3/10 people with smallpox died.
Polio 5-15%. Far more forever paralyzed.
You don’t need to sell a vaccine with death and injury rates like that. You also don’t need to sell lockdowns or social distancing.
Humans, miraculously enough, respond to their environment and make risk reward calculations all on their own. They don’t need to be force fed what to do by an allegedly benevolent government apparatus.
If Covid was a big enough deal that vaccine, social distancing and lockdown mandates were actually warranted, there wouldn’t have been so much backlash.
But it wasn’t. Hence the backlash.
We were facing an unknown enemy. Early hospitalization rates were very high. You can see the info below on excess deaths, the week ending April 4 we had 15,000 more deaths than a "normal" year. COVID was still new.
Figures present excess deaths associated with COVID-19 at the national and state levels.
www.cdc.gov
ICUs filled up entirely. We don't build hospitals so everyone can be in at the same time, and ICUs are even far fewer. That contributed to deaths, see below, and contributed to huge burnout from doctors and nurses which just makes the problem worse.
A new study found an association between the availability of ICU beds and patient mortality during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
news.yale.edu
We didn't know what worked. In the vast majority of cases, someone comes in and they can't breathe, they go onto a ventilator. It wasn't until those people started dying that we realized that made was worse for COVID patients. But there was no way of knowing that out of the gate.
I'll agree if people suggest some places were too slow to come out of lockdown. I think that is accurate. But we just didn't know in March-June. Were we facing the Andromeda Strain scenario, or just a quick hit of a bad flu? There was no good data to rely on. But for most of 2020, hospitals were near capacity and that became a problem. In the Bloomington area, Monroe and Lawrence County hospitals were completely full meaning people with other emergencies had to be sent to an Indianapolis, Louisville, or who knows where. That happened in many parts of the country. Suddenly very survivable car crashes and other injuries were much more dangerous.
We made mistakes, that almost always happens fighting a new enemy (see US Army and Kasserine Pass as an example).
But there are still studies happening on the vaccines, and we still don't see the big risk that others report we have. The risk of heart issues after a vaccine IS higher than without. But it was less than having COVID without a vaccine.
Estimates of the risk of all-cause and cardiac death in the 12 weeks after vaccination or positive SARS-CoV-2 test compared with subsequent weeks, in England.
www.ons.gov.uk
- A positive SARS-CoV-2 test was associated with increased cardiac and all-cause mortality among people; the risk was higher in those who were unvaccinated at time of testing than in those who were vaccinated.
From that, there was more of a risk for the old school vaccine than the newer mRNA:
There was evidence of an increase in cardiac death in young women after a first dose of non-mRNA vaccines, with the risk being 3.5 times higher in the 12 weeks following vaccination, compared with the longer-term risk.
When it comes to "public health" this is all tricky. When does your right not to not be vaccinated create a public danger. A great example is smallpox. While you may decide you will risk it, your getting smallpox endangers everyone who is immuno-compromised and cannot get the vaccine. So there is an open question. It is somewhat true for COVID, I know a woman that died of COVID last December while undergoing chemotherapy. Her immune system was badly damaged so it couldn't fight COVID. This is even though she had been earlier vaccinated.
It isn't just COVID, vaccine rates have been dropping since long before COVID.
An interesting story on smallpox. The UN sent troops to India to vaccinate the population because large sections of India were balking. They quite literally rounded up people at gunpoint. Pre-covid CNN did a story on this and interviewed someone who commanded one of the units. I don't know that there was a "right" answer. The world is far better off having smallpox eradicated, I think we all agree. But forcing people literally at gunpoint? That's tough.
