Should I risk getting vaccinated?

Percentages are the worst stats for people to manipulate. Unless you have a concept of the denominators involved, they aren’t meaningful, and when you are comparing scenarios with differing denominators people get all confused about the reality of the situation. This is a really good visualization of what percentages look like applied to groups.

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I looked what current statistics tell about the situation in my country.

Delta has increased the number of confirmed cases, current peak is higher than any previous one. Yet, the number of deaths has remained low. The most probable reason is that the majority of elder persons are vaccinated. Of people aged 70+ years, a high percentage (>85%) has been vaccinated twice. The age class 80+ years has formed about half of all COVID deaths, age classes 50-79 years a high percentage of the rest. Now vaccines protect them from fatal symptoms.

IMHO, this is a good demonstration of how vaccines save lives.

Yet, the anti-vaccine people are as active as before, using a surprising amount of time and energy to promote their opinions. Facts do not seem to change their opinions.

Our country started voluntary vaccinations of children aged 12-16 years. The anti-vaccine people are horrified that we use these children in ‘a medical experiment’, using ‘experimental vaccines’ that may ‘destroy’ the future of millions of children. It’s surprising that many respected persons, leaders and doctors, have been active in the campaign to ‘save the children’.

Edit: young themselves are mostly positive towards vaccinations. They are sick of being in distance learning (since spring 2020). Even teenagers show previously rare emotions, they are smiling and happy when they are allowed to go to school.

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Look it up and let us know, okay? You should be able to figure it out easily.

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Please do. If not for you then for others. Anything you can personally do to stop or mitigate the spread of the virus is beneficial.

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Is this absolutely true for a very healthy 16 year old? Even if the statistics clearly show the vaccine is safer many parents still might feel the risk to their healthy children is so low they don’t want to risk the vaccine yet considering what they perceive to be the long term unknowns. It seems many places are now entirely dismissive of long term side effects (saying they would show up already—but I was thinking long term meant something else) and most studies show the vaccine to be very safe. I mean at this point the FDA should just fully approve it. Remove this excuse if they are as safe as everyone says.

Of course, if you really want to know what the anti-vax crowd thinks, read the comments on #protectyourfamily on FB :man_facepalming:

Vinnie

From what I have seen, it is true that the risks of the infection outweighs the risks of the vaccine for a healthy 16 year old. The only worrying negative side effect I have heard of for that age group is myocarditis:

That’s a 0.0035% rate of myocarditis.

Compare this to hospitalization rates for adolescents with COVID-19

Going with the lower number, that’s a 0.0035% chance of myocarditis or a 0.2% chance of hospitalization. I think the numbers support vaccination, and that is before factoring in the chance of transmission.

There has never been a vaccine in the last 200 years that has had negative side effects that show up years later. All negative side effects show up within 3 months. There is no reason why this vaccine would be an exception. As would be expected, the negative side effects from the COVID vaccines do show up within 3 months of vaccination and they are milder forms of the side effects seen from the actual infection.

There is a lot of other paperwork involved in full approval, such as reviewing the language they will use on the package and in advertising. As for data, emergency approval requires 2 months of data while full approval needs 6 months of data, so they are well beyond the tipping point where that is concerned, especially with the people in the original clinical trials from November of 2020. It is my understanding that full approval should occur in the next few weeks.

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Of course I think most skeptical parents will tell you it’s unlikely for children to get Covid in the first place before factoring in 0.2% chance of hospitalization.

Also, are your numbers children in the hospital with Covid or actually children hospitalized because of Covid? @Dale pointed out 200+ kids a day hospitalized with Covid. But thats with Covid, not necessarily from Covid. I have trouble keeping up with all these stats and their caveats now.

My understanding was that children should be vaccinating to protect other, at risk members of society. Many parents I know will flat out tell you they don’t give a shot about other people catching Covid when it comes to them putting an experimental needle into their children’s arms.

I don’t think this has been communicated very well then. A strong campaign of “we will know in 1-3 months of any unforeseen side effects” might have been more honest from the start. Though more people probable would have waited a few months if that happened. Of course, a sleight of hand like this doesn’t increase the trust level of those worried about the vaccine. They will see the narrative as changing from “long term” to being a few months. So are there actually no legitimate LONG term concerns with Covid? Was this a mistake all along? Or were the concerns elsewhere to start?

Can you quantify your risk of getting vaccinated @SeekerKid? And not?

Quite the opposite. It is highly likely that nearly everyone will contract COVID-19 in the next few years, including kids, or even especially kids. I think we have all seen how quickly colds and flus spread through schools and groups of kids.

If they list COVID as the reason for hospitalization then it is from COVID.

Protecting others is also a good reason for getting the vaccine, in addition to protecting kids from a more severe infection. It may be worth mentioning to them that the experiments for the vaccines took place in late 2020 as part of a multi-phase clinical trial. It isn’t an experimental vaccine, at least not any more experimental than any other vaccine out there.

There were clinical trials before the vaccine was given emergency authorization, so they would have known if there were frequent negative side effects before the vaccine was released to the public.

As to why misinformation spreads faster than facts . . . that’s a question for sociology and psychology.

