Interesting questions.....
The part on groups not being consistent with their requests is nothing new, everyone always tends to interpret/want laws according to what favors them, independently of the rest. I find that the right is more prone to this kind of approach, but it's actually well spread out.....

Would you consider a good parallel one between no-vaxxers and tax evaders? In both cases they obtain the advantages provided by vaccines/state (reduced chance of infection / availability of state services), by not investing anything personally (the remote chance of a secondary effect / payment of taxes).
 

Maybe there is a parallel with legal tax evaders like Bezos or Buffet. But there is also the illegal kind, and then the parallel isn’t so strong.
 

Kids under 12 cannot get any vaccine yet, so it's in nobody's best interest for there to be pockets of uncontrolled infections allowing COVID to mutate further. Anti-vaxxers like to talk about the low mortality rate, but not so much the 10-30% of people who have persistent health issues months (or permanently) later. "It's just a flu" up until you get "brain fog that made even reading a book impossible." Those sort of outcomes are what should keep people up at night.
 

A guy I work with that was pretty young, in his late 20s, got it. The neurological side effects made it almost impossible for him to get any work done for at least two months because of the "brain fog." That absolutely terrified me. If I couldn't think straight for two solid months my entire career would be in danger. I have a lot of really important balls in the air right now.

I am fully vaccinated, which helps. My biggest worry is that one of the variants mutating in those that refuse to get vaccinated will be able to get past the current vaccines. This virus is a lot like a flu virus, so it is quite literally only a matter of time if we don't stop it from circulating.

The way things have ended up in some states is the worst of all possible worlds. For example in Georgia only 30% of people are vaccinated. That's enough of the population to provide extremely strong natural selection for a new variant that can get past the vaccine, but not nearly enough for herd immunity to basically shut down circulation and the evolution of new strains.
 

Why should we believe wild stories about 'long-haul Covid' affecting half the population, when we don't believe people who say magnets stick to them after vaccination?


 

Because the first has tangible, verifiable evidence and the other is easily disproven with commen sense. Any child who has stuck a coin to their forehead can replicate the "evidence" people who say the vaccination turns them magnetic put forward. Not to mention the people who laughably use non ferrous objects like house keys to "prove" they are magnetic.

I had Covid in January. I came down with my first symptom December 29th. I went through basically all the symptoms you hear about. Body aches, cough, fever, diarrhea, loss of taste and smell, elevated heart rate, exhaustion, shortness of breath, etc.

I tested negative on January 17th and returned to work. I had some persisting symptoms (cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste/smell) all the way through the end of March.

There is verifiable data that Covid symptoms can persist and in some people leave lasting damage.

There is 0 tangible evidence despite the millions of vaccines given that they make you magnetic.
 

Since I wrote that I'm re-evaluating a bit. Something like Covid is certain to cause lots of people to diagnose a variety of mystery ailments stemming from it, but it seems that there may be more than the usual post-viral syndromes in this case.
 

I would understand people being sceptical if somebody caught a "mystery ailment" which isn't known to science and only has symptoms that are impossible to measure or prove by a doctor. COVID-19 is far more specific, you can prove somebody had it. And we know COVID-19 has killed nearly 4 million people by now. Why should we be surprised that a disease that can kill you could also leave you alive with neurological damage? For me, various forms of brain damage caused by lack of oxygen in the blood, caused by COVID, makes total sense.
 

I work in retail so i meet a lot of people on my job, they touch a lot of things, i have to touch those things before they pay, also i use public transport, so i made a lot of contact with surfaces in the last two years. Most of my coworkers got Coviď OR got vaccinated, those who got the virus had
no problem or just had to stay in bed for 1 week felt bad but nothing serious. I did Not get covid, i know because i did multiple test and was negative. I consider myself healthy and i think i will be fine if i get it.