[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.