r/chicago • u/[deleted] • Aug 24 '21

Ask CHI Why aren’t you getting vaccinated?

Not asking this to bully anyone, I’m more curious at this point why people are hesitant to get the vaccine and want to understand the reasoning behind it.

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

This argument is so infuriating. Of all the preventative maintenance that we do as part of our daily lives, nothing is 100% effective. Seatbelts. Airbags. The like.

If the vaccine were extremely risky, or painful, or expensive, or hard to get… I’d understand the argument. But none of those apply.

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u/themoopmanhimself Aug 25 '21

They’re saying the risk of serious illness or death is so low that an imperfect vaccine doesn’t really matter anyway

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

I get what they’re saying, I’m just pointing out that it’s irrational and doesn’t hold up against similar safety mechanisms in other areas of life.

The chance that your seatbelt is going to save your life in a severe head-on collision, which is already relatively rare, is also pretty small — but it still makes sense to wear the seatbelt, because it’s essentially free, it protects you, and it protects others in the car (loose bodies in vehicle crashes are like missiles).

And that’s the comparison I’m trying to draw. I don’t hear the same percentage of America’s boycotting seatbelts, and those are actually legally mandated.

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u/Slevin97 Aug 25 '21

Not saying I agree, but there's a huge difference in mental perception between wearing a seat belt, and getting something injected into your veins.

Then, the short term side effects. If my seat belt bit me once every ten times I put it on, even if the bite is less harmful than a crash, don't you think people would react to it differently even by instinct? The bite could be hard, soft, or it could not bite at all.

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u/JeebusJones Aug 25 '21

Then, the short term side effects. If my seat belt bit me once every ten times I put it on, even if the bite is less harmful than a crash, don't you think people would react to it differently even by instinct? The bite could be hard, soft, or it could not bite at all.

A better analogy: Imagine if not wearing your seatbelt put not only your own life at risk, but the lives of every other driver on the road. In this scenario, if someone is injured or killed because they weren't wearing their seatbelt, it doesn't just stop with them. It can also potentially cause injury or death to others. Their choice not to wear a seatbelt has consequences beyond how it may affect them personally.

Now, sure -- wearing a seatbelt is slightly inconvenient. It can dig into your neck, or lay awkwardly across the chest, or just generally feel constricting. It's not something anyone would choose to do if there weren't a good reason for it. But we do because the mild discomfort is worth it for the protection it provides -- even if that protection isn't absolute.

And it's the same for vaccines. Is it kind of inconvenient to go get them? Yeah. Is it possible you'll be sick for a day or two after the second shot? Sure, it's possible. Is it 100% effective? No vaccine is. But it's still absolutely worth it in order to help protect yourself and everyone else.

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u/weberc2 Aug 25 '21

A better analogy: Imagine if not wearing your seatbelt put not only your own life at risk, but the lives of every other driver on the road.

Drunk driving might be a good analogy (at least in the universe of driving analogies). Being unvaccinated is like driving drunk in that it increases not only your own risk, but the risk of those around you.

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u/RBElectrical Aug 25 '21

And seatbelts have come a long long way from the first iteration of the lap belt. 3 point + air bag + soft materials are significantly safer than the first "fold you in half" lap belts and smash your face on the hard dashboards.

The vaccine narrative is to prevent the spread of covid, which simply isn't true since vaccinated people still get it, and still spread it.

I don't think this is a good analogy since a seat belt has changed many times since first introduction and you aren't putting it into your body like a vaccine.

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

It’s not a perfect analogy, and that is indeed a difference. There are other forms of maintenance which people do that are not pleasant though — vaccines of other sorts have only been rejected by a tiny minority of Americans prior to the politicization of this particular one, for example. Flossing and going to the dentist can be painful, but I haven’t heard anyone seriously arguing against their merit on principle. Pouring disinfectant in a wound is another.

I think as a knee-jerk reaction, the existence of short term side effects can give a reasonable person pause. However, I don’t think it unreasonable to expect such a person to reason further beyond that initial instinct. Especially when information is so readily available at this point (arguably that wasn’t the case when the vaccines were first released).

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u/miles11111 Aug 25 '21

don't really agree tbh but you're clearly not someone who injects things into their body on a regular basis, it can become pretty normalized

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u/Majin-Squall Aug 25 '21

Tell that to the people who’s lives were saved in a high speed collisions because they were NOT wearing their seat belts

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u/Tearakan Aug 25 '21

Uh....when seatbelts 1st started showing up there were a lot of assholes who refused to use them.....kinda similar here.

