COVID-19

If You’re Skeptical About COVID-19 Vaccines, Hear Me Out: This Is What You Might Want to Know

This is why you should be more afraid of COVID-19 than the vaccines.

Lately, there’ve been a lot of battles with a lot of messy fighting, especially on the internet, in terms of the COVID-19 vaccines and the virus. The whole pandemic got off to a messy start, with the Trump Administration downplaying the severity of the virus.

Trump himself even said, “It’s just a flu,” likening the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 to the common annual flu we experience.

Before I get started demonstrating why that’s wrong, I want to let you know from the outset that I value the fact that you’re thinking things through before just jumping blindly into something you feel uncertain about. I get it, I’ve made a lot of bone-headed decisions in my own life, some of which cost me a lot.

But the more I look back, the more I realize that most of those decisions were made based on nothing more than my intuition and experiences. I was thinking the best I could, but I still ended up in the wrong place.

No, here’s not where I tell you to just go out and get the vaccine because your feelings might be wrong. That wouldn’t be enough to convince anyone. In fact, I don’t even want to convince you. I want to give you some facts and you can decide what you want to do from there.

I’m Not Here to Tell You What to Do

I’m not the kind of guy to ever tell anyone what they can and can’t do. I consider myself a lover of human freedom in all forms. I believe it’s best to offer people information that might be of value to them and let them make up their own minds about what they want to do with it.

One of my favorite philosophers, 20th-century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”

That resonates with me. I feel it.

While I won’t make this whole thing about me, I will say that I’ve had a lot of people do me wrong in my life. And it was my subsequent choices that I made that stand as testaments to my character. Those subsequent choices weren’t always good, but, as the cornerstone ideas of Sartre’s philosophy pointed out, we are our actions.

As he said:

“Humans are nothing else than our projects; we exist only to the extent that we fulfill ourselves; we are, therefore, nothing else than the ensemble of their actions, nothing other than our lives.”

We’re always free to make our own choices — but we’re also destined to suffer the consequences of those choices. We can’t take our choices back once we put them into action.

Doing Nothing is Still a Choice

So with that, I’ll leave you with a couple of data sets that I made into charts so you can see for yourself how serious the COVID-19 situation is. When it came to making my decision to get vaccinated, and I am vaccinated (with Pfizer), it’s smart to compare the potential risks of the vaccines to the potential risks of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Especially considering that I live in Florida, if I didn’t get vaccinated, I’m almost certain I would’ve caught it. The new Delta variant is much more contagious, so remaining unvaccinated and uninfected simply isn’t an option for me anymore.

The best way to think about this is to understand that getting the vaccine or catching COVID-19 are our two choices. We can’t just wait it out. Eventually, like the flu or the cold, we’ll catch it.

Is COVID-19 More Dangerous Than the Flu? What About HIV?

I constantly read people saying things like, “The virus isn’t much worse than the flu,” or, “The virus is just like the flu,” echoing Trump’s words from the beginning of last year.

I see a lot of people saying that we shouldn’t do either — don’t get vaccinated and don’t catch the virus. But I think that ignores just how transmissible and deadly COVID-19 actually is.

And it’s definitely not “another flu.”

I poured through piles of numbers to get a better picture of the flu and COVID-19 deaths. He tossed out anything that was even remotely questionable.

And since confirmed flu numbers are less reliable because of a lack of testing, he compared confirmed HIV deaths too, so you could get an idea of how deadly COVID-19 is compared to HIV over the years.

He graphed everything in the chart below to give you a visual:

As you can see, COVID-19 is way more deadly than either virus. This isn’t to say that the flu or HIV aren’t serious. They are. They’re very serious. But COVID-19 is so much worse. And unlike HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is everywhere around us. It’s in the air. It’s much easier to catch.

The 2008 spike in the flu was a resurgence of the H1N1 flu, the strain that caused the infamous 1918 outbreak of the “Spanish” flu.

COVID Vaccine Side-Effects & Deaths

With the COVID-19 vaccines, severe reactions do happen. I’d never deny that. The most severe reaction to the vaccine noted so far has been allergic reactions (anaphylaxis). There have also been reports of myocarditis, swelling of the heart, which sounds scary, but these cases haven’t been proven to be in response to the mRNA vaccines.

And even if they were, the cases are usually mild (check out this story from Shin Jie Yong for much, much more information on this and a balanced perspective).

As of now, two deaths have been reported from myocarditis, in Israel, and those haven’t been proven to be caused by the vaccine. 4.79 billion people have gotten the vaccine worldwide at the time of this writing and we only have reports of 2 myocarditis deaths — that we can’t even prove happened because of the vaccine.

A few others were reported in Australia. Ash Jurberg did an excellent piece on those for the site The Age, but it’s also important to note, causation hasn’t been established. Australia pulled the plug on their vaccines before causation could be established.

If deaths were a serious issue from the vaccines, we wouldn’t have one or two reports here and there. As we scaled the vaccine administration up, we’d see tens or hundreds of thousands of people dropping like flies.

If we prescribed people basic peanut butter, smooth or crunchy, as a cure for COVID-19, considering that 4% of the population is allergic to peanut butter, 100 million doses would result in about 4 million deaths.

But we don’t see that.

The Side Effects Are Mild

I had mild side effects (they were awful, but nothing life-threatening) on my second vaccine dose. With Pfizer, the first shot felt like nothing. The second shot gave me a minor fever for three days and I felt exhausted — like I was tired all the time. It was like the sickness without actually being sick.

Fever. Tired. Grumpy. That was about it.

There’s been a ton of political media saying there are rampant deaths from the COVID-19 vaccine. One piece of disinformation circulated on Instagram that claimed 45,000 people had died from the COVID-19 vaccine. None of this is true. As of now, there are zero proven vaccine deaths.

Zilch. Zero. Nada.

And 4.85 billion doses of COVID vaccines have been administered. Even if we granted those two reported deaths in Australia and two reported deaths in Israel, still, 4 out of almost 5 billion are odds so insanely in your favor that, once you compare the threat of the vaccine with the threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the vaccine is obviously the best bet.

I’ll close this out by saying again that I understand and appreciate your skepticism. But after pouring through all the facts I could on the subject, it seems that the vaccines are overwhelmingly safe. And they’re certainly much safer than catching COVID-19, without a doubt.

This issue has been politicized to death, unfortunately. Hopefully, these facts inform your decision.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this story, you may enjoy the one below as well. Feel free to keep in touch with me on social media here.