I’m no anti vaxxer but my closest friends niece was perfectly healthy, they got her vaccinated before Covid and everything, she started having seizures and developed other health problems less than a week later. They are very good people but now are a little weary about vaccines, and they have a good reason to be. Not everything is so black and white.
The power of choice does not absolve you of responsibility for that choice when it affects other people. People are dying and new variants are turning up putting more people at risk. The people who have access to a vaccine and choose not to get it are actively contributing to that problem. You’re not the poor victim here being bullied because people point that out to you.
If you have ever taken a medicine that have needed a doctor to approve you taking it, you very likely have a note on said medicine about the statistical risk for possible side-effects. Side-effects om many medications are rare or weak enough to be approved for general use -this also applies to the covid vaccine. Your personal choice, as you put it, is risking both you and those around you needlessly. Covid have hit and killed healthy and athletic people before, if you think differently you have been misinformed. Please go vaccinate yourself, if you dont, atleast wear a mask and keep your distance.
It has killed those healthy and athletic people, who suffer from some chronic disease that the virus further worsens.
Concerning what you said about side effects- the vaccine and over the counter medication is definitely not the same. The vaccine contains microscopic doses of Covid-19, which, when battling with your immune system, helps develop antibodies that can further fight the real thing. You put yourself at risk when signing up to do it- either by not knowing your health conditions which could worsen, leading to some form of complications and possibly death or by getting sick for multiple days and developing side effects.
Either way, as I said, I believe that I do not need the vaccine as I have had covid and defeated it without consequences. When in concerns my personal health I have a right to be selfish (having defeated the covid virus is basically like getting the vaccine because of the antibodies and immunity, so why should I bother anyways?)
Being healthy doesnt magically make you immune to getting covid, as you said about yourself getting covid and beating it. And getting covid and antibodies from it doesnt make you permanently immune, as the antibodies die away after some time from infection (months).
And if you claim to have antibodies, why wouldnt you want to be vaccinated and have it be permanent, or until a resistant variant might pop up? Your antibodies would protect you from the worst possible effects of the vaccine right?
Are you also against other proven vaccines?
Also I have no clue where you heard that those antibodies die away after some time- total bullshit. Our government, upon making the vaccine certificats, made it so getting sick with covid and beating it is equal to getting vaccinated. You get the certificate even if not vaccinated, you just have to have been sick from covid and that's it.
Not all who get sick with covid produce antibodies, about 80% of infected still have antibodies after a year.
Here's a source from Sweden from july 2021, Google translate is your friend.
None of the vaccines in use have live COVID virus. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contain no virus at all, only instructions for making the spike protein. J&J uses an adenovirus vector, that doesn’t cause infection but delivers the instructions to make the spike protein. Perhaps more research on your part needs to be done, talking with your doctor is good too if you need more info.
I mentioned the one adenovirus vector vaccine approved in the US, it does not contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID, and has been modified so that it does not cause infection and only delivers instructions for making the antigen to train your immune system to recognize. This is a good article that explains how all the vaccines work and what technologies they use.
Not vaccinating gives you a much higher chance of not only death from acute repository symptoms, but we don't know what long term effects of covid are. It's much harder to predict and study the long term effects of a wild virus that mutates easily than the side-effects of a vaccination we invented ourselves that doesn't change over time.
So far covid has caused lung and heart damage, brain damage, and problems with fertility at MUCH higher incidence than any vaccine side effects we've noticed in the past year. And for all we know people who have gotten COVID still have it lurking in their systems ready to resurface worse, like chicken pox ready to come back as shingles. Maybe we'll see a ton of people who got Covid getting cancer, as with HPV. Viruses can do weird stuff.
Anyway, as an unvaccinated person, bullying is about the best you can hope for. People are mad at you because you are making a selfish decision to become a human petri dish for a mutating virus that, given more opportunity to replicate in you, could create new variants. You will also spread the virus more easily should you get it, and if you get sick, you are more likely than a vaccinated person to contribute to a stressed medical system. Meaning if someone gets in an accident while you're taking up a bed, or needs some other medical treatment, you will delay getting them help in a way that could have been mitigated.
Of course people won't want someone like you, experimenting with giving yourself a highly contagious virus needlessly, in their businesses and in their countries.
… you do realize that healthy athletic individuals have died or have long-term effects from covid, correct?
I have a friend who is a triathlete and fitness instructor who had covid fall 2020. To this day they still can’t go up a flight of stairs, let alone do their job in fitness.
We’re not talking about people that are a little weary about getting the vaccine. We’re not talking about people that can’t get the vaccine due to medical reasons. It would do you well to critically think before relaying whataboutism fodder for republicans to use to uphold their dangerous mindset.
