To Be Or Not To Be : Vaccinated

The side effects of the vaccine for the vast majority of people are minor. I had just a sore arm with both doses. Others I know reported mild fevers, body aches and pains and fatigue.
As for long-term immunity this is a novel disease, so it is not known yet whether the initial vaccine will be sufficient. Since there are new variants coming up all the time it might turn out like the flu vaccine where an annual booster shot is recommended.

 

Pros- high probability of saving from a life threatening infection.

cons- none.

Rest @MalStrom already said.

 

Astra Zeneca Oxford vaccine has been discontinued in many western European countries pretty much because of bad press.

There is a normal level of idiocy in people. Let us say that this is 100 in a million. And then in one clump of vaccinated group there are a few idiots. Someone (scoops and) runs with the story that vaccination causes idiocy. And that makes the press and internet circuits. It would not be "news" if someone runs a background check on the information to find out that there are only 88 idiots in the million that were vaccinated.

Update on the safety of COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca :

A careful review of all available safety data of more than 17 million people vaccinated in the European Union (EU) and UK with COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca has shown no evidence of an increased risk of pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis (DVT) or thrombocytopenia, in any defined age group, gender, batch or in any particular country.

So far across the EU and UK, there have been 15 events of DVT and 22 events of pulmonary embolism reported among those given the vaccine, based on the number of cases the Company has received as of 8 March. This is much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size and is similar across other licensed COVID-19 vaccines. The monthly safety report will be made public on the European Medicines Agency website in the following week, in line with exceptional transparency measures for COVID-19.​

 

The Astra Zeneca Oxford vaccine story will surely give us a mini-serial soap opera. It has colorful characters, and a dual plot track of a huge experimental botch of dose level at the early stage trials, while both the insiders and outsiders were talking it up big time.

The story (linked above) has the following that Americans would call "forward looking statements".

Britain’s health minister, Matt Hancock, told a press conference in April that Britain was “at the forefront of the global effort” to find a vaccine.

On June 26, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, said at a press conference that Oxford’s vaccine was probably the world’s leading candidate.

Five days later, the then head of Britain’s vaccine procurement program, Kate Bingham, told a parliamentary committee: “Oxford is ahead of the world in that it is the most advanced vaccine anywhere.”

Some Oxford scientists did little to dampen the enthusiasm. Asked at the same science and technology parliamentary committee on July 1 whether the world would have to struggle through the coming winter without a vaccine, Gilbert said, “I hope we can improve on those timelines and come to your rescue.”

At the end of July, she alluded to competing vaccine efforts. In an interview on the Royal Society of Biology’s website, she said of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine: “If this doesn’t work, I don’t think anything will work.”

Her main partner on the project, Hill, was equally bullish. On May 15, he told Reuters the Oxford/AstraZeneca candidate is “almost certainly the best single dose rapid-response vaccine.” He dismissed as “total unknowns” and a “wild card” the vaccines using mRNA technology, such as Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, which have since published results showing they were both at least 94% effective at preventing COVID-19. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is already being distributed in the millions in the United States and the UK.

“Why would you take a vaccine technology that is new, unproven, maybe quick to manufacture, but expensive to manufacture - and has never been scaled up and has never been shown to protect against anything in humans, and prioritize that in a global emergency?” he asked. “It’s very odd.”​

In the TV soap opera serial, the villain would be an American; developing and executing a plan to thwart the efforts of Oxford and the spin-off commercial venture called VacciTech PLC (obviously a name chosen by Techies... and not Marketers) to market the Oxford vaccine to the world. Chris Cuomo (a recovered corona infected news personality) would quit his job at CNN, which he hates so much, and get employed by a consortium of American Big Pharma in this operation.

We may watch this serial drama during the next time we are in a lockdown. This is certainly a PRO. Americans would certainly enjoy watching the documentary-drama proving to the world that Europeans are no more sophisticated than we are.