1) I fully agree that there is a tradeoff between predicted deaths and risk from vaccine. I am fine with any number of people dying because they self selected to not take the vaccine, be it 500k or 5 million. I respect their right to choose even if I don't agree with it. The debate thickens when you talk about future deaths of people who selected to get a vaccine, but died from breakthrough cases. Vaccination breakthrough cases are very rare at <0.1% of total cases[1], and vaccination still confers significant benefit against severe cases or death. For sake of argument, I would accept an annual deaths of 50K (similar to the flu) among the vaccinated before further government action is considered. I think this range is achievable given we had 500k deaths before the vaccine was widely available. We now have 160 million Americans self selected to vaccinate and this number is still climbing, The CDC also estimates that 100+ million Ammericans have already been infected.

2) I split the topics into scientific 1 & 2 vs political 3-5, and think this is more a question of science. If natural immunity is reasonably close to vaccination immunity, I think they should be treated the same (whatever that may be). This is the question that science can answer. For your implementation concern, positive covid test or antibody test would be a simple way to administer an equivalent immunity pass.

Questions 3-5 are political because they can not be answered by science or data. Science can inform the decision, but they come down to questions of values, morality, ect.

3) I agree nobody is being tied down and given a shot, and only wackos are advocating this. There is a scale for how hard society can incentivize or punish people until they get a vaccine. I personally think society has done a terrible job of informing people to change their mind, and skipped straight to the punishments, and am deeply uncomfortable with this.

4) I agree that past vaccinations were largely a success via eradication. I have not seen a success criteria stated for the covid pandemic, as eradication is unlikely. At what point will we stop ratcheting up control mechanisms? X deaths per year, sustainable hospital capacity of Y? Is any sacrifice warranted to prevent 1 death?

5) Again, this is political question, and reasonable can and do have different opinions on how much personal risk you can take on, and when the government should protect you from yourself. You brought up seatbelts, going on somewhat of a tangent, the things you described are not true negative externalities in the technical sense. They are cost society chooses to pay, and could simply choose not to. I could give a beggar $5 but that isn't an externality. If I make a rule that I will give every beggar I see $5, it still isn't an externality. If the beggar on the corner lowers my property value, that IS a negative externality because it is imposed on me and I have no control or choice. You can say that seatbelts and vaccines both reduce the cost to the social safety net. Lots of things would reduce costs, and we can choose to to pay them, or not, opposed to controlling people. I personally love seatbelts, but think that tickets for adults are unreasonable (different story for minors in their care, ect).

>I don't mean this in combative manner but I'm going to trust the people who have been studying this for years. Going back to my original comment, most arguments against the vaccine are "gut-feel" at best and not backed by any actual data.

With the exception of the first two, these arguments aren't backed by data because they aren't questions that can be answered by data. They are simply matters of opinion, and I think we would all be best served if we acknowledge this. At the end of the day, science can conclude that universal vaccination would reduce deaths, or save $X, but it cant answer question on what public policy should be. This will be different based a multitude of values in addition to deaths and money.

Opinions you disagree with (assuming they are not based on incorrect data) are not wrong, just different.

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrou...