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0 pointsrenaudg4y ago0 comments

The mistake you're making is "omission bias" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_bias)

You're refusing the "beta" (installed by billions of users) version of something that can save your life because you (mistakenly) believe the choice is between that, and staying as you were before.

It's not. That's no longer true with the Delta variant. Now it's really a choice between "carefully designed, just officially declared stable" vaccine with billions of users vs getting the "totally unstable, totally doesn't care about your health, completely unknown long term effects" SARS-CoV-2 virus forcefully installed on you.

You will get antibodies one way or another, and there is orders of magnitude more risk and uncertainty associated with getting them through infection rather than controlled vaccination.

Furthermore, there has never been in history any vaccine side effect that occurred later than a few weeks after administration at most.

There is just no theoretical basis for why anything wrong would happen here.

Are you demanding 100% certainty ? Sure, you won't get it here but you also didn't get it with anything else you ever did in medicine and you can live with that.

With Delta, ICUs (and even more so long covid clinics) are full of unvaccinated "healthy non obese non smoking relatively young" guys like you.

If you're not afraid of Covid, rationally you should be even less afraid of getting a vaccine.

To put things in perspective, here are the odds in young males for the most talked about vaccine side effect (myocarditis, which usually resolves in a few days), vs the odds of getting severe Covid at your age :

https://imgur.com/a/uW52E51

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wait_a_minute4y ago

> There is just no theoretical basis for why anything wrong would happen here.

Do you have a source for this? I’d like to read more about it. Also, what about people who have antibodies from prior infection with covid?

renaudgOP4y ago

This is the expert consensus based on everything they know about how immunity and mRNA works.

It's kind of hard to give you one single source, simply because it's hard to demonstrate the absence of something. What usually happens instead is that somebody with specific concerns raises them and explains the plausible mechanism they see as problematic, then it's either debunked immediately as BS or if the theory has legs, it's supported by other scientists and put the test.

None of that has happened with mRNA vaccines. This is a great read about the Pfizer one : https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

I mean, you can't technically rule out somebody coming up with a revolutionary theory that changes our understanding of immunity like Einstein did for physics, but there is no sign of that, no theoretical basis for trouble, and the vaccine is saving lives in the meantime

>Also, what about people who have antibodies from prior infection with covid?

Research is moving fast on this, but AFAIK the consensus is that prior symptomatic infection gives longer lasting but also less broad (against different variants) immunity compared to an mRNA vaccine.

The best protection seems to be in people with prior infection + 1 shot of mRNA vaccine (of course, that does not imply one should try to get infected then vaccinated, because the risk of damage from that first infection vastly outweighs the benefit of a slightly better immunity if you pulled through unscathed, then got vaccinated)

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