[atleta]

Well, you may not be (or see yourself) an anti-vaxxer, and your right that it's not necessarily wise to label everyone as such who have concerns with these vaccines, but it also doesn't mean that your excuses make sense.

The batch is not "rushed" more than it's needed: there IS an emergency. It's also not experimental. The experiments have all been done (up to phase 3). It's perfectly normal to only see 1 in a million (or even 1:100 000) side effects after starting the vaccination of the general public. Simply because the phase 3 will never contain millions of people. I've checked, and the 30-40k studies we had with these seem to be indeed large. I.e. safe.

What you think about your immune system is kind of irrelevant for a few reasons, but talking up their immune system seems to be a general self-convincing strategy for a lot of people. First of all, it's not apparent that you have contracted the virus. Unless you have an antibody test showing that you are seropositive, you simply don't know, but the chances aren't very high. What you can be sure about is that you have not contracted "all" variants. If you live in the UK then you had the chance to meet the UK variant (B117, IIRC) and the base variant (D6.... whatever). Very likely not both. And the immunity for the base variant seems to work pretty well for the UK variant, so it doesn't even matter if you met both.

But even if you know you are already immune, the natural immunity doesn't last that long. The vaccines give you higher antibody levels (at least the mRNA ones do, again IIRC) and better immunity especially due to the second dose. (Which you can't really simulate with a second infection within a few weeks.)

And at last: you can't generalize from your own experience. Looking at the numbers, which we do have a lot of, people who haven't met the virus and don't have immunity should by all means get the vaccine. Because the virus is a lot more dangerous (several orders of magnitude more dangerous) than even the J&J or the AZ vaccine. Though the exact risk profile will depend on individual factors, of course, but since you've talked about all vaccines...

[argvargc]

Zero experiments have been done on long-term effects, and you cannot, and no one can, counter this point.

That's the definition of "rushed".

Vaccines typically take several years of testing before being approved. These aren't approved according to those standards. Manufacturers are absolved from risks because of this "emergency use" status. Why absolve them if there are no risks? If they truly believed these were safe and of tremendously important benefit, they could stand up and say "we accept responsibility for negative outcomes in accordance with ordinarily approved medication, and waive our rights to emergency use protections". Then everyone would rush to take them as doubts would be broadly eliminated.

[jrockway]

Things are "rushed" because it's an emergency. SARS-CoV-2 has existed for a little more than a year, and it's already killed 3 million people. At some point, you have to take the leap of faith that this thing that's very much like other things is going to actually be very much like those other things. mRNA vaccines are not new. Adenovirus vaccines are not new. Vaccines are brought to market in less than a year routinely; consider the seasonal flu vaccine.

(Why are we seeing mRNA vaccines for COVID and not other diseases, if it's not new technology? Because the vaccines for other diseases didn't work.)

You are totally right that there could be some magical protein in the vaccines that causes you to drop dead in two years. There probably isn't though, so what you call "rushed" other people call "saving lives".

[argvargc]

9 million - including many children, and mostly people of colour - die each year of starvation. Where's the emergency, trillions and unprecedented worldwide cooperation and effort to eradicate that forever within less than a year? It doesn't even require the invention of anything new, and is primarily a logistical (/expense) problem. Would save three times as many lives just in the first year, overwhemingly more life years overall, and be much easier to implement, being confined to mainly a few known, poorly-resourced areas (rather than the entire earth).

If you've seen or lived the effects of starvation firsthand, you'd find it difficult to understand why suddenly everyone is willing to do anything, even destroy their own livelihoods or take rush-developed intravenous shots, to try and save the lives of a significantly smaller number of predominantly elderly people who were about to die of just about anything else anyway, at the expense of those 9 million (or any other of preventable causes of death that kill in higher numbers per year and have been known about for decades, for example: smoking).

Why not spend a year making the manufacturing of cigarettes illegal, have a worldwide crackdown with cigarette company executives hauled to jail for crimes against humanity, make it illegal to depict smoking in any media, censor all images of cigarettes, and launch a 24/7 every news channel, every street corner propaganda campaign, with celebrities publicly blacklisting smokers?

Save significantly more lives in the first year, and keep doing so year after year. Wouldn't need to trash the economy, ruin businesses, or risk plunging anyone into poverty, etc - and no need for anyone to take a rushed, long-term untested shot.

[atleta]

> 9 million - including many children, and mostly people of colour - die each year of starvation.

