Woj: Zach LaVine is expected to miss several games, healthy & safety protocol

[Bullstuff]

People are worried about long term complications of a vaccine, but not as worried about the long term complications of actually getting Covid19, which are just as unstudied, yet are already proven to exist and it is likely that the vaccines at least in part diminish the possibility of getting those. But to each their own.

[dougthonus]

People are worried about long term complications of a vaccine, but not as worried about the long term complications of actually getting Covid19, which are just as unstudied, yet are already proven to exist and it is likely that the vaccines at least in part diminish the possibility of getting those. But to each their own.

Vaccine's simply do not have long term side effects unless they trigger from short term side effects. Significant short term side effects on dead virus vaccines (and in this case mRNA should make it even safer because it isn't even a full dead virus) are typically only related to allergic reaction or extremely weakened immune system. The vaccine itself just triggers your immune system and then is gone from your body completely pretty quickly so there is nothing left to cause long term side effects.

You could theoretically have a long term problem, but it would because you had a severe short term reaction. You won't have a problem develop two years down the road from the vaccine if you don't have a problem immediately. The same of course is true of COVID. The people whom may have long term problems have obvious and apparent damage in the short term that just doesn't heal.

It's been around 700M doses of the vaccine have been delivered world wide, since you only would have long term side effects if you had significant short term problems, and we've had a massive, massive amount of doses delivered, unless there was a massive coverup (which doesn't match anything I have heard from anyone in knowing probably hundreds of people who have gotten it or stories about others who have gotten it) then there is no such short term problems that would lead to long term impacts.

This "you never know what could happen in the long run even though there are no short term problems" thought that runs through the minds of many is just a complete misunderstanding of how vaccines operate.

[nanokooshball]

Unbelievable. It seems some just want to see people keep getting sick and dying from this crap.

Over 550,000 dead in this country alone.

If you know you're going to get shot at tonight do you refuse to wear a bullet proof vest because it might not keep the bullet from bruising you?

Sent from my SM-G965U using RealGM mobile app

So there’s a couple of things here. For one, not everyone buys the COD numbers as it pertains to Covid. And there’s good reason for that. Just because someone dies WITH Covid doesn’t mean they died BECAUSE of it. But those numbers suggest just that. With said, people have died from it. So regardless of the true numbers, we know that much.

As far as your getting shot analogy, I think it’s a poor one. Primarily because you are far more likely to die as a result of a gunshot wound than you are from getting Covid. So we need to go apples to apples here. To suggest that people that are hesitant to get the vaccine “want to see people keep getting sick and dying” is extreme and presents a clear picture of everything that is wrong with this sick culture that we think is so great. Every medical solution has a period of apprehension. In other words, people can be hesitant today but convinced 6 months from now once there is enough data for them to feel comfortable with. My family doesn’t want to see anybody die. We’ve been there and done that. But we do have a right to be conscious about what we put into our bodies and those of our kids.

So again, I will say this. I’m good with anybody that has gotten vaccinated. I applaud it even. I do have a problem with people that have gotten vaccinated and somehow feel that they now have the authority to tell other people what they should and shouldn’t do with their bodies. To that, I say know your role and shut the hell up. Mind your own business and let people be people.

People dont get this. Like 99% of them. Not because they are stupid, but because they are ignorant. Yes some people died of Covid. But if I died today in crash accident which has nothing to do with virus and I had previously or I had covid during that time I would still be on list of people who died from Covid.

Most people who die from Covid actually dont die from Covid itself. It's usually just catalyst. They die because Covid hurts their autoimmune system as it's taxing on their body and if they suffer during that time from something else, Covid just furthers those sicknesses which leads to eventual death.

This is just flat out a lie (the COVID numbers and how people die). How do you know they count it that way?
I am a physician who works in the ER and have had to cover the ICUs during the surges. I sign death certificates and if a person dies of a car crash, they get listed as dying from a car crash, not COVID. We have to list primary cause of death. For people who die of COVID, people die directly because of the virus. If that person did not catch the virus they wouldn't have all the effects that overwhelms the body to fail and die. There are plenty of people who I've had to declare dead that were healthy 30 and 40 year old people. No reason to die, no medical problems that were brewing underneath. They would have most likely had a health normal life if they didn't catch COVID, so it's not just underlying illness that people have that led to their death.

