My point was making a non-sterilising vaccine a condition of work, or to go to public events was the issue. The vaccine is very good at preventing severe disease and death. People get infected, but it's much milder, than it would've been had they not had the disease or vaccine, so it's definitely useful. It's just questionable whether it's beneficial for all.
If it wasn't mandatory, the uptake would have been too low to keep the hospitals from collapse (which did happen in the UK and some other countries). Pretty much all the public health measures were just to balance hospital capacity and continues today. Isolation and/or Vaccination, one of those is much easier to sell politically.
The fact it wasn't mandatory had nothing to do with the UK's hospitals being over-crowded. Most of the
pressure on the NHS occurred at a time, before the vaccine was approved (Spring 2020) and during the point people were queuing up to take it (winter 2020/2021) and it had to be given to those who were deemed to be more vulnerable. Uptake amongst the vulnerable was more than high enough to ensure the NHS could cope. This was one of the reasons why the Delta and Omicron waves didn't cause as much of a problem as the previous ones.
Vaccine mandates would have made the situation far worse, not better. At the end of 2021, just as Omicron hit, if I remember rightly, the government mandated all care home workers take the vaccine, but it resulted in staff shortages. They were going to do the same for NHS staff in early 2022, but dropped the requirement, as the numbers didn't add up. A fraction of the population equal to 1-
1/
R need to have sterilising immunity in order to stop the spread, yet Omicron has an R
0 of 18, the vaccine only reduces transmission by 30% and is short-lived. Avoiding a small number of infections, which are unlikely to be severe in the vaccinated, didn't outweigh the poorer care which would have resulted from understaffing, which is already bad enough as it is.
You're communicating your position much better than Dave (who dropped some barely coherent "point" and walked away), and there is considerable evidence that natural immunity is as good (or probably stronger) than the vaccines available:
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)02465-5
Exactly. More importantly, protection against mild or asymptomatic disease is unimportant. Getting a cold is part of every day life. The vaccines were approved because they have been proven to be highly effective at preventing hospitalisation and death. The risk vs benefit for the first two doses was definitely worth it for most adults, who lacked immunity, especially given the more pathogenic variants in circulation. The boosters are much more questionable, but even though I find it interesting, I won't get into it again.
I've noticed many people appear to be unable to look at this rationally. There are those who will never trust the vaccine, whatever the evidence says and there are those who appear to be completely blinkered to the fact it does have some risks. Some authorities got it right, others messed up. I do my very best to look at it from both sides, but it's difficult given the lack of data.
So here in Australia the current recommendation is 6 monthly jab or infection, treated interchangeably that we'll probably agree is a reasonable balance on the known data. Now that there is enough protection within the community almost all mandates for workplaces are lifted/gone (healthcare remains, due to high interaction and with vulnerable groups).
Good. They shouldn't have been any in the first place. Plenty of other countries managed fine without them. There are no mandates for flu vaccination and now this not much different, certainly not at this stage.
I didn't want to get into a debate on vaccines. My point was the pandemic response of most governments was not evidence based. I could have talked about keeping 2m distance, facemasks, school closures etc. Some of it can be put down to inexperience but a lot of it was negligent. Governments will try to make excuses for the madness, some of them have some merit, others are completely false. Getting unbiased data on which measures proved beneficial long term and which did more harm than good is difficult. I think most of them resulted in net harm. It's often better to do nothing, than harm, but that's pure speculation.