Wait, so the father dying of covid wasn’t good enough to convince her to vaccinate but a mandate to go on a Disney cruise was? That’s a serious WTF.
Moving to Florida wasn’t enough either. Oh, and as far as my DIL knows, her brother (DIL’s brother) who lives in Florida and works as a pilot still hasn’t been vaccinated. Of course, he’s not scheduled for a Disney cruise this year.
I found some info from the NIH and CDC helpful when discussing the vaccine with my cousin, who’s fully vaxxed but fretting about “vaccinated people getting sick and dying.” Maybe others will find it useful when dealing with vaccine-ditherers.
Vaccination and the odds of infection/symptoms/hospitalization:
• The vaccine reduces odds of infection 3.5-fold
• It reduces odds of symptoms 8-fold.
• It reduces illness severe enough for hospitalization 25-fold.
Breakthrough illness in vaccinated people:
• More than 99.99% of all fully-vaxxed people do not have breakthrough illness severe enough to result in hospitalization or death.
• As of 8/2, of the164 Americans who were fully vaxxed, 7,101 people–0.005%–were hospitalized, and 1,507–0.001%–died.
• Only half of all states have reported data on breakthrough cases. Of those that have, fewer than 1% of fully-vaccinated people have had breakthrough infections.
More here:
That should be 164 million (for the literal-minded among us). 
Then there’s the “the vaccine is gonna kill me!” objection.
5 hours ago UpdatedA review of available clinical information including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records findings revealed no link with vaccination. More than 52 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from Dec. 14, 2020, through Feb. 14, 2021. During this time, there were 934 reports of death (0.0018%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. There are no patterns in the causes of death to indicate a safety problem with the COVID-19 vaccines.
I know lots and lots of people who refuse to get vaccinated. They’re all conspiracy theorists. And their theories are not falsifiable; if you ask them, “Is there any evidence I can show you to prove the vaccine is safe?” their answer is, “No.”
Evidence does not matter to them.
It’s also a waste of time to convince them otherwise. They think you are a sheep, or perhaps even a member of the “deep state,” and will dig their heels in even further. It’s essentially a religion.
They’ll have to learn the hard way.
An odd hill to – literally – die on.
I think I mentioned in another thread that my local news channel ran a story that featured a woman ranting about vaccine and mask mandates, and she said those EXACT words…….”This is the hill I’m literally willing to die on”.
OK…….
Yikes! What a bad typo! Yes, 164 million. Thanks for catching it.
My mother and my son both refuse to be vaccinated, each for different reasons. Discussing vaccination with either has been fruitless.
My 75-year-old mother is somewhat religious, addicted to conservative talk radio, and blindly loyal to Trump. Logic and reason bounce off her. She knows people who have been quite sick or have died from COVID. She continues to make excuses for not vaccinating, such as “my doctor says I shouldn’t”, which I assume is a lie, and claims she is waiting for more information about how safe it is.
My 24-year-old son is a fatalistic, rabidly anti-conservative curmudgeon. (You don’t have to be old to be a curmudgeon.) He angrily exclaims that the American medical industry is a rip-off, and he won’t participate in it until socialized medicine is the norm. He has no argument regarding the efficacy of masks and vaccines. He has said on more than one occasion that he doesn’t care if something kills him. He does admit he fears things that could disable or incapacitate him so badly that he would lack the ability to commit suicide and end such a situation.
Difficult! I assume the free vaccine isn’t sufficiently socialized?
I think the “anti medical industry” argument is partly an excuse for not wanting to deal with the effort involved in getting vaccinated. He has been sick as a dog several times in the last year, and has been COVID tested each time as required by his employer. He bends his “no medical care” principles in order to avoid quarantine and get back to work. He has been lucky and tested negative every time. If his employer also required vaccination, I suspect he would get in line for it. He likes his boss (which I am thankful for) and might not even grumble much about vaccination if they told him he had to.
Tell your friend that the experiment had ended in August 2021. The FDA has replaced the Emergency Authorization with full approval of the Pfizer vaccine.
I salute you.
It’s interesting that your incentive here involved threatening to take something away that you’d been giving regularly, rather than an offer to give something you hadn’t before. I think I read somewhere that tends to work better–people will do more to protect what they have than to gain something they want.