Ex. A person comes in for a huge heart attack, but they eventually die from respiratory failure because their heart is too weak to pump. The person died of a 'heart attack', not the consequences that led to their demise. It's the inciting event.

[RoseTheFuture22]

Read on Twitter

seems like Zach was likely 1 of the 3

[dougthonus]

They've been studied but never put into practice. And this vaccine hasn't gone through the full process, it's just emergency authorization.

This isn't true. The vaccines went through the same clinical trials as all other vaccines. The vaccines themselves were ready in May of last year generally if they didn't go through phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials. What was shortened relative to normal vaccines was the funding process and bureaucratic approval process, not the research or testing process.

Also, vaccines do not stay in your system long term, they are out in a matter of days/weeks. If there are long term impacts it is due to short term complications that never resolve. We would have seen that when delivering 700M doses world wide to date (but haven't). You won't get side effects from a vaccine (or pretty much literally anything) 20 years later unless you have continued, repeated exposure. Vaccines don't operate that way though (obviously).

I get why people are apprehensive about the vaccine, but that apprehension is generally caused by ignorance of both how the vaccines were created and how vaccines work in general.

[FriedRise]

Read on Twitter

[WindyCityBorn]

Read on Twitter

At least his ankle should be healed by the time he returns. Probably at least another week.

[TheStig]

They've been studied but never put into practice. And this vaccine hasn't gone through the full process, it's just emergency authorization.

This isn't true. The vaccines went through the same clinical trials as all other vaccines. The vaccines themselves were ready in May of last year generally if they didn't go through phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials. What was shortened relative to normal vaccines was the funding process and bureaucratic approval process, not the research or testing process.

Also, vaccines do not stay in your system long term, they are out in a matter of days/weeks. If there are long term impacts it is due to short term complications that never resolve. We would have seen that when delivering 700M doses world wide to date (but haven't). You won't get side effects from a vaccine (or pretty much literally anything) 20 years later unless you have continued, repeated exposure. Vaccines don't operate that way though (obviously).

I get why people are apprehensive about the vaccine, but that apprehension is generally caused by ignorance of both how the vaccines were created and how vaccines work in general.

Doug, they literally pulled one of the vaccines. I think the apprehension is warranted and less than a year doesn't illustrate long term. To me, it's not a definite solution. It doesn't eliminate getting it, it doesn't eliminate the masks and we still have a lot of hospitalizations and deaths.

I think they're valid concerns. It's not black and white. There is a lot of gray. Just look from state to state on how it's being handled.

[dice]

They've been studied but never put into practice. And this vaccine hasn't gone through the full process, it's just emergency authorization.

This isn't true. The vaccines went through the same clinical trials as all other vaccines. The vaccines themselves were ready in May of last year generally if they didn't go through phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials. What was shortened relative to normal vaccines was the funding process and bureaucratic approval process, not the research or testing process.

Also, vaccines do not stay in your system long term, they are out in a matter of days/weeks. If there are long term impacts it is due to short term complications that never resolve. We would have seen that when delivering 700M doses world wide to date (but haven't). You won't get side effects from a vaccine (or pretty much literally anything) 20 years later unless you have continued, repeated exposure. Vaccines don't operate that way though (obviously).

I get why people are apprehensive about the vaccine, but that apprehension is generally caused by ignorance of both how the vaccines were created and how vaccines work in general.

Doug, they literally pulled one of the vaccines.

due to a miniscule number of serious side effects (15 out of 7 MILLION dispensed doses). "abundance of caution." it was put back on the market yesterday

it doesn't eliminate the masks and we still have a lot of hospitalizations and deaths.

masks SHOULD be a trivial afterthought. and the fact that there are still a lot of hospitalizations means that more people need to get vaccinated, not that the vaccines are not effective. we're still substantially short of the 70-85% who need viral protection in order to achieve herd immunity and really drive down infections. we're crossing the 50% barrier imminently, but there's a lag time as well. additionally, 21% of adults claim that they will try to avoid getting the vaccine (43% of republicans). they are the problem

[dougthonus]

They've been studied but never put into practice. And this vaccine hasn't gone through the full process, it's just emergency authorization.

This isn't true. The vaccines went through the same clinical trials as all other vaccines. The vaccines themselves were ready in May of last year generally if they didn't go through phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials. What was shortened relative to normal vaccines was the funding process and bureaucratic approval process, not the research or testing process.

