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@kino I am neither anti-vaxer nor pro-vaxer when it comes to covid. Being new technology I feel its reasonable for people to be cautious, but at the same time there are no significant risks that have popped up.
That said I think the general issue with it is quite clear. If you are the only one vaccinated out of a crowd you are safer than if you werent vaccinated at all, but you are at higher risk than if the entire crowd is vaccinated. So the issue in their minds, and a valid one, is that your choice is increasing their risk.
@kino Vaccines increase protection, but they dont make you immune. Others who arent vaccinated have significantly high viral loads and thus are more capable of spreading the disease. So by others not being vaccinated it increases the risk of everyone, including those vaccinated.
at this point, the only real remaining argument for vaccination (within the context of COVID) is that vaccinated individuals may exhibit lesser symptoms if infected, ergo having a greater chance of recovery, and furthermore reducing hospitalization rates.
so, contemporaneously, it really just seems like vaccines are only for the benefit of the vaccinated and don't really do anything insofar as stopping spread. if you're vaccinated then you're better off, but if someone chooses to refuse vaccination they are only detrimenting themselves and not risking the safety of others. at most one could argue they are being irresponsible since their infections will be more severe and may require greater attention and hospitalization.
@kino Looking at just Delta varient is what we would call cherry picking the data. Putting aside if the viral load is the same on delta itself, which is debatable, the fact remains that on the original virus there is no debate that it significantly lowers viral load and therefore having the crowd vaccinated does, in fact, provide greater protection.
that's like defending the functionality of a program because "it worked great on windows 95. if you're going to focus on later operating systems then you're cherry-picking the data!"
@kino Who said anything about ignoring delta varient... vaccination of a crowd protects everyone even if it only protects partially, its still protection, full stop.
That said it is true it isnt as effective agaisnt variants as we hoped, we didnt have these variants when the vaccine was created. As a result we will have to create vaccines for the variants. But if antivaxers arent playing along then we cant expect that to work either.
As for your analogy, its more like saying "Someone got a virus once even though they were using a virus scanner, therefore no one should use virus scanners"
in either case, playing along or otherwise, the result is just going to be a variant vaccine treadmill which is always behind
@kino Not necessarily. That depends. The vaccine treadmill only occurs when you cant read herd immunity quickly enough. Variants arise most strongly when you have high vaccination rates that are short of herd immunity enough that R0 is still high.
So anti-vaxxers not playing along, if they are a significant portion of the population (and they are) will absolutely create that treadmill. We can only see success if people get on board, and they arent/wont.
variants arise most strongly when you have high vaccination rates of drugs that don't actually do what traditional vaccines do and instead render an entire population as a giant petri dish
in many respects the countries that did nothing are better off than the countries which are still going through draconian measures to try and fix things
@kino No it never meant that, though natural infection can contribute to herd immunity in some special cases, generally it is not a major driving factor.
A simple counter example is smallpox. It was around for thousands of years and natural immunity never got us even close to herd immunity. Then vaccines came around and we eliminated it.
General natural immunity wont get you herd immunity for many reasons and the reasons can differ from disease to disease, but a disease will usually evolve in a way that its natural cycle will make sure herd immunity cant occur (or else it never would have evolved int he first place).
The reason herd immunity cant occur naturally with covid, for example, is because your immune response is perportional to the severity of the infection and can fade with time. So natural infections usually wont protect you unless its so severe as to wind you in the hospital, in which case it likely will. So most people wont have enough of a immune response to create a herd immunity naturally.
