I don't know the long-term effects of the COVID vaccine and neither do you
And neither do the people who made it!
I like to work with facts as much as possible. I don’t mean “facts” in the sense that they mean in the cable news talk-show economy, where a “fact” is an opinion you mumble and then append with, “This is a fact.” I mean the basic, rock-bottom, inarguable, indisputable stuff, the things nobody can dispute even if they really really want to. It’s much easier to make a point and have a discussion if you stick with those things as much as possible.
Here is one of those facts: Nobody knows if the COVID vaccines are going to beget serious long-term health issues to the people who have received them. That’s just the simple truth. You cannot deny it. For starters, we haven’t had enough time to adjudicate the question; the COVID vaccines only began widespread distribution in December of 2020, which means they haven’t been in broad circulation two years yet. The NIH scientist David Resnik argues that “long-term” in a clinical sense is “five years or more” and that “some health risks do not materialize until a person has been exposed to a substance for 5, 10, 15 or more years,” so by that reasonable definition we are plainly nowhere near the window by which we might rationally assess this question.
If that’s not compelling, note that the companies that manufacture the drugs are themselves only just getting around to launching any long-term research on the matter:
Pfizer and Moderna have launched trials to determine whether there are any long-term negative health impacts associated with their Covid vaccines.
The studies will involve monitoring the small number of Americans who suffered rare side effects after receiving the shots over the past two years.
Both firms are required to carry out this long-term research by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a condition of approval earlier this year.
It doesn’t get much more definitive in this context than, “The biomedical corporations themselves are only just getting started with the longitudinal studies.” And honestly it sure seems like they’re not even going to try that hard one way or the other. But there it is. And I like to cite this fact whenever anybody argues that I need to get the COVID vaccine. I haven’t gotten it, I have no plans to, I am in an exceptionally low-risk profile for an exceptionally low-risk disease so there’s really no need, but still people insist that guys like me have to get the shot “just to be safe.” And of course the question is, “Safe by what metric?” Because, again, nobody really knows what this is going to do to you years from now. They can’t possibly know that!
You can certainly make the case that it’s safer to engage with an unknown, potentially dangerous variable rather than a known, actually dangerous one. A life preserver made with asbestos might present certain health risks, say, but none so great as that if you don’t cling to it in the middle of the ocean. But here again we run into a pretty inarguable fact: COVID-19 simply doesn’t present the kind of risk to justify just blindly undergoing any untested medical treatment they throw at you. This is not really a “fact” but it’s certainly adjacent to a fact, maybe a fact’s close cousin, the kind of cousin who basically functions as a surrogate sibling. Preliminary research by Ioannidis et al suggests a COVID fatality rate of 0.07% for those under 70 years old—and that’s everybody in that age demographic, which means when you take out the older and/or sicker folks in that stratification, the fatality rate surely plummets even more for the rest of us. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would take the risk of so many unknowns with the COVID shot when the known risks of COVID-19 appear so infinitesimal.
Still, people do. And many of those people also insist that you must do it, as well—to keep yourself safe, to keep them safe, to hedge your bets on a gamble that looks to have a dubious payoff at best. So if you haven’t gotten the shot and anyone ever pressures you to do it, you can just state a basic, bare-bones fact: “No, I’m not comfortable getting it when the long-term effects of it are still unknown.” Nobody can really argue with that, and they won’t really be able to argue with it for years. After which I’m sure we’ll know a great deal more about the COVID vaccines than we do now.
I agree in general terms. I just wonder if long-term effects are a realistic concern with a substance like mRNA that degrades naturally and with minute quantities of lipid nanoparticles.
I understand what you're saying, and I don't in any way disagree with your absolute bodily autonomy. I fully support your right not to put anything in your arm (or on your face) that you choose not to. I agree that we know essentially nothing about the long-term effects of the emergency-use vaccination, and that the unknown may well come back to bite those of us who had to make a different choice than you were able to make. If I were lucky enough to be in your shoes, I would probably have made the same decisions you have made.
Still, thought experiment ... genuinely curious:
Imagine that COVID had come along, just as contagious as it has been, and with exactly the same fatality risk that it has had (i.e., for immunocompromised people, people with underlying conditions/comorbidities, and elderly people) -- but that instead of killing people in my (immunocompromised) demographic, it affected only children 13 and under (including both those with and without any other disease process).
Would you feel/have felt any differently about the vaccination in 2020/2021?
Would you feel/have felt any differently about masking?
I picked the "kids under 13" demographic because a seat-of-the-pants estimate suggests that this population is roughly equivalent to the number of people over 65 + the number of moderately-to-severely immunocompromised people in the U.S.
But the same thought experiment could apply to any similar demographic. If you don't have (or like) kids, pick another demographic that excludes you personally, but that contains the person you love most in the world. Imagine that her (or his) risk is off-the-charts high, but that your own risk -- though not your ability to get mildly sick and spread the virus -- is as nonexistent as your current COVID risk is.
Would that change anything about your personal risk/benefit analysis?
Most importantly -- and this is the actual point of my comment -- would you write, "If we subtract out people [like the one I love most in the world], the fatality rate plummets for the rest of us"?