Trust the experts

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

My point is that you're playing a little fast and loose with the evidence. The COVID vaccine had a *net* benefit for all age cohorts, based on what is now years of evidence about their efficacy and risks. That net benefit was very small for some groups. This isn't some unknowable thing.

The vaccine injury bogeyman seems to be doing a lot of work in your impression of the risk-reward trade off. It was reasonable to be concerned about the health risks of a novel vaccine. Political games with vaccine mandates and policy choices like shielding vaccine manufacturers from liability are legitimately good reasons to be skeptical of the benefits of COVID vaccines. But there is now just such a wealth of evidence about how well the vaccine worked, and who it hurt, that the conversation can be had on the merits of the evidence rather than anecdotes about supposed vaccine harms or impressions about which politicians/healthcare companies are trustworthy.

[Jamiet99uk]

Spot on, EB

[flash2015]

The COVID vaccine had a *net* benefit for all age cohorts, based on what is now years of evidence about their efficacy and risks.

I still don't believe you can say this with certainty, especially for young men. I don't believe the evidence backs this up...though this also depends on the vaccine (Moderna vs Pfizer). There is a lot of nuance here.

[Jamiet99uk]

The COVID vaccine had a *net* benefit for all age cohorts, based on what is now years of evidence about their efficacy and risks.

I still don't believe you can say this with certainty, especially for young men. I don't believe the evidence backs this up...though this also depends on the vaccine (Moderna vs Pfizer). There is a lot of nuance here.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-05-03-ground-breaking-study-reveals-how-covid-19-vaccines-prevent-severe-disease#:~:text=Results%20of%20this%20study%20categorically,with%20those%20who%20haven%27t

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/monitoring-reports-of-the-effectiveness-of-covid-19-vaccination

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory-overview/public-health-threats/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/covid-19-medicines/covid-19-vaccines-key-facts

[flash2015]

Meanwhile, reported adverse effects of the vaccines, including death, were sky high, thousands of times higher than any other vaccine. I get that those numbers can't be taken at face value, but you don't need to do that to see a huge noticeable difference between the harm caused by other vaccines and the covid vaccines.

Where are you getting this info from? The side effects of the vaccines were definitely downplayed which I don't believe has helped trust in the vaccines. However to my understanding saying that the side effects were "thousands of times higher than any other vaccine" is a wild exaggeration.

[flash2015]

I still don't believe you can say this with certainty, especially for young men. I don't believe the evidence backs this up...though this also depends on the vaccine (Moderna vs Pfizer). There is a lot of nuance here.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-05-03-ground-breaking-study-reveals-how-covid-19-vaccines-prevent-severe-disease#:~:text=Results%20of%20this%20study%20categorically,with%20those%20who%20haven%27t

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/monitoring-reports-of-the-effectiveness-of-covid-19-vaccination

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory-overview/public-health-threats/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/covid-19-medicines/covid-19-vaccines-key-facts

I had a quick look through your links. I am not seeing anything which proves what you are saying. The most relevant studies here show how it reduces hospitalizations in the elderly. Perhaps I missed something though. If there are specific studies here for young people, please point them out.

[flash2015]

A big problem with testing the benefit for young people is that serious disease from COVID is very rare. You need truly massive number of people participating in the studies to show improvement.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

Health Canada recommends that everyone over 6 months old get a COVID vaccine on the basis that the benefits outweigh the harms. This is based on up-to-date assessments of both the efficacy of the vaccine (i.e., less than what some had claimed earlier in the 2020s) and a thorough assessment of adverse reactions to the COVID 19 shot.

This guidance isn't plausibly driven by COVID-era hysteria in 2024. It will persist even when the more lockdown skeptical Conservative party likely wins an election sometime next year.

Some European countries have a minimum recommended age of 5. In Japan it's 11. But the health agencies of basically every major country independently came to the conclusion, years after the peak of the pandemic, that the vaccine is an advisable and net-benefitting health intervention for almost everyone.

[flash2015]

Health Canada recommends that everyone over 6 months old get a COVID vaccine on the basis that the benefits outweigh the harms. This is based on up-to-date assessments of both the efficacy of the vaccine (i.e., less than what some had claimed earlier in the 2020s) and a thorough assessment of adverse reactions to the COVID 19 shot.

