For those that are NOT vaxxed - would you get vaxxed only for travel?

[WoodlandWalks123]

I chose not to get vaccinated (I am in low risk category and already had covid). I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of that choice.

Now, DP booked me and DM on a luxury cruise as a surprise present - which would be so lovely and DM is really looking forward to it - it’s a bit of a once in a lifetime sort of thing to be able to go on this / spend time with her and I’ve got it in my mind that life is short and unsure when we would go again.

When he booked, the rules were that from April all vaccination rules would end. Now they have changed their terms and require double vaxx. They will refund money if we cancel due to this change so there is a get out. My DM is vaxxed but obviously I am not.

I am genuinely nervous about getting vaccinated when it’s just so new (in relative vaccine terms) and we don’t know long term effects, and the mRNA technology is also unknown. I am not a die hard anti-vaxxer or conspiracy theorist.

I feel that I would only be doing it for this cruise - general air travel / country requirements seem to be opening up and not requiring vaccines increasingly so I don’t think I would need it to go abroad in the fullness of time.

If you have chosen not to be vaccinated, would you get vaccinated to go on a once in a lifetime (but only 4 day) cruise? Or would you get a refund? If you would get vaccinated, which of the vaccines do you think is most benign?

Years ago I went to Kenya on holiday and we had to have various vaccines in order to enter the country. Vaccinations for travel are fairly standard outside Europe so maybe look at it like that?

Years ago I went to Kenya on holiday and we had to have various vaccines in order to enter the country. Vaccinations for travel are fairly standard outside Europe so maybe look at it like that?

Years ago I went to Kenya on holiday and we had to have various vaccines in order to enter the country. Vaccinations for travel are fairly standard outside Europe so maybe look at it like that?

Years ago I went to Kenya on holiday and we had to have various vaccines in order to enter the country. Vaccinations for travel are fairly standard outside Europe so maybe look at it like that?

It's worth remembering that over 92% of people in England have had at least one dose of the vaccine. These type of threads always make it sound as though there is an unvaccinated majority.

You are only safe because others have been vaccinated.

It's worth remembering that over 92% of people in England have had at least one dose of the vaccine. These type of threads always make it sound as though there is an unvaccinated majority.

You are only safe because others have been vaccinated.

It's worth remembering that over 92% of people in England have had at least one dose of the vaccine. These type of threads always make it sound as though there is an unvaccinated majority.

You are only safe because others have been vaccinated.

Aaarghhhhh! I believe the saying is “there are none so deaf as those that will not hear.”

I suspect other posters could quote the science at you all day long, @WoodlandWalks123 but you would still reply with “but what do we REALLY knoooooowwwww?” I hear that in my head in the voice whiny teenager would use when they don’t want to hear something their parent is telling them.

But just in case you are still sticking your fingers in your ears and going “la, la, la” and listening to stories that a friend of a friend of a friend told you in the pub, here’s another scientific article published by actual scientists who know what they are on about and - here’s the thing - it was published in 2018 BEFORE WE EVEN KNEW ABOUT COVID!!!! Get that! People had been studying and making and using mRNA vaccines before you even knew you might need one for your cruise, but it’s ok, we don’t need to worry about side effects because they were mostly Africans who were taking it, or people with cancer who were probably going to die of it anyway.

mRNA vaccines have been used successfully against Zika, Ebola, Rabies and Influenza. They have also been used for targeted therapies against certain cancers. The usefulness of mRNA has been suspected since the 1970s, and understood since the 1980s, but the thing holding back it’s use in vaccines was not side effects but it’s stability as a molecule, a problem which has been solved by keeping it a very low temperatures. Currently there are a number of scientist in line for the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Science as a result of their many years of work on the use of mRNA in modern medicine.

As has also been pointed out by other posters, there are simply NO KNOWN CASES of someone having a vaccine and then having a side effect to that vaccine years later. It just doesn’t happen. There is a long article on this matter HERE but I suspect you won’t read it so here is the sentence, about halfway down, that you need to understand:

”no vaccine has caused chronic conditions to emerge years or decades later, says Robert Jacobson, medical director of the population health science program at the Mayo Clinic. “Study after study have looked for this with all sorts of vaccines, and have not found it to be the case,” he says.”

Covid vaccinations have been given in numbers never before seen in such a short space of time. The fact that the active parts of the vaccine are very unstable (see my comment above about it needing to be kept at very low temperatures

we do not know the LONG term effects over 10-50 years of this vaccine...there are no scientific studies on effects over that sort of time period - how can there be when the empirical evidence is not yet available??

