It's not only ignorant of the science, as you point out regarding prior immunity, but highly ignorant of history and social dynamics. Creating an underclass that is considered diseased and "dangerous to us" ends badly, to say the least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_stages_of_genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehumanization

In addition, minorities have reason to distrust the medical establishment.[0] For all the noise made about "voter ID is racist", almost no one has said that "vaccine passports are racist". Do we really want to create another two tiered system where minorities are the outgroup again?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

Most of those people don't actually know they had COVID. They make up stories that "they've already had it". Remember that vaccinated still get COVID, those numbers include them.

What evidence do you have for your claim? An anecdote or two from your own life? How is that any more scientific than what you claim to be decrying?

In the U.S. at least, there is a mass testing regime that many must submit to for work, school, etc. Are you suggesting those who have tested positive in these situations are "making up stories"?

Overwhelmingly people did not have to test for COVID, and never did. They had a few "symptoms" and claimed they got COVID and it "was no big deal". When in reality they have no proof of it. Humans overwhelmingly make up stories so reinforce their opinions. And no, most work did not require testing, even government work. Even federal government work.

"Humans overwhelmingly make up stories so reinforce their opinions."

At least we can agree on that. You're doing it right now.

Funny that you put "a few symptoms" in scare quotes, given that loss of taste and smell is highly indicative of covid and not any other widely circulating illness.

Anecdotally, there are people who say it only based upon symptoms. I'd even argue that they are probably right, but its fair to say that they have any way of validating or proving that knowledge.

I agree that if someone is doing this, they do not have definitive proof.

The comment I was responding to claimed "most" people are making claims without proof. Despite the hundreds of millions (billions?) of covid tests that have been administered throughout the pandemic in the U.S.

There were a few stories that called into question the effectiveness of these tests ranging from PCR, antibody, antigen, etc.

Anecdote to support your statement: A close friend that tested positive for COVID last year works at a hospital. They saw no value in getting vaccinated since they had already been infected and recovered. They were given an ultimatum last month of "get vaccinated or find a new job".

Reason has left the building.

How it would have hurt to get a vaccine?

Well for one it could go to desperate people in 3rd world countries? If you already provably had covid letting your now useless shot go to the ones in need is arguably the moral choice?

The doses in the countries they're at now aren't likely to go to a different country, and are more likely to expire before they could be shipped elsewhere, so people in those countries may as well get them. For other places, the problem is manufacturing and distribution, and lifting patent restrictions would help too.

>How it would have hurt to get a vaccine?

Notice how easy it is to conveniently jettison the science + data and just demand that people "tow the line or else.."

It would be very useful to know what percent of the unvaccinated population are not getting vaccinated because they already had COVID. What are their demographics, compared to the larger demographics of the unvaccinated population? And is it worth spending any effort (or White House budget paying TikTok influencers) trying to convince them to get a vaccine for an illness they have already had?

Choosing to risk catching a disease with a 1-2% case fatality rate, while refusing an overwhelmingly safe and effective vaccine is the definition of idiocy.

If they've already had and recovered from Covid, as in the case of this 100 MM, their case fatality rate is nothing near that, and may well be lower than that for vaccinated-but-never-infected people.

Their choice is this, if they are otherwise healthy and young: With protection as good or better than the vaccinated, should I get a shot that might lower my already minuscule chance of dying or serious disease by a further tiny amount.

I could see rational people coming down on both sides of that.

Let us assume person x already got covid? The rationale for refusing the vaccine is either (a) they believe they do not need it or (b) they do so on ideological belief.

If it is (a), evidence shows that covid + vaccine is better than either alone and hence no reason to refuse the vaccine.

If it is (b), there is perfect justification for calling that stancy as an idiotic stance.

It is true that evidence suggests past infection + vaccine is best. But the evidence also shows that antibodies from past infection are superior to two shots of Pfizer which the majority of people were rolling with maskless just fine.

So regarding option a, it’s moreso the case that there’s no legitimate reason TO bother with the vaccine if you have those antibodies already. A marginal improvement at best over what is already better than two shots of Pfizer, is not worth the long-term unknowns to me.

Source:

https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

There is also new evidence that it may be safer for boys to just get covid rather than vaccination.

Source:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...

Knowing this, will you still say there’s no reason to refuse it? Why would you elevate yourself into a position where you believe yourself to be an arbiter of this? The evidence is clear that the antibodies tens of millions already have from past infection are excellent. So stop coming up with false dilemmas.

IFR is a better metric than CFR:

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

The overall IFR is misleading, given how age-stratified the risk is:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0

I absolutely adore when publicly available data sourced from government agencies gets downvoted.

