Lots of people have been saying that, I hear it on podcasts, on news shows, on NPR. But it gets drowned out by people like DeSantis in Florida and Abbott in Texas.

100% of the COVID-19 cases in ICU at the hospital, in my county, are unvaccinated and some are dying there. There have been three deaths since end of September of people that were vaccinated but the had underlying serious health problems and were over 75 years old.

Also herd immunity can’t happen if 35% to 45% of population are not vaccinated. The anti-vaxxer are making sure the pandemic will continue.

Let’s say 80% of a population is vaccinated.
20% is not.
Part of the 80 gets contaminated (don’t get (too) sick, don’t die, but can pass it on) and they contaminate part of the 20.
Many of these unvaccinated 20% group gets (really) sick, part of them die.
(With all the consequences that come with it, for the hospitals, the staff, patients who are waiting for other treatments, and the society as a whole.)
Now let’s try this: 80% is vaccinated, and the other 20% gets vaccinated.
Part of the 80 contaminate (part of) the 20.
Guess what?
Much less (to barely any) people get seriously sick, or die.
Which is nice.
Plus, the hospital, staff, other illnesses, society gets spared the big troubles from scenario 1.

Correct me (please) if I am wrong.

What you’re saying is false.

Vaccination drastically reduces your chances of becoming infected in the first place. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t guarantee complete immunity and that immunity does decrease over time, but it makes it much harder for the virus to spread from host to host through a population. If the virus is unable to keep spreading, it will die out. Or we (as a species) could behave like total fucking morons, and try to keep it spreading in our communities and one day it could mutate into something much worse.

@gorillapaws: Yeah, I guess you’re right.

@rebbel: What you said can be, well, said just of a single country. Foreign countries have their own set of problems, as well as laws to deal with it. Not to mention foreigners who come as tourists in the USA.

@luigirovatti It’s not clear to me what your point is in your question. The jury is still out about how much viral load vaccinated people can spread. Are you saying if in fact they can spread the disease, people shouldn’t get vaccinated? That doesn’t make sense.

@janbb: I’m saying, if the point I spoke of in the thread is true, people should be FREE to choose to get vaccinated.

@luigirovatti It’s questionable whether the point you spoke of is true and even if it is, vaccinated people get less sick and don’t need hospitalization usually or die so the stress on the country’s health care system is much less That is a big reason to push vaccination in addition to mitigating the chance of mutations.

You really aren’t keeping up.

People ARE FREE to not get vaccinated. But people are ALSO FREE to require that people working with them, traveling in close quarters with them, etc., be vaccinated and/or wear masks.

” I’m saying, if the point I spoke of in the thread is true, people should be FREE to choose to get vaccinated.” . . . . in your opinion ! !

No science involved !

Get vaccinated !

People have been saying this, or something like it, since vaccines came out, or even earlier.

You have the freedom to not get vaccinated. You do not have the freedom, by your negligence, to make me ill or kill me.

Here is an interesting comparison. I found “this”“https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/ site that shows graphical representations of Covid in Israel. Note the chart entitled Total Coronavirus Cases in Israel It shows how cases have increased over time. Now look at this article. Here are two interesting dates/statements to note. “Israel started its campaign on 19 December 2020, with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu being the first person in the country to receive the vaccine, getting injected on live TV to encourage other Israelis to get vaccinated.[12] In less than two weeks, over 10% of Israelis received their first dose” AND “On 29 July 2021, Israel’s Prime Minister announced that the country was rolling out a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to people over the age of 60, based on the data that suggested significant waning immunity from infection over time for those with two doses.[34] The country expanded the availability to all Israelis over the age of 12, after five months since their second shot.”

So go look at the chart of total cases and look at the dates listed. 19 December 2020 they start vaccinated everyone and immediately the cases start to go up. Then there is a leveling of the increase for several months. Then they say immunity is waning and on 29 July 2021, they start giving boosters. Immediately the chart shows another drastic increase in the cases. Every chart shows pretty much the same thing. They start vaccinating and cases go up, deaths go up.

Israel is 78% vaccinated. If vaccinations were proof against getting the disease or spreading the disease, you would see entirely different charts.

people should be FREE to choose to get vaccinated.

People in the US are already free to choose. That is why we still have Americans who haven’t got the vaccine. It’s old news. Have you been living under a rock or something?

I just had this conversation with an American friend a while ago. She lives in Japan and she just got her second shot. She told me that she was very willing to get the vaccine, but then she had a conversation with her husband and he said the vaccine is compulsory, and suddenly she didn’t feel like taking the vaccine at all. It had everything to do with her being told what to do. She knows she is living in Japan, but if she was free to choose she would have been more willing.

