Unfortunately, the new Covid variant, Delta, is breaking through our vaccine defense. It has lowered the vaccine efficacies. This article will examine what if we do not want to be vaccinated.
What if I don't want to be vaccinated?
No country today has made Covid vaccine mandatory. Most anti-vaxx reckon by staying at home and avoiding crowdy places plus doing regular exercise can keep them away from Covid infection. Therefore, they do not have to depend on the "experimental" vaccine. Covid infection is by chances. It is not necessary one would get infected when they have close contact with those infected. It is only likely he might get infected. A layman would say it is lucky not to be infected. Many people don't even know how and if where they got infected. Studies have shown most elderly are infected at home. Being be the safest place, they will always let down their guards. Not knowing that their children and love ones might bring Covid home.
What if one got infected?
Experts have been warning us about how Covid destroys our body. Covid will leave us with long term effect after we have recovered. These warnings from the experts are all over the webs. For ease of reference, some are attached here for information.
What Chance to get such Long Term Effects?
Whether one would end up with long term effects will depend much on one's pre-existing condition and one's age. CDC USA has a few very good article on this; for example, the following
Many anti-vaxx are thinking they can be safe from infection by staying at home and keeping away from crowdy place. This is not entirely true. Some anti-vaxx are blaming their Government. They said people are suffering from severe adverse effect and even death after taking the vaccine.
No government today are forcing its residents to take vaccine. It is not compulsory. The long term effect of those infected are far worse than those vaccinated. Real World charts have been showing us the results. Countries are having lower death rate after they started rolling out their vaccination. This also means that vaccinated people are either not infected. They are suffering less severe adverse effect after getting infection.
This is usually the key messages of those people who do not like vaccine. They claimed medics said vaccine is ineffective and people get killed by vaccines. They also claimed that the Governments were trying to cover up the truth about the death caused by vaccination. This article does not intend to argue who is right or wrong or whether there is death report covering up. It intends to find out if the vaccine is doing us any good to justify the use of the vaccine even if the rumour-mongerings were true.
What's Evidences We Have?
The real World Data charts from Our-World-in-Data. Three Charts in particular:
1. The 1st dose vaccine take-up rate in % of population
2. The infection rate in per million population
3. The death rate in per million population;
The rates are used instead of absolute number for ease of comparison.
These 3 charts are arranged next to each other as shown (Note: These 3 charts are interactive charts. One can change and add countries to get the desired results. Click remove side bar for larger view plus many other charts)
What the 3 Charts are Telling Us?
It simply tells us about what happened before and after the vaccine were use from Dec 2020. These countries were used because they are attacked most by the Delta or the Indian variants. Delta are known to be more vicious and infectious than other variants. According to GISAID, these countries accounted for more than 90% of the Delta attacks as recorded on 17 June 2021
One could readily deduce from the 3 charts that vaccine has managed to tame Covid-19. We will let time tell us how effective is the Covid-19 vaccine and if it will completely eradicate the virus.
How Many People Avoided Death & Suffering?
For a better comparison, let use the period from December 20, 2020. This is when we started the vaccination exercise in the United States. Then we see the death and infection rate peaking around January 11, 2021. We can download the data from Our World in Data to form the following table. From the table, we can see that the death avoidance is estimated to be 27,000. As for the infection, it is 1.5 million people avoided.
It can be readily deduced that vaccine is very helpful in Covid-19 infection and death avoidance. Of course, some of these people might have been saved by the tightened control measures but it is believed that vaccine did most of the work.
Many people can't make up their mind. There are too many horror stories told about the Covid vaccines. Stories about how people died after getting vaccinated. Stories about long term effects. There are just no good answers. Many choose to wait at the side line. This article will try to help. It will analyse and compare the odds of getting vaccinated and not vaccinated. Hopefully, it will help someone.
Vaccine is Safe and Effective
This slogan has been used all the time. It really makes no difference. No one can be 100% sure there is no long term ill effect. There are also the serious adverse effects requiring hospitalization & even death. But if one knows one might have 20 times higher chance of getting infected, what would one think?
20 Times Higher Chance?
To work this out, one must refer to this formula often used to work out the vaccine efficacy
Using the above formula, one could easily work backward to find out the relationship between ARU & ARV, the attack rates of unvaccinated and vaccinated respectively Assuming the vaccine efficacy or VE is 95%, the ARU will be "1/(1-VE)" times of ARV or simple "1/0.05" of ARV or 20 times of ARV. In simple words, the attack rate of those unvaccinated will be 20 times higher than the attack rate of those vaccinated. Even if we were to assume the efficacy is 50%, the unvaccinated would still have 2 times the chance of getting infected.
What about the Serious Adverse Effects & Death?
It is true that there are people having serious adverse effect such as swelling, high fever. Some have to stay in ICU after taking the vaccines. Some died. The Authorities and manufacturers will never admit the deaths has anything to do with the vaccine.
Let's not talk about whether the claims are true. Let talk what if one gets infected. What are the chance of one would get hospitalized or one would end up death?
The Economist has this interesting interactive chart showing the risk % of male and female for various age group (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mortality-risk-estimator)
Every COVID-19 vaccine must undergo 3 stages of clinical trials under controlled condition to ensure accurate measurement. The trials are required by World Health Organization (WHO) and/or any country before they approve the vaccine for emergency use. The sample size must be more than 30,000 in the Phase 3 trial.
In these trial reports, the various safety and vaccine performance are recorded, determined & evaluated. The vital information about some vaccine brands are tabulated as shown
One can see that in the vaccinated cases, Those having Serious Adverse Events requiring hospitalization is only 0.53% in average among the 3 vaccines and those deaths accounted for only about 0.013% average. Those for Platebo cases where saline water was used instead of vaccines, the infection & death cases are slightly higher. Of course, the vaccine manufacturers claimed those deaths got nothing to do with the vaccines.
Now if we were to consider that the unvaccinated have higher chance of catching Covid and assumed that the Vaccine efficacy is only 53% (or 2.1 times ARV), we could see that the odds of unvaccinated has increased by nearly 30% straightaway. The males with age 80 and over will have over 60% chance of landing in a hospital bed and 25% chance of meeting a death. The female will have 44% & 15% respectively.
What will happen after the Covid Recovery
One in 10 recovered Covid-19 patients had persistent symptoms six months after their initial infection, a study led by the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) has found.