Also, vaccines do not stay in your system long term, they are out in a matter of days/weeks. If there are long term impacts it is due to short term complications that never resolve. We would have seen that when delivering 700M doses world wide to date (but haven't). You won't get side effects from a vaccine (or pretty much literally anything) 20 years later unless you have continued, repeated exposure. Vaccines don't operate that way though (obviously).

I get why people are apprehensive about the vaccine, but that apprehension is generally caused by ignorance of both how the vaccines were created and how vaccines work in general.

Doug, they literally pulled one of the vaccines. I think the apprehension is warranted and less than a year doesn't illustrate long term. To me, it's not a definite solution. It doesn't eliminate getting it, it doesn't eliminate the masks and we still have a lot of hospitalizations and deaths.

I think they're valid concerns. It's not black and white. There is a lot of gray. Just look from state to state on how it's being handled.

This does not change either of the two points I noted that are common misconceptions:

As noted, they still underwent the same clinical trials as all other drugs. It did not have less testing. It was "rushed" in the sense there were more people working more hours with more resources and more money dedicated on it but not rushed in the sense that less rigor was applied and people conflate those two points to feel that dangerous steps were taken to bring it to market, which is not true.

Any affects you have are short term, not long term. Ie, A vaccine will not just randomly cause something to happen in a year. If something does happen, it will happen right away. This is fundamentally true with pretty much any medication. Radiation exposure is perhaps the one thing in life that doesn't entirely work this way.

Thus far, one person has died from a COVID blood clot, so the death rate of the vaccine is about 1 in 700M. To put that in perspective:
You 2x more likely to win the powerball.
You are ~4,000,000x as likely to die in a car accident at some point in your life.
You are 46,000x more likely to be struck by lightning in your life.

You would expect ~16,000 people to die the day after getting a COVID vaccine based on the death rate of the world being .008% per year. As best I could find the death rate was actually around 3500, which is statically way less likely because so many people getting it aren't in the high risk group to be in the .008% now (though initially we should have been way above since most early vaccinations were exclusively the high risk group).

People's level of fear over this vaccine is either irrational (ie, you are scared of this despite the risks being orders of magnitude less than risks you find commonly acceptable and know this to be true) or of ignorance (you don't actually understand the risks and have magnified them in your head to be many, many orders of magnitude higher than they are).

The arguments against this are not based on any mathematical science or anything else. It is just "you never know" type of arguments that literally could be said about anything we aren't comfortable with and sound reasonable but fall apart very quickly when looking at the massive amount of data w have.

It is similar to how people scared of flying vastly overstate the risks of flying out of lack of familiarity or have other irrational fears (spiders, bugs, etc). Most of us haven't gotten vaccines since we were small children, probably don't even remember getting them. We don't have familiarity anymore. Obviously none of us have gotten this vaccine before at all.

It is rational to be nervous of the covid vaccine in the sense that this is what the human brain does, it makes us nervous around things we aren't experienced with regardless of the data. So I completely understand those who are nervous and do not mean to belittle them. I have irrational fears too. I fly at least three trips a year but still always have butterflys at takeoff. If I saw a tarantula in my house I'd flip out.

However, scientifically, this isn't a grey area where we still don't know whether this is safe. With the amount of doses administered we have a very exact idea of how safe it is, and that level of safety is extraordinarily high relative to other medicines you would likely take without thinking and extremely high relative to other activities you would absolutely do without thinking.

[sco]

Read on Twitter

I forget the protocols, but can I infer that this just means he tested positive and still hasn't tested negative 2 days in a row yet? I don't think there is any in-between like an injury where he can go to the facility until then.

[TheStig]

This isn't true. The vaccines went through the same clinical trials as all other vaccines. The vaccines themselves were ready in May of last year generally if they didn't go through phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials. What was shortened relative to normal vaccines was the funding process and bureaucratic approval process, not the research or testing process.

Also, vaccines do not stay in your system long term, they are out in a matter of days/weeks. If there are long term impacts it is due to short term complications that never resolve. We would have seen that when delivering 700M doses world wide to date (but haven't). You won't get side effects from a vaccine (or pretty much literally anything) 20 years later unless you have continued, repeated exposure. Vaccines don't operate that way though (obviously).

I get why people are apprehensive about the vaccine, but that apprehension is generally caused by ignorance of both how the vaccines were created and how vaccines work in general.

