A hard hat isn't a medical procedure. Some die from this vaccine.

I weighed up the options and decided it was by far the lower risk option.

I think people need to be free to make that choice.

Freedom is so valuable.

Great point, thank you for letting me know a hard hat isn't a medical procedure. If my aunt had wheels, she'd be a tea cart. I'm sure I can find someone who died BECAUSE they were wearing protective head PPE - a hat strap got caught and strangled them, whatever.

The more important point that you ignore is people are horrible at weighing relative risk. You're obviously intelligent and aware of the biases inherent in judging vaccination risk. I'm sure you know crossing the street is far more risky. There is a consistent pattern of unvaccinated, dying covid patients claiming they underestimated the risk of the illness and wish they had gotten vaccinated. People are literally unable to make that choice for themselves. There's proof.

What's the point of "freedom" if we're all stuck in our houses hiding from variant after variant because we refuse to acknowledge that our government needs to make a decision that will save lives [1] when our actual survival is at risk.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/covid-19-vaccines-sav...

I don't think people shouldn't be educated and encouraged to get this vaccine. I don't think the government should stay out of that.

I believe these are coercive tactics and the government should avoid coercion at all costs.

Right. What you want is anarchy.

No I think there are many times when the government must use coercion. I don't think this is one of them.

Has anyone died from Pfizer? I’ve seen cases of heart inflammation, but I haven’t heard of any deaths.

We have had one death in NZ.

We're a small population so it's significant.

https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/126225003/...

Yeah, I suppose deaths are always possible from anything. You could give out a million lollipops and someone would choke. Someone has probably had an infection just from the needle itself.

VAERS shows several thousand have died. Some estimate 45k based on a Harvard study on VAERS indicating a % that goes unreported.

“The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database contains information on *unverified* reports of adverse events (illnesses, health problems and/or symptoms) following immunization with US-licensed vaccines. *Reports are accepted from anyone*…”

Ignoring that VAERS is unverified data, and taking that 45k as "all these people died directly due to the vaccine", it's still only 45k out of 378M doses administered - 0.012%.

(For comparison, 2021 has 31k gun deaths[1] through September and 21.5k road deaths through the first 6 months.)

[1] https://www.gunviolencearchive.org [2] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/prelimina...

You’re going off topic. It is just a tool to track data. But here they are admitting that it suffers from underreporting. https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html

It also says "The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event."

Also, on the download page, "However, in general coding terms in VAERS do not change based on the information received during the follow-up process. VAERS data should be used with caution as numbers and conditions do not reflect data collected during follow-up."

Which is just different ways of saying "this data is probably unreliable", no?

That's interesting, my very official competing VAERS shows that the vaccine has caused several thousand people to have spontaneously come into existence! I welcome you to submit your data, as I accept any reports from anyone regardless of political axe to grind.

Please, cite your source.

Deaths on VAERs doesn't meant it was caused by COVID (I'm sure you're aware of this but the grandparent poster was probably not

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaers-9318/fact-ch...

Indeed. Baselining is important, even if an estimate.

Indeed. You should read some of these reports. It sounds like you haven’t. If someone gets the vaccine and dies the next day, sure it is very possible it is not the cause. But it should be reported. And when many people have the same symptoms after a vaccine, it becomes a common side effect.

I have read them -- and we are in complete agreement.

Here is some great information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfFeocgSKvU

From what others are saying, it's the unknown long term effects that are the difference.

What if, knowing what we do now about it, OSHA required asbestos-lined jackets?

Asbestos fire-proofing made a substantial difference. We did not - in fact - go from "Let's make things fire-proof with asbestos" to "Eh, asbestos is bad, guess everything will burn down instead" but instead moved to fire-proofing with new materials in countries that could afford to do that.

Lots of older buildings have asbestos that's preventing fires and won't cause noticeable harm so long as it's undisturbed. The fibres are a problem, but a sheet of material under a layer of plaster isn't breaking off fibres that can get into your lungs. If your job is to rip out plaster and re-model buildings then that's a huge problem, but if you just live in a building you're getting much more benefit from it not catching fire than you'd get from very minutely reducing your risk of lung damage from asbestos.

In fact even for a brand new building, although it's banned in some places, "Let's use asbestos" makes more sense than "Eh, so what if it burns down and a few dozen people die", so if those are the available choices you should go with asbestos.

So it is with the available COVID-19 vaccines. SARS-CoV-2 is very dangerous and, outside of New Zealand and a handful of Pacific islands, widespread, so you're just way more likely to get very sick or die as a result of not being vaccinated than suffer a serious side effect, known or hypothetical.

I am required to wear (chemical-infused) flame retardant clothing on oil and gas wells. Some people have to work despite the chemicals rubbing their skin all day.