Clearly a lot of people on LW want to take it ASAP. I strongly don't want that - to the point where I will most likely emigrate if it becomes obligatory in my country. Please help me understand what I'm missing. Here is my understanding:
- As a young, healthy person, SARS-Cov-2 poses extremely low risk to me:
- There is no significant risk of lasting negative health consequences after infection
- There is no strong proof for such effect. Such proof would greatly increase acceptance of governments' policies, so there is a strong incentive to publish any such proof. There has also been enough time and cases to identify a pattern of negative consequences lasting 6+ months. Therefore I'm treating absence of a proof despite strong incentives and opportunity as a strong proof of absence.
- A pessimistic infection fatality rate is probably around 0.01%
- Case fatality rate for young people is below 0.5%
- Halve that, since half of the infections do not result in the disease.
- Divide that by 25 and stockpile large quantities of vitamin D in case you get the disease (https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/finally-confirmed-vitamin-d-nearly-abolishes-icu-risk-in-covid-19)
- Reinfection is extremely rare, if at all possible.
- Again, there is a strong incentive to make people fear a reinfection.
- Yet all we hear is rare individual reports that might be test failures or long-lasting lingering infections.
- The risk of infection is getting smaller and smaller, as more people in the population become immune - either by infection or by vaccination
- There is no significant risk of lasting negative health consequences after infection
- Conversely, there is a non-negligible risk associated with a vaccine that has been developed so quickly.
- The trials have lasted only months, so we don't know whether there are some side-effects that surface only after some significant time
- The trials have only been conducted on tens of thousands of subjects so far, so very severe but rare negative consequences might have gone under the radar
- Pfizer's vaccine requires extremely low temperatures, so there is a danger that in some locations it will be transported or stored incorrectly, causing greater risk than that suggested by the trials so far
- Both the governments and the vaccine manufacturers have twisted incentives, meaning there is a serious danger of too optimistic reports of the vaccines' efficacy and safety
I can only think of two reasons why young, knowledgeable people are so excited about taking the vaccine:
- they have contact with someone at risk that they deeply care about, and want to minimise the chance of infecting them, even at the cost of personal safety;
- they value safety of strangers higher than their own safety, and want to take the vaccine for the sake of all the people at risk in the society.
One 35 year old friend of mine was on oxygen for four months and out of work for six months.
Another's (31) autonomic nervous system is fried and needs to be on vasoconstrictor drugs so she does not faint every time she stands up.
Four more in their thirties fought it off like a horrible flu plus smell issues.
There is evidence that the immunity provided by the RNA vaccines is stronger and possibly more reliable than that produced by natural infection for 3/4 of the population.
There is evidence of very weird and interesting infection of cardiac cells early in infection with implications that are not understood and might have interesting effects forty years down the line. Precautionary.
I also do not want to spread to people around me who are unvaccinated.
On another note, I remain flabbergasted and angry that very little research is going on in Europe and America about indomethacin and ivermectin.
I strong-upvoted this comment from CheerfulWarrior, to bring it from the negatives to the positives. I think CellBioGuy's comment was good, and a valuable contribution to the discussion. I think it's also useful for CheerfulWarrior to ask for citations, and useful to remind us of the risk of anecdotes here: we should share data like this, but it's true that there are meaningful risks of mis-reporting, of selection effects, and of over-updating-due-to-emotional-salience.
E.g., imagine 99/100 LessWrongers deciding not to comment because they haven't heard of their friends suffering long-term effects, while the 1/100 LWer whose friends are seeing serious sequelae does decide to comment, since they have the more interesting story to tell.
(I'm making these points as a procedural point, not because I disagree with CellBioGuy's conclusions. In this case, I do think long-term effects of COVID are not-super-rare in 30-50-year-olds, based on a variety of cobbled-together sources of varying quality, and based on first- and second-hand reports from my friends, people I follow on Twitter, etc.)
(Added: The tone is maybe not optimally friendly, but I think it's better to focus on epistemic content in this context.)