I’m in a similar boat and I hate it. I did both vaccines and I’m otherwise healthy, very low risk of hospitalization or death. My workplace has said vaccination is a requirement (even though I’m remote!) and I think boosters will be part of that.

I don’t want to file a religious or medical exemption because I don’t have one. I want to file a “I shouldn’t have to do this” exemption.

Two things I'm honestly curious about in your response:

1. I understand getting the vaccine is unpleasant (personally I was knocked out for 36 hours after the second dose with a high fever and body aches), but the linked study showed that the booster lowered chances of death by 90%. Yes, things like age and underlying health have a big impact, but many seemingly healthy people have either died or been hospitalized from that. Forgetting about mandates for a moment, on a personal level, why wouldn't you want to get something that showed such high efficacy against death and hospitalization that had such a low, temporally finite cost?

2. Just wanted to comment that I do agree that employer-initiated mandates make no sense to me if you are fully remote. Sure, restrictions on coming into an office unless you've been vaccinated make total sense to me, but mandating for remote employees makes no sense from the perspective of the reality of how the virus is transmitted.

> why wouldn't you want to get something that showed such high efficacy against death and hospitalization that had such a low, temporally finite cost?

Because they've already determined that their current health is already highly effective at keeping them out of hospital and death.

So you want them decrease their risk from 0.2% to 0.1% and in exchange expose them to a vaccine that's:

- Expires in a few months

- They've already had a history of reacting to (further shots always worse)

- No one takes liability for

- Relatively has higher risk of side effects among their profile

- Unknown long term risk

It doesn't seem like a good deal

Taking your points 1-by-1:

> So you want them decrease their risk from 0.2% to 0.1%

The linked study said those that had gotten a booster had 10% of the risk of those that didn't, so using your first number it would be like 0.2% to 0.02%.

> Expires in a few months

It's unknown how long the booster would last, or if after the booster the recommendation would be to move to something annual like flu shots.

> They've already had a history of reacting to (further shots always worse)

The person I responded to didn't say what their reaction was, or if it was time limited. Also, "further shots always worse" is demonstrably false, I know a couple people who had bad (yet, again very short term) side effects with the second dose and barely anything for the booster.

> No one takes liability for

The US government specifically runs a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html

> Relatively has higher risk of side effects among their profile

The person I responded to didn't mention this

> Unknown long term risk

Vs. the now well-known long-term risks of contracting Covid, which given its prevalence seems highly likely that your long term choices are (a) never leave your house, (b) reduce likelihood and severity of infection with a vaccine, or (c) get Covid.

> It's unknown how long the booster would last

It's well within reason to expect that it won't be longer than the 2nd dose.

> The person I responded to didn't say what their reaction was

I kind of extrapolated based on the parent's parent. I had a personal example in mind. Chest pains after first shot, heart palpitations after 2nd, checked at ER. These are myocarditis signs and a booster makes me very uneasy. This I would guess is the most commonly brought up examples of potentially serious side effects.

> Relatively has higher risk of side effects among their profile

Just generalising, assuming young healthy male with no underlying health conditions.

> Vs. the now well-known long-term risks of contracting Covid, which given its prevalence seems highly likely that your long term choices are (a) never leave your house, (b) reduce likelihood and severity of infection with a vaccine, or (c) get Covid.

It's inaccurate to have "Never leave your house" as an option, situations are different. Different case numbers based on location, different personal lifestyles. On the other hand, the vaccine risk is fixed, you either take it or don't.

I'm personally happy doing continuous risk assessment and acting accordingly and if I did catch Covid then so be it, risks are extremely low already.

All valid points except the last one. Unknown long term risk is silly because Covid and Omicron specifically also come with unknown long term risk.

I wish there was a more concerted effort on following up on both covid patients and vaccine administrations and presenting the data on the outcomes in the general media. Instead, the only widely decimated message is "get your vaccine".

Do the moral thing and quit. Don’t let someone coerce your into a decision you don’t feel is right for yourself.

Same here, no vertigo before in my life - had it for both doses, longer the second time, still not 100% recovered. I even voluntarily filled in my info on the Pfizer side-effects page, but didn't hear anything back. Did you manage to find out what exactly goes wrong with the inner ear after the vaccine?

Still, regarding the study, it appears that taking the booster would be the better choice, considering most of us will catch the omicron variant at some point.

I filled out a VAERS report and never heard from anyone about it.

Unfortunately I haven't learned anything interesting about what the mechanism of action might be. Especially with respect to the most interesting question - does this reaction to the vaccine mean I might have had an even worse reaction to a COVID infection? There are plenty of people who report tinnitus following COVID.

The vertigo effect you describe, was that right after each dose, or at a later point.

It would be interesting to know more about this side effect.

It was 6 days after each of the doses. I posted my story on the VEDA forum's COVID side-effects post[0], which is now a whopping 800 pages long. The good news is that some literature is starting to appear on this topic[1], but I'm afraid that these kinds of side effects will be seen as noise in the grand scheme of things.

