But for a young person with no co-morbidities, that chance is still basically 0%.
> C. If one doesn’t take the vaccine there is a significant chance they give the virus to someone else, killing them.
Even if others have taken the vaccine themselves? Either that particular risk is negligible if the vaccine works, or the vaccine doesn't work.
> But for a young person with no co-morbidities, that chance is still basically 0%.
Having long term side effects doesn't round to zero, even for young healthy people. And vaccine side effects do.
The reason the flu vaccine isn't one of them is because it's not that effective to begin with and you have to take it every year. It's not effective enough to really stop an epidemic, so instead vaccinating patients is the main thrust instead of HCW, because the overall impact will be fairly low.
A difference is that COVID is much deadlier, no?
There aren't actually any virus particles in the mRNA vaccines, so there's no biological mechanism for that to happen.
I'm hesitant to just accept this as a fact. Vaccinations can cause very strong immune reactions in young adults that would otherwise likely suffer mild or asymptomatic infections. There are many surveys that query for a basket of sometimes unspecific symptoms such as "fatigue" or "brain fog" as a follow-up of a COVID infection. I'm missing that volume of surveys in the follow-up for vaccinations.
>But for a young person with no co-morbidities, that chance is still basically 0%.
According to table "COVID-19 Fatality Rate by AGE:" at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se..., the mortality rate for everyone under 40 years of age is 0.2%. That "is basically 0", but means that for every 1000 people infected, 2 will die. Roughly half of the US is under 40 years old (https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...). If no-one had gotten vaccinated, you would expect to see 320,000 deaths in that age group. According to https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se..., we've had 286,000 deaths so far in that age group.
>> C. If one doesn’t take the vaccine there is a significant chance they give the virus to someone else, killing them.
> Even if others have taken the vaccine themselves? Either that particular risk is negligible if the vaccine works, or the vaccine doesn't work.
You're forgetting the number 1 law of large numbers. Things that have a very low chance of probability happen all the time at scale. The vaccine reduces the likelihood of individuals dying by orders of magnitude, and as a group it is a great tool to reduce the R0 under 1, but contagion and transmition is still possible, and every new infection we are rolling the dice on getting "lucky" with a new vaccine resistant variant.
Also, are you aware you can be exposed to the virus and not be infected?
I added every age group between 0 and 39, but took the incorrect column (Deaths from all causes, which is obviously incorrect), which puts me off by an order of magnitude.
> Also, are you aware you can be exposed to the virus and not be infected?
That is true, like with any virus it is a statistics game. It is also true that the Delta variant is 1000x more virulent/transmissible, so likelihood of infection is much higher today than a year ago.
That doesn’t even get into the benefit of preventing long Covid and being able to open the economy faster with fewer restrictions
Severe reactions to experimental vaccines for example?
Also, the chance of being disabled for a long while if you are young without comorbidity is far from 0%. It is quite significant, certainly above 0.5%.
1) The vaccine isn't perfect, and herd immunity nonlinearly reduces the risk of everyone including the vaccinated from getting it.
2) Unvaccinated people, who make up the vast majority of the cases, create an environment for the virus to evolve within, possibly mutating into a form that is more dangerous to everyone, including the vaccinated
I would argue that the data now shows that herd immunity is not achievable with any vaccination rate. The vaccines just don't work that way, breakthrough infections are rampant.
> Unvaccinated people, who make up the vast majority of the cases, create an environment for the virus to evolve within, possibly mutating into a form that is more dangerous to everyone, including the vaccinated.
This is speculative. Vaccination-induced immunity is clearly not perfect, at the same it puts selection pressure on the virus. Natural immunity, going by reinfection rates, appears to be much stronger. I would speculate that in a population where 70% are vaccinated, where the amount of infections among the vaccinated is roughly the same, the virus is much more likely to mutate in the vaccinated individuals.
