I had thought about it a lot and decided that it was probably worth the risk, based on conversations with medical researchers who really understand how it works.
Then yesterday we had a workplace webinar where the president said that all staff are required to get the vaccine. Someone said how can you possibly require a vaccine that isn't even approved, but is only under emergency use authorization. The general counsel piped up and said that we think we are within our legal rights to require you to get it.
Someone else pointed out that in order to get this experimental vaccine we have to sign away our liability rights, so if the vaccine injures or kills us we have no recourse. And so isn't the company then liable for forcing you to take that risk? The webinar went silent for about 40 seconds and then the general counsel said that she would "circle back" on that question. So now they are worried...
Going to wait this one out for a bit.
Not all of the vaccines work in this way, but I was curious about the mRNA so I talked to the epidemiologist about it. He walked me through it and a lot of the sensationalism is just that.
Epidemiologists don't know anything about mRNA vaccines. Epidemiology is the study of how viruses and diseases transmit. They are more like statisticians than doctors. If he's telling you thinks about the vaccines its things he read in the paper just like you.
The fact is, literally nobody on earth knows how these vaccines will affect humans because before May 2020 nobody on earth had ever been injected with an mRNA vaccine.
This technology has been around for decades now, but we'd never once actually used it in a real product. Anything that kicks around for that long without finding a commercial use is worth being wary of. Maybe there's no issues with it, but we do not know. We know COVID is a 0.1% risk for most younger people. That's on par with the flu. Everyone under 55 without a risk factor should really stop and think about this before getting a vaccine. You're exposing yourself to an unknown risk to lessen an already very small risk.
They have enough working knowledge to read the papers, sure. That's a far cry from being able to understand how the vaccine actually works. A child can understand the concept of an mRNA vaccine. That doesn't mean an epidemiologist knows specifically what the COVID vaccine is. It doesn't mean they know what the clinical trials mean. I work on FDA drug approvals (not COVID vaccines). The FDA requires a bit more rigor than someone not in that field will understand.
The real key here is that nobody, not Pfizer, not Moderna, not the FDA, nobody knows what the long-term effects of these vaccines will be. Anybody, epidemiologist or otherwise, who says these vaccines are unequivocally safe is not giving you a scientific opinion. They are giving you propaganda. These vaccines have been in patients for less than a year.
We've seen as many adverse vaccine events in 2021 as we did the previous 10 years combined. The vaccines were developed in 3 days. No complete genome for COVID-19 has ever been published publicly. Clinical trials lasted 4 months (normally take 10 years). There is so much reason to be cautious and so little certainty of long-term effects and safety. Run, don't walk, away from anyone that is sure these vaccines are safe.