You dumping your trash in the local drinking reservoir would probably have a couple orders of magnitude more of an impact on others than me not vaccinating after recovery (depending on what's in your trash).

In reality, it was a continuous decision: does the totality of evidence coming out suggest I should go get the shots today? And it never definitvely got to that point, and over time the decision became better supported, not less.

You seem to understand the evidence differently. I'll grant you that maybe at some point early on I could have bought a couple months where I would have had a marginally lower chance of infection. This would have had no appreciable effect on the people around me in the grocery store. We'll have to agree to disagree otherwise.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9047157/

"Conclusions: Naturally acquired immunity confers stronger protection against infection and symptomatic disease caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 2-dose vaccine-indued immunity."

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm

"What is added by this report?

During May–November 2021, case and hospitalization rates were highest among persons who were unvaccinated without a previous diagnosis. Before Delta became the predominant variant in June, case rates were higher among persons who survived a previous infection than persons who were vaccinated alone. By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone."

"That was, and remains, completely false."

Would you like to amend your claim? You might have an argument if you stick to "could have been false for short periods of time after people were freshly vaccinated", but otherwise that's pretty indefensible.

To believe otherwise would take some solid evidence, and maybe the Kentucky study is enough to convince you, but it was not enough to convince me (or apparently my doctor, though we didn't talk about that).

It even said this: Finally, this is a retrospective study design using data from a single state during a 2-month period; therefore, these findings cannot be used to infer causation.

So maybe "any indication" was too strong. How about any convincing indication?

Meanwhile you had things like this demonstrating that prior infection was pretty damn protective as early as late 2020: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034545

There were others as well, I was following this very closely because it seemed pretty important to not be wrong, and all of the messaging was very insistent.

Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.

You're misunderstanding btw, I didn't go around telling anyone but my closest friends and family. I wasnt about to out myself as a heretic when the likely biggest propaganda campaign in history was going on (pandemic of the unvaccinated, etc). It was mostly in hn threads on studies like the ones you posted where I would say anything about it.

> Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. ... People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.

This is asinine. There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else, and by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.

Also, I made the choice with my doctor's agreement.

I also frequently tested before any gatherings, and avoided contact when I had any kinds of symptoms, test or not. I saw plenty of people figure they had gotten the shots so why not go out with the sniffles?

"Best information" and what was blasted out of the TV or considered "common sense" at the time I think have quite a bit of daylight between them.

Your interpretation of events might be that a collective of all well meaning people just got it wrong, and that's your right. A lot of people ended up with different conclusions, like the machine did what it does and made a lot of money, the truth be damned.

Isn't this kinda like saying medicating your children in general is very much the right thing to do?

Like it's obviously one of those things that everyone expects you to just agree with directionally, but the actually correct answer is no, there is no in general. All drugs have a context where they make sense. E.g. you're probably not vaccinating your kids for rabies, unless you live in an animal sanctuary or something. MMR, sure.

It actually seems pretty questionable to me that it was ever a net benefit to your average young kid to get the covid shots.

Thats my pushback against gp's argument that you have to give this thing to your young kids to protect me.

The covid shots were good against hospitalization and death in older folks, but they were not great at preventing infection or transmission (despite what you may have gleaned from the speakers blaring ads in every public setting for all that time).

You can fall back to the "flooding the hospitals" argument, that works a little better here.

Why?

I'm not admiring or excusing anyone. I'm saying you probably find a whole range of IQs among them. Because why wouldn't you? Whose to say if the userbase of this site grew up in the wrong conditions, a portion wouldn't be terrorists too?

What even is a terrorist?

If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.

But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.

Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.

So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?

I think this isn't as unreasonable as it seems to everyone living it. It's like water to the fish.

We are conditioned that everything should be fueled by more and more debt, and your dollars should constantly be devalued so you can't stop grinding.

The little people can never be allowed to just work enough to accumulate what they need and then take it easy.