Why do people fear long-term effects of the vaccine (which seem very unlikely in light of past vaccine history) but dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid? It is true that most children are not affected by covid in the short term compared with other age groups, but some get neurological disease, and others have gotten "long covid". Those are not the same as the typical vaccine side effects. Feels like maybe a case of the "trolley problem".
> Feels like maybe a case of the "trolley problem".
I think that's it exactly. It seems some (many? most?) people believe that the consequences of actions deserve more scrutiny and a higher threshold to act, than inaction and the threshold to refrain from action. Lots of people—almost instinctively, at least for some of them—think acting to kill one to save five is worse than letting the five die through your inaction.
You have to go get the vaccine. You choose to get it. Getting COVID-19 is just something that'll happen to you, eventually. You don't choose to go get it.
Whether it makes sense or not, I think that really is the difference.
Why do people fear long-term effects of the vaccine (which seem very unlikely in light of past vaccine history) but dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid?
I think for three reasons:
1. Long COVID isn't a definable disease. That whole ground has been badly polluted by people claiming to have "long COVID" when they haven't ever even tested positive for short COVID, there being no symptoms in common with all reports, etc. It's very hard to say what the long terms effects of COVID really are even though there are now nearly two years of experience with it, for this reason.
2. Long term effects from vaccines have happened before, e.g. early ones gave people polio, more recently there was the Pandemrix / narcolepsy affair. Drugs of any kind are put through difficult safety trials because of a long history of accidents. They are artificial chemicals designed to manipulate the bodies most powerful internal mechanisms after all, no reason why it's impossible to have long term effects.
3. The side effects of COVID vaccines are drastically worse than any normal vaccine. They routinely make people very sick, but it doesn't get treated by scientists as a possible sign of bad things happening because these are "normal" and "expected". Some side effects weren't detected by the trials, like myocarditis, and others weren't detected despite being apparently very common, like stopped periods. Not detected because all the women were on birth control. In fact information on side effects of any kind is extremely poor - you get self reported documentation at best, as there are no major large scale surveys - and the establishment is quite obviously terrified of any attempt to find out more. The trials themselves ignored all events that happened 7 days after vaccination, which doesn't seem very long. That attitude is endemic.
In a situation where all discussion of side effects is heavily penalized or outright erased (e.g. Nicki Minaj losing her Twitter account), it's inevitable that people will conclude something is being frantically swept under the carpet.
Finally, consider something important: the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it. In reality it's now been nearly two years and most people either haven't got it yet, even when heavily exposed because they were self-isolating with sick people (I am in this category), or alternatively, got it in such a way that it was so mild they didn't notice at all. If you assume the modellers are wrong again, and that a 100% chance of infection is not in fact correct, or alternatively that by the time you do get it it's mutated to a form that's no worse than a cold, then the tradeoff around vaccines looks quite different even for middle aged people. After all, zero spike proteins is better than some regardless of how you get them.
I agree it's fuzzy, just like "vaccine side effects". If you believe one is worth worrying about, the other one probably is as well. But long covid probably a stronger clinical record even if fuzzy.
2. Ok so we definitely know by now that the vaccine does not give covid in the same way that some older vaccines against other diseases would've. There's been clinical trials and billions of doses given. As for events like adjuvant-induced narcolepsy, so far they're conjectures as well. Conjecture for conjecture, I worry more about the one that's been filling children's hospitals with unexplained neuro diseases...
3. Yes there have been lapses in reporting of side effects but so far they seem to have been rather benign.
> the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it
No, I disagree. The ambient assumption is based on what happens in an unchecked mass epidemic: massive excess deaths. It is not this way because everyone gets it or because everyone reacts the same to it. It is this way because this virus is bad enough on average. There is absolutely an element of collective responsibility in the assumption about the vaccination campaign - that it's not just to benefit the individuals who are vaccinated, and that no matter how good you think your odds are of survival, it is socially irresponsible for people not to get vaccinated just as it is socially unacceptable not to wear your seatbelt in your car, even if you're driving by yourself on a desolate stretch of road, or to do recreational heroin which is detrimental to your own health only. It's because even though the vast majority of the people doing these things survive, left unchecked, they impose a burden on society that society rejects.
The ambient assumption is based on what happens in an unchecked mass epidemic: massive excess deaths
The pandemic until very recently has been entirely unchecked yet there was not 'massive excess deaths' in many places that did relatively little, like Sweden. So you're asserting this with vague emotional terms like 'massive', but this is the exact assumption that I'm talking about.
Individual cost benefit analysis aside, normally vaccinated people would certainly feel safer and goes out more, offsetting the already meager reduction of transmissibility. (Certainly I don't have data to say if it is net benefit or not.)
If people really cares about the others, they should have had stayed home and eradicated the virus.
