[jsbdk]

Why would I want to vaccinate if I'm still going to get restricted?

I mean the whole deal here was that if we got vaccinated we'd be back to normal life. If that wasn't the case they should've been sincere up front and most of us wouldn't have gotten vaccinated.

[ben_w]

Same reason I want to wear a seatbelt even though I’m still restricted by the speed limit: demonstrably lower chances of not merely death but also sub-fatal harm.

[effie]

Would you want to wear a seatbelt if it also injected you with a novel gene therapy vaccine, which is basically a russian-roulette with rare harmful health effects and your family can't sue the state nor the pharma?

[ben_w]

Would you rather play Russian roulette with one live round somewhere in 200,000 chambers, or one round in 100 chambers?

You don’t get to opt out and attempting to do so gets you the 100 chambers. Neither you nor your family get to sue anyone in either case. If you opt for 100 either directly or by failing to make a choice fast enough, anyone around you who hasn’t faced the 200,000 yet — even if they wanted to — faces the 100 a few days later.

[effie]

You can't compare getting vaccinated with getting bad COVID in this way. Getting vaccine is like a Russian roulette, because you do not know whether you are in the group of poor people who get maimed or killed by it. But not getting a vaccine is not like going to meet all people in town and hoping for the best. There are alternative strategies that reduce your risk of getting COVID and risk of severe health results from COVID immensely, for some people even below that of vaccine.

In other words, I have lots of information to help me efficiently avoid bad COVID impact; but I have no information to help me efficiently prevent bad vaccine impact.

[ben_w]

> But not getting a vaccine is not like going to meet all people in town and hoping for the best.

Absent vaccines the disease only goes away when too many people have caught the illness; that means you can only avoid catching it with your approach (regardless of what it is!) if you are an unusual and exceptional case.

> There are alternative strategies that reduce your risk of getting COVID and risk of severe health results from COVID immensely

The best way to reduce the of risk of severe health results from COVID is literally take one of the twenty different vaccines with a variety of different operating principles behind them.

[effie]

> The best way to reduce the of risk of severe health results from COVID is literally take one of the twenty different vaccines

I don't disagree with that, although I am not sure either, it's too early to tell regarding unknown long-term efficacy and side-effects.

The point is, many people don't need to risk the (hypothetical) best way (TM) when there are proven different ways of reducing COVID impact of similar efficacy (those who care know about them, often posted for discussion here on HN). Especially given the censorship, one-sided expertology and disinformation about vaccines and available treatments from the governments, institutions and media.

These groups really f-d up the vaccination program with their despicable tactics and large masses of people are not going to vaccinate precisely because of that - the main vaccine pushers quickly became completely untrustworthy.

[nicoburns]

To prevent yourself and others from getting (the severe form of) the virus. I can assure you that most people would still have gotten vaccinated.

Personally what I would like is roughly what we've had in the UK for the previous few months. The ability to do mostly normal life, but with restrictions on large events and mandated precautions such as masks. Along with vaccinations that would probably have been a sustainable state. Unfortunately I strongly suspect that the complete opening up that we're currently seeing will only lead to further lockdowns in a few month's time. I would love to be proved wrong on this, but that's what it's looking like to me at the moment.

[native_samples]

"what I would like is roughly ... the ability to do mostly normal life, but with restrictions on large events and mandated precautions such as masks. Along with vaccinations that would probably have been a sustainable state."

To be clear, are you stating you would like all large events to be permanently banned forever.

[BoxOfRain]

A lot of people (mostly older people in my experience) seem to think that people who work in the events industry should just curl up in an alleyway and die at this point. According to the more authoritarian-inclined, COVID means we can never ever have festivals, clubs, or anything like that again in the name of biosecurity. Personally I'd rather chew on razor wire than inhabit the mind-numbingly beige world of dull conventionality these people so clearly have never left in their lives.

I really don't like this new orthodoxy of "safetyism" which to me is a slavish adherence to the precautionary principle, a general approach of authoritarianism, and excessive influence of technocratic institutions which aren't subject to the usual political processes. This kind of ideology existed long before COVID but the pandemic has massively increased its influence. If people like authoritarianism and technocracy I'd rather they argued for them openly and in good faith than trying to use the pandemic as a smokescreen. There's nothing wrong with arguing for these things but I cannot stand people who dress their political opinions in lab coats and try to pass them off as science. There's no one true approach here, and pretending there is has caused a lot of avoidable strife in my opinion.

Politics is so much more than "follow the science", I think we'll regret in the future that we only gave seats at the table to epidemiologists and bureaucrats when it came to this pandemic rather than including a far wider range of scientific disciplines, experts in philosophy (especially ethics), and broader industry representation. The events industry has been done dirty in my opinion for example.

[jsbdk]

Okay, I agree with everything you said, BUT we were lied to when we were promised that we'd be back to normal life if we got vaccinated.

We should have had all the information when we made the choice of getting vaccinated or not. You say most people would've gotten vaccinated, I say they wouldn't have. We'll never know, since we were lied to.

[himinlomax]

Why should I wear a seatbelt when I'm not planing on getting into a car accident?