Due diligence: Due to a severe allergic reaction to a vaccine as a child, I have not had any vaccines in at least 60 years. Not even smallpox, on doctor's orders. But I am not going to take the new COVID medicine for more than that reason. I've considered the reported adverse side effect counts, that are unprecedented (HUGE), and the long term effects are completely unknown.
I never discourage anyone else, except to ask the wife to read articles censored by Facebook, YouTube, etc. I believe in the freedom to make a personal choice. I don't believe in the censorship of negative, contradictory information, and we have certainly had that.
mRNA for COVID is new medicine developed in an unprecedented nine months.
People in stage two trials were unusually young and healthy -- ages 18 to 55 only, even though manufacturers knew that seniors were most at risk from COVID. This type of selection is common in double blind drug trials.
Placebo injection patients reported very few COVID like symptoms over the next two months so the absolute risk reduction was tiny, versus the injected group:
From article at link near end of this comment:
Patients Reporting Severe COVID Symptoms
Pfizer = 0.005%
placebo = 0.04%
Moderna = zero
placebo = 0.22%
No one died of COVID during the testing, placebo or vaccinated.
COVID mRNA was designed to significantly reduce symptoms, not prevent all infections.
Stage two post vaccine, or post placebo, respiratory symptoms reported could have been symptoms of a cold, non-COVID-influenze, allergies, etc.
Stage three trials are using hundreds of millions of "volunteers".
That is unprecedented.
mRNA technology had previously failed in animal tests, for other diseases, in the past.
So no animal tests this time !
Completely unknown long term adverse effects.
The worst flu ever, in 1918 to 1920, had one small death spike, two large death spikes, and one more small death spike. It obviously mutated to a milder variant, and people at the time would consider it to have gone away. With no vaccines, and no medicines, to treat it.
We have had two death spikes with COVID -- who can say there would have been another death spike if there was no vaccine?
Any flu virus will mutate, so it's very unlikely one shot will be enough for a lifetime. If you've had COVID, you should have much stronger antibodies than would be developed from a shot, and you definitely don't need a shot.
Some of the many COVID medicines have not been so effective with COVID variants so far. Pfizer and Moderna seem to be working best.
Humans used to live with about 219 viruses that cause medical problems. My guess is COVID, in some mutated form, will be number 220.
Most important is that there are many COVID, and COVID medicine, questions, but not that many answers so far.
Kind of like predicting the climate 100 years from now. Lot's of self-proclaimed "experts", but few people saying "we don't know"
Of the 100+ COVID articles I've read in the past year, this one from February 2021 is most recommended:
My final thought:
What could possibly go wrong with the experimental vaccine?
A lot COULD go wrong, but no matter what happens, politicians will claim it would have been worse WITHOUT the vaccines!
