Just because it's never been done before does not mean we have no idea what it will or won't do. Biology is uncertain, but it's important to examine the vaccine risks AGAINST COVID RISKS.

Nothing is no-risk, including the vaccine. However, the accurate comparison is getting covid without the vax, versus with the vax. Looking at the vaccine risks in isolation is somewhere between misleading and dishonest.

I can choose to not get the vaccine, but I can't choose to not get COVID. COVID may hurt me either way.

Depending on the values p1, p2, it's better to get the vaccine or not get it. The problem is, most people have no idea about values of p1, p2 and that they are highly dependent on personal details.

Your logic doesn't make sense. You absolutely can choose to not get the serious covid version that hospitalizes you: by getting the vaccine! By socially distancing, and not hanging out with people who don't take very basic precautions. Even your second sentence: "COVID may hurt me either way" doesn't reflect reality - it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated.

And while personal details may vary, we can estimate covid risks pretty well with the population base rate, sliced by a few basic dimensions (age, BMI, smoker status). We also have a pretty good idea of vaccine risks - almost none.

We may not know vaccine side effects long term, but we also don't know the effects of long term covid. We do know that short term, the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.

Look, I'm all for people making their own choice when it comes to the vaccine. Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.

That is not strictly true. Vaccination decreases the chance of bad COVID, but it does not eliminate it. This benefit is working for some people, but it is not for some other people (bad breakthrough cases, people with weak/no immune response to the vaccine who later get COVID).

Limiting contact with strangers via distancing and masks is a sensible strategy for someone afraid to get bad COVID. Except for intoxicating with CO2/H20 and being short on O2, there are little risks to this so I do practice that.

> it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated

Yes but both numbers are too small for me to care enough to risk the vaccine. This isn't the first week of the pandemic - we got more than a year and in this time people around me are still completely fine living their life, the virus has literally no impact where I live. It is different for other people who knew people who died from COVID, so they think COVID is much more scary. But numbers are clear - COVID isn't a plague-level problem and not everybody needs to get vaccinated for their benefit.

> the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.

That is not obviously true. There is a competing opinion that it is not good policy to mass vaccinate with too leaky a vaccine, because there is the dire possibility that it will put pressure on the virus evolution so it gets better at evading this kind of vaccine. I am not saying one or the other is obviously the correct one, but I do not think anybody can say with certainty.

> Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.

Society has a discussion - and there is still no clear consensus on what to do. Different states/countries do different strategies. I think that is a good thing - in case some policy turns out to be quite bad, at least it won't kill everybody.

If you're worried about that, get Sinovac or Covaxin, which are the only traditional, inactivated virus vaccines available (that I'm aware of).

Oh, but for the purposes of mandates, those vaccines aren't accepted.

Yes but a very small part of those are relevant to my personal assessment of risk of bad COVID. The risk depends strongly on age, health status, lifestyle and so on. Absolute numbers of deaths are not that important to personal risk assessment.

"Feelings" have no place in science. These are numbers not subjective anecdotes, which appear to be what you're basing your decision on. Say what you like, the data doesn't lie, only people do.

I would love some citations here, as this seems to be the exact type of misinformation this act is trying to combat. The thought that hundreds of thousands of medical professionals across the world are willingly ignoring potentially fatal consequences for children out of some nefarious political agenda is ludicrous. If this was really happening, it would be trivial to show it, anecdotes are not hard data.

In the same vein, not 1 immunocompromised child should die from COVID when there is an easy and safe way to combat it. Not one. But many have.

When you have nuts sticking spoons to their face, claiming to have been magnetized, and those folks are speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem.

In terms of time, these vaccines very much have not been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine.

> this seems to be an extension of general vaccine hesitancy

In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.

> hesitancy which has absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever

You mean Scientific(TM) basis? Because there are numerous reason to be HESITANT in terms of science (the process of uncovering what is and is not true). E.g. vaccine reactions are not a myth - we should study them more; vaccine mechanism is still sometimes opaque - we should know more about that and how someone's genetic play a part; adjuvants that have side effects are also not a myth - what about finding safer adjuvants?

> nuts ... speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem

To be clear, you're saying they should be censored?

Censorship is a Russian Doll problem. It's turtles all the way down. Who makes the censors unbiased? Science should continue to be about questioning what is believed and believed to be true.

There are skeptics on both sides of the bell curve of intelligence. A nut, as you say, and an intelligent scientist may both come to the same conclusion - it doesn't make the nut's reasoning correct, but it also doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.

This is a tired, out-dated argument, all 3 vaccines in distribution in the US have been fully vetted and passed all tests, there is no more "emergency approval". If time is what you want then you're just saying there is absolutely nothing that will convince you to take it.

> In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.

Yes, now that is has become a political issue instead of a scientific one (like it should be), many more people have been duped.

> what about finding safer adjuvants?

How about being realistic about the side effects of the vaccine? This is one of the most studied, most widely distributed vaccines in history. If there any data to back up any sort of hesitancy, I believe the amount of people desperately searching for something useful to use in their war on science would find it.

> you're saying they should be censored?

I'm saying viewpoints that obviously have absolutely no basis in reality (Bill Gates microchips, magnetizing face spoons, etc) should not have a place to flourish alongside real scientific discourse. How about we vet an idea before we let the masses with little to no critical thinking skills consume it.

> doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here, however if a "nut" says something sane, that doesn't make them sane. I think the larger problem is there are a lot of people with a lot of money to make by preaching vaccine hesitancy. If people are maliciously influencing public opinion for personal gain and the detriment of public good, how do you suggest we combat that?

I agree censorship is not the answer but I also don't support giving a platform to people in a society where people will accept absolutely anything in their echo chamber without question or serious discourse. The media has lost the confidence of the people and everyone is so caught up in bipartisanship, it's a literal crime the vaccine hesitancy falls along political lines, if anything that should tell you it is not based in science.

“mRNA vaccines tell our cells to make a piece of the “spike protein” that is found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since only part of the protein is made, it does not harm the vaccine recipient, but it is antigenic and thus stimulates the immune system to make antibodies.”

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna.html