Unnatural Selection
Posted By Russ Emerson on September 29, 2009 at 4:24 pm
I hear, lately, of people saying they will refuse to get immunized for H1N1 when the vaccine soon becomes available, either out of some sort of concern about the safety of the vaccine or — get this — because vaccinations are some sort of Government Plot™.
Allow me to opine: those people are idiots.
Even if there was a problem with vaccines causing unrelated illnesses — a point I am not willing to concede without a minimum of a metric tonne of evidence; the plural of “anecdote” is not “data” — you have to consider the odds.
Now, I know math is a weak point in the education of a great many people… perhaps 98% of them. But let me sum it up this way: a million-to-one chance of getting sick from a vaccine is approximately 10,000 times better than a 1% death rate from the H1N1 virus. If the H1N1 mortality rate is only 0.05%, the odds then are still 500 times better.
I am not a betting man, but I know which way I’ll bet on this one.
A thought-provoking read that covers (among many other things) the subjects of viruses and vaccines is John Ringo’s The Last Centurion. Being written from the point of view of a soldier, it is, shall we say, rather coarse… but it’s an astonishingly good read.
These are the same idiots who constantly badger us about “health care for all so we can get immunized”. What a joke.
Madalyn