As someone who is vaxxed, I struggle to see how the harm done by the unvaccinated is categorically worse than the risks taken by others at society's expense. I imagine you have none of the disdain for motorcycle riders that you do for the unvaccinated.
Edit: For those replying to my comment, please note the comment I replied to listed the cost of hospitalization and the crowding out of ICU beds for others as costs society has to bear; if you are crowded out of an ICU bed, whether it be from someone who is unvaccinated or someone who is obese, you are dead nonetheless.
I have personally been vaccinated but I feel a pang of guilt whenever I use the government mandated vaccine passport to make use of restaurants and so on. So I stop using those facilities that require a vaccine passport, with the exception of the gym.
In terms of ethics, yeah I care what other people do. I also care that they stop at red lights so they don’t murder me with their car. We set rules as a society when individual decisions can affect group outcomes.
We have traditionally not violated bodily autonomy for very low probability of benefit to other people, and I think the precedent that some countries have set is a grave mistake. I understand that you are upset and afraid of death, but I would encourage you to look at the statistics. If you are vaccinated then COVID is a very survivable disease. Without vaccination, the average person's risk of dying of COVID is approximately 0.5%. The vaccine trial showed that it is 98% effective, so it cuts your risk by another factor of 50. As a point of comparison, if you are unvaccinated then COVID is ~10x more dangerous than the flu. Vaccination changes that picture. Consider whether your reaction is proportionate, when compared to what your reaction to "people murdering you from across the room with the flu" would have been. Ethical violations have historically happened quite often when people are irrationally afraid. It is true that the vaccines are less effective against Omicron, but on the other hand Omicron is a milder disease than Delta. Current data is looking like we are net very lucky to have Omicron displace Delta.
Also covid is heavily weighted towards the elderly, the flu is not (or at least not as much). IIRC ages 30-50 have around the same risk as the flu, and under 30 have more risk from the flu.
I think I’m as guilty as anyone at binarizing the issue though. You’re right that I have a low risk of death. We don’t have enough data around long-COVID to really talk about other risks. I’m not talking out of fear. I’m talking out of frustration that I’ve made lifestyle changes to help others who clearly don’t feel the need to reciprocate.
Your point about schools mandating vaccines is good. I'm not categorically against vaccine mandates. For a sufficiently transmissible disease, which is also deadly, and where spread can be stopped by vaccination, it can be justified. Measles may be a candidate: very transmissible (more so than COVID) and deadly for children (2.6 million deaths in 1980), and a vaccine which is extremely effective (99% immunity against infection) and has a long term safety record (complications <1 per million). COVID is not such a disease, and the COVID vaccines are not such vaccines.
Even so, in my country it is not compulsory to get vaccinated against the measles, not even in schools. Certainly one does not have to show a measles vaccination proof when entering a non-essential business like a restaurant, which one does have to show for COVID. Nor does one have to get a booster every 9 months, which one does, by law, for COVID.
> I’m talking out of frustration that I’ve made lifestyle changes to help others who clearly don’t feel the need to reciprocate.
Ok but this is not a good reason to compel other people to vaccinate. These people likely did not ask you to make the changes that you did. Nor are the changes that you made likely to have made much difference in the lives of these people, and whether or not these people do get vaccinated has a very minimal impact on your life, other than your frustration.
The fact that you feel like it would be a nice gesture from them if they "reciprocated" by getting vaccinated does not weigh against the negatives. Many of these people are probably genuinely afraid to take the vaccine. They may be very misinformed, but the fear is real. If you put sufficient pressure on these people via the government, for instance by threatening to take away their job and their ability to provide for their children, then they may well take the vaccine. But these people may resent those who forced them into it for the rest of their lives, and feel alienated from a society that made them do it. And some of them will feel ill for a day or two (as many do after getting the vaccine), which may cause them to think that any future pain or health problems were caused by the vaccine. It this worth it to you in order to act out your frustration that they "don't feel the need to reciprocate"?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.30.21268565v...
This study shows that being boosted gives you 37% protection from infection over a period of maybe a month. But this means at peak spread, you can expect an infection rate among the boosted population of 63% of the unvaxxed infection rate.
If we assume we can get every vaxxed person boosted, you're still more likely to get infected by a fully boosted individual since the vaccination rates are something like 70%. That is, for every 70 vaxxed people there are 30 unvaxxed, and 70 * .63 > 30. If we assume we can get everyone vax+boosted instantly, the estimated infection rate drops to .85 percent of the current rate. With an estimated r0 of 10 for Omicron, such a small reduction in infections has no chance of substantially slowing the spread. At this point mandates are merely a punitive measure against those the majority have deemed moral degenerates.
The vaccines are not 100% effective and not everyone can safely take the vaccine. The unvaccinated put others at risk, not just themselves. I think it's perfectly fair to scorn those who _can_ be vaccinated but choose not to out of ignorance or religious/political ideology.
> As long as they don't mix with the rest of society
Private discrimination is your right — if you don't want to admit unmasked and unvaccinated to your premises, you should be able to. As a pro-vaccine libertarian, it would make me prefer your establishments over others.
> are willing to bear the full cost of their 10x higher risk of hospital and ICU care
Of course. Nobody can claim the rights to other people's labour, and we don't want others to be obliged to pay for our healthcare — and healthcare providers should have the same right of private discrimination.
So I'd be fine with the following deal:
1. I work out some arrangement with my health insurance firm w.r.t. COVID hospitalization costs, possibly just paying the costs myself or possibly paying a higher premium for not taking the vaccine. It's been two years now and I never caught it, all the people I know who did never required a hospital visit and Omicron is very mild so this seems like a safe bet.
2. In return governments force higher taxes on everyone under the age of 65 who took vaccines they didn't clinically need (and almost nobody under that age does). Those taxes will pay for the costs of the vaccines themselves of course but also all the indirect costs and debts caused by their insistence on shutting society down.