I do not think that bringing out (again!!!) absolute risk reduction argument has anything to do with science really but propaganda.

ARR requires that background risk is taken into account. Please note that small remark "Data collected from the Veterans Affairs system between December 2020 and March 2021." under the table.

Has prevalence of the disease changed after this period? Sure, greatly, there was delta wave and there is now omicron wave that has made the virus a lot more prevalent than it was during the winter/spring 2021.

This means that to address the risk, you should take into account future prevalence because it will affect your risk assessment.

Does he do this? No, of course not.

He just tries to look smart and is quite good at it by fooling great amount of people.

Is he really smart? I do not think so.

But I get it. People do not like to be told what to do. Especially when people who tell it are not really smart.

Vaccine mandates are an useful tool to reduce burden on health care system and reduce total amount of deaths. It has population level effect.

But it is being sold as solution for personal level problems. It just does not make sense and every claim about its benefits feels like total bullshit because it mostly is.

Of course vaccines have great personal benefits too. You will reduce your changes of severe illness and death. If there was a vaccine against death in car accidents, I would take it. The others in the accident who die? Well, bad luck for them - should have taken the vaccine too.

The vaccine will also reduce prevalence of the disease but so far the effect on personal level has stayed on coin flip level. Definitely better than nothing but still not great. But this on the population level is a huge difference. If you can reduce the amount of people being infected by half, it would be tens of millions (in US).

But lets get back to the ARR "theory". What if I told you that your child has 0.01% to die when infected. If I have the remedy that will reduce it to 0.009% and it is free but there is 0.001% risk that your child will develop heart condition that has 20% change being long lasting then will you take it? What if your child also has 0.1% of change to develop the same condition when infected but it has 50% change of being long lasting?

Now of course you will ask what is the change that your child will get infected, because you are a smart person. Why take the risk of the remedy when there is no real threat.

What this person is doing, is to confuse you to not ask this question. He claims that because the risk of infection was low in the past, you should not vaccinate your child. He decorates this claim in cleaver terms but the essence of it is exactly this.

Is he stupid or evil, I do not know.

What was the reality with delta wave? In some countries I checked, change of getting infected was about 10% in first weeks in unvaccinated children population. Omicron has been even faster. I would claim that there is near 100% change that your child will get it in coming years.

ARR does not tell us anything about this. This is just a tool used by anti-vaxxers to confuse people. Is this doctor an anti-vaxxer? Maybe not, but he for sure sound like one.