I cannot trust the institutions pushing this vaccine at all. At worst, I trust the opposite of what they say about anything politicized. But let's just say I don't trust them. In the absence of a trusted authority, I can only make this decision based on my own research. Unfortunately I am not qualified to interpret the data meaningfully, and I truly believe that if there was data suggesting that the vaccine was equally dangerous to the virus, it would be suppressed.
What remains is essentially a total vacuum of information. I then have to make decisions based on intuition and the error bars I perceive. What I expect is that the publicized covid numbers are better or equal to the reality, and the vaccine danger is worse or equal. The publicized numbers for covid give me essentially a zero risk of any problems, because I am young, fit and healthy. The real numbers are going to be even better. Meanwhile, the vaccine problems don't seem to be fewer for young people, but just kind of random. I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times. I have no idea what to expect from a MRNA vaccine, whether there could be problems that appear years later, etc, and I cannot trust any authority that says there is no risk.
There is also the aspect of direct action. If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life. If I get some bad side effects from an untrusted injection, I did that to myself and it will feel mentally much worse. All of this is to say, I don't care at all if I get covid, because I'll be fine. I won't inject myself with an untrusted medicine to avoid that.
"I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times."
No one whom I know who has had COVID describes it like any normal respiratory virus, and it attacks multiple systems. I'm terrified of brain damage, and before-and-after MRIs shows brain damage in >10% of people who contract COVID19.
"If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life"
And if you kill a loved one by sharing COVID19? Or give them brain fog? That's not something I could live with.
The deeper argument, though, is about herd immunity. If we don't stop the spread, really bad things happen.
I'll mention: Do you use proper masks? N95 and proper nanofiber masks are widely available, and appear to do more to stop the spread than the vaccine. They're also risk-free.
The odds of this are far less than the odds of me killing my wife by taking a drive with her. In the same way that I can live with the risk of driving a car with her in it, I can live with this risk. Of course if that actually happened I would feel terrible, in both cases. But life is about weighing risks, and for now I'm comfortable with the risk of remaining unvaccinated.
No, I don't wear masks. That's a different ethical discussion. I don't feel or accept a moral burden for potentially spreading a virus in any case. I wouldn't walk about while sick of course, or have uninformed sex if I had an STD, but if I'm asymptomatic and end up accidentally giving someone an illness in the course of normal life, sorry, but that's just life. People who spread the flu accidentally are not immoral people, whether they get the flu shot or not. Likewise here.
As a baseline number, about a half-million Americans died of COVID already. For comparison, there were about 40k car deaths in the US. For someone like yourself, taking no precautions, the odds of catching COVID19 are way more than 10x of a fatal car accident.
The more critical problem is a systemic one. If no one takes precautions, nearly 10 million people in the US will die. If everyone does, virtually no ones needs to die. It's like polluting or littering.
And COVID19 isn't flu. The flu doesn't leave a quarter of people with brain fog 9 months later.
>I can only make this decision based on my own research.
>Unfortunately I am not qualified to interpret the data meaningfully,
You do your own research but admit that you are unqualified to do that research.
> and I truly believe that if there was data suggesting that the vaccine was equally dangerous to the virus, it would be suppressed.
You believe institutions are untrustworthy yet somehow all of them are able to perfectly coordinate to suppress data.
>The publicized numbers for covid give me essentially a zero risk of any problems, because I am young, fit and healthy.
Nothing about your youth or fitness reduces your risk of transmitting this virus.
>I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times.
It's clear you either do not know nor desire to know how to protect yourself and others from respiratory viruses. This is a new virus that seems like it jumped to us from bats.
>There is also the aspect of direct action. If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life. If I get some bad side effects from an untrusted injection, I did that to myself and it will feel mentally much worse. All of this is to say, I don't care at all if I get covid, because I'll be fine.
You live in a society. Delta is looking to have an R0 of 4-9, that means if you are infected, on average, you will infect 4-9 new people with the virus. If you are infected and suffer long-term damage to your brain and lungs that makes you unable to work, you will qualify for disability, which is paid for by everyone.
This one surprised me. Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic, and the viral load you're carrying, affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others? That was my understanding, along with young fit people having shorter, milder bouts.
> Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic... affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others?
Infected people transmit the virus for a number of days prior to when they first (or ever) show systems.
Edit: following up, I found a recent study[1] that used a pretty extensive contact tracing effort to find
> Most transmission events occurred during the pre-symptomatic phase (59.2%). SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility to infection increases with age, while transmissibility is not significantly different between age groups and between symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals.
Your likelihood to become infected does depend on your age, but once you are infected your likelihood to transmit the virus is the same as everyone else's.
On the contrary, publications would salivate at the prospect of dropping a bombshell like this. People love reading and watching salacious, outrageous coverups and how they unravel.
You would need a multi-national conspiracy with various state and private actors coordinating and suppressing information about negative effects of the vaccine for it to be at a scale "equally dangerous" to the extent of the deaths and injuries caused by actual infection.
And it's not like we have no data about negative side effects. We have data on side effects: getting them is literally a handful in a million chance and they're manageable when they occur[1].
1. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/07/13/mo...
- less than 18 years old. For everyone older, all countries in the world have come to the conclusion that vaccination is safer than staying without vaccination.
- only considering yourself and not the risk that you are part of the reason it spreads.
What lies at the foundation of all this is your distrust and I would suggest you consider how to deal with that. If you can't trust the media and governments (and you actually should trust them to a large part), how about following role-models or friends? Or best how about following data and science? If a whole nation such as Israel goes for a vaccine such as Pfizer don't you think they do their homework?
Up until December we had the Pres/VP candidates saying they would not take any vaccine that Trump endorsed. Then they won, and were faced with convincing everyone to take those very vaccines. Do you believe them now, or then?
It’s perfectly reasonable to agree or disagree with rushing vaccine deployment even further, but don’t attack a straw man.
We humans certainly suffer from omission bias, it was probably safer in our selection environment.
Our everyday life is full of cases where we do dangerous stuff which we don't feel as dangerous because, everybody is doing that, since forever, so yeah you know some things may be dangerous but c'mon, it's not that bad, you don't want to miss out on life by being the only crazy person who doesn't get in a car or something.
When something totally new happens like covid vaccines, it's hard to get the right intuitions, and probably each will have their own, using their own biases.
My personal rules of thumb are:
1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).
2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy
3. I don't trust journalists to obey to the conspiracy; money in media is about attention grabbing, if there were serious side effects they would have ridden the tide (and probably even inflated it)
4. I personally know a few people who died of covid; I don't know anybody that had serious side effects of vaccines. Even if the media is hiding the problem, I would expect it to be visible in my direct experience (as it was for covid)
> 1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).
I do trust the authorities to be incompetent enough not to collect such data.
> 2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy
I do trust governments to engage in groupthink. That's kind of like the idiot's version of coordinating a conspiracy.
In the process, I trust authorities to "message" and dishonestly manipulate information going out in ways which appear coordinated.
I mean, sure. Governments have been and will be dishonest and lying and have been and will be again caught red handed. They also have been and will be accidentally right about various things.
If whatever a government says is always the opposite of true, then it would be super easy to have certainties! I wish that were true. Unfortunately I don't think that works that way.
Without vaccines, at present, my risk of COVID19 would be marginal at best:
- I live in an area with a high vaccination rate, and a low incidence rate
- I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks (which are probably more effective than vaccines), and pretty strong social distancing, which I can do working from home.
I'm vaccinated, but if I wasn't, my odds of catching COVID19 would be nominal at best.
That's different than, for example, a retail worker.
If I didn't believe vaccines were perfectly safe, OP's decision wouldn't be crazy. I am a general-purpose nerd, and I know enough biology to make an informed decision without relying on political authority figures. If that wasn't the case, I might make the same decision as OP.
Now, I can do the math on why, if many people make the same decision as OP, we'll have a serious problem, but again, most people (not OP specifically) can't do math.
You can have empathy without agreement.
Will you take this strong precautions forever?
I may be wrong (because what do I know?), but my assumption is that COVID will become endemic and sooner or later we'll all get it. I don't know that for sure, I didn't spend a lot of time following the numbers and reading right and left about this topic. I just can't devote significant time into doing a "proper study" of the matter. So, instead I'm going to apply my personal heuristic, like everybody else.
