[Wowfunhappy]

Of course there's a possibility. The problem with long-term effects is that if a problem takes 70 years to show up, then by definition we won't know about it for 70 years.

This applies not just to any drug you take, but also to the ingredients in the food you eat and the particles in the air we breath. We've come to such realizations before, and we will again.

But we also know for sure that COVID-19 is killing people right now.

[tempestn]

The risk of long term effects is actually very small - almost insignificant. Long term effects tend to be an issue for drugs that are taken over the long term. With a vaccine that is only taken twice, the vaccine itself and its direct byproducts (ie the spike proteins) are only in the body for a limited period. After that it's only the immune response that remains. There's no realistic mechanism for a previously unseen effect to show up from it years down the line.

There is a small possibility that there could be detrimental effects to a fetus, which is why the vaccines are not currently recommended for pregnant women. It's not expected that there would be a negative effect; it just hasn't yet been tested. (Fortunately pregnancy is not a chronic condition, so people can still be vaccinated after giving birth.)

[hn_asker]

"The risk of long term effects is actually very small - almost insignificant"

Do you have sources for those claims?

[tempestn]

I'm not an expert myself, but I've done a lot of reading. I don't have a specific source at hand, but this is the consensus I've gotten from any interviews of vaccinologists or epidemiologists I've read or heard. Essentially that any side effects from vaccinations show up within a few weeks—that there just isn't a mechanism for them to appear years down the line if they haven't already been seen sooner, for the reason I described.

Now again it is possible that side effects could still be discovered in patients with complicating factors that weren't represented in the trials (like pregnancy or other known or unknown pre-existing conditions). Or just because the effects were too rare to show up significantly in the trials. But again these would be expected to show up quickly as widespread vaccination begins, as did the few severe allergic reactions that have occurred.

Of course as with anything, especially as charged an issue as vaccines, if one goes looking for it one can find plenty of purported evidence that long-term side-effects (by which I mean here side effects that don't show up until long after the vaccine is taken) are possible or even common. But the expert consensus based on the totality of evidence appears to be that this is not a serious concern.