7 ms·

My very limited understanding tells me that the human body is a very complex system not fully understood. I only have engineering analogies, but deploying bad

My very limited understanding tells me that the human body is a very complex system not fully understood. I only have engineering analogies, but deploying bad software in a complex distributed system can appear fine until latent effects are discovered literally years later (e.g. all data in a specific column for a subset of users was overwritten for records within 6 months in 2008). My understanding with some debilitating, fatal conditions are that the causes are not well known. Fundamentally, it seems that most science is a result of abductive, deductive reasoning etc but ultimately, tinkering and observation i.e. if you don't analyse something over 10 years, you don't know its effect over 10 years. By using a variety of different vaccines all over the world the expression of humanity is that we are spreading the risk among various vaccine types or contracting COVID itself. So for a mostly self-interested individual in a rural area with a low chance of catching COVID, would it follow that the safest (but maybe selfish) bet is to wait many years? Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
AussieWog93 5y ago
>Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge? Pharmaceutical-risk-based arguments aside, India is in a pretty bad spot COVID-wise. A massive proportion of the population is dirt poor (<$1/hr) and the broader society in general don't give a damn about their plight. They cannot afford to lock down. If they do so, millions will starve to death. They were literally begging, fighting and worse to get access to oxygen tanks earlier this year. The unlucky ones watched their parents and grandparents asphyxiate in their homes with no access to treatment of any kind. If this stuff can be produced cheaply, locally and quickly, then it will be lapped up gratefully by the hundreds of millions of poor people who would be dead and buried before they got the opportunity to receive Pfizer or Moderna. What could or might happen 10 years down the track will be the least of their worries if we see another flare up.
- aguacate 5y ago
  No argument against that & my argument definitely comes from a privileged position than your average Indian.
wizardofmysore 5y ago
> if you don't analyse something over 10 years, you don't know its effect over 10 years Yes, that is why long term studies are done. Vaccine as a methodology has been proven effective. Many diseases are non-existent now thanks to it. My knowledge is limited with respect to COVID vaccines but if they are any thing like the vaccines developed for flu strains then they will not have any adverse impact. >By using a variety of different vaccines all over the world the expression of humanity is that we are spreading the risk among various vaccine types or contracting COVID itself. "spreading the risk among various vaccine types" could you elaborate on this?
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "Yes, that is why long term studies are done. Vaccine as a methodology has been proven effective. Many diseases are non-existent now thanks to it." But aren't the new vaccines of a different kind? Genetically engeneered? So I too had my doubts, before getting the shot. And I still do. But what I do know for example is, that I had strong side effects after the first dose. And also strong side effects just before my second shot of Astra. In other words, the mind is a strong factor here and the body is used to deal with alien dna all the time, so I do not worry too much about long term effects.
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    > But aren't the new vaccines of a different kind? Genetically engeneered? Only some are (those based on mRNA and DNA). There are many others based on older biotech (using inactivated virus) too. I think some of the protein based vaccine, like Novavax, are also older tech than mRNA / DNA based ones, and have been studied longer (someone more experienced can chime in and correct me if I am wrong).
icegreentea2 5y ago
If you truly believe that you can wait out a few years without being at reasonable risk of getting COVID, you're logic isn't off. You are ultimately correct, we can't actually really know what the 5+ year side effects are until we actually witness them, though I believe the data at hand indicates that they should be long-term safe. Pretty much any type of reasoning + data at hand would indicate that any type of "years past" risks that would occur with vaccines would also be present with COVID itself (especially along the inactivated virus and mRNA vaccine routes). And if the magnitude of the risks scale with exposure (they probably do), then getting straight up COVID would still yield higher long-term risk than getting vaccinated (and either successfully not getting infected, or getting infected). Basically, if you really think your choice is between not getting COVID, and not getting COVID and getting vaccinated, then obviously not getting COVID at all yields the lowest possible risk. I would challenge anyone's risk assessment on thinking they can just... not get COVID over a 10 year window however. Perhaps one change to your analogy is that the intention of these vaccines doesn't map well to new software into a distributed system. It's more like providing a specifically crafted input to a system. Long-term there is supposed to be no distinct "vaccine" sub-unit that you can point to in the human body, there's only the human bodies persisted long-term memory and response to a vaccine. I dunno if that's meaningfully changes your thinking at all, but maybe worth thinking about.
- aguacate 5y ago
  This seems like a good assessment. Personally I don't plan on avoiding COVID for the next 10 years nor do I even live in a rural area. Hypothetical. I don't fully agree with the last paragraph. I mean I think if you're charitable you can alter the analogy a little bit to make it fit. I agree that there is no "vaccine" sub-unit, but let's say the equivalent is temporarily changing a data structure that is read by service A, not thinking about service B. Or not fully examining the flow on effects from service A etc.
