> Is there any reason to be afraid of getting vaccinated?
There's plenty of reasons, do you mean to also ask how likely other people on the internet believe each one to be?
For example, if you ask me, this is my personal assessment:
Reason 1 - Vaccines could also contain microchips or other device for tracking, brainwashing and remote manipulating my body and mind by whoever mastermind is in charge of what goes in them.
I think that's very unlikely, I'd give it a 0.00000001% probability. I just dont know of any possibility for such advanced technology. And I can think of many different means that you can be more cost effectively tracked, manipulated or brain washed. I can also think of other ways they could have injected you with such things.
Reason 2 - The vaccines will result in worst long terms negative effects on your health than getting Covid.
I think this is a little more likely, but given all prior vaccines have shown to be quite safe, and even if they could be responsible for some long term effects, even some we haven't linked back to them yet, seeing as life expectancy and quality of life has grown year over year since the introduction of vaccines, it seems the equation would still play in their favor.
There are also more and more literature linking prior viruses as a possible cause of long term negative effects like dimentia, various auto-immune diseases, etc. So it would seem Covid is more likely to introduce long term negative effects.
So I'd give it a 1% chance.
Reason 3 - The vaccines will result in worst short term effects on your health then getting Covid.
I think this one has been shown that most of the time, Covid is more likely to kill you or make you really sick as compared to vaccines.
I'd give this one a 0.0001% chance.
Reason 4 - Vaccines can stop your pregnancy or your period and make you stink
I have seen zero cases of this, and everyone who's had a vaccine to my nose do not smell, and still have period and can get pregnant.
I'd give this one a 0.000000000000000001% chance.
There might be more reasons, but those are the ones I've heard most often, and this is only my personal risk assessment.
Well said, and pretty reasonable numbers over all.
The one point I'd add some clarification to is your .0001% chance of the vaccine having worse short term health effects. It's not that the number is wrong, exactly, it's that it's an average. It's contingent on a host of factors, but once you learn how rare side effects are, it's tempting to rhetorically bludgeon people with concerns over the head with this, even though in some cases they don't deserve it.
To give the most obvious example [1]:
> Some advisers were concerned that young and healthy Americans who don’t need a booster might choose to get one anyway. Side effects are uncommon, but in younger Americans they may outweigh the potential benefits of booster doses, the scientists said.
> “Those that are not at high risk should really be thoughtful about getting that dose,” said Dr. Helen Talbot, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University.
That's pretty strong language suggesting that if you are (1) young, (2) healthy, (3) already vaccinated, the risks might outweigh the benefits of getting vaccinated again (getting a third shot). That's extremely limited, of course, but it's important not to neglect the striking degree to which contingent facts can modulate the cost / benefit analysis.
> Reason 4 - Vaccines can stop your pregnancy or your period and make you stink
> I have seen zero cases of this, and everyone who's had a vaccine to my nose do not smell, and still have period and can get pregnant.
> I'd give this one a 0.000000000000000001% chance.
VAERS is tracking the following:
17,128 DEATHS
83,412 HOSPITALIZATIONS
92,017 URGENT CARE
127,641 DOCTOR OFFICE VISITS
7,532 ANAPHYLAXIS
10,179 BELL'S PALSY
2,631 Miscarriages
8,408 Heart Attacks
10,304 Myocarditis/Pericarditis
26,199 Permanently Disabled
3,875 Thrombocytopenia/Low Platelet
18,925 Life Threatening
31,753 Severe Allergic Reaction
9,734 Shingles
2,631 Miscarriage
15,158 Menstrual Disorders
5,401 Vaginal/Uterine Haemorrhage (All Ages)
The key question about VAERS data is, how bad is the under-reporting of side effects? The allegations of under-reporting ratios are all over the place, from as low as 1 to 3 undercount, to as bad as 1 to 100 undercount.
We really don't know how bad the situation is, or isn't. We just know there are side effects and some of them are non-trivial.
> A report to VAERS generally does not prove that the identified vaccine(s) caused the adverse event described. It only confirms that the reported event occurred sometime after vaccine was given. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report. VAERS accepts all reports without judging whether the event was caused by the vaccine.
Also, where are you getting your numbers. When I search the database (after agreeing several times that I read and understood a disclaimer similar to the above), I found 8,225 reports of death
That's interesting data. How easy would it be for you to compare it against the same for say other vaccines? I still think the Covid vaccines probably over-report compared to others, since its the only vaccine I ever got where I got notified about Vaers and told to report, but it be an interesting comparison and would give us a head start. We'd probably also need the count of people who received each vaccine to normalize the comparison.
Though to be fair, and again, I'm a random person online explaining my personal assessment, but in my assessment I also take into account that I assume that smarter people then me have already ran all these numbers, and maybe I'm naive to assume that, but I also don't have the time, know how and the access to all the data I'd need to do so myself.
In that case, I have to either trust institutions and academics of multiple countries who seem to mostly agree +/- a few difference, or I have to trust volunteer effort from generally amateurs on the internet mixed in with some legitimate trolls. And since in my field of expertise, I see often that the internet is filled with more crap than accurate information, I don't really trust the internet as much, especially the information that's easy to find.