Doug, they literally pulled one of the vaccines. I think the apprehension is warranted and less than a year doesn't illustrate long term. To me, it's not a definite solution. It doesn't eliminate getting it, it doesn't eliminate the masks and we still have a lot of hospitalizations and deaths.

I think they're valid concerns. It's not black and white. There is a lot of gray. Just look from state to state on how it's being handled.

This does not change either of the two points I noted that are common misconceptions:

As noted, they still underwent the same clinical trials as all other drugs. It did not have less testing. It was "rushed" in the sense there were more people working more hours with more resources and more money dedicated on it but not rushed in the sense that less rigor was applied and people conflate those two points to feel that dangerous steps were taken to bring it to market, which is not true.

Any affects you have are short term, not long term. Ie, A vaccine will not just randomly cause something to happen in a year. If something does happen, it will happen right away. This is fundamentally true with pretty much any medication. Radiation exposure is perhaps the one thing in life that doesn't entirely work this way.

Thus far, one person has died from a COVID blood clot, so the death rate of the vaccine is about 1 in 700M. To put that in perspective:
You 2x more likely to win the powerball.
You are ~4,000,000x as likely to die in a car accident at some point in your life.
You are 46,000x more likely to be struck by lightning in your life.

You would expect ~16,000 people to die the day after getting a COVID vaccine based on the death rate of the world being .008% per year. As best I could find the death rate was actually around 3500, which is statically way less likely because so many people getting it aren't in the high risk group to be in the .008% now (though initially we should have been way above since most early vaccinations were exclusively the high risk group).

People's level of fear over this vaccine is either irrational (ie, you are scared of this despite the risks being orders of magnitude less than risks you find commonly acceptable and know this to be true) or of ignorance (you don't actually understand the risks and have magnified them in your head to be many, many orders of magnitude higher than they are).

The arguments against this are not based on any mathematical science or anything else. It is just "you never know" type of arguments that literally could be said about anything we aren't comfortable with and sound reasonable but fall apart very quickly when looking at the massive amount of data w have.

It is similar to how people scared of flying vastly overstate the risks of flying out of lack of familiarity or have other irrational fears (spiders, bugs, etc). Most of us haven't gotten vaccines since we were small children, probably don't even remember getting them. We don't have familiarity anymore. Obviously none of us have gotten this vaccine before at all.

It is rational to be nervous of the covid vaccine in the sense that this is what the human brain does, it makes us nervous around things we aren't experienced with regardless of the data. So I completely understand those who are nervous and do not mean to belittle them. I have irrational fears too. I fly at least three trips a year but still always have butterflys at takeoff. If I saw a tarantula in my house I'd flip out.

However, scientifically, this isn't a grey area where we still don't know whether this is safe. With the amount of doses administered we have a very exact idea of how safe it is, and that level of safety is extraordinarily high relative to other medicines you would likely take without thinking and extremely high relative to other activities you would absolutely do without thinking.

Doug, I don't mean to be rude but i don't really take medical advice from posters on a internet basketball forum. I'm not against vaccines. I'm just not in the risk pool and prefer to wait. But to act like everything about the long term effects is decided upon in less than 6 months of administrating these vaccines is silly. How many decades did you have scientists telling people cocaine was a medicine? Or that lead paint and asbestos was safe? As I said, if I were older or at risk, my decision would be different. But to say there is no reason to proceed with caution is ignorant to me.

[dougthonus]

Doug, I don't mean to be rude but i don't really take medical advice from posters on a internet basketball forum. I'm not against vaccines. I'm just not in the risk pool and prefer to wait.

I am not trying to offer you medical advice or convince you to take the vaccine or change your personal decision. I understand it may seem that way but that is not the case. I'm informing you of areas where I believe your opinion is objectively incorrect and explaining why that is true so that your opinion can be more scientifically based.

If that information changes your opinion or not on what to do with your own body, I leave that entirely up to you. It is not my business (nor do I intend to make it my business) to try and convince people what decisions are correct for them.

But to act like everything about the long term effects is decided upon in less than 6 months of administrating these vaccines is silly.

To my knowledge and research, medicine never has effects that appear in the long term that weren't extensions of short term affects without continued exposure/uses. The case people argue with this is that I take a shot once and two years ago something happens. I do not know of a single case of anything every happening like that in medicine, but again, maybe I'm incorrect. I attempted to research anything like that and could not come up with any examples. The stuff is just out of your system after a few days/weeks and has no impact afterwards. If there are long term impacts, they started with short term ones that never resolved.

