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It is generally understood by economists and other social scientists that people often overestimate the risk of a catastrophe. Vanderbilt Professor Kip Viscusi’s research indicates that both cigarette and non-cigarette smokers “greatly overestimate” the lung cancer risk of cigarette smoking.
There must be something in our genes that nudges us this way. Or, as Adam Smith described it, one of “the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, [is] the great poison to happiness … .”
This is unfortunate, as it will likely delay our recovery from the COVID crisis because of “vaccine reluctance.” This puts the prospect of herd immunity and normal life further in the future. A CNN story indicated that 40% of U.S. Marines were choosing not to be vaccinated. A news report from the French news agency France-24 indicated that 80% of those offered the Astra-Zeneca vaccine in Sicily refused. It is true that some recipients of the AZ vaccine have suffered blood clots—some fatal. But as we understand, vaccine complications, sometimes leading to deaths, are a risk for all vaccinations. But those deaths are rare and must be compared to the risk of death from contracting the disease.
The same France-24 story reported that the European Medicine Agency’s statistics showed AZ vaccines had been administered to over 25 million people. Blood clots had been reported in 86 cases; 18 were fatal. So that’s a one in 1.388 million chance of death from a blood clot from the AZ vaccine.
In contrast, Indiana Health Department data retrieved on April 11 shows 11,787 COVID deaths out of 698,692 Hoosiers who have tested positive—or a one in 59 chance of death from COVID. That means the average person is about 23,540 times more likely to die from COVID than from blood-clot complications from the AZ vaccine.
Of course, there are likely many Hoosiers who had the COVID virus but suffered mild or no symptoms and were never tested. This means we know the data overestimates the COVID death rate. But even if the death rate is off by a factor of 10, the chances of death by COVID is still 2,340 times the chance of death by an AZ-vaccine-related blood clot. Even among those under 60, much less vulnerable to COVID deaths, one is 294 times more likely to die of COVID than AZ blood clots with the 10-factor adjustment.
Get your vaccine now!•
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Bohanon and Curott are professors of economics at Ball State University. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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Good points made here. One possible correction. The actual Covid infection rate in Indiana is probably about 3 times as high as the number testing positive, so the exposure to death from Covid calculated above is therefore probably overstated by a factor of three.
I don’t trust the validity and accuracy of statisticians like the authors because they can make a case for or against nearly anything merely by how they calculate the percentages of one parameter or another. As Mark Twain is famously quoted “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”. With that said I got vaccinated as soon as my age group became eligible. The reason was simple. Without the data the authors cite, I concluded the benefits of getting vaccinated were greater than the benefits of not getting vaccinated. And not just for factors of becoming infected with Covid-19 and surviving the disease. There is a great deal of evidence that the quarantines, social distancing, job losses and economic stress suffered over the past year, as well as the 24-7 news cycle and politicization of the pandemic, have created and continue to maintain a great deal of harm to people everywhere in our nation. Empirical signs abound. Anxiety, depression, suicide, drug abuse, murders have all increased significantly throughout the pandemic. Those lowest on the economic scale have been especially hard hit. So if getting vaccinated will contribute to satisfying our so-called leaders to get this nation back to normal so people can return to some degree of normalcy, I decided it was worth getting vaccinated. Life in the U.S. will never be the same, but change happens regardless of pandemics. What we can encourage is for leaders to restore some level of rational, normal living conditions for our society that allows people to relax and come off the “red code alert status”. Everyone needs and deserves a break from this drama. Unfortunately, it is also evident that many politicians and activists have capitalized greatly by “not wasting the crisis of this calamity”. It will be difficult to pry this new-found, effective tool of fear mongering from their greedy, self-centered hands.
Suicides are actually down in 2020 but please, go on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/health/coronavirus-suicide-cdc.html
The problem is the virus, not the restrictions.
But we chose as a society to not really lock down, but kinda lock down a little then say “lockdowns don’t work”. Birth control doesn’t work when you don’t follow the directions either. And we chose to bankrupt businesses when they needed to close until it was safe to reopen, other countries didn’t do that. Why did we make that choice?