  - icegreentea2 5y ago
    I don't think we really need to think about "reaching in and changing internals". Vaccines are very literally specific inputs into a reactive distributed system with distributed memory/persistance. We are crafting inputs based on our understanding of system internals and prior system behaviour to similar inputs, but they are very much inputs.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
I think your premise is greatly flawed. The risk from getting a little piece of Covid mRNA is infinitesimal compared to the risk of getting Covid and having the whole genome replicated, all the proteins, and actually maybe dying to Covid or suffering long Covid after. I don’t know of any risks that have been shown to be associated with the vaccine.
- aguacate 5y ago
  If I had to argue against your assessment of the risk, I would reframe or reiterate part of my premise which is really that you cannot measure the risk of what you don't know. That being said, if I'm a betting man, I suspect someone strictly avoiding vaccines through my original line of reasoning would end up like a prepper who never lives through doom's day.
  - wolfram74 5y ago
    While my personal energies are geared towards physics, there are some underlying mechanisms in biology we collectively do have a solid grasp on. We're far away being from always being able do the X that results in Y, but we are getting to the point where we can rule out some actions. Like if you drive a ford pinto into a tree, it might crumple, it might combust, but it will almost certainly not undergo nuclear fission. Since we're not replicating the entirety of the virus, just a segment with a particular geometry, we can say with some confidence what kinds of things it /can't/ do.
  - kmos17 5y ago
    Yes but what is known is the number of deaths from covid, currently standing at 4.4 millions worldwide and 600k and counting in the US vs. very few if any attributable to taking the vaccine. So I would argue any reasonable measure of risk is pointing to the vaccine being absolutely the safer alternative (also taking into account that vaccines have been around a very long time, the long term risk is not likely to be high). And thats is before taking into account the fact that no matter how isolated you are, unless you never interact with anyone, you will likely come into contact with the virus sooner or later.
antattack 5y ago
"So for a mostly self-interested individual in a rural area with a low chance of catching COVID, would it follow that the safest (but maybe selfish) bet is to wait many years?" It would be fine strategy for Hepatatis B, for example, however delta COVID is so infectious that most people will get it, vaccinated or unvaccinated (with currently available vaccines). The only difference will be severity of the disease.
- aguacate 5y ago
  Ok fair, "a rural area with a low chance of catching COVID" may be a bit too much like never-never land over a 10 year period.
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    Yep. We’ve seen Covid spread a lot in many rural states. It’s not about living in rural area, it’s more about living without seeing any human for a very long time.
XorNot 5y ago
If you've ever cut yourself in a non-sterile environment, then you have been exposed to thousands of times more genetic material and invading pathogens then a vaccine contains, bent on doing much more serious damage. For some reason people worry about "what vaccines might do" but not "what the virus that invades your cells, co-opts the replication machinery, and then invades more cells uncontrolled" will do. The virus that literally did not exist in nature till 1.5 years ago when it started infecting humans and killing them. Like it does not only produce more viruses either - that's the goal but it's a stochastic process. You also get filled with bits of viral RNA from sheared up viruses, or ones that run into an enzyme, or from viruses where the cell shuts down or dies early and it blows fragments of viral protein into your blood stream.
- tim333 5y ago
  >the virus invades your cells, splices it's DNA into the replication machinery I don't think covid has any DNA - it's made of RNA - or does that.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    I've tidied up the paragraph, but I was originally split between being COVID specific and the more general point that we're invaded by viruses and bacteria all the time. "Getting exposed to weird DNA/RNA" is the normal human experience from living in the world.
fragileone 5y ago
It seems the newer variants like delta are more contagious yet vastly less lethal, so if it continues this trend then yes, we're past the optimal time period for vaccinations.
BobJackienine 5y ago
I know several people that almost died from the vaccination I'm one of them and I never heard anything about any problems with the vaccination until I had problems and that seems to be the normal. The behavioral health center forced me to get it never asked me never told me just jabbed me and then all the sudden I had a ton of tubes and hoses coming out of me. I'll get reparations if I have to get them myself. Hardly any doctor will even entertain the fact that the vaccine did damage to my body. The few that do are baffled, even though I'm not the only patient they're seeing with the same exact problems that won't go away.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  There’s a federal vaccine injury program you realize
- webmobdev 5y ago
  I am sorry you had to go through that experience. But you are one those 1 or 2% rare and unlucky cases that are known to happen, who have some severe reaction to the vaccines. That said, I am shocked that you were vaccinated without your knowledge. I am very pro-vaccine, but would never support someone being vaccinated against their will.
