Risk Management is not an exact science. Despite the efforts to structure the decision process (e.g. ISO 31000), it’s still very dependent on perception.
Debates on vaccines illustrate the main challenge in Risk Management: making a “rationale” decision while dealing with uncertainty.
Our brain is programmed to calculate risks and make hundreds of quick decisions without even conscious thinking, which is particularly obvious for example when driving a car or crossing a road. At the end, we’re all assessing the risk of Covid vs the risk of vaccine, and make a personal decision. Which ranges (and that’s the interesting point!) from wholeheartedly pro- to thoroughly anti-, with all more or less balanced postures in between.
And there is no “right” or “wrong” in there: this is a personal decision, depending on a personal context (ah, the importance of context in Risk Management!), a personal perception, and a personal risk appetite. What might make sense from a Public Health point of view may be meaningless at the individual level: when you’re personally hit, you don’t mind being one in ten or one in a million. What we have to care of though, is not letting our well-known cognitive biases (learn more on cognitive biases here) influence our decision in such way that it looks like we expected it to be first – not the easiest exercise.
There is no “right” or “wrong”: only the future will tell us, when the level of certainty will have increased to a sufficient level.
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