[johnisgood]

> Before 2020, no mRNA technology platform (drug or vaccine) had been authorized for use in humans, so there was a risk of unknown effects.[79] The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic required faster production capability of mRNA vaccines, made them attractive to national health organisations, and led to debate about the type of initial authorization mRNA vaccines should get (including emergency use authorization or expanded access authorization) after the eight-week period of post-final human trials.

That risk of unknown effects was still there even when it got authorized for emergency use. Has it changed yet? Like... there was a vaccine based on old tech that has been used in humans for decades without side-effects that caused narcolepsy a year or two later, and we got lucky to have been able to make the association. It is not really only about what tech it uses, apparently.

[smukherjee19]

This is honestly one of my concerns (double-vaccinated with mRNA, no issues and I am not anti-vax).

The thing is, before the COVID-19, the world had barely heard of mRNA vaccines and suddenly there are billions of people vaccinated across the world in 2 years. I have no intention of denying that these vaccines have saved millions, if not billions of lives by preventing hospitalization, death and further overloading of medical systems worldwide.

But still, a skeptic part of my brain can't seem to 100% accept the fact, even though it might be a medical miracle. It's that scratch on your back you can barely not reach, and it stays itchy for days and months.

On the other hand, vaccines that use inactivated or dead viruses to incite an immune response has been known for more than two centuries, whereas this feels... different.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, none of the other answers to this question in this thread have been proper responses that directly answer the question, except the one about "changing priorities from do no harm to optimize for least harm" that seems to make most sense.

So, I'd love to have a direct answer, no analogies, no "imagine how worse it could have been without vaccines", no "disease X kills more people than Covid and mortality for mRNA vaccine for Covid is negligible compared to that", no shifting goalposts, no guilt-tripping for being skeptic, just a straight, direct answer to this question of the OP.

[cudgy]

“…if not billions of lives by preventing hospitalization, death and further overloading of medical systems worldwide.”

No remote way that it saved billions of lives. Covid is nowhere close to that level of mortality. The level of exaggeration that people have allowed themselves to succumb to over Covid is frankly quite alarming.

[johnisgood]

What can I do to convince them that it is not as bad as they think it is?

[cudgy]

Sadly. My guess is that for some people there is nothing you can do to convince them. These people believe what they hear on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc and are too lazy to consider documents and statistics that do not support their favorite news personalities.

It seems that major news sources have decided to suppress any information that disputes the reductive and simplistic storyline that the vaccine and masks are the perfectly effective and only solution.

[epylar]

Are you talking about Pandemrix? https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps... says there was a lot of follow up on that and no link to narcolepsy was found

[johnisgood]

About particularly that, Wikipedia says "In 2018, a multinational study including Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists published safety data on adjuvanted pH1N1 vaccines. Sweden was the only country where increased narcolepsy IRs were found in the period after vaccination campaigns. The ability of the researchers to evaluate the Pandremix brand vaccine was limited.", but you can read other ones as well here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix#Narcolepsy

It is quite interesting.

[nikolay]

No vaccine would have been authorized on billions of people before 2020 if it had such prevalent incidence of peri- and myocarditis! But now it's authorized even of toddlers, which have even higher chance for future heart issues! And all this, because politicians didn't have the balls to keep the face mask mandates!

[jacobolus]

There have been a few (I at least found one case study in the literature, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34664804/) people to have died from vaccine-related myocarditis, but my impression from skimming a handful of relevant review papers and news articles is that the vast majority of vaccine-related myocarditis cases were mild and temporary, and that those were still extremely rare among vaccine recipients.

By comparison, (a) these vaccines have directly saved millions of lives (including saving at least tens of thousands of lives of healthy young men), and (b) infection by Covid-19 itself causes myocarditis at much higher rates.

It is likely that these vaccines have in fact prevented more instances of severe myocarditis than they have caused, without considering the large constellation of other dangerous chronic or fatal effects of Covid-19.

The risk/benefit calculations are stark here (in favor of universal vaccination, including for 15–25 year old men), and from what I can tell there is no evidence that the vaccines put children at nontrivial risk.

