1) Little as in "0, but maybe someone wants to quibble that technically it did something so I'll hedge". As far as I can tell literally everyone I know caught COVID, so it is fair to say the vaccine had no impact on transmission. Raising the obvious question of why it matters where people caught it.
2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now. Factor in that there'd probably be between 40 and 60% uptake of the vaccine just by people being prudent and the authoritarianism was not only a betrayal of the principles our civilisation is supposed to be defending but also ineffective.
And, as the current article showcases, extremely ill-advised.
3) That logic is silly. We don't mandate people do anything special about flus and that'd save far more lives than thousands. Do you consider people who advocate normal life even though influenza exists to be some sort of malign force in society? Even COVID is still killing people. 100s of thousands are still going to die from this thing. But you want to support an abandonment of basic human rights over a few thousand maybe-deaths that can't even be detected? In the extreme, more people have been purposefully murdered to secure basic liberties than that - these aren't the sort of rights that should be casually taken away.
> 1) Little as in "0, but maybe someone wants to quibble that technically it did something so I'll hedge". As far as I can tell literally everyone I know caught COVID, so it is fair to say the vaccine had no impact on transmission. Raising the obvious question of why it matters where people caught it.
Many hospitalizations and deaths from COVID occurred on subsequent infections.
> 2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now.
False, that’s simply not how infection works.
Part of the difference here is viral load on exposure. Vaccines and masks reduced viral loads in the air, which then gave people’s immune system longer to react. The immune system takes time to ramp up, but so do infections. A larger initial exposure can snowball even in reasonably healthy individuals.
So are you advocating authoritarianism on an ongoing plan? Because most COVID infections - and deaths - are still to come in the future. By this ineffective logic you are looking at 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands of deaths because we're reverting to a dignified baseline of respecting civil liberties and human rights. Are you comfortable with that?
2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now. Factor in that there'd probably be between 40 and 60% uptake of the vaccine just by people being prudent and the authoritarianism was not only a betrayal of the principles our civilisation is supposed to be defending but also ineffective.
And, as the current article showcases, extremely ill-advised.
3) That logic is silly. We don't mandate people do anything special about flus and that'd save far more lives than thousands. Do you consider people who advocate normal life even though influenza exists to be some sort of malign force in society? Even COVID is still killing people. 100s of thousands are still going to die from this thing. But you want to support an abandonment of basic human rights over a few thousand maybe-deaths that can't even be detected? In the extreme, more people have been purposefully murdered to secure basic liberties than that - these aren't the sort of rights that should be casually taken away.