Lack of science and ethics at the FDA and CDC

Aaron,

I would have to know what the trade-offs you have in mind before I could answer your question. Even as a person in a very low risk category (me), the risk from COVID is much higher than the risk from the vaccine. I am in a community with a lot of vaccine hesitancy, and I know a lot of people who have had COVID, so I think/thought it was prudent for me to get vaccinated both to protect myself and to protect elderly loved ones (even if they are vaccinated it is not 100% effective, and the effectiveness is lower in elderly people with poor immune systems and they are obviously most at risk if infected). If you are concerned about how ethical the vaccines are, or have some other concern, then the calculus would be more complicated and more personal.

If the tradeoff is just the inconvenience of setting up an appointment and the potential side effects, then I think it is worth it to get vaccinated. The risk of you either getting a severe infection or infecting someone and causing a severe illness is probably greater than the risk that you will have a severe side effect, but that would be pretty hard to calculate, and it would rely on a lot of obscure variables - like how social you are, who you spend your time with, how many acquaintances are vaccinated, etc. There is certainly a common good argument to be made for everyone getting vaccinated ASAP to protect as many people as possible.

As part of this discussion I don’t think we should lose sight of how bad COVID has been in the aggregate.

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What @CWD said.

It’s seems pretty clear that COVID is mostly transmitted by people who don’t know that they are sick (at least yet). My wife and I will be going to get our second doses this Friday, and I will have my kids vaccinated when that becomes a possibility. I’m not concerned about that my kids will get sick from COVID, but we have elderly family members who have been told by their doctor that they will likely die if they get COVID. Since vaccination is not 100% sure to provide protection, it’s safer if younger family members get vaccinated to reduce the chance of transmission. Plus I am also concerned about the health of elderly members at church since we will be spending a couple hours together in the same room.

Could there be bad outcomes from these vaccinations? Could it be the case that the mainstream authorities are downplaying the risks? Sure. But the dangers of COVID to a substantial fraction of the population are quite obvious, and the risks of vaccination would have to be quite high to outweigh that. Moreover, the people who are expressing the most concern about bad outcomes from the COVID vaccine would carry more credibility with me if they didn’t seem to be against vaccines in general.

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Others calling out the CDC for its lack of science.

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?abVariantId=0&campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210511&instance_id=30578&nl=the-morning&productCode=NN&regi_id=133524437&segment_id=57734&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2Fa1606adc-e1e1-5581-9f2e-aee007a098ea&user_id=2bc35666db06740046cf552c03159838

Studying the adenovirus
vaccines:

Of course, the savvy professor doesn’t want to risk his reputation and career and ends with the expected,

“Covid-19 is much, much, much more dangerous than this extremely rare condition,” Prof. Greinacher said.

Interesting paper:

Jason,
Can you point me to some resources on the abortion/vaccine connection please?

I’m surprised there’s not more engagement with this aspect of the vaccine issue. Is this exclusively a Catholic issue?

If you have not seen it yet, you might take a look at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which seems to approach this from a Roman Catholic perspective. They have a really helpful PDF:
https://lozierinstitute.org/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-covid-19-vaccine/