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by sjwalter 1817 days ago
I agree nothing is perfectly safe. However, I have never once in my life taken a drug, vaccine, or other medical treatment that has not completed FDA phase 3 trials. I have no interest in doing so.

All the other vaccines I have been administered had at the minimum a decade of widespread use following their phase 3 trials (and as an aside, their phase 3 trials were much longer studies than these covid vaccines are projected to be).

I've never taken a drug released under EUA.

I investigated every vaccine I took and assessed the risk/benefit ratio and elected to take them. In general, I love vaccines, and I love the medical establishment that gave me the option to elect them! However, the medical establishment seems to have thrown away the playbook on these particular vaccines. The point is, I could examine the risks of those vaccines, and since their administration was not politicized, the data was totally trustworthy. And since most were out of patent, the financial incentive to manipulate data just wasn't there. I could be reasonably informed of the risk. Since these have not completed phase 3 trial, much less have decades of history in widespread use, I have basically no long-term safety data with which to inform my decision. So, precautionary principle tells me: No, thanks!

The risk to benefit ratio is the only thing that matters to me, as I believe it should to others. My likelihood of serious impairment from covid seems very low to me, just like it seems very low to children, for instance. Further, the ratio changes every single day: The more people who get vaccinated, the lower my risk gets, as does the risk for every other unvaccinated person, making the ratio, as more get vaccinated, skew towards not getting the vaccine.