[novemp]

> I do want to minimize the number of vaccinations she gets

Imagine saying this about anything else that's good for children. I want to minimize the amount of food she eats. I want to minimize the number of friends she has. Insane mindset, tbh.

[arjie]

Haha, I can simultaneously try to minimize neither kinds of food nor number of friends while minimizing number of medical interventions. I suppose to some people all three of these must either go down or all three must go up, but I think I can move the three for my child in different directions with different intensity.

[novemp]

Medicine is good, actually.

[arkey]

This is like saying food is good.

It is. But then you have ultra-processed food, junk food, food you might be allergic to...

Some medicines are good, some medicines are the lesser bad, some medicines will kill you if you take them when not needed, some medicines you might be allergic too, and some medicines are just a patch to have you feel well and keep you going.

[ifyoubuildit]

This is the result of the covid era info landscape, thinking like this.

Medicine is not an unqualified good. Here's a simple test. Go take some chemo meds. Assuming you don't have cancer, would that be good? Or go swallow a bottle of Tylenol. Would that be good?

Medicine is only good in certain specific circumstances when administered in the right way. Its not "more doses of anything labeled vaccine equals more good". Otherwise we would give children the rabies vaccine.

If you are a perfectly healthy person, one surefire way to become a not healthy person is to put a bunch of drugs that you don't need into your body.

[arjie]

On the whole, I think Western medical authorities manage to balance public health vs. risk fairly well[0]. Their principles of parsimony of intervention are sound.

I think the consensus across Western nations around the COVID vaccine to allow for shared clinical decision making rather than a universal recommendation is well-informed.

My daughter, like almost every child in the West, didn't get the BCG vaccine at birth either (I did). If this (and forgoing the COVID-19 vaccine) are mistakes, then that's life. Those of us who make those choices must live with the consequent regrets.

But she's got two surgeons as grandparents. And they're aligned with the CDC and STIKO schedules. I'm comfortable with the decision-making process.

0: errors like allergen management are unusual, and fairly quickly resolved; even the errors in COVID response were adaptively handled

[simianparrot]

Repeat after me: Any medical intervention has a cost/benefit analysis.

[allan_s]

Everything has risks, every time you go out of for a run you can injure yourself, fall badly on the head and die. Nearly all Life decision are about risk/benefits

[atoav]

Yes, but as the pandemic has shown people are phenomenally bad at guesstimating the risk of vaccinations.

The cool thing about medicine is that we get pretty good numbers pretty fast for everything. So in the end that choice would just be about knowing the numbers and picking your poison.

But that isn't how people make these choices. They will say "it is unnatural to stick a needle into a child" and then have their child infect half of their school plus the parents with measels.

The cost/benefit analysis of that hypothetical case is a damn no-brainer for the vaccination, yet that isn't how people act. Meaning if we talk about regular vaccinations (flu, corona, measels, tetanus) just getting all of them is the better choice for the society and yourself.

Unless those are crazy expensive for some reason in your place. Where I live all of those are free and take at max 20 minutes for me to get including the walk to the doctor's office. Not having the flu in the winter season is cool, because lying in bed for a week sucks more than a little sting of the needle with no noticable side effects.

[novemp]

So what's the downside of the covid vaccine? A little arm pain for a day or so?

[4gotunameagain]

The downsides of a very new, experimental vaccine that the covid vaccine is, have not been clearly established yet. Partially due to tribal, adherent behaviours like the one you are displaying right now.

I think it is a reasonable point of view to not want to be the testbed for vaccines that were also rushed to the market to reap the profits, let me remind you.

Oh and, I've gotten the vaccine. I'm just not tribal about it.

[atoav]

A bit over 70% of the world population has received covid vaccines as of April 2024. Over 13 billion doses. With the law of big numbers we can assume that nearly all of the worst things that could have happend with the vaccine have been already seen and widely known. The illness itself killed between 7 and 18 million people worldwide. For the vaccines we don't know exactly because it was so rare and that tells you something. Even if we assume lying medical professionals: Everybody knows somebody whose relative died from covid. Nearly nobody knows somebody whose relative died from the vaccine. I don't really see how this is tribal. Maybe it has been tribal to some people at some point, but the years have passed and we have better data now.

