Hyping the breakthrough infection ‘problem’ works against the legitimate goal of widespread vaccination, but setting priorities and contextualizing risk is beyond the capacities of the media and the public health establishment.

Now, however, safetyism and irrationality are proving contagious even among conservatives. An acquaintance justified her opposition to vaccination on the grounds that a vaccinated friend died of a heart attack. Anti-vax websites throb with reports of post-vaccine calamities, even though causation is never established. One site notes that there have been 11,000 deaths between December 14, 2020, and July 9, 2021, reported on a database for adverse events following all vaccines, not just anti-COVID vaccines. Assuming again for the sake of argument that vaccination prompted those deaths (and that COVID vaccines were exclusively responsible), they represent 0.0067 of the 164 million people who have been vaccinated as of July 30.

The CDC, by contrast, reports 1,263 deaths among the COVID-vaccinated as of July 26, or 0.00077 percent of the vaccinated population. Many of these casualties would have died anyway. Though conservatives are right to point out the high survival rate for COVID, it is lower than the survival rate following COVID vaccines.