What does a “successful” vaccine mean? Covid is a respiratory disease, so unless you go around in a space suit for the rest of your life you cannot avoid exposure to the virus, and the virus will enter your body via the same mechanisms a cold or flu virus enters the body. No vaccine will prevent the virus entering your body. The best we can hope for is a vaccine that stimulates the same immune system response that is currently responsible for >99% of infected people recovering. Which is obviously a good thing as we get to whatever level of herd immunity is achievable quicker and hopefully safer.
The immune response from a vaccine to respiratory diseases (like flu) is typically weaker than the immune response developed naturally, so hope that the vaccine will somehow work better than our natural immunity is misguided. Flu vaccines for example are only about 50% effective or “successful”.
Vulnerable to serious disease and potential death? Those whose immune systems are compromised whether through existing illnesses or age, or both. There is the potential for a young healthy person to get serious disease and die, but that exists with countless other viral and bacterial diseases.
that’s a fairly large portion of a population to isolate and protect. Throw in the people that care for them, their families, their friends etc, that subset gets wider.
Are you advocating for that entire subset to live life with different conditions than everyone else?
what advisory level would that be? how would you advise someone who has a sick Mum or Dad to live their life while everyone else is going about their business? Or a sick child? Too bad. We’ll go on about our business and best of luck with that.
Yes, if we want to minimize their chances of getting Covid. The only other way to protect them is to develop herd immunity, so their chances of encountering the virus are minimized.
until this much discussed herd immunity comes around how is that achievable? You guys seem to condone that the subset of people should be the only ones who’s lives are imposed on by restrictions. “Protect the vulnerable” seems soft speak for fuck the vulnerable under a bus and we go on about our lives
To avoid crowded settings, to make extra efforts to socialise with a distance and outside…
I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here? The emerging evidence is that older people are generally shielding themselves and the new practices in nursing homes are avoiding more infections in the elderly. My own dad does a bit of work still and won’t be going into any meeting or office setting again, getting on public transport etc. He will take his chances with his grandchildren and socializing on occasion. It is imperfect but is his choice.
What is your proposal? Shut everything down because they we are all in the same boat?
Like Malarkey here, you aren’t really making a point, just criticizing others. To the point on a “successful vaccine”, what happens if we don’t have one?
“No vaccine will prevent the virus entering your body.”
And you were saying to me to eschew comment…
Look, you will now riff on ‘successful’. And then riff on something else, temperament as momentum. Fair enough. You use TFK as an intellectual gym. Fair enough, and off you go, but I do not need that gym.
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I understand the way language works in its higher reaches. You do not.
So what exactly are you proposing that isn’t happening now with “protect the vulnerable”. Should whoever isn’t vulnerable suffer no burdens of the pandemic?