I continually see memes quoting statistics that claim to show the ineffectiveness of vaccines.
Anybody with even middle school level math competency should be able to see through the misrepresentation of these statistics.
A recent example stated that 85.7% of deaths over a particular week in Scotland were vaccinated people. The conclusion drawn was that the vaccines don't work because the vast majority of people dying were vaccinated.
What was left out in the post was that 94% of Scotland has received at least 1 dose and 74% has received 3 doses. That leaves only less than 6% of the population unvaxxed accounting for 12% of the deaths. This data suggests (suggests, doesn't prove anything), just the opposite of the conclusion drawn.
Misuse of statistics makes people look either stupid or dishonest. If you see something posted like this, you should immediately question your source. Anybody passing off this kind of stuff isn't vetting their sources or their numbers either through actual intent to mislead or sheer stupidity. Either way, the source cannot be trusted. Trusting such a source is just allowing yourself to be duped (which makes you a dupe) or a liar yourself.
Hold yourself to higher standards of integrity, please, everybody. It doesn't help anybody to lie about facts or pass on lies about facts.
This is like a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we had followed medical advice from the start, we could have thwarted the virus early. But the health community said if we didn't thwart this then the virus would continually to mutate out of control. That's exactly what happened. The more times a virus replicates, the more opportunity it has to mutate into more lethal variants. It's all about the math.
To be fair, the problem wasn't just the population of crazy, math and science phobic Americans. Even if the US had complied with health experts, huge populations around the world weren't adequately vaccinated giving the virus ample opportunity to mutate. So we're not entirely on the hook for all of this (though we could have done more to help the world get vaccinated).
We missed that window of opportunity so now we're living with the virus. The vaccine isn't 100% or even 90% effective against new variants. Maybe over time the vaccine will be less and less effective vs the virus. The flu vaccine is sometimes only 40% effective. But we're living with this thing now, so that's how it will be.
Keep arguing against the vaccine. Don't get vaccinated. I don't care. What I care about is that numbers aren't misrepresented. It's about the math. Please learn math.