One of the key anti-lockdown advocacy groups, PANDA, started out fairly sane-sounding and was packed full of hedge fund and other finance people. But once vaccines were widely available they inexplicably turned strongly anti-vaccine too.
Let's call it a "Covid preventative" or literally anything else, and stop mandating it, so that we avoid the bigger public health issue of a generalized distrust against existing, effective vaccines arising from this.
>Let's call it a "Covid preventative"...
What does preventative mean to you that doesn't imply making you less likely to catch the disease?
I get vaccinated against measles, or polio, or tetanus, and I don't have to worry about catching or spreading any of those diseases for years. With the Covid vaccine, some sources[0] say fully-vaccinated people are only half as likely as unvaccinated people to catch it (though obviously with less severe effects), and maybe about as likely to transmit it to others[1], and the protective effects wear off in a matter of months. That clearly doesn't line up with the public's traditional understanding of vaccines.
[0]: https://doh.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/421-010-Cases...
[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Do you get vaccinated for flu, the most administered vaccine in the US each year before the COVID vaccines became available? They are less effective than the mRNA COVID vaccines at preventing symptomatic disease and far less effective than the mRNA COVID vaccines at preventing severe disease.
The effectiveness of both is publicly acknowledged by the government. It just has nothing to do with the definition of "vaccine."
Other HN readers should consider this: had the social media companies not tried to limit the spread of misinformation, how many more conspiracy theories would you be parroting?
How about hospitalization and death rates, the outcomes we actually care about?