Someone could start by giving me data points that show if I’m asymptomatic and not exposed to someone with covid that I’m being “selfish” for not adopting your disposition of fear.
1. There are thousands of articles, studies, tweets, blog posts, and essays that explain all of this to you. If you were sincerely interested in educating yourself on this topic, you easily could be.
2. Covid can spread asymptomatically. Again, if you were sincerely interested in understanding this topic, you would know that extremely basic fact.
3. You have no way to know whether you were exposed to someone with Covid or not, unless you are never around other people. If you're never around other people, masks are a moot point, anyway.
4. We have been forced to wear (sometimes uncomfortable) clothing in public places due to fear for a long time. Women can't go into restaurants topless, even if it's not a city law. Fear-based or not, you don't get to decide whether you wear a mask on private land.
> There’s nothing selfish about not wearing a mask if vaccines are safe and effective.
If you really want to parrot that line, the very least you need to do is get informed about the issue you're trying to discuss.
Vaccines are safe and effective in training your immune system to handle a COVID-19 infection. That's how vaccines work. They are not, nor they ever were, a silver bullet that stops everyone from catching the disease and transmitting it to everyone the come across.
To put it very clearly and unambiguously to you, vaccines don't stop the virus from spreading, they only improve your chances of not dying from it.
Also, it's disingenuous to pretend that the current generation of vaccines, which was developed for the original Wuhan strain, also have the same effectiveness against subsequent strains such as the Delta and now Omicron strains.
Your blend of vocal ignorance is tiring. It feels like you're arguing in bad faith. A brief one-minute read on the topic is enough to clear up any possible misconception regarding the topic. Is that too much to ask?
The primary goal of masks is to reduce transmission.
The primary goal of vaccines is to reduce deaths.
Vaccines reduce deaths very well, but they only modestly reduce transmission. Using both together is much more effective and inexpensive than only using vaccines or natural immunity.