A follower asked me to address vaccination hesitancy. Where is the proof that someone should let Walgreens or CVS loose with a needle of Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson and Johnson vaccine? That’s a question that gets dismissed often by the pro-vaxxers, and I’d say we are doing a poor job of responding to people’s concerns. What should be a teachable moment has turned into a riot of finger pointing.
The questions are mostly legitimate: Can you prove vaccination is beneficial? What about the people with side effects? How can we know this is safe?
Eduhonesty: At first I thought the benefits of vaccination might be too far off-topic for this education blog but, upon reflection, I realized my questions are actually all about education. The vaccination debate has been steeped in math from the beginning. We are playing vaccination five-card draw poker and a crazy number of people are throwing away their pairs or even three of a kind to draw four cards. Why is this happening?
Teachers often start instruction by using analogies to help connect ideas. I think I will start with dogs. Can I prove that dog ownership is beneficial to human health? If we use longevity as our measure of the benefit of dog ownership, yes, I can, despite the guy who fell down the hill chasing his dachshund and broke his ankle in several places. Check out Do dog owners live longer? | American Heart Association.
To make my case, I have to spend some time looking up studies online. I have to understand that SOURCES MATTER and more sources are better. I’ll take something from the American Heart Association without much concern about its trustworthiness — although anything from the internet merits concern. On paper or from cyberspace, I should be suspicious of a source like “Puppies R Us.” When I find a Puppies R Us article about longer-lived pet owners, I should keep in mind that Puppies R Us is making its corporate profits selling puppies.
Also part of the picture:
- Anecdotes are not evidence. In the larger scheme of things, the guy who broke his ankle rushing down a tree and bush-studded hill to rescue his dog does not count. The guy who felt sick after his shot may not count either. It all comes down to numbers. We ignore numbers at our peril.
- Sometimes no option is perfect or even good.
- In any choice, the weight of the factors going into the decision has to be estimated, and then later sometimes reevaluated. Life’s not simple. If it was, everyone who wanted to live longer would simply get a dog.
Proof can admittedly be hard to nail down. That guy with the dachshund might well have been better off in the long-run if he had chosen to collect iguanas instead of sausage dogs. Yet his life is likely to include future dachshunds, more Kongs, tug toys and games of fetch. Asked about that ankle, he’ll say, “s*** happens,” while helping his short-legged dog onto the couch.
S*** happens.
The future is undiscovered country, and life involves endless choices that test our ability to measure risk against reward.
Reader, please vaccinate. Vaccinations shut down the US polio and small pox threat. True, I spent a summer unable to swim or bathe when I had an oozy, doctor-visit-worthy reaction to a smallpox vaccination. I still have vestiges of the ancient scar. And polio remains active, if rare, in Central and South America, Africa and Asia. See Smallpox – Our World in Data for information on the one disease that was entirely wiped out by vaccinations. It’s true: You can entirely or almost entirely eliminate a disease if enough people become immune to it.
It’s like playing a monster game of foosball. A piece can only move when a peg strikes it. Once you vaccinate, though, almost everybody ceases to be a peg in this game. That peg disappears off the bar and it can’t move the COVID particles ball anymore. (Notice I said “almost everybody.” Right now, COVID is everywhere and even a few of the vaccinated are kicking that germ around.) If enough pegs disappear, that game becomes lame or even unplayable.
We have to go by probabilities where public health is concerned. About those clots: Birth control pills and COVID itself have a much greater chance of causing a blood clot than the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The numbers are rather ludicrous, given that 15 out of 7 million comes out to odds of 0.000002142. The odds of being hit by lightning are 1 in 15,300 or 0.00006535. The odds of being killed by a venomous plant or animal are 1 in 44,459 or 0.00002249. (Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot: 13 things more likely to happen (usatoday.com)) In other words, we have a lot more to fear from lightning and bad snakes than we do from vaccines. Can I trust Kaitlyn Kanzler who wrote this article in 2019? Other sources appear to have similar numbers.
Numbers should not always be trusted because someone took time to write them down, I admit. But let’s say our 15 in 7,000,000 is actually 30 in 7,000,000 instead. Those odds only amount to a 0.000004285 chance of that clot. Those zeroes matter a lot. The odds of getting struck by lightning — still far higher than the odds of a vaccination clot. It’s worth noting that almost every person who suffered that particular side effect was female. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t break a sweat about that side effect for a nanosecond.
Currently about 44% of the United states has had at least one shot of vaccine and 31% is fully vaccinated. The test cases have been tested. The shots have been given. Most people I know had trivial reactions. A few had fevers and more serious discomfort. But they are all fine now.
That is not true for all my friends who had COVID. I just talked to a friend who had this virus about five months ago now. She hallucinated for three days. She struggled with brain fog for weeks afterward. Back then, she sounded so breathless it scared me just to talk with her on the phone. When she called a few days ago, she started by saying that she was walking, and that was why she sounded breathless. But she never sounded breathless when we used to walk the track before COVID. And she still struggles to smell or taste food. She relied on family members to taste dishes and help her prepare their family Easter dinner.
Reader, please vaccinate. I wrote this in September and I strongly recommend it to everyone on the fence about that shot: When I Could No Longer Walk Up the Hill — And Amber Is Still Sick, Six Months Later | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com) You don’t want this disease ever. A few days of arm pain with or without fever is a tiny, tiny price to pay to avoid what can go wrong if you skip that shot.
The likelihood of dying from COVID has been falling, true. But try to imagine not being able to enjoy the taste of food for four months and counting. So far, the consensus is that those people who lost their sense of taste or smell last year will probably eventually recover. Most recover in a few weeks or months, but others are still waiting. Try to imagine going to rehab to regain your ability to breathe. You don’t have to get violently sick to become a long hauler. Some people with mild cases back in 2020 are still dealing with body aches, joint pain, brain fog, chills, sweats, fatigue, headaches, heart palpitations and chest pain or pressure, exercise intolerance, dizziness, plus numerous other ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties of symptoms that are not resolving. A recent poll of a long hauler group on Facebook found 98 symptoms of this disorder.
P.S. I look at my friend as she pushes herself to regain her strength and I think I’d happily let Bill Gates track me to avoid what she is going through. Except Bill Gates isn’t tracking anybody and anybody who is worried about being tracked needs to surrender their cell phone RIGHT NOW. A student once stole my phone. I stood in a police station in one town and watched my phone being transported to another town after the cops had tried to get it back for me. The cops gave up as the phone left their city limits, but the next day, I retrieved my phone from a snow drift some twenty miles from home using standard software and my husband’s tablet. I put it in a plastic container of dry rice at home and the phone came out fine.
A message for those people who are afraid of being tracked: Oh, my. No one needs to chip us, guys. All they need to do today is hand us a Samsung or iPhone. Heck, I wouldn’t be stunned to discover they can track us through the chips in our cars or even our dachshunds. And to anyone afraid that the Democrats are running porno rings and trafficking children out of pizza parlors, I apologize. Somewhere we failed to teach critical thinking skills to a lot of lost souls.