I took the vaccine and I will take a booster. I am not in a high risk group but I see little personal downside. What I find odd is that all the people saying that if everyone just took the vaccine that we would get rid of Covid. This simply makes no sense. (1) The vaccines wear off rather rapidly. (2) Covid has all sorts of non-human hosts. If you vaccinated the world to 100% Covid is still around in tons of animals and will just come back like every other flu.
They say "listen to the science!". Ok I am a scientist, I am not an expert in epidemics but I do understand math. I have had a few conversations with the epidemic modeling crowd and one thing is obvious is that it is a complex systems and many of these models are not particularly accurate. The epidemic scientists are pretty honest about just how limited what they can predict but somehow the public and politicians have this idea that these scientists know exactly what is going on. In a complex system you simply do not have this level of predictability.
There is also the question is all the hysteria really worth it for fairly mellow disease at least in any historical perspective.
The death rate is rather low and is concentrated on the old and those with underlaying conditions. I would guess in the last 300 years there has been many pandemics of this same lethality that no one really noticed since the number of people over 65 has historically been very low. The 1918 flu killed young people, that is why we know so much about it. Where these mass lockdowns really all the effective? Maybe if they just concentrated on the vulnerable populations that would have been better? I know someone is going to say that is not what the scientists said to do! The problem again is that such systems they really do not know all the variables very well. It could very well be possible that non-locking down and only concentrating on the old could have actually saved more lives, they simply do not know at this point. By the way the number people who die of malaria every year is 410k. The number of Covid death per year is 2.75 million. That is much more but average age of people who died of malaria is much lower with like 60% being children, if you actually calculated total years of life lost it is about the same.
Now the question is if the US actually did a mandate could they get everyone to vaccinated? I would say no. You have have to be willing to go door to door and force people. If you look at the current vaccination rates by populations and groups you are going to run into some problems rather fast. The popular narrative is that it is white republicans that are not getting the vaccine. However if you do a simple calculation. ( I can go through this if you really want, but I simply urge to the reader think about it), you actually have a fairly even split of democrats and republicans who unvaccinated but probably slightly higher on the democratic side.
