Sorry, can’t find any better sources for this.
The animator then asked Maher what the “downside” of “getting a vaccine” was, which caused the comedian to go on an anti-vax tirade.
“The fact that you the fact that you don’t even have a clue what’s the cost of getting a vaccine that you don’t know the answer to that. You completely want to shut your eyes to the fact that there are repercussions to all medical interventions, including a vaccine, all vaccines,” he ranted. “They come, they say side effects, just like every medication does. You can see it in the literature. They can’t write it on their back on the vaccine. So you have to dig them. And of course, there is a vaccine court because so many people have been injured.”
I don’t think Math Illiteracy is the culprit in the case of well educated people, which I assume Maher is.
It is not hard to understand that vaccines have extremely low chance of serious side effects, while covid just has a low mortality chance, but a relatively high chance of long term effects. And these same vaccine deniers typically tout that covid is endemic now and “everyone is going to get it”, so we can just mark likelihood to get it as near 100%.
It’s not a hard concept. If you accept that you’re oing to get covid one way or another, your net chance of serious harm is much lower if you take the vaccine.
But to these asshats, it’s not about logic, it’s about ego. His phrasing was extremely demeaning, and offered zero evidence to his point of view. It was simply “if you don’t agree with me, you’re an idiot”. And that’s the argument I tend to get from the antivaxxers, and if pressed for actual stats, they will claim some conspiracy to hide the true numbers, and at best, quote all these irrelevant tangential stats that some misinformation article claims indicates the mainstream science willfully ignores in their agenda to promote dangerous vaccines.