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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.