Why we know the Covid vaccines are safe

A good article at the University of Alabama:

In his nearly 30 years studying vaccines, Paul Goepfert, M.D., director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has never seen any vaccine as effective as the three COVID vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson — currently available in the United States. 

“A 90 percent decrease in risk of infections, and 94 percent effectiveness against hospitalization for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is fantastic,” he said. 

Yep. I’ve had my first shot and can’t wait for my second, which is booked in for late September.

But what makes vaccine experts such as Goepfert confident that COVID vaccines are safe in the long term? …

Vaccines are eliminated quickly

Unlike many medications, which are taken daily, vaccines are generally one-and-done. Medicines you take every day can cause side effects that reveal themselves over time, including long-term problems as levels of the drug build up in the body over months and years. 

“Vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body,” Goepfert said. “This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn’t expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine.”

So the vaccine is in and out.

Vaccine side effects show up within weeks if at all That is not to say that there have never been safety issues with vaccines. But in each instance, these have appeared soon after widespread use of the vaccine began. 

“The side effects that we see occur early on, and that’s it,” Goepfert said. “In virtually all cases, vaccine side effects are seen within the first two months after rollout.”

And we’ve had people taking these for nine months now.

As of June 12, 2021, more than 2.33 billion COVID vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, according to the New York Times vaccinations tracker. 

So we’ve now got data on even the rarest side effects, the 1 in 100,000 ones. It is unlikely that there are any further ones out there.

At some stage NZ will open its borders and Covid-19 will come in. If you choose not to be vaccinated, then your risk of serious harm from it is far far greater than any adverse reaction to the vaccine.