It's now becoming obvious that vaccinated individuals can still be infected and can spread the infection as well. At the same time, mortality is greatly diminished. At that point, we have a vague and unspecific reduction of an already modest risk. This is insufficient to make a "civic responsibility" argument. By the same token, I could argue people should not drive cars as a matter of civic responsibility, because that carries a non-zero risk of killing a pedestrian.
But the analogy to cars is flawed. A more equitable one would be to obey traffic laws and not do things like speed or lane jump. I.e driving in a responsible manner that is considerate of others safety. It doesn’t reduce traffic accidents to zero, it minimizes them. Your analogy would be like continuing the lockdown for vaccinated people because even vaccinated people can in rare cases spread the disease. That is as wacky as forbidden people to drive. Having people vaccinated to partake in large gatherings is like requiring people to obey speed limits or face a penalty. Sure some people will get around it.
At the same time employers now seemingly want to be on the hook for any communicable diseases spread on company property or function. People are being coerced into disclosing medical information or risk being treated like pariahs. It cannot be understated that people are being pressured into getting an unapproved (EUA is not approval) gene therapy (FDAs classification, not mine) that has never been widely tested in humans and has non-trivial side effects. This is unprecedented, at least in the US.
This is on top of being constantly mislead by media and government officials. NPR recently gave a stat, something to the effect of “young people under 40 make up half the positive COVID cases”. Sounds alarming, except that demographic makes up half the population _and_ that demographic had disproportionately mild symptoms from the disease.
If you want to be vaccinated, please go right ahead. But then stop. Allow others that you are not the guardian of to make their own health choices based on their personal research or decision making process.
What is "much higher" in a number?
> If one doesn’t take the vaccine there is a significant chance they give the virus to someone else, killing them.
"Significant" would depend on their lifestyle, would it not? Are the rural unvaccinated as "significant" as the urban unvacinnated?
> Civic responsibility isn’t brought up much these days.
Not everyone has the same idea of what civic responsibility should be, which is probably why we have to write and then enforce laws.
I'm not sure about the booster dose, Delta or any other variants, but the Pfizer Vaccine has been consistently shown in several studies to reduce COVID mortality by 99%, so that number is currently ~100
The Pfizer vaccine as I believe 94% effective against severe disease, so around 20x higher.
> What is "much higher" in a number?
The analysis revealed that vaccination efficacy in terms of protection against deaths was equal to 72%, with a lower reduction of number of deaths for B.1.1.7 versus non-B.1.1.7 variants (70% and 78%, respectively). Other factors significantly related to mortality were arrivals at airports, mobility change from the pre-pandemic level and temperature.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.26.21257844v...
An estimated 10,400 deaths have been averted [in the UK] as a result of the COVID-19 vaccination programme up to the end of March 2021.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
>> If one doesn’t take the vaccine there is a significant chance they give the virus to someone else, killing them.
> "Significant" would depend on their lifestyle, would it not? Are the rural unvaccinated as "significant" as the urban unvacinnated?
Living in a rural environment does not mean that the virus doesn't spread, otherwise the "Cases/Deaths per 100,000" maps at https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/8167071... would have wide divergence per state, but they all are around 11K deaths per 100,000.
A common thing I heard from some early in the pandemic was that places with lower density would fare better, but that never made much sense to me: even if you have only 10K people in a 50 mile diameter circle, they all still shop and socialize in a handful of places.
But for a young person with no co-morbidities, that chance is still basically 0%.
> C. If one doesn’t take the vaccine there is a significant chance they give the virus to someone else, killing them.
Even if others have taken the vaccine themselves? Either that particular risk is negligible if the vaccine works, or the vaccine doesn't work.
>But for a young person with no co-morbidities, that chance is still basically 0%.
According to table "COVID-19 Fatality Rate by AGE:" at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se..., the mortality rate for everyone under 40 years of age is 0.2%. That "is basically 0", but means that for every 1000 people infected, 2 will die. Roughly half of the US is under 40 years old (https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...). If no-one had gotten vaccinated, you would expect to see 320,000 deaths in that age group. According to https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se..., we've had 286,000 deaths so far in that age group.
>> C. If one doesn’t take the vaccine there is a significant chance they give the virus to someone else, killing them.
> Even if others have taken the vaccine themselves? Either that particular risk is negligible if the vaccine works, or the vaccine doesn't work.
You're forgetting the number 1 law of large numbers. Things that have a very low chance of probability happen all the time at scale. The vaccine reduces the likelihood of individuals dying by orders of magnitude, and as a group it is a great tool to reduce the R0 under 1, but contagion and transmition is still possible, and every new infection we are rolling the dice on getting "lucky" with a new vaccine resistant variant.
Also, are you aware you can be exposed to the virus and not be infected?
