These are all short-term studies. Given that this is a completely new type of vaccine, a certain amount of scepticism about its long-term effects is warranted in my opinion. Personally I fail to see what benefits non-vulnerable people have from immediately being vaccinated.
"Non-vulnerable people" means "people who probably won't die if they catch the disease". There are a lot of nasty things that COVID-19 can do to you besides kill you. Many people have lost legs because of the clotting associated with it, which can also cause strokes resulting in permanent brain damage (which is actually more common in young healthy patients), some have permanently lost their sense of taste. Even those who do come out without major disabilities have to spend two weeks with their throats constricted to the size of a coffee straw.
The idea that COVID-19 is somehow less dangerous than having some RNA in your blood for a few hours (remember, it disintegrates fast when above -70C) is completely insane.
There's a good portion of people with long-term effects that weren't "vulnerable" but end up with chronic fatigue, lung damage, or mental health problems.
If you compare the frequency of those side effects alone vs. the rarity of side effects we've seen in historical "bad" vaccines, you still end up with a pretty obvious cost-benefit in favor of taking it. From that point of view, "even smaller chance of dying" becomes just a perk.
Not downplaying, I've had bad episodes of flu that left me low on energy for weeks, want to see how that compares and if it's been looked into (I expect not given recency).
My recovery from Covid in March was about on par with a bad flu, was late April until I felt good again and was back to normal on a physical level.
Thanks for the links. So how do I know these value are abnormally high compared to say a severe flu? I've read in the thread on hn that posted about the mental illness results that the values for a severe flu are 13%. And what implications do, say, a "lower left ventricular ejection fraction, higher left ventricle volumes, and raised native T1 and T2" have? Why is that worse than the risk of potentially (without knowing any probabilities obviously) developing autoimmune conditions as a result of taking the vaccine?
> Why is that worse than the risk of potentially (without knowing any probabilities obviously) developing autoimmune conditions as a result of taking the vaccine?
Well, in the 20,000 dosages in the pfizer vaccines, I believe there was no autoimmune conditions found. I think Moderna was the same. If that's your concern, maybe steer clear of the AstraZeneca/ChAdOx1 vaccine.
There are two main components to the vaccine, the RNA itself, and the proteins it causes the cell to make. Both naturally break down and are removed from the body very quickly--in hours to days from my understanding, so one could use that to conjecture that longer term effects are perhaps less likely in this case and something like that would show up sooner.
We're not really comparing flu stats vs. covid stats. I'd argue these things are not good whether they come from a severe flu or covid, so that seems like a red herring? Here our choice is "what is more likely to mess me up badly, a vaccine designed, tested and peer reviewed with a do-no-harm mindset, or the virus behind a pandemic that has killed more than a million people worldwide."
> We're not really comparing flu stats vs. covid stats. I'd argue these things are not good whether they come from a severe flu or covid, so that seems like a red herring?
The long term covid effects are exactly what worries me about this vaccine. If a vaccine is an inactive or reduced version of the real thing, why wouldn't they have similar effects?
