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Sounds like a community of absolute arrogance and security theater disconnected from the realities of natural life.
Sounds like a lot of communities around the world, like Japan, where people proactively mask up with even the slightest tickle in the throat in order to avoid passing whatever they’ve caught onto anyone else.
Community-first attitudes are a hallmark of societal stability over the long term, as people think of the community first, and themselves second. Everyone benefits because the community is put ahead of selfishness and solipsism.
Pathologically individualistic “me, me, me” attitudes lead to a very superficial community that cannot effectively meet threats to its health and survival. Everyone reaches for “why should I make the sacrifice when I don’t immediately benefit?”, which means no-one will make the sacrifice move.
I find it very ironic that the military holds so many of the second group, when its ethos teaches the first. In a military unit, your first instinct is to jump on top of that grenade so that you protect your teammates at the cost of your own life. You put the team first, so that the team can survive with or without you. This only works if every single member of the team conforms to that same ideal. Yet the amount of antivax in the military - which is no different than refusing to protect your teammates because jumping on top of that grenade would hurt your own “personal freedoms” - is surprisingly prevalent.
If you're ok with all that, then you have a justifiable position. If not, then you do not.
That is not the case.
You seem like you're possessed by the delusion of objectivity. There is no such thing.
Effectively, that is true; and the closer you get to absolute objectivity, the scarier it becomes to the average person (which was the crux of my point, so I appreciate your pointing out what you did). Fitting that the dude would have mentioned psychopaths, in that light.
What is this you're talking about? I talked about personal sovereignty OF IDENTITY. If you're going to strawman, at least strawman based on a correct reading of your target's point.
And ethically, you are proposing these walled societies where children risk their health with poorly tested treatments to save the older generation? I find that abhorrent.
There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more.
Unfortunately, politics and antivaxx disinformation got in the way of that. And people continued to die in droves due to selfishness and lies.
Where can I find a study that supports this: "There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more.
Unfortunately, politics and antivaxx disinformation got in the way of that. And people continued to die in droves due to selfishness and lies."
This is a statement that has many claims: 1. 95% implementation (whatever that means) in a specified time window of initial vaccine could've produced herd immunity 2. This herd immunity would've made it "several orders of more difficult" for the virus to mutate 3 The estimate of a 50% reduction in death toll.
I certainly can't remember something that didn't happen, herd immunity that *would've made mutation more difficult" or a "50% reduction" that didn't happen.
Your memory must be better than mine, it remembers statistics and estimates from counterfactual events.
In the case of Omicron, there's a good chance that the vaccines would have needed to reach a community in Botswana ahead of the initiation of the chronic infection that may have produced BA.1, BA.2, etc.
First-world extensive deployments would have killed off the first-world propagation of variants through Delta in short order, but everything changed with Omicron.
A vaccination-connected universal ID card will cause people to care about each other and to want to keep each other safe? This is a very strange thought process.
Do steel bars make people want to stay in jail in order to protect the community? Are they the entrance fee to creating a loving population of inmates?
Interesting how you default to thinking about this as a binary: it's either you love your community or hate and want to kill your community. There's no indication of any sort of nuance, no indication of acknowledging that maybe there are other people in your community who might feel differently. And even if they did, their feelings are irrelevant because you're already dead set on insisting that you "know what's best for them"
If you hate your community so much that you'd insist on shoving your own beliefs down everyone else's throat and demonizing anyone who disagrees as killing the community, maybe you should find a different community to be in?
If you hate your community and everyone in it so much that you want to hurt and possibly even kill them with the guns you carry, maybe you should find a different community to be in.
If you hate your community and everyone in it so much that you want to hurt and possibly even kill them with the knife you carry, maybe you should find a different community to be in.
If you hate your community and everyone in it so much that you want to hurt and possibly even kill them with the sharps you carry, maybe you should find a different community to be in.
Now all the citizens are submissive, cannot think for themselves, because they refused to stand up for their rights. Who knows what could have happened if a country stood up for their citizens.
