No, it's not the goal. The goal is also not to split society in two and create a group that'll hate everyone forever, just because our leaders can't own up to their mistakes. The goal is to get through the pandemic best we can, and keeping societal values and principals intact should be an important part of that.

what values? half the population doesn't value science, rationality, wisdom, progress etc. I don't wanna be governed by science deniers. I also don't wanna spend years in lockdown because people are refusing to get pricked by a needle

Values such as politicians not insulting a group of people on television, not taking their rights away because they might potentially get sick eventually, generally not judging before proven guilty, not forcing someone to put something in their body that they absolutely do not want, not punishing one person for another person's crime. Last one is what they're doing to you if you feel like unvaccinated people are holding you hostage.

Lockdowns end when we stop enacting them, there is no reason (except governmental screw up) to insist that people who chose to take the risk must not get sick under any circumstances, or to assume that everyone must be in lockdown until every last soul is jabbed and boostered whether they want to or not.

> Values such as politicians [...] not taking their rights away, [...] not forcing someone to put something in their body that they absolutely do not want

Vaccine mandates have been a thing for well longer than I've been alive. I wasn't allowed to attend public school as a kid without having been given several vaccines.

Sure, there were anti-vax people and people with religious exemptions then, but the vast majority of the people who are up in arms and crying foul about COVID vaccination mandates didn't blink an eye when told they had to vaccinate their kids against the measles as a condition for sending them to school.

Why the hypocrisy?

> Lockdowns end when we stop enacting them

We have lockdowns because we think they slow the spread of disease and save lives, not "just because". That's like saying "birthday parties end when we stop having them". Well, yeah, but that's a tautology and not a very useful point to make.

> there is no reason [...] to assume that everyone must be in lockdown until every last soul is jabbed and boostered whether they want to or not.

That seems like a straw man, though. Who is saying we have to lock everything down until everyone is vaccinated? What country has even tried to implement something like this? Some areas have certainly tied the relaxation of restrictions in some ways to vaccination rates, but the main concern for restriction levels is mostly other metrics, like new-case rates, hospitalizations, percent of ICU capacity used, death rate, etc.

> there is no reason (except governmental screw up) to insist that people who chose to take the risk must not get sick under any circumstances

Everyone who gets sick is a host for the virus to mutate in. Everyone who gets sick, or is even merely unvaccinated, runs a higher risk of passing on the disease to someone else.

I am really really tired of the "it doesn't hurt anyone else if I don't get vaccinated" argument. Yes. It. Does. Full stop.

Assuming you’re in Germany, you’re governed by people which managed to screw up every single aspect of handling this pandemic. From masks don’t work, to masks availability in healthcare, vaccine availability, to booster availability to making tests fee-based and much much more.

The health minister was throttling Biontech/Pfizer deliveries just as demand started to go up for crying out loud!

It could always be worse, but I’m not at all surprised about lack of trust in the government.

You will spend years in lockdowns because that’s the only thing they’re capable of. See Portugal or Denmark for the vaccination happy case. Better than Germany but nowhere near life-as-usual.

Finally, if half the population doesn’t value all those things… Germany is proper fucked. You're exaggerating by a lot, which tells me you don’t value science and rationality.

im not from germany. in my country the vaccine uptake is less than 50%. at this point everyone who wanted the jab could have gotten it. so im not exaggerating at all actually

You’ve replied to a guy who is in Germany on a topic about Germany and then made some claims without specifying you’re from somewhere else though. That was very confusing…

They value all those things just as much as you do, they call some of them different names. And they don't believe that 'the other side' actuals exemplifies or actually values those things. Every lie they see coming from people in power (masks don't work, two weeks to stop the spread, the vaccine will fix this all) makes them less trustworthy.

Did you know that the immune system reacts to more than just the spike protein? It will create a dozen or so antibodies against all the different parts of the virus.

If the spike protein mutates like it did in Omicron, most of the other antibodies will still continue to work while new spike antibodies are created. In contrast, if the vaccine-induced antibodies are avoided, immunity in vaccinated people drops to zero.

This leads to another consideration. As I understand it, antibody tests only check for the spike protein antibodies. This implies that if there are 10 other antibodies not being tested, then actual protection is 10x higher than the test indicates. Any antibody count falls over time because the body is efficient. If the disease enters the body again, it will just start pumping out the antibodies again as long as it knows how to make them.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. People with just natural immunity in Israel are 10-15x better off than people who just got the vaccine. As this is the largest such study and encompasses pretty much the entire population, you can eliminate common sample size and selection bias issues that happen when you hand-choose a couple hundred people to look at.

It's such a dumb take because natural immunity requires you to contract real Covid. I wish this was obvious, but it seems required to state it outright? I feel you should take this revelation straight to the vaccine makers and tell them they wasted all their effort and should have hosted infection parties instead.

On this topic, it's worth noting that most vaccine side effects -- which are largely "your immune system kicked into high gear and exploded" type problems -- are an order of magnitude worse when fighting an actual infection than when responding to a vaccine.

E.g., Guillain-Barre syndrome is ~10 times more common after a COVID infection than a COVID vaccine. Myocarditis is something like 20 times more likely.

> E.g., Guillain-Barre syndrome is ~10 times more common after a COVID infection than a COVID vaccine. Myocarditis is something like 20 times more likely.

In relation to what? An average Covid infection? We don't even know how many go undetected to know what that average even is. Or the average out of hospital cases? Or simply confirmed cases? What are the numbers when comparing young healthy people vs old people with co-morbidities? What about children?

"natural immunity is better than the vaccine"

Has this been studied? I have natural anti-bodies and will participate in a study.