American Consequences - January 2021

By Dave Lashmet

YOU SHOULD GET THE COVID-19 VACCINE

A PERSUASIVE ESSAY IN TWO PARTS. PART ONE IS ABOUT YOU. PART TWO IS ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE.

 CLICK HERE TO READ THE WEB VERSION

save your life. You can save yourself simply by getting the vaccine. This requires two doses of the vaccine, taken about a month apart. To be fair, it hurts... It’s worse than a flu shot and about the same as a tetanus shot for most people. There have been rare allergic reactions – about one in 20,000, which is equivalent to the lifetime risk of being struck by lightning. By contrast, the risk of death from COVID-19 is 2%. The risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 is 5%. And there’s no reason to think if you go in the hospital with COVID-19, it’s an easy road from there (if you even come back out). See, we now have nine-month follow-up data on early survivors of COVID-19 in Asia.

So, let’s start with you... Yes, you want to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Two American drug-development firms – Pfizer and Moderna – used similar technology to develop similar vaccines. Both were 95% effective in large-scale, controlled clinical trials. So, yes, they can save your life... Just think about 95%. It’s 20-to-one odds in your favor. Twenty times more people on a placebo got infected versus any one person who got the real vaccine, at the same place and same time. In other words, you don’t need herd immunity – the benefits of the crowd – to

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