> As I got closer, though, I started to believe that if the rumor was true, I would never have been able to justify to myself that I had stayed at my desk and turned down an escape from the pandemic.
I just recently got my first shot of the Moderna vaccine last week. When I learned that I would be getting it, I went through the same euphoric excitement the author is describing. Then it slowly dawns on you that this is simply a bandaid. Something to stop the massive amounts of deaths. It's not going to miraculously end everything and make the world go back to normal. There is no "escape". You're not going to be hopping on flights, vacationing, and going to bars again any time soon.
This is a real mistaken mindset that I think people are going to have to come to terms with. The vaccine is not a silver bullet. It doesn't just make the virus magically bounce off of you like a force field. You will still get infected if you are exposed, and can very well still transmit it. The vaccine simply keeps you from developing severe disease.
We (the human race) have a long, slow, painful slog ahead of us to return to anything even resembling what things were like in Fall 2019. The virus is going to become endemic. Overall population vaccine uptake will most likely look like Flu vaccine rates (<50%). And that means life will never be quite the same.
> There is no "escape". You're not going to be hopping on flights, vacationing, and going to bars again any time soon. We (the human race) have a long, slow, painful slog ahead of us to return to anything even resembling what life was like in Fall 2019.
Wow. You're entitled to that bleak outlook, but unless you're in a super-high risk group, I would advise you to snap out of it and resume living your life.
I've literally done all of the things you listed in the past month. Additionally, I'm at the gym 5x a week. If you're safe/responsible, there is absolutely no reason you can't do 99% of the things you want.
>I've literally done all of the things you listed in the past month. Additionally, I'm at the gym 5x a week. If you're safe/responsible, there is absolutely no reason you can't do 99% of the things you want.
The reason I'm not doing those things isn't because I can't. I'm at practically zero risk now that I've been vaccinated. The reason I'm not doing it is because I don't want to be around people like you.
In 6 months from now, when there's no excuse to not be vaccinated, that will be a different story. But people going about normal life right now as if nothing were happening are the reason we're seeing 4,000 deaths a day in the US, and they are objectively bad human beings.
Almost every country in the world is seeing similar per-capita death rates, about 1 in 1000 people so far, skewing much towards the old and/or already unhealthy.
Some perceive this as a high risk and would be happy to impose a police state on everyone to stop the pandemic.
Others perceive this as a low risk to themselves and don't want to give up a year or two of their lives to lockdowns.
Who gets to decide?
I'm a big believer on not unnecessarily imposing on other people. I think it's fine that you want to self-isolate. That is not my choice. I hope you can respect that.
It's not a binary choice between sacrificing the most vulnerable people and long periods of social distancing (the US has not ever really had anything resembling a lockdown, maybe your country has if you are from elsewhere; in the US we have had weakly enforced shelter in place orders and business closures).
In the US, smarter choices could have resulted in less death and a more robust economy. Just some leadership and resources devoted to contact tracing could have made a huge difference in how things went after May.
Were there any states that did real lockdowns or contact tracing? If not, then perhaps the political will did not exist to do so. There certainly is disagreement on such things. If peoples of so many states could not agree on more drastic measures, it would not have been right to impose them from above. Also the constitution limits what the federal government can do in this regard.
The extent to which the mRNA vaccines prevent infection is unstudied, it is not conclusively known in either direction whether they confer sterilizing immunity.
The mechanism of action is reason to believe that they might.
I just recently got my first shot of the Moderna vaccine last week. When I learned that I would be getting it, I went through the same euphoric excitement the author is describing. Then it slowly dawns on you that this is simply a bandaid. Something to stop the massive amounts of deaths. It's not going to miraculously end everything and make the world go back to normal. There is no "escape". You're not going to be hopping on flights, vacationing, and going to bars again any time soon.
This is a real mistaken mindset that I think people are going to have to come to terms with. The vaccine is not a silver bullet. It doesn't just make the virus magically bounce off of you like a force field. You will still get infected if you are exposed, and can very well still transmit it. The vaccine simply keeps you from developing severe disease.
We (the human race) have a long, slow, painful slog ahead of us to return to anything even resembling what things were like in Fall 2019. The virus is going to become endemic. Overall population vaccine uptake will most likely look like Flu vaccine rates (<50%). And that means life will never be quite the same.