Yes, there is a way out of this pandemic

By Brian Labus

Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021 | 2 a.m.

Editor’s note: As he traditionally does every August, Brian Greenspun is turning over his Where I Stand column to others this month. In presenting this year’s series of columns from community leaders, we feel it is important that our readers, trying to emerge from the ravages of the pandemic, hear from some of the people who can help guide us to better tomorrows. Today’s guest is Brian Labus, infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at the UNLV School of Public Health.

After 18 months, it feels like we are right back where we started. COVID case counts are up, hospitals are overwhelmed, and we are back to wearing masks again. People have started to wonder if fighting COVID is just how we will spend the rest of our lives.

It doesn’t have to be.

COVID is likely here to stay — viruses are incredibly difficult to eradicate. However, like measles, polio or a dozen other diseases we no longer worry about on a daily basis, COVID is controllable. The vaccine is the only tool we have that will allow us to achieve that control, and it is our only path out of this pandemic.

So why are so many people reluctant to travel this path? People often dismiss the vaccine hesitant as lacking concern about themselves, their loved ones, or their community. I am often guilty of this thinking, as it is easier to cast those who are unvaccinated as the villains of the story than it is to understand why an individual made that decision.

The unfortunate answer is that there isn’t a simple answer as to why people reject the vaccine. If there were, public health could address that issue and move to the other side of the pandemic. In reality, people have highly personal and complex reasons for rejecting the vaccine, and none of those reasons comes from a place of wanting to get sick, see others get sick or see the pandemic rage on unabated.

For most people, the decision to get vaccinated comes down to a simple comparison of the risk of COVID versus the risk of vaccination. As long as you see the vaccine as more dangerous than COVID, the logical choice is to avoid it. Even more, you want to protect others by convincing them to avoid it as well.

So how do people find vastly different answers when making that comparison?

Quite simply, humans are terrible at judging and comparing risk. Every time the lottery jackpot spikes, Nevadans in droves head to California to buy a one-in-300 million chance of winning. We spend the drive fantasizing about how we are going to spend that money, not thinking that we are 30,000 times more likely to die in a car crash than win.

This same problem is true for COVID. Some people see the disease as benign and the vaccine as incredibly unsafe. However, the numbers do not bear this out.

Much has been made of the deaths reported to VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. We cast a wide net to ensure that we can find rare events, so many reports have nothing to do with vaccination. For transparency, VAERS makes these reports public as soon as they are submitted and before they have been reviewed.

However, using raw VAERS data to determine safety would be like using 911 calls to calculate our crime rates — we need to investigate each one before we count anything.

VAERS has received around 6,500 reports of deaths after vaccination. If every one of those deaths were actually caused by the vaccine, you would still be 150 times more likely to die from a COVID infection than the vaccine. But few of those deaths were actually caused by the vaccine. We expect twice as many people to die within three days of vaccination just by chance alone based on the U.S. death rate.

Ultimately, we are talking about extremely rare events compared to a virus that has killed one out of every 200 people it has infected. VAERS identified a rare blood clotting disorder likely caused by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine but COVID is still 16,000 times more likely to kill you.

This same risk imbalance holds up for every aspect of vaccination we evaluate. Vaccination rarely can cause inflammation of the heart, but you are 100 times more likely to develop it from a natural infection (plus it’s more severe). A little more than half our population is vaccinated, yet the unvaccinated account for 99% of our current hospital admissions and nearly all the COVID deaths. And after a COVID infection, you are two-and-a-half times more likely to be reinfected if you don’t get vaccinated.

For some aspects, we can’t even make a comparison as the health concerns are based on misinformation. Claims that vaccination implants a microchip or can make you magnetic have no basis in fact, like claims that the vaccine harms fertility. Some women got pregnant while participating in the clinical trials and none showed an increase in pregnancy complications or birth defects. As a natural COVID infection can increase a woman’s risk of complications and pre-term birth, it’s much safer to get vaccinated than be infected during pregnancy.

For every single situation we evaluate, it is consistently safer to be vaccinated than to remain unvaccinated and become naturally infected. To put it in Las Vegas terms, if you knew that black was 16,000 times more likely to hit, you wouldn’t bet on red.

Get vaccinated. It’s the smart bet.