- I know many think the vaccine-hesitant are dumb or just misinformed.
That’s not at all what I’ve seen.
In fact, independent of education level, the vaccine hesitant I’ve met in the ER are typically more familiar with vaccine studies and more aware of their own covid risks than vaccinated people are.
For example, many of my nurses have refused the vaccine despite having seen more covid-related death and devastation than most people.
I ask them, “Why refuse the vaccine?”
They tell me that, while they have seen the first-hand dangers of covid in the elderly, the obese and diabetics, they think their risk is low.
They’re not wrong.
One nurse showed me the Oxford risk calculator.
A 30 year-old female has about a 1 in 7000 chance of catching covid and being hospitalized over 90 days.
She asked me, can I assure her that studies have found that her risk of serious harm from the vaccine is lower than her risk of hospitalization?
The truth is, I can’t. Our trials weren’t big enough. They weren’t big enough to show that the vaccines cause myocarditis. Yet now we know they do.
A recent observational study suggests the risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young males is higher than their risk of hospitalization from covid.
Is this true? We don’t know! It is based on observational data. To KNOW it’s not true we need a large trial that proves the vaccines reduce hospitalization more than they cause myocarditis in that age group.
The former FDA commissioner said the original premise of the vaccine was to reduce death and hospitalization. And that was the data that came out of the initial clinical trials. Except, as you all know very well (and unfortunately so did my nurse), the initial clinical trials DID NOT find a reduction in death or hospitalization, likely because they were inadequately powered.
The former commissioner is correct that the initial clinical trials SHOULD have found a reduction in these metrics.
We need your help on the front lines to stop vaccine hesitancy.
Demand that the booster trials are large enough to at least find a reduction in hospitalization.
Without this data we, the medical establishment, cannot possibly call out anti-vaccine activists who publicly claim that the vaccines harm more than they save, especially in the young and the healthy.
The fact that we do not have the clinical evidence to say that these activists are wrong should terrify us all.
Dr. Joseph Fraiman
Emergency room physician
New Orleans, Louisiana
Speaking before the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory Committee on September 17, 2021
