There are some good medical types here who will advise you well! Pay attention to them!

The Texas numbers as of 20 Sep:

71.5% of 12 and older: 1 shot
60.7% of 12 and older: fully vaccinated
I find these numbers impressive.

I was originally against getting it too, thinking once I got the virus, it would be a mild case. With this current strain, I was wrong. Ended up with Covid pneumonia and spent a week in the hospital. I've been out for two weeks but probably have another couple months to fully heal my lungs. It's really hitting healthy people this year, unlike the original strain. I know the vaccine won't keep you from getting it but will most likely keep you out of the hospital. Don't gamble like I did OP, it isn't worth it.

Aggies75455 said:

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I've read through a lot of this board and really wondering what the right thing to do is. I'm 31 and in good health (a little over weight) and my wife is 28 and in good health and in shape. We have a 3 year old who has celiac disease. As far as we know, none of us have gotten infected at any point. We are mainly concerned about potential birth defects or infertility as we want to have more kids.

Up until this point we've personally been against getting vaccinated as we have concerns with long term side effects from it but with the delta strain we're really weighing the options. My personal stance has been flat out that I don't trust the government but I do trust medical professionals and wrestling with the right thing to do. I also have family members in the same boat (none have gotten vaccinated). My younger sister who's diabetic had the virus last summer and was able to stay out of the hospital.

I've watched countless videos on both sides and don't have a primary doctor as we moved last year. Just looking to get input from others who are medically trained and those who have dealt with the virus. Also prayers to anyone who's lost loved ones in this ordeal. Thanks for any input.

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I would be far, far more concerned about the well documented long term effects of covid than the purely speculative fears about the long term effects of a vaccine..

Jbob04 said:

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I was originally against getting it too, thinking once I got the virus, it would be a mild case. With this current strain, I was wrong. Ended up with Covid pneumonia and spent a week in the hospital. I've been out for two weeks but probably have another couple months to fully heal my lungs. It's really hitting healthy people this year, unlike the original strain. I know the vaccine won't keep you from getting it but will most likely keep you out of the hospital. Don't gamble like I did OP, it isn't worth it.

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I know a very similar story of a 32 year old white male, slightly overweight but not much who is in the hospital. He will live and is getting out soon, but in the hospital for a week and a half is no joke.

I would get the Moderna if I were you. I would consider it for your wife too…. see if you can find out what her risks from Covid might be if she gets pregnant. A friend of a friend ended up in the hospital on a vent when she got Covid toward the end of her pregnancy…. she is alive but going through that really messes you up. I don't know how rare that is which is why I suggested that you look into it.

I started typing up a long response about why the vaccine is safe and you should get it, but I'll just say this.

Almost every doctor in the country has not only gotten the vaccine for themselves, but rushed to get it for their family. Many I know are waiting for approval to get it for their kids (this includes pediatricians, pediatric emergency medicine docs, and a host of other specialists). If just about every medical professional in the country thinks it is safe and effective for themselves and their family, chances are you're not taking any undue risk by getting the vaccine - especially when weighed against the very real possibility of a long term side effect from the actual virus.

Of course, they are human, and all humans can make mistakes.

ETA: If you do get Pfizer, just separate out your injections by 4-5 weeks instead of 3 weeks. I'm pretty sure your efficacy long term will be similar to Moderna if you do that (no evidence to back this up though).

There are plenty of ancedotes on both sides. In the entire population, the percentages of something bad happening due to COVID are really low.

However, if you're an adult, there's no way to know how your specific body is going to react. They haven't determined what the trigger is between cold-like symptoms and standing at death's door. Some sick people die, some healthy people die, and some people in between die. I couldn't answer that question, so I got vaccinated as soon as I could. I'm currently pregnant after vaccination and so far everything is going good.

If you don't have a PCP, I would recommend finding one soon to help make your decision. Get your blood work drawn. Have someone listen to your heart, your lungs. You can't accurately make the decision on whether you're "healthy" just because you feel good. You have no idea what's going on inside your body where it matters.

