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I am remorseful at this point. By calculation taking the vaccine is sensible. But very closely so in my age group. There is currently a push to vaccinate childr

I am remorseful at this point. By calculation taking the vaccine is sensible. But very closely so in my age group. There is currently a push to vaccinate children which is technically irresponsible since they won't suffer symptoms and would reach a better immunity they will never get with the vaccine. There is a lot of room for critique and much panic about a serious but not too deadly disease.

ridaj 5y ago
Why do people fear long-term effects of the vaccine (which seem very unlikely in light of past vaccine history) but dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid? It is true that most children are not affected by covid in the short term compared with other age groups, but some get neurological disease, and others have gotten "long covid". Those are not the same as the typical vaccine side effects. Feels like maybe a case of the "trolley problem".
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid? If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects. Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
  - shpongled 5y ago
    > If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects ...because they are different? A localized, single dose mRNA vaccine that transiently produces spike protein will have a completely different effect than systemic infection with a virus.
  - jlebar 5y ago
    > If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects. I mean, covid can kill you, which is kind of a long-term negative effect? Surely you're not arguing that the vaccine is equally likely to have that particularly long-term effect, so then I'd ask why you think it's equally likely to have other long-term effects? > Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before. Really? I mean, do you...generally avoid bridges where you live? It seems to me that if bridges don't collapse frequently, that would indeed be evidence that whoever is building / designing / approving them is doing something right, and that "the next" bridge is also unlikely to collapse?
  - Hallucinaut 5y ago
    That's not what the OP said though. There are two unknowns: effects of long-term COVID, and effect of long-term vaccine. The person you responded to quite clearly suggests it's illogical to ignore long-term effects of COVID in comparing the outcomes. Particularly in light of the actual evidence of neurological effects of COVID, and some evidence of long COVID being more than phantom effect. If you assume a weighted value X for long-term vaccination impacts, but assume a 0 or anything materially less than X for the same for COVID it's just not a consistent evaluation.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    > If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects. Because viruses do cause long term effects in the form of just straight up irreparable damage to your organs or long last presence that re-emerges later. They are actively hurting you, and despite the popular phrase, what doesn't kill you tends to just make you weaker. > Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before. Are you suggesting you feel you're risking death every time you step on a bridge? Because that would have to be the case if past engineering precedents meant "absolutely nothing". The reality is that medical precedent means a lot. We understand the mechanisms of vaccines pretty well. Our estimates on the efficacy of bridges tends to be pretty good. One can assess a bridge design and affirm that it's likely to stay up under X pressure for N years. If a problem were to occur, we would know the typical failure modes. Vaccines aren't a black box. We know how they work and we can anticipate the failure modes. There aren't really any paths for "long term effects".
  - amf12 5y ago
    > Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before. It does not mean nothing. Yes just because previous vaccines were safe does not mean the next one will be safe. However success of previous vaccines mean we have the technology to create and evaluate future safe vaccines. Similarly, because we have a history of building bridges we know what it entails to make future safe bridges -- however the bridge could still fall if make a mistake.
- mooxie 5y ago
  I've been upset by this myopic view since the very beginning. We are increasingly learning that viruses can have long-term effects on the body and mind, even prior to COVID. Agreed that we can't all walk around as 'bubble boys' out of fear of the unknown, but one should definitely avoid becoming infected with viruses where at all possible. That the initial symptoms are analogous to a flu for most people doesn't mean that's the end of the story. HPV was 'just' genital warts, until we found out that it causes cancer. Other animal species have cancer-causing viruses as well. Or take Chicken Pox: basic kid's illness in the past (and yes, it was worth getting it when younger before a vaccine was available to avoid late-life illness) but if you've ever known anyone with a severe case of shingles you'll know that it's not 'just' a virus that causes itchy rashes in grade-schoolers. Shingles can ruin people's lives. Assuming you won't have any long-term issues from exposure to a dangerous virus is just rolling dice.
  - Hallucinaut 5y ago
    Don't forget Alzheimer's and herpes (HSV1). The idea of letting my kids get a known neurologically-affecting virus without even the option of vaccination (yet) and just hoping that it won't cause them issues in the long-term fills me with dread.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Why do people fear long-term effects of the vaccine (which seem very unlikely in light of past vaccine history) but dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid? I think for three reasons: 1. Long COVID isn't a definable disease. That whole ground has been badly polluted by people claiming to have "long COVID" when they haven't ever even tested positive for short COVID, there being no symptoms in common with all reports, etc. It's very hard to say what the long terms effects of COVID really are even though there are now nearly two years of experience with it, for this reason. 2. Long term effects from vaccines have happened before, e.g. early ones gave people polio, more recently there was the Pandemrix / narcolepsy affair. Drugs of any kind are put through difficult safety trials because of a long history of accidents. They are artificial chemicals designed to manipulate the bodies most powerful internal mechanisms after all, no reason why it's impossible to have long term effects. 