>> To be fair, no-one knows if the vaccines might have long term side effects, and
>> that's what I'd be thinking about in weighing up the risks - the unknowns rather
>> than the knowns.
That's a very valid concern I think, and the most recent anti-vaccine stuff I have seen uses concerns about future fertility to raise doubts. As a mere possibility, this cannot be refuted.
I recall the government's line on BSE at one point - "There is no evidence that BSE can pass from animals to people". That was enough for me to change my diet, but of course there was no real downside to that. And as it turned out they were wrong.
Here, there is no evidence or reason to think that the vaccine will cause fertility problems or worse, but it might.
But there are two differences between the vaccine decision and the beef boycott one.
The is that the purpose of being vaccinated is to mitigate a risk that is known to exist, that of getting ill or dying from COVID-19.
The second is (as mentioned above) is that there is also a known, rather than putative, possibility of long term after-effects from COVID-19.
My wife and I have been told we almost certainly had COVID-19 between January and early/mid March last year, when confirmed cases were very low. Neither of us was very ill, but we both had highly unusual and exhausting coughs for weeks on end. My wife developed heart rhythm problems which continued for over a year. They were concerning enough to be investigated with a 48 hour ECG, CT and echocardiogram. She had no history of heart problems and no cause has been found. She has been told that it was probably related to the presumed COVID-19 as it is something that has been seen with long COVID. Fortunately it appears to have resolved itself after over a year.
I'm very pro-vaccines generally so it wasn't a difficult decision for me. I'm old enough to remember the fear generated by polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, meningitis, and smallpox to name a few diseases that people pay far less attention to now.
My family was actually traced back in the 1960's and received a home visit from the smallpox vaccination hit squad because of an outbreak in Bradford where we used to visit the Royal Infirmary with my brother, who had leukaemia. Perhaps Dido should have looked at how they managed it.
I don't know what can be done about fake news. The people who read this s***e think they are the ones being sceptical and the rest of us are 'sheeple'. Yet they are the ones promoting conspiracies that millions would need to be complicit in, dismissing multiple respected sources and quoting people nobody has heard of - and calling it "citizen news".
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