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Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

First off, if you're not vaccinated, it's really a lot less safe for you for me to be around you. I don't really want to be responsible for getting you or your family sick.

But beyond that, if I can't trust you to take very basic precaution of vaccinating, can I trust you to take the much more obnoxious precaution of masking up, or the still more inconvenient precaution of social distancing generally? Or quarantining after travel? True, I was using a shorthand heuristic that is almost certainly flawed in the specific. Some people cannot get vaccines.

I haven't done any research on it, so I may be wrong, but I also assume that if you have antibodies to fight off an infectious disease, the disease is statistically more likely to exist in lesser concentrations than in a person who does not have those antibodies, if it exists at all.

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> masking up, or the still more inconvenient precaution of social distancing generally? Or quarantining after travel?

Why would I still be doing any of that when I'm vaccinated and no longer required?

It is still required in many places regardless of vacc status.

The vaccine does not make you fully immune, and the vaccine does not necessarily prevent you carrying and transmitting the virus. It just makes it less likely to happen (and you're certainly much less likely to become a coughing superspreader).

I don't know about where you live, but many places in the world have not yet reached levels of vaccination that would make make masking and social distancing redundant.

I had to double check when I read this post to make sure that you were the same person that posted:

> Frankly, fuck people who refuse to get vaccinated - they can rot in their own home for all I care (not talking about people with legitimate health risks, obviously).

How do you reconcile your apparent disdain for unvaccinated people with the fact that you do not believe the vaccine to be effective? Alternatively, you’ve determined that the vaccine is effective enough. What level of “immunity” and what level of “likely to happen” does a person have to cross before you stop saying, “fuck you, rot to death in your home” to someone?

>How do you reconcile your apparent disdain for unvaccinated people with the fact that you do not believe the vaccine to be effective?

by saying "effective" you wanted to say "perfect"?

The sentence you quote is followed by a sentence which adequately addresses your comment. Here, I’ll paste it for you: “Alternatively, you’ve determined that the vaccine is effective enough.”

> How do you reconcile your apparent disdain for unvaccinated people with the fact that you do not believe the vaccine to be effective?

I'm not going to defend the choice of words, but nowhere does Valkhyr say that the vaccine isn't effective.

That would be like reading that people still die in car crashes and arrive at the conclusion that seat belts and airbags are useless.

No, it would be like reading a post that says “anyone who doesn’t have antilock brakes can fuck off and rot at home” and my post would be one asking “is there a line where someone can not use ABS and still not fuck off and rot at home?” What if they wear a seatbelt? ABS isn’t the only thing someone can do to stay safe on the road!

Analogies in the covid context are always bad though. The real question is: for a disease that kills less than 2% of people who test positive for it, most of those being older or already at risk, and in a world with vastly diminished efficacy against continually improving variants (with apparently unknown mortality rates), when does the GP think that we should all not rot in our homes? I’m vaccinated, but apparently I may need a booster. I probably won’t get said booster because playing whack-a-mole with this disease doesn’t seem worth it to me given my risk profile. Do I need to rot at home or am I cool to not fuck off and die because I got the original shot. Am I no better than the other disease ridden pieces of shit who didn’t even get the first shot in GP’s eyes?

This rhetoric surrounding the vaccine is the real thing that needs to rot at home and die.

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