The part of this argument that feels shaky to me is it ignores externalities. If it were possible to risk an infection with no impact on others then yes, the conversation is over.

But diseases don’t work like this. If you get sick, you will get others sick. If you get very sick, you will occupy a hospitable bed. Given current hospital utilization rates, this could well end in a sick person being turned away.

Given the societal costs, it seems fair to me to ask for a stronger justification than “I don’t think the virus will hurt me”

So following your argument, we would also need to outlaw every sort of risk-taking behaviour. Almost every sport except chess bears a risk comparable to what you say above. And most recreational activities also bear a risk that you might have an accident, which could put some stress on the people working at the hospital. Heck, the helicopter pilot could crash while they bring you to safety, so you implicitly killed them.

In fact, everything you do outisde of your workhours is your personal risk, so it needs to be banned I guess.

Sounds fine to me. I am blind and can not do most of the fancy recreational activities you sighted people are so fond of. So why should I care. In fact, I should immediately start a petition that makes your lifes more dull and miserable. But guess what, no. Thats not my thing. I am not an asshole.

>So following your argument, we would also need to outlaw every sort of risk-taking behaviour.

We do outlaw almost every sort of behavior that risks OTHERS safety.

>Almost every sport except chess bears a risk comparable to what you say above.

I'm not aware of any sport which is mandatory, as far as I know everyone participating is doing so willingly.

>And most recreational activities also bear a risk that you might have an accident, which could put some stress on the people working at the hospital.

Again, I'm not aware of any recreational activity that is a required activity. I'm also not aware of any that are participated in by so many people that is simultaneously so risky that we have an issue with ICU beds. Can you name one? We have mountains of data showing that covid outbreaks stress hospital systems and are in fact doing that right now. I'm not aware of any evidence that sports or recreational activities do the same, but I'm open to learning.

>Heck, the helicopter pilot could crash while they bring you to safety, so you implicitly killed them.

The helicopter pilot voluntarily signed up to be a helicopter pilot, nobody forced him to do so.

>Sounds fine to me. I am blind and can not do most of the fancy recreational activities you sighted people are so fond of. So why should I care. In fact, I should immediately start a petition that makes your lifes more dull and miserable. But guess what, no. Thats not my thing. I am not an asshole.

Well, you're comparing recreational activities that carry low risk and have 0 history of causing an issue with ICU beds, to a disease which has an extremely high transmission rate, and is provably causing issues with ICU beds. So it makes your arguments seem rather silly.

The required changes to liberty are substantially different. Giving up your hobbies means making a major change to your life. Getting two shots takes a cumulative 2ish hours.

Do you claim you receive substantial benefits from not getting a shot? Because I claim society gets substantial benefits from you getting vaccinated.

You’re trying to make this a binary thing, but we live in a society where collectively we try to make small trades in liberty for collective benefit.

I do expect you not to drive 60MPH in front of my house where my children play. I do not expect you to give up tennis.

Frankly, if you insist I get a biannual shot for your reasons, I insist that you give up tennis because I dont see why I should pay a single penny for your spare time activities.

I am willing to retract my retarded claim if you do the same.

You agree that as society you make some concessions for the greater good? I assume you (roughly) coming with speed limits, yes?

And driving slower almost certainly takes more of your time every year than getting a shot. Both measures save other people’s lives. I don’t think you have a leg to stand on here.

Yes, my "substiantial benefit" is not exposing my system to an artificially created addiction/dependency on fabricated meds. What you seem to ignore is the long term effect of going down that path as a society. If the death rate in my age group were higher, believe me, I would take a shot. But since I am statistically not really at risk, I prefer to not make myself dependent on vaccination to survive.

I’m not aware of any evidence that vaccinations of any kind cause addiction. Please provide citations.

Almost all vaccine producers claim effectivity for about 9 months, right? So after 9 months, you need to get another shot. Since you have decided your immune system can not handle COVID on its own, you have now a dependency on the vaccine. Thats what I call an addiction. Better english word is probably a dependency...

Viruses and diseases tend to have a way of spreading and causing harm that voluntary sports don’t seem to have. Two willing participants crashing into each other and needing hospitalization is not nearly the same as one selfish person coughing their way around the grocery store. The infected person in the grocery store has now not only infected a good number of people in the store, but will be the root cause of many future cases as those fellow shoppers continue to live their lives. You have a choice to play a sport. People don’t have a choice to live their lives (work, shop for groceries, send their kids to school, etc).

