Why the Covid Vaccines Aren’t Dangerous

The only argument for not getting the vaccine would be if you thought you had a better than average chance of never encountering the live virus. If given a choice between a vax and the live virus, no sane person would choose the live virus.

So everything else here is BS. People don't want to get the vaccine because they're scared. I understand that. But the probability of them encountering the virus is so high that taking the vaccine is clearly orders of magnitude less risky than not doing so, since in both cases you almost certainly will end up with the spike protein in your system and the only decision you really have is whether that will be self-administered and self-limiting, or wild and replicating uncontrolledly.

It's partly the weakness of pro-vaccine articles like this one that fuels the phenomenon. People read it and say, is that the best counter-argument there is? Then perhaps my hesitation is correct indeed.

The assertion that the vaccines give you way less mRNA / cell death than the actual virus sounds like it should obviously be true, but I can't find any papers that measure it, and I keep encountering people for whom the vaccine appeared to actually give them COVID for a day or two. I've also known people who had COVID naturally and whose symptoms and duration was pretty much the same as those people reporting bad side effects from the vaccines, which I'd guess is somewhere between 25%-50% of people taking it, judging from my social circle, but it's hard to know exactly.

The best info I could get is that dosages were obtained by simply starting really low and then steadily increasing it until antibody titers were high "enough" and side effects were still considered tolerable. However the dosages of some brands are much higher than others. At that point information became proprietary and I couldn't go further. Still, given the wide range of severities of infections it's not totally clear why this process was expected to yield a drastically lower dose than all possible viral infections.

If you read the underlying papers it seems to be just assumed that one is much less than the other because that's how vaccines normally work, and it'd be insane if it were not the case. But this is new technology, and these vaccines aren't acting like vaccines are meant to e.g. they don't seem to stop you catching it and getting sick, their effectiveness seems to last months rather than decades, and their side effects are much worse.

I have become quite suspicious about this over time because I keep encountering people who say the vaccine made them sick, and the symptoms align very closely with COVID symptoms. Recovery appears to be a little faster but perhaps not by much - the only person in my immediate social circle who actually definitely got COVID was only in bed for a day, and then it took several days to shake off the remnants of the cough. The vaccines don't give people a cough but "It laid me low for a day or two, felt so sick I had to stay in bed all day" is a very common side effect. This is what you'd expect if the vaccine was doing the same stuff as the virus itself but without filling the lungs with crap. And that's in turn what you'd expect given the way the mRNA vaccines actually work: they cause cells to act infected and the immune system then detects them as such. Whether vaccines cause more or less damage than a viral infection very much depends on the relative areas under the curves and the relative value of different kinds of cells that are exposed and destroyed, but, again, no way to actually get data into that form.

But then you weight it by incidence. Governments seem to have a bloody minded fanatical determination to make vaccine incidence 100% by any means possible. On the other hand, where I live, after a year and a half of this stuff, only ~10% of the population has tested positive. When the person I live with got sick, I was forced to self-isolate with them, and I never got sick even though delta is supposedly super infectious. The incidence of the virus is far less than the incidence of vaccines, so even if their impact is within a similar order of magnitude (i.e. much less but still comparable), it seems quite plausible that the vaccines end up making more people sick than the virus (for some value of "the virus" given that it mutates and "the vaccine" given the apparent need for repetitive boosters).

Of course nobody reasonable is saying "Go out and try to get the virus! It's better than the vaccine!" But your comment overlooks a significant and growing population: the people who have already been infected.

Last year, a WHO official estimated that as much as 10% of the world population might have already been infected. A year later, given the spread of Delta, it would not be surprising if that estimate was substantially higher.

What do you advise the previously infected to do? It is scientifically dishonest to dismiss the strong and growing evidence we now have that natural immunity is robust and likely in some respects superior to that provided by the vaccines.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/having-sars-cov-2-on...

https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/30919-natural-infection-ver...

> ...the only decision you really have is whether that will be self-administered and self-limiting, or wild and replicating uncontrolledly.

Yes, the risks of a natural infection in an unvaccinated person causing severe illness are undoubtedly higher, but let's not slander the human immune system. Young, apparently healthy people do get sick and die, and some report debilitating symptoms that linger, but if you look at the overall numbers honestly, you have to acknowledge that the vast, vast majority of people who are not old and who don't have metabolic disease don't get seriously ill and die from COVID, they recover just fine. And a double-digit percentage of people never even display symptoms.

This thing isn't Ebola and vaccination marketing that presents it as such is, not surprisingly, proving to be less than persuasive to lots of people.