I think we will all be 'forced' to take the vaccine.
Want your kid to go to school... Vaccine, want to walk into the school building...Vaccine
Want to travel via Airplane...Vaccine. Want to go into any government building...Vaccine.
I think the powers to be will make it very very VERY hard to have a 'normal' life if you do not have this Vaccine.
I need more data before I make the decision if I or my kid will have this vaccine.
What sort of data? The sort of data that career scientists who have spent decades studying to make this exact decision are looking at this week?
The sort of data that career scientists who have spend decades studying don't currently have because nobody has it because we've never developed a vaccine this quickly before and had to cut some of the safety practices we usually perform to do so.
I think it's worth mentioning that anti-vaxxer sentiment is high enough, and combined with the huge amount of covid-denier/conspiracy, this puts the incentives for the FDA in direction of being MUCH more cautious in approving this than they logically should be if it were just a question of whether this will save lives. They have to take into account that any serious side effects, no matter how rare, will put huge swaths of people off from taking ANY vaccine, and cost huge amounts of lives for years to come. I see absolutely no reason to doubt anything the FDA approves. And Canada and the UK, which I trust plenty, have already approved the Pfizer vaccine.
This is a weird statement to make. Earlier you argued that we need to place our faith in science. Now I'm hearing an argument that fear of political pressure (from anti-vax people) changes the way that science is done . . . which fundamentally misunderstands the whole scientific process.
At the end of the day we have a process for producing vaccines. This process has been shortcut to give us a vaccine faster for covid. A huge amount of effort and testing has been done on the coronavirus vaccines to make them as safe as possible. The vaccine is as safe as we can make it right now. We are missing out on some testing data that normally would have be done though.
"Science" isn't a thing, and there's no way to put faith in it. There's only people and their collected knowledge, methodologies and interests.
I'm simply talking about the incentives to the FDA because I think they're important. The truth is the question they're answering is a different question than "Should I, Cangelosi Brown, take this vaccine." They're asking a question closer to "Will American society be better or worse if we approve this vaccine," although it's a much more nuanced ethical version of that than my extremely simplified utilitarian reduction.
For example the fact that you will likely feel pretty lousy for a day or two after the vaccine is given very little weight by the FDA. You might give it more weight than that.
If the FDA's incentives were hugely pushed in the direction of "approve anything because so many people are dying that any possible side-effects are meaningless in context," which is what I think a lot of people are assuming, based on the responses here and elsewhere, then that might lead me to a different personal decision. I might decide to skip it for a while and just wear a mask and avoid people for a while longer.
But, and this is just my supposition, the FDA's incentives are in the opposite direction of that. They're overweighting individual safety when they make this decision, because of external factors such as anti-vaxxers. So I see no reason why their decision to approve nationally wouldn't be well above my threshold to approve it personally (i.e. taking it)