News articles in recent months have featured stories of unvaccinated individuals and families who have changed their position and joined the ranks of vaccine enthusiasts. The catalyst for conversion is generally a devastating case of Covid-19 involving younger adults and children who were hospitalized and, in some cases, did not recover. There is a hue of religiosity difficult to ignore in these narratives, as the repentant sinners rejoin the flock, often with promises to proselytize on behalf of their new belief.
Not disclosed in most of the stories, however, is that the featured cases are statistical outliers. The probability of a baby dying from Covid-19 in developed countries is almost zero, and while the risk of an adult under fifty dying from Covid-19 is higher, it is still very low if the individual has no preexisting conditions. Despite these facts, news articles generally suggest that the rest of the unvaccinated should draw lessons from the outlier tragedies. The intended theme is a) this could happen to you and b) you ought to behave accordingly. Yet, the question remains unaddressed: is it rational to live as a statistical outlier?
Consider that when a person experiences harm, they inevitably in retrospect wish they had taken greater steps to prevent it. Whether it is infection with a rare parasite, an exceptionally unusual act of nature, a car accident, or ingestion of a dangerous bacteria, the harmed person and those around them wish they had taken the risk more seriously. This is true regardless of how statistically unlikely the risk is to occur.
If struck by lightning, a man might wish he had never walked in storms; if a child dies from E. coli poisoning, the parents may hate themselves for having eaten salads so regularly; if a husband dies in a car accident, his wife may regret ever having used motor vehicles when public transportation was available. In other words, if in retrospect people could negate the harm that befell them, they would choose to do so all of the time. This is not a particularly insightful observation.
More difficult to assess is what actions are reasonable for those unaffected—as of yet—by statistically unlikely events. One might argue that reasonable precautions should be taken where possible and otherwise people ought to live their lives as though such events are unlikely to occur—something that is statistically true. It might also be true that what is reasonable is determined by the cost of the preventative action taken, with lower-cost actions generally being more reasonable than higher-cost actions. To take the example of E. coli poisoning, a low-cost action would be washing lettuce before consumption and a high-cost action would be never eating lettuce.
For now, let us simply attempt to summarize what a helpful disposition toward risk is and is not. It seems reasonable to adopt low-cost precautions—as defined by the individual as much as possible—with the precautions taken lowering as the statistical probability of the harm goes down. To irrationally believe that tragedies are likely to occur, however, is an untenable approach to life. Assuming that you are going to be an outlier case is meaningfully different from being aware of the probability that you could be.
People tend to bend toward their irrational impulses, especially when presented with media content that encourages such flexibility. It is worth remembering that reading stories of statistical outliers does not make you more likely to become one, and believing that every statistically-unlikely ailment is going to affect you is a guarantee of pathological, paralyzing fear and substandard decision-making.