* History tells us that severe side effects are extremely rare, and if they if do occur, they usually happen within the first two months.
* COVID-19 vaccine technologies have been studied for years and used in other treatments without issue.
* The vaccine development process, from clinical trials to ongoing monitoring, helps to uncover and understand side effects.
Not really. There are multiple instances of viruses, such as HIV, Chickenpox, and HPV, which are known to cause increased health risks or outright disease years and often decades after the initial infection appears to fade.
There are also many instances of "long" Covid we are already seeing in which people struggle with lingering symptoms, sometimes severe, for months after initially getting ill.
And in children, the rare but serious phenomenon that's been called MISC, usually occurs weeks or months after the initial Covid infection has subsided.
You are right that we don't know the long term side-effects of Covid, or of vaccination, and won't for quite some time. But what evidence we do have based on previous experiences with vaccines and viruses, as well as what we have already observed in Covid infections and vaccinations, makes it clear that vaccines are a far less risky prospect than the disease is.
Covid is a virus, the effects of which are not comparable to a vaccine. There's a lot of past evidence (as mentioned in the article) for < 2 month indications of long-term side effects based on historical vaccine development. We aren't seeing any of those indicators for the covid vaccines.
Moreover, we already have clinical evidence that covid causes long-term side effects in up to a third of people infected. There is no such evidence for any covid vaccine.
See https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...