Vaccine or not?

[vaccineornot]

I’m not sure if it’s possible to have a rational conversation about it but I’ll post!
I’ve had vaccines, missed my last as I was unwell and couldn’t rebook in time

I am doubting myself massively about whether I should have more or not
My doctor and consultant say basically “duh, yes, why wouldn’t you”

Social media seems to be (before anyone tells me not to listen, it’s every single person I see) that it’s a scam, a con, the vaccines don’t do anything, the more I have the higher the risk and the push NOT to have it is so strong that I’m thinking am I wrong to have it?
I just can’t seem to work out if I’m more at risk from Covid (which people are saying is a load of shit anyway) or more at risk from the vaccine (which everyone is saying is dangerous to health)

NC as I don’t want people thinking I’m an idiot for questioning myself

Did you miss the fact that I am referring to myself? I, like the OP, am in an extremely vulnerable group of patients. Literally no one has said that every single person who is unvaccinated dies. It is a question of relative risk for healthy people. Some people are much more high risk and have a different equation. Even then, I still support bodily autonomy and wouldn’t ever vote for compulsory or coerced vaccination. But you are trying to stop me from accurately representing even what my own risk level actually is, which is ridiculous! My post made it very clear I was speaking about the jab I myself had, today.

sorry, I'm being disreacted by your inability to answer my question of whether you really think you would die

I have literally no interest in individual vaccination statuses my argument has been that I posted for personal reasons I myself being a vulnerable person decided not to have further vaccinations and because it didn’t align with your views you deemed it misleading and manipulative in a previous post. However, you are able to post that you’ve had the vaccine and leading statements about hospital and death yet that’s fine?
vaccination is an individual choice however it’s your double standards which have annoyed me.

That's not what you said at all.
You very much said you have it because you don't want to die.
You didn't say you were very ill in some way or very obese.
You didn't say it's a personal choice based on individual risk assessment.
You were saying if one doesn't want to die they need to have the injection.
A bizarre mixture of fearmongering whilst showing how terrified the fearmongering has made you

I’m not terrified at all. You don’t seem to understand that people are only called in for these boosters now if they are in relevant clinical groups. You can use MN advanced search or search using my username and “Mumsnet” on Google - I’m not secretive about how much my disabilities affect me. Even on this thread I’ve been clear that I am unwell and I stated I’m under 40! You are very deliberately misconstruing my posts.

You’re allowed to be annoyed if you want to be! But you attacked me for posting about my own specific situation and misstated what I’d said. I didn’t ever claim anyone who isn’t vaccinated is dead, lol. But I have every right to be accurate and specific about my own risk level, even if you find that annoying.

@verysmellyjelly

That’s such a misguided decision, OP. You should listen to your doctors, not to the conspiracy theorists on MN. I had mine this morning and since I like not being dead or in hospital, I am 100% certain it was the right choice.
Remember, every risk the vaccine has is also a risk of having Covid, and higher with having Covid. The antivaxxers lie to you.

That's what you wrote.
How can you decide it's a misguided decision when you have no idea of her medical conditions?.

You went on to say ( backpedalling) that it's a personal risk assessment decision.Not quite the same as the above, is it.

How do you know the risk from covid is higher than from the injectio when you have no idea of her personal risk?

So you have decided everyone should have it and are trying to belittle those that don't with the tired old anti vaxxer retort ( please try and move on from that and think of a proper response)

Because her doctors advised her to have it. And the only people advising her not to are antivaxxers on the internet.

i don’t think you’re understanding that I only ‘attacked you’ for posting about your specific situation as you deemed me misleading and manipulative for posting about mine. so why can you post yours but not I??
not once did I offer any misleading information or attempt to influence the OP I simply stated I would not be having any further.

Personally, I wouldn't bother because I've had covid twice and it wasn't anything worse than a bad sore throat. Having said that, if I was in any way immuno-compromised, I'd be first in line for it.

Unfortunately not everyone is so lucky

That's what I'm saying. Everyone has different immune systems so that should steer your decision making. The covid strains that are on the go now are far less sinister. The virus has had to evolve in order to stay alive which means not killing its host. However, if you have a weak immune system, it could be lethal. That's why I'd take the vaccine if I was immuno-compromised in any way.

why are you advising her to have it when you're not her doctor?

fortunately the vast majority are

I’ll be sure to pass on your comments to the families of two friends who died in December 2020 just before the vaccine rollout. Neither had an underlying health issues.

well unless they were in their 80's or very obese they were very very much a statistical anomaly.
Quite astounding you know of 2 people who died of it when you look at the data.
Sorry to hear it

Unfortunately covid has never needed to avoid killing us in the way some other pathogens do, because covid is so easily transmitted before the host is even ill, that what happens to the host later on is less important (even if they die).

We've been lucky that some of the mutations that have come along have not been as bad as others, but there's no guarantee that will happen with the next mutation or the one after that. Some mutations also happen inside immunocompromised people with persistent infections and pop up later having evolved a lot within that person, and not from the most recently circulating strains.

What I would like to know is what proportion of heart attacks and strokes, long after covid infections, would not have happened if it wasn't for those infections.

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2024/10/09/covid-19-may-increase-heart-attack-and-stroke-risk-for-years

It's not lucky that the more recent strains have been weaker. It's evolution. Viruses become more transmittable and less deadly as they evolve. That's not to say that a random mutation couldn't cause an entirely new virus to be created. But then again, what are the chances that a vaccine will prevent against a person contracting it. If it has mutated to that extent, how would the antibodies, created by a vaccine, be sufficient to fight it?

Btw, I'm very definitely pro vaccines generally.

The thing is that for evolution to happen you need a bottleneck of some kind - so something like a situation where only viruses below a certain level of severity can survive to spread.

If a particular imaginary virus led to illness within five minutes of infecting someone, then yes, milder strains would survive to spread much more successfully than more lethal ones, because the latter would hit a dead end (literally) very quickly. Some viruses have evolved in that direction due to the right bottleneck.

Covid isn't like that though - it can spread before people even have symptoms, so that particular evolutionary bottleneck isn't there (or isn't as relevant).

You can imagine though that a random covid mutation that led to more virus particles being breathed out in the first couple of days (before symptoms), or more frequent sneezing, might do extremely well at spreading, even if that mutation also happened to lead to more frequent hospitalisations and deaths. The fact that it might kill more people on day 7 of the illness, say, wouldn't stop it being very successful, if it did most of it's spreading on days 2 and 3.

(A mutation that started predictably killing lots of people on day 7 after infection would eventually lead to behaviour changes in its possible hosts - we'd all start really trying to avoid catching it, in a way most people don't now. That would presumably create some evolutionary pressure against it, but not as quickly as if it killed people five minutes into day 1.)

We have been lucky, just as we're lucky so far that H5N1 bird flu hasn't hit the right mutation for easy spread from person to person.

In any case, for deciding about a vaccine, it's really what the virus is like now that matters most, not what it might do in the future. But if anyone's decision is influenced by thinking it can only ever get milder and milder in the future, then that's probably not a good idea.

well it robably is a logical way to make adecision as this virus has got much milder

What I would like to know is what proportion of heart attacks and strokes, long after covid infections, would not have happened if it wasn't for those injections.

Is that supposed to be some kind of gotcha? That's basically what you've said all through the thread. You are worried only about the vaccine, we know.

In reality both have risks (with everything pointing so far towards the risks of covid being much higher, and much much higher for some people).