I have not touched the COVID shot because I did not trust it for these reasons:
- vaccines take years to test not months - there were new untested biotech involved - in short order I was being told that it does not work for this flavor of COVID.
And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.
How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.
This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.
This time, there was a financial backer (the government) that was willing to fund development of a whole bunch of vaccine candidates, without any preconditions. That's never happened before.
Normally, if you want to develop a vaccine, you have to go to investors, and convince them that your vaccine has a high probability of succeeding, not only technologically but financially. If you're lucky, you find someone to fund phase-1 trials. After those trials are done, you analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-2 trials. You have to finish those trials, analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-3 trials, which are extremely expensive.
If there's someone who guarantees funding for all three phases up-front, you can go a lot faster, without sacrificing scientific integrity at all. You can begin recruiting people for the phase-3 trials before phase-1 trials even begin. You can immediately begin the next phase of the trials once you know the vaccine passes the requisite safety threshold, even if the previous trials are still returning data.
Normally, these things are done strictly in order in order to minimize financial risk. If there is no financial risk, you can do a lot of things in parallel.
> And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.
The vaccines reduce your risk of serious disease or death by orders of magnitude. That's extremely strong protection. They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.
> How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.
The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.
> This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.
This is not at all true. There is only so much you can parallelize things, as every software dev should know. It will always take 9+ months to figure out what the effects are for a mother that was vaccinated before conception, for instance. (Does this trigger autoimmune issues? Birth defects, like thalidomide did? And some birth defects - mental ones in particular - might not become apparent for years!)
> They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.
There's a decent bit of data now saying that having been vaccinated in the past increases your chance of infection after 12+ months.
> The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.
One problem is that the lives saved and the side effects happen in different and only slightly overlapping populations, and long-term side effects (for both covid and the vaccines) are not yet known or knowable.
A couple of things. First, pregnant women are generally excluded from vaccine trials - this isn't something specific to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.
Second, what is the scientific basis for thinking that vaccination before pregnancy will affect women at the end of their pregnancy (that is, 9+ months later)? When you propose a possible harm, there should be a scientifically plausible basis for it. Is there one in this case?
> There's a decent bit of data now saying that having been vaccinated in the past increases your chance of infection after 12+ months.
I haven't seen anything to suggest this.
> One problem is that the lives saved and the side effects happen in different and only slightly overlapping populations
CoVID-19 was one of the leading causes of death across a wide range of ages. The idea that only the elderly suffered from it is not true.
> long-term side effects (for both covid and the vaccines) are not yet known or knowable.
Long-term side-effects of vaccination are very much knowable. There is no known mechanism that could lead to these vaccines causing long-term side-effects, and there are very good biological reasons for believing that they do not cause any long-term side-effects. Vaccine side-effects occur within months of vaccination, for reasons that are understood. They do not arise years afterwards (also for reasons that are understood). Saying that there may be side-effects years from now is simply FUD.
Your arguments, however you feel may be justified, are not in favor of vaccination, and by definition are anti-vax. Ask yourself what would need to be different for you to be in favor.
