[spaginal]

Taking a medication as a condition of maintaining basic human rights, or merely existing is a long bridge to cross. This bears no equivalency to a seat belt.

We know the shots don’t prevent spread, nor prevent you from getting it, the only argument is it lessens severity of symptoms, yet many are dying after the shots anyways and being hospitalized.

So you are basically arguing they I need to take a medicine that supposedly reduces symptoms, although in practice it isn’t showing that effect, but carries other potential negative health effects unique to the shot itself.

A more analogous car argument is that I would be required by law to pick up random hitch hikers everyday and drive them to their destination as a condition of owning and driving a vehicle, especially if we are working off the public good argument. If I refuse, I lose the car. Most likely 98% of those hitch hikers won’t chop me up into little pieces in the middle of the desert, but there is always that one...

[boplicity]

> We know the shots don’t prevent spread, nor prevent you from getting it, the only argument is it lessens severity of symptoms

That's just not true. The shots significantly decrease the chance that you'll get COVID. They also significantly decrease the chance that you'll spread COVID. This is most clear via the lower likelihood of infection. (You can't spread it if you don't have it.)

Sure, the shots are not 100% effective. They were never claimed to be. That doesn't mean they are not very effective. They are.

[kristjansson]

Pretty much all of public health is cost-benefit analysis.

Vaccines dramatically reduce the incidence and severity of disease, and therefore the spread. It would be nice if I could say ‘prevent’ instead of ‘reduce’ there, but this is the vaccine we have for the pandemic we’re facing. Vaccine complications are about 1e-5, COVID complications (conditional on infection) are like 1e-2. Excepting non-falsifiable mRNA concerns the balance seems firmly in favor of vaccines if we’re all going to be exposed eventually.

It’s fair to argue that individuals should be able to chose to forgo that benefit based on their own views; it’s not fair to argue that there’s no benefit.