Ten months after the vaccines became available we now have meaningful data that can guide people deciding if they should or shouldn't get themselves or their children vaccinated against covid.
The best available data about the actual risks of the mRNA vaccines--specifically the Pfizer/BioNTech shots--come from a joint Israeli-Harvard Medical School study evaluating the medical records of more than 1.6 million people, half of whom received two Pfizer jabs while half remained unvaccinated. I reported on this study here, and you can find the peer-reviewed paper itself, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, here.
Balancing covid vaccine risks and benefits
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The study found that just five side-effects occurred more frequently in the vaccinated groups in the six weeks following vaccination relative to a comparable time period for the unvaccinated group. These included swollen lymph nodes (78.4 additional cases per 100,000 people), shingles (15.8 extra cases per 100,000), appendicitis (5 additional cases per 100,000), Bell's palsy (3.5 additional cases per 100,000) and myocarditis (2.7 additional cases per 100,000, almost all in young men).
If we add all those side-effects together we find an incidence of 105.4 per 100,000 fully vaccinated people.
It's worth noting that those symptoms vary in seriousness. The most frequent--swollen lymph nodes--is a predictable, rarely serious, reaction to vaccination, while the remaining four potentially more serious conditions represent a total of just 27 additional cases per 100,000 vaccinated people.
To keep things simple and clear, you can safely estimate that if you get two rounds of the Pfizer vaccine, your risk of suffering any reaction worse than a sore arm is around 1 in 1000, and your risk of a serious side-effect such as shingles or appendicitis is around 1 out of 3700.
We can compare these risks to the risks from covid itself in a variety of ways. Here are several that readers may find helpful:
Risks from covid in the Israeli-Harvard study: Among the 800,000 participants who remained unvaccinated, a significant number contracted covid. As is typical of covid, not all of those developed serious symptoms. However, far more did experience significant symptoms and sequelae from covid than were seen in their vaccinated peers. These included cardiac arrythmia (166 extra cases per 100,000), acute kidney injury (125.4 extra cases per 100,000), pulmonary embolism--a blood clot in the lung--(61.7 extra cases per 100,000), deep-vein thrombosis (43 extra cases per 100,000), myocardial infarction--a heart attack--(25 extra cases per 100,000), myocarditis (11 extra cases per 100,000), pericarditis (10.9 extra cases per 100,000) and intracranial bleeding (7.6 extra cases per 100,000).
So, in the same 6 week period, the unvaccinated group suffered serious, very serious or potentially fatal symptoms such as acute kidney injury, pulmonary blood clots or heart attacks at a combined rate of 443 per 100,000. That's more than four times the rate of all the vaccine side-effects combined, and 16 times the rate of the potentially serious vaccine side-effects.
Risk of contracting covid in the US as a whole. As of 10/18/21, there have been 45,798,599 recorded covid cases in the US. That's a case rate of 13,733 per 100,000 people, accumulated over 22 months. It's not possible to predict the exact course of the pandemic going forward, but for the average American the risk of contracting covid, say in the next 12 months, is probably 50 or 60 times higher than the risk of any side-effect from the vaccine, and several hundred times higher than the risk of any of the more serious side-effects.
As critics of covid vaccination point out, many covid cases are relatively mild. However, in the US over the course of the pandemic so far, about one out of every 20 people who contracted covid got sick enough to require hospitalization.
Risk of covid hospitalization in the US as a whole. As of 10/18/21, the cumulative covid hospitalization rate in the US reached 694 per 100,000. That implies that the average US resident is 6.6 times more likely to have been hospitalized because of covid than they would have been at risk for any negative reaction to the vaccine, and 26 times more likely to have been hospitalized from covid than to have risked a serious reaction to the vaccine.
Again, the first 22 months of the pandemic don't tell us what the next 22 months will bring, but the risk continues, especially among the unvaccinated.
Again, vaccination critics point out that "covid has a 99 percent survival rate." That's not quite true. In the US so far, 1.6 percent of recorded covid cases have resulted in recorded covid deaths. We can now compare that to the risks from vaccination.
Risk of death from covid in the US as a whole. As of 10/18/21 the cumulative rate of deaths from covid hit 224.5 per 100,000 people. That means that on average, a US resident is 2.1 times more likely to have died from covid since the start of the pandemic to date than to have risked any negative reaction to a vaccine, and 8.3 times more likely to have died as a result of covid than to have risked one of the serious reaction to the vaccine.
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