Last week I attended a shiva house. My friend who passed away, an amazing person, was a very young seventy and in perfect health. He had decided to book himself in for a vaccine booster shot, and later that day he was playing tennis when he suddenly dropped dead. The cause of death is said to be unknown.

No doubt many people reading this would consider it certain, or very likely, that he died as a result of the shot. It would be taken as anecdotal evidence that the vaccine is dangerous.

However, in fact it had absolutely nothing to do with his death. I know this with absolute certainty. Because he missed his appointment that morning and never actually received the shot.

Can you imagine if he hadn't missed his appointment? The story would spread that a healthy person died after receiving the booster, and likely as a result of it. It would have led people to believe that the vaccine is dangerous, even though that would have been completely baseless.

The lesson to be internalized here is that sometimes people die for reasons that are unknown. And in a world with billions of people, this happens quite often. That is why anecdotal evidence doesn't mean very much. You have to understand the statistics of how many people die from various causes. 

Most of us don't know or properly understand these numbers, or the science of vaccines. That's why, if we are smart, we rely on specialists such as epidemiologists and immunologists. If you think that you know better than them, or that you can judge that a single maverick knows better than a hundred thousand other specialists, then you're the opposite of smart.

BE SMART. GET VACCINATED.