[josephcsible]

You can't just weigh "The risk and severity of bad effects from COVID" with "the risks and severity of the bad effects from the vaccine". You also need to factor in that the probability of an unvaccinated person getting COVID isn't 100%.

[lamontcg]

The likelihood of the virus becoming endemic is very high which pushes the probability much closer to 100% for everyone.

[scythe]

About 10-30% of Americans got COVID-19 so far, depending on how you tally the numbers. Of those, approximately 8% can be expected to experience long-term effects that disrupt their daily lives: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/91270

>About 8% of all participants said at least one activity of daily living suffered long-term consequences, most commonly household chores.

That puts the net risk for non-vaccinated people at no less than 0.8%.

By contrast, the incidence of blood clots from the AstraZeneca vaccine, which caused its ouster, was about 0.001%. That's a factor of 800 in favor of vaccination with the worst of the vaccines.

[tryonenow]

And how do you measure the mid to long term risk of a novel mRNA technology which is effectively in trial now, under emergency approval, when vaccines typically take years of safety evaluations? Particularly considering that there are preprints out with a mechanism identified for reverse transcription of the spike producing mRNA, which could result in chronic inflammatory disease in some proportion of recipients, given that other preprints claim that the spike protein itself is a general inflammatory agent and may be responsible for clotting/vascular symptoms.

Note that reverse transcription of COVID RNA also is a convenient explanation for post symptomatic positive tests as well as long COVID symptoms.

I think it's irresponsible to downplay the risks associated with this novel technology, especially when people still have the option of continuing to socially isolate to some degree.

[lamontcg]

Vaccines either cause side effects in ~3 months or they don't. They could conceivably trigger long-term autoimmune conditions but they don't hide for years.

And we have a long track record of understanding this because viruses and vaccine cause the same kinds of autoimmune conditions. I had viral pericarditis once from a common cold that struck a month or two after I got over it. We've got hundreds of years of experience with it.

The issue with vaccines taking a long time to get approval is development time and efficacy data. Both of those were able to be done quickly due to the massive pandemic and due to the 10 years of preparatory work done on SARS-CoV-1 and mRNA vaccines.

And your interpretation of the reverse transcription article is just bullshit misinformation.

And you're still not escaping from being exposed to SARS-CoV-1 mRNA, it'll become endemic. You're getting it from the virus or the vaccine, there's not really going to be any skipping out.

(And if the LINE-1 results are correct this is how we pick up genetic material from all kinds of RNA viruses, our genome is littered with historical pandemics).

[kelnos]

> The issue with vaccines taking a long time to get approval is development time and efficacy data. Both of those were able to be done quickly due to the massive pandemic and due to the 10 years of preparatory work done on SARS-CoV-1 and mRNA vaccines.

Not only that, but Operation Warp Speed (hate the name, but have to give it some credit) removed bureaucratic hurdles that allowed many of the normal steps to be done in parallel rather than serially. That doesn't mean that those steps were rushed or done in an unsafe manner.

[scythe]

>Particularly considering that there are preprints out with a mechanism identified for reverse transcription of the spike producing mRNA, which could result in chronic inflammatory disease in some proportion of recipients

This doesn't make sense because the mRNA-based spike protein, unlike the natural spike protein, is specifically tuned to annoy the immune system. Any cells incorporating the vaccine mRNA into their DNA will be summarily executed for the very same reason that the vaccine works as a vaccine in the first place: it's an antigen.

>I think it's irresponsible to downplay the risks associated with this novel technology

What's irresponsible is couch-quarterbacking the epidemiological community and the medical authorities of ~every developed country in the world, based on preprints, in the face of a pandemic that has claimed ~10M lives globally.

[josephcsible]

Those numbers don't factor in age or preexisting conditions at all.

[scythe]

The safety factor is 800. Preexisting conditions and age aren't going to change the conclusion.