We’ve got billions of people who need to feel sufficient confidence in the media and authorities to take vaccines nobody has used before at a time when every media outlet has some agenda to monkey around with what we know to be true. Not cool.
The media plays a critical role in encouraging people to get a vaccine.
I say this while wearing masks in public religiously, having already received the second dose of Pfizer. Covid really is killing people, and will continue to kill more and more as time goes on. We won't see "herd immunity" for years if ever.
It’s a thought experiment; not an implication.
Second, you don't have to read the news to know that people are dying. In vulnerable populations, the increase is impossible to hide, especially since no one has gotten the flu this year. Old physicians and researchers who aren't trying to build their personal brands all agree (and have agreed since February last year) that masks and isolation are the ways to cope with respiratory pandemics. I'm hopeful for the vaccines, but I fear they won't deal well with the mutations that have never been conclusively ruled out. At the very least, vaccines are unlikely to harm people who don't have some sort of weird precondition. Besides which, unlike 99% of USA healthcare, they're free.