I agree, on review I was. I was trying to be careful in my phrasing to avoid any form of personal attack or hostility, since the other poster clearly has strong feelings about the subject.
> Society is generally hostile to behavior it views as being in the latter level of seriousness and talking about it over beers doesn’t generally make people more open to the idea that you are risking their lives
That's what's so strange about this, isn't it? I haven't seen any evidence anywhere that deciding against getting the vaccine puts anyone else's health at risk. I've certainly heard some politicians say this, but I haven't seen it backed by any reputable studies. The phrase "pandemic of the unvaccinated" has been bandied about quite a bit, without any supporting evidence that I'm aware of.
From what I've seen, omicron is spread by fully vaccinated folks without much inhibition. Apparently, being vaccinated reduces the severity of an already (relatively) mild variant. So why all the hyperbole? Why the draconian mandates? Why ignore the demographics of vulnerable populations and insist on mandates for everyone? Even children?
Risking lives? Unless you have severe comorbidities or are very elderly, there's asymptotically approaching zero risk of a severe outcome from any Covid infection, especially not with omicron.
You've struck to the heart of the matter. Somehow, many people have been convinced, against all reason and science, that deciding against getting vaccinated is somehow antisocial. Why? What are the motivations involved? Who is doing this? There's a reasonable argument that skipping that vaccine isn't smart, but antisocial? That's a very different and aggressive narrative.
It all comes across as very scary to those of us who don't necessarily agree with the prevailing interventions of the past couple years. They don't appear, on the surface, to be evidence based.
Lockdowns certainly were not, and now that we have retrospective data, we know that they were ineffective and in most cases quite harmful.
Universal masking wasn't effective, but some states and companies are still requiring it. Why?
Shutting down schools was a societal nightmare, with no demonstrated benefit. Yet we see some places doing it again. Why?
At each step of the way with these interventions, those who argued against them were also considered to be "antisocial" and were silenced, ridiculed, and othered.
Now we have mandated vaccination, ignoring immunity status and demographics. Even for children, who have a much higher risk from the flu than they do Covid. Doesn't it seem strange? School districts don't mandate the flu vaccine, but several have proposed mandatory Covid vaccines? Doesn't it make you wonder why?
What could possibly justify Austria's extreme measures, police brutality and draconian mandates? In Australia, a grandmother was just put in jail for not wearing a mask. I've seen videos of similar things happening in the U.S. How can we even pretend to be a civil society and tolerate this?
Why have we allowed ourselves to believe that "othering" anyone is ok? These are the first steps down an extraordinarily dangerous path, history shows us.
It's been so sad and disheartening to me to watch our society progress from "free hugs" towards a dystopian nightmare. Were we always so fragile? Were our liberal beliefs always just a beautiful lie waiting to be exposed at the first test?