This is a very worthwhile and informative read, and underscores some very pertinent points:
--Things are going to get much worse thanks to the Delta variant, and by the way variants happen via widespread transmission among the unvaccinated.
--The upside is, based on data from the highest-vaccinated countries like Israel and the U.K. which already experienced Delta spikes, the hospitalization and death rates will be much lower, much less proportional to case rates than in previous spikes.
--The downside to that very point is: there will still be increased hospitalization and death, *particularly* among the unvaccinated (among them, those numbers will skyrocket).
--We literally would not be in this position right now if more people had gotten vaccinated to begin with. I get so sick of people spewing bullshit like "We're just being asked to do what didn't work to begin with." That's a nutso take, because you can't say something didn't work WHEN YOU DIDN'T ACTUALLY DO IT. (People pulled the same bullshit about masks, when case rates did not go down as far as expected because the compliance rate was never as high as we were always told was needed.)
--And then there's this: "I think we’ve gotten numb here. We’ve gotten numb to the point that if we had done a much better job vaccinating, like any other vaccine in our history — like polio or many others where everybody got vaccinated — we wouldn’t be dealing with nearly as many deaths, hospitalizations, or the big burden of cases and on and on. I think if you just pick the upbeat side of this, it ignores that. There is a real downside here that we can’t ignore. When you have 35-year-old people — healthy people, perfectly healthy — who wind up in the hospital and are teetering on death, when you have that, you say, God, what are we doing here? We could have prevented this."
I am so NOT on board with this idea being passed around that "I respect your choice whether you get vaccinated or not," as though there is a moral equivalency there. THERE ISN'T. Your choice of personal freedom ends when your choice literally causes other people to get seriously ill or die. Unless you have a legitimate medical reason for avoiding vaccination, which you concluded in a conversation with your actual doctor (and those people do exist, and they are precisely why the rest of us should be vaccinated, TO PROTECT THOSE PEOPLE), then seriously, go fuck yourself. With an mRNA syringe.
