An interesting thread, thanks to all participants. We get this at home on a daily basis. One of four of us refused to be vaccinated on the grounds mentioned on here. Two over-sixties and two under-30s make up our happy household.
We also have quite a few friends (surprisingly a lot more than I thought to be willing to question the status quo), who do not see the logic of the authorities’ insistence that mass vaccination will lead to herd immunity.
I am a bit on the fence with this. At one level, I am glad to have had the opportunity to be vaccinated as has my wife and (now) our younger son. And I feel a bit peed off that our elder son is so insistent not to have it despite having parents who are in high risk category for having compromised auto-immune systems.
On the other hand, we have done with nearly 80% of our life, and our offspring have hopefully not lived one third of theirs yet. I know if I were their age or younger, I would probably object too. So I am comfortable with the younger generation making their own decisions. But what about our friend who suffers from MS, arthritis and a few other complaints. She is not yet over 50. It turns out that she never had any conventional vaccines when she was a child (hippy parents?) and I blame her parents for that, and now she did not have her children vaccinated either. And I blame her for that. After years of eradicating some of the most crippling diseases, they are returning. And I would put my money on one of the top reasons being that unless everyone is vaccinated, those debilitating diseases will return to the poor people who did not participate in that “I am alright Jack” mindset. I accept the risk of dying from accepting to take the vaccinations, just as I accept to buy lottery tickets every week without being upset when I do not win the lottery.
For Forex traders, which side of the fence to sit on should be an obvious choice (as I took the wrong choice about seven years ago not having stents fitted, only to require emergency heart surgery three times about three years after my refusal. And it is this:
What is the risk of doing something when compared with doing nothing. At the time of my decision, the consultant told me there was a 2.5% risk of having a heart attack during the operation, and a 1.5-2% chance of dying on the operating table. So I refused to have the stents. Three years later my consultant (another heart surgeon) related to me that NHS had realized that they were great at telling only half the story, and had changed their advice to doctors and specialists to talk through the relative risk with patients - not to treat them as medical idiots. So he said the prior consultant should have added "but the risk of you not having stents is that your annual risk of having a heart attack or angina attack is 5% !!
Had I had that information seven years ago I would have voluntarily had the stents, and most likely would not have had to suffer later when I was on business overseas. At least I got really good stents in Italy - better than the ones in the UK, apparently.
So do we have the statistics to be able to make a value judgement on Covid 19? I don’t think so. We need evidence based risk analysis and it seems that there is insufficient evidence to date from which to draw valid conclusions. And we also tend NOT to believe the spin doctor specialists when they are accompanied on TV by the top politicians - are you telling me this to remain in your job because the boss stood next to you will fire you if you don’t tow the party line? Or are we genuinely being told the truth in a manner of delivery that does not require us to have to analyze complex and sometimes banal and meaningless “graphs” that change every five minutes?
I am undecided, because I have not seen the evidence based comparative risk assessment, and in this case I won’t be trading the Covid-19 outcomes.
