I agree it's fuzzy, just like "vaccine side effects". If you believe one is worth worrying about, the other one probably is as well. But long covid probably a stronger clinical record even if fuzzy.
2. Ok so we definitely know by now that the vaccine does not give covid in the same way that some older vaccines against other diseases would've. There's been clinical trials and billions of doses given. As for events like adjuvant-induced narcolepsy, so far they're conjectures as well. Conjecture for conjecture, I worry more about the one that's been filling children's hospitals with unexplained neuro diseases...
3. Yes there have been lapses in reporting of side effects but so far they seem to have been rather benign.
> the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it
No, I disagree. The ambient assumption is based on what happens in an unchecked mass epidemic: massive excess deaths. It is not this way because everyone gets it or because everyone reacts the same to it. It is this way because this virus is bad enough on average. There is absolutely an element of collective responsibility in the assumption about the vaccination campaign - that it's not just to benefit the individuals who are vaccinated, and that no matter how good you think your odds are of survival, it is socially irresponsible for people not to get vaccinated just as it is socially unacceptable not to wear your seatbelt in your car, even if you're driving by yourself on a desolate stretch of road, or to do recreational heroin which is detrimental to your own health only. It's because even though the vast majority of the people doing these things survive, left unchecked, they impose a burden on society that society rejects.
The pandemic until very recently has been entirely unchecked yet there was not 'massive excess deaths' in many places that did relatively little, like Sweden. So you're asserting this with vague emotional terms like 'massive', but this is the exact assumption that I'm talking about.
Maybe Sweden was lucky.
If people really cares about the others, they should have had stayed home and eradicated the virus.
I would argue that having full scale lock-down and mass testing would be a lot less intrusive to one's liberty than using their jobs to coerce the injection of hastily made vaccine using novel technologies. But one isn't supposed to be following China's eradication strategy, or it would be undemocratic, right?
Not to mention the additional selection pressure due to leaky vaccines, but that's another story.
Disclaimer: I'm fully vaccinated.
Nicki Minaj got kicked off twitter for making an absurdly stupid and false claim because she didn't want to bother with getting vaccinated.
As for Minaj's claim: you believe it's absurd and stupidly false, because you haven't heard anything else like it. But this topic is about censorship of anything that can be perceived as anti-vaccine. VAERS has quite a lot of reports of swollen testicles and/or testicular pain, so who is to say that her report was really false? It can't be proven by either of us one way or another; just assigned probabilities based on prior expectations. Expectations partly controlled by the type of act this thread is about.
But your doctor might have told you to not do sport for a day. I never had any adverse effects before and consequently ignored that advice after a tetanus vaccination. Completely knocked me down the next 2 days.
This vaccination has been administered on a very large scale, so it shouldn't necessarily discourage anyone if there are some adverse effects. Maybe the advice against doing sports must be extended to wanking, but side effects can be a result of circumstances.
I think for three reasons:
1. Long COVID isn't a definable disease. That whole ground has been badly polluted by people claiming to have "long COVID" when they haven't ever even tested positive for short COVID, there being no symptoms in common with all reports, etc. It's very hard to say what the long terms effects of COVID really are even though there are now nearly two years of experience with it, for this reason.
2. Long term effects from vaccines have happened before, e.g. early ones gave people polio, more recently there was the Pandemrix / narcolepsy affair. Drugs of any kind are put through difficult safety trials because of a long history of accidents. They are artificial chemicals designed to manipulate the bodies most powerful internal mechanisms after all, no reason why it's impossible to have long term effects.
3. The side effects of COVID vaccines are drastically worse than any normal vaccine. They routinely make people very sick, but it doesn't get treated by scientists as a possible sign of bad things happening because these are "normal" and "expected". Some side effects weren't detected by the trials, like myocarditis, and others weren't detected despite being apparently very common, like stopped periods. Not detected because all the women were on birth control. In fact information on side effects of any kind is extremely poor - you get self reported documentation at best, as there are no major large scale surveys - and the establishment is quite obviously terrified of any attempt to find out more. The trials themselves ignored all events that happened 7 days after vaccination, which doesn't seem very long. That attitude is endemic.
In a situation where all discussion of side effects is heavily penalized or outright erased (e.g. Nicki Minaj losing her Twitter account), it's inevitable that people will conclude something is being frantically swept under the carpet.
Finally, consider something important: the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it. In reality it's now been nearly two years and most people either haven't got it yet, even when heavily exposed because they were self-isolating with sick people (I am in this category), or alternatively, got it in such a way that it was so mild they didn't notice at all. If you assume the modellers are wrong again, and that a 100% chance of infection is not in fact correct, or alternatively that by the time you do get it it's mutated to a form that's no worse than a cold, then the tradeoff around vaccines looks quite different even for middle aged people. After all, zero spike proteins is better than some regardless of how you get them.