Pete wrote:Where is the risk indeed, LL.....if anyone who wants protection can have it, why should they be concerned about any "risk" from those who don't?
Pete
The risk is what happens during the 3 month immunity period when some are vaccinated and other choose not to be. As you pointed out in a previous post, the virus has the ability to mutate. Those people who have not had the vaccine are giving it the opportunity to do so!
If enough people don't get it and continue giving the virus a path to transmit for 3 months, then once we all lose the immunity the vaccine gave us, the virus is still knocking around and we all start getting it again... This is best case in this scenario. And the result is that we all need the be vaccinated again at which point many people (mostly those who don't want the vaccine) will start moaning about the vaccine not working, and the significant cost of re-vaccinating people whilst oblivious to the fact that THEY are the reason it didn't work and the reason its more expensive that it should need to be...
The worst case scenario if the virus is given a path to survive for those 3 months, is that as you pointed out, it could mutate in that time to a point where the vaccine is no longer effective and we are back to where we were in March/April this year.
If you study the maths of viral spreads (there is a great video on YouTube by 3Blue1Brown which gives a good insight into what the statisticians are currently calculating, a simple version of course... - I will pop a link below) then we can say that if everyone got the vaccine today, in 10 days the virus would be eradicated. It can't survive in anyone for longer than the incubation period, can't be passed on to anyone else. It dies. The only bits left to mop up are those that can't have the vaccine or those that the vaccine is ineffective for. Which is a very small portion of the population making it easy to track down and isolate. Making this portion larger by choosing not to have it makes this effort FAR more difficult. I will refer back to my forest fire analogy. Of course vaccinating everyone in one day is not possible which is why they will need to spread it out a little more but it is still doable if they can get it all done within the immunity period (or close to it).
https://youtu.be/gxAaO2rsdIs