Would it make sense to skip those age groups? We still have social distancing in place; if we try to protect those people from sars-cov-2 they will also be protected by other milder variants we nurse in the wider population.

On a similar note: when a vaccine gets developed, does it make more sense to vaccinate those age groups (on the grounds that it will protect the most vulnerables) or to vaccinate everybody else (on the grounds that the vaccines may not be 100% safe and thus it may be safer for those age groups to benefit from the herd immunity)?

You cannot deliberately infect people of any age group anyway. I would skip it and doesn't sound more convincing than measles parties.

You mean you can't "ethically" infect people? I disagree, it just comes down to risk. Many vaccines and medications have rare but potentially severe side-effects, but we administer them anyway due to risk versus reward.

Let's say you have a 5% chance of dying from COVID-19, a 10% chance of contracting it, but only a 0.05% chance of dying from some harmless coronavirus that would reduce your chance of dying from COVID-19 by half. It would be irrational not to deliberately contract the harmless coronavirus.

The problem is just that we don't know all these variables, especially for a given individual.

A potential COVID vaccine is an example. I doubt you could ethically instruct people to get a shot for such a health experiment. You can require them to get one to use certain services, but bodily autonomy has precedence in my opinion. That is even more relevant for living pathogens.

Being together with other humans is always a health risk if you want to look at it like that. While it might be incredible stupid to not take the lesser risk, you cannot force people to be rational.

The problem with measles parties is that measles cause long term damage and not the delibirate infection.

If mild common cold can make you immune to covid19, delibirate infections may be a much more efficient way to achieve herd immunity than a propiatary vaccine.

Is the fact that the vaccine is "proprietary" relevant to the efficacy? Would a non proprietary vaccine be ok?

Of course, less money (no patents, etc), less interests and less non relevant choices being made (e.g buying endless supply of quinine because something) . Heck if actual mild cold could cause mass immunity, the cold virus is it's own distribution mechanism. No need for all the syringes and other logistics.

Of course this is all hand waving, but the point is we shouldn't automatically think that a man made vaccine is a much better solution.

> we shouldn't automatically think

Ah yes, we surely shouldn't automatically about anything. We should use reason and data.

We should, we don't. There are great forces working on making you think certain ways by emphasizing certain data, and push messages that promote certain reason making.

The more money is at stake the greater force is applied. The last few years have proven what a devastating effect it had on our ability to discuss and think reasonably about anything.

I'd assume the goal of a population-wide infection program would be to end social distancing. Otherwise it's not clear what the point would be.

Vaccine deployment won't eradicate the virus immediately, so the most at-risk populations will likely need to be personally vaccinated before they can safely stop social distancing.