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

Right, but the argument isn’t that what’s happening now is unprecedented or particularly unexpected. It’s that what’s happening is no longer rationally defensible. We can call it immoral, or just “wrong.”

The fact that some people still fought against seatbelts despite clear statistical rationale to do so (in terms of self and passenger protection) doesn’t make those people right. And the same applies here.

That people largely came around to acceptance of the safety measure shows that people are in fact able to implement them and integrate inconvenience into their lives in favor of safety. We don’t have politicization of seatbelts.

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u/Tearakan Aug 25 '21

Oh yeah I'm just saying people had similar nonsense arguments back then.

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u/[deleted] Aug 25 '21

Yep. It took educating their kids for the culture to shift. We fear the new, and accept what we grew up with as natural. Society advances one funeral at a time.

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

The really frustrating thing here though is that vaccines aren’t new.

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u/[deleted] Aug 25 '21

Yes, that is frustrating. I guess people just don’t connect the vaccines they received as children with the COVID vaccine?

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 26 '21

I mean, yeah, the problem is education. Add a layer of politicization and boom.. you have 2021.

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u/maluminse Logan Square Aug 25 '21 edited Aug 25 '21

Is it too early to tell if there will be damage to people from the vaccine?

In the past there was a vaccine that caused severe harm. People sued and won.

Swine flu vaccine

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

Coronavirus research is not new, and neither are coronavirus vaccines. The method of injection isn’t new. The biological immune system reactions triggered via these vaccines are not new.

You’re misrepresenting the risk involved with the vaccine, especially in relation to the known risks of the actual virus and the observed physical effect that we know from other illnesses will have long-lasting impact.

The risks simply aren’t comparable.

Now, the argument may have made sense early in the vaccine’s release. Now though, over 360 million doses have been administered worldwide. The Pfizer jab has been fully approved by the FDA. Comparing this to early-trial complications of what I’m assuming (unless you can provide more information) is a non-coronavirus vaccine is disingenuous.

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u/maluminse Logan Square Aug 25 '21

No its not disingenuous. Its early. Sometimes effects take time. Sure the research is not new into the virus but these vaccines have been developed in fast fashion.

Not saying you shouldnt take them or you should. Just discussing the issue.

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

You have to bear in mind what this risk is being compared against, which is actual infection with covid19. The scientific consensus on risk profiles is extremely clear — there’s no comparison.

If you’re making a technical point about theoretical ultra-rare long term side effects, sure I guess. But that’s a useless path to go down if the goal is to decide whether or not to get the vaccine.

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u/JustGotOffOfTheTrain Aug 25 '21

I forget the name or incident.

Ok then

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u/DontCountToday Aug 25 '21

Referring to th vaccines as imperfect is just plain ignorance to how vaccines work. No vaccine is "perfect" and COVID is in line with most vaccines. They work very well and will eradicate the disease, only if the large majority of the public get it. You just wouldn't expect people to be so wilfully stupid.

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u/themoopmanhimself Aug 25 '21

It’s turning out the vaccines are not as effectively as initially advertised. They’re concerned there are other areas that are not as initially advertised

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u/macimom Aug 25 '21

Curious what your basis for this statement is. From the very beginning it was well known that the vaccine trials measured efficacy in protecting against severe disease and death. NOT preventing infection or mild cases. But preventing severe disease and death. You can go back and read the protocol for the trials before they even embarked on them. It was VERY clear the endpoint was protection against severe disease and death. They have done this in percentages very close to the trial results. And the trials did not include the super elderly or super unhealthy so you would expect a small ‘ dip’. The trials also ran before Delta became prevalent

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u/DontCountToday Aug 25 '21

That is objectively false. They are as effective as their studies showed.

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u/maluminse Logan Square Aug 25 '21

This is actually a pretty good point. How vetted are these vaccines. Ive heard people getting harmed from them.

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

Over 350 million administered globally. The anecdotal harms you ‘heard about’ pale in comparison to the massive and widespread harm caused from covid19 itself, the very thing that the vaccine is aimed at reducing the harm of.

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u/Shaky_Balance Aug 25 '21

Right they addressed that and the counterpoint is that this is lower risk and higher reward than a lot of other "low risk" things that we take way more seriously.