3. The side effects of COVID vaccines are drastically worse than any normal vaccine. They routinely make people very sick, but it doesn't get treated by scientists as a possible sign of bad things happening because these are "normal" and "expected". Some side effects weren't detected by the trials, like myocarditis, and others weren't detected despite being apparently very common, like stopped periods. Not detected because all the women were on birth control. In fact information on side effects of any kind is extremely poor - you get self reported documentation at best, as there are no major large scale surveys - and the establishment is quite obviously terrified of any attempt to find out more. The trials themselves ignored all events that happened 7 days after vaccination, which doesn't seem very long. That attitude is endemic. In a situation where all discussion of side effects is heavily penalized or outright erased (e.g. Nicki Minaj losing her Twitter account), it's inevitable that people will conclude something is being frantically swept under the carpet. Finally, consider something important: the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it. In reality it's now been nearly two years and most people either haven't got it yet, even when heavily exposed because they were self-isolating with sick people (I am in this category), or alternatively, got it in such a way that it was so mild they didn't notice at all. If you assume the modellers are wrong again, and that a 100% chance of infection is not in fact correct, or alternatively that by the time you do get it it's mutated to a form that's no worse than a cold, then the tradeoff around vaccines looks quite different even for middle aged people. After all, zero spike proteins is better than some regardless of how you get them.
- handrous 5y ago
  > Feels like maybe a case of the "trolley problem". I think that's it exactly. It seems some (many? most?) people believe that the consequences of actions deserve more scrutiny and a higher threshold to act, than inaction and the threshold to refrain from action. Lots of people—almost instinctively, at least for some of them—think acting to kill one to save five is worse than letting the five die through your inaction. You have to go get the vaccine. You choose to get it. Getting COVID-19 is just something that'll happen to you, eventually. You don't choose to go get it. Whether it makes sense or not, I think that really is the difference.
longhairedhippy 5y ago
How many people need to die before it's considered a "deadly disease"? As a person in a high risk group, it angers me to hear folks cast my life as disposable and my death as insignificant. I've given up reddit after arguing with all these fools. A simple risk analysis will tell you it was the right thing to do. If you're wrong about the vaccine, you took a shot you may not have needed, if you're wrong about COVID, you're betting your life on it (and other people's as well).
commandlinefan 5y ago
> a push to vaccinate children That's really where I'm most concerned. We vaccinated both of our teenagers - after all, we get the flu shots every year, right? Now I really worry that there will be side effects from this rushed vaccine that we won't know about for decades.
- relaxing 5y ago
  Where does this worry come from? We’ve had 9 months with the vaccine and everyone who gets it is doing great, but you think some problem is going to crop up in 20+ years?
  - Nemrod67 5y ago
    asbestos entered the chat
    - relaxing 5y ago
      A foreign material which when inhaled damages the lungs, you say?
- Hallucinaut 5y ago
  Had you not, you should be equally worried that effectively guaranteeing them COVID, as this isn't going away, puts into their body a neurologically impacting virus, with growing evidence of medium term impacts, whilst in other medical fields a growing body of literature shows viruses can have severe life and wellness impacts decades later (whether that means Chicken Pox with Shingles, or Herpes/Cold sores and Alzheimer's).
  - bwship 5y ago
    Oh yea, I am totally suffering from long term Chicken Pox. Sometimes I scratch my arm where a pox used to be.
    - zucked 5y ago
jlebar 5y ago
It's not true that people get stronger immunity by catching covid. 1/3 of people get no antibodies at all, as compared to 100% of non-immunocompromised people who get vaccinated. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-19-immunity-is-powerful-but-kind-of-irrelevant https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-... It appears that you too have been a victim of the misinformation that youtube is attempting to mitigate!
- ignasl 5y ago
  If they didn't have antibodies how did they beat covid?
  - andruby 5y ago
    regular immune system. we don't _always_ create (long-term) anti-bodies when fighting a virus.
    - handrous 5y ago
      Yeah, looking at the linked study in the article, it seems folks who fought it off easily (often with low initial viral load) tended to be the ones who consistently tested blood serum antibody-negative. So if you had it and didn't get much more than a cough, there's a fair chance you didn't develop antibodies. Generic and local immune responses beat it in a lot of those cases (I gather), not virus-specific antibodies and a broad system-wide immune response.
Marsymars 5y ago
> would reach a better immunity they will never get with the vaccine. This isn't accurate - there's nothing indicating that the immunity from vaccine + exposure is worse than the immunity from exposure alone.
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> There is currently a push to vaccinate children which is technically irresponsible since they won't suffer symptoms Vaccination isn't just about preventing COVID symptoms, but also slowing the spread. > and would reach a better immunity they will never get with the vaccine. Do you have an article about this, preferably one written recently that takes the Delta variant into account? The CDC doesn't really have information about COVID re-infection rates [0], so I'm not sure how much immunity is really given by getting infected compared to getting vaccinated. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfection.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfe...
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
"they won't suffer symptoms" Except for the ones who get sick or die of COVID you mean.