webmobdev 5y ago
> Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge? One obvious flaw I can point out in your reasoning is that you are mixing tried and tested technology with new ones. While mRNA and DNA based COVID-19 vaccines are based on new technology and perhaps their long-term impact is not yet fully known or understood (and need to be studied), there are many other vaccines based on the older, more widely used and studied bio-technology (e.g. vaccines using inactivated virus). The older vaccine biotech have been studied for, and perfected over, more than half a century. So even if the efficacy of vaccines created with older tech maybe purportedly lower (not really) than the vaccines based on newer biotech, you can be relatively sure that they are safe. Your concern about the long term impact of newer mRNA and DNA based vaccines may be justified. But that shouldn't extend to the vaccines based on the old, tried and tested and well-understood popular tech that has successfully been used in other older vaccines for decades now. (Yes, even the COVID-19 vaccines based on older biotech need to be studied. But because of the decades of data we already have, we can be reasonably predict that nothing biologically unexpected will happen. And so most of the long-term studies of these older biotech vaccines are more focused, with fewer parameters, to determine how long their efficacy lasts. With the newer mRNA and DNA vaccines though, the long-term study will have more parameters to study and more diligently observe if some thing unexpected may occur in the future.) So all said and done, even if the prevalence of the epidemic is low in your rural area, it is much better and safer for you and your community to get vaccinated, than remain unvaccinated. It just takes one undetected case to spread it to others.
tzs 5y ago
It is helpful to consider the four prior coronaviruses that are in widespread circulation among humans. They are believed to have causes pandemics when they first crossed over into humans, but like SARS-CoV-2 they caused very little death in children even though children are easily infected. Once someone caught them and survived, that person had some immunity. Immunity against reinfection fades, but immunity against serious illness lasts longer. So what happened with them is that you got a terrible pandemic that did a number on adults but while widely infecting children didn't harm them much. People who caught it and survived would get reinfected as their immunity against infection faded, but would not get seriously ill, so the pandemic would eventually end with everyone eventually having been infected, and the virus regularly in circulation. Everyone gets infected every year or so, for the most part getting only mildly ill at worst. Children born after this point all catch these viruses when they are young. They don't yet have any immunity, but these viruses only very rarely cause serious illnesses in children. They then get reinfected every year or so just like adults, but now they have the immunity against serious illness too so remain fine when they get older. Now, hundreds of years after those viruses crossed over and caused their pandemics they are so routine that we generally don't specifically track them and don't even have a specific name for the illnesses they cause. We just lump the illness in with the illnesses caused by several other respiratory viruses and call it the "common cold". Those four coronaviruses are responsible for about 20% of the common colds in the US. It looks like SARS-CoV-2 is heading toward becoming another common cold virus. Look at infection rates, hospitalization rates, and death rates by age group (US, through May 2021, rates per 100k): Age Infect Hosp Death 0-17 37k 287 0.5 18-49 44k 1100 25 50-64 32k 2600 85 65+ 22k 5200 1140 Children get it, but very rarely die from it. For comparison, the death rate for children 0-12 per year in car accidents is a little over 1.3 per 100k. For kids, COVID is about as risky as taking about 50% more car trips. If it is indeed heading down the path of the other four then it is extremely likely that you will get COVID-19 at some point, despite living in a rural area. Vaccination makes it so that when you do get your first COVID-19 infection, it will almost certainly act more like a second or third infection. Without vaccination, you go into that first infection with your immune system totally unprepared. As far as the risks of vaccination go, yes, there is a lot we don't know about how the body works. (Ask me sometime about the mysterious lump that showed up on my ass one day, baffled all the doctors that looked at it, and a few years later just went away on its own). But we do know a lot about vaccination in general. We've been doing that a long time. For all vaccinations so far if there was going to be a side effect it showed up within something like 6 months. For new vaccines for new diseases the things that go into them are all things that have been well tested before, except for whatever is specific to the new disease. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, that new thing is the mRNA, but mRNA is broken down in cells in a few days. All the COVID-19 vaccines in use in the US and Europe have been given to enough people long enough ago that we can be confident that if there are any side effect that we do not yet know about it is because they are extremely rare rather than because they take longer to develop. Bottom line: Waiting it out perhaps made sense when it seemed like there was a chance we could eradicate SARS-CoV-2, but too many people were not willing to do what that it would have taken to do that. With it heading toward becoming the fifth common cold coronavirus that is no longer the case. Get vaccinated with one of the vaccines that has been widely deployed for at least six months.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

