My point is that many restrictions are removed for fully-vaccinated people, i.e. the exposure of these people will increase, i.e. the chance of getting the infection, even if it doesn't take you to the hospital, greatly increases. Even if it's a small percentage, this means many people will get lasting damage. To me, vaccination status should not mean you can take your face mask off - first, you can still get stick, and, second, you can still bridge two sick people even better as you're less likely to show symptoms when you still carry the virus and exhale it without the mask.

It's of course not ideal that restrictions are unduly waived. But it is also recognized that many won't consider taking the vaccine because they don't see how doing so contributes to end the pandemy. Luring them with incentives like entry to bars without testing, or positive monetary rewards, changes the decision making process though. But many places maintain restrictions like mask wearing or mandatory testing for a reason.

Vaccination is too slow anyway. You need to vaccinate the entire world at once otherwise the reservoirs outside of the first world will keep the variant roulette spinning and more dangerous variants will nullify the first generation of vaccines and we'll back to where we started. Just today here on HN was a post about gamma variant escaping fully-vaccinated with Pfizer. And this is not even considering that we're about to see immunization protection starting to expire for some people - I doubt it's for life unless you're constantly exposed to the virus, which probably makes sense to stop wearing a mask... unless getting multiple infections to relaunch the antibodies is not doing unforeseen damage.

This sumbission is actually about just that article ;-) But yeah, it's too slow. The only saving grace is that there are multiple vaccines. Unless they all work exactly the same way, new mutations are unlikely to be immune to all of them.

We indeed don't know that much about the virus itself, what happens when one gets infected multiple times and when multiple vaccines are combined. We are going to find out either way. The goal of the vaccines and the other containment measures is to keep our health systems from collapsing. Whether or not we manage to eradicate Covid or to just force it into low-level virulence is not so important. It is probably not feasible to convince the public to hunt down Covid to extinction as with Smallpox.

I am disappointed by health authorities across the globe. If I was responsible, I would have the following:

1. Provide vitamin D3, zinc, and some zinc ionophore to the masses and advertise the benefits. Also, advise people to take a baby aspirin daily (slows viral replication and prevents blood clots).

2. Just like with cigarettes, have highly visual ads presenting the data that about a third of men have ED problems after surviving COVID-19. I think this would work better than anything else!

3. Have a ongoing campaign in prime time showing how to properly wear a face masks, what's the difference between a cloth one, a surgical one, and N95 - people still can't wear masks properly and have no idea what's the difference between a cloth one, a surgical one, and an N95/KN95/KF94/FFP2/FFP3.