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