Hard disagree. The people that are going to get vaccinated either have or will at some point. The people who aren’t, won’t unless somehow forced. Policy won’t do anything except make people even more angry. Fuck policy.
It really drives me nuts when people take the attitude “I know what’s best for you, you’re too stupid to be able to make your own decisions. I’m really smart and I’ll decide for you.”
No, absolutely no. None of this is about "what's best for you". As I said above, one of the biggest category errors with COVID-19 is to treat it as a personal risk issue. The personal risk is almost inconsequential, the real problem is with public health, and the decisions there have very little to do with "what's best for you" as an individual, and everything to do with "what's best for our health systems".
What I’m saying is, policy won’t do bupkis. People are going to do what they want. This ideological idea that “policy will fix covid” is willful ignorance at this point.
My point isn't about policy. I'm retrospectively criticizing everyone and everything that has cast COVID-19 as a matter of individual health and thus allowed the entire constellation of "I know what's best for me" bullshit to spring up.
COVID-19 is a public health issue, not a personal health issue, and the required strategies for public health issues are not related to individual making the choice of "what's best for them."
Had COVID-19 been discussed and described correctly from the outset, this whole angle that "I know what's best for me" would have been appropriately cut off at the ankles before it even got started. Instead, we now face a situation where even the people who have been vaccinated likely did so thinking of it as a personal choice.
For the record, I got vaccinated for a very selfish reason: I didn’t want to kill someone by giving them covid and figure out how to live with that for the rest of my life. It was an extremely personal reason. And I got vaccinated in February as part of an early essential personnel group.
I am really struggling to figure out how you don’t think it’s a personal decision. Surely you don’t think people are anything but utterly selfish and self-centered.
I don’t think it was framed as a personal decision, I think it was an organic bubbling up of how people actually feel. If you’re suggesting we should be trying to manipulate how people feel, we’re on such different pages that this conversation will no longer be sustainable.
In one of the worst cases in the world (Peru), COVID-19 killed about 1% of a country's population. In countries like the US, it has killed/made seriously ill/given long term complications to a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Every year, people face risks at least as bad as COVID-19 without flinching or taking any particular risk reduction approaches. I feel awful and very sad for the people who lost a relative, friend, neighbor or colleague to this disease, but in most developed countries, your own personal risk of direct harm from COVID-19 is very, very, very low.
However, the risk to public health systems is immense. Too many people getting COVID-19 at the same time (let's remember that even with out Delta, it's remarkably contagious), and whatever fraction of them require hospitalization start jamming up the hospitals. Now, your regular everyday trauma, acute disease or sudden worsening of a chronic condition becomes a potentially fatal incident, because the hospitals can no longer treat you (at all, or even just effectively).
That is the actual risk of COVID-19 in terms of a nation-state, and what nation-state would say "oh, it's just a a personal decision whether or not you take steps to help avoid that scenario"? Rhetorical question, because we known precisely which ones have taken that approach, and what the results have been.
I agree with everything you’ve said above. I think most rational people, even those who don’t want the vaccine, would agree.
The issue is, it doesn’t matter. People don’t care. They think they’ll either not catch it, or not need to be hospitalized if they do. Or I suppose, they just don’t trust the contents of the shot. At this point I think it is impossible to get those people to change their minds for whatever reason they’ve latched on to.
It really drives me nuts when people take the attitude “I know what’s best for you, you’re too stupid to be able to make your own decisions. I’m really smart and I’ll decide for you.”