[kristjansson]

Pretty much all of public health is cost-benefit analysis.

Vaccines dramatically reduce the incidence and severity of disease, and therefore the spread. It would be nice if I could say ‘prevent’ instead of ‘reduce’ there, but this is the vaccine we have for the pandemic we’re facing. Vaccine complications are about 1e-5, COVID complications (conditional on infection) are like 1e-2. Excepting non-falsifiable mRNA concerns the balance seems firmly in favor of vaccines if we’re all going to be exposed eventually.

It’s fair to argue that individuals should be able to chose to forgo that benefit based on their own views; it’s not fair to argue that there’s no benefit.