[CydeWeys]

> It would be tragic, for example, to see any serious side-effects from a vaccine in people under the age of 20, who have essentially no risk from infection.

They have little risk of death if they have no comorbidities, but even for a 20 year old, just getting COVID-19 is likely gonna be worse than the side effects from almost any vaccine imaginable. I've had vaccine side effects and I've had COVID and I'd take ten more vaccine side effects over one COVID, please.

There's also the fact that vaccines are never 100% effective and that herd immunity is important, so the 20 year old still needs the vaccine to protect the older people they may run across. So even if the 20 year old is personally somehow guaranteed an asymptomatic, no-damage infection from COVID, they still need the vaccine. Vaccines don't just protect you, they protect everyone else, and a large part of their efficacy in reducing total population mortality is through these herd immunity effects, not just from protecting the individual people who've been vaccinated.

[timr]

"I've had vaccine side effects and I've had COVID and I'd take ten more vaccine side effects over one COVID, please."

I don't know what side-effects you've had from vaccines, but when I talk about risks, I'm not talking about headaches...people actually died from from the 1976 H1N1 vaccine.

[CydeWeys]

... yeah, and way more people are dying from COVID than have ever died from all vaccines put together.

[umanwizard]

> just getting COVID-19 is likely gonna be worse than the side effects from almost any vaccine imaginable

Do you have any non-anecdotal articles that quantify this?

[CydeWeys]

Do you just want to do more research, or are you contending that you think the harm from COVID-19 is actually less than the harm from the most severe side effects of a vaccine we've ever seen?

[timr]

In what age group? The 1976 vaccine actually killed people and gave Guillain Barré to many more, so that's your worst-case outcome. So far, under 20 years of age, the fatality rate for Covid is measured in low-single-digit thousandths of a percent (i.e. under a thousand in the US).

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.24.20180851v...

[CydeWeys]

Yeah, the worst vaccine mortality rate ever was still not remotely as bad as that, and you're not considering that a vaccine given to a 20 year old is helping to protect all the other people said 20 year old comes into contact with, who will have substantially higher mortality rates from COVID.

[timr]

"Yeah, the worst vaccine mortality rate ever was still not remotely as bad as that"

Citation required.

[CydeWeys]

40 million people got it, only 25 died: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-apr-27-sci-swin...

I'll leave the math as an exercise for the reader, but that's a really low mortality rate, orders of magnitude less than even young healthy people who've gotten COVID-19.

[nfw2]

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

Even with experimental concerns like the small sample size, 55% incidence of long-term neurological effects is pretty alarming