If you're at high risk, you should definitely still get vaccinated. Maybe just stop telling twenty-somethings they should get vaccinated too.
If you're at high risk, you should definitely still get vaccinated. Maybe just stop telling twenty-somethings they should get vaccinated too.
Age is a very important factor; high risk is heavily weighted towards the elderly for infection, and so far side-effects seem to hit all age groups for vaccination, possibly even weighted slightly towards the young due to an overreaction from a stronger immune system.
As probability of catching covid-19 decreases, it makes less sense to vaccinate, and if the probability of catching covid-19 is 1%, the vaccine death rate needs to be 100 times smaller than the reduced covid-19 death rate. For young people I think the numbers are against the vaccine.
If it significantly stopped spread that would be different - but the new variants statistics make it pointless at 39% only efficacy.
At this point the numbers are just sadly against vaccines. I'm saying this as a disappointed vaccinated young person. I wouldn't have taken it with the currently known numbers.
The more important point is just that viral fatigue and respiratory complications are not new things. They are present for a range of viruses. The mere existence of these factors is not pertinent to the "public good" point that the original comment centered on.
The decision rule, however, is never the existence of a non-zero number. It is always a question of magnitude and whether that magnitude has meaningful impact.
Just to clarify this point: if you experiment with some simple SIR or SIRS models (which are not useful in modern epidemiology, but I digress) you will observe threshold phenomenon. This means that there will be broad ranges where perturbations of parameters (for instance, R0) have little meaningful effect on the progression of the outputs (for instance, the number of infected). Then there will be very small intervals where slight perturbations of parameters have a very meaningful effect on the outputs. For instance, there's not that much difference between R0=5 and R0=6, but there's quite a lot of difference between R0=0.999 and R0=1.001.
This is just to say that: it's plausible that vaccination has little to no impact on actual spread of Covid variants in the global population. I'm not saying this statement is true, I'm just saying that this statement is far from being disproven. There's just not enough evidence to call covid vaccination a "public good" and care about whether the low-risk get it.