For kids, it's a different story. I'm struggling with the idea of vaccinating my 4 (will be 5 soon) & 7 year old. But they don't quite have the same risks factors and they're seen by a doctor regularly so I know how healthy they are. It's a much harder decision, especially since they don't have the same available data.

I had the same thought process. 44, overweight but not bad. No other health conditions. Got Covid about 2 weeks ago and developed Covid pneumonia. Currently on oxygen at home. This is the sickest I've been in my entire life no question, not a close call. I totally figured I would get a mild case if I ever got it and didn't think twice about getting vaccinated. Wish I chose differently, but at the end of the day I'm coming out of this thing ok and consider myself lucky. I barely got qualified to get the regeneron infusion under the cutoff date. Had I not done that I think I would have been hospitalized.

9 days straight of fever
Total loss of appetite
Uncontrollable coughing fits combined with nausea and dry heaving for two nights straight.
My breathing would become like I was hyperventilating multiple times a night.
It was hell I wouldn't wish on anyone.

JB99 said:

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I had the same thought process. 44, overweight but not bad. No other health conditions. Got Covid about 2 weeks ago and developed Covid pneumonia. Currently on oxygen at home. This is the sickest I've been in my entire life no question, not a close call. I totally figured I would get a mild case if I ever got it and didn't think twice about getting vaccinated. Wish I chose differently, but at the end of the day I'm coming out of this thing ok and consider myself lucky. I barely got qualified to get the regeneron infusion under the cutoff date. Had I not done that I think I would have been hospitalized.

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Yikes! Glad to hear you're doing better and thank you for the input.

One other point I'll make. I studied the data and knew my chances from dieing from Covid were pretty low. However, between the two extremes of a mild case of Covid and dieing, there's some Hellacious outcomes and experiences. I wish I would have understood the odds I would have been hospitalized. I'm not even sure if they have that data broken down by age group. I thought I read somewhere there is a 15% chance of being hospitalized, but I don't think that's put in the context of age group. Once you get to the point where you have to go to the hospital/ER the anxiety starts to get a bit much.

Start here.


https://texags.com/forums/84/topics/3215580

Duncan Idaho said:

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Start here.


https://texags.com/forums/84/topics/3215580

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Actually, don't start there. Start with writing down all of the people you know who have tested positive for COVID and how sick they were. How many had mild cases? How many only knew they had it because they had to test due to contact tracing? How many were not vaccinated at the time they had it? That will give the OP a better glimpse of reality than what is posted on a message board where most people who had a mild case aren't coming to give their .02.

After that, start looking at the actual numbers and take an honest look at your health. Overweight? Sedentary lifestyle? High BP? Smoker? Etc. Use the data available to you to make an educated decision. If what you find says to get the vaccine, then go get the vaccine. At least it would be the actual data telling you to go vs. emotion.

I'll say you should do it for your 3 year old. D is kicking ass and apparently healthy folks are running the risk of hospitalization and long term effects of Covid.

You must first understand that the shots out there are not actually vaccines by the long prescribed definition (not the new, update one the CDC had edited). These shots are very good therapeutics. Whether or not that changes your decision making, that's up to you.

Secondly, at this point you either do or do not believe that a regiment of vitamins and ivermectin can serve as a strong therapeutic and prevent hospitalization. (FYI - true case study for one of my employees - 45 year old Mexican man, 5'4" and 250 lbs and diabetic. ::: With the help of our local "Covid Doctor" ::: Once we found out he tested positive, put him on a daily regiment of certain vitamins and ivermectin. He had a few tough days but pulled through without ever going to the hospital. He feels fine after 8 days and is back to work (tested negative).

On the flip side, there are several people we know either hospitalized and/or dying from the virus in the last two weeks in our small town. All much older and not necessarily the picture of health but sad nonetheless.

