Again, the argument of "endangering others" is hollow. The unvaccinated are only endangering themselves. There is not a significant number of vaccinated individuals that are dying of COVID. That doesn't give you an excuse to force upon them something that they don't want. We've had this argument several pages back, I'm not going to rehash it, nor am I going to budge on the personal freedoms stance. The "risk" is to the vaccinated population is too low to justify what you are proposing.
There is an indirect risk to the vaccinated. Because the hospitals in some places are completely topped out with unvaccinated COVID patients, all other services are suspended. There are stories of people dying of easily treatable conditions because the hospital had no room. People from some of the hardest hit states are flying to low COVID places like the Bay Area and Seattle to get necessary surgeries like for cancer because they can't get it at their local hospital. Others who can't afford the airfare are waiting and hoping their condition doesn't become fatal before they can get surgery.
Do you advocate the same remedy for flu vaccine refusers?
COVID has only killed as few people as it has because modern medicine is so much better than the last time we had a global pandemic. The worst variant of the flu is at least an order of magnitude less dangerous than COVID.
I've never had a flu shot. So far I haven't needed one, I haven't had the flu since I was 11 or 12. My entire family is the same way.
Trust me, for the poor souls that have succumbed to influenza over human history there is no false equivalency. A death is a death. There is no fallacy in that.
Most of the deaths from the flu are from secondary infections caused because the person was weakened by the flu. We are very effective at treating and preventing most of the secondary infections that killed people in the past.
Flu outbreaks also tend to be worse when the population is already stressed. The 1918 flu pandemic came when a large part of the world was weakened by years of war and it spread very efficiently as armies demobilized at the end of the war and former soldiers went back home infected with the disease. That pandemic was the first in history to penetrate into rural areas efficiently.
The Spanish flu is still with us. It was on some NPR program I heard over a year ago, but the researchers who got samples of the Spanish flu from bodies they dug up. They sequenced the virus and compared it with samples collected in later years. They found little change genetically with samples into the 1950s. The descendants of that virus are in circulation today.
The Spanish flu was not a big killer after 1919 because enough of the world population had had it, as the world returned to normal the stress conditions from the war went away, and treatment techniques improved so those who did get seriously ill died less often.
Another thing with the Spanish flu is that 1918 may have not been it's first outbreak. The flu season around 1890 was a bad one, though nowhere near as bad as the later outbreak. In the Spanish flu outbreak the bulk of people who got sick were under 30. Those over 30 tended not to get sick or got much milder cases.
The chart showing the death toll from various pandemics in the past is a bit misleading because before the 1930s~1940s we didn't have the level of science based medicine to figure out and effectively treat infectious diseases. When my parents were children in the 1920s it was still common for children their age to get sick and die of infectious diseases. My father had an incredibly good immune system and never even had the chicken pox, but my mother almost died of whooping cough (though that was the only serious childhood disease she got). My father talked about classmates who died of measles, polio, and a number of other diseases.
Almost everyone, if not everyone, in this thread have lived their entire lives in a bubble in history where few people in the developed world die of infectious diseases. They have been a problem in the developing world in living memory, but even there they are becoming much less common thanks to the developed world vaccinating people in those countries.
There are infectious diseases more deadly than COVID, but we've knocked all those down to a point where outbreaks in the developed world in the 10s or 100s are considered big. And herd immunity for most of those diseases is high because of vaccination. Depending on how COVID mutates, it may be with us the rest of our lives or it might mutate itself out of existence.
