Anti-vax views? | Letters To Editor | smdailyjournal.com

I appreciate your paper and its coverage of local issues and respect you want to maintain some political balance on your opinion page. To that end, Matt Grocott makes a somewhat entertaining and certainly pugnacious foil.
I am disappointed you would publish his dangerous and largely unfounded anti-vaccination views to include, “Seems you’d have a better chance of getting hit by lightning [than dying of COVID-19].” Well, 17 Americans died of lightning and 365,221 Americans died of COVID-19 in 2020 and so far in 2021 there have been no lightning deaths and 221,979 COVID-19 deaths in the United States through June 6.
Of the more than 300,000,000 COVID-19 vaccines that have been administered in the United States, there have been no deaths causally linked to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and a handful of deaths due to blood clots linked to the J&J vaccine. This is according to the CDC and the National Weather Service.
The COVID-19 vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and COVID-19 still tragically kills several hundred Americans every day. I’m sure each of them would have preferred taking their chances with lightning.
John Dugan
San Carlos