ETA: there’s also some bizarro logic in things like people getting vaxxed to go on a cruise but not to save their lives after watching a loved one die of COVID. The latter may seem too close to admitting to having been wrong. The former is a low-stakes trade that makes the vaccine seem like less of a big deal. Sometimes smaller incentives work better, because they don’t trigger that “what’s the catch?” response. It’s kind of the reverse of how luxury pricing works (i.e. people want a thing more when it has a higher price tag.)
That must be what was going on here, because I didn’t actually threaten to let her dogs starve. I just told her that she was going to have to take responsibility for telling me that she was going to need dog food. Apparently, being threatened with having to take some responsibility for her dogs was too much for her to overcome!
So, I’ve been lurking around here for a while but always chicken out before I post. Except for the one time I drank too much and that wasn’t a very serious topic. I’ve never been a great writer so please be kind. Anyway, sorry if this gets long but I need to vent.
About 10 years ago I met a really amazing guy. We were both out of town for work but hit it off and started a long distance relationship that lasted a couple of years, it was great. One thing led to another and like the crazy person I am I left everything behind and moved to Kentucky. Just the usual, middle aged Conservative Christian boy meets middle aged Liberal atheist girl, and they live happily ever after. Obviously, things have gotten a little more complicated lately. And not to alarm anyone, my life is great. My husband is very sweet and considerate and I’m financially independent so I could leave if I wanted.
But then that mother fucking, shit stain traitor of a former president! He couldn’t be happy just fucking up the country! He had to wreck my specific marriage too! (Sorry, I hope I can swear here but I’m done now.)
I’m really terrible at arguing with people. I grew up with a lot of trauma and abuse so all my coping skills tend toward avoiding uncomfortable situations. When that fails me (last night), it’s more of a cornered animal situation, mean and ugly. Also, my entire working career was in local county government. As in, you voted for your boss and party wasn’t an issue in the kind of way it is nationally. I’ve never had any issues with people I didn’t agree with politically. But god this is so much different! This is my husband that I love, and I don’t want him to die! Now he’s just all in a “the government can’t tell me what to do” mindset and I’m scared to death. When we got into it last night I hit him with everything. (You guys have been an invaluable source of information.) But it just doesn’t matter. No matter where he starts, if I counter that he goes somewhere else. We ended last night on “they used aborted fetuses for the vaccine”. When I said that all the major religions are okay with it he brought up some Jewish sect somewhere, surely the ones that keep spreading measles around. I just can’t! If anyone had told me 10 years ago that all this could happen and end with me screaming “you aren’t even fucking jewish” at my nutjob husband I would have died laughing. It’s completely ridiculous! I don’t know what I’m going to do, this sucks so much! I’m so tired of being scared for him, and everyone. This whole thing is unbelievably exhausting. The worst part is that what really makes me feel better is him. He’s at work now and I just want him to come home cause I need a hug. And he will, he already called to apologize for upsetting me last night. What am I gonna do when he can’t come home anymore?
Sometimes you just can’t win. I had one I thought I could convince yesterday because she wasn’t antivax, just hesitant. Her work is requiring vaccination so she asked me for an excuse so she could wait until 2022. I told her that the only valid reason to not get vaccinated is a severe reaction to one of the components and that I wouldn’t write the note. I them tried to explain why waiting would not do anything, that there have been hundreds of millions of doses given with almost a year of follow-up and few serious side effects, but I failed again. I even reminded her that she had young children at home that could not be vaccinated and she needed the vaccine to protect them but she still wanted to wait. I don’t know if she is going to shop around for a different doctor to write the letter.
I know two people whose doctors told them to wait to be vaccinated. One was being treated with methotrexate, and the other had been given monoclonal antibodies to treat her covid (contracted before she was eligible to be vaccinated.) And in both cases, I believe the reason to wait was “it will work much better at triggering your immune system if you wait until this is out of your system”.
But I just wanted to point out that there are valid medical reasons other than an allergic reaction to not take the vaccine right now.
That being said, it must be tiring to try and try to convince your patients to get vaccinated. Best wishes, and I hope you have a lot of success.
You are quite right about the monoclonal antibodies. The suggestion is to wait for 90 days after treatment with monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma because the circulating antibodies could prevent your body from creating its own immune reaction. I don’t know why somebody on methotrexate would wait. Yes, they are immune suppressed but IMO better to get the vaccine and redose if needed since they are at high risk from Covid.