true information, false conclusion?

I saw an ad in a newspaper signed by a bunch of doctors advocating vaccines for everyone, including youth.  In one of their bullet points they say that the dangers of Covid to young people far outweigh the reported side effects of the vaccine.

I think this is an example of true information being used to advance a questionable conclusion.

There are two problems with the argument:

1) It confuses relative risk with absolute risk.

If a contractor were to offer to sell you a home upgrade that reduces the potential damage stemming from a tornado by 99%, you might still turn down the improvement.

But why?  Are you anti-protecting your home from tornado damage?

Of course not.  But here in NY the chance of your home being damaged by a tornado is so small that the advantage being offered is of little value. 

The 99% figure is relative risk; you need to look at absolute risk.  If the odds of tornado damage are a million to one, reducing those odds to a billion to one, a huge relative decrease, has no value because a million to one odds is something we can happily live with.  

So too with vaccines.  The odds of a child suffering death or serious illness from Covid is very, very small.  Even if vaccines reduce that risk further, that does not mean the vaccine is necessary or worth it.  

2) But what can it hurt?  To use my analogy, let's say the contractor was willing to install the upgrade to your home at no cost to you.  Why not do it?

And so the contractor installs a 5 ton piece of machinery on your roof at no cost and with no downside... until 10 years down the road and your roof needs to be replaced before anyone else's because the weight has unexpectedly caused it to buckle.  And 15 years later the foundation on the side of your house the machine was installed on starts to settle faster.  And then you go back to the contractor and he pleads innocence because he did his due diligence at the time of installation and these outcomes years later were entirely unexpected.  Besides which, his company was granted immunity from lawsuits by the gvt.

There are no long term studies of the effects of these new vaccines.  Could be there will be no problems down the road.  Could be there will be.  I don't know.  I don't know how your doctor can know.  Does the benefit warrant the risk?  

I think people tend to confuse knowledge with judgment.  A doctor has much greater knowledge of medicine than the lay person, but being qualified to diagnose and treat illness is not the same as being qualified to weigh risks and benefits and conclude with certainty which course of action is best.  

Only engineers, for example, have the technical know-how to build a bridge from point A to point B, but I hardly think that means only engineers are qualified to asses whether it is worth it for a city to invest in actually doing so.   

Lastly, in all discussions of this type one cannot avoid the issue of trust.  Do you trust what the government or big pharma tells you about these vaccines?  (Your local doctor takes marching orders/gets his or her knowledge from the FDA, CDC, local health authorities.  He/she is not an independent research lab.)

Just last week the President announced that, "“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”  This is a lie.  

Just last week emails from a Senior Director of Pfizer were revealed stating, "“The risk of communicating this [the use of fetal cells in testing the vaccine] right now outweighs any potential benefit we could see, particularly with general members of the public who may take this information and use it in ways we may not want out there.” 

In other words, we at Pfizer can choose what to reveal to the public and what not to reveal based on what they perceive to be the risk or benefit to our agenda.  Given statements like these, it is hardly conspiracy theorists alone who begin to wonder what else they are not telling us.

Scary stuff.  Not to mention the heavy handed censorship across the board, on social media, in the main stream media, etc. of all views (including those of doctors) that deviate from the approved orthodoxy regarding treatment of covid and vaccines, the labelling of people who dare raise questions as anti-vaxxers, and so on.  

I am not saying not to get your child vaccinated.  I am not saying you should. I am saying it is a decision that needs to be carefully considered and is far less black and white than these type ads lead one to believe.