According to the mRNA vaccine data I've seen, for adults the benefit of protection against COVID-19 vastly outweighs any observed risks due to the vaccine. This was already the case after the very large phase-3 studies, and much more so after real-world data from hundreds of millions of vaccinations became available. So it should not be surprising that there is a broad consensus that getting the vaccine is a good idea.
Of course the initial studies excluded riskier groups such as pregnant women and children. Now there is some data, but no general consensus between the different countries' regulatory agencies yet.
Overall, I don't see a "blank check" for the pharma companies at all. They had to conduct and publish very large studies before getting even emergency use authorizations for their products.
Lead poisoning for example takes years to manifest itself.
So did other drugs which took years until regulators retracted them because they did more harm then good.
Specifically about mRNA vaccines, we know little about the long term effects of the lipid nano particles used in them and there are reasons to be concerned.
With hundreds of millions of people having received mRNA vaccines by now, we most likely have seen all the short term side effects that there are, except the rarest of them. I would not worry too much about these either.
> Overall, the robust inflammatory milieu induced by LNPs, combined with presentation of the vaccine-derived peptides/protein outside of antigen-presenting cells, might cause tissue damage and exacerbate side effects. Since self-antigen presentation in an inflammatory environment has been linked to autoimmune disease development (Charles A Janeway et al., 2001), this merits further investigation, albeit not detected here.
Because short term inflammation is, as far as I know, not a big deal and somewhat desirable for vaccinations? It is my understanding that we intentionally mix in inflammatory substances ("adjuvants") with normal vaccines to kick the immune system into action?
The fact that those concerns are hand-waved away makes me more concerned. I mean, I don't trust Big Pharma, but at the very least, the FDA stood in their way. This time, the FDA gave them a pass called "Emergency Use Authorization," and that worries me.
For myself, I see less risk in going the route where I may not even get COVID at all and risk actually getting it, rather than having a 100% chance of injecting myself with a vaccine that I don't trust.
If you've already had COVID-19 you could argue the numbers become less clear.
Also, according to some estimates, 60-90% of people have had COVID, so I could have had it.
How can you possibly disagree with that? There is a several orders of magnitude difference. Data for the USA: there are 6,207 reports of people dying after getting the vaccine (of which only a few have a plausible causal relationship between getting the vaccine and death) [1], while there are 607,289 registered COVID-19 deaths [2] (and yes, the excess deaths do agree with that number [3]). There are exactly three confirmed vaccine deaths in the USA, from TTS due to the J&J vaccine.
> Until we know more about their long-term effects, we don't know
I agree, so we should act on basis of the data we have right now. And that data says overwhelmingly says getting a vaccine is much safer than getting COVID-19 on the short and mid long-term. There is nothing that points to that on the long term suddenly the vaccines will be worse than the virus.
> I'm in the age group that has higher risk of blood clots from the vaccines.
There is no evidence that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines increase the risk of blood cloths. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that COVID-19 does.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad... [2] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/?CDC_AA_refVal=http... [3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
These vaccines are still experimental. I am not going to take any one of them until at least they are not and companies accept liability for them.
On top of that, trying to shame people into taking the vaccines, as I see so many doing, is authoritarian. It does not lead to a good place.
This is my line in the sand against authoritarianism. It turns out that my line is against being forced to be part of an experiment. Where's yours?
You have always been responsible not only for your own safety but also for the safety of your contacts/co-workers/environment. If you think otherwise, you might want to reflect about communicable diseases/STDs/traffic/gun safety/work place safety/you name it in general and it should become glaringly obvious. Covid safety is not different. For now, the required measures are more severe but it is not true that it is a special in regard of having to look out for others.
Yet people who refuse to get vaccinated seem to have no problem making this judgement for other people that they are likely to spread COVID to, when they fall ill.
Other than that, I'm not responsible for the health of other people. They are responsible for their own health.
Unless you are living in a spacesuit, you shedding viral particles into common spaces does make you responsible for the health of other people.
More generally, there's an entire field devoted to such matters: epistemology.
What is mind boggling is the callousness of people questioning vaccination because they think their personal risk is low when so many have died, and a belief in some unproven hypothetical risk when so many facts are weighing in favor of vaccination.
People seem to have a problem with overcompensating for issues they align with positively.
This happens with vaccines, masks, racial, gender, identity, environmental, etc. basically any issue that brings up strong feelings in people tends to go into a religious fanaticism (chips all in, this is absolutely right with no question, anyone not in on the groupthink is the enemy)
We also already subject immigrants to medical inspections and forced vaccinations.
You are wrong, you need a valid digital certificate which can come from 1) two doses and 14 days; 2) negative PCR less than 73hrs; 3) certificate you had covid (in some cases a vaccine dose is required on top). Considering people have had Covid multiple times, a generic exemption for them might be too broad.
The biggest issue is whether businesses can use your personal information for purposes other than checking vaccination status.
Some of the European systems I've read about seem to discourage that, and the GDPR would also seem to prohibit it. But there's no willpower for such laws in the US, so we'd inevitably end up with the synergy of government and corporate power, like everything else. For instance, half the surveillance systems I listed in my other comment rely on abusing government-mandated identifiers.
The only way to be able to escape this is to be independently wealthy, which with the way our economy is designed is only ever possible for a minority of people. I agree that vaccine requirements are part of ever-creeping totalitarian control, regardless of apparent prudence, but to frame it as some sort of not-yet-here watershed moment is either uninformed or disingenuous.
All I’m saying is that I’d expect to see less consensus here on not touching these matters.