[Grimm1]

Well today if you were to punch me you'd likely be on trial for assault, and if you killed me, murder. Antisocial behaviors generally aren't legally punishable until they're taken out on someone else.

In this case, if you choose not to get the vaccine and then through contact tracing or some other mechanism an outbreak is traced to you when you could have gotten a vaccine? Assault sounds correct to me and if you killed someone through inaction, then something equivalent to negligent homicide sounds correct to me. You're not necessarily malicious but I'd say fairly negligent.

Not that that's what is currently the case, but it seems fair to me and in that world, rolling the dice on criminal charges instead of just getting a vaccine that 169million people in US alone currently have taken with no issue seems like a dumb dice roll to me, but most people have steadily proven to me over the last few years that they're not great at risk calculation over and under.

[mlac]

I am vaccinated and pro-vaccine, but it is not “zero issues”. There are side effects with the vaccines, and some of them are significant (partial paralysis).

The numbers still work that we should get vaccinated, but it’s unclear if people who have the worst side effects from the vaccine would be the same ones who would have suffered the worst effects of COVID (death).

So I get it - if you’re young, healthy, and unlikely to die from COVID, it is a non-zero (very, very small) risk from talking the vaccine. But I still think people should get the shot.

[hallihax]

I'm not aware of any actual data on this, but it seems to me that those who choose not to be vaccinated are probably also very unlikely to be tested on any regular basis (if at all), and also (at least in the UK, where I am) not engage in any kind of voluntary contact tracing.

There seems to me to be a gap between what people think is happening, and what is actually happening. How exactly are people who haven't tested positive for Covid (either through a negative result, or simply avoiding testing altogether) going to be identified as the source of an outbreak if they're also not engaging in contact tracing in the first place?

As it stands, it seems to me like the most likely people to be contact traced are those who are also testing regularly, and are also the most likely to be vaccinated. I would be surprised if non-vaccinated people are anything but rarely identified as the source of an outbreak, precisely because they're also much less likely to ever get tested (unless seriously ill) or engage in contact tracing.