How many decades did you have scientists telling people cocaine was a medicine?

Are you really comparing medical research from 100 years ago to today? I mean the information age has fundamentally changed our ability to know these types of things. Claims from 30 years ago that couldn't be studied in the way claims can be now are just totally different.

Or that lead paint and asbestos was safe? As I said, if I were older or at risk, my decision would be different. But to say there is no reason to proceed with caution is ignorant to me.

Which again, gets back to understanding long term exposure vs acute exposure. Can you name an example of something where acute one time exposure caused long term impacts that were not obvious within a couple months? I don't know of a single medical thing that would fall into that category in the history of medicine (and I did attempt to find examples of this unsuccessfully). Asbestos and Lead are two examples of long term exposure causing long term problems, not acute exposure which is why I was careful to differentiate.

Again, this isn't to convince you to take action or not take action. I respect your body / your choice.

[TheStig]

Doug, I don't mean to be rude but i don't really take medical advice from posters on a internet basketball forum. I'm not against vaccines. I'm just not in the risk pool and prefer to wait.

I am not trying to offer you medical advice or convince you to take the vaccine or change your personal decision. I understand it may seem that way but that is not the case. I'm informing you of areas where I believe your opinion is objectively incorrect and explaining why that is true so that your opinion can be more scientifically based.

If that information changes your opinion or not on what to do with your own body, I leave that entirely up to you. It is not my business (nor do I intend to make it my business) to try and convince people what decisions are correct for them.

But to act like everything about the long term effects is decided upon in less than 6 months of administrating these vaccines is silly.

To my knowledge and research, medicine never has effects that appear in the long term that weren't extensions of short term affects without continued exposure/uses. The case people argue with this is that I take a shot once and two years ago something happens. I do not know of a single case of anything every happening like that in medicine, but again, maybe I'm incorrect. I attempted to research anything like that and could not come up with any examples. The stuff is just out of your system after a few days/weeks and has no impact afterwards. If there are long term impacts, they started with short term ones that never resolved.

How many decades did you have scientists telling people cocaine was a medicine?

Are you really comparing medical research from 100 years ago to today? I mean the information age has fundamentally changed our ability to know these types of things. Claims from 30 years ago that couldn't be studied in the way claims can be now are just totally different.

Or that lead paint and asbestos was safe? As I said, if I were older or at risk, my decision would be different. But to say there is no reason to proceed with caution is ignorant to me.

Which again, gets back to understanding long term exposure vs acute exposure. Can you name an example of something where acute one time exposure caused long term impacts that were not obvious within a couple months? I don't know of a single medical thing that would fall into that category in the history of medicine (and I did attempt to find examples of this unsuccessfully). Asbestos and Lead are two examples of long term exposure causing long term problems, not acute exposure which is why I was careful to differentiate.

Again, this isn't to convince you to take action or not take action. I respect your body / your choice.

I'm not going to get into all this but those aren't 100 year old issues. Lead and asbestos were prevalent till the late 70's. I'll even go back to the start of the pandemic where the guy pushing the shots the most said masks don't help and then issued a mandate and then admitted he lied about it. Now I'm supposed to have full faith in him?

[dougthonus]

I'm not going to get into all this but those aren't 100 year old issues.

The 100 year quote was in reference to your thought about cocaine.

Lead and asbestos were prevalent till the late 70's.

Again, long term vs short term exposure.

I'll even go back to the start of the pandemic where the guy pushing the shots the most said masks don't help and then issued a mandate and then admitted he lied about it. Now I'm supposed to have full faith in him?

I'm not asking you to have full faith in any individual. There is a pretty big difference between someone stating an opinion about a topic based on theories and stating an opinion about a medicine with rigorous phases of clinical trials and 700 million doses given afterwards.

Again, look at the actual things I have said about how medicines enter/exit your body and long term effects of single use medicines and think if you have ever heard of a single counterexample in your life ever or can find one. If you can we can discuss, but using other things like "someone said this and was wrong" or "long term effects come from long term exposure" are just not meaningful counter arguments to what I am saying about how medicine works and enters/exits the body.