This guidance isn't plausibly driven by COVID-era hysteria in 2024. It will persist even when the more lockdown skeptical Conservative party likely wins an election sometime next year.

Some European countries have a minimum recommended age of 5. In Japan it's 11. But the health agencies of basically every major country independently came to the conclusion, years after the peak of the pandemic, that the vaccine is an advisable and net-benefitting health intervention for almost everyone.

You are making it sound like there is more of a consensus than there really is. Many countries in Europe it isn't recommended for young children. Sweden and Germany for example don't recommend them for people under the age of 18.

And even in countries that have these recommendations very few people are actually getting the vaccine. I would argue a lot of the remaining recommendations are largely inertia. We certainly are not testing the latest vaccines for anything other than checking that antibodies increase. That's it.

[flash2015]

I fully expect the US recommendations to change once Trump's nominees get in.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

A quick Google search suggests your info on Sweden and Germany isn't up to date. In Sweden it's 15, in Germany it's 12.

Obviously the benefits are tiny for the young and healthy. It's not unlike the flu shot — advisable for most people, very rarely dangerous, but not really changing health outcomes unless you're old or have comorbidities.

Those "very few people" getting booster shots are hundreds of thousands of data points even in a small country like Canada. It's not realistic to think we wouldn't know about an unusual uptick in adverse events.

[flash2015]

Here is the vaccine schedule for Sweden. COVID-19 is for 18+:

https://vaccine-schedule.ecdc.europa.eu/Scheduler/ByCountry?SelectedCountryId=192&IncludeChildAgeGroup=true&IncludeChildAgeGroup=false&IncludeAdultAgeGroup=false

Germany 18+ except for "Children and adolescents aged between six months and 17 years with an underlying condition that confers a higher risk of severe illness":

https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/en/coronavirus/faq-covid-19-vaccination.html

You are measuring potential slight benefit from the vaccine vs rare chance of side effects. Of course you aren't seeing a massive uptick in adverse events.

[flash2015]

COVID vaccines linked to Guillain-Barre syndrome, Transverse myelitis, Bell's palsy, encephalomyelitis, seizures and more (study from more than 99 million individuals):

https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/covid19-vaccines-linked-to-myocarditis

[Fluminator]

My point is that you're playing a little fast and loose with the evidence. The COVID vaccine had a *net* benefit for all age cohorts, based on what is now years of evidence about their efficacy and risks. That net benefit was very small for some groups. This isn't some unknowable thing.

The vaccine injury bogeyman seems to be doing a lot of work in your impression of the risk-reward trade off. It was reasonable to be concerned about the health risks of a novel vaccine. Political games with vaccine mandates and policy choices like shielding vaccine manufacturers from liability are legitimately good reasons to be skeptical of the benefits of COVID vaccines. But there is now just such a wealth of evidence about how well the vaccine worked, and who it hurt, that the conversation can be had on the merits of the evidence rather than anecdotes about supposed vaccine harms or impressions about which politicians/healthcare companies are trustworthy.

We know for a fact by this point that the stats and studies of the vaccines were compromised from the beginning so it's a really tough pill to swallow and trust these "stats" when everything I know from observing real life contradicts them. (At least for Pfizer)

Even one of my closest friends who was very pro-vax initially admits everything that's come out has made him realize Pfizer was corrupt from the start and was never properly tested. (He still argues we can't assume Moderna was bad too just because Pfizer was, which fair enough)

[kingofthepirates]

I wanna ask this for those who advocate against the immediate push: what do you do later when it's revealed you could've pushed the vaccine and lives would be saved? How would you respond to the inevitable backlash?

It's kind of a lose-lose here politically, no? On the one hand, if you push immediately, the opposition gives you shit for not accounting for side effects. if you push late, the opposition gives you shit for not pushing and saving lives. Personally, if I'm going to lose anyway, I'd save as many people as I can while going down (ie. mandate, push immediately). Looking at the numbers, there is are objectively fewer COVID deaths from vaccinated individuals than unvaccinated.

How about you guys? What's the solution here?

[kingofthepirates]

Pfizer was corrupt from the start

breaking: huge corporation is, in fact, corrupt

...

...

...