AussieWog93 5y ago

>Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge? Pharmaceutical-risk-based arguments aside, India is in a pretty bad spot COVID-wise. A massive proportion of the population is dirt poor (<$1/hr) and the broader society in general don't give a damn about their plight. They cannot afford to lock down. If they do so, millions will starve to death. They were literally begging, fighting and worse to get access to oxygen tanks earlier this year. The unlucky ones watched their parents and grandparents asphyxiate in their homes with no access to treatment of any kind. If this stuff can be produced cheaply, locally and quickly, then it will be lapped up gratefully by the hundreds of millions of poor people who would be dead and buried before they got the opportunity to receive Pfizer or Moderna. What could or might happen 10 years down the track will be the least of their worries if we see another flare up.

aguacate 5y ago
No argument against that & my argument definitely comes from a privileged position than your average Indian.

wizardofmysore 5y ago

> if you don't analyse something over 10 years, you don't know its effect over 10 years Yes, that is why long term studies are done. Vaccine as a methodology has been proven effective. Many diseases are non-existent now thanks to it. My knowledge is limited with respect to COVID vaccines but if they are any thing like the vaccines developed for flu strains then they will not have any adverse impact. >By using a variety of different vaccines all over the world the expression of humanity is that we are spreading the risk among various vaccine types or contracting COVID itself. "spreading the risk among various vaccine types" could you elaborate on this?

hutzlibu 5y ago
"Yes, that is why long term studies are done. Vaccine as a methodology has been proven effective. Many diseases are non-existent now thanks to it." But aren't the new vaccines of a different kind? Genetically engeneered? So I too had my doubts, before getting the shot. And I still do. But what I do know for example is, that I had strong side effects after the first dose. And also strong side effects just before my second shot of Astra. In other words, the mind is a strong factor here and the body is used to deal with alien dna all the time, so I do not worry too much about long term effects.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  > But aren't the new vaccines of a different kind? Genetically engeneered? Only some are (those based on mRNA and DNA). There are many others based on older biotech (using inactivated virus) too. I think some of the protein based vaccine, like Novavax, are also older tech than mRNA / DNA based ones, and have been studied longer (someone more experienced can chime in and correct me if I am wrong).

icegreentea2 5y ago

If you truly believe that you can wait out a few years without being at reasonable risk of getting COVID, you're logic isn't off. You are ultimately correct, we can't actually really know what the 5+ year side effects are until we actually witness them, though I believe the data at hand indicates that they should be long-term safe. Pretty much any type of reasoning + data at hand would indicate that any type of "years past" risks that would occur with vaccines would also be present with COVID itself (especially along the inactivated virus and mRNA vaccine routes). And if the magnitude of the risks scale with exposure (they probably do), then getting straight up COVID would still yield higher long-term risk than getting vaccinated (and either successfully not getting infected, or getting infected). Basically, if you really think your choice is between not getting COVID, and not getting COVID and getting vaccinated, then obviously not getting COVID at all yields the lowest possible risk. I would challenge anyone's risk assessment on thinking they can just... not get COVID over a 10 year window however. Perhaps one change to your analogy is that the intention of these vaccines doesn't map well to new software into a distributed system. It's more like providing a specifically crafted input to a system. Long-term there is supposed to be no distinct "vaccine" sub-unit that you can point to in the human body, there's only the human bodies persisted long-term memory and response to a vaccine. I dunno if that's meaningfully changes your thinking at all, but maybe worth thinking about.

aguacate 5y ago
This seems like a good assessment. Personally I don't plan on avoiding COVID for the next 10 years nor do I even live in a rural area. Hypothetical. I don't fully agree with the last paragraph. I mean I think if you're charitable you can alter the analogy a little bit to make it fit. I agree that there is no "vaccine" sub-unit, but let's say the equivalent is temporarily changing a data structure that is read by service A, not thinking about service B. Or not fully examining the flow on effects from service A etc.
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  I don't think we really need to think about "reaching in and changing internals". Vaccines are very literally specific inputs into a reactive distributed system with distributed memory/persistance. We are crafting inputs based on our understanding of system internals and prior system behaviour to similar inputs, but they are very much inputs.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

