I decided to pop in to ask why the hell that'd be a concern, given that, at this point, due to the availability and certain requirements, just about everyone has a shot at getting the shot. If the vaccine works, wouldn't it largely only affect those who refused the vaccine?

Woke up today, feeling much better again.
Left arm is still hurting a little, but no comparison to the pain of yesterday.
I'd say, my overall constitution is on Saturday level (aka: prior to the vaccination reactions setting in) again.
So, all is well.

Dito, can't wait to get my second shot in twelve weeks and then (hopefully) being done with this pandemic.

And regarding the mask wearing:
for me, it definitely had the positive side effect of not experiencing any flu or cold during the last 15 months.
Usually I suffer through two to four colds during an average year.

And going by reactions of people with which I talked about that - I'm not the only one who experienced this positive side effect.

Had to be expected, regarding the topic.

Well the thing is, that doesn't help me now.....it'd likely be a big help later on(when I get older, or if my health ever got worse), though.

Dude, which shot did you get that put you out like that?

Simple: acting like one cares about other people and their grandmas....it's the new status symbol, and some aren't too keen on giving it up.

1) Do you have some links to those mainstream sources?

Also, the Wuhan leak theory is something people are looking into to see if the facts indicate one thing or another. That's not a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory consists on having a theory about some particular fact and placing a supposed conspiracy at its center to cover the logic holes, lack of proven facts or inconsistency with known data. Which brings me to:

2) About business lying on paperwork to get money as it relates to the Covid death count, we already know that many countries all over the world with different health care systems have similar mortality rates as the US (just with the official death count, we have between 0,1-0,2% of the whole population)

Many of those countries have public health-care systems, were people and hospitals get paid the same no matter what they do and there'd no benefit from increasing the Covid death count. If there was a generalized conspiracy by hospital administrators all over the US to falsify death causes --in which thousands of doctors, nurses and admin people would have to be complicit-- the numbers in the US would be very noticeably different, but they are not.

That's why I think your idea is a bit nonsensical and doesn't match the data we have. Not because I tend to dismiss things when people say things, but because I'm looking at the numbers and thinking for a few minutes.

3) Again, the other user talked about survivability rate, as in chances of survival if you get infected. And nobody mentioned 0,4 or anything similar, that was just you not understanding how decimals work.

I'm talking about going from 0,04% to 1,17% and that's assuming that the whole 60+ population already had Covid, which is not likely, so the real mortality rate would be higher.

In any case, do whatever you want about the vaccine, obviously. I was just surprised that you took what the other person said at face value and then told me that you believed it was "from the CDC". I mean, are you taking decisions about your health based on evidence of that caliber?

No vaccine has ever been 100% effective. The fact that the vaccine works doesn't make you invulnerable to covid. Severity of covid cases have been shown to be related to the "viral load" you receive.

Vulnerable people who have been vaccinated are still more vulnerable than healthy people who have been vaccinated, not to mention the fact that there are some people who can't have the vaccine.
A "healthy" asymptomatic carrier could still make a vaccinated but vulnerable person ill. The effectiveness of a vaccine is not in its individual use but in the effect it has on spreading.

Depends on why they're vulnerable. Odds are, if you're of the genuinely vulnerable type you don't take the kinds of chances that usually get you infected, anyway. The kinds of people who are obese, have athesma, etc are not the kinds of people whom fail to have a functioning immune system (it's just impaired, which is different). We'd have to discuss things like HIV, chemotherapy, and a number of other things where you likely would've be advised to get the shot in the first place. Back when we believed the vaccine was 70-75% effective, that meant we got 2 stages of it to get 91-95% effectiveness. Now with 80% per shot it's 96%. Given that over 50% of the US has been vaccinated (and there's a massive push for health care professionals whom already had covid to get the vaccine which makes no logical sense, but people are getting it anyway), the chances of someone who's particularly vulnerable even so much as being exposed are pretty slim. The pandemic is effectively over at this point.
I got both doses long enough ago that the odds of me spreading it are small, so no. I've never had a problem masking, even before covid happened (long story). There's just no reason for me to mask, anymore.

I actually recently added a few sources to the post you just replied to.

(one is a c-span video of the director of the CDC)

Actually, the msm in the US and the big social media sites labelled it a conspiracy theory most of last year and part of this year.

Point being, one shouldn't dismiss claims so readily(or accept them so readily either, no matter if made by trusted sources or not).

In the US many hospitals are private, and had to shut down non essential services for the most part...leading to a large loss of needed income.

Around the same time, they got subsidies for every co-vid case admitted and treated, and etc etc.

In the sources linked above, you'll note the numbers were indeed off by a noticeable amount in many states.

1. I assumed it was from the CDC or some other organizartion....as iirc the numbers seems similar to what i've read from the CDC/etc in prior months.

2. All I know is the risk percentages are very low....and yes, i'm willing to take the risk, as imo life shouldn't be about worrying about small percentage risks of this and that, but more so about living and enjoying life. This means I don't worry as much about things with a low risk of happening.

