A few thoughts...
"I know someone who got the vaccine and is sick". So what? What part of 95% effectiveness is hard to understand? As of today ~165 million Americans have been fully vaccinated. 5% of these will possibly still get COVID, hopefully in a milder form. Expect 8.25 million possible "I know someone who got the vaccine and is sick" cases.
"It is not a vaccine because it uses never used before mRNA technology". So what? Does medicine continuous improvement arbitrarily stop in 2020? If any medical treatment that was never used before is illegitimate, I guess that all recent cancer drugs, stem cells therapy, each year annual flue shot cocktail, etc. etc. are off the table too...
"I will not be forced to receive a vaccine". Well, before going to Africa the first time did you get, or verified you got as a kid going to school, Polio, Measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), Tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis (TDaP), chickenpox Shingrix, typhoid Vivotif or Typhoid VI, hepatitis A & B Twinrix vaccines? Did you take Malarone when going in malaria areas? As an aging adult, did you consider Pneumococcal and Meningococcal vaccines? Did you receive an annual flue shot over the last few years? Did you advise your kids to get your grandkids the HPV vaccine? If you did not, you should really think about all this. I you did, what is different about COVID?
Etc. etc. etc.
It seems to me that the real differences about COVID are threefold:
1) It turns out that COVID is nowhere near as lethal as originally feared. If we were talking about Cholera with a 25-50% mortality rate, I reckon that that there would not be much noise about getting vaccinated ASAP. Apparently the mortality rate with COVID in the US is 1.7% overall, and concentrated in very limited segments of the population (elderlies and pre-conditions). Note that this is the mortality rate
WITH COVID, not
FROM COVID. Enter the jokes about "secondary cause of death: head crash with an 18 wheeler at 95 mph"...
2) COVID as been weaponized as a political football. 'nough said about this one, but to say that it poisoned the well...
3) Admittedly, some of the Government officials up to and including Presidents under various administrations have said some pretty stupid and mutually contradicting things about it. 'nough said about this one too, but to say that this did not help...
Like many on this forum I received so many vaccines for so many things (mandatory in France to go to school; mandatory in the French Army which sustains many deployments all over the place in Africa including the most insalubrious...), etc. so I did not think too hard about COVID. Although I had COVID in 2020 - turned out to be no worse than getting a bad case of the flue for me - I did get vaccinated 6 months ago because I expected that it could become a GO/NO GO issue for my hunt in Zimbabwe coming in 2 weeks.
Would I personally hunt with Lon and Tokoloshe Safaris? Heck yes! But I would also respect those who would not, even though I would not necessarily share their logic ![Smile :) :)](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/twitter/twemoji@14.0.2/assets/72x72/1f642.png)