LogFAQs > #953764602

OhhhJa posted...

I think that my point is that if something is sufficiently deadly, people will voluntarily opt in to be vaccinated. A lot of the problem with the covid shot is many people clearly don't feel that it's a threat to them. And for most people, that's probably true. I know people that know people that have died from it but there are probably a ton of people who don't even know anyone that knows anyone that died from it or even came down with it because the death rate is less than 1% if I recall correctly.

All of which are the personal considerations to which I alluded. Generally speaking, most people don't feel personally threatened by this. In many cases, that's quite mistaken, given that there are actually very few things that have a 0.3% mortality rate that we'd consider "acceptably risky" (skydiving and bungee jumping, for example, clock in at around 0.0002%), and the risk of being killed or maimed by Covid is several orders of magnitude higher than the risk of suffering any serious adverse effects from any of the approved vaccines, but that's just human nature. By and large, humans are really bad at risk analysis, but we still respect people's right to make bad decisions for themselves.

Those are, however, just personal considerations. Public health has to take a lot more than those into account. If somebody's personal choice harms the public, that's when it becomes necessary to intervene. The old "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins" thing. Does that mean people should be pinned down and forced to be vaccinated? Probably not. That's more than a little extreme, in addition to being unnecessary. Does that mean people should be excluded from interacting with the public until they stop acting contrary to the public's health needs? If the risk is great enough. This is the basis for any quarantine: You're not forcing treatment into them, but you are keeping them isolated from society until they recover so they don't infect anyone else.

Will anti-vaxxers pose enough of a risk to America's recovery from Covid to warrant more extreme measures? That remains to be seen. The fact that we can't easily say "no" is quite alarming, but that's the unfortunate reality of the world we live in now.

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