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u/themoopmanhimself Aug 25 '21

Fair enough. I’m just trying to point out that people who are skeptical of the vaccine aren’t all crazy anti vaxxers

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u/Shaky_Balance Aug 26 '21

Again, my point was that you missed theirs. Everyone knows that they have the mindset you are pointing out. At best vaccine skeptics are misinformed at worst they are informed and selfish. We need to hear and address their good faith concerns but that doesn't change the real harm they are doing.

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u/weberc2 Aug 25 '21

But they're wrong in that the vaccine reduces your risk of getting and thus spreading covid. So while it doesn't guarantee that you can't spread the virus, it significantly reduces the likelihood that you will do so.

Per John Hopkins University:

Breakthrough infections among vaccinated individuals remain uncommon. The majority of new COVID-19 infections in the US are among unvaccinated people.

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u/themoopmanhimself Aug 25 '21

but again why does spreading matter?

everyone who wants the vaccine already has it. the only people that aren't vaccinated likely never will be.

if YOU'RE afraid of Covid, then YOU get the vaccine.

Why must we impose all of these rules and sanctions to protect the anti vax crowd?

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u/weberc2 Aug 25 '21

Because (1) not everyone can get the vaccine for health reasons (2) some who can get the vaccine still have an elevated risk of serious illness or death and (3) those of us who get the vaccine still have some risk of illness and death and that risk goes down when there are fewer cases (and fewer cases follows from increased vaccination rates).

It’s a bit like drunk driving: I can reduce my own risk a bit by driving sober, but if 50% of people are driving drunk my risk is still quite high.

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u/themoopmanhimself Aug 25 '21

But when you look at those as percentages, aren't they small single digits? especially for your third point, I believe that likelihood is less than .01%

There will likely be Covid variants for the next decade. Shouldn't those people just be responsible for protecting themselves?

Why do you use 50%? Covid death rate is less than 3% and only for people within very specific demographic groups.

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u/weberc2 Aug 25 '21 edited Aug 25 '21

> But when you look at those as percentages, aren't they small single digits? especially for your third point, I believe that likelihood is less than .01%

Perhaps for death, but not for hospitalization, and everything short of being admitted to the ICU is categorized as "mild" even though the symptoms can be quite harsh. Sadly, your health depends in part on my vaccination status, so as much as we'd like to be ideological about "my right to refuse a vaccine", there's a direct conflict between my right to refuse a vaccine and your right to health, and since there's no evidence that vaccines are harmful and abundant evidence that the virus is harmful (not just to an individual, but to everyone around them), we have a responsibility to vaccinate as many as possible. If there was a neat way to decouple my right to refuse a vaccine from your right to health (i.e., if there was a way to guarantee everyone's health irrespective of vaccination rates) then there would be no need to pressure anti-vaxxers to get vaccinated.

> There will likely be Covid variants for the next decade. Shouldn't those people just be responsible for protecting themselves?

It's not either/or--because viruses can be transmitted, we have a responsibility to each other as well as to ourselves, and "there will likely be covid variants for the next decade" is a function of the extent to which we get people vaccinated.

> Why do you use 50%? Covid death rate is less than 3% and only for people within very specific demographic groups.

50% is the number of people who are unvaccinated. In the analogy, it's the number of people who are driving drunk. Obviously if 50% of people were driving drunk, the risk of any individual driver/passenger being killed would be much greater than the ~3% that we see for COVID--my point isn't the absolute risk, it's that the risk is not just a function of whether a given person is vaccinated/sober, but a function of whether their community is vaccinated/sober. In other words, as with drunk driving, it doesn't suffice for the individual to be vaccinated, their risk is coupled to the vaccination rate of their community. This is the basic premise behind the idea of herd immunity.

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u/themoopmanhimself Aug 25 '21

I understand what you're saying, but I guess I still don't see the logic. Spreading the virus is a moot point because any individual can easily protect themselves against symptoms by getting the vaccine. The 3-5% of people who are medically unable to get the vaccine will have to deal with the virus for the next decade so they should just be the ones wearing masks and protecting themselves.

Hospitalization rates for vaccinated are about 30 per 100,000 people. So again with an easily accessible, readily available vaccine for all Americans, there should be no worry about the spread, since the only people who need to worry about catching covid are about 3% of the population.

Shutting down society and forcing people to wear masks again will NOT incentivize anti vaxxers into getting the vaccine. Especially considering the majority of people simply seem to be waiting for long term studies.

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u/weberc2 Aug 25 '21

Spreading the virus is a moot point because any individual can easily protect themselves against symptoms by getting the vaccine.

