Christakis is right with regard to the numbers and Rogan is right with regard to the practical implications

A very revealing tweet thread.  Nicholas Christakis starts out:

I admire @joerogan. His conversational style & his reach are phenomenal. But I think his advice that young people not get vaccinated misses the mark. Young people are at low risk of death no matter what. COVID19 increases their risk by ~30%. Why not avoid this with a safe shot?

 COVID19 increases their risk by ~30%.  Really?  That sounds dreadful but what does it really mean.  What is their risk of death from Covid-19?

From WHO January 2021 -

For people younger than 70 years old, the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 across 40 locations with available data ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% (median 0.05%); the corrected values were similar." Meta study published in WHO Bulletin

Christakis is saying that risk of death from Covid-19 for those below age 70 is 0.05%.  A thirty percent in risk takes you from 0.05% to 0.065%.  

A 30% increase in risk sounds terrible.  An increase chance of death of 0.015%?  Not so much.

A keep in mind that I think Rogan specified young healthy people whereas the 0.05% is for all people below 70 regardless of health.  Risk of death from Covid-19 for young healthy people is 0.01%.  A thirty percent increase would lift that to 0.013%.

Nobody is wrong in this thread.  I accept without investigating that Christakis is correct that no vaccination raise the risk of death by 30% is irresponsible given how low that risk already is.   

To normalize this a bit, the vehicle fatality rate for driving by night is 300% greater than for driving by day.  Not 30%, 300%.  And night time deaths are material at 49%.  People do consider of  alternatives of driving by day and by night but usually there isn't much consideration, particularly for shorter journeys which are by far the majority of vehicle deaths.

Christakis is right with regard to the numbers and Rogan is right with regard to the practical implications.  Too many of our mainstream media are in the mode of communication like Christakis and not enough are in the mode of communicating like Rogan.  

Both are valuable insights but both need to be understood in order to have credibility.