Thats your personal experience. Most of my friends who got covid without the vaccines never had any major issue you had. They took rest for a week and problem solved. One of my other friends, who was vaccinated, got covid and had to be hospitalised because he couldn't breath. Luckily he survived. A coworker, who was vaccinated, still hasn't got his taste back after getting covid around a month ago.

Vaccine or not, you can still get covid and suffer the consequences depending on your body. So I dont see the point in getting a vaccine and suffer its long term consequences when it basically does nothing.

If you are saying it prevents covid death - you are wrong. Check England's data. More unvaccinated people are getting covid but they are dying less. Vaccinated people are getting covid less but the ones who died after getting covid are more. The math isn't adding up for the vaccines.

Have you recovered from the mental fog/memory problems?

As a 30-odd year old knowledge worker (vaccinated), that's the thing that affects my personal risk assessment the most right now.

sadly there are at least a few percentage points of people where that's basically the reason: they're dumb. I'm sorry, but it's true. Nonetheless, social media and other beneficiaries of fear mongering, definitely make this problem a lot worse than it would be without them.

I have a lot of trouble arguing with these people (friends, family) because I read daily about how bad covid is and they are simply ignorant. For some of them it's basically "he said, she said" (so like: who should I trust?) as if anti-vaxxers and science are on the same level of trustworthiness. And also when you talk about data they say something like "I don't trust the data" and rather trust some stupid people in their social circle. Also it appears like they feel like "vaccination can be bad", "covid can be bad (but not necessarily, my daughter had it and it was like the flu!)", so they rather try to avoid both. Yeah, logic...

More like being inundated by smoke. My town is currently experiencing intermittent days of smokiness from fires burning 100s of miles away. People are dying in those fires. Homes are being destroyed.

But the local fire department isn't doing anything about it. Nobody around here is installing sprinklers as a precaution. They act like there is no fire at all.

Covid is a serious thing. But "engulfed by flames" is the exact overstatement that causes people to question the motivation of fear-mongers.

I'm vaccinated. I wear a mask. I think too many people are whipping up a frenzy for profit. Why don't we lockdown our highways when there are 600,000 deaths from auto accidents? Why not lockdown breweries when there are 2 million drunk-driving incidents? Why isn't there a frenzy over influenza?

Covid frenzy has a better marketing campaign. It's the kind of thing that has people claiming we are "engulfed by flames" when things get smoky.

The government is not compelling you to get covid.

If COVID was like getting engulfed by flames for children, you can be damn sure we'd be jabbing them. Why aren't we? Because it's way more context sensitive than the analogy permits, so it's a particularly useless analogy.

I'd be pretty fucking pissed if someone sprayed a fire extinguisher needlessly in my vicinity.

I agree in general. The difference here is that the quote about longterm effects being unknown is from the FDA. A layperson could set their standard as being when the FDA has that information. Hopefully the FDA has objective procedures and measure to make those determinations. I feel that would be a reasonable approach.

I'm just saying, some people will still use that as a reason.

Anecdotally, I know someone who got the vaccine, and dropped to the ground of a heart attack 3 days later - no prior history of any heart issues or hypertension. Thankfully, he was near an EMT unit that had to bring him back.

Take a closer look at the mortality rate from COVID, and then take a closer look at which pre-existing conditions people who are being hospitalized largely have (all easily found on CDC's network of reporting hospitals, at least for the US). It would appear based on these data points, that the vast majority of people have nothing to fear, neither death or hospitalization. However, if you're in the growing minority of folks with chronic obesity, hypertension, and diabetes (the "holy trinity" as my ER-doc friend says), you might want to get a vaccine, but understand the effectiveness will be severely lowered by your conditions.