The sad thing about this kind of argument is that it never goes away. Whatever happens. I started an argument more than a year ago with a guy, when we had 3000 deaths. World wide, total. He kept saying that it's less than the number of people who die in car accidents in a day. And he was right. What he didn't get is that without counter-measures it would grow exponentially for quite a long time and to quite a large total.

And it did grow and we continued this argument for months (with 1-2 comments a month) he had to keep raising the stakes. Next it was less than the number of flu deaths per year, next it was less than the number of car accident deaths, this time per year, then the number of HIV deaths, and then he just stopped arguing. I pinged him at 1M last June, never responded. I don't think he changed his mind.

I see your argument as a continuation of that. You just raised the stakes again, but however much the total count will be, you guys will always find something bigger. Implicitly stating that it's only worth taking counter measures against the worst cause of death. (Be it lockdowns or vaccines.) But it doesn't make sense. This is ON TOP of all those. Also, let's not forget that the only way we managed to keep it down to 3M is by imposing pretty strict lockdowns worldwide. Without those it would have been a lot worse. And even with these lockdowns the health care system is waaay overloaded in a lot of places, which means that COVID kills indirectly as well.

Yes, help people who are starving: we can easily do so by donating money. As long as you have the money. But don't make it worse by not vaccinating and letting COVID kill others, kill even those who are very poor (they definitely have worse chances) and kill the economy which obviously means more people starving and less help for those who have already been starving.

[argvargc]

9 million/year have not been helped by donations, that's why the number persists.

The "per year" number for COVID cannot change now, it's been a year. It is what it is.

COVID, in light of other preventable deaths, and especially in terms of life years lost, is not of justifiable greater concern compared to others, and from mortality rates/demographics and seroprevalence, this has been broadly known from not long after the beginning. The dollar cost versus life-years-saved is borderline insanity.

The argument lockdowns saved lives has been thoroughly debunked [0], and even the most cursory common-sense look at any per-capita chart by country and measures employed confirms that at a glance.

If you want to continue killing tens of millions per year so you can save the lives of far fewer, you have no standing. Frankly, that position disgusts me.

[0] https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-do-not-control-the-co...

[atleta]

> 9 million/year have not been helped by donations, that's why the number persists.

I don't know where you are getting with this. As I said, this is at best an independent problem that can (and should) be handled. In reality it's worsened by the pandemic.

> The "per year" number for COVID cannot change now, it's been a year. It is what it is.

Though I think I didn't say the "per year" number would grow now, you are actually wrong for two reasons:

- while it's been a year, the beginning of that year was pretty mild, less deaths per day than during the summer or these days. So as we move the window, actually the per year number will increase. E.g. if you look at the "total deaths" graph on Worldometer [0], you'll see that it ramped up around the middle of October. It accelerated about 2x (but at least 1.5x).

- we got these "wonderful" results with various restrictions. And you are agruing for no restrictions, but you can't prove that no restrictions wouldn't yield much worse numbers.

> in terms of life years lost, is not of justifiable greater concern compared to others

I've already responded to this: it doesn't have to be a greater concern. It's a preventable concern. As far as I can remember, we were talking about vaccinations.

Also, years of life lost changes as the epidemic goes on and as the virus mutates and seem to get more aggressive (which is an affect of breeding it in a large number of humans). And let's not forget again, that the numbers are affected by how much the health care system is overloaded. Young people will die if they can't get into a hospital because too many people get sick at once.

> The argument lockdowns saved lives has been thoroughly debunked [0],

Yeah, I know. The whole pandemic has been "debunked" quite a few times. The first "debunk" I've read was a year ago, when a guy started lamenting that it would just die because of the network effect. It didn't. I've checked one random article from your link. It looks pretty weak. It just says that no matter what, the epidemic wave just stops after 6 weeks, because that's what it does. It lumps together countries like Sweden and Taiwan, which is crazy in its own right, because Taiwan has 11 deaths/30M people today and Sweden had like 8k/7M back in June (IIRC that's when that article was written). Needless to say, with the 3rd wave in Europe, the 6 week rule is out of the window: our 2nd wave (here in Hungary) was in a decline in mid February, when it started to rise, probably due to the spread of the UK variant. Without any change in the lockdown policy. Our hospitals have been full for about 1.5 months now. We've been world leaders in daily deaths for probably a month or so.

Yeah, so the article after just saying that the lockdowns don't do anything, because all countries seem to behave the same, concludes with "well, we certainly need to explain this..." (they seem to read my mind). And then say nothing about it. But they have included this (just to contradict you): "Certainly, a full complete lockdown reduces the spread of the virus."

