As I write this more than the equivalent of a 9/11 catastrophe happened yesterday (12/10). It’s horrible and it’s going to get worse. The head of the CDC predicts this level of deaths for the next 60-90 days and even the conservative model used by the IHME says it is likely we will have more than 500,000 deaths in the United States by April 1.
And yet, there is light at the end of this dark, dark tunnel: we are about to roll out a massive vaccination effort based on what can only be described as one of the greatest triumphs of modern science. We have two vaccines that are based on a new technique that will be applicable to many viruses, not just SAR-Covid 19. If widely adopted, these (and other vaccines that are coming soon) will stop the horror. Granted not fast enough, but it will happen and could (should?) be completed by the end of the 3rd or very early in the 4th quarter of 2021.
Unless people don’t get it.
The problem is that surveys show many people will be reluctant to get the vaccine. Yes, it seems that the vaccine will probably make you feel awfully crappy for 48 hours after the second shot, but that isn’t the only problem. People worry about really bad things happening because of the vaccine. But the problem is that it is hard for people to understand that random ^%$& happens a lot. They say: “Oh my friend’s father got this vaccine and had a stroke two days later.” Or, I just saw on the news that some healthy 35 year old had a stroke a week after getting the vaccine.”
They confuse correlation with causation. Why? Well unfortunately people of all ages get strokes and if you are vaccinating millions of people some of them will get strokes within a few days of getting the vaccine. How many? We can actually calculate roughly how many! From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3250269/: “Among adults ages 35 to 44, the incidence of stroke is 30 to 120 of 100,000 per year, and for those ages 65 to 74, the incidence is 670 to 970 of 100,000 per year over 75 years”
So, if we use these numbers and take the midpoint for people 35-44, about 75 people per 100,000 who are 35-44 will have a stroke in a year. There are about 45 million people 35-44 in the United States. That means there will be about 75*(45million/100,000) = 33,750 strokes in people between 35-44 in the United States or almost 100 a day. These strokes have nothing to do with a person getting a vaccine. And the rate of strokes in people over 75 is about 10 times higher. Because there are about 35 million people over 75 in the United States, we would expect about (820*35million/100,000) or about 800 strokes a day that have nothing to do with a vaccine.
So please, please keep in mind when hearing anecdotes about side effects from these miracle vaccines that bad ^&%$ happens randomly a lot.
I want to end by showing you a table for background rates on a lot of bad ^%&$ you might see as being “caused” by these vaccines-even terrible ones like death. Every time you hear an anecdote about some bad side effect after a Covid 19 vaccine please think about this table (taken from:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2861912/) . For example, within one week after vaccinating 10,000,000 people, you will likely have around 98 people keel over and die for no apparent reason and if all of them were pregnant women, almost 27,800 miscarriages.
Predicted numbers of coincident, temporally associated events after a single dose of a hypothetical vaccine, based upon background incidence rates
| Number of coincident events since a vaccine dose | Baseline rate used for estimate | ||||
| Within 1 day | Within 7 days | Within 6 weeks | |||
| Guillain-Barré syndrome (per 10 million vaccinated people) | 0·51 | 3·58 | 21·50 | 1·87 per 100 000 person-years (all ages; UK Health Protection Agency data) | |
| Optic neuritis (per 10 million female vaccinees) | 2·05 | 1440 | 86·30 | 7·5 per 100 000 person-years in US females (table 2)16 | |
| Spontaneous abortions (per 1 million vaccinated pregnant women) | 397 | 2780 | 16 684 | Based on data from the UK (12% of pregnancies)34 | |
| Sudden death within 1h of onset of any symptoms (per 10 million vaccinated people) | 014 | 0·98 | 575 | Based upon UK background rate of 0·5 per 100 000 person-years (table 2)28 |
I’m almost tempted to respond to your title with Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. But I love that book too much to drop it into the discussion the two of us would have vs anti-vaxxers. 🙂
In truth, the discussion reminds me of when Pfizer had to recall celecoxib. It’s a lovely idea, inhibiting COX2 but not COX1, to get anti-inflammatory pain relief for arthritis sufferers, without the stomach ulcers caused by aspirin (which inhibits both COX1 and COX2).
But… sooner or later heart attacks started showing up. Now, you expect some heart attacks, just as the background rate, as you note here. But if you’re comparing it with aspirin, which is cardio-protective, you expect to see more heart attacks than with just aspirin, even if celecoxib is heart-neutral.
It’s only when you see statistically significantly more than that many that you start worrying about whether celecoxib is a problem. Though I more or less recall they were vilified in the media, Pfizer seemed to take action immediately once it became clear that there were more heart attacks than expected.
It was the right thing to do. The public never much accepted that, but it was still the right thing to do in terms of saving lives.
BNT-162b2 (doesn’t it deserve a better name?!) is going to be like that, I bet.
CoVax