The only way to stop the virus is to reach herd immunity. Herd immunity does NOT mean that 70-80% of the population has to get vaccinated. It means enough people have to have antibody protection from the virus that the R number — the average number of people infected by a single person who is infected — significantly decreases, ideally to below 1.
The more people who are vaccinated, the harder it is for an infected person to infect someone else, because the virus has nowhere to go. I’ve done my part to reduce the R number by getting vaccinated, as have millions of others.
But there’s another group that is helping to lower the R number, and that is people who get infected with Covid. Those people either survive, in which case they have some measure of protection (not as good as the vaccine, but it still hinders transmission), or they die, in which case they can’t infect anyone else.
So really to get to herd immunity you need to add the number of people who have gotten the vaccine to the number of people who have already been infected. No doubt there is a fair bit of overlap between those groups, but the total is a lot bigger than just the number of people who been vaccinated.
I got the vaccine, so I’ve done my part to help prevent community spread. I’m confident that my chance of catching Covid is very low, and if I should catch Covid it won’t be a severe case and my chance of spreading it is very low.
Meanwhile, the dopes who refuse to get vaccinated and refuse to wear masks are also doing their part. By infecting each other, they are creating antibodies that will help to mitigate community spread. The big difference is that those people stand a significantly higher chance of dying of Covid than I do, but that’s their choice and if they want to risk choking to death on a ventilator, that’s up to them.
And, those people now have a significantly lower chance of infecting others. Before we had the vaccine, we all had to be extremely careful because any of us could get infected, and it could easily lead to death. Hospitals were being overwhelmed, and nursing homes were disaster areas. Now that we have a reliable vaccine, many, many lives are being saved, and it really has become a choice — either stop the virus by getting vaccinated, or stop the virus by taking no precautions, getting infected, then either surviving with antibody protection, or dying. If people want to choose the latter, I can’t stop them.
I understand that there is still concern over reinfections among the unvaccinated, and mutant variants. But all the data so far seems to indicate that we are heading in the right direction. I would much prefer people get vaccinated because it is more effective, fewer people will die, and this will all be over sooner, but people who won’t get vaccinated or wear masks or take precautions are still helping. It’s just that now, post-vaccine, they’re almost entirely gambling with their own lives and with each other’s lives, and not my life or my family or friends, because we all got vaccinated.
Maybe I’M the selfish one for thinking that way, but if the unvaccinated anti-maskers won’t listen to reason, I don’t think there’s anything I can do to change their minds.
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