ridaj 5y ago

Why do people fear long-term effects of the vaccine (which seem very unlikely in light of past vaccine history) but dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid? It is true that most children are not affected by covid in the short term compared with other age groups, but some get neurological disease, and others have gotten "long covid". Those are not the same as the typical vaccine side effects. Feels like maybe a case of the "trolley problem".

ekianjo 5y ago
> dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid? If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects. Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
- shpongled 5y ago
  > If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects ...because they are different? A localized, single dose mRNA vaccine that transiently produces spike protein will have a completely different effect than systemic infection with a virus.
- jlebar 5y ago
  > If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects. I mean, covid can kill you, which is kind of a long-term negative effect? Surely you're not arguing that the vaccine is equally likely to have that particularly long-term effect, so then I'd ask why you think it's equally likely to have other long-term effects? > Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before. Really? I mean, do you...generally avoid bridges where you live? It seems to me that if bridges don't collapse frequently, that would indeed be evidence that whoever is building / designing / approving them is doing something right, and that "the next" bridge is also unlikely to collapse?
- Hallucinaut 5y ago
  That's not what the OP said though. There are two unknowns: effects of long-term COVID, and effect of long-term vaccine. The person you responded to quite clearly suggests it's illogical to ignore long-term effects of COVID in comparing the outcomes. Particularly in light of the actual evidence of neurological effects of COVID, and some evidence of long COVID being more than phantom effect. If you assume a weighted value X for long-term vaccination impacts, but assume a 0 or anything materially less than X for the same for COVID it's just not a consistent evaluation.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  > If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects. Because viruses do cause long term effects in the form of just straight up irreparable damage to your organs or long last presence that re-emerges later. They are actively hurting you, and despite the popular phrase, what doesn't kill you tends to just make you weaker. > Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before. Are you suggesting you feel you're risking death every time you step on a bridge? Because that would have to be the case if past engineering precedents meant "absolutely nothing". The reality is that medical precedent means a lot. We understand the mechanisms of vaccines pretty well. Our estimates on the efficacy of bridges tends to be pretty good. One can assess a bridge design and affirm that it's likely to stay up under X pressure for N years. If a problem were to occur, we would know the typical failure modes. Vaccines aren't a black box. We know how they work and we can anticipate the failure modes. There aren't really any paths for "long term effects".
- amf12 5y ago
  > Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before. It does not mean nothing. Yes just because previous vaccines were safe does not mean the next one will be safe. However success of previous vaccines mean we have the technology to create and evaluate future safe vaccines. Similarly, because we have a history of building bridges we know what it entails to make future safe bridges -- however the bridge could still fall if make a mistake.
mooxie 5y ago
