We don't know what we don't know. That's the downside. You've just taken an experimental drug which has yet to be approved by the FDA, and was designed using novel technology we haven't broadly tested on humans. What's more, the companies providing the shots cannot be held liable for these vaccines.
Who's to say we don't discover issues with mRNA delivery 5 years from now? That risk seems much higher to me than the risk of long COVID for individuals such as yourself (and me).
BNT/Pfizer has so little short- and mid-term downsides that it is difficult to properly spot them statistically, even after about a half billion vaccinations.
Both may have long-term downsides, but: all vaccinations we know didn‘t have any long term downsides. The problems were either visible immediately or they were relatively rare so that they were only detected after a significant number of people had been vaccinated. The downsides of Covid-19 are not rare compared to that, for any age. There is no reason to consider the vaccine more frightening than Covid19. On the other hand everything about the virus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease Covid-19 is experimental because this virus has not been tried on humans until now! The infection it causes is way more complex than the immune reaction BNT/Pfizer causes and it definitely would not have passed a phase-1 study.
If you are afraid of BNT you should basically panic about Covid-19.
Not all: people at risk (older people, people with auto-immune disease and people with existing conditions), just not healthy, active, young people.
> Demonstrated long-term health problems vs potential ones?
The demonstrated effects you are referring to only affect a minuscule portion of people who get COVID. So it's not exactly demonstrated vs potential. One could also point to the minority of vaccinated people who got ill or died and call that demonstrated.
> It isn't. There's not really a nicer way to phrase it. Your sources are questionable, you should fact check them better, you should do your own research. The papers are free to read, there's no excuse. You're Dunning-Kruger-ing this. Get your shit together.
If anything, you're the one who's overly confident of their knowledge here.
Why didn't you quote some percentages on the risk of getting long COVID? Right, because there are none. Because we don't know what we don't know, just as much as on your side of the argument as on mine. The only difference is: you think what you say is the gospel.
Long term side effects won't be known for 5-10 years, especially as vaccinated people have kids.
Reminder of the Thalidomide drug:
> Thalidomide is a sedative drug discovered at the end of the late 1950s, which caused a worldwide tragedy. The drug has been prescribed to many pregnant women in order to relieve pregnancy nausea. It was later found that thalidomide caused irreversible damages to the fetus and thousands of children were born with severe congenital malformations. Many of them did not survive more than a few days after they were born.
https://thalidomide.ca/en/the-canadian-tragedy/
Many of the scientists have now admitted that they refrained from publicly acknowledging the evidence that the virus may have been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Alina Chan was one of those experts who says this now:
> "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory...
It never occurred to these "scientists" that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats in China is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling by "scientists".
The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on? Did they silence scientists who were finding flaws during the vaccine development process?
Bringing up Thalidomide / Contergan in a discussion on current medicine is the best indication that you don‘t have the least idea on the topic. All rules and tests that eg the Biontech-Vaccine had to pass (and has passed) have been installed _after_ and _because_ of the Thalidomide catastrophy. Bringing up the topic of Thalidomide exactly disproves any point you are thinking you make, because the level of safety in medicine we have today has been raised to a level incomparable to what we had with Thalidomide.
What you are saying instead is: “Current medicine must be _very_ safe because todays‘ safety protocols are so much higher than what we had back then.“
Here are more recent examples:
https://www.medicalerroraustralia.com/medical-disasters/10-w...
The 'rona is in cats and deer, so it will be around for approximately forever. Vaccinated humans still get it and transmit it, though may have less severe symptoms. Will you please explain what you are boxing in?
No.
We don't understand why COVID hits some people harder than others. We don't understand why some people end up with "long COVID" sequelae and some don't. I don't particularly want to roll those dice from immunological naivety.
The vaccines were free. The biggest risk I would have faced was myocarditis, and the risk even for that is higher from a COVID infection than from the mRNA vaccines.
Furthermore, getting vaccinated means that we all get back to a place where COVID is less of a big deal societally. While the data does show that vaccinated individuals can transmit Delta, it shows that they do so for a shorter period of time, and anything we can shave off of R0 is a good thing. Perfect, enemy of good, etc.
Getting vaccinated was close to no skin off my back. I had a sore arm for a few days. The payoff is that I reduce the (admittedly small) risk I did have, and I'm part of the herd boxing COVID in.
What's the downside?