This is late in coming (and maybe lacking since I haven’t kept up with news for a year), but I figured I’d share anyway. I suspect a lot of folks have been pressured into COVID vaccination through employment mandates. If you got vaccinated, maybe you don’t feel great about it. Or maybe you’ve held out or are still on the fence. It took me a while to get comfortable with getting the COVID vaccine. The arguments I’d seen presented publicly didn’t really get me there. I wanted to share the concerns I had and where I’m at now on it.
First, I have no medical training or expertise, so how can I hope to understand all this? The ultimate questions here are not questions of fact, they’re questions of policy (what should we do, individually or more broadly). We all have a stake in those. They involve our values, and they are not purely in the realm of science.
We do still need to know the facts to make good judgments, and experts in the field are going to be best-positioned to provide those facts. That does not put them beyond question. We’re all human. We all have blind spots. We all make mistakes. The process and its execution should be subjected to scrutiny.
“Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement.”
Immanuel Kant
Skepticism is warranted, but if your distrust of those most steeped in the relevant fields of study is blind, read no further. I have nothing for you here.
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My main concern has been related to the long-term safety of the vaccine. The short-term safety (through the period of study) has been well-established. Most experts seem to stop short of making claims on its long-term safety. Some will note that vaccines have historically had a low incidence of long-term side effects. But I haven’t heard anyone offering a biological or chemical argument guaranteeing that. It only takes a high consequence problem happening once with a widely adopted vaccine to really screw us over.
There is a long-term surveillance program associated with vaccines, but I don’t have much confidence in it. A surveillance program is only as good as the inputs going into it. Were you told about it? I wasn’t. And how would you know if some issue you had in a year was related to your vaccine? It’s also too little too late if there does turn out to be an adverse long-term side effect.
I suspect few of us know what problem indicators are being studied short-term or long-term. I’m pretty confident that “all of them” isn’t the answer, because there are too many and we have finite resources. We’ll cover the big ones, I’m sure, but maybe not catch problems specific to your particular intersection of traits.
There’s also a credibility issue when I see advertisements for vaccination that amount to, “it must be safe, everyone’s doing it.”
So why do I still think it is a good idea to get a COVID vaccine?
In the short-term (over the period of study to-date), the evidence is conclusive that the approved vaccines are both safe and effective. In the short-term, getting COVID is not safe for a lot of people (for “world war dead” numbers of people).
In the long-term, I don’t know if getting any particular vaccine will have adverse side effects. In the long-term, I also don’t know if getting COVID will have adverse side effects, but signs look good that some will have adverse long-term health effects.
For a highly transmissible virus like COVID in a country where people can’t or won’t isolate, the only options are a lot of people get vaccinated or damn-near everyone (eventually) gets COVID.
You could hope to isolate until enough other folks get vaccinated. The “let everyone else take one for the team” approach. If you can look back over the last year and a half as evidence that you have the discipline to indefinitely mask and socially distance and take precautions to avoid becoming a spreader, yourself, then more power to you. Indefinitely might become a very long time if too many follow that approach. If that’s worth it for y’all, great.
Given all that, I think that for most of us both the short-term and the long-term risk calculus favors vaccination. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any long-term risks. Hopefully they’re mitigated by having a diversity of vaccines (so if one screws us over, we won’t all get screwed over). I suspect only time will tell. But–given the alternative–I still think vaccination is the way to go.
Stay safe, my friends! And do your part in creating a safe environment for those around you.