See this is interesting because it's an impossible dilemma - which makes me feel like it's a statement intended (not by you, OP, I can see that this is a geniune worry for you) to stoke fear and anxiety.

Of course we will not know what effects something we do now will have in 50 years' time. That would be impossible. So is it helpful to worry about this? How does it help you? What we should be doing when we assess risk is looking at the information that is available. Anyone telling you to worry because there might be something bad happening in 50 years' time (by which point, how old will you be anyway? 80s? 90s?) is just fear mongering.

Why not worry about the effects of the alcohol that you may consume on the cruise? Or indeed long term effects of covid or other viruses (which you are more likely to catch on a cruise)? Or the risk of a car accident on the way to the cruise? Breathing in pollution caused by cars and cruise ships? Global warming? All of these things have a real and proven effect that lasts decades. But we don't worry about those things because it's either so small that it doesn't matter or we like the short term benefits of them.

We usually balance risks and benefits of any decision that we make. Vaccination is just the same as any other decision, the problem is that it has been politicised, the risks have been played right up in certain circles, under very dubious reasoning. We would often consider certain risks (e.g. of road travel) to be worth it because the benefit of the convenience of driving a car is so high. Vaccines are one of the lowest risk interventions we can have, because the ingredient dose is so small and because they are developed for use in healthy people, but in most cases they have high benefit, in fact they aren't even recommended unless there is a high benefit - older vaccines like TB, Smallpox, are no longer routinely given to children, because they are no longer needed - and Polio is (was?) on track to go the same way. The idea that we are all being coerced to take loads of unnecessary vaccines doesn't make sense, if "they" wanted us to take unnecessary vaccines, why would the old ones stop being recommended? You could just recommend them forever and people would take them. Therefore the idea that they are being recommended unnecessarily doesn't really make sense.

You don't need vaccination for most travel now, cruises are different because the setup of a cruise ship means that if one person comes onto the cruise with COVID, chances are high that it will circulate to a high proportion of guests and staff - we've seen this happen before. So it absolutely makes sense to require cruise ship guests to be vaccinated, even if it wouldn't be beneficial for those people to be vaccinated for general life.

we do not know the LONG term effects over 10-50 years of this vaccine...there are no scientific studies on effects over that sort of time period - how can there be when the empirical evidence is not yet available??

See this is interesting because it's an impossible dilemma - which makes me feel like it's a statement intended (not by you, OP, I can see that this is a geniune worry for you) to stoke fear and anxiety.

Of course we will not know what effects something we do now will have in 50 years' time. That would be impossible. So is it helpful to worry about this? How does it help you? What we should be doing when we assess risk is looking at the information that is available. Anyone telling you to worry because there might be something bad happening in 50 years' time (by which point, how old will you be anyway? 80s? 90s?) is just fear mongering.

Why not worry about the effects of the alcohol that you may consume on the cruise? Or indeed long term effects of covid or other viruses (which you are more likely to catch on a cruise)? Or the risk of a car accident on the way to the cruise? Breathing in pollution caused by cars and cruise ships? Global warming? All of these things have a real and proven effect that lasts decades. But we don't worry about those things because it's either so small that it doesn't matter or we like the short term benefits of them.

We usually balance risks and benefits of any decision that we make. Vaccination is just the same as any other decision, the problem is that it has been politicised, the risks have been played right up in certain circles, under very dubious reasoning. We would often consider certain risks (e.g. of road travel) to be worth it because the benefit of the convenience of driving a car is so high. Vaccines are one of the lowest risk interventions we can have, because the ingredient dose is so small and because they are developed for use in healthy people, but in most cases they have high benefit, in fact they aren't even recommended unless there is a high benefit - older vaccines like TB, Smallpox, are no longer routinely given to children, because they are no longer needed - and Polio is (was?) on track to go the same way. The idea that we are all being coerced to take loads of unnecessary vaccines doesn't make sense, if "they" wanted us to take unnecessary vaccines, why would the old ones stop being recommended? You could just recommend them forever and people would take them. Therefore the idea that they are being recommended unnecessarily doesn't really make sense.

You don't need vaccination for most travel now, cruises are different because the setup of a cruise ship means that if one person comes onto the cruise with COVID, chances are high that it will circulate to a high proportion of guests and staff - we've seen this happen before. So it absolutely makes sense to require cruise ship guests to be vaccinated, even if it wouldn't be beneficial for those people to be vaccinated for general life.

we do not know the LONG term effects over 10-50 years of this vaccine...there are no scientific studies on effects over that sort of time period - how can there be when the empirical evidence is not yet available??

