Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2022 1:50pm
Hi Binz1,
I'm very sorry to hear how your family has been affected by Covid, especially in view of your wife's illness. One of my nephews also believed all the conspiracy theories on social media and refused to be vaccinated. It reminded me of a tragic story I read last year about a super-fit British sportsman, John Eyers, and his twin sister - she had the vaccine, he did not. The full story is at the link below - it's long, but poignant, informative, and definitely worth the read:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/30/life-tragic-death-john-eyers-fitness-fanatic-who-refused-covid-vaccine
Something that especially leapt out for me is this extract:
"In his assumption, John wasn’t entirely wrong. He was extremely unlikely to die from Covid, as a physically fit 42-year-old with no underlying conditions. The Covid mortality rate for all 40-year-olds is about 1 in every 1,490 people infected, while for 40-year-olds with no underlying health conditions it is about 1 in every 28,500 people infected, although these figures vary between scientific papers.
But his calculus when it came to understanding the risk-to-benefit ratio of Covid vaccination was off. If infected, someone who is unvaccinated is 32 times more likely to die of Covid than someone who has been vaccinated. While vaccination carries a risk of side-effects, this risk is far smaller than the risk of being unvaccinated during a pandemic. Out of 46.3 million fully vaccinated people in the UK, 77 have died of blood clots thought to be related to a Covid vaccine."
It's also tragically ironic that someone who refused to have a Covid-19 vaccination, because he didn't trust what it was that could be injected into his body, was desperate for doctors to administer every other drug available to them in the hope of saving his life.
The article includes some interesting commentary about the effects of unqualified influencers on social media. It finishes with detail from Dr Guillaume Butler-Laporte, a genetic epidemiologist, who is part of a global research programme to analyse the genomes of more than 100,000 people with Covid, in an effort to understand why some people are more severely affected than others. Although the research is ongoing, its findings so far go a long way to explain why, for example, two people in an intimate relationship, where one of them catches Covid-19 with catastrophic symptoms, may still result in their partner escaping it altogether.
I doubt there will be anything in it that surprises you, but I hope the hesitaters,deny-ers and conspiracy theorists will also take the time to read it, instead of their generally preferred social media click-bait.
Stay safe,
Kim