The question has never really been about whether vaccines are vital or not, the question is should they be mandatory. The pool of people who object to the concept of vaccines in the abstract are a tiny crew.
There is precious little evidence that COVID vaccines should be mandatory. At this point most of the people who are avoiding the vaccine have already gotten natural immunity, or will soon.
> At this point most of the people who are avoiding the vaccine have already gotten natural immunity, or will soon.
Unvaccinated people are still flooding hospital and using ICU beds pretty much everywhere in the world, beds which could be use to treat other people having other diseases.
The overwhelming majority of people having bad cases of covid these days are unvaccinated, they're still dying/getting long term issues for no good reasons. So yeah sure, most will pull through and be immunised, I hope they'll manage to cope with the damages of going through ICU
"At this point most of the people who are avoiding the vaccine have already gotten natural immunity" And while they develop natural immunity, they remain in the population as people who can keep spreading it. Vaccines aren't 100% protection, we need as many people as possible to be vaccinated to actually get community transmission down.
Vaccines don't stop people from spreading it. The reduce overall transmission rate because they are sick and shedding virus for a shorter time, just like natural immunity.
Current vaccine is less than 50% effective against Delta variant (40% down to 30% as immunity wanes over 3-4 months) and so vaccinated can spread it arguably just as effectively as unvaccinated; based on Israel's leading data.
Yet 90%+ of people in ICU/dying of covid are unvaccinated.
50% effective when it comes to not catching covid (haven't checked this stat myself), 99% effectiveness when it comes to not needing intensive care/not dying
> At this point most of the people who are avoiding the vaccine have already gotten natural immunity
I don't agree with this statement. However, I certainly think there should be an exception to vaccines for people who have aquired natural immunity. In Hungary, if you have a documented recovery from infection, you are also granted an immunity card that can be used to exempt you from pandemic restrictions. I don't know how many other countries are using this approach.
While I don't like the idea of any kind of mandatory medical treatment, there IS public health value in ensuring that everyone partaking in potential super spreading events is immune.
> if you have a documented recovery from infection, you are also granted an immunity card ... I don't know how many other countries are using this approach.
I think most European countries do. I know for certain that the UK does[1] as well as Germany[2] and Austria[3].
Yeah, medical treatment of an individual against their will is problematic for sure, even if it is to protect themselves.
But I see no problem with mandating vaccination or some other, equally strong, way of reducing transmission risk for participation in public events. In this case the individual is given a choice in how they help protect others.
Some people call also the second instance "mandatory vaccination" and object to it on the basis of body autonomy, which honestly doesn't make much sense since the discussion is about how the right to participate can be restricted. And "you are more likely than others to make everyone else sick" is a pretty legitimate reason to restricts someone's right to attend.
The whole pushback and anger caused is the wholly illogical singular condition of being vaccinated vs. being COVID recovered or even better option - even safer than vaccination is recent negative COVID test result - which would catch if vaccinated or unvaccinated had COVID and were likely to spread it. It's this nonsense that's rightfully instilling fear in people, and at least in Canada Justin Trudeau is pandering to and rallying an ideological mob by stirring up for unvaccinated - and keeping message very ideological without nuance or critical thinking to highlight such absurdities with a vaccine passport vs. doing a safer and more inclusive version say called a safety pass - which would 100% keep people safer.
> Since the vaccination doesn't help against spread, the argument is not true in my opinion.
Can you provide a source for this statement? As far as I know, even though not 100% effective against infections and virus shedding, the vaccines do help against spread so I'd like to know if I'm misinformed.
Do we want to eradicate COVID? Or do we think that it’s mild enough to not be worth the effort? There is no evidence that waiting for natural immunity will work. There is a list of diseases (polio, etc) where we’ve shown we can eliminate using mandatory vaccines.
We would like to eradicate it. Just like we’d like to eradicate the common cold and flu. The problem is that we have no reason to think we can do so, even if we force everyone to be vaccinated three times per year.
We force all hospital workers to get it. They have greatly improved outcomes. The more interesting studies show that the flu vaccines become really effective when both the patients and the health care workers are vaccinated at high rates. That’s the annoying thing about vaccines. They need high rates of adoption.
"Vaccines becoming really effective" is a far cry from eradication. There's still no reason to believe we can eradicate Covid in the foreseeable future.
This is misinformation. Covid cannot be eradicated. Aside from animal hosts it will become endemic. So vaccination should be a choice since it will only affect your safety.
The article title is "Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine".
By removing the *-CoV-2 bit I though this was about SARS-CoV-1(commonly referred to as SARS) infection giving immunity against SARS-CoV-2(commonly referred to as COVID-19).
> The higher hospitalization rate in the 32,000-person analysis was based on just eight hospitalizations in a vaccinated group and one in a previously infected group. And the 13-fold increased risk of infection in the same analysis was based on just 238 infections in the vaccinated population, less than 1.5% of the more than 16,000 people, versus 19 reinfections among a similar number of people who once had SARS-CoV-2.
That isn't surprising to me at all. The actual virus is going to present a wider range of target proteins, etc.
The question is whether you want to have the worst flu ever for weeks (as several friends have described it) with the potential of landing in the hospital, or get a jab. I will opt for the latter. I have poor 5G reception here anyway, so it will make it hard for them to activate the nanomachines.
The relevancy is mostly for the decisions on what status to give people that had it. E.g. do you treat proof of a past infection as equal to vaccinated status? For how long? how do you handle boosters for them? ... (E.g. in here in Germany an infection that's 1-6 months ago is in many ways treated the same as being vaccinated, after 6 months a single booster shot gives vaccinated status (based on results that at that point a booster helps improve immunity). These policies and how to adjust them depend on such results)
Yes, you also have to suffer being sick which can be very bad even if it doesn't kill you.
It's a sign of the weird conversations going on in our times that Science Magazine feels the need remind people that getting sick is bad in the title of this article.
There is precious little evidence that COVID vaccines should be mandatory. At this point most of the people who are avoiding the vaccine have already gotten natural immunity, or will soon.