2022-11-10
We would all hope so, indeed we should demand so, since nurses need numerical ability in order to get the decimal point in the right place when administering drugs to patients - who may well not think (for any number of reasons) to check their work in this department.
Startlingly, some experienced nursing professionals, writing in the Daily Sceptic, fear that nursing numeracy cannot at all be taken for granted.
"When George Orwell’s Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four taught that two plus two equals five, the point was that authoritarians can make people believe something they know to be untrue. If nurses are innumerate, a pandemic can be presented with whatever numbers that the Government wants to induce fear and compliance"
"Don't be ridiculous!" I hear you say, but - "How many trotted out the mantra about the COVID-19 vaccines being 95% effective, not realising (as has been often explained) the fundamental difference between relative risk as opposed to absolute risk reduction?"
Of course, dear reader, I don't have to explain the difference between "relative risk" and "absolute risk" to you, do I?
But I have another quibble with many of these statistics - the absolute risk that we will (for example) develop cancer may (or may not!) be twice as high if we measure that likelihood over a longer period. So my risk of getting cancer may very likely be twice as high when measured over a period of two years than if measured over a period of one year, if only because I have run much the same risk for twice as long.
Yet statements such as "95% effective" need to be similarly qualified by a time period, since it is now more or less universally accepted that Covid vaccine protection wanes over time - even to the extent of becoming negative ... why else would we need constant boosters?
So to determine efficacy we must qualify this efficacy with a time period - how long is it efficacious for?
How many times did you hear any authority quote an efficacy or a risk together with an associated time-frame?
Is it any wonder then, given the above, what some pharmaceutical companies believe they can get away with?