See this is interesting because it's an impossible dilemma - which makes me feel like it's a statement intended (not by you, OP, I can see that this is a geniune worry for you) to stoke fear and anxiety.

Of course we will not know what effects something we do now will have in 50 years' time. That would be impossible. So is it helpful to worry about this? How does it help you? What we should be doing when we assess risk is looking at the information that is available. Anyone telling you to worry because there might be something bad happening in 50 years' time (by which point, how old will you be anyway? 80s? 90s?) is just fear mongering.

Why not worry about the effects of the alcohol that you may consume on the cruise? Or indeed long term effects of covid or other viruses (which you are more likely to catch on a cruise)? Or the risk of a car accident on the way to the cruise? Breathing in pollution caused by cars and cruise ships? Global warming? All of these things have a real and proven effect that lasts decades. But we don't worry about those things because it's either so small that it doesn't matter or we like the short term benefits of them.

We usually balance risks and benefits of any decision that we make. Vaccination is just the same as any other decision, the problem is that it has been politicised, the risks have been played right up in certain circles, under very dubious reasoning. We would often consider certain risks (e.g. of road travel) to be worth it because the benefit of the convenience of driving a car is so high. Vaccines are one of the lowest risk interventions we can have, because the ingredient dose is so small and because they are developed for use in healthy people, but in most cases they have high benefit, in fact they aren't even recommended unless there is a high benefit - older vaccines like TB, Smallpox, are no longer routinely given to children, because they are no longer needed - and Polio is (was?) on track to go the same way. The idea that we are all being coerced to take loads of unnecessary vaccines doesn't make sense, if "they" wanted us to take unnecessary vaccines, why would the old ones stop being recommended? You could just recommend them forever and people would take them. Therefore the idea that they are being recommended unnecessarily doesn't really make sense.

You don't need vaccination for most travel now, cruises are different because the setup of a cruise ship means that if one person comes onto the cruise with COVID, chances are high that it will circulate to a high proportion of guests and staff - we've seen this happen before. So it absolutely makes sense to require cruise ship guests to be vaccinated, even if it wouldn't be beneficial for those people to be vaccinated for general life.

we do not know the LONG term effects over 10-50 years of this vaccine...there are no scientific studies on effects over that sort of time period - how can there be when the empirical evidence is not yet available??

See this is interesting because it's an impossible dilemma - which makes me feel like it's a statement intended (not by you, OP, I can see that this is a geniune worry for you) to stoke fear and anxiety.

Of course we will not know what effects something we do now will have in 50 years' time. That would be impossible. So is it helpful to worry about this? How does it help you? What we should be doing when we assess risk is looking at the information that is available. Anyone telling you to worry because there might be something bad happening in 50 years' time (by which point, how old will you be anyway? 80s? 90s?) is just fear mongering.

Why not worry about the effects of the alcohol that you may consume on the cruise? Or indeed long term effects of covid or other viruses (which you are more likely to catch on a cruise)? Or the risk of a car accident on the way to the cruise? Breathing in pollution caused by cars and cruise ships? Global warming? All of these things have a real and proven effect that lasts decades. But we don't worry about those things because it's either so small that it doesn't matter or we like the short term benefits of them.

We usually balance risks and benefits of any decision that we make. Vaccination is just the same as any other decision, the problem is that it has been politicised, the risks have been played right up in certain circles, under very dubious reasoning. We would often consider certain risks (e.g. of road travel) to be worth it because the benefit of the convenience of driving a car is so high. Vaccines are one of the lowest risk interventions we can have, because the ingredient dose is so small and because they are developed for use in healthy people, but in most cases they have high benefit, in fact they aren't even recommended unless there is a high benefit - older vaccines like TB, Smallpox, are no longer routinely given to children, because they are no longer needed - and Polio is (was?) on track to go the same way. The idea that we are all being coerced to take loads of unnecessary vaccines doesn't make sense, if "they" wanted us to take unnecessary vaccines, why would the old ones stop being recommended? You could just recommend them forever and people would take them. Therefore the idea that they are being recommended unnecessarily doesn't really make sense.

You don't need vaccination for most travel now, cruises are different because the setup of a cruise ship means that if one person comes onto the cruise with COVID, chances are high that it will circulate to a high proportion of guests and staff - we've seen this happen before. So it absolutely makes sense to require cruise ship guests to be vaccinated, even if it wouldn't be beneficial for those people to be vaccinated for general life.

we do not know the LONG term effects over 10-50 years of this vaccine...there are no scientific studies on effects over that sort of time period - how can there be when the empirical evidence is not yet available??

