We’re all hopeful for a vaccine against Covid-10. Anti-vaccine sentiment is strong in segments of our populations, particularly in the prosperous West. An even larger segment of the population behaves as if life must be 100% risk free, and tradeoffs are unacceptable. Vaccines are not 100% perfect, and there are some risks. This is a situation of tradeoffs.
An insight I picked up from an older man about the current “we insist on zero risk” mentality: These people have no living memory of what everyday life was like before the big surge of vaccine availability in the 1940’s-1970’s, and antibiotics in the 1920’s. Infant and childhood mortality was common. Many people knew family members and neighbors who died or permanently scarred from scarlet fever, polio, the mumps, etc. There were national conversations about how to build enough iron lungs to treat all the polio victims. People living with that reality could reasonably consider the tradeoff value of sparing millions of people death and disfigurement vs. the reality that a very small fraction of people would be hurt by the vaccine.
The tradeoff risks were movingly illustrated in this clip from the HBO series “John Adams.”
Life is not risk-free.
