Why is a Covid-vaccine like a seat-belt?

Thursday, July 29, 2021

Why is a Covid-vaccine like a seat-belt? Because in both cases people make stupid decisions based on emotion, not facts. My father-in-law, Mort Zilko, a doctor by profession, was not a stupid person, but in my opinion he made a stupid decision. Mort refused to wear a seat-belt because one of the times he crashed, he was ejected from the car which then burst into flames. “I’d have died!” he said, but I thought that he stood a better chance of escape from any peril had he been restrained by a seat-belt. Today people refuse certain vaccines, or vaccines in general, because they have heard (or very rarely, know) of someone who died of a blood-clot after receiving the vaccine.

Let us look at two probabilities, death-by-blood-clot and death-by-vehicular-collision. As usual, the figures I use will be arbitrary, but you can follow my process and find your own source of data which will, I am sure, lead you to my conclusions.

Death-By-Blood-Clot

What is the probability that you will die by blood-clot after receiving a dose of a vaccine. It is the ratio of blood-clot-deaths to inoculations.

I went to https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/coronavirus-vaccine-blood-clots to obtain values; you may substitute your own choice of source data. The page quotes “Six cases” from “over 6.8 million ... shots had been administered”.

Now as always we should note that six cases means that there were six people who died, from blood clots, supposedly after a vaccination. Maybe some of those people were going to die of blood clots anyway, and the vaccination did not trigger the blood clot but was merely a co incident event. We might lower the figure in this case, As well, maybe some people died of a blood clot after vaccination but the examining doctor did not think that vaccination was a trigger. We might raise the figure in this case.

As well we should ask for a definition of “after”; does that means “within one hour”?, “within two days”? or “within one month”?

Without pursuing the medical history of everyone in the USA, we can not answer these questions; we will go with what we have got. Six out of 6.8 million. Note too that if you sample some other country you will get different figures. Perhaps Uruguay does not record death-by-blood-clot the way that the USA does. Tuvalu with just 11,650 people may have very lax records, but there again, in a nation where (almost) everybody knows everybody, perhaps there is an intense scrutiny of deaths.

We can be sure about number-of-deaths, because in most nations, death is a binary event; you are dead, or you are not-dead. Injuries are poorly defined. Think “Are you OK? Shall we take you to the hospital?”; “No, I’m fine; I just need to get home and rest”.

In your head you can divide six by six million to come up with “one in a million”, or you can use a spreadsheet to arrive at 0.000088%. Either way works for me.

Death-By-Vehicular-Collision

I went to https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.html for my data. The page reports “... more than 32,000 people are killed ... each year from motor vehicle crashes ...” and this is in the USA, from a web page dated 2016. I recall in my youth reading of fifty thousand deaths per year and realising that with fifty states, this averaged out to a thousand deaths per state per year, or about three per state per day. In my youth seat-belts were just coming into vogue.

I am aware of arguments about cause-of-death. In a car crash your hip is injured but you are not dead. However during hip-repair surgery you contract pneumonia and die. Is you death caused by the collision, or is it caused by pneumonia? And why the car trip anyway? Should we blame your death on the lack of ice-cream in your freezer?

If a vehicle strikes me as I cycle to the supermarket, or while I am walking home, is that “a motor vehicle crash”? And if it counts as a vehicular crash in Bonavista, does it count as a vehicular crash in San Diego?

Be careful about selection of data. São Tomé and Príncipe has about two vehicles per 1,000 people, so I would anticipate a very low rate of vehicular death there. There again, perhaps the folks of São Tomé and Príncipe are so unused to vehicles that they are taken by surprise and the death-rate is higher. We can expect death rates to rise once the silent e-bikes and e-scooters increase on the sidewalks and roads.

This page https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2016/ reports the population of the USA in 2016 as being 323,015,991, a wonderfully accurate figure. I leave it to you to decide whether this figure represents voting-roll residents, tourists, people on a study or work visa, or people like me who were flown down to Hazlet (New Jersey) for a two-day consultancy.

Again, you can do the calculation in your head and come up with “one in ten thousand”, or use a calculator to arrive at 0.009907%

Death-By-Blood-Clot vs. Death-By-Vehicular-Collision

We are now in a position to calculate our chances of death in perspective. This is a simple matter of dividing one ratio by the other which, in your head, is one-in-ten-thousand divided by (or into if you prefer) one in a million. In your head that is 100 times, in my spreadsheet one in 112 times.

That is, you are roughly a hundred times more likely to die by vehicular collision than by a blood clot after receiving a vaccine. Now along the way we have made a great many assumptions. The blood clot deaths were in 2020 or 2021, so we should use vehicular deaths for the same period for the 6,800,000+ vaccinations, and different years, different nations, different vaccines, different age groups. We could argue that young drivers are less experienced and believe that they are immortal (as was I). And that older drivers (as I am) drive in a sober fashion and have done the sums. Driving faster just means that you spend more time in the waiting-room at the other end.

In these notes I have avoided the obvious complication exemplified by the old married couple driving to, or from, their first vaccination shot. Married for over fifty years they love each other deeply and have been discussing this issue of blood-clots on their way to the clinic. Distracted, the driver collides and both die. Was this a Covid-related death, or just another vehicular collision?

Conclusion

I state the odds at 100:1, that is, you are a hundred times more likely to die as a driver or passenger in a motorized-vehicle collision than from a blood-clot after receiving a Covid-vaccination. This will be true regardless of the company that makes the vaccination. In a similar vein, you should fit and use seat-belts regardless of the manufacturer. One manufacturer’s set-belts will be (not “may be”) better or worse than another manufacturer’s, but you are not going to find a 100:1 discrepancy there.

There are so many variations on these calculations that I encourage you to make your own and report back to me. If your arguments are coherent and you come up with a ration below 50:1, I will append them to this page.

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