Wonder if Covid, in terms of deaths, ends up being seen as a significant moment in history as it moved the needle on different kinds of vaccines/treatments and they, in turn, saved more lives than Covid could claim...
This pandemic is also significant a moment in history when antivacc views gained wide social acceptance. This will hinder future vaccination efforts. I agree with you otherwise.
1. "mRNA" is still new tech in the public eyes, so it'll take some time to familiarize people with it and not see it as "scary new tech".
2. Covid is (fortunately) less deadly than initially feared, which lead to people not being very worried about it at a personal risk level. If mRNA therapy start rolling out for cancer, you bet people will take it.
The non-mRNA alternatives are also pretty experimental, still take the new approach of having your own cells manufacture the protein for your immune system to train against, and have been subjected to numerous safety pauses. I'm staunchly opposed to taking either kind of vaccine but if I had a gun to my head (and hey, given the rate things are going maybe I soon will!) I would probably pick mRNA, and specifically Pfizer since its dose is less than half of Moderna's.
Why don't we have an inactivated virus or subunit (i.e. Novavax) vaccine as an option?
Yeah exactly. I think the risk/reward ratio for many people is still not skewed enough in vaccine's favor compared to COVID. If COVID had been as bad as originally feared, I don't think we'd see as much hesitancy. But if somebody told an anti-vax person "you'll be dead in 3 months if you don't take this mRNA treatment", they'll take it for sure.
Taking one person's opinion and projecting it to millions is not part of the scientific method. It is like being angry to one jew and killing 6 million (see Hitler's life).
That would be a good idea, it's hard to get a proper breakdown of the demographics involved because of the way it's reported. Why make people bury their head in stats when they can get an idea of their personal risk with a quick scan of a few ICUs?
Right. I think the concerns actually played out exactly as feared. Hospitals filled up with people sick with Covid, health care system got overwhelmed, everyone is at heightened risk due to the difficulty in getting treated for anything.
The point of getting vaccinated is not to protect yourself, as much as to protect your community. I view people who won't take the vaccine because they perceive their personal risk as low to be selfish. Additionally, anyone who won't get vaccinated because they don't want anyone else to tell them what to do is childish.
> The point of getting vaccinated is not to protect yourself, as much as to protect your community.
The point is first and foremost, and by a long way, to protect yourself. Herd immunity is a by-product of mass immunisation programmes, not the main goal.
> I view people who won't take the vaccine because they perceive their personal risk as low to be selfish
If their personal risk is low (as opposed to perceived low), which it is for the vast majority, then they're not having a selfish effect on others as they won't be taking up medical resources they shouldn't. If there's any "selfish" people - according to this strange standard you've built - it's those with high risk due to comorbidities they could've done something about, like their weight, and I wouldn't for one second paint them as some kind of moral deviants, they're people who need help in the short term and long.
> Additionally, anyone who won't get vaccinated because they don't want anyone else to tell them what to do is childish.
To make your own decisions and take your own risks is the mark of an adult because adulthood is about taking responsibility on, not abrogating it. Whether they are good decisions is a different discussion.
Eh, we’ll just see a split in the population between the vaccinated and disease riddled. The Amish similarly split in the industrial revolution and they’re, for the most part, doing fine and not ruining it for the rest of us.
Given the current research paths and traction, that future list of preventable diseases looks likely to include most STIs. That will motivate young people such that it cleaves off the current voluntarily unvaccinated generation.
Long story short, this is likely to be a temporary phenomenon. That, or a hard split for a self-selecting minority. (We’re already seeing economic effects in skilled labor hiring.)
I disagree, it's all a perception issue.
The authoritarian part of population (including the government, obviously, and mainstream media) conflate people who don't want to take vaccines for various reasons with people who believe conspiracy theories about vaccines. I talked at length with these people and it's almost comical how wrong and ignorant they are. They are also very few an apart, some were homeless, other were xanax and wine soccer moms.
The rest of people who don't want to take the vaccine recognise the goods the vaccine can do but:
- They don't care about avoiding mild covid effects if they think they're healthy enough
- They don't know which long term effects mRNA vaccines will have, if any (10+ years)
- They oppose compulsory or practically compulsory (if I can't travel or visit a bar, it's practically compulsory) vaccines for a disease with a sub 1% mortality rate, which keeps having different variants which drop vaccine efficacy, which still requires you to wear a mask not to transmit it.
As it is right now, the only reason to take the vaccine is not to feel covid symptoms / reduce the damage to your organs by covid, which is a decent reason.
