Skip to main content

Vaccine Hesitancy and Odds of Going to the Hospital

In the great push to get everybody jabbed with the experimental COVID vaccine, people in the wait-and-see camp have been painted as conspiracy theorists and anti-science morons--the sort of people you'd see at the recent Redneck Rave where 15,000 people came and some ended up impaled, choked or badly cut. Dozens were charged with crimes. Won't it be interesting to see Edmonson County, Kentucky's COVID stats in a few weeks. Surely the local hospital will be full of rednecks, and not just to have fingers sewn back on...right?

Use this, plus your region's dashboard, to calculate your odds. Photo from Pixabay.

Maybe not. Humans are inherently bad at estimating odds. Several news outlets report that 99% of COVID patients in the hospital are unvaccinated, so does that mean you're almost a hundred times more likely to end up in the hospital if you haven't had your shots? Not quite. Looking only at hospitalized people rather than the whole population is relative risk. The relative risk reduction of symptomatic cases in the vaccine trials ranged from about 70% to 95%, which isn't that far off from what the news reports about COVID cases in hospitals. But if you don't currently have COVID, you're probably more interested in your absolute risk. The vaccine manufacturers' own trials showed only about a 1% reduction in absolute risk of getting symptomatic COVID. In other words, for study group of 200 (100 who get the vaccines and 100 who get a placebo), only 1 more person in the placebo (control) group would get sick. 

We can calculate real-world absolute risk reduction of being hospitalized with COVID here in Indiana--which is next door to Kentucky, coincidentally. Close to three million people out of 6.5 million are fully vaccinated. Around 40 people per day are being admitted to the hospital for COVID, according to our dashboard. If we extrapolate that to two months (the length of the vaccine studies), that amounts to 24 vaccinated people and 2,376 unvaccinated people ending up in the hospital. Dividing by 3 million and 3.5 million, respectively, and subtracting the results gives us a difference of 671 per million. That's less than one in a thousand. Looking at it another way, you'd have to vaccinate 1,500 people to prevent one hospitalization over the next two months.

So why the higher rate of unvaccinated people in the hospital than what showed up in the studies? A couple of possible reasons. The studies looked at symptomatic COVID cases, not hospitalizations. Then there's the healthy user effect. People taking the vaccines might also be taking other steps to reduce their risk of getting COVID. Another is socioeconomics. Some researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University conducted a survey on vaccine hesitancy. Here's something they found:

Workers in some occupations were more reluctant than others to take the jab. Hesitancy ranged from 9.6% among educators and people in life, physical or social sciences to a high of 46% among workers in construction, oil and gas extraction and mining. Hesitancy was nearly as high among workers in installation, maintenance, repair, farming, fishing or forestry.

In health care fields, pharmacists were the least hesitant at 8.5%. The highest hesitancy, 20.5%, was among medical assistants, emergency medical technicians and home health, nursing, psychiatric or personal-care aides.

The highest portion of the vaccine hesitant was among people who can't Zoom into work for one thing. The have to show up and in some cases have close contact with people. For another, they're in physically demanding jobs that might put them around unhealthy chemicals--and the human body has a limited ability to repair itself. And my experience (my father worked construction) is that blue-collar people are less fussy about what they eat and whether they smoke than desk jockeys are. Again, it's the healthy user effect. These things might make people more likely to contract and get ill from COVID.

There's an impression that the hesitant believe in wild stories like microchips in the vaccines or that they simply don't want to be told what to do. But the study found that the main concern was side effects. Many of the unjabbed are people in dangerous jobs where things absolutely, positively have to work in the real world--and they've found that recommendations from faraway bureaucrats or plans designed in an office don't always meet that standard. A push by faraway bureaucrats to vaccinate everyone with an experimental vaccine rushed through trials conducted by the vendors sounds like just the sort of thing to give them pause. 

To be fair, my calculation of absolute risk reduction doesn't take herd immunity into consideration. Vaccinations are one way to get to herd immunity--but so is an event like the Redneck Rave. So I'd like to thank all the rednecks who attended, got exposed to COVID, and hopefully developed some immunity to it during summer, when they're less likely to end up in the hospital. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This Just In: Yogurt Doesn't Improve Health

A recent study from Spain finds "In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," states López-García. Most yogurt is pretty much pudding with a little bacteria . Pudding is a sugar bomb. Hard to believe the stuff doesn't improve health outcomes, isn't it? But as usual, researchers are calling for...more research. "For future research more specific instruments must be used which may increase the probability of finding a potential benefit of this food."

Paleo Diet: Eating Differently from Everyone Else is Fine!

I've been seeing more and more articles by women (it's always women) whose heads have exploded trying to figure out life without yogurt and cupcakes. Oh, the shenanigans they get up to: bathroom problems from stuffing themselves with vegetables, paleo baked goods that don't taste the same as ones from the bakery, and especially the irresistible urge to eat "normally." The technical problems aren't hard to sort out: substitutes like baked goods will taste different because they are different, but an adjustment period of a few months will make those foods taste normal. And whatever you eat, don't stuff yourself. First, though, read a book by Loren Cordain or Mark Sisson to learn about the paleo diet before diving in. The articles I keep reading, though, have more to do with attitude: the urge to be exactly like everybody else or the urge to be helpless. If you're in the second category, I can't, by definition, help you. If you'd rather be Lu

Robert F. Kennedy shows up at the FDA

 

Decongestant Ineffective; Vibration Plate Works

A common ingredient in many cold medicines has been shown so ineffective that the FDA recently proposed taking it off the market. The ingredient, phenylephrine, "failed to outperform placebo pills in patients with cold and allergy congestion," say researchers from the University of Florida. "The same researchers also challenged the drug's effectiveness in 2007, but the FDA allowed the products to remain on the market pending additional research," according to CNBC .  Mostly placebos. Photo from Pixabay . I can attest that phenylephrine doesn't work. Before I stopped eating wheat, I constantly had nasal and sinus congestion. I helped keep Sudafed in business when the active ingredient was pseudoephedrine, but I noticed the PE (phenylephrine) variety didn't work at all. The only other decongestants I've found helpful are guaifenesin (Mucinex) and spicy food. Mucinex is expensive because it works! (The cheaper store brands work just as well, though.) Su

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder .