Thread: Coronavirus
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Old 08-04-2021, 12:03   #4689
jonbxx
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Re: Coronavirus

Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman View Post
With the best will in the world Pierre you're making the same false assumptions as the herd immunity crowd last March.

Transmission in schools remains low while community prevalence is low. It's inevitable that infection, given time without mitigation, will spread and infect significant proportions of the school age population and into the wider population - among those unvaccinated and where vaccine efficacy has waned.

It's then an absolute inevitability that at a later date we will be spending more time, money and effort in lockdowns against an escape variant.

I agree being vaccinated should be a matter of choice. However if too many people choose not to the herd immunity threshold is never hit and we spend years firefighting.

If we say it's not safe to vaccinate teenagers and those younger why would someone in their early 20s volunteer to take it? Suddenly HIT requires almost 100% uptake of a 90% vaccine - something we've not seen against new variants.

If we get 70% uptake of a 70% vaccine then mutant variants are an absolute inevitability.

Vaccinate the vulnerable is 2021s 'shield the vulnerable'. While it's rational to want HIT to be achieved by other people taking the vaccine - personal risk becomes zero - the problem is where everyone chooses to be rational at an individual level.

---------- Post added at 09:27 ---------- Previous post was at 09:23 ----------



So a rational individual doesn't take the vaccine but hopes everyone else does. Especially whatever politician was leaning on Channel 4 to suppress the story because it could slow easing of restrictions by a mere two weeks.
Yeah, this is where health messaging becomes difficult and can also be an illuminating window into the British pysche. If we look back at the start of this whole thing, the messaging was 'protect the NHS'. The NHS polls well in this country as most people are proud of the NHS as a British institution. Eventually though, messaging gets old and things change and went from protecting the NHS to a more fearful message. What is interesting however is the fearful message wasn't out ward looking - 'behave yourselves or you will kill someone's nan' but more a 'you really don't want to get COVID'.

Masks are a great example of this. The evidence of masks protecting the user is low but the evidence of masks protecting other is much stronger. This was picked up by anti mask people early on as evidence masks don't work which is somewhat true but only for the person wearing them. Mask wearing protects others. So why isn't mask wearing pitched as a civic duty? Do the people putting together the messaging think that we wouldn't care about protecting others or do they know that we wouldn't care about protecting others? The best case scenario is the first but I fear it is the second.

This is where we get to vaccines. The absolute necessity of vaccines for the protection 18-30 years olds is probably low (again, long COVID excepted) but, as jfman said, we need to get the uptake up for herd immunity or at least to lower the Re value. Matt Hancock said this morning on the BBC that is was your 'patriotic duty' to be vaccinated which is arguable (in that I don't want to argue about this!) but it is definitely a civic duty for younger people to be vaccinated to help protect the older population who either didn't seroconvert or couldn't be jabbed.

We tend to get more right wing as we age. Left wing politics is more around collective responsibility in contrast with more personal responsibility on the right side of things. Should we be pitching vaccination as a duty to society when the time comes for younger people to get jabbed?
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