See this is interesting because it's an impossible dilemma - which makes me feel like it's a statement intended (not by you, OP, I can see that this is a geniune worry for you) to stoke fear and anxiety.

Of course we will not know what effects something we do now will have in 50 years' time. That would be impossible. So is it helpful to worry about this? How does it help you? What we should be doing when we assess risk is looking at the information that is available. Anyone telling you to worry because there might be something bad happening in 50 years' time (by which point, how old will you be anyway? 80s? 90s?) is just fear mongering.

Why not worry about the effects of the alcohol that you may consume on the cruise? Or indeed long term effects of covid or other viruses (which you are more likely to catch on a cruise)? Or the risk of a car accident on the way to the cruise? Breathing in pollution caused by cars and cruise ships? Global warming? All of these things have a real and proven effect that lasts decades. But we don't worry about those things because it's either so small that it doesn't matter or we like the short term benefits of them.

We usually balance risks and benefits of any decision that we make. Vaccination is just the same as any other decision, the problem is that it has been politicised, the risks have been played right up in certain circles, under very dubious reasoning. We would often consider certain risks (e.g. of road travel) to be worth it because the benefit of the convenience of driving a car is so high. Vaccines are one of the lowest risk interventions we can have, because the ingredient dose is so small and because they are developed for use in healthy people, but in most cases they have high benefit, in fact they aren't even recommended unless there is a high benefit - older vaccines like TB, Smallpox, are no longer routinely given to children, because they are no longer needed - and Polio is (was?) on track to go the same way. The idea that we are all being coerced to take loads of unnecessary vaccines doesn't make sense, if "they" wanted us to take unnecessary vaccines, why would the old ones stop being recommended? You could just recommend them forever and people would take them. Therefore the idea that they are being recommended unnecessarily doesn't really make sense.

You don't need vaccination for most travel now, cruises are different because the setup of a cruise ship means that if one person comes onto the cruise with COVID, chances are high that it will circulate to a high proportion of guests and staff - we've seen this happen before. So it absolutely makes sense to require cruise ship guests to be vaccinated, even if it wouldn't be beneficial for those people to be vaccinated for general life.

Oh FFS I am sorry for the triple post

Just testing as on 'threads I'm on' someone one has triple posted at 9:26 and it doesn't show and directs to an error page

Oh, I wrote a really long reply and the internet ate it. So here’s the short version because I have stuff to get on with today instead of arguing with science-deniers.

There are NO long term effects from vaccines. The vaccine is in and out of the body (especially the case with mRNA vaccines which are inherently unstable - they have to be kept at very low temperatures, remember?) in a matter of days. The entire process of setting up your body’s immune response is completed in a matter of weeks.

Scientists have been studying mRNA and it’s usefulness in vaccines and other medical treatments such as cancer gene therapy for decades. HERE is an article from Nature from 2018 (BEFORE WE EVEN KNEW ABOUT COVID!) detailing the extensive use of mRNA vaccines against Zika, Ebola, Rabies and Influenza.

Saying “but what do we REALLY knooooowww?” and using this as a reason not to have a vaccine which has allowed the world to begin to return to something approaching normality is the immature whining of the scientifically ignorant who are wilfully choosing to ignore the lifetimes work of experience scientists. HERE is another article, detailing the facts that lead us to be completely sure that a vaccine will not cause someone to suffer a catastrophic (or indeed any at all) side effects years later. The relevant bit, although the whole article is full of good bits, is this:
“no vaccine has caused chronic conditions to emerge years or decades later, says Robert Jacobson, medical director of the population health science program at the Mayo Clinic. “Study after study have looked for this with all sorts of vaccines, and have not found it to be the case,” he says.”

So, @WoodlandWalks123 take the vaccine, or don’t take it. But don’t superimpose your lack of knowledge on the rest of the world. The 5 billion people who have taken the vaccine and survived don’t really care if you don’t get on your cruise.

No. I hate the blackmail aspect of it. We know that even with boosters, transmission and infection still occur. The 270 day rule for boosters seems arbitrary and pointless when that is taken into consideration.

The cruise lines seem to be taking the path of requiring three jabs (two plus booster). They obviously believe this is what their customers want, so by asking for a refund you are sending a message that you dont agree this is what customers want.

For other travel PCR tests can be used, and arguably a PCR test showing negative is probably a safer bet than someone triple jabbed who is untested.

