Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins
I would just like us all to stop pretending that any of one&#x27;s fear of COVID or skepticism of vaccines or distrust of whoever or whatever is about rational calculated risks. It&#x27;s about how we feel, so let&#x27;s talk about that.<p>Look, everyone is scared of doing something until they&#x27;re scared of not doing it. Everyone distrusts government until they trust it, and distrusts pharma until they trust it. Some people will wear their mask in the grocery store even though it&#x27;s a cloth mask that&#x27;s as good as doing nothing because now it feels weird not to. Some people won&#x27;t take the COVID vaccine but they&#x27;ll happily take remdesivir and ivermectin. (Who do you think makes remdesivir and ivermectin?) Some people will happily go to an indoor comic convention that&#x27;s an hour&#x27;s drive from them, but not to an outdoor wedding, because it would mean getting on a plane (this actually happened with a family member of mine and I am not over it).<p>All of which is to say that what people are really doing is going with their gut. If your gut instinct is &quot;COVID&#x27;s not a big deal&quot;, then of course taking an emergency-use-authorized vaccine for it seems risky. If your gut instinct is &quot;COVID is dangerous and deadly&quot;, you&#x27;ll take anything you can get. Now that things are subsiding, and the fear is waning, I read an article like this and I think &quot;hmm, that does seem bad, we should look into it, but also I am gonna keep doing what I&#x27;m doing and getting my COVID vaccine because it seems like it&#x27;s helping.&quot; On the other hand, you have people who are <i>literally dying of COVID</i> who are still relieved they were able to dodge getting the vaccine because it felt scary to get a not-fully-tested drug.<p>So I&#x27;m pro-vaccine because they seem like a good idea and my experiences with them (four shots so far) have been positive, in that my side effects were limited and I know there were situations where I could have gotten COVID and I didn&#x27;t. (And when I did get COVID, it was extremely mild.) Who&#x27;s to say how I&#x27;d have felt if I were one of the few cases of myocarditis out there? Who&#x27;s to say how I would&#x27;ve felt if I&#x27;d had mild COVID and recovered from it pre-vaccine? What if I&#x27;d been hospitalized with COVID pre-vaccine?<p>Can we just admit this isn&#x27;t about logic or statistics, and never was? It was always a persuasion game either way.