> If so, then your position is hard to justify.

Sorry, no. For the record, I'm fully vaccinated, but that argument doesn't work. If we all stopped driving cars, fewer people would die in accidents. That's no belief etc, it's a fact. Yet we obviously don't, because cars are super convenient and relatively few people die. We're perfectly fine accepting some people dying for lots of convenience for everyone.

The same will have to eventually be accepted for Covid. We can't live in a perpetual half-lockdown because the omega-variant will kill 0.1% of seniors otherwise.

Speak for yourself. There are a significant number of people on this site who are pretty vocally opposed to cars precisely due to the safety hazards. There was an article on here just the other day about how drivers of larger trucks and SUVs are twice as likely to kill a pedestrian as drivers of sedans.

I would posit that reasons why these risks are so underappreciated (and why we don't wear helmets in cars) is due to long-term concerted efforts to control how cars are understood and protrayed by those who make money from them.

No, they're not, otherwise they'd be on a farm and live of the land. Living in the city and being able to walk to the grocery store depends on other people with cars doing all the heavy lifting and delivering whatever they need by car to where they pick it up.

> I would posit that reasons why these risks are so underappreciated (and why we don't wear helmets in cars) is due to long-term concerted efforts to control how cars are understood and protrayed by those who make money from them.

I fundamentally disagree. Plenty of people die falling off of a ladder each year. Every time you use a ladder, there's a non-zero chance of dying. But ladders are great! They allow you to reach stuff you couldn't get to otherwise, so of course they're worth the risk. So do cars.

You can go over that for pretty much any topic. Want to live in a house? Construction workers are dying. Want to eat? People die in the process. But they're few, compared to the population of country, and houses and food are great.

If risk minimization is the goal, we'll all run around like the Michelin figure so we don't hurt ourselves. But we don't, because we want to get shit done, and for most things, there's a giant area where the risk is much smaller than the cost associated with avoiding it. The same is true for illnesses. Yes, it sucks, and of course nobody wants to die, but we can't go on like this forever because it could save lives.

Wearing a helmet while driving would increase safety for drivers at not loss of utility. The choice not to do so is indicative of the irrational ways in which we evaluate relative risks.

Balancing risk and utility is absolutely necessary, but we do a horrible job of doing that with cars.

> The same is true for illnesses. Yes, it sucks, and of course nobody wants to die, but we can't go on like this forever because it could save lives.

What are you even going on about here? You think that encouraging healthy people to get vaccinated to help protect other people is stupid because most people are willing to accept the risk of driving? You position makes absolutely no sense to me.

This is likely because you're projecting positions onto the person you're responding to that they never stated, and probably don't hold. If you read their comments again, you will discover they said they themselves are vaccinated, and offered no opinion about encouraging other people to get vaccinated as well. That was plainly not the topic of their comment. They are simply pointing out, correctly in my view, that life is not and never will be totally risk free, and at some point the risks that covid presents to the world at large will have to just be accepted, because the costs of lockdowns as countermeasures are simply too great. We can't continue to prioritize minimizing covid at the expense of all else forever.

As a side note, the fact that you read someone expressing skepticism of some measures of covid containment, and instantly leapt to "they must think encouraging vaccines is stupid" does not reflect well on you, and is a pretty strong indicator that you're spending a lot of time in an ideological echo chamber that's eager to "other" and strawman anyone that disagrees with its positions. Something worth reflecting on, if you're willing.

Ironically, that is precisely what I see you doing. You need to reread this full thread because your comment is entirely off base. The person I was discussing with was expressly arguing against encouraging people to be vacinated to help protect other people. This was justified by referencing how we accept (or in my case don't) the risks of cars in our society. There was no mention of my or anyone supporting indefinite lockdowns.

> We can't continue to prioritize minimizing covid at the expense of all else forever.

Of course not. I support encouraging vaccines and mandating masks precisely because we need to end lockdowns and still need to keep our hospitals running.

That doesn't mean I will sit by while people make ridiculous arguments to against very good reasons for getting vacinated.

I won't respond to the rest of your comment or any follow ups as I don't believe it would be productive.

1) The vaccinated are not getting it anywhere near the rates of the unvaccinated, so they are not spreading it at anywhere close to how much the unvaccinated spread it.

2) If they do spread it to another vaccinated person, that person is highly unlikely to get very sick at all.

3) If they spread it to an unvaccinated person, that person is much more likely to get sick and have a better opportunity to spread it to even more people.

4) People who get sick & end up in the hospital still have lots of time before they get to spread the virus before being hospitalized.

5) Vaccinated people who get COVID are infectious to others for significantly less time than unvaccinated people.

6) Current does not show vaccinated people causing new or more powerful strains. [0]

7) New strains are still significantly less infectious & dangerous for those who are vaccinated.

So I fail to see how your points are relevant from an overall risk-reduction point of view. Available evidence points towards vaccination as a superior risk reduction mechanism than the alternative (which I guess is do nothing? If not, please clarify) that you are proposing.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaccine-variants/f...

2) Again to point 1

3) They will most likely spread it back to said vaccinated people who are less likely to get sick

4) Back to point 3

5) Has this been proved anywhere?

6) For the time being. The delta variant only mutated 12 months after the first infection

That would be my guess, since actual evidence shows that vaccinated people are infectious for a significantly shorter period of time:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...

You are trying to condense a very complex scenario into a very simple argument.

"With the BNT162b2 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 93.7% (95% CI, 91.6 to 95.3) among persons with the alpha variant and 88.0% (95% CI, 85.3 to 90.1) among those with the delta variant. With the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 74.5% (95% CI, 68.4 to 79.4) among persons with the alpha variant and 67.0% (95% CI, 61.3 to 71.8) among those with the delta variant." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891

On the contrary, I'm actually tightening my estimation to "more than 67%" (95% CI @ 61.3%-71.8%). BNT162b2 is Pfizer, ChAdOx1 is AstraZeneca.

> (...) also are less likely to develop symptoms and so will most likely not isolate when you are infected.

Yup, so multiply those likelihoods and let me know what number you arrived at and what assumptions did you take so that we can compare some concrete estimations. Or share some article that tried to estimate this.

> You are trying to condense a very complex scenario into a very simple argument.

I'm willing to be convinced otherwise by some data, so far the only thing you're offering is an opinion.