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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Folks - if someone you know is not vaccinated at this point in time (in the US) - it's entirely on them if they get sick. And guess what - they already know this, made that decision, and nothing you rant and rave about is going to change it.

Quit trying to drum up some mandatory vaccine rhetoric - or villianize these people. Just leave them alone and go about your life in whatever way you think is appropriate for your own wellbeing.

Vaccinated people do not need to wear masks to protect unvaccinated people at this point in time.

It's time to stop catering policy towards a small percentage of the population that has decided for whatever reason to not get vaccinated. These people largely understand what they are doing - leave them alone and get on with life!

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A couple of thoughts here. (1) There are a significant number of people relying on us reaching herd immunity because they either can't get the vaccine, or if they can get it they might not be fully protected by it. For that population, getting everyone vaccinated IS important and worth attempting. (2) More importantly, a spike in hospitalizations could threaten the healthcare system as a whole if we run out of ICU beds, exhaust doctors, expend billions in care, etc. The cost of the unvaccinated isn't borne just by them - its paid by all of us when they show up in the hospital needing expensive care, and/or we are forced to shutdown our economy out of concern over overfilled ICUs. That makes a discussion of mandatory vaccination completely reasonable, and not simply rhetorical.

We should have tied CARES Act payments to vaccination... I'm guessing a $500 check would have persuaded almost everybody to get the shot. In the end the ROI of herd immunity might have been worth it?

We're spent trillions already, and seem to be on course for a few more. At some point, the cost and devastation to the economy outweighs the costs of the pandemic. It's dark and brutal - but that's how high level policy has to be formed, ie. it's an unreasonable goal to prevent 100% of illnesses and death.

> (1) There are a significant number of people relying on us reaching herd immunity

Herd Immunity can be reached either by vaccinations, previous infections, or both. We're well on track to reach the "both" mark, or possibly are already past it.

Good point on herd immunity. Also good point on the devastation to the economy and costs of pandemic. It's that "dark and brutal" logic that leads me to argue mandatory vaccination should be on the table as an option to bring down human and economic costs.

A gentle reminder that no children under 12 have been vaccinated yet, and so the behavior of unvaccinated adults affects more people than you're talking about here.

Statistics seem to imply children under 12 are nearly 100% safe (so far). This is a major reason the vaccine hasn't been prioritized for children.

If children were at serious risk here, a children vaccine would have been prioritized long ago - well before we prioritized getting vaccines to the 75 and older age group.

The entire duration of the pandemic has seen such a miniscule amount of infected children - and even fewer with serious symptoms or death - that it's absurd to base policy on this. It's statistically far more likely children will die on their way to school than become ill and experience serious complications.

We should stop basing policy off likelihoods which are prefixed by multiple zeros.

Children can still be infected and transmit the disease, no?

Vaccination does not prevent transmission, but it does reduce it.

It would seem it's exceptionally rare, and even more rare to develop complications or death.[1]

And the only people they can transit it to that would be "at-risk" are people who've had the vaccine available to them for free, for months and chosen explicitly to not get it. That's their choice, and we should not cripple the country over it.

[1] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/COV...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.10.20210492v...

It's a good thing only about 2.7% of the adult population of US is immunocompromised.

I can't tell if you're being facetious or not, forgive me.

We can't base policy off something that effects an extreme minority of the population, like this 2.7% statistic you cited. We'd never do anything if that were the case...

The affected people should take all necessary precautions available (get vaccinated if applicable, wear a N95 or KN95 mask, shelter isolated at home, etc). Everyone else needs to go back to work, school, stores, restaurants, etc.

And the immunocompromised, who can be vaccinated AND remain vulnerable afterwards.

Adding to the thoughts before, letting the virus spread and mutate among the unvaccinated to create a new variant sounds like a reset on the progress we've made. With the Delta we got lucky, our vaccines still largely work. I'm not sure how long the luck will hold on with more variants.

I'm all for leaving people alone to their own decisions. But with this, their decisions greatly affect me and society at large.

You won't stop mutations. It's a pandemic, world-wide - and short of blocking all international travel, freight/shipping, etc - if there is a new mutation somewhere in the world, it will eventually land here in the US.

Herd immunity - either reached by vaccinations, previous-infections, or both - is all we can hope for.

Good news is, we don't need unvaccinated people's cooperation to reach herd immunity - they will eventually have natural immunity anyway.

Of course, we can never stop all mutations. However, for mutations to be useful for the virus, they do need to happen at an evolutionary scale. Especially because we're lucky that SARS-CoV-2 mutates much slower than Influenza and HIV.

If the rate of transmission reaches the elusive herd immunity, the time-frame for the virus to evolve into evading vaccines grows significantly longer, even with a non-zero mutation rate.

Lastly, antibodies created via the mRNA vaccines have a broader binding affinity to different variants than those from natural immunity [1].

Again, the goal is to not eradicate, but to scale it down to the point where it is statistically not a threat.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34103407/

Your original point was we got lucky with the Delta variant because our current vaccines still work.

I'm saying it doesn't matter - even if we had a 100% vaccination rate, some new variant will develop someplace that's being ravaged right now (say, India) and spread to the US eventually anyway. If our vaccines still work - great... if they don't, well.. where are we then?

Lastly, the numbers already indicate it's statistically not a threat to the overwhelming majority of the US population as-is.

I wasn't talking just about the US, I think we need very high levels of vaccination everywhere to make it statistically not a threat. We need to control the spread of the virus to levels where it's not mutating at evolutionarily scales, _everywhere_, and the only way to effectively do that is vaccines.

It's not a threat at this very moment, for this very point in time, but since we're allowing the virus to spread at such evolutionarily scales, inside and outside the US, a new variant popping up that evades vaccines is statistically very possible, and pose a significant threat to my own and society's well being.

I'm trying to argue that this is not a personal choice issue, rather a public health one.

You may want to have av word with my wife who is under strong immunodepressants and did not react to the vaccine. Three times. Two kind of vaccines.

The healthy unvaccinated dickheads idiots, because they are idiots but do not realize it, should simply be forced to get a vaccine or be put aside from society.

And because they are idiots and won't understand it anyway, do not spend to much resources trying to explain that.

Imagine if the same was said for criminality.

It has been said for criminality, that’s why you can get set aside from society for a 15-20 stretch.

Children exist.

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