> If the alternative is COVID, that's a pretty low bar to clear. It's really not a low bar. A healthy 35-year-old has maybe 0.01% chance of dying, 1% chance of

> If the alternative is COVID, that's a pretty low bar to clear. It's really not a low bar. A healthy 35-year-old has maybe 0.01% chance of dying, 1% chance of lasting side-effects from Covid. Untested medicines can be way more dangerous than that: thalidomide, for example, has a 50%+ chance of causing stillbirth or birth defects for pregnant women [0]. If you just vaccinate the old and sick, risky vaccines start to look more attractive. But those people also have a greater risk of side effects and are underrepresented in the clinical trials, and most vaccination strategies mooted so far for Covid are based on mass vaccination of healthy people. So it has to be really safe for that to work. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737249/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737249/