The article specifically calls out this risk as "very low" and quantifies it as less than 1 in 50,000. The death rates from motor vehicle accidents in the US was ~11 per 100,000 people in 2019 [1].
I assume since you're that risk averse, you no longer drive?
This is a good example of how people are bad at risk assessment and also why people have a phobia about air travel but rarely about driving even though air travel is significantly safer.
So using the argument that there are risks with the vaccine is a selective argument that no one applies to virtually every other aspect of their lives and also misses the point: those risks are quantifiably tiny and need to be weighed up against the risks to themselves of NOT taking the vaccine, including hospitalization, death and long Covid as well as the impact that choice has on others, collectively.
> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?
I actually can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not. The optimist in me is choosing to believe it is.
For my age/health group, I view this risk of Covid to be less than the risk of the known issues with the vaccines and the unknown long term risk factors that aren’t yet fully known.
Do you fly on planes with a known safe takeoff statistics but no one has ever landed it before? It’s hard to quantify unknown risk, and I don’t trust people that safe don’t worry about this shot and we aren’t liable if there are side effects!
> For my age/health group, I view this risk of Covid to be less than the risk of the known issues with the vaccines
1. If you extrapolate that out to everyone doing it, we have a ton more people die, many from things unrelated to Covid because hospitals don't have the capacity. That hasn't been factored into your risk assessment;
2. Even with highly-effective vaccines, the death count in the US is at least 700,000. That's likely underreported by a large amount. The absolute worst case for risks of getting the vaccine are orders of magnitude less than that; and
3. Your choices don't affect just you.
(3) is the big one for me. If the net effect of not taking a vaccine was that that person would simply be more likely to die with no consequences to anyone else, I'd just call that evolution in action and move on.
But that's not the case. And the impact on other people is seemingly given absolutely no weight into these anti-vaxx decisions, which is the selfish aspect I was referring to.
Further to that, we get this under control and the vaccinated and unvaccinated both get to share in the benefits of that so it's doubly selfish.
The worst part is this level of selfishness is dressed up as some kind of virtue.
> unknown long term risk factors that aren’t yet fully known
That's just the fudge factor of confirmation bias rearing its ugly head.
100% agree on #3, and also find it odd that it’s frequently missing from the discussion. People complain about how being allowed to do something (or not) impacts themselves, or that another person can or can’t do something impacts that other person. There is less thought spent on how one person’s decisions impact everybody is law though.
How far down the rabbit hole of banning everything because it pisses someone else off do you want to go down?
Do we live in a society where we use authority to enforce the “right choice “ or do we make information and education available for people to decide for themselves how they want to live?
I rather live free, even if some people make bad choices. The risk of central authority eventually turning evil is too high.
It’s a fair question and I think the response is it scales with your proximity to other people. If you live out in the country and your nearest neighbor is a mile away then by all means do whatever you want as most of your choices will not impact others. If you’re living in a dense metropolis in a 500 unit complex then the equation is different as your choices impact more people quicker.
The article specifically calls out this risk as "very low" and quantifies it as less than 1 in 50,000. The death rates from motor vehicle accidents in the US was ~11 per 100,000 people in 2019 [1].
I assume since you're that risk averse, you no longer drive?
This is a good example of how people are bad at risk assessment and also why people have a phobia about air travel but rarely about driving even though air travel is significantly safer.
So using the argument that there are risks with the vaccine is a selective argument that no one applies to virtually every other aspect of their lives and also misses the point: those risks are quantifiably tiny and need to be weighed up against the risks to themselves of NOT taking the vaccine, including hospitalization, death and long Covid as well as the impact that choice has on others, collectively.
> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?
I actually can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not. The optimist in me is choosing to believe it is.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...