Choosing to risk catching a disease with a 1-2% case fatality rate, while refusing an overwhelmingly safe and effective vaccine is the definition of idiocy.
Their choice is this, if they are otherwise healthy and young: With protection as good or better than the vaccinated, should I get a shot that might lower my already minuscule chance of dying or serious disease by a further tiny amount.
I could see rational people coming down on both sides of that.
If it is (a), evidence shows that covid + vaccine is better than either alone and hence no reason to refuse the vaccine.
If it is (b), there is perfect justification for calling that stancy as an idiotic stance.
So regarding option a, it’s moreso the case that there’s no legitimate reason TO bother with the vaccine if you have those antibodies already. A marginal improvement at best over what is already better than two shots of Pfizer, is not worth the long-term unknowns to me.
Source:
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
There is also new evidence that it may be safer for boys to just get covid rather than vaccination.
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...
Knowing this, will you still say there’s no reason to refuse it? Why would you elevate yourself into a position where you believe yourself to be an arbiter of this? The evidence is clear that the antibodies tens of millions already have from past infection are excellent. So stop coming up with false dilemmas.
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
The overall IFR is misleading, given how age-stratified the risk is:
Since March of 2020 any kind of statement suggesting covid isn’t as bad as some make it out to be is met with fierce vitriol. The number of times I’ve been called “dangerous” for posting well sourced data that clearly shows the IFR of covid is not 1-2%…
It’s as if people believe that any good news will result in others “not taking this serious”. They must feel that everybody needs to be scared stiff of this thing all the time… the result is the average person thinks if they catch covid they have a 10% chance of dying, which for most age groups is like 1000x off[0].
It’s super evil, really. If people were better informed about the risk profiles of covid, how many would have sacrificed a year and a half of their short life? Wouldn’t that imply that forcing this “new normal” crap by scaring the daylights out of people is a tad misguided and perhaps very unethical and immoral? If the only way you can get people to comply with your draconian interventions is lying to society about the risks of covid… well that is pretty fucked up.
Worse, by the way, is peoples risk assessment for covid is so completely wrong it makes debating public policy impossible. If the average adult thinks they have a 10% of dying if they got covid, of course they will want to mask little kids at school, of course they’ll cheer vaccine passports, of course they’ll rat each other out for sitting on a park bench. If they knew kids were at almost zero risk of covid, and their age bracket had minimal risks, would they have agreed to any of that?
[0] a fascinating data set: https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
Strangely, despite all the pearl clutching about "misinformation", this data-backed and quantifiable instance of covid misinformation never gets brought up. As a result, I now consider government / public health institution claims to be politically calculated fearmongering or propaganda until proven otherwise, and likely not worth my time to pay attention to. I'll update my opinion about them if their stance toward "correcting misinformation" starts to include misinformation like the above as well.
I'm not holding my breath.
I think the point about COVID is that if everybody just ignored it, this is absolutely what would happen, and case fatality rates could get pretty high.