It's a deeply selfish attitude for the elderly and obese (those most at risk from covid and influenza) to expect healthy people to take something that might have a net negative effect to them as individuals.
Children under five are at high risk from influenza. Even if you see nothing wrong with the antisocial and frankly eugenicist idea of letting the elderly and obese die off for want of herd immunity, you might consider the utility of keeping children alive so they can feed and change you in the nursing home.
You can't reach herd immunity without a highly effective vaccine. No highly effective vaccine exists. If they manage to develop one, and if enough people get vaccinated, then herd immunity is possible. It's just math. The question is really whether a highly effective universal flu vaccine is possible to develop, and nobody knows that.
All of this discussion is abstract, based on a vaccine that doesn't exist yet, yes. It is possible to discuss eugenics in the abstract. And in the abstract, saying "It's a deeply selfish attitude for the elderly and obese... to expect healthy people to take something that might have a net negative effect to them" is eugenicist and antisocial.
> saying "It's a deeply selfish attitude for the elderly and obese... to expect healthy people to take something that might have a net negative effect to them" is eugenicist and antisocial.
Ok, but why? It seems like socially it cuts both ways. If I ask someone to do something they don't want to do and they refuse are they necessarily antisocial? How are you balancing the gains with the losses? It seems that your methods of accounting only value the most likely losers if there is no intervention.
Let's play hypothetical and say the people who are at risk are less than 1% then who is the selfish group? Less than 0.1%? Does that number ever cause you to switch positions or at an arbitrarily small number would the rest of the world be selfish to not get a medical intervention on their behalf?
Or, at the very least, it is a deeply selfish one.
reply