My impression from rather cursory research is that serious or long-lasting side effects are extremely rare. I would guess that most of the health risk is probably concentrated in car accidents on the way to/from the vaccine clinic. Minor side effects like “the injection site is mildly sore for a couple weeks” are common. Injection with the bifurcated needle method also produced a small permanent scar (older people often have these), although all or most of the current vaccinations are done with the subcutaneous injection method common with other vaccines and so do not produce scarring.
I naively guess that from the perspective of society at large the biggest cost of the vaccine program is the operational overhead of distribution and administration, not the side effects; and that on the personal scale the biggest cost is the time it takes to register for and receive the vaccine, rather than the side effects.
As to the benefit side of the equation, the risks of outbreak are extremely conjectural and rely on several layers of guesswork about technology development and adversarial political decisions—two areas which are notoriously hard to predict—so I don’t have much to say on that front beyond “make your best guess”.
The third-generation vaccine being given now was specifically developed in order to have a smallpox vaccine that was safer especially for people with health problems, and so has much less of a trade-off with conjectural benefits.
My impression from rather cursory research is that serious or long-lasting side effects are extremely rare. I would guess that most of the health risk is probably concentrated in car accidents on the way to/from the vaccine clinic. Minor side effects like “the injection site is mildly sore for a couple weeks” are common. Injection with the bifurcated needle method also produced a small permanent scar (older people often have these), although all or most of the current vaccinations are done with the subcutaneous injection method common with other vaccines and so do not produce scarring.
I naively guess that from the perspective of society at large the biggest cost of the vaccine program is the operational overhead of distribution and administration, not the side effects; and that on the personal scale the biggest cost is the time it takes to register for and receive the vaccine, rather than the side effects.
As to the benefit side of the equation, the risks of outbreak are extremely conjectural and rely on several layers of guesswork about technology development and adversarial political decisions—two areas which are notoriously hard to predict—so I don’t have much to say on that front beyond “make your best guess”.
The third-generation vaccine being given now was specifically developed in order to have a smallpox vaccine that was safer especially for people with health problems, and so has much less of a trade-off with conjectural benefits.