Yes, absolutely some scientist will tell you something wrong in the future, but it probably won't be about the safety of a two dose vaccine that has 700 million doses administered. If there are long term problems with the vaccine it would be absolutely unprecedented to my understanding of medical history unless all the world governments are massively suppressing negative outcome information on the vaccine.

And again, totally respect your decision to not get the vaccine if you decide it is not right for you. Some people may just be scared of needles and not get it. I'm not your keeper and don't mean to be. I'm just trying to clarify what is medically accurate to my knowledge and what isn't. I'm also completely open to the idea that I'm wrong if presented with counter evidence to the things I have said about how medicine generally works and how the human body works. I just don't know of any counter examples and have searched for them because initially, I thought the exact same things you did and was going to wait on getting the vaccine and upon my own research realized that my opinions weren't evidence based.

[CobyWhite0]

All of the Doctors I know who are personal friends (as in "not my physician") have received the vaccine.

But you can't argue with "cocaine used to be medicine" and "asbestos used to be a-ok". If you don't trust medicine and/or science, I'm assuming you never go to the Doctor? Why bother?

[coldfish]

This isn't true. The vaccines went through the same clinical trials as all other vaccines. The vaccines themselves were ready in May of last year generally if they didn't go through phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials. What was shortened relative to normal vaccines was the funding process and bureaucratic approval process, not the research or testing process.

Also, vaccines do not stay in your system long term, they are out in a matter of days/weeks. If there are long term impacts it is due to short term complications that never resolve. We would have seen that when delivering 700M doses world wide to date (but haven't). You won't get side effects from a vaccine (or pretty much literally anything) 20 years later unless you have continued, repeated exposure. Vaccines don't operate that way though (obviously).

I get why people are apprehensive about the vaccine, but that apprehension is generally caused by ignorance of both how the vaccines were created and how vaccines work in general.

Doug, they literally pulled one of the vaccines. I think the apprehension is warranted and less than a year doesn't illustrate long term. To me, it's not a definite solution. It doesn't eliminate getting it, it doesn't eliminate the masks and we still have a lot of hospitalizations and deaths.

I think they're valid concerns. It's not black and white. There is a lot of gray. Just look from state to state on how it's being handled.

This does not change either of the two points I noted that are common misconceptions:

As noted, they still underwent the same clinical trials as all other drugs. It did not have less testing. It was "rushed" in the sense there were more people working more hours with more resources and more money dedicated on it but not rushed in the sense that less rigor was applied and people conflate those two points to feel that dangerous steps were taken to bring it to market, which is not true.

Any affects you have are short term, not long term. Ie, A vaccine will not just randomly cause something to happen in a year. If something does happen, it will happen right away. This is fundamentally true with pretty much any medication. Radiation exposure is perhaps the one thing in life that doesn't entirely work this way.

Thus far, one person has died from a COVID blood clot, so the death rate of the vaccine is about 1 in 700M. To put that in perspective:
You 2x more likely to win the powerball.
You are ~4,000,000x as likely to die in a car accident at some point in your life.
You are 46,000x more likely to be struck by lightning in your life.

You would expect ~16,000 people to die the day after getting a COVID vaccine based on the death rate of the world being .008% per year. As best I could find the death rate was actually around 3500, which is statically way less likely because so many people getting it aren't in the high risk group to be in the .008% now (though initially we should have been way above since most early vaccinations were exclusively the high risk group).

People's level of fear over this vaccine is either irrational (ie, you are scared of this despite the risks being orders of magnitude less than risks you find commonly acceptable and know this to be true) or of ignorance (you don't actually understand the risks and have magnified them in your head to be many, many orders of magnitude higher than they are).

The arguments against this are not based on any mathematical science or anything else. It is just "you never know" type of arguments that literally could be said about anything we aren't comfortable with and sound reasonable but fall apart very quickly when looking at the massive amount of data w have.

It is similar to how people scared of flying vastly overstate the risks of flying out of lack of familiarity or have other irrational fears (spiders, bugs, etc). Most of us haven't gotten vaccines since we were small children, probably don't even remember getting them. We don't have familiarity anymore. Obviously none of us have gotten this vaccine before at all.

It is rational to be nervous of the covid vaccine in the sense that this is what the human brain does, it makes us nervous around things we aren't experienced with regardless of the data. So I completely understand those who are nervous and do not mean to belittle them. I have irrational fears too. I fly at least three trips a year but still always have butterflys at takeoff. If I saw a tarantula in my house I'd flip out.