I got covid towards the beginning of the "two weeks lockdown to flatten the curve turned in 1.5 years", I felt flu-like bad but barely had any issues. Yet last summer I was forced to vaccinate because proof of recovery older than 6 months is worthless to travel and to spend hundreds in useless covid tests. I also had zero symptoms after both vaccinations, probably because my body already knew how to fight it.
Sure, the government really makes it harder and harder to believe in anything they say, but the number of conspiracy nuts remained constant. It's just that society started calling people who care about individual freedom, conspiracy nuts (on top of nazi and white supremacists).
> As it is right now, the only reason to take the vaccine is not to feel covid symptoms / reduce the damage to your organs by covid, which is a decent reason.
This is obviously false antivax nonsense. The COVID vaccine, by and large, prevents you from dying or ending up in the ICU.
> It's just that society started calling people who care about individual freedom, conspiracy nuts (on top of nazi and white supremacists).
Or we're just tired of people buying into antivax propaganda and dying and wasting hospital resources?
Well then let’s bring out the big guns. HIV/AIDS patients. How do we keep those people from transmitting their disease? Should we force them to isolate and potentially even form their own cities?
> As it is right now, the only reason to take the vaccine is not to feel covid symptoms / reduce the damage to your organs by covid, which is a decent reason.
Well, no
It reduces severity and incidence of disease. Yes, you can still get covid if you encounter SARS-Cov-2. But you are less likely to. And if you are less likely to get the disease, you reduce the risk of infection to others.
They had wide social acceptance each time there was a new vaccine, going back to the first vaccines (which, btw had not-insignificant mortality rate). In five years when there are no long-term side-effects the antivaxxers will die down again.
> In five years when there are no long-term side-effects the antivaxxers will die down again.
You seem very certain. I'm not convinced. Some of them are simply making things up. I had one of my coaches try to show me a video of a guy sticking spoons to his body trying to tell me it was the vaccine making him magnetic.
How do you reconcile "hey, once we can show that long term side effects are non-existent" with "because there aren't enough side effects right now, they're just inventing completely crazy nonsense that defies all logic"?
The person in question isn't even a fringe conspiracy theorist, she just browsed Facebook a little too much, this is just mainstream stuff...
Most anti-vaxxers are not that crazy though. Most will be convinced by a few years of nothing bad happening. It's an easy mistake to make to focus on the most extreme people when they just aren't representative.
I would argue that a critical view of vaccinations has always been widely present. We see this now as gaining traction only because they speak up as mandatory vaccines are becoming a real possibility. (otherwise: lose job, can't travel, etc) Maybe it's time to actually have a conversation with them, instead of labelling them and regard them as idiots.
You should go try to have a conversation with those people and you will understand why we stopped. My wife had this conversation with her grandfather and just got disowned.
Maybe 50% of the people I know haven’t gotten the vaccine. They are generally reasonable, and I’ve had healthy back and forth with many of them. Many of them are highly educated.
None has disowned me.
My point is, it’s not fair to lump them into one big Idiocracy category.
>mandatory vaccines are becoming a real possibility
Becoming? Becoming!?
Vaccines for many infectious diseases are mandatory (with some exceptions) to enter for public schools in all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. They are also mandatory to immigrant to the United States. The supreme court first upheld mandatory vaccinations as constitutional in 1905, more than a century ago (Jacobson v. Massachusetts).
Mandatory vaccinations have been a thing since we've had vaccinations.
What's your point? I wasn't claiming that the supreme court is infallible, or even giving any opinion about mandatory vaccinations, just pointing out the concept is not new.
But this is pretty clearly not the same thing as is currently being talked about. No one expects to have a right to travel to another country, it's well understood they can create whatever rules they want.
What the vaccine passport debate centers around is whether it is fair to require vaccines for entry into events and businesses.
The hassle / reward for most people is much higher for those many other infectious diseases than covid.
By all means, now that the government paid for it with our tax money I'll take it and skip the mild covid side effects for my age range.
If I had to pay, unless I was 40+, I wouldn't have bothered for something with such a low mortality rate.
I thought you were going to mention the ridiculous state powers raised against individuals in otherwise relatively free countries for an illness that mostly affects people with multiple comorbidities. Thats a lot more scary than a few antivaxers.
That's a great conspiracy theory! Hear me out before you downvote:
This could be the reason the WHO has been scaring everyone for the last two years for something with such a low mortality rate. Or maybe even why American tax dollars were spent on gain-of-function research in a laboratory in China!
Maybe this was all a tax payers funded friendly fundraiser to beat cancer with mRNA!
I'm sure tons of smart educated authoritarian people wouldn't refrain from manipulating entire populations for such a noble goal.