If my risk of dying from myocarditis caused by a vaccine is 1%, and my risk of dying if I catch COVID is 1%, which risk should I take?
I would then it would then look beyond the benefit to the self and take into account civic duty. If your own personal probability of mortality is exactly the same with the vaccine and without, then we need to ask, what is then best for the system within which I live? (Remember, never send to know for whom the bell tolls.)
myocarditis isn't contagious, but covid is, and if left unchecked, might (will?) mutate into something that might be a lot more than 1% deadly to you. So you expected value of taking the covid vaccine will be higher than not.
I really think we should encourage people to be willing to think objectively like this. There IS a set of efficacy and risk numbers that would make the vaccines not worth it. They're just obviously not the numbers we have (which make it very worth it). It's just unfortunate that such an astonishingly large portion of the populace apparently can't do the math right enough or objectively enough to come to the same conclusion.
It isn't.
Even if it were an identical 1% and 1%, the answer to:
> which risk should I take?
would then involve other variables, like the fact "that vaccinated people infected with the delta variant are 63 per cent less likely to infect people who are unvaccinated". https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-l...
"Viral loads of Delta-variant SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections after vaccination and booster with BNT162b2"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01575-4
"...By analyzing viral loads of over 16,000 infections during the current, Delta-variant-dominated pandemic wave in Israel, we found that BTIs in recently fully vaccinated individuals have lower viral loads than infections in unvaccinated individuals. However, this effect starts to decline 2 months after vaccination and ultimately vanishes 6 months or longer after vaccination..."
If vaccines and their boosters infer temporary immunity, there's a certain level of rapid vaccine production and administration that can leverage that temporary immunity. Whether we can reach it is somewhat of a political problem.
"As of June 11, 2021, approximately 296 million doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in the United States, with 52 million administered to persons aged 12–29 years; of these, 30 million were first and 22 million were second doses. Within the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) (4), the national vaccine safety passive monitoring system, 1,226 reports of myocarditis after mRNA vaccination were received during December 29, 2020–June 11, 2021."
Second, the risk of death is much lower:
"Of the 323 persons meeting CDC’s case definitions, 309 (96%) were hospitalized. Acute clinical courses were generally mild; among 304 hospitalized patients with known clinical outcomes, 95% had been discharged at time of review, and none had died."
(Many, but not all--from the EU data, IIRC, excess myocarditis events were in the range of about 1 in 100,000, not 1 in 10,000.)
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/10/covid-va...