> Unfortunately the vaccination can also have side effects, but data seems to be hard to come by.
Data is not hard to come by. It is being closely monitored, leading to short pauses in administration of the J&J and Astrazeneca vaccines while small clusters of rare side effects were investigated.
We can very comfortably say it's nothing like the 600k Americans dead of COVID, despite more Americans getting vaccinated than have gotten COVID.
> Data [«vaccination can also have side effects»] is not hard to come by
To me, it is.
The best data I have is that of Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine ... for the C4591001 Clinical Trial Group¹, with its laconic "0.6% Severe Adverse Events but 0.5% in the control group".
Before being notified of that I have been looking for active monitoring databases, but could only find passive monitoring ones (VAERS, EudraVigilance, DAEN etc.).
I find it "undesirable" as an understatement that after billions of inoculations the original SAE assessment on 20'000+20'000 people, not clear about effects and their duration, is still the best document. It would have been very productive, for collective reassurance, to continue the assessment on a larger population, and provide as much detail as possible to define the risks and, e.g., their demographics.
I think deaths are counted differently, though - everybody who dies within one month after testing positive is counted for Covid (afaik - at least in some places). For vaccines, I am not aware of such rules. So the numbers can not easily be compared. That is the problem.
As I said, I am ready to believe that Covid kills more. But what if you factor in the odds of infection, and also individual odds (age, no co-morbidities, that sort of thing)? The odds are very different for somebody in their twenties and somebody in their eighties.
"Closely Monitored" - OK so where exactly is the data? "Closely Monitored" is just a call to "trust the institutions".
> "Closely Monitored" - OK so where exactly is the data? "Closely Monitored" is just a call to "trust the institutions".
Submitted to the FDA, first for the EUAs, then for the full approvals, and still on an ongoing basis for longer term monitoring. They're so careful about reporting everything that they submitted a lightning strike as a potential adverse event. https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struc...
> I think deaths are counted differently, though - everybody who dies within one month after testing positive is counted for Covid (afaik - at least in some places). For vaccines, I am not aware of such rules. So the numbers can not easily be compared. That is the problem.
Again, easily addressed. Look at total deaths, for the entire country, regardless of cause.
If vaccines were killing anything like the numbers COVID did, you'd see it. Instead, you can see in March 2021 the excess deaths largely go away (after being elevated for more than a year) for a couple months, as vulnerable populations got protected. It doesn't tick back up until Delta hits, and even then, the spike is much smaller than previous ones.
Good point with the excess deaths (you mean because many more have been vaccinated than have been known to be infected), but there still is the issue that if you are getting the vaccine, you definitely get the vaccine, whereas it is not certain that you catch the virus. And still age and individual risk seem to matter.
"They're so careful about reporting everything that they submitted a lightning strike as a potential adverse event."
So how many vaccine deaths were there so far? It doesn't seem easy to get the number, even though there clearly seem to have been deaths associated with it. When I google for it, I mostly get the unreliable VAERS reports (7400 deaths so far according to https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad... ).
> During this time, VAERS received 7,439 reports of death (0.0020%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, even if it’s unclear whether the vaccine was the cause.
So, that's an absolute upper limit, which would require zero normal deaths (car accidents, other illnesses, old age, etc.) in nearly 200M Americans over a seven month period of administration.
It's not an absolute upper limit, as there is no guarantee every death gets entered into VAERS. Is there even a protocol for entering things into VAERS, or do people do it on a whim? (Edit: missed the "required to enter any dearth part" - in what time frame, though?)
And what is the age distribution of those deaths?
Edit: my issue is really that it should be age and risk dependent. I found a calculator putting my risk of death from Corona to 1:20000 - why can't I get something similar for the vaccines. Yes, the deaths from vaccinations my be few, but if you are young enough, they may still be significant compared to Corona deaths in your age group.
Even that Corona risk calculator was just some obscure scientists project, why can't we get an official thing?
Personally I am almost at the border to severe Corona risk, at age 49. In my case it seems risk of death from vaccination would be about 10 times lower than the risk from the virus. But at younger ages, it may start ever more unfavorable for the vaccine. Especially as the deaths in lower age groups are likely to have been ill before catching the virus.
There could also be another selection bias in the sense that perhaps some people who are severely ill don't get vaccinated, but they would still catch the virus.
I just would like to get a better representation of all the issues. Not some generic "vaccinations have found to be safe" statements.
I don’t know a single person who was hospitalised from the vaccine, and almost every adult I know has got it.
Conversely, several people I know were hospitalised from COVID, one of whom was killed.
Anecdotal, of course, but in the absence of better data, I’d be interested in other peoples’ experiences.
I’ll also note that in my country someone dying of the vaccine is a news-making story. Someone dying of COVID isn’t, because, sadly, it wouldn’t be “new” at all.
I know one person who died from Covid, but he was a very unlikely case (in his thirties, and there were so far only 255 deaths in his age group in my country of 80 million people - he also was a news story), one who was hospitalized but seems to be fine now, and one who had a thrombosis from the vaccination (not life threatening it seems).
Another person I know was close to checking into the hospital for fear of heart issues after the vaccination. But it seems to have passed - except a few weeks later he now has a pacemaker, but officially not related to the vaccination (I don't know, not saying it is).
I have no doubt that for certain people the vaccine is better. But why do the stories never account for individual risk, dependent on age and co-morbidities?
Edit: changed 171 to 255, as 171 was just the male deaths in his age group. 255 is men+women.
I assume they're getting those numbers from hospitals themselves, who see FAR more unvaccinated patients than vaccinated. Which really tells you everything you need to know about the vaccine and getting vaccinated. Sure, having a concrete number to point to is nice, but knowing that your local hospital sees drastically more unvaccinated patients is far more useful than knowing the average rate nationally.
