I feel like this revisionism she's talking about... it's the kind of thing that happens when we immediately abandon nuance to try to make a truthful counterargument as simple as the lie it's countering.
https://twitter.com/BethPathak/status/1473652172705439749
Truth: No vaccine has a 100% prevention rate.
Truth: Nobody said this one would.
Truth: A less than 100% prevention rate can still 100% eliminate 100% of infections if enough people are vaccinated that the virus's survival odds in the wild fall far enough, fast enough.
Truth: Nobody said this one would.
Truth: A less than 100% prevention rate can still 100% eliminate 100% of infections if enough people are vaccinated that the virus's survival odds in the wild fall far enough, fast enough.
Truth: The vaccine also makes it so that in the unlikely event that you get a breakthrough infection, you're less likely to have symptoms, and if you do, less likely to have severe symptoms, and if you do, less likely to die.
But all of that is complicated, and it requires an audience that is receptive to caring about how their actions affect others, receptive to thinking about risk management, receptive to nuance...
And so we jump past all of that to "It's not for preventing infections, but death."
And so we jump past all of that to "It's not for preventing infections, but death."
Which undercuts the argument for the vaccine, and it doesn't even work, because the same "logic" means that when a vaccinated person dies, the same people we're trying to reach go, "Oh, I thought the vaccine was supposed to prevent death? So it does literally nothing?"
The answer to the snide "What kind of medicine only works if other people take it?" is every vaccine ever. Polio. Smallpox. None of them are wholly effective, but effective enough to prevent enough spread for diseases to run out of hosts and die out.
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