ATHLETES DON’T NEED THE DAMN SHOT

 

This is a crank letter I sent to Marcus Hayes, a veteran sportswriter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News.

 

 

 Mr. Hayes---

 

                This is not your first article criticizing athletes for refusing COVID vaccines.  You apparently think they are foolish to do so, since you attribute their reluctance to "anecdotes, pseudoscience and misinformation."  Let me try to persuade you that the decision on whether to get the shot involves a personal risk/benefit analysis and that individuals, especially young and healthy athletes, may rationally determine that getting vaccinated is the wrong thing to do.

 

                According to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database, there were 5467 COVID-vaccine deaths reported in the U.S. as of June 24, 2021.  With these numbers come a couple of disclaimers:

 

          1.  VAERS is basically a bulletin board, and the CDC does not verify these death reports.  That means that some of these deaths of recently-vaccinated people could have been caused by something other than the vaccine.  Some reports might even be completely false, though it is a violation of federal law to file a false report.

 

          2.  A study by Harvard researchers concluded that less than 1% of adverse events related to vaccines are actually reported to the VAERS database.  This is at least partly because many people are unaware such a reporting system exists and also because there is no legal requirement for vaccine-related injuries to be reported.  This means that the number of vaccine deaths might be much higher than 5467.

 

                In addition, the VAERS database (as of today), contains 66,395 reports of vaccine-related hospitalizations.

 

                 As we have all learned over the past eighteen months, COVID itself poses almost zero risk to healthy young people without co-morbidities like diabetes or congestive heart failure.  The experience of baseball players and other athletes bears this out.  Though many MLB players have had COVID, none has died, and most had no symptoms at all.  Freddie Freeman caught it last July, and he was definitely sick, and it scared him, but other than that I don't remember a serious case among pro athletes.

 

                The equation here is pretty straight-forward.  For a healthy young ballplayer, the virus itself poses a virtually zero risk of death or hospitalization.  The vaccines, however, pose a small but very real risk of serious injury or even death.  The decision to refuse the shot is a rational one.  And it is certainly not a choice you are in a position to second-guess.

 

Copyright2021MichaelKubacki

 

 

(NOTE: The VAERS database can be found at https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html.)