The problem with COVID isn't the death risk, but the risk of permanent symptoms. That list has gone up for me as of 2 days ago. Of course, this as usual, only applies to a specific group of people. Lifestyle and occupation are everything, and, unfortunately, it's not as simple as who does and doesn't have certain pre-existing conditions and unhealthy habits, and the mainstream insistance on this BS is precisely why we're learning nothing from this. Then again, we have Fauci who apparently botched up SARS-CoV-1 back then. Of course, a similar virus, which we learned nothing from, given repeated the exact same mistakes, only worse. If we as a people should learn anything from this, it's that our governments, media, etc are insanely incompetent. You can ignore the lab story, take it at face value that everything they said was true, and you still can't say they botched this without loosing all credibility. Not only was this not actually a completely new virus, but anyone who studies highschool biology would know that viruses spread the same way their tissues could get infected: in other words, surface transmission of the virus is unlikely compared to air droplets, given it's the nasal passages and/or lungs that end up infected first. And we had all this information before the virus itself left China. This was just gross incompetence to the level that we should ask why we even have governments, and i'm hardly an anarchist by any stretch of imagination.

1) In the video you posted the CDC guy actually says that misreporting in death certificates is unlikely and the article you posted says that the actual number of Covid deaths is most likely 28% higher than the reported number, not lower.

Did you just post the first two links you found in Google without watching the video or reading the article?

2) One thing being labelled a conspiracy theory being proven true later on doesn't mean that another unrelated thing being labelled a conspiracy theory is true. I mean, the "Wuhan lab theory" (which is being looked into) and the "increased covid numbers in death certificates to get more money" idea are not logically connected in any way.
I think we can agree on that.

3) In any case, as I tried to explain before, it doesn't matter what system you have in the US. The numbers are similar to many European countries with very different health-care systems, which seem to indicate there's no artificial increase in the US Covid deaths when it comes to death certificates.

4) If you don't "worry as much about things with a low risk of happening," as you say, you should get vaccinated. Risks from the vaccines are extremely low and much lower than either getting covid, needing hospital or intensive care or dying because of it.

True, but(as I said to others) the rates of even that are still somewhat low.

To me, taking such risks is accpetable....as the risks(however low) of vaccine side effects seem to be to a number of people.

And yet people/etc still did things like wrapping park benches in plastic....etc etc.

=-=-=-=

Sorry for the poor quality of the sources....my link lists are a bit of a mess, so I grabbed what I could find atm.
(I have other non official sources/etc, but i'm guessing you'd likely not be into such, so I didn't bother digging them up to post them)

Agreed, but the point I was making was more so that not everything labeled a "conspiracy theory" is false or should be dismissed so readily

I was using the wuhan lab theory to prove a point re: readily dismissing ideas/info based on source.

Even so, I can avoid the illness(being somewhat of an introvert and very health safety conscious) & I am in a very low risk category....as such, there is (imo) no good reason to get it.

Now if I were say 65 and had several health conditions, and there were more long term studies on the safety of the vaccines, it'd likely be a different story.

No, it's not even low. It's a do or don't kind of deal, where it's a small number of people, but it's not a matter of chances. For most people you meet on the street, you find people whom either didn't get it or got a mild case. However, you go to certain places, not talking to patients, but workers, you find a much different story. There's obviously high risk occupations, where if you go to certain nursing homes, you find over 50% of staff as long haulers. Yes, nursres and doctors make a small portion of overall workers in the world, but on the other hand it's clearly not chance. This was the big mistake, and should be a lesson for policy makers (but unsurprisingly isn't 'cause they don't care). There was so many things that could've been done, and would've been done willingly by the average person in just about anywhere in the world, but The level of incompetence made it so that none of these things were ever considered. Firstly, it should never have left Wuhan, let alone China. I could go into more, but i'd run out of posting space and spend a week just typing it all. And when you start analyzing what the long haulers have in common, then you start realizing that things really were bad in Wuhan, it's just that just about every developed nation other than China is better to live in. It's not like it was 0, but it's not like plastic does it. SO you wrap it in plastic: woo! Now it's the plastic that carries the thing instead of the wood or concrete. Let's be frank, here, almost no one anywhere took it seriously until they personally knew someone who was exposed, then suddenly it was nothing but panic instead of thought. Everyone I kept in touch with who knew someone who got exposed didn't care until they got exposed, regardless of political affiliation. Honestly, the whole lot of just about everythings was virtue signalling, nothing more. It's not like anyone on the left went out of their way to get the facts and actually get them out there in a reasonably convincing way instead of turning it into political jabs, and it's not like those on the right were immune to panicking when it came for them. I remember hearing about the thing from Stefan Molyneux before anyone else, left or right (that was back before it was political).

...so I happened to be passing by and noticed the rampant downvoting on this thread, rushed to grab my popcorn so I could start to enjoy the entertainment... proceeded to read all the posts... and I just don't get it???

Is the downvoter:
- Pro vaccines?
- Anti vaccines?
- Not liking threads not about games?
- Having a pathological hatred of someone who posted in the thread?
- Using this thread as a protest to show that rep abuse is easy?
- Working on a script to fight spam but accidentally released it before fixing all the bugs?

On topic, I'd expect many of us in South Africa are feeling down because we're not likely to be offered vaccines until the end of the year, despite a pretty nasty 3rd wave at the moment.