I had always been very pro-vaccination. Both me and my kid were fully vaccinated on the standard schedule. The situation around COVID vaccines prompted me to think critically about vaccines in general for the first time.
In absence of vaccines, how many serious diseases a human body was supposed to have seen throughout its life? Probably one or two, then you'd mostly be dead.
With our usual vaccination schedule, we now routinely prime our immune system against twelve diseases, if I'm not mistaken. Plus now COVID. As an engineer, I would be extremely worried if I did something like this to a legacy system. Yet we seem to only look at each vaccine in isolation and short term, and approve based on absence of visible side effects.
Take the difficulty in tracing side effects of COVID vaccines. For all the attention, good information is very hard to find, because it is genuinely difficult to produce. Now imagine same level of difficulty, plus no attention - because when was the last time anybody worried about side effects of a flu shot?
And that is before we mention politics, mandates, and trust in institutions.
For context, I did take the original COVID vaccine.
Just chiming in to say that you're very, very wrong about prevalence of minor and major disease throughout human history. For an obvious comparison, look at wild animals, which contract multiple minor infections a year, and often suffer from several fairly major ones chronically - which was typical for pre-modern humans as well.
I’ve been fairly confused by the popularity in the US of remaining unvaccinated, in the face of seemingly a non-negligible, relatively immediate personal chance of death or intense illness. And due to the bubbliness of society, I don’t actually seem to know unvaccinated people to ask about it. So in the recent covid survey I ran, I asked people who hadn’t had covid (and thus for whom I didn’t have more pressing questions) whether they were vaccinated, and if not why not. (Note though that these people are 20-40 years old, so not at huge risk of death.)
Their responses:
The biggest themes mentioned here seem to be distrust or hostility regarding the government and media and their various pro-vaccination pressurings, and the impression that the vaccine doesn’t work. (I wonder how much that one is relative to an expectation of ‘very occasional breakthrough cases’ that one might also trace to someone’s questionable communication choices.) An unspoken theme is arguably being in possession of relatively little information (like, what’s going on with the person who is still waiting to find out if the vaccines are effective? And do people just not know that the vaccine reduces the downside of covid, even if it is still possible to get it? Or do all of these people know things I don’t?).
I wonder if much good could be done in this kind of situation with some kind of clearly independent and apolitical personal policy research institution, who prioritized being trustworthy and accurate. Like, I don’t trust the government or media especially either on this, but I and people I do trust have a decent amount of research capacity and familiarity with things like academic papers, so we arguably have an unusually good shot at figuring out the situation without having to make reference to the government or media much (assuming there aren’t more intense conspiracies afoot, in which case we will end up dead or tracking-deviced, I suppose). If I wasn’t in such a position, I feel like I’d pay a decent amount for someone to think about such things for me. I guess this is related to the service that doctors are meant to provide, though the thing I imagine would look very different to real doctors in practice.