[jjoonathan]

Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such.

Publicly slugging it out in the weeds grants an optical stalemate to an argument that deserves to lose. Do this a million times in a row and you can launch an entire contrarian movement off vapors -- which is exactly what we have seen.

[trhway]

I don't see any arguments beside cheap meta and labels from your side (which seems to be pretty characteristic of the people pushing the current vaccine campaign).

>Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such.

The failure to control the spread has been obvious for at least half-a-year for anybody doing simple arithmetic on public numbers (and like others i have commented on that as far back then). Now beside being obvious, it is also confirmed by a proper scientific publication

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

" A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha."

"Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."

[kragen]

At first I expected the advent of mass vaccination to end the pandemic, because it only had to drop R by a factor of two or so to drop below the critical percolation threshold, so even a vaccine providing 50% sterilizing immunity would be good enough, and the mRNA vaccines turned out to be even more effective than expected. I turned out to be spectacularly wrong about that; as you may or may not be aware, the pandemic did not end a year ago. It turned out that, unlike vaccines like the smallpox vaccine, the covid vaccines did not provide much sterilizing immunity.

Moreover, the virus has become endemic in a number of zoonotic reservoirs, including deer, feral cats, and some mustelids, and vaccinating or exterminating those populations is not realistic in the next few decades. This is not currently a significant source of human outbreaks as far as I can tell, but after the humans reach herd immunity, it will be the only one.

Consequently, the cost-benefit tradeoff for covid vaccinations with the currently available vaccines needs to be evaluated with respect to the benefit to the person being vaccinated. I'm glad I'm vaccinated: as an obese 45-year-old man, my risk of death from covid might approach 1%, which is enormously higher than any plausible risks from any of the vaccines I'm familiar with. But that tradeoff is not the same for everyone, and there are populations where the rate of death or permanent harm from a vaccine, though still extremely low, is likely higher than the rate of death or permanent harm from covid itself.

The situation would be different if, for example, vaccinating schoolchildren prevented them from infecting and inadvertently killing their grandparents. But it doesn't. So the fact that the existing vaccinations clearly fail to control the spread is extremely relevant to the cost-benefit tradeoff, in particular because it means that there's no valid public-interest argument for requiring people to get vaccinated. Since both the cost and the benefit flow to them individually, they should be able to make the decision individually, except in cases such as small children and comatose patients.

This is an argument that deserves rational consideration, not dismissal with mindkiller phrases like "vapors" and "anti-vax". That's the sort of argument, or rather non-argument, that "deserves to lose".

[denton-scratch]

> after the humans reach herd immunity

That doesn't appear to be on the cards; neither vaccines nor actual infection confers immunity, in either case you only get resistance. And if you can't get individual immunity, talk of herd immunity is silly.

COVID is going to be endemic.

My hope is that omicron confers cross-resistance to other variants. From what I've heard, an omicron infection is nastier than a bad dose of 'flu, but much less nasty than infection with delta. With omicron's extreme success at transmission, perhaps omicron will give the whole world a degree of resistance to all COVID variants, and endemic COVID will eventually become no more scary than endemic adenovirus.

[kragen]

Immunity and resistance are the same thing, not two separate things. Total immunity ("sterilizing immunity") is relatively unusual, and doesn't seem to exist for covid, but covid immunity seems to last for at least several months, maybe a year or more, at high enough levels to prevent epidemics ("herd immunity"). Given how fast O spreads, it seems likely that it will burn itself out among the humans in a few months --- but covid will probably always be able to come back from the zoonotic reservoirs.

I hope you're right about the scariness, but I worry about the incidence of "long covid", and in particular the possibility of widespread organ damage from blood clots.

[gpshead]

Bad premise. It is not all about benefit to the person being vaccinated even in a low imputed immunity scenario. The unvaccinated fill up and overwhelm healthcare systems. That disrupts all medical care for everyone. By being vaccinated you are reducing the burden for everybody.

[kragen]

You may have a point there, but I think it would be a stronger point if you were advocating prohibiting something like rock climbing or motorcycle riding during the pandemic, because the absolute risk that a young, healthy person will end up in the hospital due to covid is just so much lower than those activities. It's a quick slippery slope to prohibiting physical inactivity that could produce obesity.

[trhway]

>The unvaccinated fill up and overwhelm healthcare systems. That disrupts all medical care for everyone. By being vaccinated you are reducing the burden for everybody.

That argument just doesn't hold the water. Most people don't reduce that burden by being vaccinated because they weren't such a burden to start with. For the most people the probability of hospitalization is so low that vaccinating them results in the practically undetectable changes to the total hospitalizations. High-risk groups is a different story. Vaccinating them does change the hospitalizations number.

So far - the available vaccines fail to control the spread, and those vaccines for most people fail to affect hospitalization numbers. So, what is the rationale for the vaccination mandates?

Note - it is the core of democracy that a limitation of personal body rights should be accompanied by a well founded reason of public interest. For the vaccination mandate that would be a scientifically sound conclusion of limit of spread for example or even say meaningful effect on the hospitalizations numbers. So far the vaccination mandate side has failed to provide any such scientifically sound reason. That makes the vaccination mandate to be an unreasonable authoritative action of gross violation of basic personal rights.