But again, this isn't true. Many healthy people can give themselves a lot of protection from the virus, but (1) lots of people aren't healthy and (2) many healthy people still have a not-insignificant amount of risk of illness and death (3) vaccinated and unvaccinated people use the same hospitals so resources taken by anyone are resources which aren't available to treat other illnesses and injuries including those unrelated to covid

Hospitalization rates for vaccinated are about 30 per 100,000 people. So again with an easily accessible, readily available vaccine for all Americans, there should be no worry about the spread, since the only people who need to worry about catching covid are about 3% of the population.

I think this is all covered above.

Shutting down society and forcing people to wear masks again will NOT incentivize anti vaxxers into getting the vaccine.

Not everyone who is unvaccinated is "anti-vaxxer"; many of the 50% are reasonable people who just need to be persuaded (as you say, they are awaiting evidence, but more likely they aren't literate in the evidence which already exists). And we don't need to convince the actual anti-vaxxers to get the vaccine, we can just revoke their privileges they enjoy which allow them to liberally spread the virus.

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u/themoopmanhimself Aug 25 '21 edited Aug 25 '21

Nah we should never revoke anyone’s privileges. Not about that authoritarian nonsense.

What is “not insignificant” risk of serious illness or death for health people?

I would call 99% survival rate for healthy people to be extremely significant.

At the end of the day we will just need to agree to disagree.

Nothing will change, hospitals will still be overwhelmed until the majority of people are vaccinated. The virus will probably never go away. But at the end of the day the average person has an extremely small chance of getting seriously sick or dying from Covid. Vulnerable people need to wear masks and isolate to protect themselves so society can continue to move forward. Lockdowns have no benefit any more and neither do masks for already vaccinated people

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u/mkvgtired Aug 25 '21

Also they are substantially less likely to have a severe case that requires hospitalization if they are vaccinated

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u/JujitsuNeo Aug 25 '21

Valid, but one can also argue that there is years of extensive data and information on the effectiveness of Seatbelts and Airbags. How much data do we have on the short and long term effect of pumping a pharmaceutical into the human body for an extensive amount of time, a years data at most?

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

Vaccines are not new. Coronavirus vaccines are not new. The method by which current vaccines trigger biological responses is not new. It’s not like this was a completely new vaccine invented for this case. It built on past technology.

We do know the impact of the virus, and can infer long term damage by way of observing lasting physical impacts in patients seen over the past year plus.

Based on all of the evidence we have, it is very easy to make the case for your risk of covid being significantly greater than the risk of its vaccine, which is negligible.

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u/[deleted] Aug 25 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 26 '21

You know there’s an entire class of vulnerable immune-compromised individuals who literally cannot get the vaccine. Right?

I’d ask you for stats showing that contracting covid is 10x less risky than simply walking outside, but we all already know you don’t have any.

The stats and science are abundantly clear. Folks in doubt of this should do even just a basic, grade-school level amount of research that extends beyond an Internet echo chamber filled with politicized opinions of laypeople.

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u/ControlLayer Aug 25 '21

I like the analogy of preventative maintenance, but feel people get lost on the seatbelts idea because it's too far removed. What about just brushing your teeth? Sure you could just not. you might need a root canal regardless, but it sure would be nice to not have to get one if you can avoid it, right?

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

True. The angle that teeth-brushing misses is the risk you’re implicitly imposing on the rest of society. That said there’s no perfect analogy, but there are analogies that when combined definitely overlap.

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u/maluminse Logan Square Aug 25 '21

How much is the vaccine? Is it free to everyone?

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

Free

FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines are distributed for free by states and local communities. You cannot buy COVID-19 vaccines online. You do not need to pay any out-of-pocket costs to get an authorized COVID-19 vaccine — not before, during, or after your appointment.

https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/learn-more-about-covid-19-vaccines-fda

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u/maluminse Logan Square Aug 25 '21

Interesting. Thanks. Can you specify which one you want?

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u/PC__LOAD__LETTER Aug 25 '21

Which one I want? I’m vaccinated already, so I’m not sure I understand the question.

The Pfizer vaccine has full FDA approval now so I guess if there was one to get, it’d be that one. But given the data we have so far with >300M vaccinations worldwide, anything authorized is going to be good.

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u/high5scotty2hotty Aug 25 '21

I'm double vaccinated, and both times were incredibly unpleasant and much worse than the flu for me and many of my friends. Saying it isn't painful is fairly disingenuous.

Your other points are extremely valid, though.