I've been upset by this myopic view since the very beginning. We are increasingly learning that viruses can have long-term effects on the body and mind, even prior to COVID. Agreed that we can't all walk around as 'bubble boys' out of fear of the unknown, but one should definitely avoid becoming infected with viruses where at all possible. That the initial symptoms are analogous to a flu for most people doesn't mean that's the end of the story. HPV was 'just' genital warts, until we found out that it causes cancer. Other animal species have cancer-causing viruses as well. Or take Chicken Pox: basic kid's illness in the past (and yes, it was worth getting it when younger before a vaccine was available to avoid late-life illness) but if you've ever known anyone with a severe case of shingles you'll know that it's not 'just' a virus that causes itchy rashes in grade-schoolers. Shingles can ruin people's lives. Assuming you won't have any long-term issues from exposure to a dangerous virus is just rolling dice.
- Hallucinaut 5y ago
  Don't forget Alzheimer's and herpes (HSV1). The idea of letting my kids get a known neurologically-affecting virus without even the option of vaccination (yet) and just hoping that it won't cause them issues in the long-term fills me with dread.
native_samples 5y ago
Why do people fear long-term effects of the vaccine (which seem very unlikely in light of past vaccine history) but dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid? I think for three reasons: 1. Long COVID isn't a definable disease. That whole ground has been badly polluted by people claiming to have "long COVID" when they haven't ever even tested positive for short COVID, there being no symptoms in common with all reports, etc. It's very hard to say what the long terms effects of COVID really are even though there are now nearly two years of experience with it, for this reason. 2. Long term effects from vaccines have happened before, e.g. early ones gave people polio, more recently there was the Pandemrix / narcolepsy affair. Drugs of any kind are put through difficult safety trials because of a long history of accidents. They are artificial chemicals designed to manipulate the bodies most powerful internal mechanisms after all, no reason why it's impossible to have long term effects. 3. The side effects of COVID vaccines are drastically worse than any normal vaccine. They routinely make people very sick, but it doesn't get treated by scientists as a possible sign of bad things happening because these are "normal" and "expected". Some side effects weren't detected by the trials, like myocarditis, and others weren't detected despite being apparently very common, like stopped periods. Not detected because all the women were on birth control. In fact information on side effects of any kind is extremely poor - you get self reported documentation at best, as there are no major large scale surveys - and the establishment is quite obviously terrified of any attempt to find out more. The trials themselves ignored all events that happened 7 days after vaccination, which doesn't seem very long. That attitude is endemic. In a situation where all discussion of side effects is heavily penalized or outright erased (e.g. Nicki Minaj losing her Twitter account), it's inevitable that people will conclude something is being frantically swept under the carpet. Finally, consider something important: the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it. In reality it's now been nearly two years and most people either haven't got it yet, even when heavily exposed because they were self-isolating with sick people (I am in this category), or alternatively, got it in such a way that it was so mild they didn't notice at all. If you assume the modellers are wrong again, and that a 100% chance of infection is not in fact correct, or alternatively that by the time you do get it it's mutated to a form that's no worse than a cold, then the tradeoff around vaccines looks quite different even for middle aged people. After all, zero spike proteins is better than some regardless of how you get them.
handrous 5y ago
> Feels like maybe a case of the "trolley problem". I think that's it exactly. It seems some (many? most?) people believe that the consequences of actions deserve more scrutiny and a higher threshold to act, than inaction and the threshold to refrain from action. Lots of people—almost instinctively, at least for some of them—think acting to kill one to save five is worse than letting the five die through your inaction. You have to go get the vaccine. You choose to get it. Getting COVID-19 is just something that'll happen to you, eventually. You don't choose to go get it. Whether it makes sense or not, I think that really is the difference.

