What I mean by punching yourself in the face is: Even if you don't have any family and you hate your neighbours, getting vaccinated is still in your own interests, because it stops you dying.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1
Since the Delta variant is so contagious there will be no significant herd immunity effect to protect the unvaccinated. The virus is now endemic and can't be eradicated so all of us can expect to be exposed multiple times throughout our lives.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/80-of-vaccinated-covid-carrier...
RNA levels spike to the same levels on PCR, but they decline faster, and culturable amounts of virus are lower in breakthrough infections, indicating a higher proportion of viral debris in breakthrough infections rather than virus:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.20.21262158v...
Even if you take the worst numbers out there vaccines still eliminate 50% of infections. And symptomology, viral load and transmissibility are correlated -- which means the vaccines is likely to be effictatious against transmissibility just like it is against disease.
The worst-case idea that breakthrough infections, even though they're much less severe, produce identical risk of transmission does not make any sense at all.
I would bet money that if everyone was vaccinated that the R0 of delta would be less than 1.0 and we would not have epidemic spread and that breakthrough superspreaders are incredibly rare.
Maybe against community spread of infection.
The protection vaccines provide against overloaded hospitals, tragic avoidable deaths and paralysing additional lockdowns and mask policies is clear, though.
This all seems to be done in order to blame unvaccinated people - and more specifically unvaccinated Republican voters - for the fact that Covid is still spreading and causing deaths and economic damage. (Vaccination rates are also dangerously low amongst black Democrat voters, but of course it'd be politically unacceptable to blame them in the same way). The press keeps pushing the narrative that we could end Covid and all the damage it's doing if not for those evil unvaxxed people, even though this doesn't seem to be borne out by the experience of countries with higher vaccination rates or the scientific evidence.
