The vaccine-reluctant

From a comment on the article, Vaccine Success, Media Misery: Is Good News Taboo in the Trump Age? by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“I find it interesting that for all the takes on who will and who won’t take the vaccine- and why- a simple reason is commonly overlooked: For many people in good health and of a certain age group, the virus poses little to no real threat. Yes, there have been terrible cases reported in surprising victims, but as far as the data goes, they continue to be anomalies.”

This is exactly the kind of reasoning that torpedoes a common effort. That’s why the vaccines will work for those who get them, but they’re doomed as far as preventing COVID from becoming endemic (that ship has largely sailed in western countries anyway).

The ego rules. Each individual decides for themselves that they don’t want the vaccine because it probably won’t happen to them. It ends up happening to enough people to swamp the hospitals, leading to unnecessary deaths from both COVID and also from people who can’t get treatment for other medical problems.

The ego does not think about that, cannot comprehend this level of abstraction, does not care. The ego is afraid for itself, so it just make its own little, short-sighted decisions, not caring that these decisions, multiplied millions of times, ends up causing a much bigger problem. Chaos theory is hard. Math is hard.

These people are afraid of the vaccine because it hasn’t been approved yet. They’re all waiting around for those of us who took it to die. When that doesn’t happen, they won’t bother to question their own behavior. They will be afraid for themselves next time as well.

While we’re on the subject: do these people try to convince their loved ones not to get the vaccine? Are they good or bad Christians? Do they fight to convert their loved ones to keep them out of hell? Or do they believe strongly enough that the vaccine is bad to want to protect themselves, but not to protect their loved ones? Or do they not care about their loved ones? How do they reconcile this?

Infecting Vaccinated People

People ask how Israel can have such a high incidence when so many people have already been vaccinated. They hypothesize (without numbers) that this is because of breakthrough infections and conclude that the vaccines are no longer working effectively. They conclude that either the vaccines don’t work against the delta variant or they are losing efficacy over time.

But Israel has about 11M people. They claim to be 70% vaccinated. That means 3.3M people are not vaccinated. We can assume that these remaining people (which constitute a good-sized country) are “clumped” rather than evenly distributed. That is an advantage for the virus.

They had an incidence of 417 on the day I wrote this, corresponding to 4500 cases. That is very high, but delta is very infectious. At this rate, though, it will take 2 years to go through the remaining, unvaccinated population. That is not a realistic herd-immunity strategy.