Saturday, July 3, 2021

Bad News Sells

Lucianne.com links to an American Thinker article by Jack Gleason who makes an interesting, but ultimately wrong, point. About the Covid-19 vaccines, Gleason argues that while official sites argue they are safe and effective:
But when you go to an uncensored video website like Bitchute.com or Rumble.com, you see a totally different result: scores of doctors and scientists warning about the danger from the shots, and hundreds of videos from real people who have had horrific side effects from their injections.

Understanding human behavior, that is exactly what you’d expect from an almost entirely safe vaccine. How many people (like the DrsC) who’ve had the vaccine safely bother to write up their experiences? Almost none; we had maybe a little sore arm, which sometimes happens with a flu shot, and it was done.

On the other hand, the relatively few people who had a bad experience - and they do exist - are motivated to tell you it can be horrible. Driving to the grocery store can also be horrible, if some loon t-bones your car, which also happens albeit rarely. 

Do people tell you about their safe trip to the store? Only the most boring people do that, millions of such trips are made safely every day without being reported. The same is true of vaccines. A few people have bad experiences and those you hear about. The millions who had no problems remain unreported.

I don’t know the exact numbers but I’d guess over a hundred million Covid-19 shots have been given. If one in 100,000 has a nontrivial problem, that’s still over 1000 unhappy souls with a horror story to tell.

Gleason wants to argue that if you’re young and healthy you have little to fear from Covid-19 even if you get the disease, and more to fear from the vaccine. I’m reading about too many people with lingering disease aftereffects to make that argument entirely credible.

I like your odds better with the vaccine, while admitting there is some risk either way. But at the end of the day, the choice is yours, as it is with flu shots. It is worth remembering more than a few people also die from influenza every year.