if you like number think about this. There is 25% chance you get covid this year and if you get covid there is 0.5% (IFR) chance you will die and 100% chance you will infect 7 other people.
How does this compare with the odd of adverse reactions to the vaccine?
Yeah cool I'll pass that along to the 3 people I personally know who died from it.
1 in 100 odds isn't super great, and that's ignoring the unknown impact of long-COVID. The risk of bad vaccine side-effects is lower than the chance of death.
You have to look at the odds: the risky vaccine side-effects are massively less common than those of COVID, which in case you haven’t noticed is raging and causing lots of economic disruption to boot. The trade-off is obvious.
Adverse reactions are real, but they are orders of magnitude less likely than those caused by Covid itself and Covid is capable of causing basically all the same long tail harms the vaccines can.
Which makes sense--many of them are made of some part of the virus, so how can they be more deadly than Covid itself if they're just a piece of it?
It's weird to me that people aren't willing to trade a 2% risk for a 0.0002% risk when both have similar types of horrible outcomes.
The numbers we're talking about are slightly different. You're referring to CFR but calling it IFR. There are many more infections than positive tests ("cases"). That's OK, the difference is quite subtle. Likewise your hospitalization stat is hospitalizations per infection and only in one US state, whereas the stat I quoted is the weekly risk of COVID hospitalization for everyone in that age band in the UK.
It doesn't matter much. The stats you cited don't change the point being made: whether it's 0.1% or 1%, neither number is "relatively high", "fairly high" or a "high chance". These are all quite low probabilities.
"Feeling sick for a few days after a vaccine is not in any way similar to actually being infected with COVID"
For many people it does seem to be the same. I know a few people who got COVID. They report the same experience as many people who got side effects from the vaccine: a day or two of feeling really rough, followed by recovery. But getting COVID, or at least COVID bad enough to notice, isn't that common. The cumulative number of cases is about 10% of the population where I live. Probably there were far more infections, but if those infections don't yield noticeable symptoms then they don't matter, so we can say 10%. By now I know more people who got sick from the vaccine than sick from COVID. It's not a massive surprise as far more than 10% got the vaccine. Given how they work, it makes sense that lots of people who get it report getting a form of COVID. The assumption that it's always drastically worse to get COVID itself does not match what I hear other people around me report. For example nobody who got COVID said it interfered with their periods. The vaccines have done this to several women my girlfriend knows.
This is what leads to problems and disagreements. People are pushing vaccines with claims about COVID that don't match the stats, and claims about the vaccines which seem to be contradicted by lived experience from the offline world. What are people to make of this?
You have a 0.5-1.0% chance to die from COVID-19, a higher chance to be hospitalized and experience serious consequences from that. And the chance to contract the disease is very, very high in many countries right now.
The vaccines have been tested in 30-40,000 people each. The typical serious side effects for vaccines are something like 1 in a million or 1 in a few hundred thousand. Even if the vaccine had an usually high level of side effects, odds are it's still far, far less harmfull than contracting the actual disease.
I've seen numbers from germany that suggest across all vaccines manufactured the risk is roughly 1/8500 (~0.00011) for severe adverse events, while Ioannidis somewhat recently published a systematic review finding the global IFR roughly 0.0014 for covid - so it would seem the vaccine risk is about an order of magnitude lower than covid, but I do think it's a tough and important question to consider because many people are at much higher risk for covid (which mean others are much lower) and there are a great deal of asymptomatic people that may already have better immunity than these vaccines can provide.
Unfortunately I'm not expecting much calm rational debate on the nuances of getting the vaccine. This whole pandemic has felt like an emotional rollercoast void of logic.
(and please don't take my vaccine numbers as an authoritative risk assessment - there's a lot that goes into assessing such a number and I don't want to sound like I'm confident those numbers are correct)
Its also not a guarantee you get Covid. Current stats are that 50 / 330 million of the USA population have had Covid. So comparing the risk factors of the vaccine to covid directly is a bit misleading, IMO.
Currently, I think the numbers for a person in that case are then 1% chance of getting COVID again naturally vs vaccine’s 0.001% chance of allergic reaction and a reduced chance of getting COVID again of 0.5%. (Using very round numbers)
With all respect, this is terrible logic. You have two probabilities to compare, not one to compare to zero! If and only if the vaccine is more dangerous then your "improbably small chance of dying of covid", you should forego the vaccination.
Is it? No. It is not. Not even for the best protected youngest cohort. Get your shot. You're being misled by politics and tiny, difficult numbers.
Any vaccine triggers an immune response, so it's not surprising that there's some small risk to people in taking them. But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.
I think it's reasonable to do a personal assessment of the risk. Yes, COVID can have very negative short and long term effects. BUT, what are an individuals chance of getting COVID? Quite a bit less than 100%.
That's not the same math as the vaccine.
If you've had COVID you are more likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine, it's just how the immune system reactions. If I knew I'd have 2 bad sick days to take 2 doses of a vaccine that I have already beaten.. meh.
That's reassuring from a public health perspective, not so reassuring from an individual perspective. When it comes to one's personal risk, you have a sense of control over not getting COVID, and/or are personally at low risk of severe complications, which can weigh in favor of avoiding a vaccine with extremely rare but serious side effects.
It's a simple risk-reward calculation: the vaccine protects me from Covid-19. The chance of side effects is very low. The chance of severe, long-term complications that cause me more than $250K in damages is even lower.
Yeah, there's a tiny risk that I'll end up in a situation where I get screwed over, but I'm significantly more likely to suffer harm from Covid.
Your own calculations will vary, of course - this is just the math given my own risk factors.
It's kind of annoying to have to be fearful on public transport, having to avoid infecting older family members and therefore not seeing them, and much else. Then there's the risk to yourself with COVID, which varies based on your lifestyle, age, and good/bad genes. Clearly some percentage of the population die, and a bigger have long-term very unpleasant effects.
On the other hand, the vaccine can be discovered, 12 months from now, to cause an autoimmune reaction in some people and their immune systems attack their joints or something.
I think this pandemic teaches us all one thing - almost the entire world of understanding can be boiled down to probability.
How does this compare with the odd of adverse reactions to the vaccine?
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