longhairedhippy 5y ago

How many people need to die before it's considered a "deadly disease"? As a person in a high risk group, it angers me to hear folks cast my life as disposable and my death as insignificant. I've given up reddit after arguing with all these fools. A simple risk analysis will tell you it was the right thing to do. If you're wrong about the vaccine, you took a shot you may not have needed, if you're wrong about COVID, you're betting your life on it (and other people's as well).

commandlinefan 5y ago

> a push to vaccinate children That's really where I'm most concerned. We vaccinated both of our teenagers - after all, we get the flu shots every year, right? Now I really worry that there will be side effects from this rushed vaccine that we won't know about for decades.

relaxing 5y ago
Where does this worry come from? We’ve had 9 months with the vaccine and everyone who gets it is doing great, but you think some problem is going to crop up in 20+ years?
- Nemrod67 5y ago
  asbestos entered the chat
  - relaxing 5y ago
    A foreign material which when inhaled damages the lungs, you say?
Hallucinaut 5y ago
Had you not, you should be equally worried that effectively guaranteeing them COVID, as this isn't going away, puts into their body a neurologically impacting virus, with growing evidence of medium term impacts, whilst in other medical fields a growing body of literature shows viruses can have severe life and wellness impacts decades later (whether that means Chicken Pox with Shingles, or Herpes/Cold sores and Alzheimer's).
- bwship 5y ago
  Oh yea, I am totally suffering from long term Chicken Pox. Sometimes I scratch my arm where a pox used to be.
  - zucked 5y ago

jlebar 5y ago

It's not true that people get stronger immunity by catching covid. 1/3 of people get no antibodies at all, as compared to 100% of non-immunocompromised people who get vaccinated. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-19-immunity-is-powerful-but-kind-of-irrelevant https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-... It appears that you too have been a victim of the misinformation that youtube is attempting to mitigate!

ignasl 5y ago
If they didn't have antibodies how did they beat covid?
- andruby 5y ago
  regular immune system. we don't _always_ create (long-term) anti-bodies when fighting a virus.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Yeah, looking at the linked study in the article, it seems folks who fought it off easily (often with low initial viral load) tended to be the ones who consistently tested blood serum antibody-negative. So if you had it and didn't get much more than a cough, there's a fair chance you didn't develop antibodies. Generic and local immune responses beat it in a lot of those cases (I gather), not virus-specific antibodies and a broad system-wide immune response.

Marsymars 5y ago

> would reach a better immunity they will never get with the vaccine. This isn't accurate - there's nothing indicating that the immunity from vaccine + exposure is worse than the immunity from exposure alone.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

> There is currently a push to vaccinate children which is technically irresponsible since they won't suffer symptoms Vaccination isn't just about preventing COVID symptoms, but also slowing the spread. > and would reach a better immunity they will never get with the vaccine. Do you have an article about this, preferably one written recently that takes the Delta variant into account? The CDC doesn't really have information about COVID re-infection rates [0], so I'm not sure how much immunity is really given by getting infected compared to getting vaccinated. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfection.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfe...

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

"they won't suffer symptoms" Except for the ones who get sick or die of COVID you mean.