Comment by ericmay
7 hours ago
Yes, but it would depend on the results.
The problem is that most people are bad at risk assessment. If COVID-19 vaccine increased their risk of premature death by .0000001% they point to that and say sure not taking my risk! Despite the fact that they'd be at much more risk of dying by getting the disease, or just hopping in their car and driving down the street to get a loaf of bread of whatever.
If you showed say, a 1% uptick in mortality that you could attribute to the vaccine, yea that would be a different story. But guess what? We wouldn't* release such a vaccine.
* I add an asterisk here because if it was a 1% uptick in mortality you can think of scenarios like a disease which kills you 50% of the time or something around that range as being a worthwhile trade off for a 1% rate.
The thing is people 'on the other side' think exactly the same, but come to different conclusions. For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? And what do you think his chances of suffering a significant case of myocarditis or pericarditis from the vaccine is? By "significant" I mean a case that's significant enough to result in active diagnosis - in other words somebody being diagnosed after a visit to an emergency room, as opposed to passive diagnosis where you assess each vaccinated individual to find cases that would otherwise go undetected.
Obviously I'm not comparing apples to apples (side effects from vaccine vs death from COVID) but this again is as explained by your own logic. If we were having a smallpox outbreak (with some strains having upward of 30% mortality rates across all demographics), I'm not going to be concerned about side effects of vaccines short of death. But with the rather low risk profile of people in favorable health/age demographics, the side effects of vaccination become quite relevant. Another issue is that early on it became quite apparent that the vaccines were not stopping people from getting COVID, so it's not like you can really compare vaccine vs covid effects, because the reality is you're probably still going to get COVID (and repeatedly, as it turned out) regardless of vaccination status.
Let's start with this question:
> For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are?
Much more likely than dying from the vaccine.
Also, and this is very important, at the time the vaccine was developed and released to the general public it was even more unknown what the fatality truly would be. We weren't totally sure as a species how the virus might mutate... maybe it would become more deadly? Maybe it would kill young people specifically even if they were otherwise healthy? Maybe by not getting the vaccine with less risk to you as the healthy 20 year old means you get COVID-19 and get "long COVID" (which I'm not sure is a real thing anyway, but I digress) and sure you didn't die but now your life sucks some.
The problem with "the other side"'s line of reasoning is that there was a specific concern with "risk" of the COVID-19 vaccine that didn't translate into practical reality and wasn't being assessed relative to the broader risk of getting COVID-19 itself or other general risks we undertake everyday.
Another way you can slice this up is, well, there's no risk of getting the vaccine, but getting sick sucks so even one day of being sick is well worth getting a shot for just to not get sick. "What about the risk" there's no real risk. If you think there's a risk, the risk is higher for getting COVID or whatever.
It all comes back to this perceived risk of COVID-19 vaccines (thank you to China, Russia, Iran, etc.) and improper assessment of risk.
Relative to getting COVID-19 there was no risk. Relative to the dumb risks people take everyday it is even less risky. The only difference is people are sitting around reading about it on social media and being stupid.