I don't know what to tell you other than just use common sense. The vaccine does not protect you from getting the virus at a very high rate and if we all got vaccinated tomorrow, people would still be passing the virus around and it would still mutate.
Don't forget about all the lies the media and the government have told you since this whole thing began. What we know now vs. what we knew a year ago is like night and day...which tells you these professionals don't know a whole lot about this virus. Just because a polio vaccine worked doesn't mean this vaccine will work. It's all common sense. Why wouldn't the government have us all wearing N95 masks if they really cared about us not spreading the virus? Why would they still allow these inefficient paper masks? Don't forget, Fauci lied to the world about masks in the beginning and admitted it. This whole thing has defied common sense since it began. At this point it's about control and money while presenting you with the illusion that it's about humanitarian efforts.
Common sense trumps anything the media tells you. If you want to fully protect not only yourself but the people you don't know that you care about, then you should be wearing an N95 anywhere you go because there is enough evidence right now that you are still at a good risk of contracting the virus even though you're vaccinated. In some ways you could potentially be more deadly to someone who isn't vaccinated because you could be carrying the virus and you would have a much higher percentage of being asymptomatic or just have a little bit of the sniffles and think it's nothing.
This post is one big pile of
.
"Common sense" is not measurable in any way that could possibly be useful during a global pandemic. If I trip on a loose floorboard in my house, common sense dictates that I should either nail it down tighter or choose a walking path that circumvents the loose floorboard so I do not trip over it in the future. I require no outside source or expert opinion to arrive at that conclusion, and it would represent a colossal failure of my common sense if I persisted in tripping over the loose floorboard.
COVID-19 is not a loose floorboard. And "common sense" is not a catch-all that can assist in protecting an
organized society during a global pandemic. Expert opinion is vital in crafting a societal response to the threat that COVID-19 poses. More to the point, it would be problematic if what we knew today bore any resemblance to what we knew a year ago. This is the scientific method at work. It's startling to me that
your common sense has failed to recognize that science is
always subject to the best information available in a given moment. As new information is acquired, one must make adjustments to one's approach. What may have been sensible based on the information available in the spring of 2020 will not necessarily be sensible based on the information available in the summer of 2021. This is not politics. This is not a game of "Gotcha!" It's not flip-flopping. It's a reevaluation of the facts and the data on the ground to determine the most sensible and safe path forward.
You sound increasingly like a partisan on this issue, and not someone who has any interest in approaching the facts as they are. I'd guess that you're more than a little influenced by "the media" yourself, as your talking points seem as if they're peeled directly from dozens of other bad faith arguments currently being propagated by untrustworthy news sources. By the way, do you even have any idea what you mean when you say "the media"? I often wonder if people grasp how silly it is when they wield that particular cudgel. It just smacks of a failure to think critically in
concrete terms about an issue at hand, instead relying on a boogeyman they'll happily fill with straw.
"The media" is not some monolithic entity that's out to get you. When my mother says she "saw it on the Internet," she is showing her age a little bit. She doesn't exactly have a strong grasp of the vernacular related to online engagement. The internet is, of course, far too vast a network to cite as a singular source. She might as well say "I saw it on planet Earth." What she probably means is that she saw it on Facebook, which is itself just a vast network where information is shared from a wide variety of other sources. When you say "the media," you sound rather like my mother. It's too big of a target and too non-specific to be taken seriously. The truth is that there are plenty of reliable media sources to seek information from during a global pandemic that offer current information rooted in the best available scientific data in a given moment.
If your sources of information are narrow and untrustworthy, then yes, "the media" won't be particularly helpful to you in discerning misinformation from fact, or in recognizing the sensibility of mass vaccination during a global pandemic. But COVID-19 doesn't particularly care if an individual watches [conservative television network X] or reads [liberal newspaper Y] or listens to [ideologically-disorganized podcaster Z]. It's just going to continue to bounce from host to host until we do something to choke off its supply of available bodies.
For the record, no epidemiologist has
ever said that the COVID-19 vaccines would prevent individuals from contracting COVID-19.
That's not how vaccines work, and your rather generic talking points betray a lack of education in very simple immunology. Vaccines are an instruction manual for an individual's immune system. They teach an individual's antibodies how to defend the human body against the incursion of a particular infectious disease. They can aid in the suppression of or outright elimination of symptoms, but they don't protect from contraction. They're not a shield or a force-field. A well-developed vaccine is a general that effectively trains and musters its troops to victory.
This is the kind of sh*t you can read on the posters in your doctor's office when you get your flu shot. The information is readily available and easily explained to those who are willing to listen. A child can comprehend it. And I'm perpetually astounded by the ability of the American mind to look at representative data and conclude that it's wrong, that they know the
real truth because of their common sense or their intuition or their [extremely limited] experience or their partisan leaning or their pet conspiracy theory of the week.
Ultimately, what you failed to address that
@Warhawk took pains to explain on multiple occasions is that the vaccines are doing a remarkable job at reducing the hospitalization rates and death rates amongst the vaccinated.
This was always the goal. If enough are vaccinated, our healthcare system can stabilize so that hospitals have beds to offer to non-COVID patients in need, and our economy can stabilize as more go back to work, as events stop being cancelled, as masks are no longer required. Mass vaccination won't eliminate COVID-19 altogether, but it can give this highly transmissible and dangerous virus fewer avenues for replication and mutation.
One doesn't have to be a scientist to understand the math. The duration and severity of the disease is orders of magnitude higher in the unvaccinated than in the vaccinated. Its symptoms make it easier to spread. Reduce the duration of the disease and reduce the severity of its symptoms, and you give the virus fewer opportunities to replicate and mutate. A vaccinated asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19 wearing a mask of any kind is going to be far less likely to spread the disease than an unvaccinated carrier coughing without a mask in the elevator with their coworkers on the way up to the 13th floor of their office building.
Here's a simple analogy. The Kings had a historically awful defense last season. Should the front office and coaching staff abandon all hope of defensive improvement simply because the team's bad defensive habits often allow opposing teams to march to the rim with impunity? Or should they make an effort to bolster the team's defense to prevent penetration with greater frequency, even though there will be opposing players who still manage to "break through" that defense? The answer should be obvious. You don't give up on mass vaccination just because of the risk of break through infection. You do the math. You follow the data. You reduce the spread of the disease wherever you can. Vaccination is the single most effective tool for achieving that task. The more who get vaccinated, the closer we are to returning to some semblance of normal.
Honestly, I have yet to hear a single good faith argument against mass vaccination that was worth listening to. The bad faith arguments are hardly worth responding to anymore. It's all just slapdash justification for narcissism masquerading as ideological reasoning. It would be infinitely more productive if the vast majority of those who are refusing vaccination simply said, "I'm selfish and I don't particularly care about the health and safety of those around me."
