Quote:
Originally Posted by astrangerhere
J And out in the world, you have no idea if the person next you is immunocompromised or unable to get vaccinated due to a medical condition. An unmasked, vaccinated person raises real health dangers to those folks.
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I'm just going to put in a clarification here, that the conversation this came from was about UNvaccinated people putting others at risk, not just themselves, by their choice to avoid vaccination.
At this stage I wouldn't be super comfortable being close to an unmasked vaccinated person in an area with COVID transmission, but that's just because I think we need a little more data (the existing data is encouraging on low viral load, which is great).
But I sure as hell wouldn't be AT ALL comfortable being near an unmasked unvaccinated person, which is what we were talking about. I'm "fully vaccinated", but the meds I'm on reduce humoral immunity (the only data we have so far) to 22% of normal after Pfizer vaccination. Until we have more data demonstrating that that level is actually protective, or come up with some strategy to deal with that (more boosters? Different adjuvants? No one knows yet), people who choose to stay unvaccinated put people like me at risk. Maybe that problem will be solved, but this is early days.
That data on COVID being a "nothingburger" after vaccination comes from trial data that did not include people like me.
And we're not vanishingly rare unicorns and therefore dispensable, as haertig implies. Autoimmune conditions, cancer, post-transplant state, and other conditions involving lowered immunity are common. (Heck, I have one in my immediate family, for completely different reasons, and at least half a dozen, maybe more, in my friend group.) And yes, we obviously try to protect ourselves as much as is feasible. I'm probably keeping at least one hand sanitiser company in business! But airborne viruses are harder for a single individual to avoid - that takes collective action. Part of that attempt to protect outselves involves advocating for good public health policy, including vaccination that is as universal as possible, rapid effective contact tracing, etc.