It depends on how you define long term. There are COVID “long haulers” who have had long lasting side effects from the infection. However, these symptoms started immediately. They didn’t show up a year after the infection. It is entirely possible for people to have side effects from the vaccine that show up within the first few weeks after the final dose, and that those side effects hang around for the long term. But again, these side effects show up soon after the final dose, not years later.

As I stated before, in the 200 years that humans have developed and used vaccines there has never been a vaccine where negative side effects begin 6 months or years after the vaccination. There is absolutely no reason this vaccine should be an exception. You can judge for yourself why people would invent such a story for the COVID vaccine.

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Pfizer’s application was submitted in May. It is rumored that it will be approved by Labor Day. There is a process, it’s not like they just sit around a table and vote.

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Mortality rate for kids is very low. If this new variant changes that it will be even more unfortunate than it already is.

Quite possibly true but currently there doesn’t seem to be a dire need for kids to vaccinate for their own sake.

    • Overall rate: 5,864 cases per 100,000 children in the population
  1. and 0.2%-1.9% of all their child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization

    • Among states reporting, children were 0.00%-0.25% of all COVID-19 deaths, and 7 states reported zero child deaths

Those three are all from your link. I can tell you that all the people I know with a certain political affiliation will look at that and find no dire need to vaccinate their kids. For their sake I can only hope that holds true. I’m sure there are a bunch of people who regretted not vaccinating themselves while in the ICU. I still maintain that kids should be vaccinated to protect the elderly and those with underlying conditions. Every major authority I see seems to say the same thing. Not a major risk to children.

I try but all my anti-vax friends formed their opinions along party lines during a presidential election. They post a link to a child in the hospital from the vaccine and think that a handful of cases like this settles the issue. I know about 30 people like that and only 2 that were just legitimately nervous about side effects. Some people legitimately earn their Darwin Awards. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

True. But it’s not nothing and a small percentage are hospitalized and end up with long term side effects that are far worse in terms of both probability and severity than any side effect of vaccines. Infection rates among children are climbing because of the higher transmission rates of the delta variant. So even if Delta is not more serious, larger numbers of children becoming infected means a larger number who will have a rare serious reaction or die, because that is just how percentages work. Studies have shown that when a large percentage of people are vaccinated, cases go down among the unvaccinated as well. It is far less risky get a vaccination than to get a COVID infection if you are over 12. If you are under 12, your risk of infection is lowered the more people around you that are vaccinated.

Health experts are recommending that all children over 12 be vaccinated. When the vaccine is approved for use in younger children, they are going to recommend younger children get vaccinated. It will save lives. What would qualify as a “dire need” in your mind? Only a small percentage of children will be involved in a serious car collision in their lifetime, but they should still all wear seatbelts. If you can do something safe and harmless to protect against proven risks of death or injury you should do it, even if the odds of not dying or being injured are good.

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Here’s some data:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/18/health/us-coronavirus-wednesday/index.html

In the 10 states with the lowest vaccination rates, fewer than 41% of their residents have been fully vaccinated. In the 10 states with the highest vaccination rates, more than 58% of their residents have been inoculated against coronavirus.

Hospitalization rates in those bottom 10 states are nearly four times higher, and death rates are more than 5.5 times higher than in the top 10 states, according to a CNN analysis of federal data.

I got the 2nd Pfizer vaccine on Monday. Sore arm came on faster and that night pain and feverish (i.e. hot) spots were popping up all over. I spent most of Tuesday in bed. Today, Wednesday, the pain in my arm is less, but I was still a little achy and tired.

When I brought up the vaccine with my best friend, his biggest problem was that he couldn’t understand why more than one vaccine was needed. He thought the makers of the vaccine were just trying to make more money. He also couldn’t understand why actually getting the virus wouldn’t give you a better immunity than the vaccine.

To me it seems quite reasonable that multiple exposures build up a better immunity. And from what I read it seems that getting the virus counts as a single exposure and gives the same immunity as a single dose of the vaccine.

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I think remember the childhood vaccination schedule is important. There are multiple shots for the same virus for a reason for kids:
image

I think a lot of people don’t have a lot of experience (myself included) of dealing with the actual diseases that childhood vaccines protect against and having background knowledge comparing the two.

Here’s a little summary comparing the two for various childhood diseases (plus we need to consider the risk of the actual disease itself- much higher for COVID-19 than its vaccine):

https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdch/Waiver_Ed_Natural_Immunity_479884_7.pdf

Plus we have some evidence that vaccines protect you better than infection at reinfection:

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Soon, the unvaccinated will have to pay for these vaccinations against Covid. The government will step in and set a cut off date. Free until that date. People will race to get vaccinated.

Good articles. I suspect as time goes on we will learn more about the relative efficacy of infection vs vaccine. Delta has changed a lot of predictions. I know about the same number of people who have had Covid twice as who have had vaccine breakthrough,

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The risk of getting myocarditis from the vaccine is much lower than the risk of getting myocarditis from a COVID infection.
Risk of myocarditis from COVID in people under age 20

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Why would any sane government do that?

Mortality rates of vaccinated kids is even lower, and no kids have died from taking the vaccine.

I think it frustrates many of us when partisan politics seeps into science.

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