The vaccines have been in testing since the spring of 2020 and have repeatedly been shown to be both safe and effective at reducing your risk and ability to spread to others. At this point they’ve been given to a billion people – because of the way vaccines work you’re not making yourself safer by waiting a second year and you are far more at risk from getting COVID in the meantime than any reported side effects.
For example, what is the longest recorded delay between a vaccine being administered and a side-effect being observed? Vaccines trigger an immune response but aren't in your body for a long period of time, so you typically see reactions within a few hours or days — the record is something like 6 weeks, so multiple years would be quite the outlier.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
The other key thing to remember is that this isn't some hypothetical question about risks in absolute: your odds of being one of the very few people who have a significant vaccine side-effect has to be weighed against the much higher probability of having significant health impacts from COVID-19. “Neither” is not an option any of us get to pick.
You have to be very careful with this kind of informal statements, because probability is a tricky thing.
For example, assume that a vaccine has a probability P of causing long-term bad effects and that we observe historically that 1000 vaccines have no long-term bad effects. What can we rationally say about P? It would be tempting to conclude that P is zero or at least negligibly small (maybe 2^(-1000) or something). However, this cannot be the correct answer because if P were 1/1000, you would observe the historical pattern with probability .999^1000 ~= 1/e, or about 1/3 of the time. A more sophisticated analysis would conclude that it is very likely that P is somewhere between 0 and 2/1000, and if you believe a thing called the "Laplace Rule of Succession", the expected value of P is something like 1/1002.
Now, 1000 widely deployed vaccines sounds like a reasonable upper bound to the number of vaccines ever produced, which would suggest that the probability of this vaccine being safe is probably 100% but the error bar is O(1/1000). O(1/1000) is about the same as the probability of the virus killing me, so it is perfectly rational to have doubts.
Again, I'm not saying that there's no chance of a problem but by now a billion people have been vaccinated and a significant number of people are 18+ months out, with no indication that any of these hypothetical scenarios are actually happening.
It also increases the selection pressure, thereby creating even more new mutations(In this case).
Isn't that hot? Always on the run for another shot!
Ka-Ching!
1. Are we dealing with complex mechanisms that are not fully understood? (in this case, human biology and immune response)
2. Are we operating in an environment that is itself complex and weakly understood? (in this case, the broader ecosystem including other viruses and new variants)
3. Do we have clear channels/signals of information? (do we have all the reliable and comparable stats we’d like, anything approaching controlled experimental data etc)
4. Are there incentives for people to distort the information? (are their significant monetary and political factors weighing on outcomes)
Left as exercise to the reader to apply this to covid.
You don't actually want them weighing the odds, you just want to imply they're wrong without being histrionic about it.
When asked, the person I was responding to admitted that they didn't do that but were instead relying on “common sense”. If they had some real data, a concern based on some real mechanism which would explain why it's risky for them personally in a way that doesn't show up in the population-level statistics, etc. that could be something to discuss because there would be a claim which could be evaluated scientifically.
They did exactly that, to quote them:
"I use my common sense to know that a vaccine that didn’t even begin testing before spring 2020 does not have a long enough track record to assure safety."
No reasonable person is going to interpret this as "they admitted they didn't weigh the risks".
My favorite part is how you set the bar to "something that can be evaluated scientifically", without also admitting that __"SCIENCE", IS IN THE MIDDLE OF EVALUATING__.
This is the reason no one trusts people like you, your willingness to dishonesty and misrepresentation makes you untrustworthy. Nothing anyone says will change anything other than the bar you claim others should be clearing, said bar just so happening to cause everyone to land on your opinion.
Not even the CDC takes a stance as strong as yours.
You know, you can see what I actually wrote in the quote — note the key word missing from this paraphrase: rational. I am certain that they made a subjective assessment of the risks — my point was that they hadn't critically analyzed that decision but still want it to be treated as equal in merit to the scientific consensus.
A key part of science is testing your beliefs: that's what the scientists who've spent decades working on mRNA vaccines did, that's what the extensive trials leading up to approval were for, and it's quite telling that you are both not doing that and trying to claim that ongoing monitoring means that the results of that earlier work are unreliable. Yes, scientists are still evaluating evidence — that's what they do! — but when it consistently points to the same conclusion over a long period of time and has been used to make accurate predictions, it starts to be considered a consensus.
[Imagine Staff of Aeskulapius here] http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/2
Vaguely remembering things from
[·] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_Biology_of_the_Cell_...
which I've read about 1997 while designing and implementing compute-clusters for a biotech startup,
I've come to the conclusion it would be wise to wait.
While I'm not up to date on biotech anymore, I'm still sceptic.
My strategy so far is to avoid unnecessary contact with the beta-testers, wearing masks, and so on.
OTOH I've never had a flu-shot. But also no flu since eons.
Maybe because I'm bicycling in all weather?
I don't care. Call me a member of the control group :-)
We are all aware you are certain.
I think the worst part of your entire post is that your argument boils down to it being irrational to wait until more complete information is known.
Let me quote them again so we're clear on the context that started this conversation.
> ... a vaccine that didn’t even begin testing before spring 2020 __does not have a long enough track record to assure safety__.
Lets consider how you responded
"why do you feel more qualified to say it's unsafe than the people who have spent their entire careers focused on it?"
I would love for you to explain why that's a reasonable response to what the other poster said. Or explain how the other posters statement is irrational.
Because that's the major problem people like you have. You even start attacking me for the egregious wrongthink of not calling someone irrational for having the opinion that we can't be assured of its safety __YET__.
And I realize I'm not going to get through to you, but here's an observation for you.
When you start lumping such middle-of-the-road opinions in with people who believe covid can be spread through 5G networks it's possible you're part of the problem.
It's reasonable to be leery of a vaccine produced in such a small amount of time when most vaccines go through much more rigor.
And making claims such as "it's been thoroughly tested" is balderdash. It's like claiming your software has been thoroughly tested because you push straight to production with minimal testing after someone says they won't use your software because they don't want to be the testers of your software.
We're still learning about both the virus and the vaccine. In 10 years we'll be a lot more confident in our knowledge, and what's "known" about it will be a lot more trustworthy.
Also, I'm sure by 2/5/10 years the virus will have mutated down to the point it's endemic and similar enough in nature to the common cold and we won't be needing these experimental vaccines.
That's the only thing you can control - encouraging governments and employers to force rushed medical treatments upon their citizens, through threats and acts of violence will only further vaccine hesitancy or put a damper on vaccine uptake.
Covid will be around forever and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
I agree.
> and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
Nope, with a vaccination it'll be finally comparable to a bad flu (like all those deniers said in the beginning). Portugal has 98% vaccination and has now dropped most of its restrictions.
As someone who's vaccinated I do wish the governments would drop all the restrictions and let all the refusers deal with their own mess, but luckily for us governments have a duty of care* for all of society, including the beligerent members, and overfull hospitals disadvantage the vaccinated too.
* Although some politicians in power seem to be sacrificing the lives and health of their citizens to sabotage their "enemies", e.g. in Florida and Texas.
For the sake of making clarity, after almost two years of mess: in Portugal over 88% of the population is vaccinated (2% of which only partially), which is 98% of the eligible.