blackwater wrote:

Polio is spread through the fecal-oral route which makes it much less of a threat in the modern world than a disease spread through respiratory droplets and aerosols. You cannot get polio by someone breathing on you; you have to actually ingest their poop. Which is easier than it sounds (through flies landing on poop and then on your food, changing a baby's diaper, toilet aerosols, etc.) but still easier to protect against than COVID-19.

I do think that people should get the COVID vaccine, and I got it myself. I'm just a little tired of people constantly using vaccines to dunk on their perceived political opponents. I would feel differently if there was any realistic hope of eliminating the virus, but there just isn't (more on that later...) Trump literally was behind the initial big push to speed up vaccine development; the people who don't want the vaccine didn't make their decision based on "a Democrat in the White House." And you know the demographic that is most resistant to vaccines? Blacks and hispanics. Somehow there's not a lot of dunking on them despite this obvious fact. I guess they're not "the enemy" so nobody cares.

I said this before, but I'll repeat it yet again. Vaccines aren't 100% effective; already more than half of new COVID cases in the UK are among the vaccinated. Even if the vaccine were 100% effective, and we somehow managed to vaccinate everyone in the country, there would still be places like Pakistan where that wasn't true. All it takes is one of those people to take a flight to the US, cough on some people, and the virus is back.

Given that the current US regime refuses to close the borders, for any reason, ever, the chance that I will die in a COVID-free United States is pretty much 0%. So all this brouhaha is really over nothing; there's no way to win and the only question is when we'll figure that out. Hopefully we'll figure that out sooner than we figured it out in Afghanistan. Or maybe we'll just spend the next 20 years cowering in our bunkers. I don't really care; I don't like people anyway. But I feel bad for the kids.