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Vaccine Safety
A strongly held belief is not truly strong if you are unwilling to let others challenge or scrutinize it.
If you believe something so strongly that you would risk the health of yourself and others—you should be able to defend your opinion without concern or trepidation.
You should have an unshakeable confidence in that belief if you are going to spread information that could be life or death to someone who trusts you.
You should not discount the seriousness of telling a pregnant friend that vaccines are dangerous. You should consider the responsibility of telling an elderly family member that mRNA vaccines are riskier than getting COVID-19 if you don't have a firm understanding of how they work and how their safety was actually assessed.
Your opinions have power and they can most certainly have consequences.
If you do not have that confidence... if you are not open to challenge your possibly dangerous belief... if you fear seeking out opposing views or googling research you know will contradict your conclusions... maybe deep down you know that belief is on shaky ground and you should not share the information without further research and evidence.
Be willing to show your work and share your sources.
I strongly and confidently believe vaccines are the greatest medical advancement since sewage systems.
Seriously, soooo many people died from poop that was just laying around. Even a president! (Rest in Peace, William Henry Harrison. May heaven be free from tainted poop water.)
I have challenged my own beliefs about vaccines. It is an exercise I do with many of my beliefs in order to strengthen them, change my mind, or gain new perspective. I will purposely try to prove myself wrong.
I have rebutted several anti-vaxxers over the years with the best information I could find and the support (and fact-checking) of my friends who are medical professionals. I have researched every claim I could find made against vaccines. I have gone down multiple rabbit holes trying to find *credible* evidence that vaccines are dangerous. I was willing to be wrong about some of my beliefs depending on the information I found. In the end, I only grew more confident in my vaccination declarations.
I generally have three things I look for when challenging one of my firmly held scientific beliefs.
Peer review: Has the opposing claim been verified or even suspected by any other experts?
Scientific Method: Could this claim be produced and then reproduced? Could it be reproduced multiple times? Could it be reproduced multiple times by other experts? Is it a catholic bunny?
Credentials: Does the person making the opposing claim have the necessary qualifications to be considered an expert? Do they have a sordid history? Are they well respected by their peers? Do they have a financial incentive to make said claim? Do they have a history of saying bonkers shit controversial things? Are they bigots? Are they friends with bigots?
Here are the red flags I found when I tried to give anti-vaxxers the best possible chance to convince me.
I could not find peer-reviewed sources in respected publications.
I could not find legitimate scientific research of vaccine danger that could be verified by multiple experts.
I could not find a claimed anti-vax expert that passed my bullshit detector standards for credentials.
In contrast, I could find an abundance of all three of those things when looking into vaccine safety. I found that vaccines have been studied more than just about any other medical treatment. Not just Big Pharma R&D, but publicly funded academic studies too. All of the evidence showed the risks of vaccines were minor, the serious dangers were shark-attack-while-getting-hit-by-lightning rare, and the benefits were responsible for saving *millions* of lives and preventing a lifetime of suffering for *millions* more.
I could find no vaccine consequences that were not preferable to scores of people succumbing to the agonizing death of smallpox or the chronic torture of polio.
I also found a stark contrast in the notable people on either side of this topic.
On the one hand, you have someone like Jonas Salk who passed up a portion of a possible $7 billion fortune when he decided against patenting the polio vaccine.
He believed it to be immoral to patent his discovery saying, "Could you patent the Sun?"
Then you have former doctor Andrew Wakefield who was seeking several paydays when trying to convince folks there was some kind of patoot-centric autism caused by MMR shots. I have yet to hear of someone on the spectrum seeking out a proctologist for diagnostic purposes.
Almost all of the notable anti-vax figures I found were linked to shady things or made bonkers claims on myriad topics or had no credentials in the area they claimed expertise. Many are just public figures and have no medical background whatsoever. Or chiropractors who have vastly overestimated their medical training consisting of *checks notes* "crackin' dem bones."
One of the most reasonable-sounding anti-vax "experts" is Robert Kennedy Jr. His vaccine expertise includes... being a lawyer, studying American History and Literature, and probably some very compelling Facebook posts. I mean, I guess that is a little more impressive than Jenny McCarthy's two years of college. Or Alex Jones's brief stint in community college.
When researching these folks I found eugenics and racism and religious zealotry. I found they had links to truly horrible people and organizations. Many had a financial stake in the wellness industry. And I don't think I've seen such a large group that all had a "Controversies" section in their Wikipedia entries since I looked into famous climate skeptics.
