Studies have shown that deaths from COVID among children are incredibly rare, and more kids die from the flu than from COVID. People with auto-immune diseases, transplant patients and certain kinds of cancer have always been more susceptible to illness. Never have we mandated flu vaccines before, and those people would be equally as susceptible. However, I think you should be asking yourself.. if an mRNA vaccine presents auto-immune response, who is to say that isn't harming those being forced to be vaccinated? There is little to be understood about many auto-immune diseases, just look at fibromyalgia, which has often been labeled as a psychological condition and not a physical one. Many doctors still don't believe it is real, and if you use it for a disability claim it is difficult to prove.

If what you're saying is to be considered, then it must also be considered that the vaccine could have subtle side effects that may not be immediately known and later exhibit themselves as incredibly hard to diagnose and nearly impossible to detect illnesses.

Or those who can get the vaccine but it won't help them much.

But, as you say, homo homini lupus.

Erm why do you think those can NOT get vaccinated?

Quite the opposite. They need more boosters as the vaccines don't generate enough immune response.

Where Covid vaccination could work (remains to be seen) is if, combined with other mitigation measures, it brings the effective reproduction rate down low enough and for long enough to eradicate the virus. Problem is, the long tail can last for years, and every time the goal has been within grasp, people would see the falling numbers and assume that meant it was already over. Vaccination makes that less of a problem.

Polio and MMR vaccines aren't 99.9999% effective, either. More like 80-99%. A breakthrough is extremely unlikely because you're not likely to be exposed to those viruses at all anymore. But it took decades to reach this point.

What do you say to people who eagerly took the initial 2-dose vaccine series but aren't interested in perpetual boosters every 6 months? Are they antivaxxers? Do they need to be marginalized?

The neutralizing antibodies generated after vaccination wane very quickly and the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission. There are even breakthrough cases happening in people who are just 2-3 months out from their second dose.

I flew halfway around the world to get vaccinated and when I was in the US earlier this year, observed that the people who were most confident and even cavalier about forgoing preventative measures like mask wearing and social distancing were people who were fully vaccinated.

If vaccinated people who harbor objectively wrong beliefs about what the vaccines actually do engage in behavior that causes "real harm to other's bodies", do they need fire and brimstone too?

In the US, even before the pandemic, ICUs were typically run at very close to capacity. From Becker's Hospital Review[1]:

> For most level 1 trauma centers and tertiary care facilities, operating intensive care units at 80 percent to 90 percent capacity is standard — even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

In bad flu years, ERs are commonly overwhelmed[2] even though we obviously have vaccines that provide so-so protection:

https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

I suspect that the situation in Europe is much the same.

Even if the vaccines continue to provide good protection against hospitalization, that doesn't mean that breakthrough infections won't have any impact on the healthcare system. As an anecdote, I just learned that a friend, who is a super fit collegiate athlete, just had a breakthrough infection and almost went to the ER because her symptoms were quite bad. She decided against it and the symptoms subsided within a couple of days, but if you hear about and read enough reports about breakthrough infections, it's pretty clear that it's not rare for "mild" cases to be pretty rough -- rough enough to have some people thinking about a visit to the hospital.

SARS-CoV-2 is well on its way to being endemic (it basically already is) so if we're being honest about getting back to normal, it's time for public health decision makers to be more realistic about the impact the virus will have on the healthcare system. Practically speaking, that means being prepared for high utilization and expanding capacity.

[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc...

[2] https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

This is partially untrue.

Numbers are back up in the Netherlands, hospitals intensive care units are largely at capacity, and facemasks were reintroduced in public spaces such as all shops, doctors offices, etc last week.

Is that a joke? You can't seriously be advocating the extinction of a crucial species.

And it's not just deer. Many other mammal species can also catch and transmit SARS-CoV-2.

Not to mention passenger pigeons :-(

I think the terms have more narrow and specific meanings in the context of fighting disease.

From https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su48a7.htm

>Control: The reduction of disease incidence, prevalence, morbidity or mortality to a locally acceptable level as a result of deliberate efforts; continued intervention measures are required to maintain the reduction. Example: diarrhoeal diseases.

>Elimination of disease: Reduction to zero of the incidence of a specified disease in a defined geographical area as a result of deliberate efforts; continued intervention measures are required. Example: neonatal tetanus.

>Elimination of infections: Reduction to zero of the incidence of infection caused by a specific agent in a defined geographical area as a result of deliberate efforts; continued measures to prevent re-establishment of transmission are required. Example: measles, poliomyelitis.

>Eradication: Permanent reduction to zero of the worldwide incidence of infection caused by a specific agent as a result of deliberate efforts; intervention measures are no longer needed. Example: smallpox.

>Extinction: The specific infectious agent no longer exists in nature or in the laboratory. Example: none

There is no evidence yet the deer actually get sick. It's quite normal for a virus to be terribly pathogenic in one mammalian species, and able to infect a wide variety of others but without illness or only minor illness. For example, camelpox (related to smallpox) is horrible in camels and kills a quarter of camels infected. In humans and most other mammals it usually is limited to skin sores at the site of contact and goes away quickly. Similarly, monkeypox is highly contagious and usually fatal in its host monkeys, much less contagious and only infrequently fatal in humans, and downright hard to give to a cow or mouse and it won't make them ill. But they can catch it. All of the poxes exhibit that trait, with family- or genus-specific pathogenicity but broad cross-species contagiousness.

Before we had people vaccines, we social isolated. It will be even more difficult to get deer to follow isolation and masking protocols and to show up to a vaccination clinic.

One explanation for hospitals filling up is that there was a major fear campaign happening in the media, and many people use the ER as a doctors office. Many doctors office at the beginning of COVID were refusing to see patients that exhibiting any cold like symptoms, so people had no choice but to go to the ER, which undoubtedly would have increased the spread.

2nd, there is a mental component to sickness that is apparent when looking at placebo effects in studies. If a patient is deathly afraid of COVID and catches COVID, they can in fact worsen their symptoms and sickness based on that alone. If media is convincing people that COVID-19 is incredibly deadly, it can become deadlier than if you are not someone who worried a lot. This is nothing new as there has always been a component of care for cancer patients that involved mental health. Watch Patch Adams to see what I'm talking about.

They had a decade to develop and much more to improve. Nothing prevent us to improve this also.

Right now, track and trace is ineffective because cases are high. In the Netherlands, we can only trace the source of a quarter of infections. [1] If cases are brought down, track and trace has an easier workload and thus can be more effective.

We don't need draconian restrictions, just sensible ones. Wear a mask, get vaccinated, test yourself regularly. Many small measures combined have a big effect in aggregate. The only reason we have to resort to the draconian measures is because people are unwilling to do the basic measures.

[1] https://www.rivm.nl/coronavirus-covid-19/actueel/wekelijkse-... (In Dutch, the linked PDF has a table of track and trace for this past week on page 27)

> What sort of tracing system do you imagine implementing to achieve containment?

Ask Taiwan? They had 39 cases in the past week, only two of which were local, and the latest of those was six days ago. https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Bulletin/List/MmgtpeidAR5Ooai4-fgHzQ

Of course they've never had more than 554 cases in a day, so it was a bit easier to get down from the peak. In most other countries people don't seem to have the patience to keep up countermeasures for long enough to achieve local elimination.

At this point, as conspiratorially as it sounds, I think this is exactly what the powers that be intend.

I think you severely underestimate how big the US is, how many deer there are, and how long this would take. Is it possible: yes. Will it take decades: likely.

What are you suggesting exactly? Culling the white tail dear population across the USA?