Vaccination doesn’t mean you cannot be infected, and cannot spread it once infected. It lowers the chances of infection and presentation of symptoms.
So when your unvaccinated coworker exercises his selfish right to be stupid, you’re putting others at risk. The difference here is that your exposing your coworkers children and others who cannot be vaccinated to infection.
We socially tolerate people like this who choose to infect an entire office or daycare with rhinovirus, flu or the cold, because the impact is generally lower. COVID is different, and frankly, people don’t want to be around unvaccinated people just as they avoid people who display bad judgement in other ways.
But we were told to get vaccinated to protect others. Get vaccinated so you can visit your grandparents. Now we are getting a different message. This is why people develop doubts that the authorities have any real idea what they are talking about.
"Being vaccinated isn't a perfect defense, but it reduces the risk to you of getting the disease, it drastically reduces the risk to you of dying from the disease or suffering long term life altering consequences from it, and it lowers the risk of you spreading it to others."
The general guidance hasn't changed. The risk to each other has gone up as Delta spreads, because it's more dangerous. There will probably be other dangerous variants given the huge breeding ground for the virus among the unvaccinated and immune compromised.
Get vaccinated, lower your risk, lower the risk to everyone around you and to the general population of the earth. (And it's incredibly harmless).
Ofcourse these may be a small number of cases. But you can't see these people, and say that the vaccine is "incredibly harmless"...
How these people are being neglected is absolutely disgusting. I have submitted this link here and it was promptly flagged, where have written why I think that these people deserve to be thanked
The vaccine does protect yourself and others, a lot. It is very much worth it. The reported numbers make this very clear.
It's not absolute protection however. But it greatly reduces the probabilities of propagating the virus.
In a population the effect is multiplied more than the effect on an individual, because of the reduced propagation. If enough are vaccinated that multiplier does make it near-absolute protection.
Thus, it protects you, and it also protects each other through the multiplier effect.
It also greatly reduces the chances of hospitalisation and death from infection if you are one of the unlucky ones who gets Covid-19 anyway in spite of vaccination.
> Now we are getting a different message
No, we aren't.
The message from the authorities has been consistent on why people should be vaccinated, including acknowleging that it isn't absolute protection (with reported probabilities), that people should still take care to protect each other in other ways, and that collective multiplier effects mean it's important for nearly everyone to be vaccinated - people protect each other, not just themselves.
Despite not providing absolute protection to an individual who takes it without others taking it, it is believed to be able to provide nearly absolute protection if vaccine takeup is sufficiently widespread and social behaviour stays careful enough - because R < 1 means the virus dies out instead of continuing to spread, and R depends on collective vaccine takeup and people's behaviour.
Measured likelihoods of infection with the vaccine are reported from time to time, as is the effect of different virus variants. Due to the complex nature of social interactions in different environments, and the fact that data is continuously being produced and analysed, and nothing is static, those reported values are not the same everywhere, and new values keep emerging.
> This is why people develop doubts that the authorities have any real idea what they are talking about.
Different people explain the message in different ways, and emphasise different aspects. It does not mean the authorities are changing their mind on the major points.
But public health messaging is a difficult field of its own: If you spell out all the details and nuances, that some people would like to hear, most people tune out and don't follow the advice no matter how important. They also forget details, then when they hear the same thing put a different way with different emphasis, it sounds different and perhaps contradictory, but isn't really.
It has to be simplified and memorable, for people to follow it, unfortunately.
You're right that when people hear different versions of the same message, it leads people to wonder if what they are hearing is consistent.
I'll try to provide my simplified version:
When you get vaccinated and your grandparents vaccinated and everyone you interact with vaccinated, then wait a while, eventually you will be pretty safe visiting them.
If you only get yourself vaccinated but your grandparents don't, nor any of the people you interact with daily, you will be better protected than them, but they can still give you the virus (with lower probability), and you can still pass the virus on to your grandparents. You'll probably not be too ill because the vaccine protects against severe illness as well, but you might still carry it and pass it on to someone who does gets severely ill. This is why it's so important to have almost everyone vaccinated around you, not just yourself.
For example, the right to freedom of association, and choosing not to employ people who are making reckless choices that impact the safety of their coworkers?