Since March of 2020 any kind of statement suggesting covid isn’t as bad as some make it out to be is met with fierce vitriol. The number of times I’ve been called “dangerous” for posting well sourced data that clearly shows the IFR of covid is not 1-2%…

It’s as if people believe that any good news will result in others “not taking this serious”. They must feel that everybody needs to be scared stiff of this thing all the time… the result is the average person thinks if they catch covid they have a 10% chance of dying, which for most age groups is like 1000x off[0].

It’s super evil, really. If people were better informed about the risk profiles of covid, how many would have sacrificed a year and a half of their short life? Wouldn’t that imply that forcing this “new normal” crap by scaring the daylights out of people is a tad misguided and perhaps very unethical and immoral? If the only way you can get people to comply with your draconian interventions is lying to society about the risks of covid… well that is pretty fucked up.

Worse, by the way, is peoples risk assessment for covid is so completely wrong it makes debating public policy impossible. If the average adult thinks they have a 10% of dying if they got covid, of course they will want to mask little kids at school, of course they’ll cheer vaccine passports, of course they’ll rat each other out for sitting on a park bench. If they knew kids were at almost zero risk of covid, and their age bracket had minimal risks, would they have agreed to any of that?

[0] a fascinating data set: https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/

I remember when I first saw that USC dataset, it was mind blowing. Any public health official worth their salt should be absolutely horror struck that the public's perception of the risk profile of a disease is off by multiple orders of magnitude. Their entire job is to accurately inform the public about public health risks, and that dataset is proof that they've failed more spectacularly than I would have thought possible. They should be working around the clock to try to amend their failure, and earn back the trust they've thrown away.

Strangely, despite all the pearl clutching about "misinformation", this data-backed and quantifiable instance of covid misinformation never gets brought up. As a result, I now consider government / public health institution claims to be politically calculated fearmongering or propaganda until proven otherwise, and likely not worth my time to pay attention to. I'll update my opinion about them if their stance toward "correcting misinformation" starts to include misinformation like the above as well.

I'm not holding my breath.

Mmmm - I thought the problem was that the risk profile is it's not linear? So like, if enough people have it, they swamp emergency rooms, and suddenly, a lot more people are dying than would be dying at a lower incidence rate. So from a public health perspective, you're not really looking at 'how likely is this to kill people' but rather, 'how likely is this to crash an already fragile medical system' and thereby cause a lot of people to die.

I think the point about COVID is that if everybody just ignored it, this is absolutely what would happen, and case fatality rates could get pretty high.

You expressed my exact thoughts better than I ever could hope to. Thanks!

> It's highly ignorant to call unvaccinated Americans idiots.

Agreed. The correct term for them is "immoral". The only world in which it makes sense to forgo the vaccine is one in which your life is only one that matters. So a healthy unvaccinated person is making a perfectly rational decision, just a morally bankrupt one.

How is it morally bankrupt to care about yourself more than people you don't know?

How does getting a vaccine affect a young healthy person negatively?

It is immoral for the same reason as refusing to help others survive at zero cost to you.

> How does getting a vaccine affect a young healthy person negatively?

Isn't that a reason people don't want the shot? Because they're not sure of the answer to that question.

I got my 2 shots. Had to drive 1.5 hours each way both times, find someone to watch my kids and burn up 2 Saturdays that I could have spent doing something I wanted to do that wasn't getting a shot.

To claim there is zero cost is insincere at best.

I am not sure which country you are in because I can walk into pharmacies and grocery stores and get a shot while shopping. Vaccine appointments were booked out early in the year in the United states. You could have just waited. The US government/pharma companies cant produce 600 million doses in a couple of weeks.

For me both shots were zero cost, as for every other person I know.

I was flying all over the country for the entire lockdown period. I didn’t want to wait to get the shot.

You had a peculiar outlier situation that simply isn't true for 99% of Americans. Glad to see that you judged that the vaccine was worth spending 2 entire days on.

If you answer my question I'll answer yours.

The vaccine does not come with 0 cost.

What was the cost to you? Sore arm? Feverish for a day?

It sucks to be surrounded by people who won't give a shit about senior Citizens, immunocompromised neighbors or older folks in their own families. It is indeed a lack of morality.

There is some value in fitting in with society and showing those who are skeptical that there's nothing to be afraid of with a vaccine. And with more mandates going into place it's easier to just get vaccinated.

I've said from the beginning of this year that I'll get vaccinated as soon as the government gets out of it. At this point, the mandates are specifically why I refuse to get vaccinated. I caught covid in August so I'm immune for the next year at least. So there's no reason for me to get vaccinated and every reason not to.

