People seem to be rather dismissive about potential long term effects, and the gamble may backfire spectacularly.
You are right, this is a gamble I am willing to take. At the beginning of the pandemic I might have favored a very strict lockdown like in China but at this point its just too late, we have to accept that COVID-19 is going to stay.
There is absolutely no evidence to support the notion that the protein is in any way harmful
Of course the protein is harmful, if it were not our immune system would not attack it and cells producing it. If it weren't harmful the vaccination would not even work in the first place. The question is how harmful it is and in how far having it produced via mRNA injections differs from what the virus itself does.
And we do know that the virus reaches pretty much everywhere including your heart and brain
Yes, the dosage and distribution matter though, the distribution of the protein via the vaccine is surely going to be different from what the virus does.
It’s not even comparable.
For young people it actually is at least regarding myocarditis, see https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf But admittedly, there are a lot of papers and of course I am cherry picking here. What I want to say is that things are not as clear cut as you make them sound to be.
Saying that we know that having your cells produce a bit of protein that your immune system then destroys is less risky than having a virus attack your organs is just stating the obvious.
This is the very oversimplification I have tried to point out. How is any of us supposed to know that? Also note that our immune system is not only destroying the protein but also the cells producing it. This is actually how you get myocarditis. If the mRNA gets into your blood stream and subsequently reaches your heart, your heart may start producing spike proteins which in turn makes your heart a target for your immune system.
I sure hope your assessment is right though, actually I think mRNA vaccines are a fascinating technology and I'd love to see them developed further.
playing mental gymnastics.
Well, in a way science is exactly that :)
What's that even supposed to mean? If an object enters your body and provokes an immune response it is by definition harmful at least in the way that the immune system requires energy to destroy it. I. e. you are better off if said object doesn't enter your body in the first place.
My bad, I meant to say the mRNA and its container, which is what my main concern is.
Perhaps you are missing my point, let me restate it: The virus does damage by attacking cells which then are forced to replicate the virus. Thus these cells are attacked by the immune system and die. A very similar thing happens with mRNA vaccines. Except that cells are only forced to replicate a part of the virus which itself can not do any further replication. If both mRNA vaccine and virus were always distributed very similarly and thus affected pretty much the same cells, I could not see how the vaccine could possibly be more dangerous than the virus and for quite a while I thought this was obviously the case. But this is not true. Distribution as well as dosage may differ.
At least for the short term we do know by observation that statistically taking the vaccine, especially for high risk groups, is much safer than getting infected. But I still think there are too many variables to consider to make a proper prediction about how possible long terms effects of an infection compare to these of the vaccines.