[0] https://vestibular.org/forum/dizziness/covid-19-vaccine-side... [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01455613211048975?i...

Countering this anecdata with my own: I have several rare diseases and I'm quite disabled. I didn't get noticeable effects from my first two Pfizer doses (at least nothing I could distinguish from my chronic illness), while the third gave me flu-like symptoms for 2-3 days. I was happy about this because it told me it was working, and I returned to my (crappy) baseline afterwards with no lingering effects.

I wonder if you just happened to get ear ringing coincidentally around the time you got your second dose, and connected the dots even though it might not be causally related.

I'm sorry to hear it was flu-like for you. I'm in the same boat, and it was flu like for me too.

Data is showing T cell response is great from 2 doses so you won’t be a burden on the hospital. Looking like cases will diverge from hospitalizations soon and vaccinations will move to flu-like in “strongly encouraged and taken up by the responsible”

Maybe you can consider another vaccine as a booster if this one did not acted well on you?

I don't see how the booster is guaranteed to be the final answer as the virus keeps mutating and spreading among the very large unvaccinated population.

I personally think that it will become endemic, thanks to the vaccine we would have enough immunity to keep us out of hospital and each time we get the virus it would act as a booster.

This thing is not going to end without something like world wide super strict lockdown(Wuhan style) or world wide vaccination(and probably some combinations as the vaccine itself reduces but doesn't completely stop the spread).

I think the media might have unintentionally done themselves in by using the terminology "vaccinated" with no qualifiers in much of the coverage of the virus in the past two years. Soon we might have to be careful to state "vaccinated, but only within the last six months" or "vaccinated, but with the version targeting omnicron". I can't imagine it will be easy for all the existing articles from months ago to be updated now that we have new information.

I feel the same way with masks. If you didn't do enough research, you could easily believe that anything with an N95 certification would be ideal for protective purposes, but plenty of N95 masks have valves which makes them useless for preventing infected individuals from infecting others. There are also cloth masks, gators, and so on. But to many people they all fall under the umbrella of the unspecific term "wearing a mask", and unless you explicitly look up the medical consensus, many sources of information are unlikely to also state "but not those masks."

It’s a mass communication, not precise scientific communication.

It will keep evolving as the situation evolves.

I think, the danger lies in the fact that everything said by scientists on the media is oversimplification and technically wrong as a result of the simplification attempt. This can erode credibility significantly.

Comments amounting to "I am the science!" don't help either.

Vaccines are different from antibiotics in that they are designed to use your own immune system. Whereas an antibiotic targets a bacterial weakness which the bacteria can fix, the immune system watches for both specific invaders and possible variations of those invaders.

Kurzgesagt made a good explainer video on this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmpuerlbJu0

Unless those accounts extensively discussed how immune compromised individuals and not evolution across whole populations provided the virus a platform to mutate extensively as that’s the current leading hypothesis of omicron’s origin, then I would recommend understanding those accounts are garbage and should be a big red flag about their motivations

I guess we can solve this by issue by going back to days with no vaccine and no antibiotics.

I never get this antivaxxer argument for ”naturalism”.

Your source is a random YouTube video? AFAIK viruses are nothing like bacteria…

It’s not exactly random, it includes Robert Melone who is early researcher in the mRNA technology who was part of a team that got some patents but he likes to call himself the inventor of everything mRNA.

So the guy somehow got bitter with the people involved and turned it into media battle. He tries to portray himself as an insider who is not afraid or has higher morals to tell the truth about mRNA.

He says stuff like “This research shows that virus spike proteins damage the heart, the vaccine produces spike proteins therefore vaccines are dangerous”.

Doesn’t have any actual research on his claims, he simply invents things from thin air and says them from the position of inventor of the mRNA.

Very popular guy in the antivaxx community.

Is there any research that it doesn't? I mean the guy is a well-known scientist, he can make educated claims can't he. Being apart of the team that created mRNA vaccines probably means he knows more then the average smuck about them...right? So why not take his claim seriously and figure out if its true or not.

For me, i'm young and healthy, im not at risk. Thats been demonstrated clearly now. For me, the risk of unknown long-term side effects related to the mRNA vaccine far outweigh my risk to covid. Also i just don't trust the profit incentives of modern big-pharma and big-science.

Read https://www.amazon.ca/Real-Anthony-Fauci-Pharma-Democracy/dp...

Educated guess is a good start, that’s how you find what to work on. The important part is the work, you can’t suspect something and preach it as if it’s true. Most of the time these hunches are wrong.

Also, just as a good mechanic doesn’t necessarily make a good racer, knowing how to produce mRNA doesn’t mean that you know what it does and doesn’t do to humans. That’s completely different field.

The guy is a complete schmuck, if he had something he would have been working on it and publishing the results instead of using his CV to preach BS in the media.

antibody levels after booster are much higher compared to after second shot. there is a chance that it will last longer