But diseases don’t work like this. If you get sick, you will get others sick. If you get very sick, you will occupy a hospitable bed. Given current hospital utilization rates, this could well end in a sick person being turned away.
Given the societal costs, it seems fair to me to ask for a stronger justification than “I don’t think the virus will hurt me”
In fact, everything you do outisde of your workhours is your personal risk, so it needs to be banned I guess.
Sounds fine to me. I am blind and can not do most of the fancy recreational activities you sighted people are so fond of. So why should I care. In fact, I should immediately start a petition that makes your lifes more dull and miserable. But guess what, no. Thats not my thing. I am not an asshole.
We do outlaw almost every sort of behavior that risks OTHERS safety.
>Almost every sport except chess bears a risk comparable to what you say above.
I'm not aware of any sport which is mandatory, as far as I know everyone participating is doing so willingly.
>And most recreational activities also bear a risk that you might have an accident, which could put some stress on the people working at the hospital.
Again, I'm not aware of any recreational activity that is a required activity. I'm also not aware of any that are participated in by so many people that is simultaneously so risky that we have an issue with ICU beds. Can you name one? We have mountains of data showing that covid outbreaks stress hospital systems and are in fact doing that right now. I'm not aware of any evidence that sports or recreational activities do the same, but I'm open to learning.
>Heck, the helicopter pilot could crash while they bring you to safety, so you implicitly killed them.
The helicopter pilot voluntarily signed up to be a helicopter pilot, nobody forced him to do so.
>Sounds fine to me. I am blind and can not do most of the fancy recreational activities you sighted people are so fond of. So why should I care. In fact, I should immediately start a petition that makes your lifes more dull and miserable. But guess what, no. Thats not my thing. I am not an asshole.
Well, you're comparing recreational activities that carry low risk and have 0 history of causing an issue with ICU beds, to a disease which has an extremely high transmission rate, and is provably causing issues with ICU beds. So it makes your arguments seem rather silly.
Do you claim you receive substantial benefits from not getting a shot? Because I claim society gets substantial benefits from you getting vaccinated.
You’re trying to make this a binary thing, but we live in a society where collectively we try to make small trades in liberty for collective benefit.
I do expect you not to drive 60MPH in front of my house where my children play. I do not expect you to give up tennis.
And yes, of course, with a different situation, my decision might be different. If covid were as harsh as our media and government claimed at the beginning of the first lockdown, I would certainly get a shot. However, it turned out the media and government have overstated the danger, apparently to achieve compliance. This sort of lie (we were told "everyone will know someone who died") was my wakeup call. I was originally mislead and expected a deathrate of 1%. As it turns out, almost only the elderly die, and the deathrate (including the elderly) is around 0.1%. Wrong order of magnitude for real panic on my side.
Regarding side-effect-free - not sure anyone ever claimed that? I understand that the relative risk is very low when compared to the risks associated with the disease itself - even for those that might expect milder symptoms from covid. I think people (myself included) are just really really bad at assessing these kind of risk/reward equations - I don't think we have the right tools for it, and our assessments are polluted by our personal history/culture/biases (in every direction).
I can't agree with your assessment of overstating the danger - the full hospital wards and large death numbers at the height of the pandemic before vaccines are enough reasons for me to accept that the costs are high enough for the small risk/inconvenience I'd pay personally.
I also know personally people in public health and can vouch for the sincerity of their (very) educated advice. If anything they have been consistently critical of governments being too slow to accept their recommendations (due to political pressures). I'd feel foolish for thinking I would know better than they who have spent their entire career in this area. I know that's an appeal to authority which isn't always warranted - but I'm comfortable with landing on that side of the fence.
To be fair, this is what the vaccines do.
Well the main feature of the vaccine over the actual virus is that the vaccine doesn't give you covid. The vaccine doesn't cover all of the multitude of compounds your body might recognize on the virus, but it covers enough for most people to build a better immune response to the actual virus than nothing. There is the issue that the viral strains are mutating and so over time so that a recently-vaccinated person today will probably do worse than a recently-vaccinated person 6 months ago, but there's not really much you can do about that.
I never said that humanity couldn't survive without a vaccine. Clearly we can. We also can survive with rotten meat and with poor shelter and with rampant war and famine. Sure a larger portion of us would die, but humanity would certainly survive.
Anyway my point was that when you're infected with a virus, your body basically builds up the ability to recognize certain proteins that the virus expresses and uses that to fight it off. It takes time to build up the ability to fight it off. The vaccine exposes you to basically the same proteins so that your body is able to identify and fight off the virus more quickly after infection. So really the vaccines are just priming your immune system so that it can better do its job.