I then told her that something like that won’t work in my country. Here people don’t have any sense of responsibility. “Volunteer” means “I can choose to ignore what you want me to do and you can’t do anything about it”. People are only willing to do something if there is a law for that and a heavy punishment for not doing it.

Just a little personal story to illustrate how your “free to choose” proposal could affect each country differently. Not everyone is going to benefit from being free, because with great freedom come great responsibility, and a lot of people lack the latter.

But if you are trying to make a statement against the vaccine with this question, then that topic has already been done to death here, and @Tropical_Willie sums the entire thing up nicely.

There have been times when 20% of hospitalizations in my local hospital are vaccinated! Plenty of friends I know with breakthrough cases were very sick. We are 55 and up here where I live so our stats skew towards more severe disease, you all mostly hear about the national averages reported by the media, but stats in FL just support what I see locally, they show that a vaccinated 80 year old has more chance of dying from covid than an unvaccinated 50 year old. Hopefully, the boosters will help with that. The people cavalier about covid are still killing grandparents.

I do not accept that there are a lot of asymptomatic cases. I think there is presymptomatic spread and mild cases dismissed as allergies, colds, or some other fairly benign discomfort.

People who are vaccinated have less chance of catching covid than a someone who is unvaccinated. It is not true that vaccinated people get sick just as much and just are asymptomatic.

To get herd immunity we need to be vaccinated up above 90% of the population from how it looks. You have a percent of older people who don’t get immunity from the shot. Then you have people who had covid or were vaccinated, but over time their immunity wanes. So even if 100% of the population was vaccinated, there is a percentage who are not immune. We need a high percentage immune at once; in the same time frame. Right now, we are waiting to see if the boosters create significantly more immunity that is enduring. Maybe Israel has some compelling data?

@seawulf575 When a portion of the population was vaccinated a lot of mandates were lifted. People had masks off, getting together with friends and family, etc. Even unvaccinated start partaking.

@JLeslie That is true. But what doesn’t make sense is the pattern. If cases were going up and they started vaccinating and they leveled out, it would make sense. What we see is as they start vaccinating, cases take a drastic step up. Once the vaccinations level out…there is no big increase in the number of vaccinations…there is a leveling of graph. There is no big increase and they decide they need boosters. When they start the booster campaign, the case load go drastically up again.

@JLeslie look at the other charts as well. They start vaccinating and there is a HUGE spike in the daily case load. Then it levels out and goes back to normal for a while. Then they start giving boosters and there is another huge spike.

Current covid cases per 100,000.

Israel 7 day average per 100,000 is 36.4.

United States 7 day average per 100,000 is 221.5.

Source: https://www.weather2travel.com/travel-advice/covid-19-statistics/

As far as surges I would want to know about the school year and holidays and mandates being lifted.

@seawulf575 What was the vaccination rate among Palestinians? That’s important when you’re talking about herd immunity.

@seawulf575 Israel primarily used the Pfizer vaccine. The Pfizer vaccine requires two doses received 21 days apart followed by an additional 14 days for full efficacy. So let’s look at 19 December 2020 + 35 days (i.e., 23 January 2021). That date, as it turns out, is right at the center of a wave, which means that the infection rate dropped precipitously every subsequent week until the next wave started (though not every single day because real world statistics are never quite that neat and tidy).

As for the booster, the daily case chart shows that it was rolled out after the third big Israeli wave had started. Furthermore, the booster was pushed precisely because the Israeli government (correctly) predicted that another big wave was coming. So the increase of cases after the booster rollout isn’t surprising when you consider that the whole point of the rollout was to make that wave shorter (which it was when compared to the previous wave).

Plus, Pfizer wasn’t as effective as Moderna, it was a lower dose than Moderna, and most likely would have been better to space it more than 3 weeks, but I figure they wanted to be first to market, plus maybe they were pushed to get it out as fast as possible.

I wish Pfizer would do another study with 50mcg doses and 6 weeks apart. They only tried 10,20,30, and 100. The UK are the Guinea pigs for spacing 3 months apart, I’m not sure how that’s doing. I don’t know if anyone is analyzing that.

In the US more hospitalized breakthrough pts had Pfizer than Moderna, but possibly that is because more older and more fragile populations received Pfizer? I have never seen an age breakdown by brand.

