If it’s an emergency because it’s dangerous, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Ebola Zaire is related to Ebola Reston which is not dangerous to humans at all, but Zaire kills 50% of people it infects. Such a comparison would be sheer idiocy. If it came back every winter, or every summer, or every Tuesday for that matter, it would remain an emergency.
Right, they don’t really hurt people except a small percentage, who can be taken care of with a medical exemption, and that’s what OP said, not the words you put in his mouth. This isn’t hard to understand. There have been no documented developmental issues in children, and there have been no children who haven’t seen anyone’s face in 2 years, but regardless you can mandate/request masking while making it easier for children and others who have a harder time.
As OP succinctly put it, there simply is no biological mechanism for adverse reactions to pop up out of the blue months or years later. Any reaction would be detected shortly afterwards, even if it could take some months for the data to be collated.
If there is a demographic which is deemed more susceptible to damaging side effects from the vaccine than from exposure to COVID, then they probably shouldn’t be made to vaccinate (although it would help to greatly minimize spread, which would lower more than just the hospitalizations in that demographic). Thus far, there haven’t been any such documented demographics.
Source
Right, everything is black and white. Either you spread or don’t and either you get infected and die or don’t get infected at all, so your question remains a strong one. Imagine a world in which some people could spread while most don’t, and less vaccinated people leads to more hospitals being overrun. (I’m being sarcastic. This isn’t an actual point you’re trying to make, is it?)
1. You prove my point. If the 'danger' is constant and never ending, we cannot continue to be in a state of emergency forever just because there's danger. You have to come up with rule of law, even (especially!) under dangerous circumstances. We need to learn how to live with this, because it's not going away.
2. My close relative has a medical exemption. She was ridiculed, kicked out of stores, and generally excluded from daily life while the mask mandates were in force. Most people are not aware of it, and believe it's a made up excuse. Masking mandates exclude 1% of the people from daily life.
3. Just because the accepted theory right now is that this vaccine cannot do any harm, does not mean it cannot. I pointed to studies where people are hurt, and some people died from the vaccine in the short term.
If it produces long-term immunity, it might produce long term reactions to something else as well. Who knows if something beneficial in the body also has a spike protein? ACE2 is a similar molecular structure, and has been theorized that how the virus affects heart muscle tissue is because of it's similarity to ACE2 :
https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13054-020-03120-0.
You cannot in good conscience tell me that the vaccine can NEVER produce long term side effects, because it has only existed in the world for 9 months.
4. I am for delaying the spread to protect vulnerable people. However, all the people who need a vaccine have access to a vaccine at this point (in the US). The vaccinated are affected by Covid in the same manner (hospitalization and death rates) as seasonal flu. We don't shut down the country for seasonal flu. Whoever does not get the vaccine (and has not gotten covid), and is in the vulnerable category should ABSOLUTELY get it. But MANDATING that people make choices that the government sees as correct has never been something we do in a western democracy.
We let people make choices when given information. This should be no different.