I think your premise is greatly flawed. The risk from getting a little piece of Covid mRNA is infinitesimal compared to the risk of getting Covid and having the whole genome replicated, all the proteins, and actually maybe dying to Covid or suffering long Covid after. I don’t know of any risks that have been shown to be associated with the vaccine.

aguacate 5y ago
If I had to argue against your assessment of the risk, I would reframe or reiterate part of my premise which is really that you cannot measure the risk of what you don't know. That being said, if I'm a betting man, I suspect someone strictly avoiding vaccines through my original line of reasoning would end up like a prepper who never lives through doom's day.
- wolfram74 5y ago
  While my personal energies are geared towards physics, there are some underlying mechanisms in biology we collectively do have a solid grasp on. We're far away being from always being able do the X that results in Y, but we are getting to the point where we can rule out some actions. Like if you drive a ford pinto into a tree, it might crumple, it might combust, but it will almost certainly not undergo nuclear fission. Since we're not replicating the entirety of the virus, just a segment with a particular geometry, we can say with some confidence what kinds of things it /can't/ do.
- kmos17 5y ago
  Yes but what is known is the number of deaths from covid, currently standing at 4.4 millions worldwide and 600k and counting in the US vs. very few if any attributable to taking the vaccine. So I would argue any reasonable measure of risk is pointing to the vaccine being absolutely the safer alternative (also taking into account that vaccines have been around a very long time, the long term risk is not likely to be high). And thats is before taking into account the fact that no matter how isolated you are, unless you never interact with anyone, you will likely come into contact with the virus sooner or later.

antattack 5y ago

"So for a mostly self-interested individual in a rural area with a low chance of catching COVID, would it follow that the safest (but maybe selfish) bet is to wait many years?" It would be fine strategy for Hepatatis B, for example, however delta COVID is so infectious that most people will get it, vaccinated or unvaccinated (with currently available vaccines). The only difference will be severity of the disease.

aguacate 5y ago
Ok fair, "a rural area with a low chance of catching COVID" may be a bit too much like never-never land over a 10 year period.
- jeromegv 5y ago
  Yep. We’ve seen Covid spread a lot in many rural states. It’s not about living in rural area, it’s more about living without seeing any human for a very long time.

XorNot 5y ago

If you've ever cut yourself in a non-sterile environment, then you have been exposed to thousands of times more genetic material and invading pathogens then a vaccine contains, bent on doing much more serious damage. For some reason people worry about "what vaccines might do" but not "what the virus that invades your cells, co-opts the replication machinery, and then invades more cells uncontrolled" will do. The virus that literally did not exist in nature till 1.5 years ago when it started infecting humans and killing them. Like it does not only produce more viruses either - that's the goal but it's a stochastic process. You also get filled with bits of viral RNA from sheared up viruses, or ones that run into an enzyme, or from viruses where the cell shuts down or dies early and it blows fragments of viral protein into your blood stream.

tim333 5y ago
>the virus invades your cells, splices it's DNA into the replication machinery I don't think covid has any DNA - it's made of RNA - or does that.
- XorNot 5y ago
  I've tidied up the paragraph, but I was originally split between being COVID specific and the more general point that we're invaded by viruses and bacteria all the time. "Getting exposed to weird DNA/RNA" is the normal human experience from living in the world.

fragileone 5y ago

It seems the newer variants like delta are more contagious yet vastly less lethal, so if it continues this trend then yes, we're past the optimal time period for vaccinations.

BobJackienine 5y ago

I know several people that almost died from the vaccination I'm one of them and I never heard anything about any problems with the vaccination until I had problems and that seems to be the normal. The behavioral health center forced me to get it never asked me never told me just jabbed me and then all the sudden I had a ton of tubes and hoses coming out of me. I'll get reparations if I have to get them myself. Hardly any doctor will even entertain the fact that the vaccine did damage to my body. The few that do are baffled, even though I'm not the only patient they're seeing with the same exact problems that won't go away.

selimthegrim 5y ago
There’s a federal vaccine injury program you realize
webmobdev 5y ago
I am sorry you had to go through that experience. But you are one those 1 or 2% rare and unlucky cases that are known to happen, who have some severe reaction to the vaccines. That said, I am shocked that you were vaccinated without your knowledge. I am very pro-vaccine, but would never support someone being vaccinated against their will.

