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by stjohnswarts 1333 days ago
What happens when a virus comes along that kills at a higher rate, say 35%? You're saying people should be willing to work alongside others when there is a 35% chance of a pandemic level virus killing you because a peer thinks science is dumb?
1 comments

I think you've gotten your hypothetical scenario a bit scrambled.

Given a safe and effective vaccine, you and your vaccinated coworkers would either not become infected at all or would experience very mild symptoms and be left with supercharged immunity (immunity from your vaccine + immunity from infection). Your dumb, science-hating coworker would suffer much worse symptoms and maybe die (a little over 1 in 3 chance given the 35% fatality you postulate).

Your vaccine, first and foremost, is supposed to protect you.

But with covid that is not at all what we are seeing.

This was especially painfully clear in places with strongly-enforced "vaccine passport" regimes during the period they were in force before being abandoned. The vaccinated spent time with other vaccinated and were infecting and being infected by one another and birthing new, more transmissible vaccine-evading variants of the virus. Vaccine efficacy actual goes negative (i.e. vaccine recipients more susceptible than unvaccinated persons after a few months: "Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron or Delta variants following a two-dose or booster BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccination series: A Danish cohort study" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...) and vaccine recipients are infected and infectious for at least as long as unvaccinated persons (e.g. "Duration of Shedding of Culturable Virus in SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (BA.1) Infection" in NEJM https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35767428/).