“We have to protect the immune-compromised!” That’s an old argument about to be trotted out, and it will fall flat to the unbelievers. It’s a preaching to the choir argument on the face of it. We know that natural immunity to a virus strain cleared by the body exists for at least a decade, if not a lifetime, as well as strains that are sufficiently close. There are studies out there showing that something like 90% of the unvaccinated have cross-immunity, and I would surmise that at least 50% of the unvaccinated have already had it and recovered just fine. They don’t consider themselves a threat to the cancer patients. Which is silly. Of course they’re a threat, because of the thousands of other viruses, bacteria, and fungi which can infect and kill the immune-compromised, which are colonized on the skin and in the guts and lungs of normal average everyday people all the time, in balance. There is NO way to protect the immune compromised via eradication of one out of over a thousand infectious agents. None. Don’t kid yourself.
On top of that, we know that antibiotic resistance occurs via the overuse of antibiotics. The population pressure selects for antibiotic evading bacteria. Therefore, vaccines or gene therapies also select for vaccine evading viruses. That’s basic mathematical modeling. It should be obvious, but unfortunately Captain Obvious quit teaching in med school when Coca-Cola and the Seventh Day Adventists took over writing the nutrition curriculum. You want to select for deadlier strains? Vaccinate. Just like Marek’s Disease in chickens.
However, the real underlying concept to wrap your head around right now is that the social contract is irretrievably broken. Nobody wants to protect the people who put millions of people out of work. Nobody wants to protect the people who bullied them, yelled at them, called the police on them, and were utter assholes to them over the past year. Nobody wants to protect the people who are responsible for throwing millions of people out of their homes at the end of June for unpaid rent. Nobody wants to protect the people who imprisoned children in their homes and suffocated them with masks, even when they already had immunity to the virus, until their children shriveled into husks of themselves with loneliness and despair. People are not going to risk harm to their own children to protect the fragile lives of strangers who won’t lift a finger to help their children survive. If they weren’t selfish before all this, by God, they are selfish now. Shame doesn’t put food on the table, or clothe the growing children.
There are now a ton of people who think that the immune compromised can just fuck off and die. They are selfish and cruel now, because they know that nobody is going to help them and nobody cares about their wellbeing. They have been abandoned by their social support system, and they won’t help others because of it. There is no duty to save the life of a stranger, and they no longer have any desire to even try, when they are suffering themselves.