Isn't tinnitus a known side effect of actually getting COVID-19 too?
So - if you don't take the vaccine, better make sure you live in a bubble for the rest of your life so you don't get COVID-19 either. Disclaimer: I'm still waiting to make up my mind about the vaccine too.
FWIW I had about a 7 day spike after #2, similar to what happens sometimes with a flu vaxx. It was much more minor than the spikes I get from any kind of illness.
In my real day to day life I have 4 good vaxxed friends who all have tinnitus (mild, moderate, moderate, severe). One of them experienced a spike from the vaxx that subsided in a couple weeks, and his mother (who doesn't have tinnitus) had it for a few days after the second shot. The person who has severe tinnitus said no change whatsoever from the shot, but they had previously had COVID-19 and they do feel that having COVID-19 did permanent hearing damage, they just toasted a bunch of additional high frequency hearing, proved by audiogram (pre vaccination).
You can find all sorts of other bullshit anecdotes online but if you go to the primary sources and pour over the whitepapers, it's pretty easy to conclude that:
* the vaccines
may pose some tiny risk to hearing*
* COVID-19 causes hearing loss and/or tinnitus in 10-15% of cases.
That's pretty cut and dry. The asterix is because, just based on the number of Americans we've vaccinated, and the normal rate of tinnitus in the population, at this point we'd expect that 30,000 people in the US would have developed tinnitus within 2 weeks of one of their shots, and this has nothing to do with the shot, that's just the normal rate of people developing tinnitus in the US.
If it's actually 60,000 or 90,000 then that's a big problem, but last I checked there were less than 30,000 incidents related to this period in VAERS, and also keep in mind VAERS data includes a lot of people (like me!) who reported tinnitus after the jab and then had it fade.
To put things differently, in my personal life I know one person who suffered significant hearing loss from COVID-19, about six dozen people who are fully vaxxed, and no one who had any long term problems from any of the shots. People can do whatever they want but Delta scares me more than any of these other things and my experience with #1 and #2 was trivial enough that I expect to get a delta booster with no hesitation as soon as it is available.
The worst thing about the vaxx by far was the weeks of waiting to get it and wondering if it was a good idea; if I could have just signed up and boom been done same day, it would have been much less stressful.