This is such a weird take imo. There is no need to vaccine non-risk people afaik. I thought the whole deal with covid is how mild it is for the general population but deadly for a subset of it.
Covid has killed 42 people from age 5-14 in the US according to the CDC, for example. That alone is really not something we should be making huge policy decisions around. It's sad, of course, but it's extremely isolated. All it does is distract us from making good policy decisions.
If I was making policy decisions I'd order vaccine rollout as follows:
Essential workers => 80+ years old => 70+ => 60+ => etc. as we produce and distribute the vaccines.
At some point we might look at the data and say "that's good enough, we can resume normal activities while we work to vaccinate the rest of the population".
I'm not sure if this is a concession for argument's sake, but imo it does take away from it. Why do you think it doesn't?
There are plenty of valid arguments to vaccinate everyone we can.
EDIT: After re-reading I understood the sentence, my bad.
IIRC the IFR is ~0.2% for people in the 20-39 age bracket. I still find that risky (though I'm risk-averse), but the better argument is the lingering effects of moderate/severe cases, which I'm not sure is counted.
Also, I assume your policy decision would include younger people with risk factors like heart disease and diabetes, rather than going strictly by age. I'm chronically ill and I want my vaccine.
My main point is that there are sub-populations that have a small enough risk that we shouldn't stress over them too much. And talking about them is a distraction.
I was under the impression that vaccine + immunity will just lead to herd immunity and the disease to go away on its own.
Confirmed cases: 13.4 million people
Confirmed deaths: 267 thousand people
deaths / confirmed: ~2%
2% of the US dead (assumes homogeneous 2% death rate, which is incorrect but an upper bound): 6.6 million people
Distribution of deaths by age bracket, including population distribution: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
About half the population is over ~45 years old.
Anything we do now to reduce the R0 of this disease will disproportionally enable people to live long enough for herd immunity to be attained, courtesy of the exponential growth curve. The amount of people that has to get sick to overwhelm hospitals is smaller than you might think. When hospitals get overwhelmed people die of other preventable cases due to reduced resources, tired physicians, lack of time to see patients at all and people being scared of even going to the hospital in the first place. Old people are not "disposable" and for younger people that happen to have the genetic (or other) predisposition to bad or fatal cases it will be hard to tell them "sucks to be you" when the preventive steps are well understood by now: interact with people as little as possible and when you do, do so outside while wearing masks.
Also, the death rate among poorer people is a multiple of that of the general population, among other reasons because they are working essential jobs to not starve. Those of us that can isolate and don't are saying that these people's lives (essential workers, including health care workers) have no value, they are just meat for the meat grinder.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
I was referring to the proportion of population that was not at risk. That population has an insanely small chance of having long term side effects from data I've seen. Which was the reason I'm not sure why we would force them to get these vaccines.
EDIT: To be more precise; Of course we want a vaccine and vulnerable people to get it. You'd rather risk getting whatever potential side effects of that vaccine than get covid. I'm more torn about why healthy young people should get it.
So they don't infect and kill their older relatives.
But the proportion of people who are both at risk and can't get the vaccine (and alternatives) must be small (from intuitive maths, I actually haven't looked into this).
Why would this vaccine be mandatory while plenty of other aren't? E.g. I've never got flu-tested before a concert/the flu shot, even though it could pass to other people/kill people.
I'm wondering where's the line between freedom to one own's body and other people's well being. IMO it's not as clear-cut as people make it out to be.
2017-2018 Flu 2018-2019 Flu COVID-19 as of August 27, 2020
Cases 45 million 35 million 5 million
Deaths 61,000 34,157 180,000+
A TIA at 23 isn't a trivial thing. https://twitter.com/RileyBehrens/status/1333230792206553089?...
At the moment we think covid is at least ten times more lethal than flu. If you're comparing numbers of people killed you need to make sure you're counting death the same way, and most people aren't doing that.