And what’s the benefit or not getting it? As much as I despise cars you can at least go do something arguably beneficial with them. I think we should have fewer though because they do cause unnecessary deaths. But what is gained by not having the vaccine? If I have a car I can do something beneficial. If you don’t get the vaccine you can transmit the disease or wind up in the hospital and for what reason? Do you, or society get much pleasure from skiing? Seems like it. There’s an entire industry. Will there be COVID-19 resorts and YouTube videos showing who can get the sickest or something?
We do deprioritize smokers and drinkers BTW on the transplant list.
If I get into a car accident and you're across town, you're right, that doesn't affect you. Likewise, if I get COVID and you're across town, I can't infect you, so likewise, you're not affected.
However, if we're on the same side of town, and I get into a car accident, it could affect you because I might hit you. Likewise, if I get COVID, and we're on the same side of town, I could infect you.
You might protest that I could still infect you if I get COVID on the opposite side of town by infecting someone else who infects you. This is false. The person who actually infected you infected you. To claim it was my fault that you got infected means that we should all blame patient zero and China. I mean, we should blame China, but probably not patient zero.
If you had reasonable actions available to you (wearing a mask, getting vaccinated) that you chose not to pursue, then yes, in my view you do bear some responsibility for continuing the chain of infection. If you had taken those reasonable actions then you bear no responsibility: it’s an act of nature that the chain passed through you.
If everyone who could get the vaccine did get it, then it’s almost certain that 10’s of thousands of people would be alive today just in the US and hospitals would not be under strain. Who are responsible for those 10’s of thousands of deaths if not those who chose not to act to protect their own lives and their communities?
You can choose your "freedom" over your life and your community, but you bear culpability for doing so. "Freedom isn’t free," as the saying goes.
If I get a vaccine and suffer an adverse reaction, should I receive blame for getting the vaccine? After all, since compensation for adverse reactions are paid for by society (the government), I failed to protect my life and my community, as you say.
By the way, hospitals have been under strain long before COVID. That's how they operate.
Also, if I get vaccinated and found get myself tested regularly, I could spread COVID. Is taking a test weekly to prevent spread as a vaccinated person a reasonable action?
Patient zero being the first person who contracted COVID-19? I wasn't aware that they had been identified.
> If I get a vaccine and suffer an adverse reaction, should I receive blame for getting the vaccine? After all, since compensation for adverse reactions are paid for by society (the government), I failed to protect my life and my community, as you say.
All of the evidence at this point is that the harms from getting vaccinated are orders of magnitude less than the harms from the disease. So no, you should not receive blame because you took the best action known to you at the time.
> By the way, hospitals have been under strain long before COVID. That's how they operate.
They are under strain now because of COVID, out of all proportion to the strain experienced in recent memory from any other cause.
> Also, if I get vaccinated and found get myself tested regularly, I could spread COVID. Is taking a test weekly to prevent spread as a vaccinated person a reasonable action?
I don't know what you're trying to say here. Yes, get tested if you are worried about being exposed to COVID, irrespective of whether you're vaccinated. Leading epidemiologists have long called for widespread rapid antigen testing to prevent asymptomatic spread.
They haven't. Neither can we identify with certainty who spread COVID to who. Yet you want to blame the unvaccinated.
> All of the evidence at this point is that the harms from getting vaccinated are orders of magnitude less than the harms from the disease. So no, you should not receive blame because you took the best action known to you at the time.
For those who might be at risk for one or more of the adverse events from the vaccine, or have already recovered from COVID, the best action would be to not get the vaccine. Yet you still want to put culpability on their shoulders. Your can't have it both ways.
> They are under strain now because of COVID, out of all proportion to the strain experienced in recent memory from any other cause.
They are under more strain, yes. How much of that is COVID, and how much is that hospitals are not willing to pay enough to stay staffed?
> I don't know what you're trying to say here. Yes, get tested if you are worried about being exposed to COVID, irrespective of whether you're vaccinated. Leading epidemiologists have long called for widespread rapid antigen testing to prevent asymptomatic spread.
I'm saying that if it's reasonable to blame the unvaccinated for spreading COVID, it's also reasonable to blame the vaccinated who don't get tested weekly because getting tested weekly is, in your terms, a "reasonable action." In other words, if you think the unvaccinated are culpable, so are the vaccinated who don't get tested weekly.
If you claim that requiring the vaccinated to get tested weekly is not reasonable, then my answer is that neither is it reasonable to blame the unvaccinated. In fact, in my opinion, it's as reasonable as requiring weekly COVID tests. You and I would have different definitions of reasonable. We are not going to agree.
You want to blame me for COVID and to force me to conform to an orthodoxy that changes daily, and you call that reasonable. I want to be left alone and call that reasonable.
If you build in a system where the government can extract profit by not complying with their actions, what makes you think you wont someday find yourself on the wrong side of those actions?
Keep in mind, your side might not always be the one in control and once you hand over extra power to the government it's extremely rare for them to hand it back to you.