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So there have been a lot of people suddenly collapsing or dying recently. Or have there? My Twitter feed certainly seems to think so. Off the top of my head we have Adam Rich, a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee, an Old Dominion basketball player, an NFL player, and tons of normal people as well. This does seem... odd? I can't remember a lot of people just suddenly collapsing and dying in the past although I remember Hank Gathers from 1990 as a rare exception.
Now, I'm willing to accept that it's possible that sudden deaths of healthy people may be normal-ish thing. Possibly this is just signal-boosted noise. As a heuristic, no one I know personally has collapsed so it's presumably not incredibly widespread. We also have the possibility that Covid itself, not vaccines, is causing these deaths.
The problem is that, as a layperson, it is nearly impossible for me to obtain unbiased information about this phenomenon. I encourage you to search Google for "vaccine death". The results are a muck of "fact checks", opinion pieces, and out-of-date articles talking about how many lives the vaccine saved.
On the other hand, on Twitter, (where free speech is truly allowed now), #vaccinedeath is allowed to trend. However, the results for that hashtag tend to be a lot of anecdotes of sudden collapses mixed in with spurious assertions about vaccine safety.
What's a normal person to do in this information environment? For myself, I will not be receiving future Covid vaccine doses. They have an unknown risk against a low risk from Covid itself. However, I have little confidence in this assessment. And I have no faith that I will be able to reach a confident assessment. When counter-narrative information is suppressed by the media and by the scientific apparatus, how can we trust anything they say? But it doesn't mean the counter-narrative is correct either. It just means there is no way to be confident without a free exchange of ideas.
Why do you believe covid's potential harm is more known or bounded than the vaccine? We have a little bit more long term data (about a year) for the virus but the vaccine's data is also of higher quality
Fair point. I should have phrased this differently. My statement implied that getting a vaccine and getting Covid are either/or. This is clearly not the case. I should have said something like this:
"My risk from Covid is low. Vaccines have extremely limited efficacy against current Covid strains and unknown risks. Why add an additional risk factor, even if the risk from vaccine is also low".
That said, I think vaccine risk is harder to quantify since it's not properly studied. There's a nonzero chance that the data is bullshit in a way that matters. Any researcher investigating vaccine risks would be committing career suicide. It's like a courtroom with a prosecutor but no defense. It doesn't mean the defendant is innocent, but it does mean I wouldn't trust the result of the trial.
Also, we have tons and tons of data on "coronaviruses", and SARS 2 is one of those. mRNA nanolipid particle injections? Less experience, to say the least.
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