Yes, but if enough people get the vaccine before getting COVID-19, then it's more likely that when they get the vaccine they'll have milder symptoms and so hospitals won't be overrun. Also, if viral load is decreased in the vaccinated, then there should be less chance for more mutations which may evade the vaccine and natural immunity.

So even with an expectation that everyone gets COVID-19 eventually, getting everyone to get the vaccine now still helps society.

It seems that it comes down to two different things that people have to think over. Firstly, is it a good idea to get the vaccine. Secondly, given that it is, should it be required in society.

The first thing comes down to where you are getting your information from, whether it is reliable, and then making a decision from there based on pros and cons. Regardless of moral/politcal leanings, truth is what matters. When things get political sometimes finding the truth can get a bit muddy especially if you are not good at recognizing disinformation/misinformation.

According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ there have been 45,135,620 total Covid cases in the US. According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/...vid-by-age-us/ 3,739 people have died in my age group. That means I have less than a 0.008% chance of death from Covid. Some mild cases may not have been counted and I'm skinny so the number is significantly less. The benefits of a vaccine from a purely selfish standpoint is very small. My odds of hospitalization are also very low.

For other people it is hard to measure. I suppose if I get vaccines every 6 months for the rest of my life I'll maybe save 4% of a person? I'm picking this number out of the air since I don't know how one would measure this?

The part that gets me to pause is if there is even a fraction of a percentage of a chance that my parents are right and that I'll die from the vaccine if I get it, makes me hesitant. They've shown me videos of people with messed up faces from the vaccine and other stuff and I think yeah, those are low probability side effects or maybe even fake. They've also said that if you get the vaccine and die within two weeks of getting the shot that it is counted as an unvaccinated death. Someone's dad in my parent's neighborhood died the day after he got the vaccine, but he was also old and may have been on his way out anyway. It still lingers in my mind though.

The second thing comes to cost over benefit. What is the death rate in an unvaccinated world vs. a vaccinated world. If it is an extreme number 99% more will die without the vax then vaccination makes sense. If a vaccinated world only saves one person then it doesn't. It is an arbitrary line to be drawn and I'm not so sure where the best spot to draw it, but where people think it should be drawn is going to differ from person to person based on their values. Getting the vaccine every 6 months for the rest of our lives is a small inconvenience, but it still is an inconvenience nonetheless.

I think the pants analogy kind of makes sense, but is a bit of a strawman because nobody is afraid of the pants killing you. A better analogy would be airbags in cars. Sometimes they actually kill you in rare accidents, but generally save your life so you want them in your car. However there is a campaign on telegram that says air bags have been faulty and randomly deploying in people's cars and killing them. You see through it and think "yeah okay, that's a load of bullshit", but then at the same time you're thinking "what if I'm wrong though and if there is a small chance that I am, I'm making a huge mistake". Maybe an even better analogy would be self driving cars in the future because that factors in the safety of other people as well. It also is something that less people understand the inner workings of.

I'm not anti-vax, but at the same time, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid to get it.

You can bring all the statistic you want but vaccine is less dangerous than the virus itself by a huge margin .

A lot of people don’t die because they are getting health cares in emergency room ….

No one gets vaccinated and lot of people dies because all the hospitals are already full , giving cares for those having covid and killing others that do not have covid (but something as serious) but still they die because a person unvaccinated took his place at the hospital to get health care instead of just getting the vaccine .

The funniest thing in all of this,
the majority of anti vaxxer are on the right politically , disregard free health care for everyone ( like any other develop country that respect itself already have) saying it would cost too much.
Yet they are happy to cost tremendous amount of money , for those unvaccinated people ending at the hospitals for weeks , instead of a simple cheap solution called vaccine …

But as usual , they are always for freedom and not wasting money as long as it fit their ideology and it benefit only them .
Like the debt ceiling , Trump made 4 trillions of debts pre covid and debt ceiling was not an issue by some miracle and oops , when a democrat president in power , now debts becomes a problem again …,
It is so disgusting , stupid and hypocritical.
You just can’t do nothing with those people .
The US are going down the drain on multiple fronts for a reason .


Ps: why take total cases of covid and divided with your age group ?
Shouldn’t you choose total cases of your age group to begin with?

I'm going to guess that this is a slightly skewed version of the truth. If you die from COVID-19 within 2 weeks of the vaccine, then you would count as unvaccinated as the vaccine hadn't had enough time to be active enough. If you die even a second after getting the vaccine, that will be reported and considered to be possibly death from the vaccine.