I added every age group between 0 and 39, but took the incorrect column (Deaths from all causes, which is obviously incorrect), which puts me off by an order of magnitude.
> Also, are you aware you can be exposed to the virus and not be infected?
That is true, like with any virus it is a statistics game. It is also true that the Delta variant is 1000x more virulent/transmissible, so likelihood of infection is much higher today than a year ago.
That doesn’t even get into the benefit of preventing long Covid and being able to open the economy faster with fewer restrictions
You statement sounds far more confident than what the science would currently permit.
Severe reactions to experimental vaccines for example?
1) The vaccine isn't perfect, and herd immunity nonlinearly reduces the risk of everyone including the vaccinated from getting it.
2) Unvaccinated people, who make up the vast majority of the cases, create an environment for the virus to evolve within, possibly mutating into a form that is more dangerous to everyone, including the vaccinated
I would argue that the data now shows that herd immunity is not achievable with any vaccination rate. The vaccines just don't work that way, breakthrough infections are rampant.
> Unvaccinated people, who make up the vast majority of the cases, create an environment for the virus to evolve within, possibly mutating into a form that is more dangerous to everyone, including the vaccinated.
This is speculative. Vaccination-induced immunity is clearly not perfect, at the same it puts selection pressure on the virus. Natural immunity, going by reinfection rates, appears to be much stronger. I would speculate that in a population where 70% are vaccinated, where the amount of infections among the vaccinated is roughly the same, the virus is much more likely to mutate in the vaccinated individuals.
Also, the chance of being disabled for a long while if you are young without comorbidity is far from 0%. It is quite significant, certainly above 0.5%.
~60 million are <12 years of age, which means that they aren't eligible for the vaccine at this time, and I've seen reports that it is unlikely we'll have vaccines for the youngest among us. So 82% of the population is the absolute most we can vaccinate.
With the demographic numbers and the (admittedly terrible proxy of) allergy numbers, 86 million people wouldn't be vaccinated (~25%). With a 0.2% percent fatality rate, we are talking about 170,000 deaths if all of them get infected.
> But for a young person with no co-morbidities, that chance is still basically 0%.
Having long term side effects doesn't round to zero, even for young healthy people. And vaccine side effects do.
The reason the flu vaccine isn't one of them is because it's not that effective to begin with and you have to take it every year. It's not effective enough to really stop an epidemic, so instead vaccinating patients is the main thrust instead of HCW, because the overall impact will be fairly low.
A difference is that COVID is much deadlier, no?
There aren't actually any virus particles in the mRNA vaccines, so there's no biological mechanism for that to happen.
Beyond that, the virus causes orders of magnitude more spike protein response, so even if that was true, which it probably isn't, then it is still very unlikely that the vaccine could cause long-covid.
Also, all vaccines introduce spike proteins in the body, not just mRNA vaccines.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201217154046.h...
Relevant part "The spike proteins alone can cause brain fog". And vaccines do produce viral proteins as intended.
It appears to come from a researcher contacted by the site for the article. And it's probably true.
However, there's a few reasons to believe that "long" covid like symptoms wouldn't come from the spike protein alone:
1. As a parent mentioned, you generate a lot fewer proteins w/ the vaccine than the virus
2. IIUC, those proteins are more localized. The soreness with an initial injection is inflammation due to spike protein creation, and that's usually localized to the injection site. The proteins themselves are less likely to travel as widely as the virus.
3. The proteins don't last very long. They're gone after a few days. So long term symptoms wouldn't be due to a continued immune response. They might be due to inflammation that hasn't gone down, I guess, but that seems unlikely to last months.
And again, all of these will be worse with the virus than the vaccine. You'll have more spike proteins, for longer, over a larger part of your body, and also have a virus attacking you in addition to the immune response.
I'm hesitant to just accept this as a fact. Vaccinations can cause very strong immune reactions in young adults that would otherwise likely suffer mild or asymptomatic infections. There are many surveys that query for a basket of sometimes unspecific symptoms such as "fatigue" or "brain fog" as a follow-up of a COVID infection. I'm missing that volume of surveys in the follow-up for vaccinations.
A. Pfizer isn’t the only vaccine option.
B. If one doesn’t take the vaccine, one’s chances of dying or being disabled for years or permanently are much higher.
C. If one doesn’t take the vaccine there is a significant chance they give the virus to someone else, killing them.
I think it’s the best option out of all non-great options to mandate vaccines in order to participate in crowded settings. It’s a matter of civic responsibility in order to partake in civic life. Sure it would be better if there was no Covid so no one would need an extra vaccine, but that world no longer exists. I don’t like the current situation either but it is what it is.
Civic responsibility isn’t brought up much these days. Liability shield for vaccine makers isn’t fair, but unvaccinated allowed to romp around spreading the virus without liability is also not fair.