The more people it infects (even if it is young healthy people), the greater chance of more deadly strain. COVID-19 isn't that deadly, but is highly infectious. What happens if it mutates into something like this (another form of the coronavirus):
When you are young and care about other people, you should really get vaccinated. When there are many vaccinated individuals the number of infections drops dramatically, which helps to protect vulnerable individuals (some of them might be young).
* Not infecting others who are more at risk or cannot get the vaccine (allergies, age, availability) or are higher risk than you (age, preconditions), including anti-vaxxers (I would be devastated if a beloved family members died even if they rejected the vaccine).
* Doing your part to wipe Covid out so we get back to normal (do you have a better plan?)
* Wiping Covid out so we don't get a worse strain like the delta strain that will affect younger people.
* The lag between a particularly bad strain circulating widely and you finding out about it.
* Long Covid including brain chronic fatigue / brain fog, potential non fatal but still permanent, debilitating lung damage, cardiovascular damage leading to increased risk of strokes later on. Which has been shown to be a risk for young people as well, more than death.
* Avoiding the massive inconvenience of a potential multi week "very bad flu".
* The medical experts (gov agencies, universities, industries) across the world all strongly recommending it. (Have you at least asked your primary care physician if you should get it? Why not?)
* Benefitting from the exemptions granted to vaccinated people such as indoor dining in NYC and entering the US from Europe and vice versa.
* Keeping your job when they mandate it unofficially or officially (I've seen both).
* The demonstrated risk of dying from covid, and even more so the risk of long covid, as a young person still being way higher than the theoretical / non demonstrated risk of the vaccine. Especially since we have already vaccinated >1.5 billion people - if anything should be seriously wrong with the vaccines, fixing that and helping affected people would likely immediately become an important topic of medical research as soon as we find out.
* Fringe benefits like the lotteries for vaccinated people.
* There being clear evidence of covid being downplayed for political reasons, especially in the US and in 2020. But everywhere else and in 2021 as well. Prominent politicians who have downplayed it still having gotten the vaccine (granted, they're all old people, and your question was about young people). The same politicians constantly retreating from one wrong position to another as they are proven wrong again and again. Whereas the "other side" has so far mostly been right on every major topic.
* Political players that normally don't agree on anything agreeing on this - Russia, China and the US all have a vaccine program and recommend vaccination for essentially everyone. Inside the US, the Democrats are obviously in favor of vaccination, but do not forget that two vaccines got emergency approval while the Republicans had control of all three branches.
* Young people being vaccinated and showing up in vaccination stats influencing older people to get vaccinated.
* Last and least all the anecdotes of people who on their deathbed said they should've gotten the damn vaccine.
I hope you understand that we will not be “wiping out COVID” any time soon.
We need long term management strategies that are actually sustainable and protect the most vulnerable. And we probably need to worry less about persuading the die hards and more about things like standing up booster distribution and making ventilation improvements.
And a lot of the die hards will probably come around when the vaccine becomes part of the normal, boring health care routine instead of something they’re being “forced into” in an emergency, You know, you go in to the clinic in the winter with a cold. Doc asks if you’ve had your flu shot. Asks if you’ve had your COVID shot. That’s a much more comfortable context for people, I think.
> And a lot of the die hards will probably come around when the vaccine becomes part of the normal, boring health care routine instead of something they’re being “forced into” in an emergency, You know, you go in to the clinic in the winter with a cold. Doc asks if you’ve had your flu shot. Asks if you’ve had your COVID shot. That’s a much more comfortable context for people, I think.
Have you looked at uptake rates for the seasonal flu vaccine?
> Flu vaccination coverage among adults ≥18 years was 45.3%, an increase of 8.2 percentage points from the 2017–18 flu season and 2.0 percentage points higher than the 2016–17 season.
Well 70% of people adults are already on board, so we don’t need to worry about besting that number. The question is how do reduce resistance. My totally made up theory is that some people are just generally resistant to things being “pushed” from above, and some people are more concerned about new technology than others. Both of those things will probably improve as this cools off and becomes less political. In the mean time, there are other things we could be working on.
I think it's far more likely that the expressed reasons you cite are, for many (I'd bet 15-20% of the population), just rationalizations for the underlying reason which is that being anti-covid-vaccine is now a part of some folks political, cultural, and/or religious identity.
And it is damn tough to break through something like that. That's doubly true when political and religious leaders are actively pushing people to not get vaccinated.
No, I’m not discounting it. That’s what I’m talking about when i refer to people resistant to things “pushed from above.” I’m saying that’s part of the issue, and it’s only going to be solved (if it can be), by depoliticizing the issue and making it a mundane medical concern. And that’s going to take time, and backing off the stick.
Or… you know, just give people 500 bucks (including everybody who already did it.)
Vaccines reduce ones chance of acquiring a Delta infection by a significant margin (not as high as previous variants but still significant). Even if you assume just 50% effectiveness in preventing disease (which is very conservative), that dramatically lowers the R-value and slows spread.
