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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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To play devils advocate: He isn’t entirely wrong. There are inherent risks with vaccines, and they can and do cause harm to a small percentage of people.
Now to stop talking crazy: The harm caused is extremely rare, and the percentage of affected people is quite small. These risks aren’t unknown or hidden, and they usually come from allergies or a compromised immune system’s.
Right.
This is basically the same as saying that wearing a seatbelt is a terrible idea, because in rare cases it causes terrible damage to the wearer.
Let's just ignore the hundreds of thousands of people it helps and cherry pick cases that look bad. It's not like we're a people who rely on rational thought to progress.
Which is extra ironic considering the parallels between anti-vax and early 1980s anti-seat belt protests.
I think the word you are looking for is apt or relevant, and not ironic.
That's fair. I've probably never used it appropriately.
80s? To this day I hear boomers saying this exact shit.
Before I got any of my COVID vaccines, the nurse explained the risks, what to look for and gave me a pamphlet.
I'm not listening to Maher or MacFarlane about it because they don't know what they are talking about.
MacFarlane seems to have read the brochure, at least. He wouldn't be my go-to for health care advice, but he does appear to be reasonably well informed.
Its crazy to me as to how many people will use a "comedian" as one of their sources for healthcare information.
I mean if I wanted advice on how to be a shitty comedian then I would ask Maher for advice because he is a pro at that. But I ain't taking his advice or even his opinion for my healthcare.
Comedians are consistently some of the loudest people in the room.
Even then, you can get people in white coats and stethoscopes to show up on TV shows and tell you medical-sounding things. I see them all the time in commercials and on daytime lifestyle shows. And they're very popular bit-characters in reality tv productions.
But then that's a big snag in the whole "Who do you trust?" game. Come out to Houston and talk to Dr. Steven Hotze. He will tell you all the same crazy shit Bill Maher is saying, and he'll do it with an M.D. after his name. Even a strict "I only trust doctors" rule-of-thumb only gets you so far.
Dude's been a shitty comedian longer than I've been alive. Its genuinely amazing how long that guy has clung to the national spotlight, given how many vastly more talented comics have come and gone alongside him.
And most importantly, there's a cost to getting the fucking thing the vaccine is for that outweighs the risks of the vaccine itself by an order of magnitude.
So yes, there's 1 in a tens of thousands chance of serious adverse reactions. Which is a much smaller risk than the difference in adverse reactions to getting the disease when vaccinated vs unvaccinated.
True, and worth extending: for example, the cardiomyopathy (heart inflammation) known to affect some people (particularly, young men): if we're evaluating the risks of taking a vaccine vs. not taking it, we also have to consider the risks of not taking the vaccine.
It turns out that incidence of cardiomyopathy in young men that didn't receive the vaccine but were infected is higher than its incidence among young men that got the vaccine- and if anything, the immune reaction to the live virus (it causes the body to attack heart tissue) is stronger and more lethal than the reaction to the vaccine.
This means that the people arguing 'but the vaccine has risks!' as an argument against receiving it aren't considering the risks associated with rejecting it. If you think about it, your odds of being exposed to the virus are basically 100% given enough time, and basically every adverse reaction to the vaccine will be milder than the same reaction to the live virus.
Yes- people are constantly worrying about the wrong things. Maybe they should be wary of lighting, because there are much greater chance of harm there than vaccine reaction (somewhere between 12-53 per million doses) and airline crashes (chance is .090 per million, or 1 in 11 million).
It's also literally true that you risk choking to death every time you eat, but I wouldn't advocate stopping.
You are absolutely right.
The hardest part about this is that, there is truth, to what he is saying it just needs way, way more context.
Pretty much ANYTHING has risks, including vaccines.
Brushing your teeth HAS risks, but that doesn't mean that going natural, not brushing is the way to go.
Wait wtf risks am I taking brushing my teeth!?
It's kinda like saying, "More then 3 Jews were killed during the Holocaust."
Technically true, but still very disingenuous.
20 years ago Penn and Teller covered anti Vaxxers on an episode of Bullshit. They even provided an analogy for your comment by rolling bowling balls to represent the statistics.
They showed that there was either a really good chance of death, or a tiny chance of complications using the anti-vaxxers own information.
You can wear a seatbelt because most people will be in a car accident at some point in their lives or not wear a seatbelt because of the 0.0001% chance you end up in an accident where the seatbelt traps you and you die.