You don't know me or my medical history, so you can't make that statement honestly. I am in a population where I am at borderline negligible risk from SARS-2 infection. The mere 24+ hours of post-second-shot acute inflammatory cascade, which is almost guaranteed, already eclipses the expected value of COVID symptoms I would experience if infected. (Perhaps you aren't aware of how stratified the risk is based off age and comorbidities?)
You doubly so cannot make such a statement when you don't know whether I've already had COVID previously. Someone who has had SARS-2 naturally and recovered is almost completely insulated from COVID risk. And this, by the way, is much moreso than compared to an unexposed-yet-vaccinated individual. And the effect size is massive, we're not talking about natural immunity being "20% better", we're talking like 800% better. Source: https://pastebin.com/8yR3y5NA
> That's so weird, all the data seems to indicate that in areas with high vaccination rates nobody gets sick and dies.
How closely have you been looking at the Israeli data? It is simply false that nobody gets sick and dies. The vaccines very significantly reduce the personal risk of hospitalization or death, but as I've already told you, my risk from SARS-2 is almost nonexistent, so that confers exactly zero benefit for me. The reason you and others are so concerned about vaccination is - I hope - the purported societal benefit of vaccination, and I've already hinted at the very predictable phenomenom that vaccinating against only the spike protein is just going to lead to antigenic drift and immune escape and will just end up spinning our wheels at best, and at worst it will actually lead to increased pathogenicity in the unvaccinated (https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...)
You don't have the necessary information about my demographic and medical history to be able to make this claim. The following statement of yours is a non-sequitur because it in no way proves the claim of yours that I am at greater risk from SARS-2 infection than I am of a COVID vaccine:
> because you know the Covid disease creates fully functional viruses whereas the vaccine only incorporates a small subset that cannot reproduce. Why you would want the fully functional version is beyond me.
I was referring to the aggregate, it is strictly correct unless you have a specific medical issue and I'm confident your doctor will inform you.
> The following statement of yours is a non-sequitur because it in no way proves the claim of yours that I am at greater risk from SARS-2 infection than I am of a COVID vaccine:
Sure it does. You will get COVID. You'll either be vaccinated at the time or you won't be.
That may be true, but it's another non-sequitur. You need to show that the acute and long-term risks of me receiving the moderna or the pfizer or the j&j, is lower than the risks to my health from getting COVID-19 while unvaccinated. And first you need to know whether I've already had COVID, because that's highly relevant to that calculation.
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I think you're missing the general principle here, so let me see if this hypothetical helps you. Imagine a hypothetical virus that spreads just like SARS-2 but has a 0% IFR, no symptoms, and no complications whatsoever, whether short or medium or long term.
Imagine a vaccine that is 100% effective at preventing this hypothetical 0% IFR virus from infecting me. Imagine that in 99.9999% of people, the vaccine causes no harm, but in that .0001% of people, it causes harm.
Which is more dangerous to me, getting infected with the hypothetical virus, or getting vaccinated?
You not getting vaccinated and then getting infected with COVID is more dangerous to you and those around you than you getting vaccinated and then infected. Those are the only two options. Everyone on earth will contract COVID.
Surely you believe then that folks who refuse to get vaccinated on principle like yourself and then contract COVID should be triaged strictly below anyone else who needs medical care? I'm not saying that you shouldn't receive care, but you should receive it after everyone else has been sorted out. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes IMO.
Perhaps we should start by admitting there is no long term data on the Covid vaccines as a whole truth and we honestly start from there?
How about a steelman argument? Just don’t put it on YouTube, it would be censored.
Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending there’s no long term data here.
That is a lot. I’m one of those. How long has it been since all these doses were given?
> Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending there’s no long term data here.
I agree. Please shut me up and post the links to long term human mRNA vaccine safety.
Please shut me up and give me any reason to believe that there would be long term effects.
You're asking me to prove a negative, to prove there's no god. It's the wrong question to ask. The question to ask is why you would think there is one in the first place.
The first vaccine was given almost a year ago, how long do we need to wait to placate your nebulous fear? Two? Ten? Twenty more? What basis do you have for selecting this timeframe?
The long-term data we do have is the 30 years of mRNA vaccine research.
The current survival rate from the virus is at around 99.2%. The vaccine may or may not have long term health effects. How is taking the virus head on less risky?
I would use 99.7% as a fairly conservative number, frankly: https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/99/1/20-265892.pdf
Anyway, the other point is that that number is the overall IFR. If, like me, you know you're in a category that has almost no risk from COVID, then it's even more of a no-brainer. That's why it's completely absurd that the GP tried to tell me that I'm at less risk from the vaccine from the disease, when they don't know my age, # of comorbidities, metabolic health, past SARS-2 infection status, past non-SARS-circulating-hCoV infection status, etc. They simply don't know what they're talking about.
So if you want brain damage, scarred lungs, or some other organ malfunction, Covid infection is the way to go.
And the longer term risks are still unknown.
Which is why it's insane to play evidence-free yes-but-what-if FUD games about vaccine safety when the risks of infection are already known to be high for the survivors.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
Where are you getting your information? Your mayoclinic link doesn't make this 10% claim, nor did you provide any citation for it. I'm genuinely shocked by how divorced from the clinical reality your claims are.
SARS-1, which is SARS-2's less infectious but much more deadly older brother, didn't even cause long-term damage in 10% of cases. And you're trying to claim it for SARS-2, which is a virus where many who are infected will never even know they had it (if they don't get tested)?
Your claims are unfounded and, quite frankly, simply false. There's nowhere near 10% occurrence of "brain damage", scarred lungs, or "some other organ malfunction". (The vagueness of your terminology betrays you, btw)
Since you almost certainly haven't read any literature, let me provide you some reading material. I'll stick to just the lung issues subclaim. Some of these are on the older side but they're still relevant:
["Follow-up Chest CT findings from discharged patients with severe COVID-19: an 83-day observational study"](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-27359/v1) - First Submitted May 4 2020, Published online May 12 2020
> Radiological abnormalities in patients of severe COVID-19 could be completely absorbed with no residual lung injury in more than two months’ follow-up.
^ note this is severe COVID-19, so that's from a population selected for severity of symptoms and they're still recovered by 2 months.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1843... (SARS-1 pathology)
> Preliminary evidence suggests that these lung function abnormalities will improve over time
Conclusive evidence suggests that people who get vaccinated don't get lung function abnormalities. Why are you so dead set on refusing to get a vaccine haha? It takes a few minutes, it's free, and it's really not that big a deal. There's really no good reason not to get one.
> and I reject the societal benefit argument given the population dynamics of what happens when you vaccinate against just the spike
That's so weird, all the data seems to indicate that in areas with high vaccination rates nobody gets sick and dies.
It feels like you've manufactured a windmill for yourself.