> Vaccines clearly reduce ones chance of acquiring a COVID infection by a significant margin.
All of that data is pre-Delta. The best thing you can say about the vaccines today is that they tend to reduce the overall severity/prevent people from dying.
The absolute lowest bound estimate was an Israeli study:
> In late July, the ministry further reduced its vaccine effectiveness estimate for symptomatic COVID-19 to 40.5%
However, they have failed to provide the data necessary to evaluate their results, and so at this time there's pretty wide skepticism regarding this figure.
In contrast:
> A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on July 21 by Public Health England, for example, found that after the two recommended doses, the effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in preventing symptomatic disease in the U.K. fell only slightly, to 88.0% against delta
Being a betting man, I'd say the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but even at 60-70% effectiveness in preventing symptomatic Delta infection, vaccination leads to a significant reduction in R-value.
Hospitalizations don't drop off anywhere near as fast as deaths do. About every 8 years younger halves the death rate, about every 15 years younger halves the hospitalization rate.
And delta has a hospitalization rate which is across the board twice the rate of alpha (with age/sex/deprivation/comorbidity-matched patients).
The virus is also not done mutating and is facing evolutionary pressure to become more transmissible, which is mostly through the mechanism of increased viral loads which has the knock-on effect of increasing virulence and hospitalization/death rates. In the short term it isn't getting any better and its only getting worse (turns out viruses don't always naturally evolve to become less virulent, and epidemiologists have known that since the 90s).
The hospitalization rate for old D614G variant in 20 year olds was 1%, that should be up to 2% now with delta. The hospitalization rate of vaccination in 20 year olds is probably too low to be measurable. If you're worried about 1-in-10,000 or worse vaccine side effects you should be much more worried about the virus landing you in the hospital (even though it probably won't kill you).
Vaccines also don't cause outbreaks of side effects months or years later. The vaccine is cleared in a few days, all that remains is the immune system response. That immune response can cause autoimmune side effects just like any virus can cause autoimmune side effects. What we know from a couple hundred years of studying viruses and vaccines is that the side effects appear in 90 days or they don't. There's no lingering time bombs, the immune system doesn't work that way (that would be a fantastically shitty way for the immune system to evolve, so it didn't).
And the mRNA vaccines are just a fragment of the virus genome that cannot reproduce which is packaged in a lipid (fat) particle that will get naturally shredded. It is both as close to "natural" as we can make it to have a low side effect profile and its also highly effective. If you manage to get naturally infected you get a pile of other shit from the virus genome plus self-replicating virions trying to kill you, which is all worse, nothing better.
And due to the concept of original antigenic sin you really do want to have your first exposure to the virus be something which your immune system mounts a strong defense to and learns how to clear the virus without killing you. If you get infected for real and wind up in the hospital your maladaptive response to the virus may wind up causing you problems down the road as the virus becomes endemic and you get infected with a different strain in the future. You should be worried about the long-term effects of that a lot more than the long-term effects of the vaccine.
Covid can't live long outside a host, and it absolutely can't reproduce outside a host. It uses the host's cell reproduction mechanisms to reproduce. IT CANNOT REPRODUCE ON ITS OWN. That's why the virus infects you, so that it can reproduce, and its species can continue to exist. Its niche is to use the host's cell reproduction mechanisms to reproduce.
If we had strong herd immunity, then covid would likely become something deadly but manageable, because the spread would be limited and slower. Mutations would slow, because the mutations would have fewer opportunities to persist.
Everything that reproduces experiences genetic mutation. "Mistakes are made." Most mutations don't persist and don't have much effect. Some mutations cause the organism to die or otherwise fail to reproduce, limiting the mutation's persistence.
Some mutations do persist. Red hair. Downs syndrome. Etc.
The "life cycle" of a virus is very short and very fast. Anyone infected with the virus gives that virus an environment to reproduce, and to mutate. A lot.
All the variants we have, including Delta, which won't be the last, are because enough people gave the virus an environment to thrive.
If you are infected, even if you have no symptoms, then you are providing the virus a safe haven to reproduce, thrive, and mutate. And you will spread it to others.
As for immunity, we have two ways to acquire it. With the vaccine, your body produces an immune response without having to host, increase and spread the virus.
Without the vaccine, if you're infected, and you don't die, then you'll likely have some immunity. But you've also spread it to other people, who may die from it, and who will further spread it. And you'll all probably contribute to the next mutation.
"I'm not vaccinated, and I never got the virus." Maybe. You could have been infected without symptoms, and therefore you did spread it, possibly killing one or more people.
"I got covid, but didn't go to the hospital. I beat it!"
Or,
"I got covid, went to the hospital, but recovered. I beat it!"
No you didn't. You spread it to other people, and helped it mutate into something stronger and more deadly.
"My $PERSON got it, and died in the hospital. But that was their choice, it didn't affect anyone else."
Yes it did. They spread it to other people, and they consumed medical resources and staff that could have been used by other covid and non-covid patients.
It's not just you, it's the people around you that you will infect, and all the follow on results.
