I know several people who have been hospitalized immediately after getting the Pfizer shot. I know one woman, whose daughter is a nurse, who died immediately after getting the shot. This daughter told me that in the hospital she works, all doctors publicly recommend the shot, and most doctors are privately pro the shot, but by no means all.
She said that the doctors discuss this among themselves professionally, and there are legit doubts and fears.
Despite having waded through many technical articles and endless discussion threads on mRNA, autoimmune responses to mRNA, yadda yadda, I consider myself not knowledgeable enough to have a "legitimate" opinion. Even so, I would think anyone above 50 should get the shot, and anyone who is young and healthy should talk with their doctor.
But plenty of responsible people are learned enough to be anti, and even more have seen the vaccine send themselves or their neighbors to the hospital. They are not "emotional people who will parrot whatever piece of misinformation supports their worldview"
> I know several people who have been hospitalized immediately after getting the Pfizer shot.
The first or second shot? Can you elaborate on what the complication was? Did you know them directly or know of them (like via someone else telling you about them)
1. My next door neighbor, a healthy 80 year old and good friend, took the first shot as soon as he was able to. Within hours he had to be rushed to the hospital where he was in ER for five days.
He returned home and called it a fluke. A month later he got the second shot, but stayed at the medical center for watching. Good thing too, since he soon passed out and was in the hospital for a week (though not ER).
He has decided to skip the third shot. He never had Corona.
2. Four buildings away, a story with a thirty-something year old man. Someone I have met but do not know him well.
Took the first shot and was immediately hospitalized.
3. The father of a friend who lives on the other side of town. Never met the father, but am friends with his son and believe he did not make up the story.
4. The aforementioned nurse's mother - I know her family very well, and have met the mother at least once a few years ago.
Real people. I know that I am just a person on the internet and there is no way I can prove it without giving actual names (and even that might not help). But try looking for a community that has close connections with their parents (NY or Miami) and I am sure you will find plenty of similar cases.
I have extended family, my girlfriend has extended family (we would have to make 250 person wedding to invite them all, but my mother has contacts with even more people) and no one we know had any complications apart from a mild two-day fever. Some of them had covid and some were hospitalized, but no one after vaccine. Also we don't know of anyone who had any covid symptoms after vaccine.
That's just anecdotal. (My grand-parents, parents, friends took Pfizer/Moderna and there was nothing beyond the regular symptoms; and my grand-parents are in a bad shape).
There are stats about the side-effects of the vaccine, I think we better stick to those.
In Germany the PEI reported ~two cases where they consider it likely or very likely that Comirnaty caused death (out of ~100 million doses). Obviously, this is extremely rare (~10 ppb), but saying that the notion is "ridiculous" is... ridiculous. Overall these are very safe as far as we can tell, but as with everything in life, this does not mean zero risk (the obverse risk of not being vaccinated is how many orders of magnitude higher? Five. Five orders of magnitude.)
> Im Rahmen einer Obduktion wurden ein Fall eines akuten Rechtsherzversagens bei fulminanter Thrombosierung der Lungenarterie nach Comirnaty sowie drei Fälle eines akuten Linksherzversagens mit myokardialen, lymphozytären Infiltrationen im Sinne einer möglichen Myokarditis nach Comirnaty (n=1), Spikevax (n=1), Vaxzevria (n=1) als wahrscheinlich oder gesichert im Zusammenhang mit der Impfung beschrieben.
I too don't consider myself knowledgeable enough, even though I've tried to learn as much about how both covid and the vaccines work as possible. And I was wiped out for a full 36 hours (all the nasty flu symptoms except respiratory: cytokine storm!) and the worst reaction I know of first-degree was someone with the same who had to take a full week off.
But ultimately it all boils down to trading-off risks.
So many of the anti-vaccine arguments only look at absolute risk, instead of the risk compared to getting covid itself, or even just everyday risks that we shrug off. (At one point in the AZ discussion, I worked out that the risk of a blood clot was around the same as getting killed on your commute... every week).
I'm sure this is what the doctors do as well. Unless they're immunologists etc, it's quite easy as a layman (at least if you're on HN) to bring yourself up to the level of understanding of your average general practitioner, so there's probably the exact same conversations happening. I browse the published medical studies, same as they do.
Was it the vaccine or just two independent events close in time. Because when you give anything, even water to 160M people and then record adverse events afterwards you're going to get a lot of them and some will die. The question is are they happening at a higher rate than normal and could they be attributed to the vaccine (is there a pattern.)
There are some patterns. Blood clots for one. Inflammation of the heart.
But both of those are also caused by covid at several orders of magnitude higher rates. Not a good reason to avoid the vaccines. Covid is here to stay, most of us will get it. The only question is do you want to be vaccinated when it happens? Any logical person who honestly did the research should answer this with a clear yes by now. We have so much data. Yes we don't know what we don't know, but that's also true for Covid.
I know several people who have been hospitalized immediately after getting the Pfizer shot. I know one woman, whose daughter is a nurse, who died immediately after getting the shot. This daughter told me that in the hospital she works, all doctors publicly recommend the shot, and most doctors are privately pro the shot, but by no means all.
She said that the doctors discuss this among themselves professionally, and there are legit doubts and fears.
Despite having waded through many technical articles and endless discussion threads on mRNA, autoimmune responses to mRNA, yadda yadda, I consider myself not knowledgeable enough to have a "legitimate" opinion. Even so, I would think anyone above 50 should get the shot, and anyone who is young and healthy should talk with their doctor.
But plenty of responsible people are learned enough to be anti, and even more have seen the vaccine send themselves or their neighbors to the hospital. They are not "emotional people who will parrot whatever piece of misinformation supports their worldview"