Thread by @bopinion

Vaccines can be scary. You’re asking healthy people to roll up their sleeves and take a mysterious shot.

But the Covid-19 vaccine trial results should be reassuring: The associated risks are tiny compared to risks associated with getting the virus itself trib.al/euxV1y6

The risks of taking a vaccine are minuscule compared to the struggles we’ve faced in the pandemic and our interventions to try to stop it:

💵The economic insecurity
📚The lost education
🚪The deep isolation twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Recent surveys reported in the Wall Street Journal this week show about 27% of Americans say they would not get a vaccine. So did 40% of Europeans.

And the fear of vaccines is likely to get worse trib.al/euxV1y6

In clinical trials, the leading vaccines caused unpleasant side effects including intense soreness and flu like symptoms considerably worse than those sometimes caused by flu shots.

People might be shocked and frightened by these symptoms trib.al/euxV1y6

As millions of vaccines are rolled out, some people will get illnesses by coincidence — ALS, multiple sclerosis, cancer — soon after they get the shots.

Most will have nothing to do with the vaccines, but it may be hard to convince the public of that trib.al/euxV1y6

Many people still believe, against all evidence, that childhood vaccines cause autism.

Past experience shows there’s profit in stoking vaccine fears, says Stuart Lyman, who has been studying why so many people refuse the cancer-preventing HPV vaccine trib.al/euxV1y6

With Covid-19, such hesitancy could cost lives and delay our return to normal life and economic activity.

Those refusing a vaccine could be a reservoir for the virus, infecting others whose vaccines don’t give them full protection trib.al/euxV1y6

With existing vaccines, most severe vaccine side effects show up within two weeks, and nearly all within two months.

The clinical trials completed on the Covid-19 vaccines have already gone on longer than that trib.al/euxV1y6

The viral attack from Covid-19 is profoundly more dangerous than the front-runner vaccines.

And the rumors that have associated mRNA vaccines with long-term consequences of infection — from brain fog to low sperm count — are completely unfounded trib.al/euxV1y6

Most people who get Covid-19 will recover and be fine — but already, over 1.5 million people have died.

And Covid-19 is indirectly harming millions of people who have never been infected trib.al/euxV1y6

Poverty is a health hazard and so is loneliness. Even masks aren’t completely harmless — they make it difficult for hearing-impaired people to have meaningful human interaction.

Vaccines are what will allow us to go back to normal life trib.al/euxV1y6