[yosito]

While I share his sentiments, I don't think his approach is going to convince anyone to get vaccinated. He seems to be playing politics by forcing his opponents to take the far less popular anti-vax side before upcoming elections. It's sad to see politicians abuse a public health crisis like this to win political battles at the expense of the wellbeing of their people. Sad, but not really surprising.

[olliej]

you mean it sad to see politicians claiming that vaccinations are harmful, or being unvaccinated doesn't cause harm to others, or something else?

The politicization of the vaccine has been entirely on the antivax side. People are just sick of letting them have free range to terrorise us.

[ifyoubuildit]

> or being unvaccinated doesn't cause harm to others

I believe that being unvaccinated in fact does not cause harm to others. Infecting other people is the thing that can cause harm.

There is a difference. People who aren't vaccinated and have never recovered from the disease and are not taking other steps to prevent spread? Sure, those people may be more of a risk to you than your typical vaccinated person (though maybe not now that omicron is rampant).

But they are a subset of the unvaccinated, and as much as your favorite news corp or bureaucrat or blogger wants you to believe everyone who hasn't taken the covid vaccine is coming to eat your children, I'd ask you to question if that's really the case. I don't think it is.

[olliej]

I don’t think they’re coming to eat my children.

I think they’re lobbying (or lying about status) to let their unvaccinated children bring plague into otherwise vaccinated schools.

I believe they’re lobbying to force businesses to employ them despite them risking other people at work.

These statements all have verifiable behaviour to back them up.

I have yet to see anyone stand up and say “I have the right to be unvaccinated as long as I stay away from places where I have an much higher risk of harming others”. In fact all the evidence shows that they are demanding the exact opposite.

[ifyoubuildit]

My point is that "unvaccinated" is a broad term that is including a lot of people with prior infection that you really shouldn't have been made to be concerned about. They are now more of a risk of infection for omicron, but so are folks who received double and triple shots.

> I think they’re lobbying (or lying about status) to let their unvaccinated children bring plague into otherwise vaccinated schools.

How much damage has covid (catching the actual disease) caused to children? How well do the current vaccines stop transmission when youre in a room with 30 other people for an hour?

> I believe they’re lobbying to force businesses to employ them despite them risking other people at work.

This is an interesting framing. You could also say they're lobbying various governments to not force companies to fire people for vaccine status, which as I've said is not as useful of a descriptor as everyone makes it out to be.

> I have yet to see anyone stand up and say “I have the right to be unvaccinated as long as I stay away from places where I have an much higher risk of harming others”. In fact all the evidence shows that they are demanding the exact opposite.

You're talking to someone who had a prior infection but has not been vaccinated. I test frequently, I wear masks (not that I've seen convincing evidence that they do much of anything at an individual level, but because its easy to do and it makes people more comfortable), and I stay home if I have the slightest of symptoms.

Something to keep in mind, especially with omicron: if you are vaccinated you can and will pass the virus if you are infected. You just probably won't die or be hospitalized yourself.

[trinovantes]

> I believe that being unvaccinated in fact does not cause harm to others.

They are a tiny part of society but take up a large portion of ICU capacity. This delays elective surgeries (e.g. cancer) for everybody else. Most hospitals in Ontario have already suspended all elective surgeries. Somebody with curable cancer today could die in a few months thanks to anti-vaxers.

[ifyoubuildit]

How many of those people clogging up the icus are people who are unvaccinated but had a prior infection?

I'm saying that I don't think being unvaccinated is the issue, despite people like Macron repeating that. Being seronaive and careless is.

[trinovantes]

Does it matter? Either way, their choice of not taking a vaccine has a higher chance of them denying a hospital bed from somebody who needs it

[ifyoubuildit]

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2108120

This is evidence that it does matter. That the unvaccinated as a whole are some outsized threat to everyone is misleading at best. The subset of the unvaccinated that are seronaive are more likely to take up hospital beds, that seems to be true. The unvaccinated with a prior infection are not.

This is important because the general populace has been whipped up into a frenzy and pointed roughly in the direction of myself and people like me, who are not an issue. With asshats like Macron stirring the pot like this, its leading us to a scary place, and its all for political points.

[landemva]

Business meeting today was cancelled. The double vaxxed and boosted guy called to say he is sicker than he had ever been before and was going to get tested. He sounded alarmed and unhinged. Too bad the shots don't prevent infection.

[olliej]

> Too bad the shots don't prevent infection.

Except they do. However the unending plague of unvaccinated people mean that vaccinated people are still getting sick as no vaccine for any disease has ever had 100% effectiveness. Even completely irradiated diseases never had 100% effective vaccines.

Meanwhile we have a large group of unvaccinated people who are creating a breeding ground for mutations that weaken the various vaccines. Eventually new vaccines will be needed to compensate for that, but they will still not be 100% effective.

As long as there exist large groups of unvaccinated groups with no real justification for being unvaccinated, there will be a population of carriers providing a breeding ground for new variants. However unlike the traditional animal hosts any mutation that occurs in the human population is inherently more transmissible to other humans.

Let's quote twitter: Sure vaccinated and unvaccinated people can both catch covid. Similarly, both I and Serena Williams can play tennis.

[spurgu]

I don't know how you managed (or what your sources are) but it looks like pretty much everything you said is untrue.