This is a crazy level of absolutism that seems only to exist to force a "with us or against us" reaction.

I think everyone where I live should probably be supplementing vitamin D in the winter months because it is damn near impossible for even people working outdoors all day to get enough vitamin D through natural sunlight at this parallel. Never would I dream of mandating a vitamin D regimen to people. My lack of wanting a vitamin D mandate, by your very argument, would make me anti vitamin D.

I take vitamin D daily, and have convinced others they probably should too, which I think makes me an advocate on some level. If even your top percentile advocates are "anti" from your operating definition, because they don't go far enough, you may be an extremist.

This argument is useless in the face of the COVID shots because they do not prevent transmission, an important factor in herd immunity being effective.

Being anti-vax-mandate for an ineffective vaccine is not anti-vax in any way.

Ok I have more vaccines then the law requires because I went places where it made sense to get more shots for more disease.

I have not touched the COVID shot because I did not trust it for these reasons:

- vaccines take years to test not months - there were new untested biotech involved - in short order I was being told that it does not work for this flavor of COVID.

And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.

How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.

The etymology of vaccine comes from vacca, which is Latin for cow. Vaccines were originally discovered after finding that milkmaids seemed somehow immune to smallpox, which otherwise not only made people gravely ill but had a mortality rate upwards of 30%. The reason, it was discovered, is that they were regularly exposed to cowpox which sufficiently strengthened their immune systems to provide effective immunity to smallpox. And thus the field was born.

Herd immunity does not make vaccines work better, but is a tertiary effect whereby unvaccinated individuals can receive effective protection simply by living in an area with a high vaccination rate. In extreme cases (such as with smallpox) diseases can even be completely eliminated, but this requires extremely effective vaccines that prevent infection and spread, vaccines that are robust against mutations, and diseases that are unlikely to be able to exist without humans. None of these factors apply to COVID or the vaccines developed for it.

The problem is that this is a very first mandate for vaccination we ever imposed on ordinary people.

The US has very complex society and diverse population, so mandates do not work and might create backclash.

I think mass vaccination can be easily achieved by mass marketing. Mandates just made this way too political: and as we can see did not achieve a thing.

Funny how millions of people who had all the common vaccines except the covid "vaccine" suddenly became anti-vaxer. That like saying someone who smokes cigarettes, pipes and shisha but not cigars must be anti-smoking.

The common western covid "vaccines" do not have the properties of other common vaccines. They are at best comparable to flu shots which I know no one under the age of 50 who has ever took them. Are these all anti-vaxers now too? Have you ever head anyone talk about herd immunity related to flu shots pre-covid? Almost everyone alive today apparently prevented herd immunity for flu most of his life by not taking the flu shot. So we're all anit-vaxers.

>I thought about this for several moments, and I disagree.

You need some more moments I guess, you clearly didn't think this trough.

One can be absolutely pro-vaccine, want to drive down vaccine hesitancy rates and still think that mandating vaccinations is not the way to go.

For example they could argue that people will rebel against "you must do X" reflectively, but a well designed and sensitive information campaign might win them over.

We knew the odds the Covid vaccine would substantially reduce transmission were very low. Covid first impacts your mucosal immune compartment, which means an infection first gives you all the symptoms exhibited by a mild case of Covid. It also mostly spreads from there as you exhale.

The vaccine does not target your mucosal immune system. It's injected. Thus, the vaccine will help you if you develop a severe case of Covid that spreads beyond your throat/sinuses/lungs. Immune system compartments work largely independently. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27169/

> The first is that immune responses induced within one compartment are largely confined in expression to that particular compartment. The second is that lymphocytes are restricted to particular compartments by expression of homing receptors that are bound by ligands, known as addressins, that are specifically expressed within the tissues of the compartment. (Immunobiology: The Immune System in Health and Disease. 5th edition.)

This definition of "anti-vax" is broad enough to include those who happily received the vaccine, but oppose mandates.

That really isn't what normal people infer from the term.

Protection was falling steadily at the time delta disappeared completely, and continued falling on the same trend far below zero.

Your description of the trials is perfectly inverted! I wonder how that happens. The trials weren't designed to detect anything except reduced PCR test positivity i.e. infections. They didn't attempt to determine what a "severe case" was because that distinction was invented only after the falling effectiveness made it necessary to do so, and as for death, more people died in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm! They definitely didn't make claims about reducing the death rate because it was so tiny to begin with that they couldn't get a big enough sample of COVID deaths to make any conclusions, not even with 64,000 odd people.