We are writing to encourage you to get the Covid vaccine. It’s all about the risk vs the reward. In the US, 3000 to 4000 people are dying every day from Covid.
The risk: Covid is a terrible illness, especially worse for older people or those with other health conditions. For Marc, as a 71-year-old, he has about a 10% chance of being hospitalized, a 3% chance of ending up in Intensive Care, and over a 1% chance of dying.
The other big risk for all ages is Long Covid, which affects 10-20% of those who get infected and have up to 70% chance of long-term damage. Maybe you don’t know anyone who got very sick, but I do! My 50-year-old son was very healthy and fit. He was not taking risks, but still got Covid. Three months in, he still gets short of breath when he does anything physically demanding. If you are younger, and get Covid, you also put your older friends and family at risk.
What about the newer mRNA vaccines? This is the vaccine being used in the Rogue Valley. Are there risks? Sure. You could have an anaphylactic reaction. As we write this, 10.6 million people have gotten the vaccine. One person out of that ten million may have died from it. During the two months that the vaccine has been out, something on the order of 130,000 people in the US have died from Covid.
For a younger person, the vaccine is at least 40 times safer than choosing to not get vaccinated. For older people, it is at least 1600 times safer to choose the vaccine.
Our brains are very poor at estimating risk. We are trying to give you a quick overview of the risks vs rewards of Covid, as an illness, vs the Covid vaccine. In our opinion, get the vaccine!
We are natural medicine doctors and we want to encourage you to live a healthy life. We have no great love for Big Pharma, but unprecedented situations call for different actions. The best way to improve your immune system against Covid is to get the vaccine.
The mRNA Covid vaccines according to the initial research, are about 95% effective. How do the mRNA vaccines work? The vaccine injection carries a small stretch of genetic material known as messenger RNA or mRNA. It instructs cells in the body to make a small piece of material that looks like a part of the virus. Those bits, in turn, get recognized by the immune system as a foreign invader, and your body starts to make antibodies and immune cells that can recognize and neutralize the virus if you are exposed to the virus.
Get the vaccine!
