Life is a game of dice, and all you can do is load the dice in your favour

My Nan smoked all her life. She died at 97. Obviously we all understand that this doesn’t mean that smoking is safe.

The large majority of people who die in car crashes were in fact wearing seatbelts at the time. Obviously we all understand that this doesn’t mean that wearing a seatbelt is a bad idea.

The side effects of the vaccines are understood and, like many drugs (statins spring to mind for some reason), it’s true that some people who would not have become ill from the disease do become ill from the cure.

One issue is that people just don’t run the numbers on that. Say for example there’s a 5% chance you’ll die of a condition if you don’t take statins, and a 1% chance you’ll die from taking statins if you do (I just made those numbers up to illustrate the point, they’re not accurate and I CBA to GIYLF at 2am). Obviously for some people they will take statins and die when they would otherwise not have died. And yet given a choice between a 1% chance of dying and a 5% chance of dying, which is the more rational?

We know for a fact that the mass vaccination programmes have majorly impacted the effect covid is having on our health service. The more people are vaccinated the less pressure the NHS faces. This doesn’t just impact covid deaths: cancer patients are now being denied surgery due to lack of ITU beds for them to recover from their major operations in. So we are also losing people to cancer who didn’t have to die, because people are not getting jabbed.

Another issue is that the tone of the debate, like so many debates these days, is very sharp, ad-hominem and assertion-driven. You read things like “vaxd can still die so what’s the point” (cf my first two/three paras), “they’re just trying to control you” (ermmmmmm ok), “no virus has ever been isolated” (again, ermmmmm, so very blatantly wrong but ok) and so on. Most of this is readily debunked by a simple glance at public domain science. But doing one’s own research is not so fashionable these days. There’s a general lack of grasp of what a virus is and how and why it mutates. And so on. And please don’t get me started on those who compare needing eg a covid pass with the Shoah. But a disturbing number of people have taken not getting jabbed as a counter-cultural component of identity. The arguments here, it seems to me, should be scientific and not cultural.

Another issue is that people simply say “you’re an idiot” rather than engage calmly with arguments presented. This can be because arguments aren’t actually presented of course. But I wish everyone would try to take the heat out of it to some degree. You won’t persuade someone by shouting at them. If anything you’ll make them more defensive. You might persuade them by talking to them. Of course it takes two to tango and that’s not always on offer.

Far too many words at 2am. I’m awake because the dice didn’t roll well for me. Despite being triple jabbed, I have covid. Despite being triple jabbed it could still make me badly ill (so far it’s just like a bad cold with a particularly tight chest) or kill me. One of my school classmates died of it not so long ago and that chap from Il Divo was only 53 and also vaccinated.

None of this means the jabs don’t work. Getting them doesn’t mean you become magically immune. It just means you’ve loaded the dice in your favour. I was unlucky to get covid, but we’re all unlucky sometimes. I’ll have to be a lot more unlucky to end up in hospital than would be the case were I not jabbed and a lot more unlucky again to die of it compared to Hypothetical Unjabbed Me.

It’s much more likely that all it will mean is some days in bed and a f**ked up Christmas (this latter is guaranteed as I’m in isolation until 28th). Honestly I feel a bit of a fraud right now, all this fuss (had to change all the kids plans for Xmas as I now can’t take any at all) and I’ve had worse colds. That’s likely to remain the case and much more likely than if I’d not been vaccinated. So I’m extremely glad I’ve had my jabs and I do wish everyone else would too, because I also have friends with cancer and I’d quite like ITU beds to be available to them should they need one.

As I say, far too many words. But I do get frustrated the way this, and indeed many, discussions play out particularly online but increasingly in real life too. We have two ears and one mouth and sometimes that’s the right proportion to use them in.

Posted By: Old Man, Dec 20, 02:27:20