Thread by @soncharm

77% of eligible people in the US (12+) have received at least a dose of a vaccine.

Why are people still scheming like mad to get more vaccinated? What sea-change exactly do you imagine this would bring about, even if attainable, which it isn’t?

I guess I just don’t understand

Honestly, we don’t even need to get into some heavy discussion of rights or whatever

We just need to confront the more immediate issue which is that there’s simply *no point* in pushing this thing so hard from where we already are

It’s not gonna do anything meaningful

If you disagree explain it to me

‘If we get 77 up to X, then ___ will happen’

What is X and what goes in that blank

There simply is no need to chase this asymptote. It’s a total waste of energy, political capital, and social cohesion.

And by the way that 77% is across all ages but of course the older age cohorts - you know, the ones that are at orders of magnitude more risk - are way into the 90s

So what the fuck do you care whether a 28 year old takes it?

Like even if your rationale is ‘it reduces hospitalization risk’, that risk is already very small for the cohorts with siginificantly not-near-100% vax rates. So it’s practically a red herring. You’re fanatically trying to get an already-tiny risk lower? Why

It’s possible to envision some true-risk metric, whether hospitalizations or deaths

It’s possible to envision boosting the vax rate significantly, but mostly/only by coercing 20-40 year olds

Doing the latter won’t really improve the former much. Why do people think it will?

I have difficulty escaping the conclusion that the only reason for all this is that the ‘vax rate’ has become the Administration’s metric of choice for policy success.

But that’s bad, and dumb. It’s a bad metric and people who fixate on it are being dumb.