> wouldn't you need to balance the risk of death / complications from the vaccine against the risk of death / complications from covid multiplied by the risk of getting covid?

For certain demographics the probability of getting infected might be that low, but at least in every social young adult I know, the risk is averaged to well over 1.0. I've been infected twice, before and after the jab, and in both cases the infection was worse (months of recovery, VO2Max reduction) than the acute vaccine side effects (weekend of feeling shitty). Pre-vaccine I'd say it took around 5 months to fully feel recovered, e.g. able to run a 4-miler without feeling like passing out, where-as post-vaccine and prior infection I was well recovered at the 6-week mark.

But the rate of being vaccinated is also over 1.0, since people keep getting boosters.

It's 60%. Probably.

Meanwhile most vaccinated people have had 2-4 shots. Also keep in mind immunity doesn't last forever, so you need to balance the risk of the shot within a certain timeframe versus the risk of Covid times the risk of complications within the same timeframe. You also can't compare the lifetime risk of Covid versus only 1 shot, both occur within a timeframe since immunity from the shot isn't forever.

The risk comparison is indeed not trivial, but I think it's a safe bet that you're going to get covid.

There's ~3 possibilities after an infection happens:

* A person's innate immune system quickly fights off the virus. This is a generic set of defenses in our bodies that are always active, and if they succeed then you don't create antibodies in the first place.

* Detectable antibodies, meaning your innate immune system wasn't enough and your adaptive immune system took care of it.

* Antibodies have faded and are no longer detectable. You can still do a T-Cell test (more costly, may take longer?) to find out if you can rapidly create new antibodies, which would mean you're still good despite no longer having antibodies.

There's also the issue of the type of antibodies. The mRNA vaccines are only coding for the spike protein, so your body only learns to fight that - but the virus has mutated away from what's currently in the vaccines. Natural/recovered immunity creates a variety of antibodies that work against different parts of the virus, so that's still effective even against "vaccine escape" variants.

Having seen the impact of covid on young family members and others in my extended social circles, I believe that there's a long tail of effects that we won't be able to see the full picture of for years to come. There's a lot more that should be considered in the decision than just risk of death.

> Compared to an unvaccinated individual, the risk of long Covid in a fully vaccinated individual was cut by only about 15 percent, the study found.

> Dr. Greg Vanichkachorn, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Covid Activity Rehabilitation Program in Rochester, Minnesota, who was not involved with the new study, said the results were not “too surprising.”

> “We know that the majority of folks with long Covid have not had severe infections,” he said.

Not very much help against long covid on average, nothing like the protection against hospitalizations in vulnerable populations.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccines-offer-li...

I'm not suggesting that long covid doesn't exist, but I wonder how much of that long tail of effects can actually be causally linked to covid infection (obviously not talking about things like lung damage, though I do wonder if stress and isolation could have affected previously healthy people's immune systems). My personal experience with mental health issues suggests that they can have severe and wide-ranging physical effects that are as bad as any disease.

As far as I know the leading theory is that damage to the circulation systems of some covid patients is causing a reduction in the quality of bloodflow in the brain which has obvious negative impacts on neurons.

I said within a certain demographic... For old people, the vaccine is obviously worth it. Boys/men from age 10-30, probably not. Hell, a bunch of EU countries literally stopped giving young people the Moderna vaccine:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/11/10/germany-f...

In the short term yes, in the long term, that is not known.

Same can be said about the vaccine. The full story has not been written yet.

Investigate everything, make it available to the public, let people decide for themselves what to put in their body.

Curiously, probability of what specifically is 1 in that case? I am assuming by 1 you mean 100%, right?

With environmental infections, it's possible that most people fight the virus within other parts of the body, with the vaccine it looks like the immune response occurred in the heart for many in this study, specifically right heart, possibly due to proximity or accidental intravascular injection:

>we recorded inflammatory foci predominantly in the right heart, which may suggest a gradual blood-stream derived dilution effect and based on this finding it is at least tempting to speculate that inadvertent intravascular vaccine injection may be contributive

Where did you get this data?

> Remember, COVID hasn't been shown to be particularly dangerous to young people...

What are the top 3 leading causes of health-related deaths in your choice of demographic (15-24? 25-49?) in your choice of 2020 or 2021?

Covid was only #3 for all age groups in the USA during the pandemic (and remember, old people are the mostly likely to die at any given point, because, well, they're old). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Meanwhile, Covid is far behind accidents, suicide, drug overdoses and homicide for young people:

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/levels-and-...

Yes, when including the elderly, cancer and heart disease are greater causes of health-related deaths. Is COVID-19 not the #1 health-related cause of death for "young" people?

> accidents, suicide, drug overdoses and homicide

Not long ago this discussion was about health risks, such as infectious diseases or medical complications. But yes, young people can be pretty reckless.

We were doing arithmetic, such as multiplying the risk of myocarditis and hitherto uncorrelated medical complications by 1.0, and then a number that is likely several orders of magnitude larger (death by COVID, not even the much, much more likely disablement of "long covid") by a number you erroneously claimed was 0.25 and was perhaps around 0.6 almost a year ago (anti-body study, 9/2021-2/2022).

I have friends in their early 30s who still haven't recovered their sense of smell. Knoew a 25-year-old who spent 4 weeks with terrible symptoms. I'm a marathon runner and lift and in my early 30s and this disease kicked the shit out of me and had 4 with reduced physical function.

It is very obviously worse than the worst flus almost everyone had and the flu is sufficiently dangerous that it has a nontrivial effect in human quality of life.

Also, if you choose to get the vaccine, then the multiplier for vaccine risks isn't 1, it's 2, or 4, or 6, however many times you get the vaccine.