COVID-19 Pandemic

go to /r/nursing and sort by top of all time and just read the posts and the respective top comments, most of it is about covid patients and how absolutely awful the situation is

most people think that getting covid is a black and white case of either dying with a chance of around 2 % or surviving and being perfectly fine, when in reality you might get permanent lung damage, making a walk from your bed to the kitchen seem like running a maraphon

or get brain damage from hypoxia, so that you get what's called brain fog, meaning that your consciousness will be clouded for an unknown time

or any number of yet undescovered side effects

tldr iirc there is a small chance to get sick from a vaccine, but there is an exponentially higher change to get sick without a vaccine and suffer much worse consequences

First of all it doesn't matter if you win this argument. Herd immunity does not require 100% of people to be vaccinated. That's why it's such solid public health policy, and why vaccine mandates are so controversial. It doesn't matter one iota if this one guy and all his friends don't get vaccinated.

Seconly, the first data I found was this.

As of January 8, 2021, 55 deaths were reported, and the mortality rate of COVID-19 vaccination was 8.2 per million population. A total of 37 deaths were reported among long-term care facility residents, and the mortality rate was 53.4 per million population. Top reported comorbidities associated with deaths included hypertension, dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, and heart failure. In addition, dementia was more likely to be associated with deaths vaccinated at long-term care facilities than at other locations.

Fairly insignificant then. It's less than the chance of being murdered each year (for an englishman). Less than the chance of randomly dying for some other reason that day. And it's less than the chance of dying from running a marathon. Source

I didn't do the sums, but I'd wager it's also less than the chance of contracting and dying from covid.

Unless you are demented or diabetic etc, you're probably fine. Anyway, it's a free choice he can make. None of anyone else's business, unless he's unfortunate enough to live in Italy.

From what I've heard, this misconception comes from the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Pretty much any issues that come up after a vaccination are reported to the system. Using that data, the CDC can detect side effects with extremely low rates of occurrence. Since vaccines are administered to the entire population, it is critical to detect these issues because even problems that are unlikely to arise from an individual dose will result in widespread harm.

Unfortunately, people who don't have an intuitive grasp of statistics have full access to VAERS. They will cry foul when they see thousands of deaths without realizing that those deaths have no relationship to the vaccine nor any particular similarity to each other. They are simply records that are there to ferret out any issues that were not detected in trials. That then goes viral on the Internet without even less context and reaches people like your friend.

Good question. Is this person someone who’s mind can be changed with facts? A loved one? An acquaintance? You could go for the slapback of how many people died and are continuing to die from getting coronavirus vs the alleged thousands that have died from the vaccines. Or you could point them to factual sources that they’ll reject as fake. You could lay down facts about hospital overcrowding due to Corona patients? Maybe tell them that not getting the vaccine is a liberal conspiracy to let republicans get sick all over each other? I dunno, good question.