[revax]

>It is not a conspiracy theory to believe that a relatively untested vaccine can have unknown side effects.

Everybody knows that. But the benefits (reduced transmission, protection from severe forms of the disease) still outweigh the risks of the vaccine.

[jsmcgd]

It's impossible to say what the risk/reward trade-off is, if all the risks aren't known.

[michaelmrose]

That is nonsense. We approved it for emergency use based on a tentative analysis of the risk reward trade off. With hundreds of millions of shots given there is no particular reason to believe there should be ANY long term consequence of the covid vaccine and short term side effects are understood.

[jsmcgd]

I don't know how you can dispute that if you are trying to compute A where A = B/C and you don't have a fixed value for B, then you cannot know A with any certainty. We're distributing novel vaccines treatments which have had zero long term tests. We are all in the middle of the worlds largest vaccine experiment. The final results will not be known for years.

Particularly there are actually plenty of reasons to believe there might be lots of long term consequences. Especially for coronavirus vaccines:

- previous attempts to make coronavirus vaccines often made people more susceptible to subsequent variants not less through ADE (antibody dependent enhancement) where the virus uses the immune system to infect more cells

- long term testing used to be an essential part of vaccine approval, presumably not for no reason

- distributing multiple novel vaccines increases the chance that a harmful one will have been distributed (albeit to fewer people than just administering one novel vaccine)

- distributing a vaccines during (not before) a pandemic almost guarantees increased virulence (much like administering incomplete courses of antibiotics promotes antibiotic resistant bacteria)

- unlike other vaccines, the active ingredient - the spike protein - is toxic. The vaccines make your cells produce this protein and it accumulates in bone marrow and especially the ovaries. The long term effect of this is to be determined

- vaccination can make the immune system hyperfocused on a specific variant, increasing vulnerability against other variants

There is also the issue of accute vacine injury, but I'll not go into that.

Immunology appears to be one of the most complex systems to try and contend with. I'm not an expert, but I worry that the 'tentative analysis' may have not been sufficient.

Hopefully it was the right decision to vaccinate the entire western world with novel vaccines. Time will tell.

[michaelmrose]

"- distributing a vaccines during (not before) a pandemic almost guarantees increased virulence (much like administering incomplete courses of antibiotics promotes antibiotic resistant bacteria)"

This is not how the world works. It is a risk of incomplete vaccination but no vaccinations carry an even higher risk due to rolling 100x more dice.

There is no reason to believe vaccination against one variant makes you more susceptible to others your body already contends with a soup of microscopic invaders more extensive than known to man.

Each mRNA payload is a partial work product of a spike protein rather than plans for a factory which means that the quantity of the spike protein produced is too small to be harmful unlike getting covid which would produce plenty.

If we don't vaccinate most people you will eventually get actual covid within a few years. You are selecting between the certainty of getting covid and vaccination or if you are selfish between everyone else getting vaccinated and you getting covid. However if too many are selfish this strategy fails.

We have every reason to suppose our analysis is correct and we are preventing millions of deaths by moving forward now. This is a privilege we have never had before we would have gladly done the same in different places and times throughout history.

You need to either educate yourself more thoroughly or consider listening to the overwhelming consensus of highly educated people.

[revax]

>I don't know how you can dispute that if you are trying to compute A where A = B/C and you don't have a fixed value for B, then you cannot know A with any certainty.

I'll argue that C, the benefits, are also unknown. What about the long term effects of COVID-19? What if a new more deadly, more infectious or vaccine-resistant variant appears that could have been prevented from a quick mass vaccination?

You can only make the best decision from what we know at this time.

[jsmcgd]

> What if a new more deadly, more infectious or vaccine-resistant variant appears that could have been prevented from a quick mass vaccination?

The vaccine rollout could only ever proceed so quickly and we already have a 'vaccine-resistant' variants. So I agree the benefits look incredibly dubious.

Remember the so called vaccines don't even claim to stop people spreading or catching the virus. They only reduce rates of hospitalization. Vaccine is a misnomer. They should just be called therapeutics. They're doing almost nothing to stop the spread.

[jaywalk]

I don't think everybody knows that. I think a lot of facts have been brushed under the rug to convince more people to get the vaccine. I don't disagree about the benefits of the vaccine outweighing the risks (in many cases) but I don't think most people have the full picture.