I suspect the jab rules will be quietly dropped over the next 12 months as those countries with a more relaxed approach show the same infection rates as those with tighter rules.

No. I hate the blackmail aspect of it. We know that even with boosters, transmission and infection still occur. The 270 day rule for boosters seems arbitrary and pointless when that is taken into consideration.

The cruise lines seem to be taking the path of requiring three jabs (two plus booster). They obviously believe this is what their customers want, so by asking for a refund you are sending a message that you dont agree this is what customers want.

For other travel PCR tests can be used, and arguably a PCR test showing negative is probably a safer bet than someone triple jabbed who is untested.

I suspect the jab rules will be quietly dropped over the next 12 months as those countries with a more relaxed approach show the same infection rates as those with tighter rules.

No. I hate the blackmail aspect of it. We know that even with boosters, transmission and infection still occur. The 270 day rule for boosters seems arbitrary and pointless when that is taken into consideration.

The cruise lines seem to be taking the path of requiring three jabs (two plus booster). They obviously believe this is what their customers want, so by asking for a refund you are sending a message that you dont agree this is what customers want.

For other travel PCR tests can be used, and arguably a PCR test showing negative is probably a safer bet than someone triple jabbed who is untested.

I suspect the jab rules will be quietly dropped over the next 12 months as those countries with a more relaxed approach show the same infection rates as those with tighter rules.

No. I hate the blackmail aspect of it. We know that even with boosters, transmission and infection still occur. The 270 day rule for boosters seems arbitrary and pointless when that is taken into consideration.

The cruise lines seem to be taking the path of requiring three jabs (two plus booster). They obviously believe this is what their customers want, so by asking for a refund you are sending a message that you dont agree this is what customers want.

For other travel PCR tests can be used, and arguably a PCR test showing negative is probably a safer bet than someone triple jabbed who is untested.

I suspect the jab rules will be quietly dropped over the next 12 months as those countries with a more relaxed approach show the same infection rates as those with tighter rules.

No. I hate the blackmail aspect of it. We know that even with boosters, transmission and infection still occur. The 270 day rule for boosters seems arbitrary and pointless when that is taken into consideration.

The cruise lines seem to be taking the path of requiring three jabs (two plus booster). They obviously believe this is what their customers want, so by asking for a refund you are sending a message that you dont agree this is what customers want.

For other travel PCR tests can be used, and arguably a PCR test showing negative is probably a safer bet than someone triple jabbed who is untested.

I suspect the jab rules will be quietly dropped over the next 12 months as those countries with a more relaxed approach show the same infection rates as those with tighter rules.

It's worth remembering that over 92% of people in England have had at least one dose of the vaccine. These type of threads always make it sound as though there is an unvaccinated majority.

You are only safe because others have been vaccinated.

No. I hate the blackmail aspect of it. We know that even with boosters, transmission and infection still occur. The 270 day rule for boosters seems arbitrary and pointless when that is taken into consideration.

The cruise lines seem to be taking the path of requiring three jabs (two plus booster). They obviously believe this is what their customers want, so by asking for a refund you are sending a message that you dont agree this is what customers want.

For other travel PCR tests can be used, and arguably a PCR test showing negative is probably a safer bet than someone triple jabbed who is untested.

I suspect the jab rules will be quietly dropped over the next 12 months as those countries with a more relaxed approach show the same infection rates as those with tighter rules.

No. I hate the blackmail aspect of it. We know that even with boosters, transmission and infection still occur. The 270 day rule for boosters seems arbitrary and pointless when that is taken into consideration.

The cruise lines seem to be taking the path of requiring three jabs (two plus booster). They obviously believe this is what their customers want, so by asking for a refund you are sending a message that you dont agree this is what customers want.

For other travel PCR tests can be used, and arguably a PCR test showing negative is probably a safer bet than someone triple jabbed who is untested.

I suspect the jab rules will be quietly dropped over the next 12 months as those countries with a more relaxed approach show the same infection rates as those with tighter rules.

No. I hate the blackmail aspect of it. We know that even with boosters, transmission and infection still occur. The 270 day rule for boosters seems arbitrary and pointless when that is taken into consideration.

The cruise lines seem to be taking the path of requiring three jabs (two plus booster). They obviously believe this is what their customers want, so by asking for a refund you are sending a message that you dont agree this is what customers want.

For other travel PCR tests can be used, and arguably a PCR test showing negative is probably a safer bet than someone triple jabbed who is untested.

I suspect the jab rules will be quietly dropped over the next 12 months as those countries with a more relaxed approach show the same infection rates as those with tighter rules.