Yes, you are correct, that makes more sense. My age group is 16.4% of the population which makes it more like 0.05%ish. So roughly 1 in 2000 people my age are dying from this in the US. Worldometer lists the stat as 0.2% in my age group across the world which is 1 in 500. 1.6% in the USA for all age groups which is 1 in 62.5 people. Israel's death rate is 0.60% for all age groups. Stats are going to obviously be variable, but it gives a good ball park.

Since infection rates compound it makes a pretty big difference in the scheme of things when looking at it in a broad view.

Is herd immunity just a dream at this point and the thing to focus on is hospitals being overwhelmed? We've had the flu vaccine for years and people still get the flu. I've heard 90%+ of the population needs to get vaxxed in order to reach herd immunity which I don't think will ever happen unless it becomes mandatory or extremely inconvenient to not be.

I was also afraid of getting the vaccine before it rolled out.

I decided to wait and see the stats.

Almost nobody is dying from the vaccine itself. There are probably only hundreds of people who have died overall as a result of having to take the vaccine. So if over 3,000 people have died in the US in your age group from Covid then overwhelmingly fewer people have died as a result of having taken the vaccine.

But for younger people the key thing that nobody seems to be talking about is getting "Long Covid". This is affecting a substantial number of people of all ages. Long Covid is where one or more serious symptoms lasts over 6 months. It can be emotionally as well as physically crippling.

For me it was an easy decision. At 65 it could very well save my life. But if I were younger I would get vaccinated to help reduce the spread of Covid and potentially save lives. I made sure my 17 year old son was vaccinated as soon as he was eligible. And yes there were potential heart issues I didn't know about at the time for Pfizer. But it turned out the reason we didn't know about it was because it occurs so infrequently so in the studies of 40,000 people it wasn't likely to come up. If I had it to do over again I would still want my son to be vaccinated, the risks are that low and the benefits to him being able to fully participate in his life, and to society are that high.

Looking at how many lives you would save by taking the vaccine is interesting. But the way I look at it is how many lives could be saved in total? On average any one individual may not save a lot of lives. But the problem is that any one individual can infect hundreds of people given a superspreader event of the unvaccinated. I look at it like voting. Will my single vote ever make a difference in an election? Probably not. But if everybody like me votes then it would make a difference...

I personally mask up when indoors though not to protect myself. Just in case I have Covid and would possibly spread it to others, especially those unvaccinated. Not that I care about them any more than I care about smokers, who I don't know, putting their lives in danger. But the problem is that there are 9,000,000 Americans who can't effectively take the vaccine. So the unvaccinated who seemingly don't care about getting Covid could in turn infect one of those 9,000,000 who do care.

I loved your airbag analogy. I think that is right on point. The only difference really is that nobody consciously thinks about airbags when they get into a car. Whereas we all think about the vaccine as we make the appointment and as the needle approaches our arm. But, having it brought to my attention I will still get into cars because I know that the chances of an airbag killing me is extremely low. Kind of like getting struck by lightning. Which is also how I look at the Covid vaccine - almost no chance of killing me but a decent chance of saving my life if circumstances arise.

As for the benefit to society, as of now approximately 3% of those who are hospitalized and dying are fully vaccinated. Whereas about 90% are people who have not yet had any vaccine shots. The saddest is of course the ~7% who have started the vaccine process but were cut down before it could take full effect. So if we all took the vaccine it would greatly reduce the number of hospitalizations and deaths.

As we saw with covid , influenza is an incredibly high variance in mutation .
So with the flu shot , they have to target one variant virus in particular amongst many variants every year for a vaccine .
Sometimes they got it right , sometimes not .

Same with covid , the vaccine made last year is extremely efficient vs the first main variant of covid but lose lot of efficient for further variant , like the delta .

But the one thing with this vaccine , is still pretty good for preventing massive inflow into the emergency room from other variant of the Covid
(as more mutation occurs , less the vaccine will be efficient, obv that is why no vaccine for the flu as happen yet and may never happen , the variance in mutation exceed the number of atoms in the universe or close to that ….) .

Let’s not forget, one of the main concern of covid in 2020 , it was not the rate of death but the rates of hospitalisation that menace the health care system to break down .
Which is actually what’s happening in Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, where they had the most unvaccinated people ( they are the equivalent of the Republican in the states with the sane ideology ) .
And now they suffer from it with massive restriction now and a higher death rates they shouldn’t never had , with a massive cost in postponing thousand of surgery for later, some being urgent …..