Because this isn’t just like some small difference of opinion. This isn’t “I like cats more than dogs” or “vanilla is better than chocolate” why can’t I just have my opinion? This is hundreds of thousands of people are dead from COVID, millions more have long term consequences, hospitals are overflowing again, and new variants are popping up. And people who are bad at math are actively making things worse.
Most of us would like to get back to normal, so we’ve done our part to try and do that. And the people who haven’t are not the victims here just because they’re being held responsible for the decision they’ve made.
Dude I’m totally with you. I’m just bringing up a situation about someone who is worried about getting vaccinated and has a good reason to feel that way. Like, it’s not always people being anti vaxxer conspiracy theory nuts.
The people who are worried about vaccinations don't really have a "good" reason to feel that way, they just think they do. Questioning some random experimental shit like all those crystals and supplement hawkers is normal. Questioning an overwhelming scientific and medical consensus, with now millions of recent verifiable data points showing the efficacy and relative risks of the vaccines, is frankly ridiculous, especially if said questioner is not at all educated in the medical field. Do they really think doctors and pharmacologists are just spitballing or something, going off hunches?
I did, and while I feel for those people who are one of the unfortunate few who get severe side-effects, they are outliers. Direct family members of these outliers would have understandable psychological barriers to the vaccine, but they are still irrational barriers, and are still personally safer taking the vaccine than risking infection. I'm not heartless, I get why they'd be hesitant, and would approach them from a place of empathy.
The problem is, a bunch of other people will hear about this anecdote who arent blood relatives of the niece, but will over value this one situation over the data, and then start spreading this elsewhere etc, the end result being a whole bunch of unvaccinated people. Their fear of a rare side effect has a solid chance of killing them.
Thank you for a very reasonable response! I agree that what happened to his niece is extremely uncommon. But what I’m trying to prove is that people like them aren’t bad people for being skeptical.
If you are a person that truly doesn't "believe" in vaccines, anything you type on the topic of vaccines makes the world a stupider place, and adds to the pile of dead. You are more concerned about "sarcastic trolls" than the lives of others, which speaks volumes about your priorities, and brands you a grade-A asswipe in my book.
This means the vaccine works. It can help prevent infection, and it helps those who get infected have a lower rate of morbidity/mortality. Your second infection was likely far less severe than your first.
I honestly hope the vaccine works, but there was “scientific fact” that since I had Covid I may or should have some sort of immunity to it. Unfortunately I drew the short straw and tested positive again. Due to the short timeframe of Covid research I struggle to believe what any dr. Or scientist recommends.
The vaccine doesn't and isn't designed to hard counter a viral load. Think of it as wetting down a forest during wildfire season. Some parts still end up burned and if you are basing the results on not one stick burning you will consider it a failure. But that isn't what wetting down the woods is meant to do, it is meant to mitigate the fire that may happen anyway. It is hoped it will not be needed but it is there if it happens.
That is what the vaccine is designed for. It is infinitely better for you if you never get into a position where infection is a risk but that is hardly reasonable for everyone to attempt. The vaccine is wetting your system down so the fire burns less intensely and over a far smaller part of your system. You will still get sick with a high enough viral load, obviously. But perhaps you noticed you overall were less sick after vaccination than you were before you got it?
No there wasn't any 'scientific fact' about covid antibodies preventing infection. The WHO said to get vaccinated whether you had it before or not.
Curious where you heard that 'scientific fact'. Was it about other viruses? Cause I might be about to blow your mind but viruses tend to be different from one another.
I’ll be perfectly honest, I don’t believe anyone knows. I’ve seen my dr., 4 specialists for stomach issues, and 2 GI drs. since having Covid and they are still trying to figure out my gut issue. I’m not here to debate or argue, I just am skeptical about how quickly a vaccine became available with less than a year of research.
It came about so quickly because it had to. It was also a group effort handled by scientists spanning several well-established countries.
I can understand being doubtful because of how quickly it became available, but when there’s a pandemic affecting everyone on the planet, people are going to focus all of their efforts on developing a vaccine.
I personally think that the amount of time it took isn’t necessarily a red flag, but rather a testament to how far we’ve advanced in pharmacology and disease research. We aren’t used to quick and efficient (kinda) vaccine rollouts because we didn’t have the sort of technology we have today back when the polio or shingles vaccines became available. Research and development can occur much faster today than it could in the past.
Not arguing with you, just explaining my perspective.
My Dr. said I may be a long hauler, due to my on going symptoms. The recommendation was that getting vaccinated could subside my issues. Nothing has changed since being vaccinated. Mind you I am not for or against the vaccination. I’m hoping it helps eventually.
Every state in the country is reporting higher than average amounts of cases, we had ~100k new infections last week and the variants are surging in every country in the world but yeah, dumbass, it's basically over.
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u/AdvancedAdvance America 17d ago
I just at find it difficult to have a normal discussion with an anti-vaxxer, mostly because it’s hard to talk over the sound of their ventilator.