I feel is that it has been less than a year since the pandemic was declared and the fact that a vaccine using new synthetic RNA technology that has never been used before is being promoted before studying the long term effects is scary as hell.
How many years did we use Antibiotics before it became apperant that over-use results in super bugs?
There have been many other novel medications that have turned out to be less than good after they were studied over a longer duration of time. I am worried in 5 or 10 years from now, a whole bunch of people are going to get some new type of autoimmune disease, or liver cancer, or their yet to be concieved kids will get it, or something I can't even imagine right now.
I hope I am wrong and that everything works out but I feel this whole situation could use some sober second thought before jumping in head first and dose-ing a large percentage of the human species so quickly with a novel technology.
* Edit: I would also like to see antibody tests being done prior to vaccination as already having antibodies might result in negative reactions that were not studied in the current trials, not to mention the effect it would have on the statistics that will be used as a metric to encourage more people to get jabbed.
Governments and corporations have a very good history of doing shady stuff and rushing things when they shouldn't so it's not wrong to be sceptical based on history. To me it's about evaluation of risk profile and what you want to do.
I can wait for better data.
That's likely to be when something stable with an ordinary cold chain is at normal pharmacies, but who knows? I work for a large University that probably has hundreds of those super-cold freezers and we get a supply I might go into campus for the first time in seven months...
Vaccines aren't zero risk, but the risk is very low. The candidate Covid vaccines have been tested on 30-50k volunteers with 0 or maybe 1 adverse event, so the risk must be well below 1:10000. Given that the risk with Covid is much higher, like 1:100 of death and 1:20 of other nasty long-term effects, and (without vaccines) most people would get it, that seems like a fantastic deal.
People in areas with no virus, like New Zealand, could plausibly consider the risk not worth it yet.
In hardware, software and now Covid vaccines, I try to avoid being an 'early adopter'. I wait til the bugs are ironed out.
So apparently I can recieve a vaccine that still allows me to contract the virus to the point where I can still have enough vital load to spread it, but I'm somehow protected from the severe symptoms which are thought to be an overreaction of the immune system which was previously stimulated into producing the antibodies to target this virus. I'd be interested to know how that works since I must be missing some mechanism.
From a game theotetic perspective if most people get the vaccine, you're better off not taking it yourself. And if most don't, I will be happy with that too as a political statement.
For high risk individuals like very old people I wouldn't wait too long if the data is solid.
Nothing is zero-risk, but Covid is certainly a higher risk than even quickly-researched vaccines will be.