But don't you see that you're immediately resorting to the somewhat misleading arguments that I already preempted? You're engaging in the typical fallacy of vaccine OR covid. When in reality it was clear rather early on that the vaccines were not particularly effective at preventing people from getting COVID, meaning you need to look at getting the vaccine and covid, or covid alone.
And yes the risks are very real. Vaccine induced myocarditis and pericarditis rates in young males are very high, and they can result in heart failure, life long damage, early mortality, and more. And for young males you're looking at multiple significant cases per 10,000. [1] For all cases of myocarditis/pericarditis the rates would be substantially higher yet still since most cases will go undiagnosed. For some contrast, the normal rate of significant side effects in vaccines ranges in the 1:100k to 1000k range.
No, that's a straw man you made up. You very well could not have gotten COVID-19. I didn't get it for about 4 years. Well, at least a symptomatic version. But the chances of getting it were quite high, and you are still neglecting the timeframe in which decisions would have been made based on preliminary data. In other words, it wasn't get vaccine or get COVID-19. It was get the vaccine and most likely prevent getting a very severe bout of COVID-19 if you did in fact get COVID, which the vast majority of Americans did get, or something similar, including those in the age range you specified. Frankly, it seems to me that just not being sick was well worth the risk.
I'm not going to pull a number out of my hat here but I bet the number of people who were in the 19-20 year old range who died from suicide or something after losing their job from getting sick from COVID-19 and not having sick days to take is higher than the number of folks who died from the vaccine.
Even if it turned out that COVID-19 wasn't a big deal for 19/20 year olds and taking the vaccine might cause negative effects, it still doesn't mean that getting the vaccine at the time wasn't the best risk-based decision.
All in all though even if we took at face value your 1:10,000 number that still would be tangential to my original post because you're focusing on one small segment of the population and as folks get older (or younger) their risk profile changes.
What's a straw man? Following the vaccines, vaccinated people were still getting COVID and indeed dying of COVID. Early on that was disproportionately the elderly as they were who the vaccines were rolled out to first, but nonetheless it was clear that the shots were much more akin to flu shots than e.g. smallpox or polio type vaccines. This is what led to those silly things like the CDC deciding to redefine vaccine on their website to shift vaccination language away from immunity and towards a poorly define "protection" instead.
And the 1:10,000 is not my number. It is the repeatedly verified rates of significant myocarditis and pericarditis, and it's much lower once you filter it down to just younger males since the 1:10000 is for both male and female across a relatively wide age range. It's not tangential, because the entire point of our discussion is that there were rather large groups of people for whom vaccination was, at the bare minimum, an extremely debatable decision.
> rates of significant myocarditis after vaccination
Absolute straw man, deceptive and one-sided.
> Young people’s risk of developing myocarditis is higher and longer lasting after covid-19 infection than after vaccination against it, the largest study of its kind suggests.
I again don't know what you mean. Are you stating that you don't believe that the CDC chose to redefine vaccination to move away from immunity and towards "protection"? Or do you think it had nothing to do with the low efficacy of the vaccines in preventing infection?
The paper you linked to studied a much wider age group and assessed the odds of heart issues from vaccination as being about 1/3rd as high as those from infection. Their estimated rates of vaccine induced heart issues are more than an order of magnitude lower than those for the study I referenced earlier which instead was an overview of studies with more of a focus of vaccination's impact on vulnerable groups.
I'd also add that, as is typical, the study you linked to failed to assess the odds of heart issues were when one was both vaccinated and then later infected, as that is a rather more realistic scenario.
And yes the risks are very real. Vaccine induced myocarditis and pericarditis rates in young males are very high, and they can result in heart failure, life long damage, early mortality, and more. And for young males you're looking at multiple significant cases per 10,000. [1] For all cases of myocarditis/pericarditis the rates would be substantially higher yet still since most cases will go undiagnosed. For some contrast, the normal rate of significant side effects in vaccines ranges in the 1:100k to 1000k range.
[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-024-00893-1