Lots of good thoughts here Troverman.
First, there is no drug on the planet that is put into a Human body that doesn’t have a side effect in some percentage of the population. People have died from Tylenol, Advil, cough syrup, you name it. It doesn’t mean they are “unsafe” or “ineffective”. Dont take my word for it, look at the study done on acetaminophen last year yourself.
Acetaminophen (N-acetyl-para-aminophenol, paracetamol, APAP) toxicity is common primarily because the medication is so readily available, and there is a perception that it is very safe. More than 60 million Americans consume acetaminophen on a weekly basis. Acetaminophen is used in many products...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Safe is a quantitative threshold that medical experts have put in place to gauge use in the general population. We use this threshold for every drug that the FDA has approved in this country. We have for decades, the COVID vaccines are no different. There is nothing crazy going on there, the drug companies did the appropriate Phase 1, 2 trials to prove this to the FDA, as any other drug requires. I do understand they accelerated timeline concerns, but feel given the potential to bring the US healthcare system to its knees.
Medical science is an amazing field. Doctors and trained professionals are going to get it wrong some of the time. Let me ask this, who do you want telling you how to build a rocket to fly to Mars…a rocket scientist or a medical doctor? Of course it’s rhetorical, but the same goes for trusting medical professionals. They aren’t going to get it right 100% of the time, but it is going to be much better than getting medical advice from rocket scientist. If you don’t feel that way in general (some on this forum do not trust medical professionals) then I do understand. Practically though….having a non-medical professional try to debate the benefits/risks of a vaccine with someone that has read hundreds of primary, peer reviewed literature is not really practical. We have read many articles, see patients in the ICU/hospital on a weekly basis, are involved in their care directly/indirectly, and have been trained to interpret statistical analysis and study design. It doesn’t mean I am going to get it right 100% of the time,…its medicine. The reason we say medical “practice” is because with biology it may be just that…practice. We are learning all the time, we evolve, we get better.
There has been a lot of miscommunication regarding the vaccine by the government. Didn’t help we had a change of regime during the pandemic. The CDC has done a poor job in my opinion. I dont have much confidence in them either. Social distancing was proven to be a joke, yet we spent BILLIONS of dollars across the US rearranging tables/workspace to accommodate 6 feet of spacing. Masking while beneficial if done properly (proper mask, proper face seal) has been a mixed bag and depends on the reliability/material of the person wearing it. Overall studies show masking has benefit to reducing airborne pathogen transmission. During a pandemic studies that isolate masking with no confounding variables are hard to design and monitor. Population health studies of this nature have never been tackled before, certainly not in the last 100 years. We are learning everyday. What we do know is the vaccine is safe and effective. Not because the CDC says so, but because the majority of the collective medical community in the world has studied it and published peer reviewed data to show it is.
With regards to the effectiveness of the vaccine, all I look at is burden on the healthcare system. As long as our ICU and critical infrastructure remains open for those non-COVID patients that need it, we are good. What we know is the vaccine keeps all but very old and immunocompromised out of the hospital. This is a very important metric. In Colorado at UC Health, 200 of 246 patients in the ICU were unvaccinated. Of the 46 that were vaccinated, almost all (98%) had comorbidities that made them susceptible to COVID, or were over 75. In Colorado we have around a 60% vaccination rate. A COVID patient is 4 times (in medicine this is huge, we often deal with 10% or 20%, not 400%) more likely to have very severe illness if unvaccinated. The data doesn’t lie or pick sides.
The last point of irony I will make is those folks that are ok with taking ivermectin, COV-REGEN, or other immunotherapies when they get COVID. While I would also consider these treatment options, they are far, far less studied than the vaccine. Why would anyone be ok with these drugs but not with of the most scrutinized vaccines in modern history is difficult for me to understand.
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