[[Vaccines are safer than post-infection treatments for COVID-19]]

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There is no reason to believe, no rational reason that anyone can discern, you know, that that would be the case. If you want to claim that vaccines are causing strokes or heart attacks, those rates were roughly the same in the people who got the vexi n the people who didn't get it. We need to understand that when we're dealing with public health threats, we have to engage in a kind of utilitarian calculus. Just like men and women on the battlefield don't send their young children to die from colds because they fear for their lives.

Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about the lessons of the COVID pandemic. They discuss our failures to coordinate an effective response, the politics surrounding vaccination, vaccine efficacy, vaccine safety, how to think about scientific controversies, the epidemiology of excess deaths, transmission among the vaccinated, natural immunity, selection pressures and new variants, the failure of institutions, the lab-leak hypothesis, the efficacy of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, boosters, what would happen in a worse pandemic, and other topics.

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