To me it’s not the side effects themselves, which are low in frequency. It’s that if the side effects are legitimately from the vaccine, they point to an incomplete understanding of the vaccine’s risk. This incomplete understanding is significant because the powers that be are trying to vaccinate everyone, including children and young women. I have zero problem whatsoever vaccinating elders.
So for instance, j&j (non mRNA) is linked to a rare brain blood clot. On its own? Too rare too even care about. But how on earth did it even happen? If it can affect the brain’s coagulation processes, what else could it affect potentially longterm? If you don’t know how, then why are we potentially teaching the body to behave in this way when it contacts coronaviruses?
We have an incomplete understanding of literally every process in the world. You have to draw a line at complete understanding somewhere. I could write you a 100 page, sourced, scientific review on everything we know about protective immune responses. We've been studying immune memory for over a century, depending on where you define the beginning of the field. Yet, you're right, I can't tell you why some people have adverse events and 99.9999% of people do not. I can't tell you why even among identical twins there are discordant pairs for all kinds of immune related diseases like Crohn's, MS, lupus, take your pick. We have an incomplete understanding of quantum physics, but you still use a phone with a chip that was made exploiting those processes. During the manufacturing, a predictable number of chips are duds and get thrown out. In the same manner, at this point we have enough data to predict the odds and nature of (acute) adverse covid vaccine events and efficacy of protection.
Tens of millions of children and young women want the vaccine. Large clinical trials have been conducted on those populations already that would have caught AEs beyond a certain threshold of probability. Why not? Even with the low death rates from covid in those populations, the calculus still seems to be in favor of the vaccine from a personal standpoint, and heavily in favor from a societal viewpoint.
But how on earth did it even happen? If it can affect the brain’s coagulation processes, what else could it affect potentially longterm? If you don’t know how, then why are we potentially teaching the body to behave in this way when it contacts coronaviruses?
Who knows, my man. Well, maybe we will someday. Those people that had blood clots likely had either a very rare genetic or environmental quirk in their immune system. But for literally every clinical trial we do, that kind of thing is a possibility. The human body is far too complex to ever be computationally solved like a game of checkers. The narcolepsy example you mentioned is actually a pretty well understood case of molecular mimicry now that we've had some time to study and learn from it.
There's no evidence that the vaccine would train your body to throw clots in response to subsequent infection with more benign coronaviruses. If anything, you might get some cross-protection and have milder infections. But none of us can rule out that possibility any more than we can rule out Russell's teapot.
mRNA is literally so new, were there longterm studies in humans ever done? I think it’s only been used in cohorts of rare disease and cancer patients? We’re talking serious research only being done with lipid nanoparticle mRNA in like 2017... (I have no scientific experience at all, but this is my skeptical reasoning)
As someone pointed out in a thread last week, 'lipid nanoparticle' sounds pretty scary but that's essentially literally what a virus is. We've been using viral vectors for some niche treatments since the 1990s; the early ones had unacceptable safety profiles, but keep in mind they were effecting permanent somatic changes whereas the mRNA vaccines we're talking about are much safer versions of that. You can go even farther back to attenuated vaccines (live, weakened virus) which have been used since the 50s. mRNA vaccines are equivalent to even safer versions of live attenuated vaccines.
Again, I'll stress that you're right and we don't know everything. Maybe next week there's some insane news story that blindsides us all and some quirk about the manufacturing process of the vaccine makes it behave a lot differently than those other analogous scenarios. But if your threshold is 'complete understanding,' you should reject some enormous number of medical treatments beyond vaccines not to mention a ton of other things like processed foods, car exhaust, water bottles and who knows what else...