To your Health! The risky choice is not getting vaccinated

Okay, folks, today we’re going to assess the risks around getting a COVID-19 vaccine. But before we get into the vaccines, there’s something we all need to remember: People are generally bad at understanding how risky things are. I’m not talking about being able to calculate risk—lots of mathy people can do that extremely well—I’m talking about the ability to gut-check the risk level of an activity on the fly, without the aid of Google or a calculator.

You’ve probably already heard of several reasons why people are bad at this task: confirmation bias (we preferentially look for evidence to back up what we already believe), optimism bias (we tend to believe that our own risk is less than other people’s), false sense of control (if I’m in control of the activity, it feels less risky to me, even if I know better). All this is to say that when we’re faced with a set of numbers telling us what the risks are for a certain activity, we need to step back for a second and remember: Our brains are unreliable in this department. All people’s brains are.

A new metric for measuring risk

If you’re like me, you’ve got another problem to deal with: Numbers and percentages alone don’t tell me much; I need context. So I’m going to offer a new metric for assessing low-level risks. This metric won’t remove all the psychological roadblocks our brains put in our way, but it’ll give the numbers context that makes gut-level sense.

My metric is the risk of getting hit by lightning in a given year in the U.S.: about one in 500,000, according to the CDC. Why lightning? Because in our culture, when we want to say that something is unlikely to happen, we say, “You’re more likely to get hit by lightning.” We all have a visceral understanding that, on average, the risk of getting hit by lightning is pretty low—assuming you’re not standing out on a hill in a thunderstorm, waving a golf club, in which case good luck to you.

COVID-19 vaccination isn’t very risky

So now that we have a better metric than abstract numbers, let’s assess the risk of getting one of the COVID-19 vaccines. First, the obvious question: What’s the risk of experiencing a severe blood clot if you received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which the CDC and FDA recently put on pause? You’re more than twice as likely to be hit by lightning this year than you are to develop a dangerous blood clot as the result of that vaccine. How about the risk of anaphylaxis (a severe but treatable allergic reaction) from either the Pfizer-BioNTech or the Moderna vaccines? You have about the same chance of getting hit by lightning as you do of having an anaphylactic reaction to either of them.

What about the risk of any other severe COVID-19 vaccine side effect? Think about it for a second. We need vaccines to end the pandemic. The FDA paused the use of one of only three vaccines available in this country because of an event more than twice as rare as getting hit by lightning. If any other severe vaccine side effect even existed, it would have to be even less common, or the public health folks would have acted on it.

Think about that the next time you read on social media that “my friend got vaccinated and the next day [insert awful health event here] happened. Be warned.” I’m sorry about your friend, truly I am. But awful health events happen all the time. In 2017, about 7,700 people died in the U.S. every day, on average. Without a pandemic. “Warning” people about the COVID-19 vaccines without good evidence is fearmongering, plain and simple. It helps no one.

What to do if you think you’ve experienced a severe side effect

If you do experience what might be a severe side effect of the COVID-19 vaccines, here’s what to do: 1) Tell your doctor, and 2) tell the folks who track vaccine safety. You can accomplish #2 using either the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS; vaerhs.hhs.gov) or the CDC’s v-safe smartphone app.

No vaccines in history have ever been scrutinized like these. And they’re standing up to that scrutiny. So if you haven’t done it yet, get vaccinated; the risk of doing so is astonishingly low. And the benefit is not just protection for yourself—it’s the knowledge that you’re helping to end the pandemic.
  

Liz Ruark is the founder of covidsafeschools.org and co-chair of COVID-Safe Schools, Harvard Public Schools’ community COVID-19 screening program. She holds a DVM degree from Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.