serious question for anyone pro-vaccines: what’s your problem with people choosing to not get vaccinated?

@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.

@freemo wdym by "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.

@freemo yet recent studies after the failure of vaccines to contain delta variants found vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals have similar viral loads in communities with a high prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2; this was even conceded by the CDC in their own study from the massachusetts outbreak (where 74% of infected were fully vaccinated) which found that fully vaccinated people who get infected carry as much of the virus in their nose as unvaccinated people and could spread it to other individuals just as easily.

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.

@freemo i would say ignoring delta variant is being unrealistic. the virus is going to continue mutating. more and more variants are going to arise. vaccination, if we're meant to only focus on the single variant of the virus it's meant to work against, seems like a losing battle.

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"

@freemo >But if antivaxers arent playing along then we cant expect that to work either

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.

@freemo herd immunity (prior to everyone changing their definitions of words) meant we all get sick, we all get over it, tada we've reached group immunity

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 @freemo The 1918 flu, while deadly, also never developed any variants and it died off.
You can imagine the horrid conditions of hygiene and food supply at the time and that's exactly why it never mutated to be more infectious.

@Dice

Thats unlikely to be why. Eating rotted food and other things that might invoke your immune system wont carry over to viruses.

The horrid conditions at the time and its effect on the immune system is why you dont have autoimmune diseases, but wont effect your response to a virus all that much.

@kino