Only if the mechanism of its action contributes to herd immunity. If it provides symptom abatement without lowering infection and transmission, then vaccination of those not at risk can prove counterproductive due to asymptomatic spread.
Source?
I've seen it reported that this may actually be dubious. [1]
It's really hard to draw meaningful conclusions when COVID has completely changed all kinds of factors in healthcare ranging from people being stuck at home and eating poorly to opting not to visit the doctor because of overburdened hospitals and fear of infection. I'd like to see some studies a year from now before forming a strong opinion.
We do not know. Since we do not know, we need to play it safe. If we are wrong, nothing will happen. If we are right, we have avoided long term damage.
> Comparison groups are also important to understand the scale of a problem. To put it bluntly: it’s not very informative to describe people as COVID “long-haulers” if, sixty days after being diagnosed with an illness that is sweeping the world in a devastating pandemic, they report anxiety, fatigue, insomnia, headache etc., without a comparison group!
The effects of the virus at play are irrelevant... long term, short term, sniffles, death. None of that matters to the topic of moral obligation. Only contagion matters, so let's take two opposing mechanistic scenarios:
1 - Reduced infectiousness (what we expect)
Person A getting the vaccine reduces the chance they will spread it to Person B if exposed and/or infected.
2 - Reduced symptoms (counterintuitive)
Person A getting the vaccine still gets infected and can infect Person B, but no longer has symptoms such as fever. In this situation, Person A actually becomes problematic to the un-vaccinated Person B, since it's not obvious to either individual that Person A is infectious.
In the first scenario, your vaccination potentially helps others. In the second, your vaccination potentially hurts others. The mechanism of action can change altruism into unintended harm. This is why the mechanism of vaccination is so important from social perspective.
No, I'm sorry, but hospital ICUs near me are 90+% full again and we're returning to a strict lockdown. Given a hypothetical vaccine which reduces symptoms but transmission, the vaccine still reduces the hospitalization rate, so your un-vaccinated person B will have a better chance at treatment. Your situation #2 presumes that people with mild symptoms will be inclined to stay home -- in my experience, this is not the case.
It may be that the vaccines will be incapable of giving us herd immunity, but they may allow us to keep the R number below 1 with much less extreme social distancing and lockdown procedures.
Without the vaccines, the only way to get rid of this pandemic is through severe economy-damaging lockdowns and liberty-encroaching contact tracing and quarantining. If we can achieve the same thing with vaccines plus just having to wear a mask when near other people, then I would say that vaccination would still be a moral obligation, even though we haven't achieved herd immunity.
We KNOW containment measures work (Ebola, SARS).
If you expose more people to a virus, you risk making the pandemic much worse. Or deadly. Viruses mutate. Every new person exposed is a potential laboratory.
Of course containment measures work -- for keeping 80 year olds (and few other people) alive for a little bit longer at the expense of everyone else.