[Cogito]

The original claim was a qualified 'impeccable' - "the current ones with an impeccable record" - that is the original response was that the current covid vaccines are as safe as the other safe vaccines we have.

The follow up was saying "the covid vaccine doesn't have a perfect safety record therefore it's not really impeccable is it!" while not comparing to other safe vaccines at all.

You can't use a broad definition in the original claim and then try and use a narrow definition when refuting counter claims.

[incrudible]

> The original claim was a qualified 'impeccable' - "the current ones with an impeccable record" - that is the original response was that the current covid vaccines are as safe as the other safe vaccines we have.

They absolutely are not "as safe", not by a long shot. The Myocarditis risk is unprecedented, as is the risk for GBS, as is the risk for VITT, which is a disease that didn't even exist before. Those are just the side-effects we acknowledge.

Beyond that, the sheer number of adverse event reports for the COVID vaccines dwarf the reports for all other vaccines combined. You can argue that surely most of those reports must be unrelated to vaccination, but that is true for all reports.

Now, before you move the goal post, I'm not saying that these risks outweigh the benefits. That becomes highly subjective and speculative as we move into the younger age brackets. In its approval papers, the FDA itself calculated scenarios in which the risk of vaccination outweighs the benefit for males under 18, we just choose not to pay attention to that.

[Cogito]

I agree with most of what you say.

Here in Australia we held back from giving certain vaccines (the mRNA vaccines we have available here) to some demographics when the virus was suppressed here, until the risk from a new outbreak meant it was safer to get the vaccine than not. The adenovirus vaccine we have available was not held back in the same way.

The contention in this discussion, I think, is that we haven't established an absolute yardstick for an 'impeccable safety record'.

You rightly point out the adverse effects we're seeing from these new vaccines, and that they appear more frequent than adverse effects from past vaccines, but that doesn't make them significantly less safe.

Suppose we have an old vaccine that has adverse effects 1% of the time (this would be terrible, but still), and a new vaccine that has twice as many adverse effects. The old vaccine would be 99% safe and the new vaccine 98% safe - quite similar (though still terrible)!

When we start talking about the actual rate of excess adverse effects for the covid vaccines it's on the order of 10 per million doses [0]. Even if this is 10 times worse than old vaccines we're talking about vaccines that are 99.9999% safe vs 99.999% safe.

Based on the evidence we have these vaccines are extremely safe, and I would feel comfortable accepting the 'impeccable safety record' label even though I probably wouldn't choose it myself.

[0] https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2021...

[incrudible]

It is not ten times worse, it is hundreds of times worse. You would be hard pressed to find a death linked to any of the established vaccines over many years. In Australia, eight people died from VITT alone so far, but how many healthy young people died of COVID? The survival rate for COVID for under 30 without comorbidities is estimated at 99.999%. An impeccably safe infection, by your standard!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7482102/