Employees at Google are mostly at-will. Google can fire them any time, although typically, they produce a 6+ month performance record with failure to do job before terminating (mostly to protect against lawsuits). However, Google has terminated people on the spot, with cause. The government will back Google firing people for not being vaccinated.
The takeaway is that the general left now is for firing employees for political or medical reasons, when historically they were against. Why that is, at least in Europe, is because the left is no longer majority working class, it is majority middle class.
That's how you know it's not just a public health measure. For other vaccines, we rely on the majority being vaccinated so that any isolated outbreaks are naturally contained. I assume google doesn't ask you to prove you're vaccinated against measles for example. If one person is not vaccinated, it's to their detriment and irrelevant to everyone else. There are weak arguments about vaccine efficacy etc that some people could still get infected, but the point is that majority voluntary vaccination contains disease to the point that there is no justification of invasive personal measures (in this case disclosing personal health information to an information predator, but its unacceptable regardless of the employer). It seems to me this is much more about signaling to their various stakeholders about their politics rather than an actual public health campaign.
FWIW I think (I think) they should be allowed to enforce this if they want, even if i dont like it. Although I might support measures to make this kind of discrimination illegal, I'd have to think more about that. Despite having my vaccine, I would not work for a company that asked me to prove it, however. I've got no beef with the vaccine, only with giving state or corporate actors power over my health choices.
> I assume google doesn't ask you to prove you're vaccinated against measles for example.
Is there a massive measles outbreak currently infecting millions of people? I don’t see how the fact that they don’t require proof of measles vaccine is in anyway proof that COVID vaccination isn’t in the interest of public health.
Think of yourself at the center of a circle with a series of concentric rings. If you are vaccinated with a 90% effective vaccine, your chance of catching the bug is 10% from anyone in the first ring. However, if everyone in the first ring is vaccinated, the chance of catching the bug from anyone in the second ring is only 1% (i.e 0.1*0.1). Thus with enough people vaccinated even a crappy vaccine works pretty well.
Perhaps a rather simplistic model, but somewhat illustrative.
The same way that my friend who is vaccinated was infected by his unvaccinated wife. Close quarters with an infected person is going to increase risk for some one who is vaccinated. The Pfizer vaccine is 38% effective [1] at preventing infection on average. It’s obvious that spending 8 hours next to someone who is actively infectious will reduce that efficacy rate.
[1] for the Delta variant, which at this point is what matters
"The CDC has found, however, that in rare breakthrough infections — instances where a fully vaccinated person tests positive for the virus — the amount of virus in that vaccinated person's system is similar to the viral load in an infected individual who is unvaccinated."
One could be forgiven though for not being up to date on the latest oscillation.
And a second unvaccinated coworker is also someone that has chosen not to be vaccinated, right? (Obviously there may be some individuals who can't get the vaccine, but that should be a relatively rare circumstance, and could have policies around dealing with it.)
With the delta variant becoming more common, it's seeming like vaccinated people might still be able to transmit the disease, even if they don't become infected themselves. There's also the matter of asymptomatic infection: remember that the 95% efficacy numbers reported by Pfizer and Moderna (for example) are about symptomatic infection; during their clinical trials, they only tested people if they showed symptoms.
And if a vaccinated person is infected but asymptomatic, they may never even know about it. Technically we may or may not call that a "breakthrough infection", but that person could still presumably infect an unvaccinated person, and that's the thing that matters.
> Obviously there may be some individuals who can't get the vaccine, but that should be a relatively rare circumstance, and could have policies around dealing with it.
Right, and having people around them who are unvaccinated by choice is an unnecessary risk to those who can't be vaccinated.
Not that rare in the scheme of things. Odds are strong that if you're vaccinated a breakthrough infection will be much less serious though. However in either case, you've now inconvenienced the breakthrough infectee who has to be concerned with how they go on to infect others, e.g. unvaccinated children.
So when your unvaccinated coworker exercises his selfish right to be stupid, you’re putting others at risk. The difference here is that your exposing your coworkers children and others who cannot be vaccinated to infection.
We socially tolerate people like this who choose to infect an entire office or daycare with rhinovirus, flu or the cold, because the impact is generally lower. COVID is different, and frankly, people don’t want to be around unvaccinated people just as they avoid people who display bad judgement in other ways.