Covid 19 conspiracies dump

[Spongebob]

I didn't claim the vaccine shouldn't have been released. I'm simply saying that people shouldn't be compelled to take a brand new vaccine that was put together way more quickly than any other vaccine in history. I took the risk and took the vaccine because of my asthma, so I decided it was a risk worth taking. Others don't want to take it.

Do you support 8 year olds being forced to take the vaccine or get kicked off their little league team, like is happening here in Canada? What are the chances of an 8 year old dying from covid? 1 in 500,000? And that's with most of those children having comorbidities. What's the chance of a healthy child dying from covid? 1 in many millions?

Yes there are a lot of people who don't want to take the vaccine and I've encountered a number of them.  One of my nephews is one; he's about 26 years old.  It wouldn't be so confounding if these people had valid reasons other than just being contrary.  I actually had an in depth conversation with a colleague who was resistant to taking the vaccine to understand his reasoning.  The most common reason I hear is that it's too new/untested or some variant of that.  This is not a logical reason.  The vaccine has gone through the exact same testing procedures that any medical treatment goes through and passed.  If it took 10 years to develop this vaccine, it would still go through the exact same process.  And in fact, the technology for developing mRNA vaccines has been in development for over a decade, so its not as new as it seems.

This concern over the speed of development is an extension of a fear that the vaccine is dangerous in some way.  But this is another product of bad logic.  Because the testing is the same and the vaccine passed with flying colors, there's no more reason to fear it than any other medicine.  We can expect some small portion of people to react badly to it, but again, all medicine has side effects so there's nothing different here.  What we do know is that the probability of getting Covid and have extremely bad results is orders of magnitude greater than any bad result from the vaccine.  So none of these fears are rational.  Anyone who refuses to get the vaccine should consider using the same logic to decide other aspects of safety in their life, such as seat belts, fire alarms, seeing their doctor if they have chest pains, getting virtually any medical treatment.

Compared to all of the bad results of people not getting vaccinated such as deaths, long covid, community spread, over stressed hospitals, social and economic restrictions, the remote possibility of having a bad reaction to the vaccine is a much smarter bet.