Pfizer submits Covid vaccine to FDA for approval, to distribute in December

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> Looking at this selfishly and from PoV of game theory, the best decision is to let vaccinate everybody else but don't take vaccine yourself. Obviously, not everybody can make same decision

There are two different ways a medicine might have long term unintended and currently unknown effects.

1. It does some kind of permanent damage to you fairly immediately after taking it that takes a long time to show noticeable effects, or

2. It does some some kind of damage that is not permanent and won't lead to any long term noticeable effects as long as the original damage is allowed to heal or at least not made worse.

Category two is what you have to worry about with things you have to take regularly, because they can accumulate the damage or risk and it can take many years before it accumulates to the point that we might notice.

Because this is a not a "take every year" kind of vaccine, I don't think there is much need to worry about category two.

With "take it once" types of medicine (yes, I know some vaccines require more than one dose over a week or two, which counts as taking it once when considering long term effects), with wide deployment, I'd expect any unintended and unknown long term side effects to start being found within maybe a year of wide deployment.

• In the entire history of vaccines, only one has been recalled because the vaccine itself caused long term side effects (a rotavirus vaccine that had rare complications and no deaths for those under 1yr). If you can't find any papers about it, that's why. It's like finding a paper on death by lava lamp explosions. It's happened (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-dec-01-na-brief....), but not enough to study it.

• Much of the speed was gained by relaxing enrollment rules, which are for study participant safety. The majority of normal study participants join in the last year or two anyways.

• These studies were larger than usual to make up for the decreased time. 30,000 people is a lot, and plenty to check for rare side effects.

• Then compare the odds that there's a common reaction that didn't show up in 30,000 participants against the ~5-10% chance of serious health complications from COVID. It's a no-brainer.

You can read the list of recalled vaccines and why they were recalled straight from the FDA (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....).

Additionally, you also have, as an individual, the option to just stand further back in the line. You don't have to get in immediate contact with the enemy, you can just go to the back of the army and wait for some time until the experimental armor is battle tested.

What sounds like the more rational choice (from an individual standpoint) now?

EDIT: not sure why this is getting downvotes. I do agree that the risk equation does seem leaning towards taking the vaccine. Tests have been conducted with >30.000 people, and so far it seems safe. There still exists of course a probability of that not being the case, but compared to the (known, and very real) side effects of covid, taking the vaccine asap even if it's version 1.0 seems like the sensible choice.

Still, parents analogy seemed flawed so I tried to extend it.