By the way in the US we had herd immunity for measles for years. We actually still basically do. When an outbreak occurs here (because someone brings it into the country) it hits immunity walls and dies out fairly quickly. Sometimes a community might us quarantine or close school for several days to stop transmission.

We do not have measles in the US at all except when someone brings it here. Extremely rare.

Measles is unbelievably contagious. Measles is a great example of vaccines that work to achieve herd immunity, even though there are breakthrough cases of measles too.

The difference with measles compared to covid is that when the vaccine for measles was introduced the majority of the population was already immune and didn’t even need the shot. We only needed to vaccinate children for the most part.

I still don’t understand this type of debate. Get Vaccinated. We have had mandatory vaccines for years. If we had this same conversation around Polio, small pox, measles, mumps, etc, we would still be battling those.
The majority of people over 40 years old have had some of these required vaccines.
Just stop the banter and GET VACCINATED.

@Forever_Free the OP looks like he wasn’t around when we were discussing the vaccine issues. His argument is just the exact same thing people have brought up over and over again.

It’s not “anti-vax” as much as anti-compulsion. Viruses mutate. Get a shot if you don’t trust your immune system to do what it was designed to do, and leave everyone else alone. The virus has a 2% mortality rate. You’ll be fine.

@Egg Tell that to 780,000 people that died.

@Forever_Free All those vaccines were of the old variety. They all took some form of the disease, injected it into you, and it let your immune system get used to the disease. That way, the next time you got exposed to the disease (or something close to it), your immune system would instantly kick into action and take care to protect you. The current Covid-19 vaccines do NOT stimulate your immune system. It genetically alters your immune system to take one action when it sees one virus. If the virus alters, the vaccine loses significant amount of efficacy.

But let’s look at another aspect. Take the polio vaccine. Polio was around for a long, long time. Vaccines were started to be researched back in the 1930’s. There was finally an oral vaccine that was created around 1950. The Salk vaccine was an injected version and was not released until around 1955. The Soviet Union did large scale human trials of an oral version created by Albert Sabin. They did these tests over the course of about 5 years…late 50’s to the early 60’s. Based on the results of these tests, the world said it was safe and took up that version as something that would be the best for the people. It was all based on science. Now, look at the Covid-19 vaccines. New technology, never been used before. It has been around since about 1990 and has never been proven safe for any application. Yet when they throw it into a “vaccine” and start human trials by injecting people as an effort to head off the disease, it suddenly is okay. We don’t know what the long term effects are, we really don’t know how it will react with variants, we really don’t know anything. Looking at the VAERS database, there are a huge number of adverse reactions…more than any other vaccine we have ever looked at. By a large margin. So there are adverse reactions.

The Polio vaccines were found to be almost 100% effective after a few doses and the protection lasted a long, long time. They never give “boosters” for it. They gave 3 doses separated by several weeks and then a 4th dose about 6 months later. And the people that got it were protected from getting Polio ever again. There were a very few breakthrough cases….to the tune of 3 incidents of paralysis per 1,000,000 doses for the oral doses (0.0003%). Other than that the adverse reactions were a little pain at the injection site and maybe a little redness. Now compare that to the Covid-19 “vaccine”. People that got the vaccine can still get and transmit the disease. The efficacy wears off after a few months and they want to give boosters over and over again to try keeping the efficacy up. It doesn’t have anywhere near the same protection against variants. The side-effects from the Covid-19 vaccines include the injection site pain and swelling which I will discount as that can happen with most injections. But then you get into the more adventurous reactions. Fevers, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, new or worsening muscle pains, new or worsening joint pain all generally show up in mild to moderate rates significantly more during tests v placebos. And all these symptoms get worse with the second dose. Then you get into the real fun reactions which include lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes…your immune system fighting against the vaccine), appendicitis, acute myocardial infarction, and cerebrovascular accident. Not to mention the Myocarditis and Pericarditis we have been hearing more and more about.

So while you are urging everyone to take experimental drugs and compare them to prove, tested vaccines of other types, you might want to think about what you are really doing.

And because I will have someone like @Tropical_Willie screaming for sources:

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer/reactogenicity.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

mRNA vaccines, such as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, work differently than other types of vaccines, but they still trigger an immune response inside your body. This type of vaccine is new, but research and development on it has been under way for decades.
mRNA-graphics

The mRNA vaccines do not contain any live virus. Instead, they work by teaching our cells to make a harmless piece of a “spike protein,” which is found on the surface of the virus that causes COVID-19. After making the protein piece, cells display it on their surface. Our immune system then recognizes that it does not belong there and responds to get rid of it. When an immune response begins, antibodies are produced, creating the same response that happens in a natural infection.
CDC https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/facts.html

So you agree the vaccines work and you just don’t wont to get vaccinated.