I'm honestly curious if you would apply this reason to other types of infections? or is it something about covid and the covid vaccine that has the risk/reward ratio tilted in favor of not vaccinating for it? When I do my own assessment, I look at the tremendous success of the vaccines (efficacy and low serious side-effect rate) and compare it to the risk and consequences of getting the disease, it seems a very easy call for me. So I'm really curious what you are evaluating differently - what am I missing?

For one, I am not sure about the side-effect-freeness. In fact, the covid vaccine is the first vaccine I know where a high percentage of people I know who have got the shot also were ill for a few days. So this is new for me. I have got a lot of vaccines around 15 years ago for a travel gig, and didn't have side-effects from a single one of them. So this is new, me having to accept that the vaccine might take me out for a few days.

And yes, of course, with a different situation, my decision might be different. If covid were as harsh as our media and government claimed at the beginning of the first lockdown, I would certainly get a shot. However, it turned out the media and government have overstated the danger, apparently to achieve compliance. This sort of lie (we were told "everyone will know someone who died") was my wakeup call. I was originally mislead and expected a deathrate of 1%. As it turns out, almost only the elderly die, and the deathrate (including the elderly) is around 0.1%. Wrong order of magnitude for real panic on my side.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate you didn't have to take the time to reply to a random stranger on the internet :)

Regarding side-effect-free - not sure anyone ever claimed that? I understand that the relative risk is very low when compared to the risks associated with the disease itself - even for those that might expect milder symptoms from covid. I think people (myself included) are just really really bad at assessing these kind of risk/reward equations - I don't think we have the right tools for it, and our assessments are polluted by our personal history/culture/biases (in every direction).

I can't agree with your assessment of overstating the danger - the full hospital wards and large death numbers at the height of the pandemic before vaccines are enough reasons for me to accept that the costs are high enough for the small risk/inconvenience I'd pay personally.

I also know personally people in public health and can vouch for the sincerity of their (very) educated advice. If anything they have been consistently critical of governments being too slow to accept their recommendations (due to political pressures). I'd feel foolish for thinking I would know better than they who have spent their entire career in this area. I know that's an appeal to authority which isn't always warranted - but I'm comfortable with landing on that side of the fence.

> The actual reason for most, which is "I have decided to risk an infection to let my immune system do its job"

To be fair, this is what the vaccines do.

Yeah, what does the vaccine do that the virus doesn't? There's a lot the latter does that the former doesn't. That's the part I don't get.

> Yeah, what does the vaccine do that the virus doesn't? There's a lot the latter does that the former doesn't. That's the part I don't get.

Well the main feature of the vaccine over the actual virus is that the vaccine doesn't give you covid. The vaccine doesn't cover all of the multitude of compounds your body might recognize on the virus, but it covers enough for most people to build a better immune response to the actual virus than nothing. There is the issue that the viral strains are mutating and so over time so that a recently-vaccinated person today will probably do worse than a recently-vaccinated person 6 months ago, but there's not really much you can do about that.

Come on. If humanity were unable to survive without the help of artificial vaccines, we would never be here.

> Come on. If humanity were unable to survive without the help of artificial vaccines, we would never be here.

I never said that humanity couldn't survive without a vaccine. Clearly we can. We also can survive with rotten meat and with poor shelter and with rampant war and famine. Sure a larger portion of us would die, but humanity would certainly survive.

Anyway my point was that when you're infected with a virus, your body basically builds up the ability to recognize certain proteins that the virus expresses and uses that to fight it off. It takes time to build up the ability to fight it off. The vaccine exposes you to basically the same proteins so that your body is able to identify and fight off the virus more quickly after infection. So really the vaccines are just priming your immune system so that it can better do its job.

Interesting To get minused on this comment when all informations contained are scientifically accurates.

The thing is many humans did not survive to get us here. I think this is a key point a lot of the antivax crowd doesn't see.

How would you feed the world, if all these people had survived?

> How would you feed the world, if all these people had survived?

I'm not really sure what your point is. We shouldn't try to help those with weaker immune systems survive? How far should we take this? Should we as a society not make an effort to help the physically disabled, the old, the blind, etc. survive? Looking to the wild, basically no members of those groups survive. Is that what we should aim for?