I don't fully agree with the last paragraph. I mean I think if you're charitable you can alter the analogy a little bit to make it fit. I agree that there is no "vaccine" sub-unit, but let's say the equivalent is temporarily changing a data structure that is read by service A, not thinking about service B. Or not fully examining the flow on effects from service A etc.
Getting vaccinated, then getting COVID is always an option.
Either way, from my personal anecdotes, aka friends and family- I now know at least a handful of people with permanent life altering reactions to the vaccine, and one death from the vaccine. These are all younger people that were previously in good health. Given my age, health, and natural immunity- it makes zero sense for me to incur additional risk from the vaccine.
The vast majority of these events are happening at or below the level of "background noise", meaning people are indeed getting sick and dying after taking the vaccine, but that it is highly unlikely to be the vaccine's fault.
https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12440202923658158...
Then you have Fauci redefining "Gain of Function" research to claim that engineering an animal virus to spread to humans is not Gain of Function: https://youtu.be/IqUOcVwRUtc
Mind you, Fauci is part of the NIH, not the CDC, but still an egregious case of government officials purposely pushing misinformation.
If you want actual apolitical data, you can get it directly from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System: https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/datasets.html?
I can't vouch for this data being uncorrupted but it's pretty much all we have. It's also user submitted which is quite unfortunate - you think there would be a system for hospitals and doctors to use - with some higher level of verification. Nope, this is the crapshoot we are handed.
I see 500,000 submissions in the CSV for 2021 but not all of them are for covid vaccines. It'd be nice to see a data scientist pull this data into Tableau or scipy/pyplot/etc and create some good visuals and breakdowns so we can get a better idea of what's going on with these vaccine side effects.
The point of your immune system is to fight a virus when you conduct it and the point of getting vaccinated is in very simplified terms to "train" your immune system for when that happens.
So, would you rather conduct the virus without having been vaccinated or after having been vaccinated?
I only had some biology in school so I'm far from an expert but it seems pretty weird to me that people think a vaccine will give them actual immunity, as in, they won't even be able to get that virus anymore.
Now in terms of mRNA and DNA vaccines, I personally think that this is how vaccines will generally work in the future, for many reasons. Although do note that there are all kinds of COVID-19 vaccines, about 30 around the world with different technologies being used. Only the "top" ones use this new technology and they are mostly used in more wealthy and developed nations. I can't really comment on your last paragraph, personally I don't know anyone who has had any complications from these vaccines, although here we only have Pfizer-BioNTech (mRNA based) and Moderna (mRNA based). AstraZeneca which is DNA based did not pass trials in my country.
I would rather not take my chances with the vaccine after already beating the virus, and having been exposed to it several times subsequently and having no symptoms whatsoever. Adverse reactions to the vaccine seem to be more common if you've already contracted covid in the past. I've read several(anecdotal) reports of people losing their naturally acquired antibodies after the vaccine. And there's evidence that the vaccine has an adverse effect on existing T-cell function. Hence the common side effects of viral resurgence for people with herpes/shingles.
The craziest thing about the approach to the vaccines is that there is almost no push to do mass antibody testing, nor is natural immunity being considered a viable option to the vaccine. Natural immunity should give you a fuller spectrum of protection, not just protection against the spike protein. But somehow this is no longer accepted science.
What type of life altering reactions? And also what country do you live in, because the number of AstraZeneca deaths due to clotting disorders is incredibly low.
edit: Country - USA, all either Moderna or Pfizer.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-...
The vaccines have applied selective pressure to create super strains. It won't be long before we have a covid strain akin to airborne AIDS. I'd say it's prudent to have a good N100/P100 respirator for if and when that time comes.
The polio vaccine is nearly 100% effective. That's the difference here - the covid vaccines have efficacies as good as Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan ;-)
Pretty much any type of reasoning + data at hand would indicate that any type of "years past" risks that would occur with vaccines would also be present with COVID itself (especially along the inactivated virus and mRNA vaccine routes). And if the magnitude of the risks scale with exposure (they probably do), then getting straight up COVID would still yield higher long-term risk than getting vaccinated (and either successfully not getting infected, or getting infected).
Basically, if you really think your choice is between not getting COVID, and not getting COVID and getting vaccinated, then obviously not getting COVID at all yields the lowest possible risk. I would challenge anyone's risk assessment on thinking they can just... not get COVID over a 10 year window however.
Perhaps one change to your analogy is that the intention of these vaccines doesn't map well to new software into a distributed system. It's more like providing a specifically crafted input to a system. Long-term there is supposed to be no distinct "vaccine" sub-unit that you can point to in the human body, there's only the human bodies persisted long-term memory and response to a vaccine. I dunno if that's meaningfully changes your thinking at all, but maybe worth thinking about.