We should have tied CARES Act payments to vaccination... I'm guessing a $500 check would have persuaded almost everybody to get the shot. In the end the ROI of herd immunity might have been worth it?

> (1) There are a significant number of people relying on us reaching herd immunity

Herd Immunity can be reached either by vaccinations, previous infections, or both. We're well on track to reach the "both" mark, or possibly are already past it.

If children were at serious risk here, a children vaccine would have been prioritized long ago - well before we prioritized getting vaccines to the 75 and older age group.

The entire duration of the pandemic has seen such a miniscule amount of infected children - and even fewer with serious symptoms or death - that it's absurd to base policy on this. It's statistically far more likely children will die on their way to school than become ill and experience serious complications.

We should stop basing policy off likelihoods which are prefixed by multiple zeros.

Vaccination does not prevent transmission, but it does reduce it.

And the only people they can transit it to that would be "at-risk" are people who've had the vaccine available to them for free, for months and chosen explicitly to not get it. That's their choice, and we should not cripple the country over it.

[1] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/COV...

It's a good thing only about 2.7% of the adult population of US is immunocompromised.

We can't base policy off something that effects an extreme minority of the population, like this 2.7% statistic you cited. We'd never do anything if that were the case...

The affected people should take all necessary precautions available (get vaccinated if applicable, wear a N95 or KN95 mask, shelter isolated at home, etc). Everyone else needs to go back to work, school, stores, restaurants, etc.

I'm all for leaving people alone to their own decisions. But with this, their decisions greatly affect me and society at large.

Herd immunity - either reached by vaccinations, previous-infections, or both - is all we can hope for.

Good news is, we don't need unvaccinated people's cooperation to reach herd immunity - they will eventually have natural immunity anyway.

If the rate of transmission reaches the elusive herd immunity, the time-frame for the virus to evolve into evading vaccines grows significantly longer, even with a non-zero mutation rate.

Lastly, antibodies created via the mRNA vaccines have a broader binding affinity to different variants than those from natural immunity [1].

Again, the goal is to not eradicate, but to scale it down to the point where it is statistically not a threat.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34103407/

I'm saying it doesn't matter - even if we had a 100% vaccination rate, some new variant will develop someplace that's being ravaged right now (say, India) and spread to the US eventually anyway. If our vaccines still work - great... if they don't, well.. where are we then?

Lastly, the numbers already indicate it's statistically not a threat to the overwhelming majority of the US population as-is.

It's not a threat at this very moment, for this very point in time, but since we're allowing the virus to spread at such evolutionarily scales, inside and outside the US, a new variant popping up that evades vaccines is statistically very possible, and pose a significant threat to my own and society's well being.

I'm trying to argue that this is not a personal choice issue, rather a public health one.

The healthy unvaccinated dickheads idiots, because they are idiots but do not realize it, should simply be forced to get a vaccine or be put aside from society.

And because they are idiots and won't understand it anyway, do not spend to much resources trying to explain that.