Well said. And at this point we should pray this doesn't turn into a Marek's disease replica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention
I'm not going to ban you right now, because I did notice a few previous comments that weren't doing this—though I had to look pretty hard for them. If you keep this up, though, we're going to have to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I do agree that more dissent and conflicting expert opinions were needed in this crisis. Especially dangerous is the idea that "if only everyone did X", then all will be well. This is rarely true.
I think the government's role should be to transmit the best possible information available at the moment, give some strong recommendations and incentives (and change them when new information comes to light), but never use force and coercion. It simply doesn't work in the long run.
Especially true since the virus lives in animals, so it will never be eradicated.
We could vaccinate all of those. If we needed to do the last 4% of wild animals, I'm betting we could vaccinate more than half of those too.
There are remarkably few mamallian species with > 1m population. Virtually all are grazing animals, sea mammals, or rodents.
I'm not sure what species SARS-COV-2 is compatible with, though I've mostly heard of animals > 5kg mass (e.g., domesticated cats, dogs, deer, wildcats), with the very notable exception of bats.
The virus has been detected in 20--40% of sampled deer in the US in multiple states, which is a particularly bad sign.
If it's gained foothold in rodent populations ... well, it could be around for a while.
From April of 2021:
Results obtained from experimental studies indicate that animal species such as cats, ferrets, raccoon dogs, cynomolgus macaques, rhesus macaques, white-tailed deer, rabbits, Egyptian fruit bats, and Syrian hamsters are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, and that cat-to-cat and ferret-to-ferret transmission can take place via contact and air. However, natural infections of SARS-CoV-2 have been reported only in pet dogs and cats, tigers, lions, snow leopards, pumas, and gorillas at zoos, and farmed mink and ferrets. Even though human-to-animal spillover has been reported at several instances, SARS-CoV-2 transmission from animals-to-humans has only been reported from mink-to-humans in mink farms.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8128218/?report...
That's not to say that broader transmission isn't possible (the abstract doesn't mention deer, and I'm aware they're found to be infected). The science is still being established.
Careful here. There is no guarantee that once 95% of the world is vaccinated that this will be solved. Respiratory viral infections are notorious for mutating and spreading regardless of vaccines or treatment.
IMO its important not to simplify the situation and say if group A just did this than everything would be okay. Its quite possible this virus is simply here to stay and a multi array of treatments will hopefully continue to improve outcomes.