Compare that to someone like Dr. Fauci and you find a long history of genuine and extraordinary accomplishments. Before conservatives decided to assassinate his character to shift blame away from Trump, you could find notable, stalwart figures giving him praise from both sides of the aisle. He was always ready to give his expert advice to whomever could benefit. Most impressive of all... Fauci developed treatments for 3 fatal diseases.
They are no longer fatal.
Do you know how many doctors in the world have not cured a single thing—much less 3 things?
I'm sorry, but you can't develop complex life-saving treatments for three fatal conditions and be a "moron in a lab coat." It's just not possible.
He's won prestigious awards and gained the respect of nearly everyone in his field. His work as a researcher has literally saved thousands upon thousands of lives. He is partially responsible for HIV no longer being a death sentence.
He earned his status as a trusted expert and has the bona fides to prove it.
Also, (and this is definitely way more important than the "curing 3 things" biz) Dr. Fauci has NO "Controversies" section.
Junior has an "Other" subsection in his controversies section.
He has controversies that defied classification, which is impressive in its own special way.
The people propped up by anti-vaxxers as their experts and spokespersons have none of that experience or positive recognition. They are lucky to have published one paper in a respected journal. They all have dubious pasts and dubious bedfellows. I found them to be quite the motley crew without a decent glam metal song nor peer-reviewed study to their credit. No catholic bunnies whatsoever.
Most of the anti-vax claims I researched led to grifters trying to dupe people so they could sell a book or a fake cure or advance some other greedy agenda. Just rub some Colloidal Silver™ on your measles!
Or I found medical quacks who do not have a shred of credibility left—and in some cases they harmed people when trying to prove their dangerous notions. Former doctor Andrew Wakefield literally *tortured* children when trying to prove his claims of vaccine-induced butt-based autism.
(I honestly didn't want to make a joke in that sentence, but I also didn't want to downplay the absurdity of his assinine theory.)
In truth, these anti-vaccine "experts" are few and far between. When I looked at the number of experts assuring vaccines are safe and effective—they outnumbered the supposed medical professionals opposing them by multitudes of multitudes.
*Expert* consensus is one of the most powerful indicators of the truth.
Gone are the days when lone voices like Galileo and Copernicus are the truth-tellers butting up against a sea of doubters among their peers. We now live in a world where scientists and researchers are in vast digitally connected communities and these communities hold themselves to extremely high standards when trying to find the best information available. They check each others' work and then recheck it many times over. They develop better studies to prove or disprove previous studies. They have varied funding sources so even if a few are paid off to hide a dark truth or create a dark truth, that truth will be revealed in short order by someone else.
If Big Tobacco couldn't hide the truth years ago with their vast resources and no internet, there is no way a conspiracy of that magnitude could be hidden in this age of information.
Nowadays, instead of hiding the truth, shady groups use their resources to convince people the truth is fake. Since coverups rarely last these days, misinformation and propaganda have become their preferred tools. They prey upon the vulnerable minds who cannot pass up a good conspiracy and then use those conspiracists as puppets to convince more people—thus perpetuating a cycle of lies.
When there is a near-unanimous consensus in the scientific community, you can trust that is the best truth we have available.
That doesn't mean that truth is 100% complete. It may need some of the variables updated over time. That is just the nature of science. Understanding improves as we go.
COVID-19 was new. The info at the beginning was not always perfect, but we were always heading in a positive direction of understanding and those places that listened to experts from the beginning were impacted far less. (See: New Zealand.)
At the start, experts weren't sure about the efficacy of masks, and seeing how people freaked out and bought 500 rolls of toilet paper as if COVID caused unending diarrhea, experts advised against the general public using masks because they worried all of the N95s would be hoarded. That ended up happening anyway—so they were at least validated in that regard.
It was thought that since coronavirus particles were smaller than the microscopic gaps in the weave of cloth and surgical masks, those would not be very effective in protecting people from infection. Soon it was discovered that COVID was not usually transmitted as its own singular particle, but rather it was hitching a ride on droplets. These droplets were bigger than the gaps in most masks, meaning they would be effective at mitigating transmission after all. Not 100% effective, but when combined with isolation and distancing, masks could give another robust layer of risk reduction.
So we updated our understanding and people were asked to wear masks of any kind to keep those droplets in check.
New information does not make the old information a lie. A lie requires the intention to deceive. If I were to fault science communicators for anything, it would be not adequately explaining how scientific understanding is a process that will change and update over time. Life software patches for our brain.
Experts were wrong about masks initially, but they were right about tracing programs, social distancing, good hygiene, and isolation. Listening to experts still would have mitigated your risk by a large margin. The process of expert consensus worked for those who gave it a chance. (See: New Zealand.)
When things like gravity, climate change, or vaccine safety have 99% of experts on board, you can rest assured there is not a dark and sinister Big Gravity behind the curtain trying to hide a giant floaty secret. With all of the brilliant minds researching, testing, and theorizing every aspect of gravity—any attempt to create a grand gravitational conspiracy would be exposed posthaste via our vast network of networked scientists.
You can sleep comfortably knowing gravity is *not* fake and we are not tethered to this planet because directly after birth we had magnets implanted in our itty bitty baby feet. There would surely be brave OB/GYN whistleblowers taking secret pictures of baby magnet feet. Nurses would smuggle spare foot magnets to the press. A radiologist on TikTok would dance in front of x-rays of adorable neodymium toes.
Cutting off your feet will not grant you the power of flight! (Don't even try it!)
You cannot walk upside down on metal ceilings! (I guess you can try that if you really want to. I'm not your mom.)
What I'm trying to say is vaccination conspiracies cannot survive in a community of immunologists and virologists that is many tens of thousands strong.
A sufficiently sized group is the death of any secret.
So... just how strong is my belief in vaccine safety?
I was vaccinated today.
As were my mom and dad.
Would I endanger cuties like these if I weren't confident vaccines were safe?
In areas with high vaccination rates, cases of COVID have been plummeting.
"As of Wednesday, Vermont reported a 54 percent decline in the average number of new cases a day, while Michigan, which had one of the nation’s most severe recent outbreaks, is now seeing rapid improvement with cases there down 40 percent."
As long as people keep getting vaccinated, those improvements will continue.
Aside from some frustrating short-term side effects (which are normal when creating an immune response), these vaccines have been remarkably safe. That is why I knew getting my family vaccinated was the best decision to help keep them alive and healthy.
If you doubt the safety of vaccines, I would like to challenge your belief.
All you have to do is watch a video.
It is entertaining. It is thorough. It has a 1.5x playback option.
And it has a list of sources you can parse through to assess their validity.
In the dozens of anti-vax videos I've watched, whenever they linked to a source, it was almost always to their own website. They were their own source—which is totally not suspicious at all.
Here is the point of this entire post...
If that video instills any doubt in your vaccine skepticism, I would ask you to consider getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
Not just to keep yourself safe, but to help keep everyone you love safe as well. You may be able to handle a COVID infection, but you never know how the people around you might respond. A simple shot could save the life of someone close to you—as you are less likely to infect others.
And it may keep you from getting Long COVID—which has been affecting people of all ages and health statuses. It is said to be similar to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which is the very condition that has kept me housebound for over 15 years.
You do not want CFS. TRUST ME.
And because I know some people are all about the anecdotal evidence...
My 97-year-old grandma tested positive for COVID.
Scary, right?
But she had her first vaccine shot a few weeks beforehand and despite being about the highest risk possible with multiple comorbidities—the virus felt like a mild cold and she is absolutely fine.
My younger, healthier aunt was not vaccinated yet. She got COVID at the exact same time (most likely from the same source) and suffered from an excruciating COVID experience. Thankfully, she was able to avoid hospitalization and serious complications, but she said it was one of the most miserable health experiences of her life.
Think about that.
I am almost certain I would be mourning my Gram-Gram if she had not gotten the vaccine in time.
That is pretty damned incredible in my book.
VACCINES WORK.
VACCINES ARE SAFE.
Epilogue: Flu shots have a low participation rate in the United States. Every year, even with only 45% participation, Flu vaccinations prevent roughly 80,000 hospitalizations. Can you imagine the death and illness we could prevent if we had 100% participation?
We could also prevent a lot of misery if we continued to wear masks—especially during flu season or whenever someone feels sick. The rate of influenza has been shockingly low during the pandemic and most experts agree it is because of all the COVID mitigation techniques being employed.
These practices could also help mitigate the severity of future pandemics.
Let's learn from this past year and move toward a healthier future.