webmobdev 5y ago

> Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge? One obvious flaw I can point out in your reasoning is that you are mixing tried and tested technology with new ones. While mRNA and DNA based COVID-19 vaccines are based on new technology and perhaps their long-term impact is not yet fully known or understood (and need to be studied), there are many other vaccines based on the older, more widely used and studied bio-technology (e.g. vaccines using inactivated virus). The older vaccine biotech have been studied for, and perfected over, more than half a century. So even if the efficacy of vaccines created with older tech maybe purportedly lower (not really) than the vaccines based on newer biotech, you can be relatively sure that they are safe. Your concern about the long term impact of newer mRNA and DNA based vaccines may be justified. But that shouldn't extend to the vaccines based on the old, tried and tested and well-understood popular tech that has successfully been used in other older vaccines for decades now. (Yes, even the COVID-19 vaccines based on older biotech need to be studied. But because of the decades of data we already have, we can be reasonably predict that nothing biologically unexpected will happen. And so most of the long-term studies of these older biotech vaccines are more focused, with fewer parameters, to determine how long their efficacy lasts. With the newer mRNA and DNA vaccines though, the long-term study will have more parameters to study and more diligently observe if some thing unexpected may occur in the future.) So all said and done, even if the prevalence of the epidemic is low in your rural area, it is much better and safer for you and your community to get vaccinated, than remain unvaccinated. It just takes one undetected case to spread it to others.

tzs 5y ago

It is helpful to consider the four prior coronaviruses that are in widespread circulation among humans. They are believed to have causes pandemics when they first crossed over into humans, but like SARS-CoV-2 they caused very little death in children even though children are easily infected. Once someone caught them and survived, that person had some immunity. Immunity against reinfection fades, but immunity against serious illness lasts longer. So what happened with them is that you got a terrible pandemic that did a number on adults but while widely infecting children didn't harm them much. People who caught it and survived would get reinfected as their immunity against infection faded, but would not get seriously ill, so the pandemic would eventually end with everyone eventually having been infected, and the virus regularly in circulation. Everyone gets infected every year or so, for the most part getting only mildly ill at worst. Children born after this point all catch these viruses when they are young. They don't yet have any immunity, but these viruses only very rarely cause serious illnesses in children. They then get reinfected every year or so just like adults, but now they have the immunity against serious illness too so remain fine when they get older. Now, hundreds of years after those viruses crossed over and caused their pandemics they are so routine that we generally don't specifically track them and don't even have a specific name for the illnesses they cause. We just lump the illness in with the illnesses caused by several other respiratory viruses and call it the "common cold". Those four coronaviruses are responsible for about 20% of the common colds in the US. It looks like SARS-CoV-2 is heading toward becoming another common cold virus. Look at infection rates, hospitalization rates, and death rates by age group (US, through May 2021, rates per 100k): Age Infect Hosp Death 0-17 37k 287 0.5 18-49 44k 1100 25 50-64 32k 2600 85 65+ 22k 5200 1140 Children get it, but very rarely die from it. For comparison, the death rate for children 0-12 per year in car accidents is a little over 1.3 per 100k. For kids, COVID is about as risky as taking about 50% more car trips. If it is indeed heading down the path of the other four then it is extremely likely that you will get COVID-19 at some point, despite living in a rural area. Vaccination makes it so that when you do get your first COVID-19 infection, it will almost certainly act more like a second or third infection. Without vaccination, you go into that first infection with your immune system totally unprepared. As far as the risks of vaccination go, yes, there is a lot we don't know about how the body works. (Ask me sometime about the mysterious lump that showed up on my ass one day, baffled all the doctors that looked at it, and a few years later just went away on its own). But we do know a lot about vaccination in general. We've been doing that a long time. For all vaccinations so far if there was going to be a side effect it showed up within something like 6 months. For new vaccines for new diseases the things that go into them are all things that have been well tested before, except for whatever is specific to the new disease. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, that new thing is the mRNA, but mRNA is broken down in cells in a few days. All the COVID-19 vaccines in use in the US and Europe have been given to enough people long enough ago that we can be confident that if there are any side effect that we do not yet know about it is because they are extremely rare rather than because they take longer to develop. Bottom line: Waiting it out perhaps made sense when it seemed like there was a chance we could eradicate SARS-CoV-2, but too many people were not willing to do what that it would have taken to do that. With it heading toward becoming the fifth common cold coronavirus that is no longer the case. Get vaccinated with one of the vaccines that has been widely deployed for at least six months.