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Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

Europe (or Germany at least) accepts natural immunity in lieu of vaccination. As far as I've heard, no one has been getting covid on purpose as a result.

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I mean ultimately we’re guessing at the rationale of the leadership of each of these countries - but I’d guess based on vaccination rates that Europe generally has less of an antivax problem than the US, so authorities there might be less concerned about vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine hesitancy in the US is also very regionally concentrated - maybe less so in Germany?

“COVID parties” are also a worst case scenario - I think the vast majority of people would just opt to not get vaccinated and live their lives as usual - which would lead to more outbreaks, deaths, mutations, etc.

There is a huge variance in vaccination rates of European countries. The US is behind most western European countries but ahead of most eastern European countries.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer

I was talking about Germany specifically in the parent - the least vaccinated state in Germany has a ~10% higher vaccination rates than the least vaccinated state in the US. But it looks like there is a good deal of variance even inside Germany.

There are also only 16 states in Germany; Even a naive statistician would presume that the USA is likely to have larger differences between min and max than Germany.

Another post on the HN frontpage is relevant to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28526966

Specifcally this part:

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations#attitudes-to-c...

The US has more skeptics than Germany and France, but it's a pretty slim difference

Rule in Italy is only one shot after at least 3 months (and no more of 6 months) after the first Covid-negative test.

In Belgium there is an organization threatening covid parties right now, because the government wants to introduce covid-safe-passports in Brussels due to the low vaccination rate [0].

[0] https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/184786/la-boum-calls-f...

German culture is not as feircly selfish as American culture. They also have far lower vaccine hesitancy rates.

“Selfishness” is not how I would characterize the motivations of people who haven’t vaccinated.

By the way, I have been vaccinated for months, but I can understand that others may not want to for reasons other than those I would describe as “selfish”.

Regardless of their motivation, remaining unvaccinated is a selfish choice, same as driving around burning gasoline recreationally.

Wait, how is it non-selfish? I've only ever heard selfish reasons to not get the vaccine, e.g. that there could be side effects to them personally so they selfishly decide to not get the vaccine.

You have a bazillion replies sprayed across this whole thread. Many of them are extremely confrontational, baselessly accusatory, and certainly not convincing. What do you think you’re accomplishing?

I got the vaccine. Still, I can easily come up with like a dozen good faith, non-selfish reasons to avoid getting it. Are you unwilling to brainstorm a little, or are you just being disingenuous?

The only non-selfish reason I can think of is that you're misinformed.

> German culture is not as feircly selfish

Oh, let's please not delve too deeply into "German culture".

Update/PS: Maybe the downvoters can explain how the unselfish German culture works when it comes to things like considering Turks to be equally valuable human beings.

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