With the ongoing challenges associated with healthcare facility staffing in both acuteand non-acute care environments , additional mandates may have negative impacts on the ability to deliver care due to staffing shortages .”
before we do that ? We have more data on fertility effects on women and on men , for fertility on pregnancy issues on people who have underlying diseases like rheumatoid arthritis , etc . Any other vaccine we ’ ve had with that exception of durability and with everything we do in life , not just medicine . It ’ s always risks and balances . I have people who ’ ve told me they get into a car accident , and they weren ’ t wearing their seatbelt . I said , why weren ’ t you wearing your seat belt ? And they said , well , I read this story about a guy who was driving his car , had his seat belt on . He went through the railing , fell into a shallow lake , the seat belt jammed , and he drowned in four feet of water , and I don ’ t want to drown . That may be a true story , but for everyone like that story there are a thousand people walking around because the seatbelt saved their life . Do the seatbelts always work ? The vaccine is 95 percent effective , much better than flu for instance , but it still doesn ’ t work all the time . But if you ’ re driving 60 miles an hour and a truck jumps the median and hits you going 60 miles an hour the other way , seatbelt or not , you ’ re not going to survive , but we don ’ t say don ’ t wear seatbelts because they don ’ t always work and it ’ s the same thing here – it ’ s a risk and benefit .”
Weber adds , “ To my knowledge there ’ s never been a death related to the vaccine , and even if somebody can dig up some report from wherever about somebody dying as a side effect , it ’ s maybe 10 people . Yet we ’ ve given out , you know , hundreds of millions of doses . It ’ s a simple risk-benefit calculation . The logical thing is to say , even if all those side effects that people have reported and all the others are absolutely true , the benefit is overwhelmingly in favor of the vaccine . I ’ m driven by science , not by emotion or politics . To me , it ’ s a very simple calculation . People do this all the time . The risk of driving , I think , is one death per 100 million miles . The risk is small the next time you drive to get milk at the supermarket but it ’ s not zero , and we know that what 30- , 40- , 50,000 people a year die in car accidents . So , not many people get in the car and say , ‘ I don ’ t know if I ’ m going to go get milk today , I ’ ll just go to the shopping once a week because I might die while I ’ m driving to get my milk .’ They just go get the milk . More people die each year slipping in the bathtub , taking a shower or bath , than die from COVID vaccine in the past year , but we don ’ t think too much about getting into the bathtub .”
The COVID-19 vaccines have been described innumerable numbers of times as “ safe and effective ,” with the FDA being the final arbiter of those parameters during the four clinical trial phases . But Weber says , “ The definition of safe and effective is less important than the question of do benefits exceed the risks . As I ’ ve said , there is a risk to almost everything in life , like getting into the bathtub . As an example of how we make those type of decisions , we transitioned away from giving oral polio vaccine in this country years ago to using the inactivated vaccine , for two reasons : One , the risk of getting paralytic polio from the oral vaccine that reverts to a wild type is something in the order of around one in a million to one and 1.2 million . In the 1950s when we had 20,000 cases of paralytic polio a year , the benefits clearly exceeded those risks . But now in the last 15 to 20 years when we have had no polio , the risk of one in a million is still higher than we want , because why should one in a million people have that risk when we can give them inactivated polio without that risk ? So , it ’ s always still a balance . You have another vaccine like flu . It ’ s just maybe 70 percent effective , much lower than COVID , yet we recommend everyone each year get it . Why ? Because each year you know somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 people die of flu and a 70 percent effective vaccine still saves thousands of people a year , that otherwise would not be .”
Weber continues , “ Yes there are some side effects , some rare cases of Guillain-Barre have been reported with uncertain causation , but the benefits greatly – in orders of magnitude – exceed the risk , so it is a bit of a moving target , but I would argue that that ’ s really not the right question . The right question is when the FDA authorizes or approves a vaccine and the CDC recommends it , they ’ re approving it and recommending it based on ultimately that the benefits of this greatly – again , in orders of magnitude – exceed the risks , as opposed to saying we ’ ll accept a level of one in a hundred or one in a thousand or in a million . Similarly , I see patients occasionally in the emergency room that come in with gas gangrene of their arm and I ’ ll turn to the surgeon and say , ‘ You know you need to remove their arm to save their life ,” and the surgeon will say , ‘ Well , you know if I take this person to the operating table they have an 80 percent chance of dying on the table ,’ to which I ’ ll reply , ‘ You ’ re absolutely right , but if you don ’ t take them to the OR , they have a 100 percent chance of dying .’ A 1-in-5 chance of living is better than no chance of living , yet it ’ s not the absolute risk that ’ s relevant , it ’ s the relative risk compared to the benefits . The goal is no side effects or no serious side effects , but that ’ s not practical either , so , we pick something in between .”
But the middle ground is increasingly difficult to find , given the fractious nature of the current vaccine debate that is potentially creating far-reaching ramifications .
J . Hudson Garrett Jr ., PhD , MSN , MPH , MBA , FNP-BC , FNAP , FSHEA , president and CEO of Community Health Associates , LLC , and adjunct assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Louisville School of Medicine , says that it is important to balance the consequences of mandatory vaccination and ensure proper education about the vaccines is readily available . “ Patients and healthcare providers share a common purpose , which is safe healthcare . The discussion of mandatory COVID-19 vaccination is controversial and likely to create a no-win situation for at least one group of stakeholders ,” he says .
“ Patients and their families have a reasonable expectation that they will receive safe and effective healthcare , but the key here is how do we define safety in terms of this novel virus and pandemic threat ?” Garrett says . “ With the ongoing challenges associated with healthcare facility staffing in both acute- and