@Tropical_Willie mRNA does cause an immune response. It forces a specific response, it doesn’t let your immune system do what it was designed to do on its own.

mRNA is indeed new. Tell me one thing it was ever used for before they started injecting humans as a Covid vaccine. Don’t tell me what it might be used for or what they were looking for it to help with. One treatment it was actually licensed for. I mean after being around for 30 years, you’d think there would be something, right?

As for vaccines working, I agree vaccines work. I just don’t agree this particular vaccine is safe.

It is called making antibodies not modifying you DNA. Are any of the people vaccinated growing antlers or fur between their toes, that is

Your UNVACCINATED body has NO response to COVID-19 accept to get sick and start to make antibodies. COVID-19 is novel virus, humans have never encountered it until 2019.

” I just don’t agree this particular vaccine is safe.” In your opinion!

How about 780,000 people dead in the USA, The virus isn’t safe.

There have not been millions or hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands people or thousands of people dying from taking mRNA vaccines !

Science is tough to understand.

@seawulf575 I respectfully disagree that they are experimental drugs unless you think all medicine is experimental. There are ADR’s to every medication and treatment on earth. Unfortunately we are dealing with situation and society that is far different that from the 1930’s or 1950’s. People can justify anything if they want to. I however will go the road of proven science that is working to eradicate this no matter how long it takes. Without blocking it’s spread and mutation this will go on for quite some time.
You are welcome to your beliefs and opinion. I however find no reasonable value in your argument.

It’s amazing to me that we’re still arguing about the merits and efficacy of the vaccine, considering the virus has been with us for close to two years and the vaccine has been with us for almost nine months.

@Forever_Free I however will go the road of proven science that is working to eradicate this no matter how long it takes. Yet, we have pushed these vaccines onto millions of Americans and still the disease rages. It is still being contracted by the vaccinated, it is still being transmitted by the vaccinated. Nothing has really changed, except that several thousand people have died from severe side-effects to the vaccine. And that is only the several thousand that were reported. So is it science to push a technology that has never been proven safe and has never been used for any application before? I disagree with that being sound science.

Forget for a moment what people that have a monetary stake in things are saying. Look at reality around you. Vaccines are not keeping people from getting the disease. They are finding there is just as much viral loading in their nasal passages as their unvaccinated counterparts. We are all still wearing masks. We are all still social distancing. Not a single thing has changed. So where is the big gain from these vaccines? In science, when you do an experiment, you have a goal in mind. You make a test to see if that goal is correct or not. In this case, an experimental vaccine was pushed as a cure-all and people started getting it. It was touted that once people got vaccinated they could go back to their normal lives. It was the carrot that was being dangled. Have you gone back to your normal life? So the experiment was a failure. We did not get the desired end goal so there it isn’t working.

Vaccines are keeping people from dying in my county:

Currently 99% of the ICU beds have unvaccianted patients

100% off the dead for the last month are unvaccinated !

For the last 90 days less than three vaccinated people have died; all were severely comprised.

What are you not seeing @seawulf575 ? ? ?

What alt-right website are hanging with or is it Tucker “Swanson Pie” Carlson ?

@seawulf575: __“Have you gone back to your normal life?“__

Hmm, let’s see. April 2020, restaurants around the country closed or severely limited service. Airlines flying on a very limited basis, if at all. Employees all over stayed home, laid off, furloughed, except for essential workers. Covid rates spiking. Funeral homes and coroners were overwhelmed with dead bodies, to the point where they had to use refrigerated trucks to hold the cadavers in some cities. Movie theaters and other public places closed. Stores and retailers closed except for grocery stores and essentials such as Walmart, Costco, Sam’s Club, Home Depot. November 2021, restaurants the country over are now open. Workers are back full time in most, if not all industries. Movie theaters and airlines are back to it. Offices are open again. Not sure where you live but I was in NYC two days ago and it was packed with tourists, shopping, eating, going to plays and seeing the Rockettes. A year ago, this was not the case. So people are vaccinated and back to their normal lives, as you put it. By the way, in NYC, if you’re not vaccinated, you can’t eat in a restaurant or see a show.

Yeah, things are mostly “normal” for me now too, or at least 85%.

@seawulf575 Science has proven that the vaccines work. Yes, the disease is still there. The people that are contracting it are those that are either unvaccinated or have underlying issues.

Please read up on it and stop spreading anti-vax falsehoods and negative speak.