> I've said from the beginning of this year that I'll get vaccinated as soon as the government gets out of it. At this point, the mandates are specifically why I refuse to get vaccinated.

Do you find any irony in your decision being controlled by the government's policy?

I agree with arcbyte, and I got my second shot in March. The amount of government interference as it relates to COVID and vaccines is complete bullshit. I hope we look back on this in 20 years and feel a deep sense of embarrassment for how COVID and the vaccine has been managed and used to emotionally manipulate and divide people.

When 9/11 happened it united the country. COVID should have done the same thing, but it has been used as a political tool instead, bringing out the worst in people. It makes me quite depressed when I think about it for too long.

After 9/11 a significant portion of the US was staunchly anti-war, organized some of the largest protests in US history, and yet they were ignored by the media and demonized as anti-patriotic. On top of that, muslim americans have had to endure years of racist attacks, not only from individuals but also from the state, in borders and airports, ongoing to this day.

If you think it "united the country" then you either have rose-tinted glasses on, or you had your opinion validated by the pro-war media and never looked elsewhere. The difference is that now the media disagrees with you.

That isn't accurate. The media doesn't disagree with me, the country is ripped in two over COVID and vaccines, there is no denying that.

Why do you say they disagree?

Edit: capitalization

Second edit: I didn't say the WAR united the country. You're twisting my comment.

The war was a direct response to 9/11, they're directly related, just like vaccines and mandates are a direct response to COVID. The country was ripped in two back then two, you just didn't hear about it as much.

I was wrong when I said the media disagrees with you though. Maybe the difference is that the anti-vax side has managed to organize through the internet and has gotten a lot more coverage, so they look bigger than they actually are?

> The war was a direct response to 9/11, they're directly related, just like vaccines and mandates are a direct response to COVID. The country was ripped in two back then two, you just didn't hear about it as much.

I understand the point you’re trying to make, but I still disagree. I was in high school when 9/11 happened, I remember it well. There was a period of time, I will admit it was on the order of 48-96 hours, where this country was as united as I’ve ever experienced. COVID could have had that same effect, us as country(wo)men against the world. It didn’t. From the jump it was politics. I’m sure you remember Harris and Biden saying they wouldn’t get a vaccine when Trump was president. It’s political all the way down.

You talk about an event that occurred over 12 hours uniting the country for a business week, and wonder why a disease that had been politicized and downplayed in contradiction to the science and what we were seeing in other countries for months before we saw significant numbers of infections in the US did not generate the same effect?

Of course it didn't. I don't understand why you think it ever had the chance to.

>I’m sure you remember Harris and Biden saying they wouldn’t get a vaccine when Trump was president. It’s political all the way down.

I remember their comments. I also remember the rest of the statements they made and the context around them. And neither of them said they wouldn't get a vaccine while Trump was president - they said that they wouldn't get a vaccine if Trump was the only one saying to get it, and experts like Fauci weren't.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/23/tiktok-pos...

> I remember their comments. I also remember the rest of the statements they made and the context around them. And neither of them said they wouldn't get a vaccine while Trump was president - they said that they wouldn't get a vaccine if Trump was the only one saying to get it, and experts like Fauci weren't.

that is another shining example of how COVID and the vaccine were used for political manipulation. Biden and Harris should have not made the vaccine about donald fucking trump.

Their stance was bullshit and you know it. In what world are global pharma companies going to develop a brand new vaccine using relatively new technology to try and stop a global pandemic, and the only fucking person to talk about them is Trump? Nobody else will say anything until Trump does? Trump would be the first and only authority on these vaccines? That's such a crock of shit.

> When 9/11 happened it united the country. COVID should have done the same thing, but it has been used as a political tool instead, bringing out the worst in people. It makes me quite depressed when I think about it for too long.

I've felt this way too. People have made this so incredibly, incredibly divisive. I'm not sure what blend of fear and tribalism is driving this either. When you talk to some people about covid, what comes out of their mouth is almost word salad--they are so incredibly fearful and panicked that almost none of what they say makes sense. The idea that society should completely alter everything for this one specific illness (aka "new normal") is pretty absurd, yet people will stop just short of spitting on your face when you express any skepticism at all.

Societies reaction to this is all just so freaking bizarre. None of what we are doing adds up or makes much sense when you really start asking questions.

> I caught covid in August so I'm immune for the next year at least.

Yeah and if you got vaccinated you probably wouldn't have caught it in August. Great hill to (hopefully metaphorically) die on.