My decision was made for me when I got Covid back in late April. It was more than the sniffles, but I got up and did stuff every day. Now I have the best kind of immunity.

I'm wondering what your biggest concerns are with the vaccine. If you shared your specific areas of concern some of us might be able to answer those directly.

Anyway, I recently found this thread on Quora which I thought was very informative about some of the biggest concerns a lot of people have:

https://covid19.quora.com/I-am-not-an-antivaxxer-I-took-all-vacines-I-ever-should-according-to-my-doctor-but-I-feel-strange-about-covid-vacines


Particularly this answer I thought was helpful:

Quote:

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1. How did they do it this quick when previous vaccines took years to develop?
I guess first we have to ask why is that vaccines and other drugs take so long to develop and then we can see which corners were cut to arrive at the current covid vaccines.
In general, there are a number of factors that cause the development to take as long as it does.
MONEY
The first, and obvious one is funding. It takes time to secure funding, especially for a drug for which there is no guarantee it will work. Sometimes you finally do secure funding to try a given approach, and after all the research and trials it turns out that approach was a dead end so you now have to start all over again, which can add more delays as you try and secure new funding all over again.
With the covid vaccines, money wasn't an issue. The world's governments and philanthropists were pouring money into these vaccines (which makes sense, given the devastation the virus was causing to the world's economies). This not only shortened the time to getting the initial funding, but also allowed many different approaches to be tried out in parallel so we didn't have to waste time with dead ends (which is how we got the situation where we have a number of competing vaccines all at once).
MANPOWER
People-hours are a limited commodity. There are many diseases and conditions that need drugs developed, and only a limited number of researchers qualified to work on them. During the covid pandemic however, all of the world's top minds dropped what they were doing to work on this one problem. Competing labs were sharing data and collaborating. Work that usually had to be done sequentially was able to be done in parallel and a lot of time was saved that way.
RED TAPE
There's a lot of bureaucracy involved in drug development, a lot of forms to push, i's to dot, t's to cross, forms to fill in triplicate etc. Many of these steps have to be done in a certain order, so you file the forms for stage A, and only after those get approved can you start the paperwork for stage B etc.
During covid, a lot of the red tape was cut. Things that were there just for the bureaucracy and didn't actually affect the safety were postponed until after, steps that usually had to be done one after the other were allowed to be done in parallel. This way they were able to cut a lot of time out without sacrificing safety.
TRIAL SUBJECTS
It takes time to recruit enough people for the trails needed to develop a vaccine. During covid, many people were motivated to sign up, either out of a sense of duty and privilege in doing their part in fending the pandemic, or out of the hope that they would be first in line to get the life-saving vaccine. The point is that while a typical study has a few hundred participants, and large ones can have up to 1,500, the trials for the covid vaccines typically had 3040,000 participants each! So they were able to collect much more data, and of much higher quality.
TIMING
Once you've secured funding, filed all the paperwork, signed up participants, given some of them the vaccine and the others a placebo, you now have to wait. You need to wait for enough of them to get infected with the disease you're trying to protect against to see how many of those infected got the vaccine and how many got the placebo so you can tell if the vaccine offered any real protection.
With most diseases, this wait can take a while, but with covid, because of how prevalent it was and how infectious, it didn't take more than a few weeks for over a thousand of the study participants to test positive, and seeing how those thousand tended overwhelmingly to be from the placebo group, it gave the researchers confidence that the vaccines were pretty darn effective!

So all of those factors satisfied me that the vaccines, while rushed, had no corners cut and were built on solid data.

But what about question number 2?


