I'll bite. He says it's crazy conspiracy theories. I have family hospitalized with blood clots after receiving the vax. She's out now, but that hospitalization will lead to a personal bankruptcy. It's not crazy conspiracy theory when your own family starts seeing negative effects. After watching what happened to her, nobody else in my family has any desire to get vaxxed. Nobody in my family is "anti-vax" as we've all gotten vaxed at birth, have voluntarily gotten flu vaccines in the past, etc. It's anti-this-vax, because it is not fully tested, and has caused real harm to people.
I’m sorry your family member had this serious but exceedingly rare reaction to the vaccine, but here’s the thing: when, exactly, do you propose making the call to go ahead and get your family vaccinated? When vaccines are provably 100% safe? Probably not. So how about five nines, 99.999% safe? Well, no, apparently that’s not good enough for you, because that’s roughly what we’ve got. When it comes to fatal reactions to the vaccines, it’s past six nines. And of course, that still means that out of 330 million Americans, we could expect 33 to die from the vaccine! That’s dozens!
Compared to over a half a million dead and still counting from Covid-19.
Again, it sucks that serious, life-threatening side effects from the vaccine are possible, and sucks more than you’ve been personally touched by them. But the chances are still literally orders of magnitude greater that you will suffer serious, life-threatening side effects if you get Covid-19. Including blood clots. More people have been hospitalized by or even died from blood clots caused by Covid than they have from the blood clots caused by the vaccines. By a lot.
About 1 person in 1 million (so 300 americans) will possibly suffer (there is a weak link) GBS, a rare disorder where the immune system begins to attack the nervous system.
More commonly, people suffer allergic reactions (Up to a few hours later) which can be deadly. Allergic reactions aren't rare.
In my personal case, it's 1 in 8 vaxxed that I know personally with bad reaction and accompanying devastating financial consequences.
I also don't really consider the reported thousands dead, tens of thousands of ER visits, and thousands more hospitalized and/or permanently disabled as exceedingly rare. These are CDC numbers from the VAERS database,
Well. "medalerts.org" is the "National Vaccine Information Center", a notorious source of vaccine misinformation, pushing the thoroughly discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, and lately -- surprise -- being widely criticized as one of the worst pushers of Covid-19 misinformation. A substantial amount of their funding comes from Joseph Mercola, which, well, yikes. (Why I say "yikes" is left as an exercise for the reader.)
But VAERS (the "Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System") is from the CDC, right? Great! Except that it's an open database -- anyone can submit a report and there is no verification. While this doesn't make it useless, it does make it ripe for abuse. "One of the main limitations of VAERS data is that it cannot determine if the vaccine caused the reported adverse event," cautions the FAQ on the VAERS website itself. A lot of information back in the vaccines-cause-autism scare days was literally being added to VAERS by personal injury lawyers.
Are you suggesting their information isn't the same as the CDC? Have any proof of it?
>But VAERS (the "Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System") is from the CDC, right? Great! Except that it's an open database -- anyone can submit a report and there is no verification.
Again, do you have any proof that there is a conspiracy to fill the VAERS database with fake data about covid vaccines? Or is this all just a theory of yours?
There's no evidence that what you are saying is true. There is a hospital bill that has to be paid, due to a covid vaccination in my family. That's hard evidence for me that covid vaccines are not safe.
From about the 200 people I've got on my spreadsheet to track this shit (because I'm not a very busy person and it's a nice way to counter antivaxxers), I've got 0 people who have been hospitalized. Most people simply suffer from a strong, but expected, side effect of a vaccine. After all, their immune system is indeed fighting off what it thinks is a serious threat and expending a lot of resources for that.
You get similar (but weaker) side effects from Influenza shots.
If you look at the write-ups on that link, btw, and not simply if the person was hospitalized, you see that most cases simply end up in observation overnight and most suffer rather mild symptoms you'd experience from a strong immune reaction. A lot of cases are marked as "not recovered" but the writeup says "Headache for 45 minutes, gave ibuprofen."
Even better, most of the deaths are labelled as an allergic reaction and in some cases it's 80+ year old people dying.
Linus is responding specifically to the allegations made that the mRNA vaccines change your genes "into a new humanoid race", which I think can reasonably count as a conspiracy theory.
Additionally, I don't believe the mRNA vaccines are the ones linked to blood clots (a big part of mRNA vaccines is that they should be safer and more effective!), but I'm sorry to hear about your family member's hospitalization.
I think vaccination is the best thing we can do cost/benefit wise and recommend it wholeheartedly, but I respect those waiting for more testing if they continue to take appropriate precautions. Good luck to you and yours!
All due sympathy to your family member, but there is potential for serious side-effects in almost every medical intervention. It's true that these vaccines received emergency authorization, so the known unknowns are greater in number than usual, but this vaccine appears to be safer than many commonly prescribed medications. It's as irrational to be anti-vax as it is to be anti-medications. First do no harm does not imply a guarantee against all potential harm in all cases for all people (the world is too complicated to guarantee such a thing).
(I do think Western medicine is slavishly focused on medications and relatively blind to prevention but that's a separate issue)
There's a fund for those harmed by vaccines (sorry, don't remember the name). Your relative should apply for compensation from that fund. (If I understand correctly - and I might not - she won't even have to prove that the vaccine was the cause of the clots.)
That's reassuring from a public health perspective, not so reassuring from an individual perspective. When it comes to one's personal risk, you have a sense of control over not getting COVID, and/or are personally at low risk of severe complications, which can weigh in favor of avoiding a vaccine with extremely rare but serious side effects.
What happened to "First, do no harm"?