Xan wrote: ↑Mon May 31, 2021 8:54 pm
It's pretty clear for me anyway that the unknown long-term risks of Covid are vastly more intimidating than the unknown long-term risks of the vaccine.
Could you elaborate on the data that might support this statement?
No known coronavirus has any long term effects. Viral indirect sequelae are known, but they are rare: ADEM (acute demyelinating encephalomyelitis) and Guillian-Barre syndrome are the major ones, and neither has been reported associated with COVID. There are also viruses with acute effects (polio, hepatitis B) and that can hide and re-emerge years later (shingles), but none of those mechanisms have been described with COVID, apart from the loss of sense of smell which appears to be self limited (recovers after a period of months). I will grant that there are still some unknowns here, but the more time goes by, the less likely it is that one of these known viral long term effect mechanisms apply.
As far as mRNA vaccines go, you can't make any assumptions on long term effects because they have never before been tried in humans and only 2 months of clinical trial quality testing was done. In a year or two we'll know more, hopefully, although the level of knowledge will never rise to the level of a clinical trial lasting 2 years, which is the standard. We'll have to rely on things like noticing unusual trends for certain conditions emerging.
Also, let me speak to the idea that you will 100% get COVID if you're not vaccinated. That's not quite true. I think yes we will all be exposed to COVID eventually, masks or no masks, distancing or not distancing, vaccine or no vaccine. This where playing fast and loose with the definition of "COVID case" hurts us, because what we really need to know is the natural history of COVID infection in a healthy person without the major risk factors for severe disease. For starters, a good proportion - maybe half or more - of infections don't result in any clinical symptoms at all.
That in other words is the infection-fatality rate. The estimates for that are all over the place. Best I've seen is 0.4% for the entire US population - including high risk groups. The vaccine decision should depend on your personal estimated risk, which could be a tenth of that or less. At some point, after the effects of mRNA vaccines (and the COVID vaccines in particular) are better understood, even someone at very low risk would be well advised to take it. But the data simply don't exist now to make that decision. There's no right or wrong answer, but there are certainly wrong assumptions being made that make it difficult for a person to make a truly informed decision.