Other good reasons aside, I care because it can also affect how my work and risks become altered. I have friends in healthcare who live in divided teams - ones vaxxed and others not. The ones who are not - openly avoid and channel all Covid positive patients to the ones who are - under the pretense that they have better protection. That's unfair. Those who chose to vaxx didn't also sign up to carry increased exposure frequency and risk as a side-effect. This ominous behavior easily translates to other scenarios outside of healthcare. Retail workers who are vaxxed are steered exclusively to people facing roles because those are riskier. Travel necessary, let those who got vaxxed take those trips. Whether we like it or not, individual vaxx status affects us all since it influences behavior and decisions because of its effect on risk determination at the individual and collective level.
Why? Aren’t you worried that a patchily vaccinated population still provides a good (possibly even better) breeding ground for new variants?
I care because despite being vaccinated and having had restrictions lifted, I am once again affected by them because of people that refuse to get vaccinated. If the consequences were siloed to unvaccinated people, I wouldn't care as that's their choice.
Those who chose not to get vaccinated are doing nothing to you.
They are if you consider second order effects.
This is the kind of thinking that resulted in measles starting to have outbreaks again.
You know vaccinated people still transmit right?
I do, because I'm not the only person I care about.
That's nice. I have a baby. I don't want to be exposed to unvaxxed people at the office and risk bringing that home to my baby.
You know the vaccine doesn't do anything to stop transmission right? So you can be in a room full of vaccinated people and still be just as likely to get it...
I do care because if enough people refuse to vaccinate we won't get rid of this pandemic, with all it consequences, and we make it easier for variants to develop, which could be even resistant to vaccines.
So you don't care about the immunocompromised people who might get sick or die? Or the subpopulation of vaccinated people for whom the vaccine just didn't take well?
We're about to go through another spike in cases in the US because of the Delta variant spreading through the unvaxed population. This has implications for vaccinated people.
We may need to reintroduce some lockdown rules and the Delta variant is still going to kill some vaccinated people (in much lower numbers, but unnecessary).