Graham wrote:
I believe you only treat the two different healthcare interventions (jabs vs diet/exercise) differently because one is easy and the other requires willpower and self-control.
I surely do when one is easy while the other is difficult. In addition to that one is a very short time decision, while the other is very long. People do not eat too much, because they say: “I do the conscious choice to risk heart disease” but they choose their food for taste, fun, whatever.
In my opinion, it IS a huge difference, if you do a lifestyle choice to have fun, etc. with the unwanted side effect that it puts a risk on your health or if you consciously decide tu put your health at risk as primary objective.
I think if I were in Germany right now, I’d be on the first plane to Florida so as to remember normal life.
Malibu did you have numbers for the ICU covid vaccinated vs unvaccinated proportions?
Malibuflyer wrote:
Define “most”: UK and Germany are converging towards 70%, US below 60%. This is a huge (and decisive) difference to “80-90%”
Sorry, I was using the old terms of references when most discussion was in terms of the % of eligible (adult) population jabbed.
Malibuflyer wrote:
The problem is, that infection risk is reduced exponentially if vaccination rate is approaching 90%. Therefore we need to get there.
Is it? I’m not sure we know, if no countries have got there?
The ridge height analogy doesn’t hold. Every human in the world could be jabbed and you might still catch Covid and might still die. If the ridge is 5,500ft and you cruise above it then you cannot crash into it.
For what it’s worth, I believe many are refusing vaccines simply because they feel they are being coerced and they don’t like being coerced. I’m not at all sure about this idea that some 10% are hardcore anti-vaxxers and wouldn’t get a jab even if you paid them 10 AMU. My experience is that people respond better to persuasion than coercion, but it seems governments dedicated very little effort to persuasion, quite a lot to coercion, and having lost people’s trust are now considering resorting to compulsion.
Graham wrote:
and that the virus spreads here there and everywhere – mostly undetected – even among the vaccinated. This last point is contrary to what was when the vaccination campaign began.
Only those who know nothing about vaccination could believe virus would not spread among vaccinated. And this mis-communication used by politicians at the beginning of vaccination campaign is now back-fired and it’s widely used by antivaxxers.
Graham wrote:
For what it’s worth, I believe many are refusing vaccines simply because they feel they are being coerced and they don’t like being coerced.
If we tell people “you must not shot yourself into your knee” – how many of those take a gun and do exactly that because they do not “like being coerced”?
People do not vaccinate because they don’t care at all about others – it’s no form of resistance it is just a form of selfishness and/or stupidity. It was a sad (but true) story that a vaccination center in Germany could raise vaccination numbers significantly when they offered free Bratwurst to those who got the shot.
Graham wrote:
Every human in the world could be jabbed and you might still catch Covid and might still die.
Sure – but the odds of that become exponentially smaller due to the effect commonly referred to as “herd immunity”: If the vaccination level in a population is high enough the combined effect of the chance for exposure being small and the risk of infection when exposed being also small leads to a self reinforcing circle that limits infections to very local outbreaks. All well understood since decades…
Malibuflyer wrote:
People do not vaccinate because they don’t care at all about others – it’s no form of resistance it is just a form of selfishness and/or stupidity.
I wish that were true but it isn’t, at least not for many who have declared their refusal their religion. I’ve had to learn the hard way that you can not really discuss this topic with a lot of people for the danger of reprecussions, either against yourself in the form of verbal abuse or violence or against your family if people within your surroundings are concerned. My personal group of friends and acquanitances to whom I have cordial relations has about halved in the last months because of this.
If the polarisation goes on, I would not be surprised if sooner or later a new wave of anti-state terrorism might develop like it did in the 1970ties/80ties in Germany, based on these extremist groups who get huge press coverage and who regularly fill assembly places when they spit their venom.
Graham wrote:
My experience is that people respond better to persuasion than coercion, but it seems governments dedicated very little effort to persuasion, quite a lot to coercion, and having lost people’s trust are now considering resorting to compulsion.
I agree with that. And you are also right that a lot of European and other Governments have shot themselves in the foot at the beginning of the pandemic with lies, bad advice and failure to react adequately, hence the loss of trust.
And yes, by all means it would have been better if people would have been persuaded rather than having to put measures and regulation, but this does not work for most people. Remember when at the beginning, people were asked politely to stay home, to wear masks, to do other stuff to protect themselves and others? They spat on it and just carried on as if everything was normal. Nothing, not the horriffic pictures from Italy and Southern Switzerland, not the horriffic accounts by those who survived this, could get people to take caution and follow what were then suggested very benign measures. Egoism, ignorance, rebellion, their motivation does not matter.
Right now, we see movements who are acting in an agressive and provocative manner to force the governments and organisation’s hands in order to prove their point. Well, we had that before, in the 1970ties and 80ties, when various domestic terrorist groups tried to do exactly that with violence. Now that groups start talking like this here, e.g comparing themselves to Willhelm Tell who shot a hated governor, one wonders how long it will take before someone will go to that lenght.
Yes, there were massive mistakes and bad tactics but it is scary that people will rather follow crazy conspiracy theories and revolutionist movements than to sit back for a moment and THINK about what is happening and form their OWN opinion. Unfortunately, this is no longer fashionable today with all the influencers and social media experts today plus politicians trying to win political capital with spreading fake news and enraging the population.
So what is the alternative to governments having to resort to regulation and restrictive measures, lest they want a full blown catastrophe on their hands yet again? It is a vicious circle and the longer I look at what is going on, the less I believe that our society will survive it’s outcome in it’s present form.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Governments have shot themselves in the foot at the beginning of the pandemic with lies, bad advice and failure to react adequately, hence the loss of trust.
I think this is the main takeaway from this whole debacle. It is hard to regain trust once it’s lost.
Graham wrote:
Just as it is a simple binary decision to get a vaccine shot (or to take an aeroplane into the air, or whatever) it is a simple binary decision whether you choose to eat a healthy diet or something closer to 4000kcals a day of sugar and stodge
This is a reductio ad absurdum argument. By the same token it’s also a binary decision to trust the instruments and not your inner ear when in IMC, or a binary decision to not be e.g., an alcoholic. But we know these things, while they are binary choices, are hard.
Getting a COVID jab is easy.
One thing is a five minute procedure you do twice a year, the other is an entire lifestyle change which may be very difficult to do (for example, many people live in places that are actively hostile to any form of transport that is not sitting in a car, which lends itself to a sedentary and very unhealthy lifestyle which is difficult and very expensive to escape). You’re dealing with all kinds of conditioned instincts with food, and it’s orders of more magnitude complex than getting a simple vaccination despite being on the face of it a “simple binary choice”. As I said, trusting the instruments is a “simple binary choice” but so many pilots fail to do it, and we all know why, and we all know it’s not that simple.
