Yea I'm pro vaccine myself. BUT, when they say heard immunity is once we hit 75% of people vaccinated and now they are threatening people's jobs to get to 100% of the population vaccinated? From what I've read that's not the point of a vaccine. If everyone gets vaccinated won't it just produce a different strain of virus to spread? So then it becomes a never ending thing. If we have as to fight covid through other avenues with pills and medicine that have an efficiency of up to 90% of reducing hospitalizations then why the need for the push of a vaccine for something that kills less than 1% of the people that get it? Or the .08 of kids that get it? That's what's irritating. They say follow the science. Are we though?
To keep this in one post, I'll address the question from
bill ace 350
first. I'm deeply uncomfortable with government mandates. Much better if people retain the right to make their own choices, and enough of them make the smart choice so that mandates never come up as an option. I do love the fact that smallpox has been
vaccinated into extinction, and polio is likely to follow (it only exists now in a few small populations in more remote parts of the world), but since the coronaviruses mutate faster and have a shorter incubation time, these vaccines will never be
that successful at preventing the disease--though they're really impressive in their ability to keep people from dying from Covid. If I ran the policy zoo and wanted to be serious about tamping down Covid19 transmission to the maximum extent possible, I'd exempt some job classes from the vaccine mandate, and for the others accept proof of vaccination, weekly testing, or solid proof of a previous infection. Any of the three. But I'm not in the policy arena (and I'm happy about that!)
To Tgrim's points, getting most people vaccinated will NOT cause other strains of the virus to spread. That hasn't happened with other vaccines. The danger in not getting any virus outbreak tamped down quickly is that everyone who gets infected becomes an incubator; viruses mutate randomly, and occasionally one of those mutations makes the virus more 'successful' (which generally means more transmissible). Will even worse strains of Covid emerge? That's impossible to know, but having fewer people incubating the virus reduces the possibility. So that's good not only for the individual's health, but also for public health.
The non-vaccine treatments for Covid 19 that have emerged are really impressive. The antibody cocktails, such as the Regeneron cocktail, have saved many people. The small-molecule treatments that are on the horizon (Merck's molnupiravir and Pfizer's Paxlovid) are closest to approval, and they also look great. But the antibody cocktails cost about $4K for the drug, plus the cost of the stay in the hospital or clinic. Merck announced molnupiravir will cost $700 for a course of treatment, Pfizer will likely price their drug similarly, but both have the advantage of not requiring a hospital stay. But none of those treatments, however impressive, confer immunity to Covid. That's not cost-effective, when the vaccines cost $10 to $20 (and the Feds have been paying for them; I don't think anyone in the US has been charged for a Covid vaccination).
Yeah, you can be fully vaccinated and still have some risk of catching Covid. But you have almost zero risk of arriving at the hospital needing a $4000 infusion, or at the doctor's office needing a $700 prescription.
