I’ve had people tell me and my friends similar things to this. Some people just aren’t good with numbers and can’t put them into perspective with other numbers and arrive at scary conclusions with no further context. Canada has 40+ million people and side effects can include trivial things such as feeling tired or having a sore arm. On a similar note, 2 of the COVID vaccines were mRNA based and some people were scaremongering about how the vaccines must somehow alter your DNA because both “mRNA” and “DNA” sound vaguely similar.
Comment on bird flu
Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This guy in my city had anti vaxx banners and signs. One said “50k+ Canadians suffered side effects from the COVID vaccine!”
So I looked up how many people were vaccinated in Canada, and 50k was below 1% of the people vaccinated. I pointed out to the guy that this means the vaccine had a success rate without side effects of 99% and how incredible that is. Dude got pissed at me and started yelling that I was a shill.
I guess he didn’t like math and common sense
Corno@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Not to be that guy but 50,000 people is still a lot. Percentages are great because if they’re very low we tend to like that but it doesn’t change the absolute number.
The real comparison isn’t how safe the vaccine is, its how safe the vaccine is compared to getting the disease it’s preventing. Every medical product is not about zero harm or low harm, it’s about harm reduction. If medical therapies didn’t cause harm, we wouldn’t have chemo treatments and we would be much worse at treating cancers.
Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Also though that 50k side effects is vague, what did the sign mean? A side effect can be a mild headache or rash, which I would imagine is the majority of those cases. A 99% rate for any medicine is incredible