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Comment by ElectronCharge | Hacker News Reader

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Ignoring the higher risk of major long-term damage incurred by letting yourself get sick when you could've been vaccinated, I don't understand how this thought process accounts for anyone else.

What if my main reason for getting vaccinated is to lower my chance of infecting an immunocompromised person I care about? Even if I could somehow be 100% certain that if I were to be infected it'd be fully asymptomatic, the vaccine still helps me avoid spreading COVID-19 further.

Do you imagine young people who get flu shots do so only because they're worried about dying from influenza at 20?

But you can still infect other people? It's a non-sterilizing vaccine?

Non-sterilizing vaccines still reduce viral load, decreasing the amount of active viral particles in circulation. There are plenty of vaccines we use to curb epidemics that aren't full sterilizing vaccines.

For the COVID-19 U.S. vaccines in particular:

> Preliminary data from the clinical trials among adults ≥18 years old suggest COVID-19 vaccination may also protect against asymptomatic infection.[0]

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

The vaccines do reduce the chances of transmission quite significantly, so it makes sense to get vaccinated if your goal is to protect others. It doesn't need to be 100 percent sterilizing to be helpful in this regard.

Prior to this pandemic, were you getting the yearly flu vaccine?

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