First, getting vaccinated is indeed not just about your own protection but also about empathy.
Second, actual empathetic people don’t suddenly lose all their empathy and go into “got mine fuck you” mode the moment something doesn’t go their way.
First, there's history.
Second, the POTUS himself - self proclaimed enemy of divisiveness - yapped "pandemic of the unvaccinated." Which was a lie. A lie for which he has yet to acknowledge, let alone apologize for.
The point is, people with an appreciation for history, and a willingness to exert their God given rights were being manipulated and maligned. That's not cool. That's not unifying.
To see it as trivial and harmless says more about you buying into the ruse than anything else.
History is clear my friend...be careful what you wish for, especially when your government is making big promises that hinge on your convenience and someone else's loss of liberty.
For example, NY state requires that children attending daycare or school be vaccinated against a range of pathogens.
I don't know what you're envisioning happening with mandatory SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, or why you consider it a "ruse." A "ruse" for what, exactly?
I don't think mandatory vaccination equals anyone's "loss of liberty." I don't think there's a right to not be vaccinated. It's a critical public health measure that brings huge benefits to society, and which imposes virtually no burden on the individual.
Rewind and remember all that was promised with the vaccinations. The effectiveness. The long term safety (without *any* such testing). Remember the comparisons to other historic vaccinations by professionals well aware the mRNA technology was new and relatively untested. The Covid jab !== The Polio jab. Not even close.
Remember how masks were required. Then remember the news that most masks are ineffective because the virus is smaller that what the masks can stop? How did we not know that? Why do some continue to push masks, even the ones that are effectively useless?
Remember the guy (i.e., Biden) who talked down the divisiveness of others then shamelessly said, "It's a pandemic of the unvaccinated" forcing an unnecessary wedge between the citizens. For what? To get a jab that does perform as promised? To wear "government sanctioned" masks that don't do anything?
For the record, being someone's guinea pig is not liberty. Being someone's political chew toy is not liberty. You can think what you want about public health and the mRNA jabs but don't confuse your confidence with liberty.
The fact that many reasonable and intelligent people such as yourself have forgotten so many important details can only be explained by...a ruse. But that ok, just be sure to carry your Covid papers / Covid passport and you'll be safe.
> The effectiveness.
The vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe disease and death, which was always their primary goal. If you go back and read the vaccine trial procedures on clinicaltrials.gov, you'll see that their "primary endpoint" was prevention of serious disease, and that preventing infection was viewed as the cherry on top - it wasn't the primary endpoint, and the trials weren't designed to test for infection. The fact that the mRNA vaccines protected so well against infection with the original strain was just an added bonus.
> The long term safety (without any such testing).
There was extremely rigorous safety testing. They followed tens of thousands of people for months. The "long term" aspect you're bringing up is unscientific. Based on the modern scientific understanding of the immune system, the types of long-term side-effects that anti-vaxxers posit are not possible, and there is no known example of such a side effect ever occurring with any vaccine. Vaccine side-effects always show up within a few months at most, and there was extensive testing to look for such side-effects.
> The Covid jab !== The Polio jab. Not even close.
You're right, but not in Ruhe way you think. The mRNA CoVID vaccines are far safer than the widely used oral polio vaccine.
> don't confuse your confidence with liberty
I don't agree with you on the definition of "liberty." I view the "liberty" to not get vaccinated as similar to the "liberty" to not wear a seatbelt or to buy a car without airbags.
> But that ok, just be sure to carry your Covid papers / Covid passport and you'll be safe.
If you travel around the world, you'll find that much more than just CoVID vaccination is required.
And your lack of understanding this is a lack of empathy BTW. You don't care what reason somebody has to deny the vaccine. You are (for whatever reason) convinced that it is the right thing to do and want to force it on all others (mandate).
At the start of the pandemic we are told it's no big deal. Then a few weeks later it's a massive deal. At first masks don't work so don't rush out and buy them. Then masks are mandatory in all public places. We then put society on hold for about a year. Finally we have an experimental drug that helps you be protected from the virus. YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! Don't want it? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You already had COVID and recovered? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You had a legitimate medical reaction to a previous vaccine? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG!
That process broke the trust of a significant amount of people. Why trust the establishment when they change their minds all the time and demand demand demand? If they do all these things in the name of empathy, empathy shouldn't be the base principle.
The actual reasons are self preservation and slowing down a pandemic. And when people don’t care about the latter, that is an easy tell that yeah they have zero empathy.
Especially since your actions do absolutely nothing to advance that goal you likely just made up now. If the governments have learned anything, it's that mandates need to be quicker and stronger, with much more stringent penalties for the dodgers.
So yeah... thanks for nothing.
There’s people who were forced to sell their homes, lost their jobs, and can’t move back to the place they grew up right here on American soil - in layman’s terms, I’m out of f’s to give.
I understand that some people have an irrational fear of the vaccine, and I can even try to empathize with them to that extent. However, it still is very difficult to understand the level of opposition to something which is so simple (just two painless injections, each taking seconds to administer) and so overwhelmingly positive (a 90+% reduction in the chance of serious disease, in exchange for a vanishingly small risk).
Public health messaging in the US was terrible, but US public health agencies were extremely cautious with the vaccines. If they hadn't cared about testing the vaccines, the vaccines could have been rolled out by mid-2020. After all, the vaccines were formulated all the way back in January 2020, pretty much as soon as the viral RNA sequence was published. I think it's sad that people have the impression that the vaccines were not thoroughly tested, because they were actually subjected to an extremely high level of scrutiny. They weren't approved until full-scale phase-3 trials with tens of thousands of participants had shown that the risk of severe side-effects was minuscule (i.e., as low as in other approved, safe vaccines).
The vaccine saved on the order of a million lives in the US. It's one of the most unambiguously positive things developed by humankind. That's why the strident opposition is so difficult to understand - it points to something very wrong in society.