The Pill for Men and COVID Vaccines

I heard a story the other day about a sister of a friend deciding not to get the COVID vaccine. She saw a YouTube video about unknown infertility from the vaccine and decided the risk wasn’t worth it. Her brother tried to talk sense into her but she wouldn’t budge. 

Which led to an interesting conversation. Who should get the COVID vaccine, or any vaccine I suppose, and how do we accommodate the fact that risk and rewards are different for different people?

This is not an anti-vaccine post. I got my COVID vaccine. Here’s how I thought about it. My individual risk from COVID is very small, but it exists. The vaccine will cause me discomfort and expense but completely eliminate the risk of severe disease and death. And I’m excited about that.

That’s my personal calculation. I’m willing to accept that another person might reasonably say that given their own low risk, the unknowns outweigh the perceived benefit. Perhaps especially for their child who has a lower risk from COVID than from the flu. 

I don’t like the idea of shaming people into getting vaccinated or insisting that people get it. Especially if the rationale centers around the risk they will pose to others. Because we allow people to act selfishly all the time.

The most recent U.S. maternal mortality rate is 17.4 per 100,000 pregnancies or about 660 maternal deaths in 2018. The only way for a woman to die from childbirth is to become pregnant. To remove this risk of dying in childbirth, a woman might rationally use some form of birth control. 

But the only way for a woman to become pregnant is by a man impregnating her. So should men also take birth control?

In 2016 the FDA halted a trial on a “male pill” due to side effects like nausea and mood swings. Women immediately reacted in frustration because they have been experiencing those same side effects for decades. The FDA’s rationale was that while women can avoid a potentially fatal condition, men have no upside from birth control. Any side effects were too many. 

Bringing this back home, if your risk from COVID is very very low, do you have a moral obligation to get a vaccine to protect others? If yes, why don’t men have a moral obligation to utilize a drug that can prevent death in women? When bars start asking you to show your vaccine card, will the women inside be allowed to ask men for proof of birth control?

We readily accept in many situations that people are allowed to prioritize themselves and their own risk-reward. The key is to understand that some people are as scared of side effects as you are of COVID. While that might not make sense to you, it’s what we need to grapple with.  

Remember that we just spent a year telling people that after 100 MILLION cases, we don’t know what kind of danger COVID is. But a month after 15,000 vaccinations we asked those same folks to trust that we had the whole picture. You can see how to the average person this doesn’t quite square….