While I'm in favour of vaccines, and think that mandating vaccines for some, such as people who work in healthcare (in contact with those who are potentially ill and have low resistance, or immune systems that are lowered or ineffective through medication or particular conditions especially) is necessary, I do not think that every worker must be vaccinated. Some, whose work involves a lot of contact with the public, might be able to be redeployed in a different area. Some who have existing antibodies from having already recovered from a bout of COVID-19 have roughly the same sort of protection against reinfection as those who have been vaccinated.
I would PREFER if everyone who can be vaccinated is vaccinated. Force is not the answer, though.
A very great part of the current hardnut attitude who don't want to be vaccinated (and I mean hardnut as in strongly opposed, not as in mentally defective) is due to dangerous misinformation. That misinformation has been allowed to circulate, and efforts to stop it have been largely ineffective. It's shared by people who are suspicious of governments and the media in general, and who are susceptible to being influenced by others in their group or family or vicinity.
The media has to bear some of the responsibility. Their irresponsible dramatising of the very very low adverse outcomes of the AstraZeneca vaccine played a huge part in generating some vaccine hesitancy. Ridiculous reporting. Even now, it's almost impossible to have a logical conversation with anyone about that extremely low percentage of blood clotting. If I try to explain by comparing risk (in percentages) of being severely injured or killed in a road accident, there's a definite wall up that means people are not listening. They're not computing the real risk. Their heads are so filled with a different narrative that they are ready to argue and pfffft before hearing the data.
Road Accidents in Australia - risks and data
In 2018, there were 39,598 hospitalised injuries due to road accidents. Of those, there was a high threat to life in 10,097 (that is, 25.5%) of them.
Annual fatality rate per 100,000 population: 4.3 during 2020. (This is lower than previous years because of COVID restrictions; however, let's go with that lower number.)
That is, there's a risk of being killed in a road accident of 0.0043% in the year 2020.
Do people stop driving because of this risk?
No.
Developing TTS as a result of AstraZeneca vaccine - risks and data
Risk of developing TTS (thrombosis in combination with thrombocytopenia) after a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine is between 0.001% and 0.002% for people over 60, and between 0.002% and 0.003% for people under 60.
Up to 29 August 2021, just to put actual number to it, there were 125 probable cases of TTS in Australia. (Not deaths, just cases of TTS.) The great majority of them were able to be treated. We've even improved in being able to diagnose and treat TTS.
Out of 9.6 million AstraZeneca doses administered in Australia, there have been 9 deaths. This equates to the risk of death being lower than 1 in a million. Let me put that in terms of percentage: 0.000001%. That's right; the risk of dying from an adverse reaction to the AstraZeneca vaccine is 0.000001%.
Developing TTS as a result of getting COVID-19 - risks and data
The risk of developing TTS as a result of getting COVID-19 is significantly higher than developing it after being vaccinated with AstraZeneca. More than 10% of hospitalised COVID-19 patients develop TTS.
Mortality rates PRIOR TO THE INTRODUCTION OF VACCINES for the overall population-wide risk of death after the diagnosis of a COVID-19 infection was 4 percent.
However, this overall mortality risk hides wide disparities in age groups:
COVID-19 mortality risk was 40 percent for the elderly (90+), which was 10 times the population-wide risk
- 32 percent COVID-19 mortality risk for people in their 80s
- 14 percent COVID-19 mortality risk for people in their 70s
- 3 percent COVID-19 mortality risk for people in their 60s
- Less than 1 percent COVID-19 mortality risk for people in their 50s or younger.
Now that the administering of vaccines has begun to affect the data, the situation shows a significant - one might say dramatic - change. We've had 145,073 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the beginning of 2020, with 1,545 deaths due to COVID-19.
That puts the risk of death at 0.01065%, by which I do not mean that the OVERALL RISK of dying from COVID-19 is 0.01065%, but rather it is at that percentage primarily because of the effect of the vaccines.
That percentage doesn't tell the whole tale. It conflates the risk of death of the unvaccinated with the risk of death of the vaccinated. The risk of dying if one is unvaccinated remains at the percentages above (i.e., 40% for >90+, 32% for >80+, 14% for >70+, 3% for 60+, 0.9%-0.99% for those 50 and under). The risk of dying if VACCINATED is drastically lower: 95% to 98% decreased risk, as Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist at the Australian National University, has stated.
So... let's say that the chance of an unvaccinated person dying from COVID-19 is 0.9% (the lowest end of the estimate). That's 0.9% risk of death, as opposed to the 0.000001% chance of dying from AstraZeneca. If I were to make the comparison between dying from Pfizer and dying from COVID-19, it's even wider - so much so that it's ridiculous for anyone to refuse to be vaccinated on the grounds of the risk of an adverse reaction to a COVID-19 vaccine.
But are the vaccine-defiers listening? No, they're not. I'll tell you what they're doing... They're DRIVING THEIR CARS, perfectly happy about the 0.0043% risk of dying in a car accident, but up in arms about the greatly-less-than-0.000001% risk of dying from a COVID-19 vaccine, and defiantly nonchalant about the at-least .9% risk (at best, and increasing heavily with age) of dying of COVID-19.
Ah... perspective.
That is why I would like people to be properly educated about this disease, its transmissibility, its mortality rate, its after-effects for at least 30% of people who contract it, the process of vaccine development, the safety of these vaccines, their efficacy in trials and effectiveness in the wild, and so on. Making a free choice is only really possible if one has the facts, not a muddled mess of misinformation.
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