You are correct that Alberta & Saskatchewan are the worst but comparing them to Republican states. Little over the top.
Alberta is at 64 % fully vaccinated and Sask at 63% . No provinces other than one have cracked 75 %

It looks like Alberta has more fully vaccinated folks than the best US State as well

I mean their ideology on a lot of issues are the same , was not talking about vaccination rates .

But they try to open way too early without any restriction and today they pay a big price for downgrading consequences of covid .

Watching your US news and are all these pilots and healthcare workers and first responders really going to sacrifice their jobs over the vaccines?

A small % will hurt

Not many, no, but I am happy to see the ones who do leave go.

How is it that this stuff is still debated? Look at the most vaccinated big countries (Spain, Chile, Portugal and Uruguay). Now look at their covid rates right now ...

There's your empirical test with almost one hundred million participants ...

There was a large study out of Harvard, published in the European Journal of Immunology, and posted on the NIH website that came out a few weeks ago.

In a country fighting so much about vaccine mandates, what does their below conclusion say for the efficacy of those mandates?
"In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. "

"The sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined, especially considering the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant and the likelihood of future variants. Other pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions may need to be put in place alongside increasing vaccination rates. Such course correction, especially with regards to the policy narrative, becomes paramount with emerging scientific evidence on real world effectiveness of the vaccines."


If the vaccines are useful in reducing risk of severe disease but not in significantly altering community spread, doesn't that render the primary argument for mandates moot? It's not a case for a large percentage of people to forgo vaccination, but it is a case against the notion that the unvaccinated are putting the vaccinated at risk. In no way does the study recommend against being vaccinated, but instead, that forcing those that don't want to causes a lot more harm than good. Especially in light of the fact that the virus spreads regardless of community vaccination rates.

Interested to hear thoughts on this. If you don't agree with the study, what do you take issue with?

I don't agree or disagree with their conclusions, but the "study" seems pretty useless on its own. It uses data over a 7 day period, and compares countries' case and vaccination numbers while taking no other measures into account other than vaccination rates - it's nothing more than an analysis of data. It provides a potentially interesting data point (or maybe a meaningless one), but that's about it.

For example, I'd be asking for each jurisdiction they're comparing:

What Covid measures have been taken in the past?
What Covid measures are being taken now?
How widespread is Covid there already?
What is the recent trajectory of cases?
What is the recent trajectory of vaccinations?
What is the population density?
What are the demographics?

That's just a few off the top of my head, in no particular order.

if you focus solely on covid guess you are right .
But people that die of cancer and other illness, needing beds and doctor not being occupied to heal people that did not take the vaccine is important as well....

because vaccine help a lot to not glut the emergency room for a illness that could be control easily with a vaccine.

you look in canada where vaccine was frowned upon in certain provinces like saskatchewan and alberta and they had ( and still do) massive problems with their health care system, even asking other provinces for nurse and other health workers to help them, problem is, other provinces too are in need of those workers.

And at the end of the day, all those surgeries that are needed to be done but cant be done will be postpone and costing hundreds of millions because cares have been given for irresponsible people.

So it endanger the health of the weakest and the economy by adding debts that would be not necessary by taking a simple vaccine.

Only if you believe that "vaccines are useful in reducing risk of severe disease but not in significantly altering community spread". I think the "study" is a long way from proving that.

I think you have just bought into the right wing propaganda machine. Thing is, the people pushing this from the top like Tucker are onv vaccinated.

Bruh that's already happened.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here...it's happening and it's ok because the right is opposed to it, or it's happening but it doesn't have to do with covid?

Your posting history belies this as the true start date. However I must admit, this is one of the most honest things you have written. The bar is low.

Some people say that anti-vaxxers like Luckbox are selfish. But of course, that’s not correct either, because “selfish” means that they are putting their own interests ahead of others. In the case of anti-vaxxer, their own interests would obviously also be served by getting vaccinated. Therefore they are not selfish. They are merely incredibly stupid.

I enjoy reading LB's posts. But then again, my enjoyment meter swings based on the entertainment gained from what I read - not a knock to LB, his posts are entertaining to read. I don't really dislike anyone, except for one who tried to get out of a bet that he lost. And Rococco

What are some of the more dishonest things I've written? Since you know my posting history so well I'm sure you have some examples handy.

You weren’t terribly honest abou my your reasons for not getting the vaccine.

In ny , they’re about to enforce the mandate on the police , emts, sanitation workers , fdny

All these guys are part of a union that’s willing to fight . What can the government do if they all decided to strike? I feel like there’s more of a brotherhood loyalty amongst those professions . Very curious to see how these things shake out