[pknight]

I don't understand why this batch of vaccines is being compared to vaccines for other diseases as if they are the same thing. Other vaccines are generally mandated for children with extremely high efficacy, have an extremely low chance of adverse events, prevent community spread perfectly or almost perfectly, have an exactly known quantity of doses required and are deployed as prevention (not in the midst of a pandemic). Importantly, they treat diseases that cause extremely bad outcomes in children at very high rates. This current generation of covid vaccines is more like a drug that works well for some and not so for others, doesn't prevent transmission, aims at moving target, requires an unknown amount of doses, only modestly discourages continued spread and represents one of many ways for society to treat, tackle and prevent the disease. This is a disease that is trending downwards in its mortality rate, while being of fairly low risk for the majority of the population, with the lowest risk found for young people. The diseases we mandate children to get vaccinated for are not declining in their disastrous health effects as far as I know. The risk of adverse events from the current set of covid vaccines is lowish but not particularly low. All that doesn't make the vaccines we have for covid any less important, but the comparison really does not wash and is a highly dubious way of engaging around the topic of body sovereignty.

There are a small group of people out there who are scared to death to take this vaccine because they genuinely think it will do harm to them. They are being asked to override their own alarms by people who do not share the fear because they don't have the same alarm bells going off. I know only a few of these people and they all have a ton of prior negative experiences with the medical system that would have left me feeling much the same way if I had shared their experiences personally. There are people that have been put in a 'do as you are told' situations and have received medical interventions that have done them great harm. Now they are being hounded and once again are being told to do as they are told, while fearing for their own health. A lot of people are willing to sweep aside their concerns as if they are asocial, ignorant, stupid, irresponsible and part to blame for the scale of the epidemic. People who feel out of control want to blame others so very badly, concentrating culpability in the hands of a group of bad actors, and it results in completely warped thinking with a tendency to dehumanise. And people can pick this up in others and it only increases their skepticism. They fear people operating in a blinkered, blame-seeking authoritarian way, and they see that as danger.

Though I encourage vaccination and have repeatedly tried to talk people who fear it off the ledge, I totally understand where the dictatorship and corruption logic is coming from. It doesn't take a hard-core cynic to raise an eye-brow when a drug company CEO proclaims that we'll all be needing many repeated doses of their product for years to come, while a leading political figure with immediate ties to the biotech industry wants to encourage countries to mandate the use of their products. If you had told me 2 years ago that society would control, monitor, demonise and divide people on the basis of having or having not received a recent government sanctioned medical treatment, I would have probably called you a hysterical conspiracy nut.

[stormking]

Thank you! Every crazy axe murderer receives more empathy then the people who simply stopped trusting the system after being lied to one time too often.

Two things drive me crazy: 1. How easy it is to dehumanize a significant percentage of the population. 2. How willingly politicians embrace that in order to find a scapegoat for their own failures.