[slumdev]

> I'd wager that the average American anti Covid fanatic (the sort: Masks are fascism! It's like what the nazis did with the jews!) is not really the kind of person travelling the world.

You'd be wrong.

I've received more vaccines than 99.99% of the people you meet. I visit the doctor and get every jab that's recommended before every international trip (along with documentation for my prescriptions in case I'm questioned about them at a border,) but I will not receive any of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines until they are adequately tested. Adequate testing takes about a decade. I'm not really concerned about their efficacy, but anyone who tells you that their long-term safety is already established is lying to you.

[RspecMAuthortah]

Not sure why you are downvoted.

Health officials in US have done a phenomenal job showing how incompetent they were during this crisis. From initial downplay, then the mask fiasco, then trying to covering up the lab leak hypothesis, and of course politicizing the vaccine release timeline, they have blood on their hands. Then to say we need to blindly trust them on what they are saying on safety profile of the vaccine, its completely crazy. And through it all they never said we are sorry.

I will never trust US Health Authorities anymore. Period.

[guitarbill]

Maybe because saying "Adequate testing takes about a decade" is kinda BS - maybe in poster's opinion that's what "adequate" means. Realistically, the vaccine just has to be safer than getting Covid and it's long-term effects. Because we've seen in most Western nations that not getting Covid doesn't work in general.

> I will never trust US Health Authorities anymore

It's a shame some of their mistakes have eroded trust, and for what it's worth, I think easing masking requirements for vaccinated people was rash. But:

> then trying to covering up the lab leak hypothesis, and of course politicizing the vaccine release timeline, they have blood on their hands.

Come on. With all due respect, the lab leak hypothesis does not change the fact Covid exists now and we all have to deal with it, and I'm not even sure what "politicizing the vaccine release timeline" even means, or how a vaccine rollout better than Europe (so far) means they have blood on their hands. There is for sure some politics involved, which can be seen between the different approaches between the administrations. But that just points to factors outside health officials.

So what about other countries then? Are they equally untrustworthy? And with all the vaccinations given so far, the safety profile of some vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech) seems very good (compared to AZ, which is still not bad). At this point, data exists on the short term effects and blind trust is not necessary. On the long term, who knows? But you'd be in the same boat as millions of other people if there were wide-spread effects. If not, then it'd be like cancer or car accidents. Shit does sometimes happen, and often it's out of our control.

[ghoward]

If we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccines, we don't know if they are actually better than COVID and its long-term effects.

[Pyramus]

Don't forget Covid/SARS-Cov-2 is only 6 months older than the vaccines: Nov-2019 vs Apr-2020.

Every bit of data that we have today about the safety profile of the vaccines vs Covid indicates that for the majority of people vaccines are orders of magnitude (think 100-10000x) safer than Covid.

Even when they aren't, e.g. children or AZ & young women, we are talking about super small risks similar to an average car ride.

[supertrope]

People consider risk emotionally. A Facebook post claiming their uncle’s roommate’s sister died of a JNJ blot clot (1 in a million) gets more eyeballs than yesterday’s hundreds of COVID-19 fatalities (hundreds of times the risk!)

[ghoward]

No, there are data that says that the vaccines may be the same as COVID, or worse because the virus is not that dangerous for young people.

[guitarbill]

that's true, but also not useful if you're dead.

luckily, there are a few vaccines to choose from, and we do understand how the vaccines work in general. but if you don't trust mRNA vaccines, adenovirus vaccines are very well understood.

[supertrope]

I’m not a betting man but a one in a million chance of dying of a Jannsen shot looks good in comparison with COVID-19’s 300 per million(1). Lightning is about 0.3 million. Driving or riding a car is 100 per million.

(1)Death rate much higher in hotspots after hospitals are overwhelmed.

[ghoward]

I'm not a betting man, but it looks like the chance of dying from the shot might actually be higher than 1 in a million. And we don't yet know how high it is, nor will we, I suspect.

[RspecMAuthortah]

> With all due respect, the lab leak hypothesis does not change the fact Covid exists now

It would though, in Jan 2020. When it was almost equivalent to xenophobia. When everyone was told travel was no biggie. And everyone should hang in NYC because the preparedness is so high. What does it say about those experts who espoused these bs? I remember Anthony Fauci publicly saying in news conference there is no way this is a lab leak and it has to be a natural virus. If a year later now it seems the were not being honest to public (intentionally or not), what makes you think a year from now they won't reverse course on vaccine?

> how a vaccine rollout better than Europe (so far) means they have blood on their hands.

You don't think US wouldn't have a better response if this was not an election year in 2020? I remember the tone around vaccine suddenly changing post election from "I will use it when Drs say it is safe" to "if you don't take vaccine you are a bigot".

> the safety profile of some vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech) seems very good (compared to AZ, which is still not bad)

Sure "seems good", it is like saying safety profile of this code I am going to be using in production that will be tested on billions of people "seems fine" so let's go ahead and if anything happens we will be on the "same boat as millions of other people" as you said.

My hypothesis around this is this - countries that have been successful the most in controlling the virus i.e. China have the lowest vaccination number too. So what makes you think we are smarter than them when we did an awful job managing the virus?

> Shit does sometimes happen, and often it's out of our control.

This is the point though. Shit happened and it was within our control. There were multiple mis-steps from health officials and media from the get go with outright downplay to being completely wrong (about masks and other things) and politicizing. And there were no recourse. No introspection. No apologies. The NYC health commissioner who said their preparedness was very high is still there. No one had any accountability.

Hell there are still 700+ people dying in US everyday, do you hear those CNN panelists outraged about those deaths? No, we have moved on. It's all about channeling the narrative. The political war has been won and that''s all that mattered in an election year. People's lives were secondary.

And we still are supposed to trust blindly the same group of people?

[slumdev]

Well, don't take it from me. Take it from Hopkins:

> A typical vaccine development timeline takes 5 to 10 years, and sometimes longer

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/timeline

Or how about from New York State?

> The creation of a vaccine involves scientists and medical experts from around the world, and it usually requires 10 to 15 years of research

https://www.health.ny.gov/prevention/immunization/vaccine_sa...

Or the World Economic Forum?

> In total, a vaccine can take more than 10 years to fully develop

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/vaccine-development-b...

mRNA technology doesn't eliminate the need for lengthy safety testing. It only decreases the amount of time between initial brainstorming and sticking needles in test subjects. The need to follow those subjects for years to monitor them for negative outcomes doesn't change.

[supertrope]

There were big mistakes but attributing malice and rejecting experts is just jumping out of the pan and into the fire.