[lultimouomo]

Honest question: would you wait if there was a pact to the effect that either everyone takes the vaccine, or no one does?

Because obviously not getting vaccinated when everybody else does is almost always the best choice game-theoretically speaking; it doesn't really say anything on the vaccine (it may say more on the civic sense of the individual).

[amurale]

Let's see... it's a calculus of death vs potential long term adverse effect:

P(death) < 0.05% for the vast majority of the population (Age < 65) vs P(unknown) long term harm in life quality, my wild estimate: P(0.1%). It's within the same order of magnitude.

I'd take the vaccine in a heartbeat, long term effects and all, if P(death) was 10% or higher.

[toast0]

If you get covid, there's a P(unknown) of long term harm as well.

It's an unknown vs an unknown. Novel virus, novel immunization (first mRNA or maybe first widespread modified adenovirus)

[usaphp]

But from what I understand the vaccine does not prevent you from getting the Virus and it's unknown side effects

[amurale]

You're correct about long term harm, I lumped them together. A better formula would be:

  P(covid death or long term harm) < 0.05%
  vs.
  P(vaccine long term harm) = ?

since my estimate is they're about the same order of magnitude, I prefer to take the devil-I-know vs. the small-scale-tested vaccine.

I model the potential harm based on a similarly rushed vaccine of 1976 which caused a large increase in cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome [0]. Longer trials and phase IV monitoring was instituted in response to this rushed vaccine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak

[MauranKilom]

What is your reason for assuming P < 0.05% for long-term harm due to COVID-19? You quite clearly assumed 0.05% for death only, therefore attributing even less to long-term health effects. But so far, there appear to be many indications that COVID-19 does have significant medium (and possibly long) term consequences even in asymptomatic cases.

I fully admit that I am not up to speed in proven COVID-19 medium- or long-term effects beyond having seen headlines, but to essentially assume none when there have been very obvious and multi-faceted indications of them implies you must have a very good basis of research to base your estimate on. Care to share?

[amurale]

I take the IFR (infection fatality rate) for age < 65, and multiply by 10 to get a worst case of IFR+long term harm. Note that we're talking about severe long term harm - such as autoimmune disease etc. Not "it took me 3 months to recover" stories.

For example, IFR(age<65) in geneva[0] is 0.0045%. multiply by 10 to include also long term harm, you get 0.045%.

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laninf/PIIS1473-3099...

[MauranKilom]

Ok, I can get behind that thought process.

I will note that the cited 0.0045% infection fatality rate number is quite old/outdated (June 1st). It's not easy to match different areas under the age curve (which seems to be exponential) and that it can vary a lot by region, but here is a review paper which has your number for ages 0-34 (Table 3) and (substantially) higher ones for ages above that:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...

[MoosePirate]

How about P(get covid, infect others, they die)? Does that factor in to your calculations?

[Gupie]

What about the known long term effects of Covid?