Covid is very deadly right now, it is the leading cause of death in several countries, including the US. If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year, and without a vaccine, it will happen eventually.
It means that even an "unsafe" vaccine, you are better off taking a shot.
On the other hand, a flu shot has to be extremely safe, because the flu is much less deadly, and the flu vaccine seems to be less effective than the covid vaccine. So most vaccines are pretty close to perfectly safe, the covid one, maybe a bit less so, but it is still worth it.
The thing is that we are biased. We will focus on the one person the vaccine has killed, but not the ten others the vaccine has saved. Just like with the trolley problem, will you throw someone under a bus if it can save five people?
Right now, covid is the leading cause of death. It wasn't the case in 2020, but now, it is.
For the "roughly doubles", it is, as I said a rough idea in a high income country, something I forgot to mention. It is probably less overall but not by a huge amount. It is relatively consistent with a 1% IFR. It is age dependent but surprisingly not by that much, simply because older people are more likely to die of any cause.
> How many people even knows what chance it is they will die this year?
That question is meaningless. The nature of probabilities is that you don't know. For example, if you are playing Russian roulette, just before you press the trigger, you can estimate your chances of death quite accurately to be 1/6. But there is no intrinsic value to that number. To someone who can see the bullet in front of the hammer, it is closer to 100%, and to someone who knows the gun is jammed, it is closer to 0%.
>Right now, covid is the leading cause of death. It wasn't the case in 2020, but now, it is.
Are you implying you think covid will kill more americans than heart disease in 2021 based on this incomplete data set?
>>How many people even knows what chance it is they will die this year?
>That question is meaningless.
It is not meaningless for people who care to take personal responsibility for their own health, and who want to make informed decisions based on a data driven risk analysis.
However, most Americans do not care to take personal responsibility for their health, so you're right that such people are not concerned with such information.
>Covid is very deadly right now, it is the leading cause of death in several countries, including the US.
This is misinformation.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, killing around 650,000 americans each year[1]. Also note that heart disease and obesity are extreme risk factors for negative health outcomes from covid, leading to potentially 3x the risk of hospitalization.[2]
Populations suffering from prexisting obesity epidemics, such as America and Europe, have had far worse health outcomes from covid than Asia and Africa, which have no obesity epidemic.[3][4]
>If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year
Do you have a source for this? I'm assuming this is not true for young and/or healthy people.
The thing with covid is the younger/healthier you are, the less likely you are to die from it, but you are also less likely to die from anything. So the relative risk does not change much.
In Africa, the population is much younger than in the US and life expectancy is lower. People die from other causes like malaria, malnutrition, violence, etc... much more often than in the US, so mechanically, the relative risk of dying from covid is lower.
In rich Asian countries like Japan, I haven't heard of a significant difference in infection fatality rate compared to western countries. They have less deaths overall because they have less cases, certainly because they manage the pandemic better. In poor Asian countries, it is essentially like Africa.
As for obesity, it is actually worse in northern Africa than in Europe, and closer to the US. And southeast Asia is getting close to Europe as these countries develop.
>The thing with covid is the younger/healthier you are, the less likely you are to die from it, but you are also less likely to die from anything. So the relative risk does not change much.
Exactly my point. Covid is a negligible risk to young healthy people compared to elderly, sick, obese people. This will have an effect on their risk calculations determining if they should take a vaccine which was rushed through safety trials or to take on a virus naturally which their immune systems can easily defeat, according to the data.
>In rich Asian countries like Japan, I haven't heard of a significant difference in infection fatality rate compared to western countries.
If you look at the data, you'll see the significant difference.
The US has 139.30 deaths per 100,000 people from covid.
Japan has 4.88 deaths per 100,000.[1]
>As for obesity, it is actually worse in northern Africa than in Europe, and closer to the US. And southeast Asia is getting close to Europe as these countries develop.
Indeed, if you look at the obesity map and the covid map of the world, you'll see the same correlation of obesity and larger relative covid risk in northern Africa.
Probably the best example of this is the live oral polio vaccine. It's a bit risky (it occasionally reverts to being infectious) but in a population where polio is endemic it's much safer than letting polio keep circulating.
(In places where polio isn't endemic, you get administered a totally inactivated vaccine by injection instead. They don't give everyone that one because it's more complicated to distribute, the oral one needs much less infrastructure)
Another advantage of the oral vaccine is that it produces better immunity in the gut, which helps cut off assymptomatic transmission in places where polio is still endemic.
Covid is very deadly right now, it is the leading cause of death in several countries, including the US. If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year, and without a vaccine, it will happen eventually.
It means that even an "unsafe" vaccine, you are better off taking a shot.
On the other hand, a flu shot has to be extremely safe, because the flu is much less deadly, and the flu vaccine seems to be less effective than the covid vaccine. So most vaccines are pretty close to perfectly safe, the covid one, maybe a bit less so, but it is still worth it.
The thing is that we are biased. We will focus on the one person the vaccine has killed, but not the ten others the vaccine has saved. Just like with the trolley problem, will you throw someone under a bus if it can save five people?