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Comment by bryan0 | Hacker News Reader

> Half the problem is no one has actually expressed a goal we're working towards.

Yeah I don’t think the goals have been clear, even if they have been changing over time. I think the clearest goal now should be a 90% vaccination rate to turn Covid into the common cold, and then going back to life as normal, but as long as huge swathes of the population refuse to get vaccinated this goal is unattainable.

Edit: I believe Biden actually set a 70% vax goal for July 2021, and we missed it. No way we can hit 90%. I think possibly for anti-vaxers their goal is simply to not be told what to do and if they end up in an overwhelmed hospital so be it.

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I live in a country with a vaccination rate over 90% and we still have partial lockdowns.

So I suggest you reassess whether meeting that goal in your location would result in things going back to normal for you.

Good to know. Which country? Why are they implementing lockdowns?

The other problem is that just hitting the % isn’t good enough. You need to keep up to date if boosters are required. So definitely not easy.

Maybe portugal and the likely reason in any answer will be hospitalisation rates.

Looks like Portugal really turned their vaccination program around to be a real success story. As far as I can tell they are not reintroducing lockdowns?

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1063830104/portugal-covid-vac...

Lockdown "light"

https://m.dw.com/en/covid-19-special-vaccination-champion-po...

their goal is simply to not be told what to do

The urge to resist force is a vital element of US culture as a check on runaway governments. You see it in many movements, on both sides for or against. Women don't want to be forced to carry a baby. LGBT community doesn't want to be forced to hide. Christians don't want to be forced to stop praying in school. Non-Christians don't want to be forced to listen to prayers in school.

Everyone should be persuaded to get vaccinated for things like flu and COVID. Very few people should be forced to do so just to keep their jobs.

The comparison of abortion with vaccination is a horrendous piece of libertarian propaganda.

No one is strapping people down and injecting them with a vaccine, it’s not a forced medical procedure. However the involvement in certain activities by the unvaccinated is limited and this is similar to many other public health orders such as not being able to smoke inside a restaurant.

Correct, nobody is strapping people down and injecting them with a vaccine. Instead, they are merely withholding your ability to purchase food and avoid repossession of your shelter if they aren't vaccinated.

There are plenty of work opportunities that don’t require vaccination, just as there is work available where you can smoke while on the job. If you choose to smoke you will find it much more difficult to work as a flight attendant than a truck driver for example.

Flight attendants can smoke off duty if they want.

There are also other ways to limit the spread of viruses apart from vaccination, like testing, distancing, masks, ventilation, etc. There should be a gradient of choice, maybe with triage nurses at the "almost definitely need to vaccinate" end, and payroll processors at the "almost definitely would be okay with regular testing and/or other standard measures" end.

The vast majority of people refusing to get vaccinated are doing so because a centralized top-down political machine told them to be against vaccination. This is about as un-libertarian as one can get.

As a libertarian that is actually concerned with freedom, the main thing the Trumpertantrum has accomplished is discrediting the concept. Back when it was a small subset of antivax nutters, causing at most an occasional localized outbreak, I had sympathy for people's right to make their own bad decisions. Now the political machine took up the banner and created a force majeure situation, so I'm just done.

Even your "good libertarian's" version of the small localized outbreak affects people that didn't make that choice.

My personal view (please don't be offended, libertarians -- it's my right to believe this!) is that individuality itself is a bit of a fiction, and this makes libertarianism essentially based on falsehood and break down. We're interconnected.

The best argument for individuality in politics and government, in my view, is that it gives "the average person" a fair shot, giving us good outcomes at the societal level even if many individuals do not get what they want.

Excessive vehemence fuels that machine, though. It's just too easy to take an authoritarian stance when we already agree with the stance and would stand to benefit, but that is counterproductive in the long run and just amplifies polarization.

Some antivaxxers are just afraid of needles, so if we had a nasal spray vaccine they’d take it.

I’ve wondered for what % of people this is their main reason for not getting vaccinated….

I imagine it is hard to measure that, since

1. It is a "wimpy" thing to admit to. People are reluctant to think things about themselves which, if admitted aloud, could earn social ridicule.

2. One fear can prompt another and lead to an anxiety spiral which is too overwhelming for someone to even put into words.

Conjecture: The best way to measure it would be to introduce a nasal spray and see what sort of uptick it earns.

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