We had prepared enough doses of the AstraZeneca to vaccinate the entire country. Then some people got blood clotting disorders, and a few died. Being over 60 I was prepared to take the risk, but I wasn't given the choice. Most of it was thrown away.
mRNA vaccines had lower risks, but no one would ship them to us. The plan was always to go into lock down until everybody who wanted to be vaccinated could be, so the end result was the country was in lock down for far longer than would have happened if, as the headline implies "no one was listening".
As for the inevitable few unfortunates who did get a severe reaction to the mRNA vaccine - they knew the risks. After AstraZeneca you would have to be living under a rock to not be aware every vaccine came with risks. I don't know about the rest of the world, but being vaccinated is a personal choice in Australia. The choice was take the best vaccine humanity could produce at short notice, or take your chances with COVID.
The idea that this was the "choice" presented to Australians is just the worst sort of gaslighting. Of course your lockdowns weren't meant to last only until everyone who wanted a vaccine could get one, and didn't end when that was achieved; there were many explicit measures to target the unvaccinated and exclude them from society.
And of course, everyone who took the vaccine still "took their chances with COVID" since it never stopped them from getting it anyway.
Public health is effectively a multidimensional utilitarianism problem and the mainstream medical establishment chose to de-emphasize legitimate problems, likely because they considered it important to reach high vaccination rates, and any message that would cause people to decline the vaccine was viewed as affecting the rates significantly. Most of the major officials have done their mea culpas, and I think it's high time that we actually invest more into addressing vaccine side effects.
Anecdotally, I was at the doctor's office today and was offered shingrix since I'm over 50. Shingles is terrible, but my doctor basically talked me out of getting the vaccine, by explaining that it had significant and common side effects (sore arm, puffy arm, tired feeling) and that I wasn't really at high risk (other than my age). She also no longer prescribes dual vax (for example, flu + pneumo at the same time), also because of commonly reported side effects (again anecdotally, in my case when I got both, my whole left arm was useless for days and I felt sick, tired, and pained for over a week).
1 in 3 unvaccinated adults will get shingles. https://www.cdc.gov/shingles/surveillance.html#:~:text=Shing....
The shingles vaccine can pack a wallop, but shingles pain is extreme and can persist years after the initial illness. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/12093-posther...
Thousands believe the earth is flat.
Thousands believe their fillings send them person radio transmissions.
Don’t toss the baby out with the bath water. Would it have been better to let everyone die of Covid? Or get debilitating effects of long Covid?
This headline is unnecessarily alarmist.
I’m saying the headline overplays the danger and is the kind of irresponsible sensationalism that has lead to a massive increase in vaccine denialism.
My doctor is an expert in giving advice to people based on her org's current recommendations. I also independently looked at what little information I could glean and don't see anything deeply wrong with her suggestion. I also can easily change my mind, and with a single trip to my normal pharmacist (twice in ~6 months) and get vaccinated at any time that I choose. I'm lucky enough that I can take 3 days of sick leave each time so I'm not trying to work while experiencing side effects (for example, I lost about 2-3 days of work when I had pneumo+flu vaccine a few years ago).
public health and vaccines is a complicated subject; I am no expert, but I can read into the literature and talk to people who work in the field. Please do not assume I am simply blindly following a mistaken doctor's suggestion.
But some people are going to think that non-vaccine issues are due to the vaccine due to the proximity of the two events in time. Either issues they already had but hadn’t noticed before getting the vaccine, or total coincidences. Those need to be investigated too rule out possible issues. But even with an obvious explanation people may continue to blame the vaccine.
There are also the group of pseudoscience believers who will truly believe impossible things are the result of the vaccine and may work hard to make their “injury” known.
So I don’t like blindly taking the number of complaints, without even a cursory check for nonsense, and using it in a headline to make it sound like the vaccine’s danger is being covered up, without making it clear how small the percentage is.
Not everyone will file a complaint, true. So even if every complaint was true harm, more people would have been hurt. But billions of doses of the Covid vaccines have been given.
If 20,000 people were injured and “only” one billion doses were given that’s a 1:50,000 ratio. I don’t think the tone of the headline fits a ratio like that.