No, he's not. He's calling out antivax nonsense from an "I'm not an antivaxxer but".
> There are downsides to getting the vaccine.
Sure.
> I know people who were down and out with side effects to the vaccine for a week.
That's widely documented [0], no need to share anecdotal data.
> If this is accurate, then people who had covid are 18x protected vs those vaccinated.
The paper says 13x (though 95% CI goes up to 8-21x), where's your 18x coming from? The most protected group is, unsurprisingly, infected and single dose vaccinated (6-7x over just infected). It's also important to notice these multipliers have a different meaning when talking about rates: 95% vs 99% is 5x, yet both are excellent
Now since you seem to dig immunity from infection vs immunity from the vaccine, it would only be honest to compare side effects from both of them [1] and their relative cost, and the global cost for everybody else: roughly $30 for vaccination vs ~$6000 [2] times 13 days [3] = ~$78,000 per ICU stay on average (and that's 2005 dollars as per [2]).
I only see rational hesitancy towards <12 year old population. For the rest, mRNA vaccines are better than waiting for the bug to catch you on literally all metrics, often with multiple orders of magnitude.
> Maybe we should introduce a covid card and only let those with them into restaurants.
Not sure only letting 12% of the population into restaurants is gonna help the sector antivaxxers are so worried about.
> After all, it is likely that the combination of the reopening and breakthrough caused the spike.
It's just the reopening despite the vaccination. If anything, vaccinated people feeling overconfident about their immunity during the reopening played a role.
[0] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/coronavir...
[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/long-term...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7800750_Daily_cost_...
[3] https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...