Vaccines offer some personal protection but predominantly become effective by achieving herd immunity. Vaccine hesitancy undermines this goal and weakens the system. Being pro-vaccine is senseless without being in favor of enough people being vaccinated to provide strong immunity, including for those who cannot be vaccinated due to medical complications.
Even if you were to argue on behalf of one who is indifferent to vaccines but is against mandates, so long as those mandates encourage vaccination, they effectively are discouraging vaccination and are thus anti-vax.
It can be hard to recognize all of this without the right perspective. In isolation, it is easy to claim that one is not anti-vax; however actions speak infinitely louder than words.
I think everyone where I live should probably be supplementing vitamin D in the winter months because it is damn near impossible for even people working outdoors all day to get enough vitamin D through natural sunlight at this parallel. Never would I dream of mandating a vitamin D regimen to people. My lack of wanting a vitamin D mandate, by your very argument, would make me anti vitamin D.
I take vitamin D daily, and have convinced others they probably should too, which I think makes me an advocate on some level. If even your top percentile advocates are "anti" from your operating definition, because they don't go far enough, you may be an extremist.
Being anti-vax-mandate for an ineffective vaccine is not anti-vax in any way.
Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.
I have not touched the COVID shot because I did not trust it for these reasons:
- vaccines take years to test not months - there were new untested biotech involved - in short order I was being told that it does not work for this flavor of COVID.
And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.
How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.
This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.
This time, there was a financial backer (the government) that was willing to fund development of a whole bunch of vaccine candidates, without any preconditions. That's never happened before.
Normally, if you want to develop a vaccine, you have to go to investors, and convince them that your vaccine has a high probability of succeeding, not only technologically but financially. If you're lucky, you find someone to fund phase-1 trials. After those trials are done, you analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-2 trials. You have to finish those trials, analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-3 trials, which are extremely expensive.
If there's someone who guarantees funding for all three phases up-front, you can go a lot faster, without sacrificing scientific integrity at all. You can begin recruiting people for the phase-3 trials before phase-1 trials even begin. You can immediately begin the next phase of the trials once you know the vaccine passes the requisite safety threshold, even if the previous trials are still returning data.
Normally, these things are done strictly in order in order to minimize financial risk. If there is no financial risk, you can do a lot of things in parallel.
> And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.
The vaccines reduce your risk of serious disease or death by orders of magnitude. That's extremely strong protection. They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.
> How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.
The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.
Your arguments, however you feel may be justified, are not in favor of vaccination, and by definition are anti-vax. Ask yourself what would need to be different for you to be in favor.
Herd immunity does not make vaccines work better, but is a tertiary effect whereby unvaccinated individuals can receive effective protection simply by living in an area with a high vaccination rate. In extreme cases (such as with smallpox) diseases can even be completely eliminated, but this requires extremely effective vaccines that prevent infection and spread, vaccines that are robust against mutations, and diseases that are unlikely to be able to exist without humans. None of these factors apply to COVID or the vaccines developed for it.
Namely, herd immunity absolutely does make vaccines work better, and is the basis of all vaccine policy in the modern world. I'm not even sure how you can state it's a tertiary effect when it is the primary reason vaccine policies exist.
You're simply spreading misinformation. Herd immunity due to vaccination has resulted in the eradication or near eradication of multiple deadly infectious diseases over the last few centuries. And if not for humans, then look only to farm medicine. Ignoring the power of vaccine policies and mandatory vaccination walks humanity back hundreds of years. Eradicating small pox took hundreds of years. We've been combating COVID-19 for close to three years.
Ask yourself: what qualities of a COVID-19 vaccine would satisfy you?
The US has very complex society and diverse population, so mandates do not work and might create backclash.
I think mass vaccination can be easily achieved by mass marketing. Mandates just made this way too political: and as we can see did not achieve a thing.
That's not true! It used to be you had to show your smallpox vaccine scar (the vaccine left a distinctive mark) in order to enter many businesses.
The common western covid "vaccines" do not have the properties of other common vaccines. They are at best comparable to flu shots which I know no one under the age of 50 who has ever took them. Are these all anti-vaxers now too? Have you ever head anyone talk about herd immunity related to flu shots pre-covid? Almost everyone alive today apparently prevented herd immunity for flu most of his life by not taking the flu shot. So we're all anit-vaxers.
>I thought about this for several moments, and I disagree.
You need some more moments I guess, you clearly didn't think this trough.
For example they could argue that people will rebel against "you must do X" reflectively, but a well designed and sensitive information campaign might win them over.
One would then be quite ignorant of the history of how vaccines are rolled out. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211029-why-mandatory-va...
The vaccine does not target your mucosal immune system. It's injected. Thus, the vaccine will help you if you develop a severe case of Covid that spreads beyond your throat/sinuses/lungs. Immune system compartments work largely independently. [1]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27169/
> The first is that immune responses induced within one compartment are largely confined in expression to that particular compartment. The second is that lymphocytes are restricted to particular compartments by expression of homing receptors that are bound by ligands, known as addressins, that are specifically expressed within the tissues of the compartment. (Immunobiology: The Immune System in Health and Disease. 5th edition.)
That really isn't what normal people infer from the term.