Do keep in mind that these raw counts are meaningless, and arguably scare-mongering. Some number of people will have a heart attack regardless of whether they had the vaccine... If all these numbers were zero, we should all get the vaccine simply to live in perfect health forever!
We also know that the usual mechanism for bad reactions to vaccines is allergic reaction, which is easily observed on a short timescale, and basically doesn't happen with the covid vaccines.
> Do keep in mind that these raw counts are meaningless, and arguably scare-mongering. Some number of people will have a heart attack regardless of whether they had the vaccine... If all these numbers were zero, we should all get the vaccine simply to live in perfect health forever!
The question is really fundamentally simple for a massive vaccination campaign
Expected injury rates as a % of the population
Actual / Reported injury rates as a % of the population
Even while accounting for the low likelihood of even receiving reports of things.
We already know that some of the injury reports coming in have been independently verified by other nation's health departments. After all, there is a reason for some of the vaccine pauses among the young and healthy in the nordic countries.
>We already know that some of the injury reports coming in have been independently verified by other nation's health departments. After all, there is a reason for some of the vaccine pauses among the young and healthy in the nordic countries.
Other countries with their own health systems have independently confirmed these issues.
A friend of mine that happens to be a medical professional in a European country told me of the clotting related issues starting to show up in their own numbers far in advance of it being likewise confirmed in VAERS too.
That is why we know about these issues.
Country A and Country B have problems that show up, they ask which vaccine, which vector, etc, and they draw conclusions.
I think this is a likely concern in some countries. The vaccines are challenging to transport and properly keep stable and manufacturing of them happens in many places and was put in place and scaled up very quickly, quality control could be an issue, same as proper transportation and storage.
The non-crazy, non-simple faction of vaccine resistance argues about the likelihood of ADE, which is where the vaccine primes the immune system to have a larger reaction against some types of future infection. The typical dwell time before effect is something like 12-18 months.
Argument goes along the lines that "all" previous coronovirus vaccines were found to have ADE effects. It took a long time for them to show up, but the effect was large and the trials were abandoned.
So apparently we're still all going to die. Spring/Summer 2022 (northern hemisphere time) will be the cataclysm.
I'm inadequately gnorant to evaluate the argument on merits, but I find it interesting because it fits the classic definition of "bullshit".
>The non-crazy, non-simple faction of vaccine resistance argues about the likelihood of ADE, which is where the vaccine primes the immune system to have a larger reaction against some types of future infection. The typical dwell time before effect is something like 12-18 months.
Didn't tens of thousands of trial participants get covid vaccines back during July to September last year? They're still monitored I think. If what you said is true then they should be dropping like flies which they are not.
You may find interesting that Pfizer erased the control group for the 5-11 EUA study. Probably for your study too. There is no longterm data & analysis by design. The practices of BigPharma are questionable at best.
> Pfizer intentionally wipes out the control group as soon as they can by vaccinating all of the kids who initially got the placebo. They claim that they are doing this for “ethical reasons”. But everyone knows that Pfizer’s true aim is to wipe out any comparison group so that there can be no long term safety studies. Wiping out the control group is a criminal act and yet Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, and AZ do this as standard practice with the blessing of the FDA/CDC.
What? It's an adaptive trial design, not a criminal act.
The vaccine was effective/safe enough that it would cause more harm to leave them unvaccinated. If anything it means that there's more points of safety data by doing it this way.
Not very happy about the use of 'criminal' by the original source, but you are sadly missing the point. NONE of the kids in the Pfizer FDA clinical test developed severe covid. Not the vaccinated kids, not the unvaccinated kids. There was ZERO medical reason to vaccinate the control arm of the trial. Given that the two major concerns around covid vaccine are a. effectiveness fading over time and b. lifetime OAS, makes you wonder.
> COVID-19 rates in children ages 5 to 11 are so low that there were ZERO cases of severe COVID-19 and ZERO cases of death from COVID in either the treatment (n= 1,518) or control group (n= 750).
I tried to be clear with my language -- apologies if I did not succeed.
My intention is not to spread it, but to describe it because I think it's useful to understand the narrative. You cannot disagree with something you do not understand.
There's a faction of resistance which is neither shrill, nor obviously stupid, and they have coalesced around a narrative that is constructed in a way to be very compelling and frightening.
It's either an elaborate effort, or it's the natural result of smart people not trusting evidence, and extrapolating into authoritative-sounding "maybe"s.
In short, classic "bullshit".
But it would take someone more learned than I, to argue on merits. The promulgators of this narrative have read the Wikipedia article on ADE, and insist that that narrative is flawed, for reasons I cannot contradict.
Personally, I don't believe it for a second, but my reasons are rather prosaic: IME the more elaborately-cooked the future scenario is, the less likely it is to happen, outside of fiction. Nature tends toward the non-dramatic. I expect to be proven correct over the next ~year.
Is there any reason to be afraid of getting vaccinated?