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Originally Posted by Paul
Exactly the same as before I would think.
Every drug/medicine/vaccine etc has potential side effects, sometimes serious, generally not - even paracetamol can have rare but serious side effects.
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They do but the point that the covid vaccines were new (how couldn't they be, when a year before the virus didn't really exist or was stuck in a lab or a pangolin or whatever one believes) and based on new/not particularly largely used technology (the viral vector ones ironically being the more conventional) especially with mRNA vaccines, nothing had been mass vaccinated like this before, the mass delivered vaccination programmes tend to be something which is given to something like kids at a certain age or like flu vaccines to people in a certain risk profile and it's not particularly the case that the general population is immunised with something new and all largely at the same time (I think we'd basically gone from the point at the start of Jan 2021 where no-one had been vaccinated at all to the summer where pretty much all adults had been given at least one dose).
Don't get me wrong, it had to be that way and it had to be the case that everyone who wanted a vaccine could get one. And the vaccines presumably had to pass the various stages to be certified, though there's no doubt these were sped up but without cutting corners for regulation. But it does mean that whilst side effects may have been noted in the sample groups, it would not have been clear how this translated into the general population, and in what frequency, as well as if there were any longer term effects of using the vaccines 1, 3, 5, 10 etc years later - indeed some of this isn't known yet. But with something like paracetamol it's known which side effects are rare, which are common, which happen years later if it's used extensively, etc etc, because it's a commonly used drug and it's been used for decades.
What I'm mainly on about is the people who were saying that the unvaccinated people would not be permitted from doing certain things, those advocating vaccine passports, etc, all because in some cases they would want to be careful about what they're taking, as opposed to being crackpots opposed to the vaccine (mainly looking at people like Novak here). If people didn't want to be vaccinated, weren't at massive risk from not doing so, nor was this a risk to others (e.g. if they weren't in contact with known risk people) but only did so because they wanted to be allowed to go to the shops or the football or a concert or something, this seems a bit wrong, and especially if the vaccine then caused them adverse effects. (But then covid can do this too).
Chris made the point about herd immunity too but you can achieve that with a certain percentage where the virus doesn't transmit anyway without sufficient vulnerable hosts to move around, and also, this immunity can (albeit not without risk) be attained by infection as well as vaccination. As another slightly related point on this, the increased herd immunity can sometimes also lead to the virus wanting to gain more of a competitive edge which results in variants with more vaccine escape becoming more prominent, which is what happened (although I don't think the actual evolution of omicron was a lot to do with vaccination).