People forget, that epidemiology is a well established field of science. It's only new for them. If I'd have to guess why the epidemic could start to decline on its own, I'd say that people just shit in their pants after a while and start to keep more distance. This could probably be seen in the mobile tracking data if anyone cared.

The sad thing about the lockdowns and the restrictions is that they work pretty well. If combined with all the other efforts and if people comply. Because in the end that's what matters: what people do. Not what governments say they should do. If you (or any of those authors) care to look at East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, you'd see that it can indeed be controlled pretty efficiently. Not for free, but for a lot cheaper than what most of the Western world ended up with. What they do is the complete opposite of what we're doing and what you re suggesting. Instead of ignoring, they react very quickly and vigorously. Closing entire counties if they found a few infected (that's e.g. what I've heard from a guy living in Thailand - they have 70 dead for 70M). And this allows them to have less restrictions overall. Because math. You can stop it when it's just a very low number or you can fuck around and stop it when you have a lot of dead people, when your hospitals are full. Of course, if you can stop it by testing, contact tracing, light restrictions (no mass gatherings), masks, etc., all the better.

Another piece of interesting (but not unexpected) information is that the economic effects indeed correlate with the number of deaths. [1]

> If you want to continue killing tens of millions per year so you can save the lives of far fewer, you have no standing. Frankly, that position disgusts me.

I don't kill anyone, but you definitely look angry and seem to handle this on an emotional level. Which I get, a lot of people do this but it doesn't help with having a logical argument.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirme...

[atleta]

You're mostly repeating the claims of GP and I have already responded to these. Esp. this one: "Vaccines typically take several years of testing before being approved."

The so called long-term effects have been mostly non-existent with any vaccine. First of all, the very expression "long-term effects" is vague. Do we mean effects that only materialize over the long term (i.e. a long time after being administered) or effects that last for a long time? The latter can be known (well, with a worst case estimation) even with short testing.

And as far as I am aware, there is very little evidence of the former happening with former vaccines. I.e. the vaccine inducing some systemic change in your body that remains undetectable for years.

> If they truly believed these were safe and of tremendously important benefit, they could stand > up and say "we accept responsibility for negative outcomes in accordance with > ordinarily approved medication, and waive our rights to emergency use protections".

First of all who? You seem to mingle several groups into one here. It's not the pharma companies who believe that that these are very important, but the society. (Well, at least the ones who don't live in denial.) The importance stems from the seriousness of the epidemic.

And safety is not a binary/boolean attribute. Safety can be measured and the accuracy of the measurement has a confidence (i.e. a probability that it's within the estimated limits). Now the claim is that this measured safety is way above the safety of contracting COVID. And this is the very reason we know that it's beneficial. For the society. It's pretty clear that pharma companies don't make nearly as much profit as much it is beneficial for the individual countries. Just try to add up the cost of the lockdowns e.g. for a year and then devide it by the number of doses and see how much they should cost if calculated like that. You know what, let me do the math for you: a year of lockdown has been estimated to cost 251bn GBP for the UK[1]. The UK has 66M population. Let's calculate with 266M doses. That would give you 19GBP/dose (~26USD) for the vaccines per dose. Per year. But they won't vaccinate everyone, 80% would already be an over estimation (which would increase the value of price/dose to 32.5GBP and we're not just talking about money we're also talking about lost lives and a lot of frustration, which would further increase the value of these shots.

Comprared to that, the AstraZeneca costs about 2USD, IIRC, the EU pays about 16EUR (14GBP) for the Pfizer/Biontech one.

So it's not that the tremendous value gets all snatched up by the pharma companies. Also, they do have a responsibility. In the US they have been waived, but not in the EU. And guess what: a lot of people keeps saying the same things over here. (Including* that they don't take responsibility.)

The reason the US waived these companies is exactly because the vaccines are so important and valuable for the sate (i.e. for the people). A quick rollout was more important for them, than for the pharma companies. As a side note: some politicians over here (EU) think that the US did it the right way by not wasting time on negotiating hard with the pharma companies and that the EU is behind exactly because of that and that we should have waived them as well. (I'm not sure I buy into it.) But the EU non-waiver is an assurance for everyone else, including the US citizens. Yes, you may not get a million $ check if you happen to be unlucky, but it still shows that the companies indeed do have the confidence in their product you were talking about.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/22/a-year-of-c...