What are the risks and benefits of each vaccine?

[revelarts]

1 doctor's perspective

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/w...nd-benefits-of


The Forgotten Side of Medicine
What are the risks and benefits of each vaccine?
The COVID-19 vaccines have provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to answer this question.

A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR
APR 5, 2023
A major problem I see throughout the scientific and political sphere is that people cannot maintain a perspective that allows them to see the whole picture; rather they tend to focus or fixate on things they have some type of emotional or subconscious priming to focus on (this has been an issue throughout history). This is why you can say have someone be around an individual they like and primarily registers the one good thing the individual did (while ignoring all the bad things) and conversely why they will ignore all the good things another individual they don’t like is trying so hard to do and focus on the one bad thing that individual did.

This human tendency ends up becoming a huge problem because the media will emotionally condition the public to focus on the one side on an issue which favors its corporate sponsors. This in turn leads to these people getting up in arms about that one point when individuals who dissent against the corporate narrative try to highlight the issues that greatly outweigh any purported benefit of the narrative.

This is particularly common with complex issues (which are difficult to understand to begin with) and one of my longstanding frustrations has been that despite the harms of vaccines greatly outweighing their benefits, many you bring this up to can only register the danger of the (often insignificant disease) the vaccine allegedly protects against. In my eyes, one of the upsides about COVID-19 is that this selective reframing of reality and the medias lies to maintain it went to such an extreme extent, much of the public became able to realize it was absurd and started taking the time to try and fully understand the subject.

One of the common questions I get from readers relates to another complex question—which vaccines are safe for their kids, and which ones are a bad idea? This is surprisingly difficult to answer because you must weigh the likelihood of an adverse event from a vaccination vs. the likelihood of suffering a complication from the disease that the vaccine would prevent you from getting and compute an figure that takes the weighted average of each into consideration.

In order make this determination, you need to consider all of the following:

Disease Risk
How likely is it for a person to get the disease?

Some diseases we vaccinate against are incredibly rare (e.g., tetanus).

How likely is the disease to cause a negligible, minor, moderate, severe, or fatal complication?

It is very important to distinguish between these categories because, for most infections, the risk of you catching it and then it becoming a severe condition is extremely low. For example, a Neisseria meningitidis infection (which can cause septic meningitis) is really bad and can progress very quickly, but also very rare for people to develop (one in ten people are asymptomatic carriers whereas approximately one in a million get it a year).

How likely is it that the severity of the disease can be improved with an existing medical treatment?

Most of the infections we vaccinate against are very easy to treat. Unfortunately, the focus is always on vaccinating against the disease rather than providing treatment for it (especially if the treatment is something more unorthodox than an antibiotic). In the case of COVID-19, while severe complications represent the minority of cases, they (and the more minor ones) can in most cases easily be prevented by early outpatient treatment. Unfortunately, the Federal government has refused to disclose to the public what the effective treatments are for it (presumably because it would make it impossible to continue making money off COVID-19).

How likely is it that you will have access to the necessary treatment before you get seriously ill?

Although I dislike the vaccine approach, I have to acknowledge that this is one of the strongest arguments for it. For rapidly progressing diseases, for those in isolated areas, for those unable to recognize their need to seek medical care, and for those of limited economic means, they often cannot get the necessary treatment for the disease before it is too late to prevent a severe complication.

In general, it’s very rare that a vaccine-preventable disease has both a significant likelihood that you will get it and a significant likelihood that it will develop into a severe condition. Many of those believed to fall into this category are no longer an issue in the United States (e.g., polio or smallpox), regardless of whether or not you are vaccinated, but people who look at this question are often fixated on the past presentations of the disease when it was more pathogenic or when we did not have a way to treat it.

Vaccine Efficacy
How likely is the vaccine to be effective in preventing the disease, and do the presence of vaccine antibodies correlate with a decreased risk of the disease?
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https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/w...nd-benefits-of