It’s not clear how long immunity lasts after infection or vaccination, but we’re looking at a timetable of many years, with possibilities for mutations that will be more vaccine-resistant, and tens or hundreds of thousands more dead. And their precious economy isn’t going to like that either.
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The sad thing is that the CDC even under Trump’s administration was posting facts about the vaccines given. It’s only expanded since Biden has taken over. What else do they want? Seriously.
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I find it interesting that anti-vaxers are generally Republicans. I think that is the case because they tend to look at the world from a more individual perspective.
Let’s say your change of getting Covid is one in thousand. I know there are many factors that influence this, but this number is not totally unrealistic and it makes the math easy. If you look at it individually you can meet one new person per day and your chance of getting Covid in a whole year is about one in three (365/1000).
That means if you look at it from an individual standpoint the danger of getting Covid is not that high. If you also take in account that roughly one in a hundred people that gets Covid needs hospital care, the personal risk is a lot lower (not taking in account that people may get Covid lungs after a relatively mild flue period).
If you take a group of ten people and each person of that group meets one person outside that group per week, the chances of someone getting Covid in that group are still about fifty/fifty in a year (my statistics are a bit to simplified, but here how I got to that figure; 1 (in a thousand) times 10 people times 52 weeks is gives about 50%). With still only a 1% change of being hospitalized if the group gets Covid.
Now if you look at it from the point of view of a society, then things change. I live in the Netherlands. We have 17 million people living here. So if everybody met one stranger in a single day, then 17.000 people would get Covid that day, out of which 170 would be hospitalized. Hospitals have limited room, so this would quickly overrun the healthcare system.
With an overrun healthcare system, doctors will have to choose who gets treatment and who doesn’t, so who gets to live and who dies. This is a choice that can never be done right in all cases. You can apply some rules, like all things being equal a younger person gets priority over an older person, but this will not always be fair. Take, for example, a 65 year old who has had a bad childhood and a mediocre job, who now is enjoying life and does a lot of volunteer work vs. a 21 year old that has a history of being hospitalized after dangerous driving and extreme sports accidents who is likely to have a fatal accident in a few years time. In this case to older person might be the better option, but there is no time to make that decision well informed.
People may suggest to just add intensive care units. They forget that this is not simply a case of adding an extra bed. You need a whole room with specialized equipment and people trained to work there. This is not something you can easily scale up.
So, in an overrun healthcare system a lot more people will die then is necessary. One person that dies affect quite a few people around him or her. Those people will not be happy if their loved dies but could have been saved if proper care could have been given. Economic damage is recoverable, death is final.
I may be off, but I think anti-vaxers may not see this bigger picture. As for vaccines containing other stuff (microchips, mind or DNA altering substances or whatever), in my opinion if an organization is powerful enough to have that kind of technology (and keep it hidden) and pull the whole thing off in secret, they would also have better and easier ways of achieving their goal.
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No… Just fucking no. In the best case scenario, the vaccines are 95% effective. This means that 5% will not have the protection they think they do. With adequate vaccine coverage, that should not matter. With inadequate coverage, it means death and disability for a huge number of people. This is why the antivaxxers constantly point out that in the recent measles outbreaks, a majority of the victims are fully vaccinated. The attack rate is north of 90% for unvaccinated, but only 5-10% among vaccinated. With a large enough exposure, though, that 5-10% is still a huge number of sick individuals.
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History would suggest no. Smallpox was with us for many millennia without generating herd immunity. The black plague simply killed off enough people that population density dropped below a critical level and spread became too unreliable. Not the optimal outcome. Influenza has shown no sign of herd immunity due to frequent mutation. That sound familiar? No, vaccine is the only route to herd immunity. As long as we cannot get to the critical threshold, we are screwed.
I find it interesting that anti-vaxers are generally Republicans.
Currently, that might appear to be true, but there are plenty of lefty, crunchy granola type antivaxxers as well. Usually concerned about body purity rather than microchipping, but they are out there. Pre-Il Douche, I would have said they were the majority. Not so much now, but still out there.
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This is why people should listen to actual epidemiologists. They know how to create models that do the hard math using real numbers.
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That’s an excellent point. The vaccine has been so incredibly effective compared to early estimates that I seriously forgot that 95% is still not 100%, and I don’t want to throw that 5% under the bus any more than I do the people who legitimately can’t get the vaccine because of an allergy. So… there basically is no good scenario. A more lethal outbreak would take innocent people along with the 26% who refuse to be vaccinated. But as things stand, some of those people will die anyway because we will never achieve herd immunity. As always, progress in the USA is impossible for the stupidest reasons.
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I could not agree more
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They really do seem to need someone to cuddle them, say “everything’s gonna be OK…”, patiently spoonfeed some mushed lima beans, tuck them in, sing lullabye, coo sweet nothings as they arrange the mobile above the crib, then *JAB* them when they aren’t looking.
Wait, I was playing into pattern of just discarding them as a lost cause and calling them stupid babies.
So, yeah, they’ll respond to “new” information. But it has to come from the right people. Really, it takes friends, family, and strangers they trust. (And they dont trust Presidents/politicians, even high-up GOP ones.) So, it takes people from “inside the tribe”, who dont use (but yeah, kinda do use) emotion, who introduce facts they already know, but these facts are from “a friend of mine” so now their ego has been given the fig leaf to drop their consistency/commitment to their previous fallacious tenets.
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Leaving out the laughable claim that Democrats deal in emotions while Republicans deal in facts, I think different approaches are required for different segments of the antivax population, and it’s hard to bifurcate a TV skit.
With people who have vague worries based on not knowing the science, calmly explaining the facts is probably helpful. On the other hand, people who thing Bill Gates is using the vaccines to microchip them are beyond help, and I feel like you can freely laugh at them because nothing is going to convince them to start living in the real world.
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