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A Question for Mandated-Vaccination Advocates
How are you quantifying the public health risk represented by any given individual not getting vaccinated? Can you give it to me in units of, say, third-party life years lost per year by the decision to remain unvaccinated? Can you give me an estimated probability that the failure of individual X to get vaccinated will result in the COVID death of some individual Y?
No? Can you at least try?
Because you’re giving us a value-of-freedom vs. cost-of-risk inequality that looks something like this:
Freedom < Risk
And I want to know when you think the cost of the risk no longer outweighs our personal freedom to make health care choices for ourselves.
If you can’t give me a number, can you give me a ratio? Can you tell us what relative reduction in risk will drop it below the value you seem to place in individual choice?
Don’t tell me you don’t know. We don’t want to trade our freedom for don’t know.
And it isn’t obvious to me that you’ve got the direction of that inequality right even now. If neither of us knows what the actual risk is, I at least know how much I value individual freedom. So the ball’s in your court and, until you come back with some science and a better argument than I’ve heard, I’m going to assume the freedom I value outweighs the risk you can’t or won’t quantify.
And, until you put a number on it, don’t call it science.
Published in Domestic Policy
They will as elections come up and the economy mandates it. I’m down on the government too but I’m not completely cynical. :-)
Further to the high rate of vaccination among the elderly.
This would probably lead to a significant change in my calculation. I assumed a vaccination rate of 60%, which is pretty close to correct (CDC reports that about 57% of the total population has been fully vaccinated).
However, this large age differential in vaccination rates would, in all likelihood, substantially reduce the cost of non-vaccination in my quick model. I assumed an IFR of 0.5%, reduced by a factor of 10 upon vaccination. I think that this is a reasonable estimate on a population-wide basis. However, the IFR varies enormously by age.
CDC uses 18-29 year-olds as the reference group in risk reporting. The risk of death from Covid is 90 times higher for people aged 65-74, 220 times higher for people aged 75-84, and 570 times higher for people aged 85 or over.
Thus, the overall IFR is overwhelmingly driven by deaths among the elderly. If they are far more likely to be vaccinated, then the unvaccinated population as a whole would be much less likely to die from one of the hypothetical infections posited in my simple model.