On a news program this evening, they interviewed a patient who does now seem to be recovering. However, he had been calling his wife to discuss his funeral not long ago.
He said that social media claims that the vaccine is more dangerous than Covid-19 itself had persuaded him not to get vaccinated. He has changed his mind...
My view is very simple:
I can't see any way forward other than vaccination or gigantic scale infections.
The numbers who appear to have suffered from vaccination, while it is a real thing and can be serious, are still far lower than those who have suffered from Covid-19. And that is the situation despite the proportion of the UK population that has been vaccinated being far higher than the number known to have been infected with Covid-19.
I totally understand the logical arguments...and I am happy to discuss and consider those. It is the pedestal-mounted moral arguments that I cannot abide...but that's just me!!
To counter your news program story, a friend of mine got COVID pretty badly back in December/January. He was laid up in bed for three weeks...could hear "bubbling" (his words) from his lungs when he tried to breathe...and went so far as to give his wife instructions about his funeral...same as your guy above. However, since his experience, which saw him have a fever for ten days straight, he says that he knows about 20 people who have had bad symptoms of COVID, but nobody that has died from it. He also knows three people, all under 45 years old, and all fairly fit and healthy, with no known health issues, who have died within two weeks of taking the vaccine. He told me just today that he will NOT be taking the vaccine and would rather risk COVID again...make of that what you will...
I have no issue taking the vaccine myself...after it has been at least 3-4 years "in the wild" (normally clinical trials for longer term effects but seem like this is a real life trial so....) and if, at that time, COVID is still anything of an issue. I am not an anti-vaxxer but I am, as a great deal of people are, an anti-untested-for-long-term-effects-vaxxer. This is especially true as I happen to believe that anything that involves messing with genes (RNA and DNA) is just asking for trouble. Humanity has got so cocky and arrogant that it now feels like it can play god with our fundamental building blocks...and that is an experiment that I am prepared to be a part of...but good luck to those who are...genuinely!
EDIT: And re: the numbers, currently the "official" deaths post vaccine are somewhere around 1,400 I believe and the deaths post COVID are around 130,000...so just based on that the vaccine could be seen to have killed 1% as many people as the virus. However, it is widely accepted that these kinds of adverse reaction databases only get between 1% and 10% of the
actual number of adverse reactions (including deaths) reported to them. So best case scenario we can reasonably extrapolate that the number of deaths post vaccine is up around 14,000 (and potentially 140,000). Equally, we could equally point out that those 130,000 "COVID Deaths"
do include people who have been killed in a car crash within 28 days of testing positive, clearly not something that it is reasonable to attribute
to COVID. So that will bring the number of deaths
actually caused by and not simply concurrent with COVID down. It isn't clear how much that would reduce it by, but let's just say 10%. We now have a situation where the real numbers could be 117k COVID deaths and 14k vaccine deaths. COVID has had 17 months, the vaccine has had (at most) seven - depending on age group. So COVID has killed an average of 6882 people per month, and the vaccine has killed an average of 2,000 per month!! Forgive my hesitancy to risk an as-yet-untested-in-the-long-term medical treatment for an illness which I am at relatively low risk of anyway, which has a 99.something% survival rate (even pre-vaccine) and which actually kills a third as many people per month as the disease it is supposedly fighting against! If I was in my 80s and had other pre-existing conditions, I'd give the old Russian Roulette wheel a spin...but that's probably about it!