Viruses, on the other hand, can make you a lethal object to anyone who comes close to you simply by you breathing without a mask.
And that’s why we have laws on the safe storage, handling, and public carrying of these items. We have RESTRICTIONS on their usage, in the same way a person can be restricted from being a Typhoid Mary who only has to be in the physical vicinity of someone else in order to kill them.
Your logical fallacy is: Slippery Slope.
If you actually cared about people and a zero covid policy would you would move there or isolate yourself forever so you can’t infect anyone even if you really vaccinated? I got my vaccine but I don’t pretend it prevents corona, the only zero covid policy is what China is doing. Do you support them?
But how many acts of mercy do we owe our brothers and sisters?
Five? A dozen? Per year? Per month?
It was inevitable that the COVID-19 vaccines should require a followup and a booster and there were variants that mutated and then we just had a neverending cycle of vaccine opportunities.
In the '60s when polio was a spectre, it just began to be civic duty to get your round of shots. You got the polio and you got the pertussis and you got x y and z. Then people were taking in their babies so they could load up on vaccines before they were even threatened and then stuff was eradicated.
But what's the endgame for that? How many is enough? Who's gonna recommend fewer vaccines? Not the manufacturers. Not the pharmacies or physicians. Are insurance companies gonna put a rate limiter on vaccines? I don't know. It's hard to tell what is truly Medically Necessary and what is just putting on a show.
Except all it is, is a little prick in the arm. Quite literally. Nothing more than that. Unless you are lucky, at which point your arm gets sore, and you have a bit of a temperature and feel under the weather for a day or so, which is evidence that the vaccine is producing an extra-robust immune response from your body, ensuring you are getting the full benefit of the vaccine.
Would I take it monthly, if a formulation was designed for that purpose? Yeah, I would. Why? Because I’m not a sociopath. I CARE about the people in my community. I don’t want to be that Typhoid Mary that causes ANY deaths at all, much less a superspreader event that kills multiple people.
It’s _all about_ putting the community first, and my trivial inconveniences (of getting the vaccine, and its effects) second. Because those inconveniences of the vaccine are truly trivial. It’s a few minutes out of my day, and a little bit of crankiness for a day or two if the immune response was robust.
Against the loss of someone else’s life, or that someone getting hit with Long COVID that cripples them for months or years, I CALL THAT A BARGAIN.
>It was inevitable that the COVID-19 vaccines should require a followup and a booster and there were variants that mutated and then we just had a neverending cycle of vaccine opportunities.
The precedent has already been there for decades. The point being, people who are at risk (the elderly) and those who take care of at-risk people are ALREADY taking yearly shots for the flu. Why? BECAUSE IT WORKS at strongly limiting transmission. They themselves get much less likely to be hit with the current strain, and even if they do get hit, it ends up being less severe and less transmissible. These people protect themselves and those vulnerable people around them by getting the yearly flu booster shots.
>But what's the endgame for that? How many is enough?
Now that - thanks to politics and anti-vaxx paranoia - we have missed the opportunity for broadly-similar herd immunity (there was only a tiny 3-4 month window when the vaccines first came out), it will never end. COVID has gone endemic because we couldn’t vaccinate quickly enough, and completely enough. We can place that outcome squarely at the feet of the anti-vaxxers who refused to get vaccinated, and the politics that made roll-out issues and vaccine wastage such a big problem.
>Who's gonna recommend fewer vaccines? Not the manufacturers. Not the pharmacies
They have no input into the process, nor should they.
>physicians.
If these are the same people who collect and publish data on in-the-wild vaccine effectiveness, then yes. They CAN be the people who show when enough is enough. And all that information is collected and collated through orgs like America’s Center for Disease Control, who then provide that data to people like immunologist (this being his career specialty) Dr. Fauci, who can then craft public policy that aligns with whatever real-world peer-reviewed data they have on hand.
Alright then, I'll just poke myself with a sewing needle and you can count that as a vaccination, if that's quite literally all it is.