Dear editor,
I read with dismay Paul Henderson’s guest column titled The socioeconomic costs of anti-vaxxer behaviour in last week’s paper, Page 14. Once again we, the unvaxxed, are eviscerated by someone who knows nothing about the subject.
Starting with his article title, it assumes those that chose not to get COVID shots are anti-vaxxers. Not true, like most who did not get a COVID shot, I would get a measles or polio shot.
Henderson’s article is full of erroneous assumptions, as he goes on about Fox news and Tucker Carlson, and how we unvaxxed are all science deniers. The article never gets into the science, it just gives source after source about how I am believing all this misinformation. All totally untrue. Yes, there is lots of misinformation out there, but like him, I can generally tell the difference.
Maybe two per cent of the millions of us who are unvaxxed are falling for all the misinformation out there.
Henderson’s main source is the “Fault lines” study that grabbed headlines saying, “There would have been 2,800 fewer deaths if we had vaxed.” I suspect he missed this story in the Financial Post on Feb. 1 titled Terence Corcoran: CCA panel on COVID offers ‘post-truth’ misinformation.
This article debunks the Fault Lines study. Noting that it was done by the Canadian Council of Academies, funded by the Liberal party of Canada - see Wikipedia. The study was a pure modelling study using suspect modelling techniques that are new. The Financial Post came to the same conclusion I had that it was a self-serving junk study like much of the COVID science the last three years.
Like many of the unvaxxed, I looked at much of the same science and data Dr. Bonnie Henry looked at but came to a different conclusion, taking my health and age into consideration. There is not room here to go into all the science.
One day I hope authors like Mr. Henderson will ask us what we think rather than tell us.
Brian Vezina,
Comox