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I really hate the way anti-vaxers have co-opted, confounded, and corrupted the concept of herd immunity because it's crucial to how vaccines work and why we can't just vaccinate "high-risk individuals" and protect anybody.
If you have a protection against infection that 95% effective, that's still 1 in 20, which is a LOT of people being left out. But if the 1 person is surrounded by 19 people who are protected, there's fewer chances for them to be infected.
The way that vaccines that aren't 100% effective can be used to 100% eradicate a virus is by cutting off its opportunities to spread. The more people who are vaccinated, the fewer opportunities it has to spread, reproduce, and mutate.
The idea that I could take a vaccine and be safe if nobody else is taking it is like the idea that I could go to a grocery store that's currently home to a gun fight and not get shot just because I'm not participating in the battle.
Like, imagine we've all got guns that are just firing randomly. And maybe these guns aren't even particularly lethal as guns go. Not everybody who gets hit by one is going to die. They might be wounded. They might suffer permanent injuries. But most won't die.
In all honesty, I don't think it's clear yet. I don't think there's enough data available to make that call. https://twitter.com/C_Weynerowski/status/1344391000068915200
But imagine that the randomly-firing guns that people are carrying have some kind of Borg nanotech where if you're hit by one, then maybe even before you notice you've been tagged, you sprout a gun and start shooting randomly, too.
That's a virus.
That's a virus.
The more people are protected, even to just 95%, the fewer people are going to sprout these randomly-firing guns. Conversely, the more people who get hit by them, the more people are going to die, even if most people who get hit don't.
There was a video that went viral the other day of a woman in a drug store who refused to wear a mask, saying that it's wrong to treat "healthy people" like "sick people". She repeatedly stated "it's been shown that asymptomatic spread is a myth," which isn't true at all.
It may be true that asymptomatic carriers spread it *less* on an individual basis than symptomatic ones, but it's all about chances. A six-sided die is more likely to come up 1 than a twenty-sided die, but if you keep rolling the twenty-sider, you'll still hit the 1.
And the risk with asymptomatic carriers is that because they are less likely to know they're infected and less likely to worry about passing it on if they do know, they will repeatedly expose others, until that lower chance becomes a higher risk.
