5 ms·

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

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.
yonaguska 5y ago
> if you really think your choice is between not getting COVID, and not getting COVID and getting vaccinated, Getting vaccinated, then getting COVID is always an option. Either way, from my personal anecdotes, aka friends and family- I now know at least a handful of people with permanent life altering reactions to the vaccine, and one death from the vaccine. These are all younger people that were previously in good health. Given my age, health, and natural immunity- it makes zero sense for me to incur additional risk from the vaccine.
- DanHulton 5y ago
  The CDC vaccine safety page: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad... The vast majority of these events are happening at or below the level of "background noise", meaning people are indeed getting sick and dying after taking the vaccine, but that it is highly unlikely to be the vaccine's fault.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    I would not really trust CDC pages as primary sources considering the surgeon general tweeted that masks don't work. The CDC is either incompetent or political, either way, not a reliable source of information. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1244020292365815809?s=19 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12440202923658158... Then you have Fauci redefining "Gain of Function" research to claim that engineering an animal virus to spread to humans is not Gain of Function: https://youtu.be/IqUOcVwRUtc https://youtu.be/IqUOcVwRUtc Mind you, Fauci is part of the NIH, not the CDC, but still an egregious case of government officials purposely pushing misinformation. If you want actual apolitical data, you can get it directly from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System: https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/datasets.html https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/datasets.html? I can't vouch for this data being uncorrupted but it's pretty much all we have. It's also user submitted which is quite unfortunate - you think there would be a system for hospitals and doctors to use - with some higher level of verification. Nope, this is the crapshoot we are handed. I see 500,000 submissions in the CSV for 2021 but not all of them are for covid vaccines. It'd be nice to see a data scientist pull this data into Tableau or scipy/pyplot/etc and create some good visuals and breakdowns so we can get a better idea of what's going on with these vaccine side effects.

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.

yonaguska 5y ago

> if you really think your choice is between not getting COVID, and not getting COVID and getting vaccinated, Getting vaccinated, then getting COVID is always an option. Either way, from my personal anecdotes, aka friends and family- I now know at least a handful of people with permanent life altering reactions to the vaccine, and one death from the vaccine. These are all younger people that were previously in good health. Given my age, health, and natural immunity- it makes zero sense for me to incur additional risk from the vaccine.

DanHulton 5y ago
The CDC vaccine safety page: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad... The vast majority of these events are happening at or below the level of "background noise", meaning people are indeed getting sick and dying after taking the vaccine, but that it is highly unlikely to be the vaccine's fault.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  I would not really trust CDC pages as primary sources considering the surgeon general tweeted that masks don't work. The CDC is either incompetent or political, either way, not a reliable source of information. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1244020292365815809?s=19 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12440202923658158... Then you have Fauci redefining "Gain of Function" research to claim that engineering an animal virus to spread to humans is not Gain of Function: https://youtu.be/IqUOcVwRUtc https://youtu.be/IqUOcVwRUtc Mind you, Fauci is part of the NIH, not the CDC, but still an egregious case of government officials purposely pushing misinformation. If you want actual apolitical data, you can get it directly from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System: https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/datasets.html https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/datasets.html? I can't vouch for this data being uncorrupted but it's pretty much all we have. It's also user submitted which is quite unfortunate - you think there would be a system for hospitals and doctors to use - with some higher level of verification. Nope, this is the crapshoot we are handed. I see 500,000 submissions in the CSV for 2021 but not all of them are for covid vaccines. It'd be nice to see a data scientist pull this data into Tableau or scipy/pyplot/etc and create some good visuals and breakdowns so we can get a better idea of what's going on with these vaccine side effects.