Can somebody explain to me what is the long term "let's vaccinate everybody plan", and what data are we collecting to determine if the plan is working or not, and what data would indicate that the plan is not working in that case?
Plan Number One is, I should think, to reduce hospital loads. Here where the vax rate is above 85%, fully 3/4s of hospitalizations are the unvaccinated. The evidence is so damn clear, it astonishes me that there are still people who choose the worst possible bet. Did they somehow miss out on all their primary-grade math education?
For that goal wouldn't it make more sense to vaccinate only the risk populations like older people, overweight people and people with respiratory issues? That way you avoid promoting vaccine-resistant variants while protecting people that are likely to be hospitalized, hospitalizations are really low in younger people, and almost zero in kids. I think for example in Spain for all populations below 50 years old there has been more suicide deaths than Covid deaths since the pandemic started.
You could argue that it can still be good to take vaccines even if it's not to protect yourself, to reduce transmission, but seeing the recent examples of Singapore and Gibraltar with >90% vaccination rates and cases exploding that this hypothesis should be revised.
Also I haven't seen many studies evaluating the efficacy of vaccine that also take into account the seasonality of Covid waves, which makes me skeptic seeing the cases exploding as the cold weather arrives.
I imagine that's going to be tricky with their own state-run media outlet distributing vaccine misinformation, like this.
It seems to be a frequent tactic to say, "This hurts us but it hurts you more. Therefore we win because you're too weak to take that." As far as I can tell, it seems to be pretty effective.