2. How do we know there won't be any rare long-term effects?
The above only tells us that the data from the vaccine trials is solid for the duration of the trials which was about 68 months. How do we know there are no ultra-rare and/or long term effects that didn't show up in the trials do to their size and duration?
I will split this question into two for rare side effects and long term ones:
RARE
The part of the question about rare side effects was easier to get out of the way. As mentioned, the trials were much bigger than typical (3040,000 participants vs. the 1,500 max they usually get), so any adverse effect that didn't show up in the trial would have to occur in less than 30,000 people who got the shot. That's rare enough for the vaccine to be much safer than covid for which almost 15% of people who test positive end up with symptoms sever enough to need hospitalization, and more than half still have symptoms over a year later, so even if there are ultra rare adverse effects, the vaccine is still safer than the disease it's protect you against.
Note: it's worth noting, that this has indeed turned out to be the case. Some rare adverse effects did come out a few months after the vaccines were widely available and administered to millions of people, namely the risk of blood clots with the J&J vaccine and heart inflammation with the Pfizer, but, as mentioned, those effects are extremely rare (one in a few hundred thousand doses) and are much more common in people who catch covid.
LONG TERM
But what if there are more common side effects that we just haven't seen yet because they take months, or even years to manifest?
This part really bothered me, but it turned out that it was based on a misunderstanding. I was under the impression that the reason vaccines usually take so long to approve is because they look for such long-term effects, when the reality is that it takes so long because of all of the reasons already mentioned.
The reality is that long-term effects for a drug or vaccine that's taken just once (or a few times) aren't really a thing. There are drugs that have long-term effects that take years to come out, but those are drugs you take regularly for a long time and slowly slowly build up in your system. Any drug that's taken once and is done with (or at most requires a booster every now and then) typically has side effects that come out soon after the drug was administered.
For vaccines specifically, there are no known side effects from any vaccine that takes more than about a month to come out, and most known effects are seen within an hour of the shot (that is the reason they have you sit at the clinic for 2030 minutes after your shot).
That is why since the 90s the FDA has only required 10 months of data for for regular vaccine approvals and 6 months for emergency approvals (Frequently Asked Questions about the FDA Drug Approval Process).
The covid vaccines had about 6 months of data in the trials, and by now have data from billions of doses over a period of almost a year. It's reasonably safe to say that pretty much all of the data in terms of long-term effects is in. Contrast that with covid, where more than half of symptomatic infections still have long term effects over a year later!

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They have just started studying the potential effects on womens menstrual cycles after tons of them claimed to have weird cycles after the shot(s). I would wait until more is known about the potential impacts on this and possibly fertility.

The way several doctors pushed the vaccine HARD on my wife when she was 5-6mo pregnant in early 2021, just months after she had recovered from Covid just fine, really turned us off to just blindly trusting doctors. They looked at us like we were nuts for not wanting to expose our baby girl in utero to a "free and 100% safe" vaccine.

There are some pretty scary stories on here and elsewhere, but I really like you and your wife's odds a lot.

I would get tested for antibodies before vaccinating.

There is a very real chance you had it and did not know it. I would not have known I had it as I was pretty much asymptomatic and I still have antibodies 9 months later.

If you don't have antibodies then the risk profile probably tilts towards getting the vaccine. But for a healthy 31 year old we are talking minute percentages of complications for the virus or the vaccine.

JesusQuintana said:

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aTm2004 said:

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Duncan Idaho said:

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Start here.


https://texags.com/forums/84/topics/3215580

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Actually, don't start there. Start with writing down all of the people you know who have tested positive for COVID and how sick they were. How many had mild cases? How many only knew they had it because they had to test due to contact tracing? How many were not vaccinated at the time they had it? That will give the OP a better glimpse of reality than what is posted on a message board where most people who had a mild case aren't coming to give their .02.

After that, start looking at the actual numbers and take an honest look at your health. Overweight? Sedentary lifestyle? High BP? Smoker? Etc. Use the data available to you to make an educated decision. If what you find says to get the vaccine, then go get the vaccine. At least it would be the actual data telling you to go vs. emotion.

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I would go ahead and start with finding a doctor. As a society, do we normally make spreadsheets to evaluate health matters and then weigh that against emotion? Find a doctor, get a physical and discuss your concerns and health with him/her to best make a decision on how you should proceed.