Given the biological mechanism of these vaccines, the risks are well-known at this point. The mRNA does not integrate into DNA and degrades within hours to days. We were extremely lucky we had years of science on the mechanisms when the pandemic broke out (+won the scientist who did it a Nobel price). The major serious (but rare) side effects are (1) myocarditis in young men with mRNA vaccines and (2) thrombosis with adenovirus-based vaccines. Both were either known already or identified quickly because of the mentioned huge number of doses given and the careful monitoring then. These risks are measurable, have clear incidence rates, and are lower than the same complications from infection (otherwise millions would have had them).

There is no plausible mechanism for any delayed catastrophic effects years down the line without any signal in the first billions of doses, neither for this vaccine nor for others. At this stage the vaccines are not exactly what I would call "experimental" anymore. They one of the most heavily observed medical interventions in history.

So if you believe there ought to be something wrong with the numbers (incompetence/grand conspiracy) or some weird thing is gonna happens with a delay of multiple years (black swan mechanism), the burden of proof IMO on your side.

I am not from the US, so I might not be up to speed with the tribal pandemic conflicts emerging in your culture. So you may call me tribal, but I prefer to mitigate real risks for my family and me, rather than hypothetical ones proposed by people who don't go into detail beyond a "who knows".

[novemp]

I love how you didn't get a single response to this. But yeah, we're the ones who are being "tribal"...

[novemp]

How long is the covid vaccine going to be "new" and "experimental" for?

[4gotunameagain]

Until people with your mentality allow proper, unbiased science to tell us the facts. Are you suggesting that you are certain that the covid vaccine is entirely safe, and the benefits outweigh the risks ? And what are your credentials ?

[atoav]

So of the 13.84 billion doses administered how many people have seen serious harm and why did I never hear of them?

Note that 13.84 billion is a huge number, if every dose was a powerball lottery ticket we should see around 64 jackbot winners. That means nearly every weird thing that can happen by chance, will happen. And since people were on the edge every weird thing will be reported. But even these reports are all like "yeah that person eas already on the verge of dying or had some other weird medical condition and we can't really establish a clear chain of causality".

Maybe I am a bit allergic to a generic anti-modern-medicine stance, since my neighbour (my best friends mom), died of a preventable disease because she didn't want to get the known-safe medical remedy and spent a fortune on shamans and other greedy healers instead. She wanted a natural thing and died (as was natural before the advent of modern medicine).

[novemp]

If you're implying there's evidence the covid vaccine is harmful, by all means, share it.

[beeflet]

There is no downside to taking any vaccine. I've taken 4 different covid vaccines alongside all their associated boosters when they were available for free.

For anyone that isn't afraid of needles and a little arm pain, it's worth it for the peace of mind alone.

[ifyoubuildit]

> There is no downside to taking any vaccine.

This is just wrong. Go figure out which vaccines you haven't had, and then figure out why they haven't been prescribed to you. (Hint: It's not because your doctors are anti-vax)

[croon]

While you are technically correct, my charitable interpretation of GP is "There is no downside (not grossly outweighed by the upside) to taking any vaccine (against an illness you are likely to come in contact with)".

It's hard to exhaustively list all qualifiers to statements in short form communication.

[ifyoubuildit]

Still false. Maybe if you qualify it further to currently prescribed vaccines (e.g fda certified ones that haven't been taken off the market for whatever reason, or just superceded by newer better vaccines), you'd be closer, but some of those vaccines still wouldn't be recommended to certain people for certain reasons (say after a certain age, or maybe if they're pregnant, or if they have certain conditions, etc, etc, etc)

I don't think it's being particularly pedantic to say "there is no downside to any vaccine" is just wrong, and not really something that should be repeated. It's more of a religious statement than anything else, and it's the exact kind of thinking that comes out of the insane pressure put on people during covid.

[ZeroGravitas]

So minimize the risk, not the number of vaccinations.

Decisions that take you in opposite directions.