“People who are not willing to be vaccinated are free to not participate in society” - argument goes both ways

False equivalence. Actively requiring someone to take an action to participate in society is not the same as someone making a personal risk assessment for themselves and deciding whether or not to participate in society based on that.

Besides, if we go with your standards, those that can't take the vaccine would not be allowed to participate in a mandatory vaccine society anyway. So either they're forced to avoid participating, or they at least have the option to based on a personal assessment.

Alternatively, you can look at it as

1. We all go a little out of our way to help those who need help (the sick, those the vaccine doesn't work for, those who cannot get the vaccine for other reasons), OR

2. Some people are selfish and only care about their own self gratification, so are unwilling to sacrifice a tiny bit to help everyone else.

I'll take the society with more 1 and push back on 2.

No one knows what the level of sacrifice is, that's the problem. The long term effects of both the virus and the vaccines are unknown.

You're weighing guaranteed exposure to potentially unknown effects vs a non guaranteed risk of contracting the virus.

Yes, and I'm weighing it based on various well educated professional (scientists, doctors, etc) putting forth the opinion that it is well worth the risk given the benefit to society as a whole.

Versus a bunch of people that refuse to get the vaccine because ... they feel like they are better able to analyze the facts than those well educated people.

There was literally an interview with a woman on NPR recently who said, "I have grand children, so I'm not getting the vaccine". Like... she thought that having grand children was a reason _not_ to get the vaccine. And she followed it up with "they don't think we're smart enough to make good decisions for our families". Here's the thing; "they" are clearly correct.

I just get so frustrated by this stance of "Science and facts are propaganda; _I_ know better, because I trust my gut. The welfare of society be damned".

The food pyramid, demonization of fats, antibacterial soaps, and countless other examples were touted as "factually beneficial for society" by well educated professionals until there was sufficient data to definitively prove them wrong, and those that challenged them based on the insufficiency of the data were considered "crazy" until they were proved correct.

> until there was sufficient data to definitively prove them wrong

Yes, and that's precisely how good analysis and decision making is supposed to work. You're supposed to change your mind when the information you based your decision on changes. That's a _good_ thing.

For any given discussion, given enough people, there will always be a set of people that believe each of the possible things that _can_ be believed. We have people that believe the world is flat. However, the fact that _some_ of those people happened to believe what turned out to be true when the set of input information changed... doesn't make them smarted than everyone else. Unless they were basing their conclusions on a known and defensible set of arguments... it just makes them randomly lucky. You can have a watch to tell time... then ignore it and say it's always 12pm. When it happens to get to 12pm, you'll be right. But you'll still be stupid.

lol no, the burden of proof for efficacy and safety is on those pushing the idea. It's perfectly reasonable to reject something based on a lack of, or questionable, empirical evidence.

There's nothing stupid about rejecting "expert consensus" when the data backing the experts doesn't exist.

We know what the efforts of Covid are. I personally know people who have lost their sense of taste, one for over a year and no sign of it coming back and hates cooking/food now - I’ll vaccinate up just to avoid that.