LogFAQs > #966754638

Conner4REAL posted...

agreed except for the last sentence. Your medical issues dont stop a virus spreading to someone else.

Ultimately, you don't need an entire population to be vaccinated to control a virus. That's the concept of herd immunity: If enough of a population is immune, the virus isn't going to be able to find new hosts to spread to within its infectious window, so you don't get significant outbreaks (and in some cases, the pathogen dies out altogether) and those who remain vulnerable are unlikely to encounter the disease. To that end, if a handful of people don't get vaccinated because they're allergic or otherwise unable to do so safely, that's not the end of the world and there's no need to force them to take that excessive risk.

The problem arises when the unvaccinated population becomes large enough to prevent herd immunity from being reached, which is happening with a number of preventable diseases that had been well controlled (measles being a major one that's seeing actual outbreaks now, and polio making enough of a comeback as to be concerning). That also happened with Covid, and Covid has especially galvanized the anti-vaxx movement to the point where that movement is a very credible public health threat now.