This guy in my city had anti vaxx banners and signs. One said “50k+ Canadians suffered side effects from the COVID vaccine!”
So I looked up how many people were vaccinated in Canada, and 50k was below 1% of the people vaccinated. I pointed out to the guy that this means the vaccine had a success rate without side effects of 99% and how incredible that is. Dude got pissed at me and started yelling that I was a shill.
I guess he didn’t like math and common sense
Not to be that guy but 50,000 people is still a lot. Percentages are great because if they’re very low we tend to like that but it doesn’t change the absolute number.
The real comparison isn’t how safe the vaccine is, its how safe the vaccine is compared to getting the disease it’s preventing. Every medical product is not about zero harm or low harm, it’s about harm reduction. If medical therapies didn’t cause harm, we wouldn’t have chemo treatments and we would be much worse at treating cancers.
I’ve had people tell me and my friends similar things to this. Some people just aren’t good with numbers and can’t put them into perspective with other numbers and arrive at scary conclusions with no further context. Canada has 40+ million people and side effects can include trivial things such as feeling tired or having a sore arm. On a similar note, 2 of the COVID vaccines were mRNA based and some people were scaremongering about how the vaccines must somehow alter your DNA because both “mRNA” and “DNA” sound vaguely similar.
Safe And Effective*
*While supply last. Subject to the oversight of the FDA, which could become politicized upon the inauguration of a new administration. ahem RFK Jr. ahem (Better hope he doesn’t add bleach to vaccines)
To piggyback off this:
Not to be that guy, but I have an immediate family member who got their booster and (I don’t remember what the technical term was, apologies) their immune system started attacking their nerves, which caused them to lose most control over their hands, arms, feet, and legs, and at the worst point, become bedridden and at risk of dying, had they not received the care they did (I’ve been told the docs said ‘a few more days and it would have been too late’). They are recovering, still, almost 3y later; daily care, wheelchair, walker, weekly therapy. It’s been a very slow process, and they only got the help they needed because another family member is in the medical field and was able to correctly diagnose their situation, when their main (prior, now) gp shrugged it off as the flu (???) twice, even as their condition was worsening and painfully obviously not just “the flu”. I have heard of friends of friends who seem to have had this phenomenon occur, but were not as lucky to receive (the correct) treatment in time.
Two other family members who got the booster at the same time had no issues. I got mine a couple months after, with no issues. They are usually safe… but not always. Practicing medicine, studying science; never absolutes. Healthy dose of skepticism is okay. But weigh the risks logically, not just “this can happen so I’m never going to do X”, as sometimes X can save you from Y. My mom in particular was freaking out when I got my booster - understandable, but it’s one risk over another.
E: autocorrect shenanigans
I usually don’t engage in conversations like this but let’s try. The condition you are describing is an autoimmune disease known as Gillain-Barre (Also, sometimes called acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy or AIDP). It is a devastating disease and I am sorry that your loved one has had to cope with it.
This disease can be triggered by any number of exposures including vaccination not just to COVID but to any vaccine. It is truly something to be concerned about and an important thing to understand when making health decisions. Essentially, when your immune system is exposed to something it thinks is foreign (Like a virus, viral protein from a vaccine, or bacteria) you body trys to fight it by making antibodies. The anti bodies attach to it and inactive or kill the virus. Rarely (like 1 in 100000ish) the body makes antibodies that also attach to something that it should not like your own body. If that thing happens to be a spinal nerve you develop this disorder.
If you are concerned about it, you should ABSOLUTELY get the vaccine. You are orders of magnitude more likely to get AIDP (Gillain-Barre) from contracting a native virus than you are from the vaccine. Also, you are more likely to spread the virus causing death and the same low chance of AIDP (Gillain-Barre) to others.
When a vaccine is deemed “safe and effective” that is not to say it is without any risk. Any exposure carries risk. It means that our society is more likely to be healthy with it than without it. Both on an individual and population level. People are concerned about the antigens (things that generate an immune response) in vaccines but you have many more antigenic exposures in the world without vaccines than with them.
Yeah, I agree with all your points - mine boils to just giving a real-world example that “safe and effective” does not mean “completely safe” or “completely effective”. Just like if you are driving to a dealership to trade in your old beater for a 5-star safety rated car, just to be hit and killed by a F-450 on the way there; trying to protect yourself still comes with risk. Everything, everyday, is a risk. Not taking action, is a risk. Just need to evaluate the best course of action for whatever situation, and act.
Its always true that nothing is 100% safe. To decide if something is safe you have to evaluate how likely unwanted side effects are and what those Side effects are. Theres always a risk to get some reallllllly bad side effects but in the most cases this doesn’t happen.
