So if you haven’t been vaccinated, or if you’re talking to someone who hasn’t been vaccinated, the right question to ask isn’t whether to get vaccinated; it’s which vaccine to take. Would you rather come in, at a time of your choosing, to get a vaccine that’s been carefully tested for safety? Or would you rather be ambushed with a vaccine that has killed millions of people? The approved vaccines aren’t completely risk-free, but they’re pretty close to it. The worst known side effect, a blood-clotting syndrome, occurred in 28 of the 8.7 million people who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. That’s about three cases per million. Some people have died after getting the vaccines, but fewer than you’d expect based on the normal death rates for people in those age brackets. In other words, vaccinated people, like unvaccinated people, die of other causes, such as heart attacks or strokes—but they don’t die from getting the vaccine. Instead, the death rate among vaccinated people is lower, because they’re protected from a deadly virus. Compare that record to COVID-19. Even if you attributed every reported death of a vaccinated person to the vaccines, the fatality rate would be 0.0017 percent. The estimated U.S. fatality rate from COVID-19, calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the number of known infections, is 1.8 percent. That’s 1,000 times higher than the calculated risk from the vaccines. The real U.S. fatality rate from COVID-19 is probably much lower than 1.8 percent, because many mild infections go unreported. But the fatality rate from the vaccines is also much lower than 0.0017 percent, because among the 300 million doses administered so far in the United States, only three deaths have been persuasively connected to a vaccine.