EDIT: more respectful title.
So my FIL isn't really all that terrible politically-speaking, and was even one of the human trial volunteers for the original COVID vaccines (can't remember which).
However, he did spend much of the larger pandemic years obsessively watching youtube videos by a handful of people claiming to be doctors who would do weekly news updates on stuff like vaccination progress, covid mutations, just general "pandemic content" which also seems to have covered side effects and concerns with the vaccines.
That's to be said, that now if current COVID vaccines are mentioned in any way he'll mention stuff like "heart problems" and "lung damage" and "rolled out too quickly" etc. which comes off (to me) as anti-vax paranoia, but I also don't really know how to properly research this shit myself because I'm not an immunologist!
Of course there's the usual capitalistic bullshit with COVID vaccines as there are with other vaccine programs, such as how the imperial monopolized the vaccine efforts to exploit it for $$$ in the global south (and in turn, created an endless pandemic hellhole). However, in terms of its safety and effectiveness I can't say I buy much of the claims because we've seen how even this botched vaccine rollout correlated with massively reduced hospital admissions and long term COVID effects.
EDIT: I've added a few links I've found while researching this myself in the comments. I hope some of this info is useful to people other than myself, and hopefully I've understood some of it properly. I didn't want to ask a question like this and not do any work on it myself!
The risk of myocarditis is present every time you get covid, because covid is a vascular disease and can directly attack your heart.
There is also a risk of side effects every time your immune system is activated, which vaccines purposely do. A real virus will always cause worse harm, because it's an active infection attacking your body, and not just a vaccine that is mostly inert and designed to trick your body into reacting.
For example, 36 million doses of the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine resulted in an approximate excess of 430 cases of myocarditis above the 105 expected (as derived from analysis of Figure 3 of the study). That is roughly 12 excess cases of myocarditis for every 1 million doses administered in a 42-day window post-vaccination.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/06/sfvw-m06.html
It should also be noted that during the vaccine rollout we never had covid fully under control, and it was very much present in a lot of communities, especially younger folks where most of the side effects were noticed, since so many people assumed young people weren't effected by covid. I'm not sure if any safety review took this into account, but the chance that people got covid before the vaccine took effect (like if they went back to normal immediatly and didn't wait two weeks) was not insignificant.
The site COVID.tips is all about how to talk to your friends and family regarding various COVID subjects. One of the arguments in particular that they mention is "okay you don't like the mRNA vaccines, why not get Novavax (which is a traditional vaccine)?". Note: this is assuming you're in the US, as I don't know if it has been distributed much internationally.
And yeah, as you've pointed out in your comment, the side-effects of the vaccination are lesser versions of what happens if you actually get COVID.
I'm just gonna post any findings I do notice as a comment as not to mislead in the original post.
- https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-11-reveals-covid-vaccine-safety-patients.html
So the one thing I see a lot of skeptic accounts mention is "blood clots" and heart/circulatory issues following vaccination, which the study mentioned in this article directly addresses. From what I can tell from this analysis, however, is that: yes the risk of "thrombo-embolic events" does increase post-vaccine,but only if you were already suffering or at risk of atrial fibrillation/flutter. Furthermore, this increased risk was only if at-risk patients weren't given anti-coagulant medications post-vaccine.
The IRR across the whole population was 0.93 (Which I'm taking to mean more-or-less no difference in risk?) whereas for the untreated, at-risk group was 1.88.
- https://www.salon.com/2024/02/23/major-vaccine-study-finds-heart-risks-are-rare--and-the-real-is-being-unvaccinated/
So personally I don't think these articles are as helpful because it has more opinion to it, but then I'm still personally too layman to understand the source material either. Then again, I'm only mentioning it here because Salon has some actual journalistic integrity from what I gather, unlike the Daily Mail.
This one covers claims of myocarditis and Guillian-barre syndrome, and points out that these "side effects" are also present in... getting COVID. I'm well aware that COVID and long-COVID are strongly linked to heart/circulation issues so it also makes sense if the vaccine had these rare side effects - no different to getting a snotty nose and a headache after a flu shot.
- https://pennstatehealthnews.org/2022/09/covid-19-infection-causes-myocarditis/#%3A%7E%3Atext=The+researchers+compared+patients+with%2Cdid+not+contract+the+virus.
This link is one of the papers mentioned in the Salon article, about the risk of myocarditis being 7 times more likely from COVID infections over vaccination. Honestly this is more helpful for me to digest; It's good enough to look at "X times in Y doses, Z sometimes happens" but that isn't the dice roll I'm making - the game of chance is what side effects of infection am I risking that would be avoided/mitigated by vaccination which might be a good in-road with my FIL.
