I’m hearing that lots of people have major reservations about the COVID-19 vaccines, and I just want to make sure people know I’m available as a resource for anyone with concerns about it. Also, I’ll be getting it myself (along with my family) as soon as it’s our turn to do so, and I want to explain why.

Why I’ll get the vaccine, and I hope you will, too

Why will I be getting it? I used to avoid things like the flu vaccine, because I’m not in an at-risk group, so I thought it wasn’t worth the bother. Our experience with my daughter, though, changed my attitude on this front, as I wrote in March

Two years ago, my youngest daughter had RSV and nearly died – or at least, she would have died if she hadn’t been in the ICU. Pretty much all kids get RSV before they are two, and for most it’s not severe, but occasionally it requires medical attention – in about 5-20% of cases, similar to COVID-19. She was one of those, and ended up needing to be on oxygen in the pediatric ICU for a couple of days while she fought it off. However, she hated the breathing devices and at one point while I was holding her, she managed to rip off her oxygen device (cannula) and break it. Watching her look of terror as she turned purple in my arms from lack of oxygen as I shouted for help was one of the most horrifying experiences of my life. She would have died right there in my arms while I watched if she’d not had appropriate medical care. Fortunately, she was in the ICU, got the right care, and was back home feeling normal again in about 24 more hours.

When she was in the pediatric ICU, most of the other kids there – and there were a lot – were there with similar issues because of flu and RSV. Until that time, I’d never gotten flu shots regularly because I thought, “What’s the big deal? It’s just something which makes you sick for a few days.” But after this experience, I realized that I ought to get flu shots regularly – not for me, but for the at-risk folks who I might infect if I were to get the flu. I don’t want to kill someone else’s one-year-old or grandmother because I thought it wasn’t worth my time to get a flu shot. And that’s what I’d be doing, without even knowing it. Love for my neighbor, I now believe, means I need to take action to help protect vulnerable people around me.

The parallel to RSV is interesting, because RSV seems to result in a similar fraction of hospitalizations to COVID-19 (though mainly for children) and also has a relatively low mortality rate– less than 1%. Still, in some cases it is severe. There are key differences, though; for example, no one in our population is immune to COVID-19, it spreads rapidly, and has a very high death rate for some fractions of the population.

This perspective drives my desire to wear a mask when I’m in public, and to get vaccinated. I’m not that concerned about myself or my family, but I don’t want to be responsible for someone else – or their grandmother – dying because I happen to be an asymptomatic carrier and exhale some viral particles while walking past them in the grocery store or whatever. I’ll get vaccinated not for me, but to protect others.

There might be a few groups who perhaps shouldn’t be vaccinated, such as those with severe allergies or autoimmune issues. I’m not a medical doctor. But I hope that most of us will get vaccinated.

What about ethical concerns regarding the vaccine?

A lot of people have raised concerns about whether the vaccines might have ethical issues, such as with stem cells from abortions, etc. NIH director Francis Collins addressed some of these in an interview; he’s a Christian and understands people’s concerns. The short answer is that there are no concerns with the first two vaccines other than the same concerns that underly most of modern medicine – some experiments done in their development were done on cells descended from those derived from a single abortion done decades ago. While I hate the idea of any abortion, much of modern medical research uses these same cell lines and the event in question was so long ago that I don’t see us as contributing to abortion or condoning it in any way. The analogy would be if I died, and then you used cells (or organs) from my body to continue medical research; I’d be enthusiastic, because it’s a way for my life to continue to help people after I’m gone.

How effective will vaccination be?

To be effective, lots of people – most of us – will need to get vaccinated. Our vaccines so far are 95% effective at protecting those who are vaccinated, but more importantly, we want to stop the virus from spreading.

Why will most of us need to be vaccinated? The underlying math is simple and there are lots of “herd immunity” simulators out there. Here’s a decent one; scroll down to “The model” near the bottom and you can play with it yourself. I adjusted the effectiveness to 95% (that’s how effective our first two vaccines look), the R0 to 2.5 (that’s how many people each person infects, on average), and then let it run. You can play with the toggle to adjust what percentage of people are vaccinated to see how it might affect the spread. To some extent this depends on how mobile people are (more mobility means more spread; the simulator assumes each person has contact with only eight others, so if people contact more than this the situation is worse) but this allows you to get a feel for roughly how this works. If enough people are vaccinated, sick people don’t come into contact with enough susceptible people for a disease to continue spreading and it will die out. If not enough people are vaccinated or have immunity, it will continue to spread.

Other resources

Here are some other resources I posted before that I want to link to again: