CV and mad panic behaviour

[Mav]

What you say is right, Thryleon, but this just illustrates the dilemma when it comes to persuading the public to vaccinate.

If we treat vaccinated and unvaccinated people as the same, many people will think there’s no benefit to being vaccinated. Of course, the benefit is avoiding infection or reducing its severity but some people think they’re bulletproof anyway. If they can see that they’ll be able to travel more freely, for instance, then they’ll do it even if they don’t think they’re at risk. That’s a better carrot than lotteries or free beer. Well, maybe not better than free beer ...

Then we have the issue of the efficacy of the vaccine. Yes, there’s a risk of the vaccinated being overconfident, but there’s much more risk of the unvaccinated losing interest in the vaccine if its benefits aren’t clear. Anti-vaxxers would love to undermine confidence in vaccines by saying some vaccinated people die of Covid and implying there’s no benefit in being vaccinated. It would be a disaster if public health authorities in the face of such an anti-vaxxer campaign agreed that vaccination might not protect people.