I originally was wary of the vaccine just because it was kind of rushed (for good reason), but during the period that it was slowly becoming available but still not available for me, I gave it lot of thought, basically weighing the long term risks of the vaccine and the long term risks of covid. Long story short the long term risks of covid are becoming more and more established and are there. The long term risks of the vaccine are not yet known (if there are even any and that's a big if) but based on history of vaccines in general I feel the risks are very low. A lot of people seem to get reactions but they are short and I don't even worry about anything short term. There are very rare cases of serious long term effects or even death such as the AZ blood clots but those are still fairly low odds compared to the chances of complications from covid. Also it's not just unhealthy people who are getting complications, there has been cases of young healthy people such as former Olympic athletes actually ending up in hospital. I suppose a case like that is fairly rare, but it can happen.
So weighing both sides, I chose to get the vaccine myself. Now that we have covid in the family it hit close to home and now I can't wait to be able to get my 2nd shot. My sister actually did have the vaccine for 2-3 weeks and is still sick so the 1st shot is probably not the end all be all, but I imagine it helps.
I really hope they can look at giving out 2nd shots sooner here given the situation as it would be nice to get it within the month instead of having to wait several months for the scheduled date.
I can't speak about the long term effects of these vaccines because, @ this point, not enough time has elapsed, but I CAN talk about the effects vaccines are having right now in Portugal.
Since Portugal began having deaths from this virus on March 2020, we only had ONE DAY with zero deaths in 2020 and it was on
August 3rd 2020. People starting to get vaccinated just before the year's end, and with just roughly 23% of our population with the 1st dose and roughly 8.4% with the 2nd dose,
we had our 2nd day with zero fatalities from COVID and, since then, we had SIX more days with zero fatalities,
THREE of which this past week, though we are experiencing an uptick in new cases which MAY aggravate things.
Herd immunity is thought to be around 70% to 80% but, as can be seen here in Portugal, even with 36.5% of our citizens with the 1st dose alone, the fatalities dropped severely.
Compare this latest week with
our worst week, back in January 31st. Portugal has roughly 1 / 32 of USA's population so multiply our numbers by 32 and compare those to USA's worst days: you'll find we had WORSE worst days than USA ever did.
Good luck to your family members: may they return to good health shortly.