Covid-19 Restrictions

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Do you also believe that the government and private businesses should be allowed to make their own decisions on whether they want to employ people who are not vaccinated?

 

Sure. I do not believe the government should be allowed to pressure private businesses to do their bidding though, especially through OSHA. Which is just as ridiculous as the CDC mandating an eviction moratorium; glad that was finally rejected.

But really, why the fear of the unvaccinated? Unvaccinated does not mean you are riddled with SARS-Cov-2. And vaccinated apparently does not mean you are not. Everyone has the choice to get vaccinated if they want to at this point, so let the unvaccinated take their chances and let the vaccinated be secure in their choice and protection.

 

Realistically, I have a higher chance of contracting covid from an unvaccinated person than from one who is vaccinated. And the unvaccinated have a considerably higher chance of suffering negative side effects to their health from catching covid than from any of the vaccines on the market. So a similar question "why the fear of vaccines?" could be posed to those who don't want to get vaccinated.

The choice isn't really as clear-cut as you make it out to be. The latest research suggests that the vaccines are only 60-66% effective against the delta variant, which is now predominant here. My getting vaccinated is only the last line of defence against covid, but definitely not something that I want to test if I can possibly avoid it.

So the unvaccinated aren't only gambling with their health, but also with the health of anyone else that they come in close contact with, especially in enclosed spaces such as work environments, family gatherings and so on. Add to that the fact that in my experience the majority of those who don't want to get vaccinated also don't want to wear masks or wear them in such a way as to render them ineffective, which significantly increases their chances of infecting others once they become infected themselves.

 

Who says someone who takes their chances should not get treatment if they have a negative outcome? You could say that about a whole lot of things if you want to go down that road.

That is unknowable since "unvaccinated" at least here in the US includes those who have caught the disease and recovered. And since vaccinated people as you point out are not necessarily immune and can spread the disease, you cannot trust that anyone you come into contact with is not contagious. It's also unclear as far as I'm aware (conflicting info) how contagious asymptomatic/presymptomatic people are.

So. Take care of yourself as you see fit and let other people take care of themselves as they see fit.

I'd say because it is new technology, and there is a vast history of released drugs that have later been determined to be very harmful.

 

Whereas covid is a new virus and already has been determined to be potentially very harmful, causing everything from lasting long-term negative effects to death. In exponentially higher numbers than the vaccines. The irony of some people being more frightened of the vaccines which so far have been proven to be infinitely safer than catching covid is really quite striking.

 

Well, at least in the US, we have a long history of vaccine denial/suspicion that goes back well over a century. There are always people who feel that their personal rights are more important than the overall health and safety of the population. However, we have an equally long history of those people being told to shove it. The problem right now is that there is not a tremendous amount of political will to do what is necessary to mandate vaccines across the board. That allows for all sorts of weasel ways out like "religious exemptions" even though not a single major religion says a damned thing against vaccines.

Also, we now have Republican legislatures and governors in many states who are more concerned with appeasing the wackos and Trump than in actually safeguarding the public good. So you get idiots like Abbot and De Santis who are pushing against all sorts of mandates, whether vaccine or masks or anything like that. It's so logically inconsistent with all of their other positions that it would be comical if it weren't so dangerous.

And the old canard that we don't know what the long term side effects might be is nonsense. At no time previously when vaccine mandates were enforced for new vaccines had we any idea what the long terms effects would be, but we mandated them anyway, for the betterment of the whole society.

 

Oh, it's no better here, really. We have a good 40% of the population with moderate to extremely strong anti-vaccine sentiments. But the saddest thing is, most of it is not due to any bad past experiences with vaccines but simply due to the influence of lies and misinformation spread over Facebook that people choose to believe over the words of medical professionals. Everything from vaccines causing autism, to Bill Gates wanting to implant them with chips, to there being various poisonous substances in the vaccines, to covid not existing, to the pandemic being a global conspiracy and that all the medical professionals are paid off to lie about covid, to everyone infected daring to speak about covid is a paid actor, etc. etc. The endless stream of crazy that this huge chunk of population takes for granted is mind-boggling.

From what I've seen, FB is usually the only source of information for these people, or at least the only one that they trust, so manipulating this huge mob is very easy as they feed themselves and perpetuate a constant stream of made up BS that only reinforces their beliefs. No amount of reasoning, common sense, persuasion or disproving their claims has any chance whatsover to sway their opinion. They simply dismiss everything that goes against their beliefs as lies.

 

I take it from the rest of the post you are shocked that the CDC says you cannot catch the flu from a flu shot? What you described as the symptoms you felt after shots is your body's immune response to the vaccine which is what makes you immune to the actual flu strains they included in the vaccine. I'd imagine that when you had hardly any reaction to the vaccine you were probably already resistant/immune to those strains.

Flu vaccines do not have any live virus in them.

IIRC my mother told me I nearly died of rubella from the MMR vaccine, so the doctors were fairly certain I would have died from it if I had actually caught the fully viable virus instead of the attenuated one in the vaccine.

 

This sorta sums it up nicely at the micro-level:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/21/us/idaho-covid-crisis-nurse-death/index.html

 

Many lower level school teachers and nurses are some of the more vocal anti-vaxxers and spreaders of covid/vaccine misinformation here. Just goes to show that education by itself has never stopped anyone from being stupid. But it's the same with most people who spend half of their days on Facebook, really. Social media spreads lies and misinformation like the plague.