Transcript of AE 992 - I regret getting AstraZeneca...

I was totally freaked out about how sick I was going to get the next day, that I was going to have these piercing headaches and that I was going to get sweats and fever and everything.

I feel like I'm going to die, Bart. We're all going to die Lis'. I meant soon. So, did I.

So, do I regret getting vaccinated? I got vaccinated yesterday, I got the AstraZeneca vaccine, and today I'm going to be talking to you about that experience and a little bit of the science and statistics behind what you've probably seen on the news. Okay, so let's do this. Yesterday, what happened? I finally booked in online for myself to get a vaccine.

I was dying to get vaccinated full stop, because the last thing I want is for COVID to get to where I am in Australia, for me to contract it and whether or not I get sick or die from it, I'm terrified of giving it to other people in my family and having them potentially pass away. So, the rules finally changed and people under the age of 40 could finally get vaccinated. But the only one that was available was AstraZeneca.

And there's so much hype at the moment about getting blood clots from AstraZeneca and potentially dying from it, that there's just been so much misinformation going around that people are worried about getting this vaccine. So, today I wanted to talk about it and I wanted to kind of put it into perspective for you guys with other things like shark attacks, car accidents and COVID deaths in general.

Okay, so you ready to do a bit of this science? Let's go. So, there's this weird phenomenon where we freak out about things that are very unlikely to kill us. And yet we think nothing of things that are much more likely to kill us. And I'm sure that you've probably heard about this or thought about this when it comes to something like shark attacks versus car accidents. So, I tried to discover what this is.

I looked up some articles on shark attacks versus car accidents and tried to find the stats on this. So, I found this really interesting article 'Why We're Afraid of shark attacks, but probably shouldn't be'. David Ropeik, who is an expert on risk analysis at Harvard, points out that more people are attacked by cows than they are sharks.

And yet the average person is never going to freak out about a cow, but when they think about being attacked by a shark, that's something that sends shivers down their spine. So, there's some really interesting stuff here that I wanted to read out. We take daily risks all the time. We cross the street, we use our cell phone when we drive and we have unprotected sex.

How you doing?

Our brain doesn't even do a risk analysis. You just think, oh, it won't happen to me. You don't wake up in the morning and think, I'll fall out of bed and hit my head. So, he refers to this as optimism bias, where the risk is so far off in the distance that you just tell yourself...

It's not going to happen to me.

And so, I think this is what a lot of people are suffering from when it comes to COVID. They see it on the news, they hear about it on the TV, it may even be in their country and it's going around. They're not currently sick and they think, well...

I'm not going to get COVID. It's not going to happen to me.

So, that's that optimism bias.

I'm going to drive this car. I'm not going to get into an accident. I'm going to have unprotected sex with a random person that I've just met. There's no chance that I'll get HIV or some other STD. It's just not going to happen to me.

So, you're being overly optimistic. You're bias towards optimism. Then he talks about loss aversion. So, he keeps talking about shark attacks here, saying shark attacks don't usually fall under optimism bias, instead, it's loss aversion. So, for instance, once you get to the beach on your holiday, you're standing there looking at the water. That is when suddenly you become loss averse and you're thinking...

Screw going in the water. I don't want to die from a shark attack.

You don't think of the stats. You don't weigh things up statistically and think it's so unlikely for me to be bitten by a shark that I'm just going to go in the water, and it'll be fine. Instead, you think...

Oh, I've heard about shark attacks, I've seen news about shark attacks. There's sharks in the water here, so there's no chance I'm going in because I want to be loss averse. I want to avoid losing maybe my limbs and I don't wanna have my arms cut off.

Now, stand aside, worthy adversary. Tis but a scratch.

So, it's easy to be optimistic when it's off in the future, but now that your butt is on the line, you know, you're at the beach, you could die. You revert to caution.

I know I probably won't be eaten by a shark, but it'll be really bad if that did happen, so statistics go out the window and I'm just not going in the water, even though it's very unlikely I will get eaten by a shark.

He also mentions there are other factors at play here, too, where there's an irrational fear about shark attacks because you dread the pain and suffering of being attacked by a shark. And not only that, there is the idea of a lack of control, where you're in the water and there is something there that is obviously at home in the water and is ripping you to shreds. So, the next thing he talks about here is availability awareness.

And this is the availability of, say, news and information about shark attacks that we're constantly being bombarded by on the news, because, as he says below here, as a former television producer, he understands that rare and violent stories get more attention and media outlets know people will pay more attention to stories about the possibility of death.

He said, though, that there's a downside to overexposure. When our brains are saturated with fears about unlikely things such as shark attacks, we don't pay as much attention to safety precautions we actually should follow, like wearing sunscreen. So, there are these three main things. There's this optimism bias, the risk of something is far off in the distance, so you think is never going to happen to you.

And I think this applies to a lot of Australians at the moment with COVID.

