Publicly slugging it out in the weeds grants an optical stalemate to an argument that deserves to lose. Do this a million times in a row and you can launch an entire contrarian movement off vapors -- which is exactly what we have seen.
>Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such.
The failure to control the spread has been obvious for at least half-a-year for anybody doing simple arithmetic on public numbers (and like others i have commented on that as far back then). Now beside being obvious, it is also confirmed by a proper scientific publication
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
" A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha."
"Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."
Moreover, the virus has become endemic in a number of zoonotic reservoirs, including deer, feral cats, and some mustelids, and vaccinating or exterminating those populations is not realistic in the next few decades. This is not currently a significant source of human outbreaks as far as I can tell, but after the humans reach herd immunity, it will be the only one.
Consequently, the cost-benefit tradeoff for covid vaccinations with the currently available vaccines needs to be evaluated with respect to the benefit to the person being vaccinated. I'm glad I'm vaccinated: as an obese 45-year-old man, my risk of death from covid might approach 1%, which is enormously higher than any plausible risks from any of the vaccines I'm familiar with. But that tradeoff is not the same for everyone, and there are populations where the rate of death or permanent harm from a vaccine, though still extremely low, is likely higher than the rate of death or permanent harm from covid itself.
The situation would be different if, for example, vaccinating schoolchildren prevented them from infecting and inadvertently killing their grandparents. But it doesn't. So the fact that the existing vaccinations clearly fail to control the spread is extremely relevant to the cost-benefit tradeoff, in particular because it means that there's no valid public-interest argument for requiring people to get vaccinated. Since both the cost and the benefit flow to them individually, they should be able to make the decision individually, except in cases such as small children and comatose patients.
This is an argument that deserves rational consideration, not dismissal with mindkiller phrases like "vapors" and "anti-vax". That's the sort of argument, or rather non-argument, that "deserves to lose".
That doesn't appear to be on the cards; neither vaccines nor actual infection confers immunity, in either case you only get resistance. And if you can't get individual immunity, talk of herd immunity is silly.
COVID is going to be endemic.
My hope is that omicron confers cross-resistance to other variants. From what I've heard, an omicron infection is nastier than a bad dose of 'flu, but much less nasty than infection with delta. With omicron's extreme success at transmission, perhaps omicron will give the whole world a degree of resistance to all COVID variants, and endemic COVID will eventually become no more scary than endemic adenovirus.
I hope you're right about the scariness, but I worry about the incidence of "long covid", and in particular the possibility of widespread organ damage from blood clots.
That argument just doesn't hold the water. Most people don't reduce that burden by being vaccinated because they weren't such a burden to start with. For the most people the probability of hospitalization is so low that vaccinating them results in the practically undetectable changes to the total hospitalizations. High-risk groups is a different story. Vaccinating them does change the hospitalizations number.
So far - the available vaccines fail to control the spread, and those vaccines for most people fail to affect hospitalization numbers. So, what is the rationale for the vaccination mandates?
Note - it is the core of democracy that a limitation of personal body rights should be accompanied by a well founded reason of public interest. For the vaccination mandate that would be a scientifically sound conclusion of limit of spread for example or even say meaningful effect on the hospitalizations numbers. So far the vaccination mandate side has failed to provide any such scientifically sound reason. That makes the vaccination mandate to be an unreasonable authoritative action of gross violation of basic personal rights.