(this is the sound of no one being surprised)

[note: satire, cus why not :3]

[Fluminator]

I wanna ask this for those who advocate against the immediate push: what do you do later when it's revealed you could've pushed the vaccine and lives would be saved? How would you respond to the inevitable backlash?

It's kind of a lose-lose here politically, no? On the one hand, if you push immediately, the opposition gives you shit for not accounting for side effects. if you push late, the opposition gives you shit for not pushing and saving lives. Personally, if I'm going to lose anyway, I'd save as many people as I can while going down (ie. mandate, push immediately). Looking at the numbers, there is are objectively fewer COVID deaths from vaccinated individuals than unvaccinated.

How about you guys? What's the solution here?

I'm a strong believer in free will and bodily autonomy. People should be allowed to make mistakes. If I had the power to save someone by forcefeeding them a drug, and they very clearly told me they didn't want me to do that, I wouldn't, as hard as that would be.

If I assume your entire premise is correct and the covid vaccine was a net benefit to society, I still think it was the wrong move as it sets the precedent for government overreach and it would only be a matter of time before the corporations make a drug that does hurt more people than it helps.

There's a line and it is an interesting discussion to have where the line is, but forcing people to routinely inject themselves with a pharmaceutical drug is past the line for me.

[CaptainFritz28]

Meanwhile, reported adverse effects of the vaccines, including death, were sky high, thousands of times higher than any other vaccine. I get that those numbers can't be taken at face value, but you don't need to do that to see a huge noticeable difference between the harm caused by other vaccines and the covid vaccines.

Where are you getting this info from? The side effects of the vaccines were definitely downplayed which I don't believe has helped trust in the vaccines. However to my understanding saying that the side effects were "thousands of times higher than any other vaccine" is a wild exaggeration.

That's just reported adverse effects, not vetted or investigated. I got it from VAERS and whatever the UK's equivalent is. The numbers can't be taken on their own, but the fact that more adverse effects, and three times more deaths, were reported from just the covid vaccines within a year than all other vaccines since 1990 warrants a great deal of caution.

But no, I don't exaggerate. However, again, that is reported, not necessarily actual, numbers.

[CaptainFritz28]

I wanna ask this for those who advocate against the immediate push: what do you do later when it's revealed you could've pushed the vaccine and lives would be saved? How would you respond to the inevitable backlash?

It's kind of a lose-lose here politically, no? On the one hand, if you push immediately, the opposition gives you shit for not accounting for side effects. if you push late, the opposition gives you shit for not pushing and saving lives. Personally, if I'm going to lose anyway, I'd save as many people as I can while going down (ie. mandate, push immediately). Looking at the numbers, there is are objectively fewer COVID deaths from vaccinated individuals than unvaccinated.

How about you guys? What's the solution here?

I think it was a mistake to think that vaccines were our only option from the start. There were multiple medicinal solutions which all clinical trials indicated had positive effect, and which has now been proven through studies to have effect similar to or better than the vaccines without the adverse effects.

In engineering they tell us that the first course of action should be to figure out what the actual problem is and if the resources that you currently have can solve it. The government didn't do that, and I think that was the first large mistake.

[Jamiet99uk]

I wanna ask this for those who advocate against the immediate push: what do you do later when it's revealed you could've pushed the vaccine and lives would be saved? How would you respond to the inevitable backlash?

It's kind of a lose-lose here politically, no? On the one hand, if you push immediately, the opposition gives you shit for not accounting for side effects. if you push late, the opposition gives you shit for not pushing and saving lives. Personally, if I'm going to lose anyway, I'd save as many people as I can while going down (ie. mandate, push immediately). Looking at the numbers, there is are objectively fewer COVID deaths from vaccinated individuals than unvaccinated.

How about you guys? What's the solution here?

I'm a strong believer in free will and bodily autonomy. People should be allowed to make mistakes. If I had the power to save someone by forcefeeding them a drug, and they very clearly told me they didn't want me to do that, I wouldn't, as hard as that would be.

If I assume your entire premise is correct and the covid vaccine was a net benefit to society, I still think it was the wrong move as it sets the precedent for government overreach and it would only be a matter of time before the corporations make a drug that does hurt more people than it helps.

There's a line and it is an interesting discussion to have where the line is, but forcing people to routinely inject themselves with a pharmaceutical drug is past the line for me.

Do you object to water fluoridation also?