Covid vaccinations have only been proven to protect the vaccinated from severe outcomes. They don't prevent infection or re-transmission. There's no valid claim to pushing this on those that don't want them.
Of course I agree that those who do not want vaccines should not be forced. But they also should not get to ruin everything for the rest of us. The r coefficient for vaccinated people is drastically lower leading to protecting those that can not get vaccinated (whom, I guess, unvaccinated people do not mind screwing over). And vaccinated people are not taking away ICU beds from people suffering from non-prevetable diseases.
This is nonsense. The causal feature of the people saturating ICU capacities is that they are unvaccinated, not obese. It also matters that getting vaccinated is a cheap safe triviality, while getting into a healthy BMI range is an expensive long process (but I would agree that it should be encouraged).
It's the calories that count for obesity, not the "healthiness". It's perfectly possible to maintain a healthy body weight eating chips and drinking soda. Time isn't a factor here, personal responsibility is.
Yes, I am on the same page that all you need is a bit of discipline (and some baseline amount of crucial nutrients not present in cheap calory sources). But we all have about the same "discipline reserve", and some have harder life circumstances that expend that reserve on more urgent things than lunch. And this snowballs after it happens once. But to be fair, I do not really know what is the percentage of "well-off cushy fat people without a modicum of health discipline" vs "money-poor and time-poor stressed depressed fat people". I do suspect the latter group is bigger, and just yapping about "personal responsibility" kinda misses the point in that case.
You don't need to be money-poor to be time-poor and stressed. Just as with other vices, it's a matter of priorities - do you prioritize your near-term comfort or your long-term wellbeing? People can make either choice, but I expect them to take responsibility for the outcome.
They both reduce infections and reduce transmission.
The VE is reduced with delta, but its still nonzero (most of the studies of what it really is are still incredibly poor though, but nothing has show it to be below 50% VE against infection).
The initial comparable viral load studies are also all bad. All they did was compare Ct of RNA loads. We now know that there is less infectious virus in vaccinated individuals, and that Ct values themselves decline faster, which indicates they're producing more viral debris -- we expect studies of transmission to show that they transmit less. Older studies from earlier this year against Alpha found that 80% of vaccinated breakthrough infections produced zero transmitted secondary infections with the other 20% only infecting 1-3 other people.
That is sufficient enough impact on infection and transmission to end the pandemic if everyone was vaccinated.
Unfortunately, everyone, including many scientists are panicking in the face of uncertainty over the delta variant and assuming the absolute worst and spreading worst-case messages which are portraying vaccines as not being worthwhile, when they're still effective enough.