Oh yea, Vaccines are not 100% safe, the point is that Vaccines will protect more than 99% of people, unfortunately there are cases where there are adverse reactions. My cousin had some heart problems like hours after getting the 2nd dose and and to go to the ER and had to get some surgery (idk all the details), and had to spend several days in ICU, then still have heart issues and weakness even after gettinf discharged from the hospital, have trouble even going to school. Caused a bit of vaccine skepticism amongst my extended family, not everyone gotten fully vaccinated at the time, I’m not sure if they ever got it eventually, or if that incident caused too much fear.
MRNA or viral vector vaccine (like AstraZeneca)? I’m not even in the vicinity of being knowledgeable about medicine but AFAIK that vaccine was the one causing myocarditis not the MRNA based.
I got a sample size of about 15 family members and a few acquaitances (including a cancer patient in chemo, a 90 year old and some kids) who all got Biontech/Pfizer MRNA vaccines except one who got AstraZeneca. The MRNA ones caused no side effects as per my inquiry the one with AstraZeneca was the only one with short term side effects. And another one who got a flu shot in parallel to Biontech who was ill for a few days.
I got most of the boosters up to JN.1 and I haven’t even had the mild aches at the injection point.
Even if any of this is true, which I very much doubt, what evidence do you have that your relative’s illness was caused by the vaccine?
It was the only change in their day-to-day life (they, and myself, are both housebound due to disabilities), and is a known risk of any injection, afaik. I’m not into the med field myself so this is all secondary knowledge, but I found the name of the condition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillain–Barré_syndrome (jeez that’s a mangled url).
Doubt all you want, but I watched it unfold over the course of a week before they were admitted to the hospital, and stayed there for over a month before being able to return home. I watched the difficulties grow, and I went to see them in the hospital a couple weeks after being admitted. It was absolutely heartbreaking. They already had enough to deal with before it occurred (physical and cognitive impairments, from birth) and it was just… just really trying, showing strength and being positive while scared I was going to lose a sibling.
E: paragraph two, “Sometimes this immune dysfunction is triggered by an infection or, less commonly, by surgery, and by vaccination.”
People can be potentially allergic to ingredients they put in vaccines. Have you ever gotten a vaccine where they ask you if you’re allergic to eggs beforehand? And that’s a more common ingredient.
If you have an allergy, even a tiny amount of the substance you are allergic to can cause a severe reaction. That’s why single bee stings have killed people.
Huh, that’s a fun thought. If the bird flu turns into a pandemic (there’s a prediction market that gives 16% for it, which is pants-shittingly terrifyingly high), we’ll get to see how the Trump administration deals with one. And that… can go various ways.
On one hand, there’s tons of anti-vaxxers in the Trump voting base and presumably this will affect the government, which is concerning. But on the other hand, one of the biggest problems in the COVID handling was when FDA stopped people from using already-created vaccines for idiotic bureaucracy considerations while people were literally dying by the million. That’s the sort of thing that could go a lot better with just one presidential decision speeding it up, and there’s a bunch of new people with power in the government now, like Elon Musk. Muskrat is a horrible person and kind of insane in some ways, but not stupid and I think he’d notice and act upon an opportunity like that. So I’m not totally pessimistic about how a new pandemic would go, either.
So there are actually levels to antivaxxers. The granola nuts that think putting anything into your body is a sin are actually the extreme minority or antivaxxers these days.
The average antivaxxer is someone who has extremely little faith in both big pharma and the government as a whole. They usually come from a community that has been screwed over by both. In the US, this translates to older first generation immigrants, the African American community, and low income white people in areas that were hit hard by the opoid crisis.
A lot of these people are cool with the traditional flu vaccine, because it’s been around forever. The covid vaccines on the other hand were met with skepticism, on account of it being “untested”. In their eyes FDA testing and positive media coverage don’t mean anything, because in their eyes both groups have lied to their faces in the past.
A lot of the antivaxxer discourse during covid frustrated me. While there were people who were legitimately just idiots, there were a lot of communities who had fears rooted in genuine trauma and frustration. Calling them a bunch of idiotic death cultists and then celebrating on social media when one of them died just resulted in those communities distrusting the system further.
You just need 1 person you know working in a morgue. That’s enough to convince you that the last pandemic was really bad.
Sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of being dead because I took the COVID vaccine.
I was told I’d be dead in 5 years because of the covid Vax. So like… Nice talking to you all. This is my year.
First it was one year. Then it was two. Now it’s five. Soon it’ll be ten. The bullshit never stops.
I am hella pro vaccine and after my third COVID vaccine I got horribly sick with COVID and I’m not getting any more. Do I think I would have even way more sick if I didn’t get vaccinated? I fully believe I would have been more sick if I wasn’t. But I’m done.
