Thread by @WhitneyEpi

🧵1/ When we don’t get #SARSCoV2 transmission low, the most vulnerable - the old, the immunocompromised, the just plain unlucky whose bodies can’t mount a robust immune response to vaccines - they pay a high price

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1450088925956034570

🧵2/ I know many people in US see #COVID19 primarily in personal terms. Their risk to others is not a main priority…

Others argue that the unlucky vulnerable should just “shield” themselves indefinitely, as if being old or sick means that you are no longer a social being

🧵3/ And others argue that the shortening of life for the old in particular is not that great a tragedy bc they would have died soon anyway*

🧵4/(*I have strong feelings about this one. My grandfather is 94 yo. When he passes, we will be sad but know that he lived a full life. I’d like him to have the dignity & comfort of dying in his home peacefully, not suffocating in a hospital, tended by exhausted strangers)

🧵 5/ I know that there are different ways of seeing the world and that we come to our decisions about policy bc our life experiences lead us to weight valid competing values differently.

Daily I learn from people who see the world differently than I do

🧵6/ But I’m still sad. These vaxxed deaths make me especially sad bc they are a foreseeable consequence of a policy of promoting high-transmission among the “young and healthy”. That transmission eventually reaches the unlucky whose bodies can’t fight off this virus

🧵7/ I do not envy people in charge of setting #COVID19 policy in the US: in our polarized environment, it’s hard trade-offs all the way down

But I wish we in US could more honest with the fact that trade-offs are being made

And it’s sad, a lot of it is really sad