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As a society, are we normally up against such fear pumping and misinformation when it comes to any other illness? Also, you think your avg doctor really understands this virus or is an expert on it in any way? Almost every doctor I have encountered is a hardliner on masks...that tells me a lot.

There are sad stories, we all know people who have had tough cases (I even know a fully vaxxed man who almost died) and many of us know someone who has died...but also look around you...look at the overall numbers...look at the by-age fatality chart and make a decision based on your own age/health/situation in life etc. For many people, getting vaccinated is the clear cut right decision. We weren't about to chance it with a developing fetus...after mom had recovered from virus just months before. A lot of people thought we were crazy.

I 100% agree with what you're saying, but Jesus does have a point. If OP hasn't had a physical in a while, it would be wise to visit a doctor to get an annual physical. Make sure there are no issues that OP is unaware of. Use the information as more data to use in the decision. Also, listen to the doctor and what he has to say, but understand it's a recommendation.

SB 43rd STREET OG said:

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JesusQuintana said:

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aTm2004 said:

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Duncan Idaho said:

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Start here.


https://texags.com/forums/84/topics/3215580

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Actually, don't start there. Start with writing down all of the people you know who have tested positive for COVID and how sick they were. How many had mild cases? How many only knew they had it because they had to test due to contact tracing? How many were not vaccinated at the time they had it? That will give the OP a better glimpse of reality than what is posted on a message board where most people who had a mild case aren't coming to give their .02.

After that, start looking at the actual numbers and take an honest look at your health. Overweight? Sedentary lifestyle? High BP? Smoker? Etc. Use the data available to you to make an educated decision. If what you find says to get the vaccine, then go get the vaccine. At least it would be the actual data telling you to go vs. emotion.

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I would go ahead and start with finding a doctor. As a society, do we normally make spreadsheets to evaluate health matters and then weigh that against emotion? Find a doctor, get a physical and discuss your concerns and health with him/her to best make a decision on how you should proceed.

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As a society, are we normally up against such fear pumping and misinformation when it comes to any other illness? You think your avg doctor really understands this virus or is an expert on it in any way? Almost every doctor I have encountered is a hardliner on masks...that tells me a lot.

There are sad stories, we all know people who have had tough cases (I even know a fully vaxxed man who almost died) and many of us know someone who has died...but also look around you...look at the overall numbers...look at the fatality chart and make a decision based on your own age/health/situation in life etc. For many people, getting vaccinated is the clear cut right decision. We weren't about to chance it with a developing fetus...after mom had recovered from virus just months before. A lot of people thought we were crazy.

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I think your avg doctor has a better understanding and is more of an expert than your average american citizen. Does that mean they know everything about this virus...no...nobody currently does. There is more to what I said though. Doctors don't or should not just sit you down and read the memo from the cdc. They would take into account other info regarding your health as everyone is different and provide advice hence getting a physical/health check. I never knew i was at the low range for Vitamin D for example until i requested a test for it. I still believe the best starting point in any health journey is a doctor. You can still crunch numbers, interview your buddies, watch the propaganda on the news and listen experts on facebook....but i would start with a health check and the advice of a physician.

I played the data game but still ended up with a bad case of Covid pneumonia spending a week in the hospital. I am 47, not overweight, don't take any medication, even had a wellness check in May with no concerns by my PCP. I exercise on average of twice a week, if you count the exercises that I do with my patients then that number goes up. Lol. When I tested positive on August 24th, I began Rev's vitamin regimen, took Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, Symbicort inhaler, and Levaquin antibiotic but still ended up in the hospital.

My suggestion to the OP is get a wellness check, even check for antibodies in case you already had it, and consult with your physician. I am not one to tell someone to get the vaccine or not (I don't even tell my patients when they ask), it should be their choice.

I got the vaccine but I wasn't sitting on a fence when I got it. That would hurt.