[remarkEon]

No.

The continual insistence by some - many in prominent leadership positions - that nothing changes after you get vaccinated is what was hurting confidence that the vaccine works. If it works, why would I have to act like it doesn't? People can make their own judgements about their personal risk, but I'm not waiting until some arbitrary effectivity point (99%? 99.9%? 99.99%?) to go back to normal. I'll be in the gym tonight for 2 hours without a mask for the first time in well over a year.

[shados]

> If it works, why would I have to act like it doesn't?

This vaccine is -ridiculously- effective, which definitely changed things a bit (well, a lot). It looks like people who have it are pretty much immune, the chances of transmitting even if you DO get the virus is extremely low, etc. We're lucky.

It could have gone a very different way though. If we had a vaccine that's much less effective (eg: like the flu's), we'd have to rely on the power of statistics at scale to get rid of the pandemic. So yeah, that would have meant you'd have to get vaccine and still act like you haven't for a while until more people take it.

Thank <whatever deity> things turned out better though, since its pretty obvious that people wouldn't have been able to comprehend that scenario.

[dlp211]

When they made those statements, it was nothing changes for now. We were always going to get to this point where enough people became vaccinated and others had enough of a natural immunity that we would start to open up, take off the masks, and get to normal. You couldn't do that when 10% of people had the vaccine dose. Did people really think that the government was going to forever make people where masks and to social distance and all the other measures?

[josephcsible]

Even if only one person in the world were vaccinated, why should that one person not get to stop wearing a mask and social distancing?