Look, the risks are pretty low for younger people, but from a population level every extra bit of immunity helps to reduce the likelihood of health care system collapse (which has been the goal throughout the pandemic).
Protection from Omikron quickly wanes. At what point does that "extra bit of immunity" justify heart injury? We're talking about roughly 1 in 10000 doses administered causing Myocarditis in a young male. We don't know if the risk increases after each dose, but preliminary data suggests that it may:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v...
The study also shows that there was practically no increase in risk for the third shot (though with a fairly wide CI), so it's possible the risk may just depend on whether someone is immunonaive or not.
Has America tried addressing COVID that way, increasing the number of doctors?
https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...
I honestly don't understand how there wouldn't be protection from the vaccine. It's not a sterilising vaccine, but it does offer protection.
With vaccine and booster shots, both require a similar amount of hospital resources.
The current way is simply not sustainable.
I mean yes, that's still sort of the point.
There's still probably about 10% of the population which is unvaccinated and unexposed. If they all wind up catching Omicron in the next 2-3 months (due to its ability to reinfect and ignore neutralizing antibodies to travel through the population to find those still-vulnerable hosts) then the fraction of them winding up in the hospital will be sufficient to knock over the hospital system again. We didn't have any excess capacity in our medical system when this started, and we have less now.
The population's tolerance for any sort of behavioral changes is low, and the unvaccinated aren't listening to anyone, so the real only remaining lever to pull is recommending boosters to try to provide some level of protection against disease and transmission over the next couple of months in order to flatten the curve yet again.
The modelling estimates that I've read though are that we're at about 90% of the population being exposed (depends somewhat widely on vaccination status and how hard the area was hit by Delta though), so we're just about done with the pandemic. Omicron should mostly finish the job that Delta started of finding all the holdouts and burning through all the dry wood in the population. In the meantime though that last 10% is enough to put the medical system under too much stress again.
Now we have 1/10th that by your estimate. Why wouldn't we be under significantly less strain?
And Omicron is able to reinfect through the recovered/vaccinated population and we're not taking any precautions at all now so the rate of infections is through the roof.
Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/28/omicron-is-not...
"Omicron is “not the same disease we were seeing a year ago” and high Covid death rates in the UK are “now history”, a leading immunologist has said."
I think your concern is based on the heightened risk of myocarditis, right?
My understanding (mostly from [0], made by a UK cardiologist) is that the danger of myocarditis from the vaccine is higher than the danger of myocarditis from COVID only for males under the age of 30 who receive a Moderna shot. For every other case, the vaccine is an improvement (so males under 30 should get Pfizer/BioNTech, which is the government recommendation at the moment in my country).
People should be free to choose booster shots, those who are worried can continue to get booster shots.
In essence the same system we have with the flu is what we should have with Corona.
And then we can focus on some of the bigger problems such as Global Warming.
Funny how that got dropped from the spotlight, I didn’t even notice.
I don't see the point written anywhere so I suppose I did.
In my opinion, people should get the vaccine as long as the harm of not having it is greater than the harm of having it. Adverse reactions are very uncommon and unvaccinated people are at heightened risk of hospitalisation (even under 40s) so the balance tips in favour of the vaccine. The booster seems like a good idea due to Omicron.
> People should be free to choose booster shots, those who are worried can continue to get booster shots.
I do agree that people should have a choice to take it or not.
However just as I believe the right to free speech doesn't mean I'm obliged to listen, I believe the right to choose not to be vaccinated (or receive a booster) doesn't mean I'm obliged to be around you. That is, I think it's fine for participation to be refused to people based on their vaccination status (though I support say testing as an alternative).
Too bad the health systems couldn't come up with one tiny sugar pill that would confer 100% protection against all variants for the next 100 years. The are asking us to take 3 shots, the horror!
