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I tried skimming the top few responses to your post to see if I had anything to add. I see a very wide range of perspectives on this, both internally in my own mind and across my diverse friend group.
I am not addressing your discomfort with policies, because I share many of them.
A practical anecdote because my dad has severe COPD
My household (girlfriend, brother, father, myself) all got covid last December. My father is 72, has COPD, diabetes (afaik reduces ability to heal the body to SOME degree), 1 partially collapsed lung that never recovered after hospitalization, severely overweight, etc. etc. etc. He's on all the medicines. While he's surprisingly spry for someone in his condition it is clear that he is highly at risk from a respiratory illness. Even the cold makes me worry.
We got vaccinated summer 2021, and my father got boosted about 2 weeks before I caught Covid. Normally, he takes a while to recover from colds and other things, but he had a markedly shorter infection with Covid than my brother and girlfriend. He was like 2-4 days. I was 3-5 days and my brother and girlfriend took about 7 days to get back to normal.
Yes, there's luck involved, but luck must also get applied on a bell curve, right? How likely do I find it that the "vaccine" didn't perform it's utility function appropriately by giving my father increased active antibodies for a while?
Does that mean I support mandatory vaccination policies? Absolutely not, but I also push back against this idea that the vaccine doesn't do anything, or shouldn't have been approved or delivered to people.
Vaccine legitimacy
People seem to mix up "totally eliminates risk from a virus" and "primes the immune system in some meaningful way." A lot of people wanted total protection from the Covid virus, and what we got was a priming of our immune system to a virus which mutates rapidly. I feel like some of your argument falls (E.g. using "vaccines" in quotes) in to word games in order to discount the utility of priming the immune systems of the population.
If there was a medical intervention that reduced the chances of catching HIV or cancer by some amount (20, 50, 90%), how many people in the population would take it? At what efficacy threshold would you take a pill or injection against a form of cancer?
There was a really good ZDogg MD podcast with Paul Offit (on the CDC vaccine advisory board, voted against youth boosters based on the evidence presented to CDC [maybe that increases his credibility?]) https://zdoggmd.com/paul-offit-10/
They get in to some of the technical details on why a vaccine for a rapidly mutating corona virus has no chance of totally stopping the virus, and how that compares to a virus with different characteristics. The technical details matter.
If consenting adults want to take an experimental medicine, I have no problem with that.
But when medical experimentation is mandated, at risk of losing your job, or ability to participate in society, then I have a huge problem with it. I see it as a brazen violation of the Nuremberg Code by the authorities.
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