I would argue that having full scale lock-down and mass testing would be a lot less intrusive to one's liberty than using their jobs to coerce the injection of hastily made vaccine using novel technologies. But one isn't supposed to be following China's eradication strategy, or it would be undemocratic, right?
Not to mention the additional selection pressure due to leaky vaccines, but that's another story.
What dream world do you live in where people don't get sick or die of other vaccinations as a side effect? You're injecting a foreign substance into your blood stream. There's always a small risk.
Nicki Minaj got kicked off twitter for making an absurdly stupid and false claim because she didn't want to bother with getting vaccinated.
I've had lots of vaccines and none of them made me sick. I guess about half the people I know who have been vaccinated were knocked out for a day or two, with many of them reporting that they felt truly terrible. That's not normal.
As for Minaj's claim: you believe it's absurd and stupidly false, because you haven't heard anything else like it. But this topic is about censorship of anything that can be perceived as anti-vaccine. VAERS has quite a lot of reports of swollen testicles and/or testicular pain, so who is to say that her report was really false? It can't be proven by either of us one way or another; just assigned probabilities based on prior expectations. Expectations partly controlled by the type of act this thread is about.
That depends. If you don't physically exaggerate yourself, you generally don't feel anything, perhaps your arm is a bit painful and that is it.
But your doctor might have told you to not do sport for a day. I never had any adverse effects before and consequently ignored that advice after a tetanus vaccination. Completely knocked me down the next 2 days.
This vaccination has been administered on a very large scale, so it shouldn't necessarily discourage anyone if there are some adverse effects. Maybe the advice against doing sports must be extended to wanking, but side effects can be a result of circumstances.
> dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid?
If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects.
Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
> If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects.
I mean, covid can kill you, which is kind of a long-term negative effect? Surely you're not arguing that the vaccine is equally likely to have that particularly long-term effect, so then I'd ask why you think it's equally likely to have other long-term effects?
> Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
Really? I mean, do you...generally avoid bridges where you live?
It seems to me that if bridges don't collapse frequently, that would indeed be evidence that whoever is building / designing / approving them is doing something right, and that "the next" bridge is also unlikely to collapse?
> If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects
...because they are different? A localized, single dose mRNA vaccine that transiently produces spike protein will have a completely different effect than systemic infection with a virus.
That's not what the OP said though. There are two unknowns: effects of long-term COVID, and effect of long-term vaccine.
The person you responded to quite clearly suggests it's illogical to ignore long-term effects of COVID in comparing the outcomes. Particularly in light of the actual evidence of neurological effects of COVID, and some evidence of long COVID being more than phantom effect.
If you assume a weighted value X for long-term vaccination impacts, but assume a 0 or anything materially less than X for the same for COVID it's just not a consistent evaluation.
> Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
It does not mean nothing. Yes just because previous vaccines were safe does not mean the next one will be safe. However success of previous vaccines mean we have the technology to create and evaluate future safe vaccines.
Similarly, because we have a history of building bridges we know what it entails to make future safe bridges -- however the bridge could still fall if make a mistake.
> If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects.
Because viruses do cause long term effects in the form of just straight up irreparable damage to your organs or long last presence that re-emerges later. They are actively hurting you, and despite the popular phrase, what doesn't kill you tends to just make you weaker.
> Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
Are you suggesting you feel you're risking death every time you step on a bridge? Because that would have to be the case if past engineering precedents meant "absolutely nothing".
The reality is that medical precedent means a lot. We understand the mechanisms of vaccines pretty well. Our estimates on the efficacy of bridges tends to be pretty good. One can assess a bridge design and affirm that it's likely to stay up under X pressure for N years. If a problem were to occur, we would know the typical failure modes.
Vaccines aren't a black box. We know how they work and we can anticipate the failure modes. There aren't really any paths for "long term effects".
I've been upset by this myopic view since the very beginning. We are increasingly learning that viruses can have long-term effects on the body and mind, even prior to COVID. Agreed that we can't all walk around as 'bubble boys' out of fear of the unknown, but one should definitely avoid becoming infected with viruses where at all possible. That the initial symptoms are analogous to a flu for most people doesn't mean that's the end of the story.
HPV was 'just' genital warts, until we found out that it causes cancer. Other animal species have cancer-causing viruses as well. Or take Chicken Pox: basic kid's illness in the past (and yes, it was worth getting it when younger before a vaccine was available to avoid late-life illness) but if you've ever known anyone with a severe case of shingles you'll know that it's not 'just' a virus that causes itchy rashes in grade-schoolers. Shingles can ruin people's lives.
Assuming you won't have any long-term issues from exposure to a dangerous virus is just rolling dice.
The idea of letting my kids get a known neurologically-affecting virus without even the option of vaccination (yet) and just hoping that it won't cause them issues in the long-term fills me with dread.
