Historically speaking, countries have refrained from forcing even medical workers and people caring for the elderly to get flu vaccines, even though this argument - that there are some people for whom the vaccine will not be effective - is even more true of that (in fact, as I understand it some studies suggest the flu vaccine might be basically ineffective at preventing serious complications and death in those at risk of them, leaving its ability to stop people from being infected and spreading it as the only way to reduce risk). As far as I can tell, the only reason to treat Covid differently basically boils down to partisan politics...

Of course not. Most countries have mandated vaccines for HCW.

The reason the flu vaccine isn't one of them is because it's not that effective to begin with and you have to take it every year. It's not effective enough to really stop an epidemic, so instead vaccinating patients is the main thrust instead of HCW, because the overall impact will be fairly low.

> As far as I can tell, the only reason to treat Covid differently basically boils down to partisan politics...

A difference is that COVID is much deadlier, no?

People can essentially get "long-covid" from the vaccine. Unfortunately, people are afraid to talk about it for fear of being labeled an antivax-er.

You'll, of course, cite a source?

There aren't actually any virus particles in the mRNA vaccines, so there's no biological mechanism for that to happen.

I can get a source in a bit. IIRC it was the spike protein that causes some (still unknown) response from the human body. The mRNA vaccine elicit a response from the immune system to reproduce the spike protein.

We have no idea that the spike protein causes long covid. It's much more likely that damage from the viral infection and immune response is at least an equal cause.

Beyond that, the virus causes orders of magnitude more spike protein response, so even if that was true, which it probably isn't, then it is still very unlikely that the vaccine could cause long-covid.

Also, all vaccines introduce spike proteins in the body, not just mRNA vaccines.

Source for above:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201217154046.h...

Relevant part "The spike proteins alone can cause brain fog". And vaccines do produce viral proteins as intended.

That claim isn't made or supported by the cited nature article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-00771-8).

It appears to come from a researcher contacted by the site for the article. And it's probably true.

However, there's a few reasons to believe that "long" covid like symptoms wouldn't come from the spike protein alone:

1. As a parent mentioned, you generate a lot fewer proteins w/ the vaccine than the virus

2. IIUC, those proteins are more localized. The soreness with an initial injection is inflammation due to spike protein creation, and that's usually localized to the injection site. The proteins themselves are less likely to travel as widely as the virus.

3. The proteins don't last very long. They're gone after a few days. So long term symptoms wouldn't be due to a continued immune response. They might be due to inflammation that hasn't gone down, I guess, but that seems unlikely to last months.

And again, all of these will be worse with the virus than the vaccine. You'll have more spike proteins, for longer, over a larger part of your body, and also have a virus attacking you in addition to the immune response.

Another thing is that spike protein from the vaccine in the arm has a much tougher time getting to the brain than viruses in the nose/olfactory bulb. That's on top of less spike to begin with.

> Having long term side effects doesn't round to zero, even for young healthy people. And vaccine side effects do.

I'm hesitant to just accept this as a fact. Vaccinations can cause very strong immune reactions in young adults that would otherwise likely suffer mild or asymptomatic infections. There are many surveys that query for a basket of sometimes unspecific symptoms such as "fatigue" or "brain fog" as a follow-up of a COVID infection. I'm missing that volume of surveys in the follow-up for vaccinations.