It's off in New South Wales. There's COVID spreading around. There's a few people dying, but I'm in Western Australia, it's never going to happen to me. Or COVID overseas, people are dying there, but it won't happen here.

Then we have loss aversion, right, where you overweigh the downside of possibilities, like...

I'm not going to get vaccinated because I saw a news article of someone dying from blood clots, and that terrifies me. And I don't want to die from blood clots.

And then we have availability awareness, which is the more that something is on your radar screen, it's shown to you on the news, you're bombarded by these stories. The more prominence it holds in your risk radar, the more you think it is something that could happen to you, like when the news is showing shark attacks all the time.

Or in the case of the AstraZeneca vaccine, the idea that people are dying from blood clot deaths, and it's being shown on the news all the time. Where blood clot deaths from AstraZeneca are happening very rarely around the world, but it's being shown so much on the news that you're outweighing it, you're thinking it's way more common than it really is.

So, I want you to keep those three things in mind, optimism bias, loss aversion and availability awareness, whilst now we go through some statistics of things like shark attacks, car accident deaths and then COVID and AstraZeneca. So, according to Florida Museum here, worldwide there were 129 shark attacks in the year 2020, last year. Okay, whilst COVID was happening, of all of those 129 shark attacks, only 10 were fatal.

Only 10 deaths took place in the entire year of 2020 from shark attacks. Now, let's put that in the context of car accidents. So, if I go over to the WHO website, so the World Health Organisation, let's have a look at some of the stats here. Approximately 1.3 million people die from road traffic accidents every single year. 1.3 million people, and yet, ironically, you would have optimism bias to car accident.

I'm going to go driving. There's no chance that I'll die in a car accident, that happens to other people, it won't happen to me.

And yet you'll have loss aversion when it comes to swimming in the ocean and you're worried about shark attacks. So, weigh those two things up. 10 fatalities in 2020 from shark attacks versus 1.3 million deaths from car accidents in 2020. That's 3,500 car accidents a day. All right. So, how does this all sort of fit in with AstraZeneca and these blood clot deaths?

So, there have been 11 deaths that we know of so far from AstraZeneca's blood clots. There have been 6 deaths, Pete. Jesus! Read the article, it says 11 blood clot cases and if you actually do a proper search, it says there have been 6 deaths. There have been 104 cases, only 59 of which have been confirmed and of all of those, 6 people have died from 7.4 million doses.

So, when I went and got vaccinated yesterday, they told me that it is a 1 in 50,000 to 100,000 chance that you will get blood clots. And then even if you get it, it's a 1 in 10 chance that you could die from it. So, that is a 1 in a 500,000 to million chance of you dying from the blood clots. If we look at the total deaths from COVID, there's only been 39,615 cases of COVID in Australia and nearly 1,000 deaths in Australia.

So, again, people are freaking out about the vaccine, but they're not putting into perspective that you're much more likely to contract and die from COVID than you are to get the AstraZeneca vaccine and die from the blood clots. So, based on these numbers, if you get COVID, you have a 1 in 41 chance of dying from it. Put it in perspective, guys. If you get COVID, you have a 1 in 41 chance of dying from COVID.

If you get the AstraZeneca vaccine, you have a 1 in a million chance of getting blood clots and dying from it. And I remember yesterday speaking to the nurses and they told us that it's a 44 in a million chance of you dying, getting into your car and going for a drive in Australia on any given day compared to getting the AstraZeneca vaccine.

So, again, we have to put these things into perspective. We have this optimism bias when it comes to COVID.

COVID's out there, but it's not going to happen to me. I feel fine right now. I've had the cold before, if I get COVID, there's no chance I'm going to die from it.

We have this weird loss aversion with...

Well, we can get the vaccine right now. The vaccines are available, but I've heard about people dying from the vaccine. And so, deal breaker, I don't want to die from the vaccine.

And if we put those stats into perspective, there's about 10 fatalities from sharks in 2020 and six fatalities from AstraZeneca. It seems based on the stats, you're about as likely to die from a shark attack as you are from blood clots from AstraZeneca. And then lastly, we have availability awareness where the news is just constantly smashing us with these stories.

And it's getting pushed into your brain so often that you are giving it way, way, way more of your attention, fear and worry than you really should. So, there you go. Oh, man, I forgot to talk about the side effects. The side effects from the AstraZeneca vaccine have been non-existent for me personally, okay.

I was totally freaked out about how sick I was going to get the next day, that I was going to have these piercing headaches and that I was going to get sweats and fever and everything. And obviously that does happen to some people, but it didn't happen. I feel fine, maybe a tiny bit tired, but I'm normally pretty tired just in general. So, do I regret getting vaccinated? Hell no. I regret getting vaccinated so late.

I am so irritated that the Australian government has been so incompetent with rolling out this vaccine plan so that we can all get vaccinated as soon as possible. That's what I regret. I would have done this months ago if it had been possible. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode, guys. Stop worrying. Stop freaking out. Turn the news off and I'll see you next time.