In my previous comment I shared my personal heuristics about "can the government effectively hide the dangers of the vaccine?"
Here I'll respond to whether I believe it's rational to not get vaccinated because other people will be vaccinated and the problem will go away without me risking it:
From what I could see, COVID seemed to be very transmissible; despite strong social distancing and lockdowns the contagions kept going. The only way to stop it would be to either doing a prolonged and airtight global lockdown (hard to implement) or to have a vaccination rate that exceeds the herd immunity threshold.
And this vaccination level has to be maintained throughout the world, or else we have to lock down travel in perpetuity, which is again, IMO hard to implement.
Currently we do observe regional variation in covid spread; my intuition is that a lot that can be attributed to the "reverse tinkerbell effect": we're avoiding travel, in some cases forbidding travel, testing people who travels; we cannot reach the conclusion that if you live in an area where vaccination level is high you're going to be fine; as soon as travel resumes you'll encounter unvaccinated people more often.
As I said, I don't know; it's just a heuristic. I think it's possible that I'll catch covid in the next few years. Let's put a generously low probability of 0.1%. Then let's attach a generously low probability of having serious problems if I do catch it, again 0.1% (probably higher than that, but lets be generious). With those number I'd have a chance of one in a million to get severe problems of covid in the near future.
There have been 3.4 billion doses of vaccine administered so far; if 1 in a million of them had severe side effects, that would mean 3.4 million people would be affected; I think somebody would have noticed. This is why I was focusing on addressing whether the governments can actively hiding this problem. That's the main counterarguments I hear to my heuristic about pros/cons of getting the vaccine now, namely that there are indeed million of people who're suffering from the vaccine but we don't know about them because the government is lying (I find this hard to believe; I cannot rule that out logically, but my credence in that proposition is quite low)
I think COVID19 spread because, at every point, people said "It can't be that bad," and it turned out it was. Our response was characterized by wishful thinking.
People can and do catch COVID19 multiple times, and that will only increase as it mutates. Let's start with your assumptions and go one level deeper:
1. COVID19 is highly transmissible
2. COVID19 will become endemic
3. You'll be exposed to COVID19 multiple times
With vaccine breakthrough rates of 5% for the original, and perhaps 20% for delta, and more with growing mutations, you'll catch COVID19 multiple times. Each time, you'll lose a little bit of gray matter in the brain, and sustain other damage. By the time you're old, you'll be a drooling, exhausted zombie idiot.
This makes a lot of additional assumptions, a key one being that breakthrough and brain damage are random events (as opposed to e.g. at-risk individuals), but it is a plausible scenario. We can argue about whether it's 20% odds or 80% odds, but it's definitely not 5% or 95%.
From my perspective, social distancing, masking, and similar just aren't that bad relative to even a moderate risk of the alternative. Proper masks are $2 (ones that filter down to <300nm), mildly uncomfortable, and more effective than vaccines. If we assume independence, proper mask+vaccine+modest social distancing reduces odds of infection to be infinitesimal. I don't believe in independence, but they certainly reduce R0 below 1. Why not?
Now, regarding long term side effects, there are a lot of "alternative news" sources, and random internet anecdotes, which claim relatively common heart problems following vaccination, and some stories of healthy people dying a few days later, though these deaths can't be explicitly linked to a vaccine necessarily. These sources are not more trustworthy than the mainstream media, but if the 2020 election has shown anything, it's that the media is willing to die on the hill for their narrative. These alternative sources are the same sort that were correct about Russiagate and other such media nonsense. So I can trust neither side, and there is at least some fringe evidence that the vaccines are worse than we know.
About long term effects appearing, I can't know if this is possible, and I can't trust anyone who says they do know, since it has been so politicized. There are actually medical doctors who say it could be dangerous in this way, so again, I can't know whether they're crackpots or if a large number aren't just fearful for their jobs and such. If you were a researcher right now and you had some evidence to believe this vaccine could be dangerous long after the injection, I find it hard to believe you could get your message out to any credible mouthpieces at this point.
If, in a couple of years, everything is still fine, then I may relent and get the jab. But right now there is just no way to trust it without trusting institutions which have proven themselves liars.
