What I don't like about posts like these is they "infect" those serially susceptible to misinformation that refuse to look at statistics and raw data. So I did it for y'all.

First, Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are correlated with myocarditis risk [0]. Pfizer at 1 in 71,400 and Moderna at 1 in 23,800.

Alright - maybe scary to a few folks, right? Nobody wants an inflamed heart. Well before we dig in there, let's look at weekly COVID case rates for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated using December 4th, 2021 data from the CDC [1]. There were 1,006.39 / 100k cases of COVID that week in unvaccinated individuals and 443.69 / 100k in vaccinated individuals. This is including the most recent Omicron wave (which you can see in the data). Meaning you have a 2.27x higher chance of being diagnosed with COVID if you're unvaccinated.

Okay, so there's some protection - but clearly not 100%! The biggest concern we have is side effects, right? Because if risk of vaccine side effects outweigh the benefit to vaccination, then we shouldn't be vaccinating people. I think everybody can agree on that. So we'll want to look at death rate data... but first, let's tackle myocarditis.

Myocarditis has an occurrence rate of 1 in 23,800 post-Moderna vaccination. We can normalize that to 4.20 / 100k. However, did you know that myocarditis is actually a long-term symptom of COVID infection? So if you don't get vaccinated and get COVID, you're risking myocarditis anyway. But what's the rate of myocarditis post-COVID infection?

Turns out it's a staggering 150.00 / 100k, about 35.7x the risk of myocarditis after vaccination [2]! If you get vaccinated, you decrease your risk of contracting covid by about 56%. Which means you could still get myocarditis post-infection; but that risk is more than halved. Your risk of getting myocarditis, even if vaccinated, overwhelmingly comes from the risk from COVID itself causing it.

There's an argument to be made that maybe you just won't catch COVID at all. Factoring this in takes a lot of work; you can be re-infected, there are new strains emerging constantly. There were estimates that at the end of 2020 up to 1 in 3 Americans had been infected at least once [3]. It's very likely we're looking at a virus that has completely permeated the human biosphere. You can protect against, you can't avoid.

Okay: so where we're at is, myocarditis risk? Way higher by simply getting COVID. But that's just myocarditis! What about other post-COVID symptoms? Well, the worst is the terminal symptom: death. Relying on our CDC data from December 4th, 2021 [1] we can see that the weekly death rate for unvaccinated was 9.20 / 100k and the weekly death rate for vaccinated was 0.47 / 100k. Meaning you have a 19.57x higher chance of death from contracting COVID if you're unvaccinated. Also; your chance of dying from COVID if you're unvaccinated is literally 2.19x higher than getting myocarditis from getting vaccinated! I should also note that most bouts of myocarditis are minor and symptoms resolve without issue.

So that's where we're at. The numbers are here for anybody to look into and research themselves. These aren't anecdotes; they're hard data.

Vaccines work. There's more I have to say on the subject... like I'm excited about the next decade of biomedical research as a result of increase productive capacity of biomedical reagents due to the pandemic -- but this post is long enough.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm?fbclid=I...

[3] https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...