Saturday, February 04, 2023

Misinformation can kill you

A recent study by the Council of Canadian Academies - a body I admit I have never heard of, but it certainly sounds legitimate - has somehow put a figure on the actual consequences of the disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines that was rife in the early stages of the pandemic (it is still rife, but the consequences are arguably less drastic now that the virus has mutated over time).

The World Health Organization has, in the past, taken a stab in the dark and estimated that vaccination has averted two to three million deaths a year, but this is an overall ball-park figure. The Council of Canadian Academies has tried to specify the numbers of excess cases and deaths that can be attributed to those who declined to be vaccinated against COVID, either through their own ornery stubbornness or as a result of deliberate disinformation campaigns, well-meaning or otherwise.

They concluded that, as a direct result of Canadians not getting vaccinated when they became eligible, a figure they estimate at 2.3 million, some 198,000 additional COVID cases occurred, resulting in 13,000 additional hospitalizations and, ultimately, 2,800 additional deaths, between March and November 2021 alone.

These are alarming figures, and the overall count over the full course of the pandemic would of course be substantially higher. I don't know what methodology they employed to arrive at these figures, but even if they are wrong by a factor of several - and, of course , they could also be understated by a factor of several - they give a graphic and disturbing indication of the kinds of numbers we are looking at. 

The bottom line is that hundreds or thousands of people - wives, husbands, kids and grandparents, real people with real lives - have died because some people have ill-advised and erroneous views about vaccinations or half-baked political views, and other people are either excessively credulous or too lazy to do some basic due diligence. And that's a scary thought.

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