[ButtSpark69]

You're not wrong, but neither is the person you're responding to. You responded with logic for why the vaccine was a good idea, while they only talked about what was typical in the past. Past American medical philosophy has mostly been dictated by an attitude of "do no harm" rather than "optimize for least harm". These yield very different recommendations.

[jacobolus]

This is not a fair historical summary.

The smallpox vaccine causes roughly comparable rates of myocarditis, but that didn’t stop us from undertaking a worldwide vaccination campaign to eradicate the disease.

* * *

If there were like 100x more common serious side effects, we should maybe have a conversation about whether certain populations with low Covid risk or heightened vaccine risk should pick which vaccine to take based on potential side effects. But we are so far away from that kind of risk that it is hard to see the commentary from the anti-vax side as any kind of good faith conversation, compared to grasping at whatever straws they can find to spread FUD.

The basic summary is: these vaccines are extremely safe and extremely effective for people of every age. Please everyone get vaccinated. If you have had 2 doses >4 months ago, get boosted. Anyone who tells you that the vaccine is unsafe compared to catching Covid is either grossly misinformed or lying.

[erhk]

Birth control kills more women annually then any covid vaccine. If you engaged in non-procreative sex in the past year you've done something which has a greater risk for human life and health.

[GuB-42]

Procreative sex is deadlier, pregnancy can cause the same symptoms as taking the pill, but worse, and the act of giving birth is about 1/10000 chance of death.

Life is deadly, but both sex and covid vaccine rank low on the death list, and high on the life list.

[naasking]

Masks are nowhere near as effective as vaccines.

[nikolay]

If two people wear N95 masks, masks beat vaccines manyfold!

[johnisgood]

And in comparison to COVID-19? Do they actually need a vaccine to protect against COVID-19? If not, are we giving it to them in the chance that it reduces spread, or why? It has been said it reduces spread, but this is not what you observe in countries that are >80% fully vaccinated (at least double dose), so I do not get it.

[jacobolus]

Something on the order of 1e4 children aged 0–9 have died from Covid-19 so far, worldwide.

They face ~3 orders of magnitude less risk than elderly people (of whom ~1e7 have died so far), but it is still nontrivial and much higher than the risks from vaccination.

Small kids also spread Covid effectively. There have been a bunch of places with high vaccination rates where there were outbreaks in daycares.

> It has been said [the vaccine] reduces spread, but this is not what you observe

This is what you observe. There have been a large number of studies published examining the effects of vaccination rate on community spread showing that the reproductive number of the virus (at least the original and alpha/delta strains) is significantly depressed by vaccination.

With omicron, vaccine effectiveness vs. initial infection / mild disease is much worse than with previous Covid variants (though it seems that protection vs. severe disease / death is still robust), so we can expect to see significant spread in highly vaccinated areas, but still less and slower than among an unvaccinated population.

[johnisgood]

Well, a reply (from cudgy) to my comment says this:

> The vaccine does not prevent spread of Covid. Period. The smallest amount of research proves this to be the case.

So what is the truth?

[jacobolus]

The commenter cudgy who posted that clearly did not do nontrivial research on this question from reliable sources. The statement is flat out false.

The vaccines significantly reduce the chance of infection given identical exposure. For those who still get infected, the vaccines reduce the viral load throughout the infection, eliminate or ameliorate symptoms, and shorten the time during which an infected person is contagious.

They do not completely prevent any spread of the virus (nor does any other vaccine ever created for any disease), but they make a significant beneficial impact on the rate of spread. They both cut the rate of secondary infections within each household, and reduce the amount of inter-household spread in the community.

[johnisgood]

> Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance. Nonetheless, fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts. Host–virus interactions early in infection may shape the entire viral trajectory.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

[cudgy]

The vaccine does not prevent spread of Covid. Period. The smallest amount of research proves this to be the case.

[desine]

It's not because of mask mandates, it's because every politician is invested in pfizer and moderna, it's because pharma has massive lobbying power, and because pharma companies make up much of the advertising revenue of the news networks in the USA