> There´s only one reason for taking the vaxx, to protect yourself from severe disease.

My second reason to get vaccinated was to slow down spread as far as reasonably possible. Ergo, there are more reasons to get vaccinated than just that one you mentioned.

> If you´re young and healthy, [...] you benefit as much from the vaccine as you do from a tinfoil hat.

Bullshit. A tinfoil hat doesn't protect you against a covid infection a few weeks down the line, a vaccine does. And even though the likelyhood of severe symptoms for COVID-19 is generally lower for younger people, it's still beneficial to get vaccinated due to the lower chance on extreme symptoms and 'long covid'.

Other than not wanting to get the illness yourself, there is another major reason to get the vaccine. The more that people get the illness, then the more likely the virus is to evolve variants. Regardless of how bad or not bad it is now, a future variant could always be much, much worse. And there is just no way to know if or when that might happen.

As many people as possible getting vaxxed is the best way to prevent some future deadly variant. Getting it naturally is and surviving does not help in this regard, because that is where most (all?) of the variants come from to begin with.

So, I think you're trying to say the risk is low, but non-zero. And getting vaccinated would seem to lower this further. Making it more valuable than a tin foil hat?

Only an idiot thinks that 0.2% is low or that a tinfoil hat (which gives exactly zero protection) is equal to the protection the vaccine gives.

I already had covid. Extremely mild. The first vax does had me in bed for a day, missed work with chills, shakes and the worst "hangover" ever. The other main reason I got it is that I want to see my parents (abroad) and the vaccine status will no doubt factor into that. Not for another couple of months hopefully but I haven't seen them in nearly two years.

In the UK, most people getting into hospitals now with severe Covid are young and unvaccinated. So while yes, the risks are much lower for young people, there are enough of them getting seriously ill.

The population has built in immunity to influenza. There's a combination of health risk and spread potential, and if you continue to limit the benefit to only one of the two, it's easy to distort the conversation in a way that benefits your point of view.

>Let the children build up natural immunity

If a vaccine is safer, why? Framing a covid infection as "natural" is pretty twisted. It's not like primates have been developing immunity to this strain of bat poop for millennia. Pretending a natural infection is better because its natural is reckless. I bet, and I could be wrong, most people who had chicken pox wish they had the vaccine instead.

> We don´t vaccinate young people against influenza either, because the risk is so low.

We do. You might want to read up on why the seasonal influenza is a seasonal influenza and how it is different from a new, pandemic strain. There is a reason children are ill all the time - their immune systems are naive with respect to (almost) all strains of influenza. That's also the reason the 1918 flu killed predominantly young people - it is conjectured that their immune systems hadn't seen the new strain yet, while older people had.

As of yesterday (2021-07-12), there were 563 people admitted to the hospital with Covid in the UK [1]. If 80% are young and unvaccinated (and I think the proportion is higher), that's 450 severly ill people going into hospital per day.

Doesn't sound much like the flu to me.

Even if "these young people" (makes me sound like a dinosaur, though in fact I'm in that cohort) don't care about that risk, they are wasting doctors' time, and taking resources away from overstrained health system.

So maybe I'd say: if you don't want to get vaccinated, without an overwhelming reason, then stay at home (so as not to risk infecting others) and if you do get sick, don't go to the hospital (as it was your risk you were taking).

[1]: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

> There´s only one reason for taking the vaxx, to protect yourself from severe disease.

This is nonsense. There are several, and they include helping to protect other people both directly by reducing spread and indirectly by not acting as a host for potential variants.

> it has been clear for a long time that the restrictions will not go away

And this is pure conspiracy thinking.