It is only immoral if I make the decision for you. If I make the decision to not vaccinate myself, that isn’t an immoral act. I am proposing the idea that Vaccinated people + Postive PCR Test (<6 months) = True measure of current immunity in a geographic area. I think by ignoring the idea that disease immunity is a valuable measure of temporary immunity in the population we have ignored really valuable data on how much immunity we need to reduce the worst impacts. As the recent outbreaks in the very highly vaccinated geographies on the east coast are showing.
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I disagree with this. Some people who are going through things such as cancer treatments CANNOT get vaccinated…it’s not a choice, it’s a medical necessity due to the contraindications of the medications they are on and being mixed with the vaccination ingredients. So, if someone who chooses to NOT get vaccinated gets around that person who can’t get vaccinated, they can get them sick and kill them. That same crowd also has problems being masked. I find that immoral.
Or being unvaccinated and unmasked around the populations of people not yet approved to get the vaccine (anyone under 5), the risk of passing the virus off onto them is there as well.
Now, if you live in Kansas on a 100 acre farm and you never see anyone, then great…stay unvaccinated and you pose no risk to anyone else.
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I feel like the idea of a “herd immunity strategy” is kind of like the famous quip that the “Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” It’s not really a strategy because it’s just what will happen if, like a herd of animals, we don’t really do anything to change the spread of the virus. It’s sort of a choice to not strategize.
Also, I don’t think it will actually achieve herd immunity, LOL. Seems like we’re heading towards a future where at least some of the population is susceptible to this disease yearly or seasonally. So I’m not sure we’ll ever achieve any kind of meaningful herd immunity. The flu circulates every year and at any given time we don’t have herd immunity, and we still have a huge fraction of our population relatively susceptible to severe disease.
We will definitely reach a future where almost all of us have had it at least once. And I am hopeful that between vaccination, all prior infections and widely available antivirals, severe disease will be a negligible issue in 5 years. At that point it will be endemic. But we probably won’t ever reach the herd immunity threshold where the virus can’t spread anymore.
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Herd immunity was something the prime minister of my country talked about during the very early stages of the pandemic, but that idea was quickly abandoned.
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It was a deliberate strategy to deal with limited ability to give any doses - the UK system had not ramped up to be able to cope with comparatively massive numbers of vaccinations like it has now with the stuff being done for Omicron. As @ClaudnDaye says:
That’s how I look at it too. Like swimming out of quicksand.
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