However, scientifically, this isn't a grey area where we still don't know whether this is safe. With the amount of doses administered we have a very exact idea of how safe it is, and that level of safety is extraordinarily high relative to other medicines you would likely take without thinking and extremely high relative to other activities you would absolutely do without thinking.

Great post.

Just to add, the birth control pill has a relatively high rate for blood clots and aspirin has a relatively high rate for bleeding events. Significantly greater than any of the vaccines. I have been told that if aspirin applied for use today, it may not get approved based on all the side effects yet just about everyone has popped an aspirin.

[econprof]

To amplify Doug's post, as many as 5% of the population have a crippling anxiety over flying in an airplane -- aviophobia. You can explain that there has been exactly one fatality on a domestic carrier in the past dozen years, during which time passengers have completed nearly ten billion flight segments. It doesn't matter. Those who suffer from aviophobia will give you all sorts of rationalizations that are not objectively rational. (I won't get on a helicopter, fwiw, and a copter pilot friend of mine says I am irrational -- he may be right.)

But here is the important difference. Those of us who are willing to face the microscopic risk of dying on an airplane (or a helicopter, for that matter) are not normally bothered by those who are not. If anything, aviophobia means more open seats for the rest of us to choose from. But vaccine phobia adversely affects everyone. As the pandemic rages on, businesses will remain closed or at reduced capacity, our medical providers will remain overtaxed (physician burnout is at an all time high), while many patients in need of other medical procedures will have to wait. And all the while, variants continue to pop up that may defeat current vaccines, putting us all at risk of returning to square one, or even worse.

[sco]

Any Zach updates (or just evolution vs. creation debate)?

[DuckIII]

Doug, I don't mean to be rude but i don't really take medical advice from posters on a internet basketball forum. I'm not against vaccines. I'm just not in the risk pool and prefer to wait.

I am not trying to offer you medical advice or convince you to take the vaccine or change your personal decision. I understand it may seem that way but that is not the case. I'm informing you of areas where I believe your opinion is objectively incorrect and explaining why that is true so that your opinion can be more scientifically based.

If that information changes your opinion or not on what to do with your own body, I leave that entirely up to you. It is not my business (nor do I intend to make it my business) to try and convince people what decisions are correct for them.

But to act like everything about the long term effects is decided upon in less than 6 months of administrating these vaccines is silly.

To my knowledge and research, medicine never has effects that appear in the long term that weren't extensions of short term affects without continued exposure/uses. The case people argue with this is that I take a shot once and two years ago something happens. I do not know of a single case of anything every happening like that in medicine, but again, maybe I'm incorrect. I attempted to research anything like that and could not come up with any examples. The stuff is just out of your system after a few days/weeks and has no impact afterwards. If there are long term impacts, they started with short term ones that never resolved.

How many decades did you have scientists telling people cocaine was a medicine?

Are you really comparing medical research from 100 years ago to today? I mean the information age has fundamentally changed our ability to know these types of things. Claims from 30 years ago that couldn't be studied in the way claims can be now are just totally different.

Or that lead paint and asbestos was safe? As I said, if I were older or at risk, my decision would be different. But to say there is no reason to proceed with caution is ignorant to me.

Which again, gets back to understanding long term exposure vs acute exposure. Can you name an example of something where acute one time exposure caused long term impacts that were not obvious within a couple months? I don't know of a single medical thing that would fall into that category in the history of medicine (and I did attempt to find examples of this unsuccessfully). Asbestos and Lead are two examples of long term exposure causing long term problems, not acute exposure which is why I was careful to differentiate.

Again, this isn't to convince you to take action or not take action. I respect your body / your choice.

I'm not going to get into all this but those aren't 100 year old issues. Lead and asbestos were prevalent till the late 70's. I'll even go back to the start of the pandemic where the guy pushing the shots the most said masks don't help and then issued a mandate and then admitted he lied about it. Now I'm supposed to have full faith in him?

Dr. Fauci is not the only voice advocating vaccines, so that’s a pretty bad argument and sounds like alt-right conspiracy balderdash.

Virtually the entire “non-quack” medical field (so exclude about 50% of chiropractors and doctors who believe in demonic possession as an illness) advocate the vaccine.

If you’re scared to take it, fine. But citing Fauci and trust takes a page out of “Plandemic” and tends to discredit everything else you wrote.