1) I know enough about molecular biology to tell you the vaccine is safe. You pick up novel stuff all the time. In abstract, we don't know a pebble in your backyard doesn't have some odd chemical which will end humanity, but the odds of that are astronomically low. There just isn't any voodoo in the vaccine.
2) In this case, the claims from "alternative news" are nonsense. With hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine administered, there will be instances of virtually everything happening after the vaccine. That's not to say they're always nonsense -- I read a variety of media -- but in this case, they are.
3) Doctors who fear vaccines are crackpots.
4) You're absolutely right about institutions lying. You're not only right about researchers not being able to get a message out contradicting the party line, but worse, their career would be destroyed. It's the story of the boy who cried wolf.
I agree the CDC has done a terrible job of representing science and establishing trust, but the virus is less politicized in other countries. Look at what those health institutions with better track-records are recommending.
The problem with that calculation though is that it doesn't take into account the increased risk to other people. If you do catch it you'll become a vector for infecting other people, some of which might be a lot more vulnerable or less lucky than yourself. Even if you only pass it on to other younger people, the odds of someone having a bad reaction still go up with infections.
It has not passed the testing that a vaccine needs to have, to be FDA approved. Especially long-term effects testing, which I guess is us now. I doubt the tests will ever be completed now since the makers can already sell every dose they can make.
That said, I'm not too worried about the safety of the vaccine, but I certainly understand people who are.
1) Did that 1957-58 vaccine use existing tech? My understanding is that other RNA vaccines and therapies were already under FDA trials with ~10 year time-frames since the method is new.
2) Why is sequential better, because it is considered safer?
3) Yes, short-term we know it is extremely safe. But there are zero people that have had the vaccine much over 1 year. Long-term effects are unlikely but it's just not scientifically correct to say that this vaccine is better studied than any other just because of the number of doses administered. Duration matters a lot.
Our scientific knowledge in 1957 was limited at best. The double-helix was discovered just a half-decade before. Today, we understand in-depth most of the mechanisms of action involved. There just isn't a comparison here. The COVID19 vaccine is far safer than what we put together in 1957, no question.
> 2) Why is sequential better, because it is considered safer?
It's safer to the original research subjects, but not to the general public. For general safety, you don't find out more by going slowly. You generally learn strictly more from a human study than an animal one, and you learn more from a large study than from a small one.
The point of an animal study before first-in-man is to not endanger a human subject. Small groups come before big ones to pick off things which might e.g. harm 10% of subjects. And so on. The decision was made to skip that step, slightly raising the risk of the subjects, in order to save millions of lives.
Part of that is we had pretty darned good reason to believe the vaccine was safe, and part of that was the grave risk.
> 3) Yes, short-term we know it is extremely safe. But there are zero people that have had the vaccine much over 1 year. Long-term effects are unlikely but it's just not scientifically correct to say that this vaccine is better studied than any other just because of the number of doses administered. Duration matters a lot.
Not so much:
- We have historical evidence. Do you know of any vaccine in the history of mankind which had long-term effects not visible the first few months? I don't.
- We understand mechanisms of action pretty well at this point. Your body gets all sorts of junk thrown at it all the time -- random polens, plastics from your water bottle, randomly mutating cold viruses, and so on. There just isn't any reason to believe a new vaccine is any more dangerous than a random bug bite. Indeed, we understand the stuff going into the vaccine a lot better than we do a random bug.
To answer your question:
(1) Most vaccines don't have 10+ year trials. A year is not even the fastest; the flu on 1957-1958 has a vaccine developed in 4 months.
(2) Most medical trials are slower since everything is done sequentially, since there is no rush. You can do an animal trial, a first-in-man, a small group, then a medium group, and so on. It's a better way to go.
(3) This vaccine has had over 3 billion doses administered. It's far better studied and validated at this point than the vast, vast majority of medical trials.
If you believe "the risk of the vaccine greatly outweighs the risk of getting the virus," can you provide any back-of-the-envelope numbers to back up that statement? From my perspective, the virus already killed half a million Americans, and likely brain-damaged millions. We have enough data on the vaccine to know it doesn't do that.