Unnatural Selection

Posted By 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.

Comments

One Response to “Unnatural Selection”

  1. Madalyn says:

    These are the same idiots who constantly badger us about “health care for all so we can get immunized”. What a joke.
    Madalyn