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> Can you imagine just how horrible a 10 year old feels when he learns that the COVID infection he got at school killed off his grandparents?

The mRNA vaccines don’t stop the spread of COVID.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.30.21268565v...

That’s not what your pre-print, non-peer-reviewed citation says.

But you know this, right? After 2+ years?

At this point, it’s one side of the aisle cherry-picking pre-print, non-peer-reviewed papers to justify their not getting vaccinated because they bought in 100% to the narrative that it’s not a big deal and will blow over.

> Additionally, even young and completely healthy people have parents and grandparents.

Everyone knows this by now.

The people you’re conversing with simply don’t care if they kill someone.

What a pity the vaccine didn't stop infections/eradicate the virus.

You shouldn't use the sarcastic tone. It didn't seem at all clear in 2020 that the virus would quickly mutate to more than double its already dangerously high R0 number. If you're aware of someone credible who said this as more than a wild-ass guess at the time, it'd be interesting to see a link. I'm sure someone somewhere managed to reason that far, but we work based on the facts we have, not how they look in retrospect.

The mRNA vaccines did reduce R below 1 in populations with reasonable vaccine coverage of the initial Wuhan strain, increasing to optimistic (but achieved in many countries) vaccine coverage with the "British" Alpha strain. And then becoming unviable to reduce R below 1 with Delta and later. But even then, vaccination reduced the average reproductive number, which from a public health perspective had great temporary value in buying more time for getting vaccines to all who needed and wanted them.

Europe will probably officially roll back its vaccine passport thingy soon, exactly due to this. Granted, that's a bit late, which is another example of not working based on the facts we have, but then again most countries have practically ignored these rules for more than six months already.

I do have sympathy for the arguments around bodily autonomy/coerced vaccination/violation of fundamental democratic right of travel and so on, but it's a question with a bit of nuance to it.

I think the argument for a mandate is stronger when the prevalence of the vaccine can eliminate the virus from society and I think in that case I would support mandates. But that was never the case for covid.

Instead we have absurd covid policies. France for instance treats double jabbed but not boosted people as unvaccinated. Whatever was the short term effect expected from the booster in Dec last year, it is long gone now, and the omicron wave never translated in a meaningful increase in hospitalisations, booster or no booster. Health authorities are applying moronic policies. My patience with this absence of common sense has evaporated.

> I think the argument for a mandate is stronger when the prevalence of the vaccine can eliminate the virus from society and I think in that case I would support mandates. But that was never the case for covid.

It could have been the case, but it was “all going to blow over” and “not a big deal”.

And hence the US became an infection vector for the whole world.

> France for instance treats double jabbed but not boosted people as unvaccinated.

So?

> the omicron wave never translated in a meaningful increase in hospitalisations, booster or no booster.

Pure disinformation.

“During the Omicron-predominant period, overall weekly adult hospitalization rates peaked at 38.4 per 100,000, exceeding the previous peak on January 9, 2021 (26.1) and the peak rate during the Delta-predominant period (15.5).”

It’s been more than two years. Disinformation such as yours is transparent by now.

Just admit that it’s political - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23405649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22614676 - and save all of us some time.

We are arguing different things, and would probably mostly agree if we sat down to summarize our views.

French authorities are corrupt morons, but there are countries in the world that largely do evidence-based health policy once they get around to it. Norway’s did very good, in general. Including cancelling AstraZeneca, which made everyone get up in arms about how irresponsible they were.