor dismissal. If people are bullying you, then they need to be responsible for their bullying, not for what you do in reaction to it. If you're really insisting on people being responsible for other peoples reactions, then don't you worry what you'll be responsible for when people react to your behavior?
It's my opinion that allowing yourself to be so affected by other people's views (whether it's towards spite or compliance) is fundamentally a less good way to live than deciding what you think is right and living according to that.
I do understand the extreme self-hurting aversive reaction to behavior you don't like (and there are places for it), but the internet has made that kind of attitude dangerous - you'll find bullies on every side of every topic, and to let which bullies your filter bubble rubbed you against dictate your behavior in serious ways is to cede way too much of your precious autonomy.
From my POV there is a heavy stigma associated with anti-vaccine activists downplaying and disbelieving the very real stats about covid sicknesses and deaths.
At this point the COVID vaccines are among the most "tested" medicines in history just on merit of their huge scale deployment, with them only truly lacking much insight into what happens after 2 years, which is something we hardly know about COVID itself.
Get it, whatever it cost you, because it's your duty.
Even the blood clots that were found with AZ and J&J are happening with the virus itself at higher rate.
So it's just a simply choosing lesser risk.
There was also heavy disinformation campaign against AZ because AZ was the only non-profit vaccine made and its presence was standing in the way of Sputnik V being introduced into EU[1]. J&J has similar issues and it wasn't affected as much. Pfizer[2][3] was also targeted similarly, but the problem was that not much could be found on mRNA vaccines. I guess the worst one was some inflammation of hart in young people that resolves on its own.
[1] https://www.biospace.com/article/russia-sees-opportunity-in-...
[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-pfizer-covid-disinformation-s...
[3] https://www.euronews.com/2021/04/29/eu-slams-russia-and-chin...
The "Russian disinformation" argument doesn't really work either, because Russia targeted mRNA vaccines specifically. The Sputnik vaccine (in theory) has the same problem as the AZ and J&J vaccines, also being based on viral vectors.
The fact that the lab leak hypothesis stopped being a heterodoxy despite long being censored by big social media networks by non-medical professionals pretending that by citing politifact they were proxy medical professionals was shrugged off and censorship didn't even pause. Negative feedback has no effect on the strategy even when it reveals a stunning lack of expertise on the part of the censors. We even saw papers like WaPo just quietly retroactively correcting headlines and continuing to dish out Pinocchio ratings.
I don't find the data to convince me of the anti-vax argument at all, save for potential arguments that there might be an angle to freeride at least short term off other people mitigating covid through vaccination and non-vaccination measures.
I'd love to learn more about this but run into the walls your described about everyone dismissing your worries. Where is this data?
This is really nasty, I'm inhaling litres of it per year while vaping.
"I held off on a COVID vaccine because I wanted to wait for data with positive signals for both pregnancy in the short term and long-run fertility. I’m trying to get pregnant, and those are the two things I care about most.
Vaccine data is so politicized that it’s actually somewhat difficult to find full studies, results discussions or data sets as a layman, because every search term redirects you to “yes, get vaccinated right now, your concerns are merely ignorance”
The other study that concerns me shows that the vaccine’s lipid nanoparticles— which carry the RNA instructions for the spike protein — move beyond the deltoid muscle they’re injected into and accumulate in other tissues, and seem to accumulate in ovarian tissue preferentially.
That study looked at a very small sample, but given what we think we know about the spike protein — it likely causes some degree of tissue damage on its own, independent of the virus — it’s something that definitely demands further study
Anyway, I feel like I need to come clean at this point. For a long time I was avoiding the vaccine because I wanted to hold out for more data. Now I’m actively choosing not to get it because what I’ve seen is providing the opposite of a positive safety signal for my purposes.
It’s really important that I clarify I’m not at a high risk of exposure. I generally don’t work or even socialize outside my home. Lockdown life frankly doesn’t look that different from my preferred lifestyle. If I were a high exposure risk I would think about this differently
I’m in the process of getting a prescription for prophylactic ivermectin, which has also become extremely politicized — to the point of becoming a censored topic on some platforms. I’m not giving advice, here. I’m not making broader efficacy claims. I’m just trying to be honest
COVID is no joke. You do not want to get COVID. “Long COVID” symptoms should concern you even if you don’t think an infection would kill you. But the vaccines are very new and skipped a great deal of otherwise required safety testing, and some of this data is really worrisome."
https://mobile.twitter.com/webdevMason/status/14056498962128...