You are suggesting we mislead people to get them to be vaccinated because they are too dumb to understand. The whole point of this post and comment thread is that it doesn't work.

No, I'm not suggesting misleading anyone. I'm suggesting that a simpler system is easier to understand and leaves fewer ambiguities for compliance and enforcement... especially at national and international scale, where you are dealing with a significant number of very dumb people.

You can tell people that if they had covid they're at less risk because they've built up a resistance, but you can also tell them everyone is required to get the vaccine anyway.

> suddenly everyone who has a cough thinks they don't need to get vaccinated.

But we can do testing.

For the record:

> Earlier estimates that 80% of infections are asymptomatic were too high and have since been revised down to between 17% and 20% of people with infections.[1]

> It’s also unclear to what extent people with no symptoms transmit SARS-CoV-2. The only test for live virus is viral culture. PCR and lateral flow tests do not distinguish live virus. No test of infection or infectiousness is currently available for routine use.678 As things stand, a person who tests positive with any kind of test may or may not have an active infection with live virus, and may or may not be infectious.[1]

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4851

Testing is less reliable than a shot in the arm, there's literally no reason for the additional complication. Get the shot.

Getting the shot is not reliable at all either. How would we know without testing anyway? As I said in another comment: nursing students got the hepatitis B vaccine, and it turns out they were still not immune after the 2nd shot. How do we know how many people are actually immune without testing? Having vaccinated is not exactly a certainty of anything.

I regularly run into people who claim they had Covid back in fall 2019, and it's vastly more likely that they had the flu.

And not getting vaccinated because you don't want to support the pharma industry misses that they get $20 per shot for the vaccine, but will get thousands per dose of the expensive meds you'll need if you wind up in the ICU.

> they get $20 per shot for the vaccine

Strengthening your argument further, the pharma industry already got $20 per shot for the vaccine.

The government signed a contract for the shots, so if you're letting them go to waste, you're just wasting your tax dollars which went to pharma companies anyways.

Part of me wonders if anyone has run these numbers at big pharma. I would guess that at some point in July, unvaccinated people became the bigger cash cow, since not only did they have to discard that vaccine that Trump had already brought for them and been produced, we have perhaps gone past the point of having done that a second time with the dose that Biden bought and was produced for them. This comes as the percentage of doses in arms drops. And they are also much more likely to end up in the hospital and buying yet even more expensive experimental treatments such as this one. </rant> Sigh.

Moderna, I think, is the only company that gets a large chunk of its income from vaccines. Pfizer has far more lucrative drugs that provide most of their income: they've made tens of billions from Viagra alone.