HMH

That’s not how the immune system works!

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.

The protein is not the harmful part of the virus. You don’t understand how the virus works.

My bad, I meant to say the mRNA and its container, which is what my main concern is.

It’s not, this is literally what the effect of the vaccine 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.

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 :)

I can’t fathom how anybody would prefer dealing with the nightmare that we’ve lived through to China style lockdowns where you stay home for a few weeks and life goes back to normal.

That's why we have discussions like this! I can assure you there is a significant amount of people like me, who absolutely prefer the current situation to what's going on in China. Also note that even though some of the lockdowns in China have been lifted, the situation is far from back to normal.

And no, the very thing cannot be said about the new vaccinations. We have a much better idea of what the vaccines do because we design them.

Ehh, I would not be so sure. The way most of these vaccines work is by injecting mRNA which makes your cells produce a part of the Virus, namely the Spike protein. This protein is known from sequencing the virus. There are several unknowns. Obviously it is impossible to tell what kinds of damage the presence of the Spike protein may cause in the long term, especially if it is produced at places the virus itself may not even reach as it is not injected into your body. (Something that is known is that mRNA vaccines, especially if administered improperly and the mRNA is injected into the blood stream your risk of getting myocarditis is greatly increased.) Something else to consider is that the delivery of the mRNA via nano lipid particles is also a very new technique which to my knowledge has previously never been widely tested on humans. So there is no proper long term data either.

Saying we have a good idea of possible adverse side effect of a medicament just because we designed it is incredibly naive. It's not like we perfectly understand how the immune system works and can just design the perfect vaccine. Instead all that's been done is to take a part of the virus and have it built using mRNA in your body and then hope for the best.

This is the very reason why developing vaccines takes many years, you have to make sure there are no severe adverse long term effects by observation, because you do not fully understand what the vaccine is doing within the body. I do not think it is reasonable to expect that vaccines developed in a tiny fraction of the time typically required are as safe and performant as those developed within the normal time frame.

In short, I think the situation is way to complex to make predictions as good as to allow comparing long term effects of the virus with that of the vaccines.

the virus is still actively mutating

Just as about every other virus. One example is the common cold which actually can be caused by Coronaviruses (not SARS-CoV-2 of course). Yet we never made a fuss about that even though it's theoretically possible that one of these viruses mutates into something dangerous.

Letting this thing run wild through the population is a very dangerous experiment.

Vaccination is (sadly) not changing that. I am not sure what's supposed to be done but to just let it run wild. The only thing I can think of is lockdowns like currently in China for the rest of time. This is definitely not something I'd want.

We have no idea how dangerous covid is long term

This very thing can also be said about the new vaccinations. Every medication has adverse side effects and just as with COVID-19 we have no clue how things will be in say ten years.

Tbh, probably nothing as COVID-19 is not dangerous enough to bring healthcare in Austria to a collapse. And as vaccinations do not prevent the spread of the virus and only provide some short term protection against COVID-19, it makes a lot of sense that getting the vaccine should be your personal choice.

Have you made sure all submodules are checked out, i.e. did you run git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy.git --recursive with the --recursive flag?

While I think a lot of you guys here will probably agree with this decision, I think it is really stupid.

Sadly the vaccination doesn't protect the majority of people (ages 18-59) from infections at all anymore. This can be seen in the following diagram from the Robert Koch Institute (the German CDC), which shows infections among unvaccinated, vaccinated and boosted people per 100,000. (Source)

All the vaccination can do, albeit to a limited degree, is prevent a severe disease and death. This means if you actually wanted to protect vulnerable people you wouldn't push vaccination just because but instead make tests (and masks) mandatory for health care workers around those groups.

And all that would not even be enough, it's not only humans that can be infected. From Wikipedia:

Cats, dogs, ferrets, fruit bats, gorillas, pangolins, hamsters, mink, sea otters, pumas, snow leopards, tigers, lions, hyenas, tree shrews and whitetail deer can be infected with and have tested positive at least once for the virus.

Good luck quarantining(lol)/culling all these animals...

True two months ago but now China has achieved something entirely impossible for the US, namely the imprisonment of more people than even live in the US: Nearly 400 million people are under covid lockdown in China

No, I know my numbers, no surprise here. Also IMO the headline is a classic example of all the fearmongering that's been going on.

Nearly 250,000 people under the age of 65 have died of Covid-19 in the United States so far. Around 61,000 of these deaths were in people under the age of 50.

61,000/250,000 = 61/250 = 24.4%

So not even 1/4 of those under the age 65 that died of COVID-19 are also younger than 50 years old. And considering all ages, those under age 50 total to

61,000/1,000,000 = 61 / 1000 = 6.1%

which is definitely not more than I expected.

But I guess the main takeaway from the article is:

Covid-19 has caused a greater deviation from normal death rates among non-seniors than seniors.

In numbers:

Since the start of the pandemic there has been a 30% increase in all-cause mortality among US adults ages 18-49, and a 26% increase among adults ages 50-64. The increase has been “just” 17% for adults ages 65 and up.

Which is commented like this

However, because the usual mortality rate for seniors is so much higher to begin with, the raw numerical increases in mortality among seniors has been greater, accounting for around two-thirds of all excess deaths since the pandemic erupted on US soil.

leaving out the flip side, which is that even though mortality for younger people increased more than that for older people, in total it still is not going to amount to much because the absolute mortality numbers for young people are very low.

This is especially true for actual young people under age 30. If you are under 30 years old, it's more likely that you die in a traffic accident than with COVID-19...

I'd rather have an article with a headline like: "Cars deadlier than COVID-19 for young people" posted to c/fuck_cars.

That head line though... Infecting babies sounds like a good thing like this.

What's actually in the rest of the article of course paints a slightly different picture:

data from 46 individuals who received care at a hospital for COVID-19

So this is not about long COVID in general but about people that had to be hospitalized.

Six months after their stay in hospital [...] measure their memory, attention and reasoning.

those who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 were less accurate and displayed slower response times

These results were "similar in magnitude to the effects of ageing between 50 and 70 years of age," the authors wrote.

And this is where they got their headline from.

And this is how it sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4JD-3-UAzM (skip to 1:57 if you don't care about the rest).

Gladly taking videos with actual jumping back.