I don’t think you can infer that from just this data. The timeframe for a large amount of people getting Covid plus lag time (recovering, identifying they still have an issue, and applying for disability) also lines up.

Yeah given the time lag I think the graph clearly falsifies the connection to the vaccine. It isn't like people got the vaccine and 3 days later still felt crappy and filed for disability.

Except vaccines don't damage people

The covid vaccine damaged my heart and nearly killed me, but you do you pal.

Never!

My wife’s long covid (14 months and counting) started after her 3rd jab. You know that day after the jab sometimes when you feel all tired and woozy and sick-ish and can’t get anything done? That just never ended for her.

Even though she got vaccinated 3 times, she got called an anti-vaxx loony for a long time, for even daring to suggest that the vaccine clearly marked day one. But by now, increasingly many official sources concur that there are indeed a very small % of people whose symptoms started after a vaccine. Eg C-Support, a semi-government non-profit here in NL says[0] that ~400 of the people they track long covid got it from the vaccine. Out of 39 million jabs, mind - these are tiny (but nonzero!!) likelihoods.

This shit shouldn't be political. Saying that the vaccine can or cannot have bad side effects got hijacked as signaling which camp you’re in. This is nuts. Insights can change, and a vaccine can both be effective (ie better on average than the alternative, getting sick without) and harmful at the same time.

Maybe its time for both camps, at least on a place like HN, to stop triggering so intensely when people say stuff about covid vaccines that don’t match your priors.

[0] https://www.c-support.nu/langdurige-klachten-na-vaccinatie/

I do agree with you that people are way too quick to politically dismiss criticism and questions surrounding the vaccine. However the logic you're showing here seems very quick to draw the causal connection between vaccines and long covid.

I got covid immediately after receiving my first Nintendo Switch for a Christmas present, but most people would consider it absurd to blame the switch for my covid.

On a more serious note, my grandmother did die of heart failure very shortly after her covid vaccine. However she was 91 and in poor health.

It's not outside the realm of possibility that your wife happened to get covid roughly the same day as she got her vaccine. The claim that "there are indeed a very small % of people whose symptoms started after a vaccine" also covers this possibility unless you can clearly show that the incidence of getting covid among this population is significantly higher than would be expected.

It wouldn't surprise me terribly if there was eventually found to be a variety of complications caused by the vaccine which explain many of these things, but I also see people making very quick causal connections between events that seem to have a great many other plausible explanations.

> It's not outside the realm of possibility that your wife happened to get covid roughly the same day as she got her vaccine.

A Nintendo! You could have chosen to assume that we thought this through, instead of getting pedantic. Consider actually having a bit of an open mind instead of second-guessing everything you read that doesn’t fit your worldview. You don’t have all the facts.

But ok, because you “asked”: My wife got tested positive for covid about 6 weeks after she got this jab, same as myself and our kids. We were all super sick.

So it’s possible that she got 6 weeks of long covid from the vaccine and then 13 months from covid.

It’s also possible that without the vaccine, the covid would have hospitalized her.

But it’s not possible that her symptoms started because of an undetected covid infection around the time she got vaccinated, because to the best of my information, you can’t get covid twice so quickly in a row.

Sure, there can be lots of other explanations. Some other viral infection? Psycho-somatic shit? Sure thing. But the fact of the matter is that on January 6th she felt fine and got her third jab, and on January 7th she called in sick and that was that, she’s been struggling ever since. Sure that’s not proven causality, but it fits Occam’s razor.

At least some long COVID is likely to be autoimmune and caused by the immune systems response to an antigen.

Both the virus and the vaccine are actually antigens. Your Nintendo Switch is not.

It is likely that some people who got the vaccine got severe lasting side effects. The incidence though has been measured to be orders of magnitude lower than the side effects (including death) from the actual virus.

The problem that we have is that we cannot talk about these kinds of tradeoffs in this society where any action that leads to negative consequences is treated as something to be litigated out of existence to make the world "safe".

The vaccine is a trolley problem. There are a few people who will get seriously hurt by flipping the switch. There are vastly more people who are going to be killed and disabled by letting it run.

I’m still angry at you. You used the term “very quick” twice. We spent more than a year thinking about this! The only “very quick” conclusion here is your extremely dismissive comment.

Vaccines can, and do. There were certainly folks who had reactions to the COVID vaccinations, at times severe. With every vaccine, we have to do the safety versus efficacy versus disease impact math.

There's absolutely no solid evidence widespread "long COVID" is a vaccine reaction, but flatly stating vaccination can't ever damage a human is false.

(Hell, some of the polio vaccines can cause polio. They're still worth it.)

Everything hurts someone somewhere. It's not realistic to assume that a given thing be entirely devoid of negatives.

Since COVID has been around forever, that is surprising. It isn’t like it was a novel virus that was started in 2019

Don't those two arguments contradict each other?

No one is to blame for the disease, one party is to blame for the vax, and they're in charge, so ...

Look, I'm not a fan of the Conservative And Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, but blaming them for the four different privately researched vaccines that the FDA of the American government decided to allow private healthcare providers in the USA to choose to offer during a transition from Republican to Democrat President is a bit much.

Or did your conspiracy theory just forget that 95% of the word population isn't American?