The trouble is, that’s the honest way to present the data. It’s how they presented it in the first couple of months. Risk versus benefit. Death by Vallance’s graphs and spreadsheets. I think it was unfortunate that they stopped doing this and reduced it to a three word soundbite. We are naturally suspicious of those.
That’s not quite the whole stat. You need to factor in the likelihood of infection as well. If you have the vaccine your likelihood of having had the vaccine is 100%. Your likelihood of getting Covid isn’t. Where a disease is as widespread as Covid was that isn’t very material though.
But with this example you make the same error and it is material. The chance of dying from a lightning strike is massively higher than 1 in a million. It’s the likelihood of being struck in the first place that is remote.
Indeed.
I get what you're saying, but it would have had an additional layer of detail that some would have been incapable of understanding, or it would have been another layer to try and argue against. When they can't understand the basics of it, making it more complicated is often not the way. All that adding detail would do is strengthen the scientists/ my arguments, but that doesn't need strengthening, as it was already known as the right choice. You could go even further and say read the scientific papers, this would add more certainty, but there's zero chance of an anti vaxer reading it, understanding it and putting together an argument against it.
The likelihood of exposure was probably close to 1 for anyone in the developed world, so the chance of infection was extremely high, even more so if we "let it rip" with no lockdowns and had nobody taking vaccines etc. It's like how I used to say you can fight covid with antibody protection from vaccines, or from having covid, but the scenario of not getting covid with no antibodies was remote, so remote that it didn't even need to be in the conversation. Loads of the anti vax lot, were the same people who said covid didn't even exist, or "was a cold" etc, they're not rational enough to understand, or don't want to understand, or actively promote misunderstanding to line their own pockets.
If I remember correctly ~70% had caught covid by the end of 2021, which was before the Omicron wave. So if you add Omicron, and took away vaccines, then surely it's fair to assume at least 95% are going to catch it.
Even if you said the risk of infection was 50%, it just means the benefit might be 5:1, rather than 10:1 etc, 5:1 is still a massive winner.
The lightening strike example includes being struck, i.e it's the odds of being struck and dying, you don't die without being struck. Well, actually you can die without being directly struck, it's happened a few times, but think people would still class that as death by lightening strike.
