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Let’s put some context to this. In any given day, about 7,000 Americans die. The population of the US is about 332 million. This means that in a random sample of a million people, we would expect that on average about 21 of them will die today.

How many people have received the COVID vaccine? Well even a biased media reporter questioned Sleepy Joe about whether his “100 million vaccinations in 100 days” was really a significant improvement. It’s not unreasonable then to assume a rate of not much less than a million per day. Since the vaccine was rolled out almost a month ago, and accounting for slower initial rates, 10 million probably is not an unreasonably high estimate. Since out of any million we expect 21 deaths, 210 people would be expected to die on the day they were vaccinated, even assuming a 100% safe vaccine. The actual 122 deaths is certainly not out of line with the hypothesis that the vaccine is safe.

Let’s assume further for the sake of argument that the vaccine is not safe and that 122 out of 10 million died because they were vaccinated. The question then is “Is it safer to be vaccinated or to not be vaccinated?” Too often these discussions are erroneously predicated on the notion that the alternatives are a risky vaccine and the perfectly risk free option of not taking the vaccine. Obviously, that’s not the case. Even if the mortality rate isn’t as high as advertised, COVID is killing people.

Let’s look at our sample of 10 million as before. The number of confirmed cases is just over 7%. If we assume that rate of infection and a 99.9% survival rate, we expect about 775 deaths in our sample population if none are vaccinated. This number is an underestimate on two accounts; the real infection rate is certainly higher than the confirmed one and the survival rate is actually lower overall than 99.9%.

Now let’s vaccinate a group of 10 million. We get, assuming all the deaths were caused by the vaccine, 122 deaths right away. Of the remaining people, we can assume an infection rate of 5% or the non vaccinated infection rate or about 0.35%. Assuming again a 99.9% survival rate, we expect about 35 additional deaths among our vaccinated population due to the virus. The total is 157 out of the ten million vs. 775 if we don’t vaccinate. Vaccination is almost five times safer, even if the vaccine did cause all of those 122 deaths.