> For my age/health group, I view this risk of Covid to be less than the risk of the known issues with the vaccines

1. If you extrapolate that out to everyone doing it, we have a ton more people die, many from things unrelated to Covid because hospitals don't have the capacity. That hasn't been factored into your risk assessment;

2. Even with highly-effective vaccines, the death count in the US is at least 700,000. That's likely underreported by a large amount. The absolute worst case for risks of getting the vaccine are orders of magnitude less than that; and

3. Your choices don't affect just you.

(3) is the big one for me. If the net effect of not taking a vaccine was that that person would simply be more likely to die with no consequences to anyone else, I'd just call that evolution in action and move on.

But that's not the case. And the impact on other people is seemingly given absolutely no weight into these anti-vaxx decisions, which is the selfish aspect I was referring to.

Further to that, we get this under control and the vaccinated and unvaccinated both get to share in the benefits of that so it's doubly selfish.

The worst part is this level of selfishness is dressed up as some kind of virtue.

> unknown long term risk factors that aren’t yet fully known

That's just the fudge factor of confirmation bias rearing its ugly head.

100% agree on #3, and also find it odd that it’s frequently missing from the discussion. People complain about how being allowed to do something (or not) impacts themselves, or that another person can or can’t do something impacts that other person. There is less thought spent on how one person’s decisions impact everybody is law though.

How far down the rabbit hole of banning everything because it pisses someone else off do you want to go down?

Do we live in a society where we use authority to enforce the “right choice “ or do we make information and education available for people to decide for themselves how they want to live?

I rather live free, even if some people make bad choices. The risk of central authority eventually turning evil is too high.

It’s a fair question and I think the response is it scales with your proximity to other people. If you live out in the country and your nearest neighbor is a mile away then by all means do whatever you want as most of your choices will not impact others. If you’re living in a dense metropolis in a 500 unit complex then the equation is different as your choices impact more people quicker.

Everyone driving a car puts a health risk on the people walk or biking in the city.

As a cyclist, I demand all ICE cease operations that are killing people and the planet by burning fossil fuels.

Because it’s ok to force people to do things because their actions have external risks on other people.

You ban all ICE cars and I’ll consider vaccinating myself.

Because old people in their SUVs are slowly killing me when I breathe the fumes.