I believe in vaccination, too, but this is a pale imitation of vaccination, with an unusual and unacceptable level of risk attached. An injectable substance that doesn’t prevent infection and doesn’t stop transmission is not a vaccine.
I retired early from a 30-year career a few months ago because of the mandate. Now I’ve started consulting part-time, but had to apply for an exemption (it was approved) because I will be working on a contract with the FAA, and so the federal contractor mandate applied (and I’m working 100% remote from my home - what a joke). Anyone who can’t see that protecting health has absolutely zero to do with the government’s COVID response is just blind. When you’re forcing people to be “vaccinated” who will never be in the same building with any of their coworkers (or in my case, not even in the same state), the obvious objective is power and control, period.
Yeah. I wonder about that. Here in Australia the evidence that vaccination does greatly reduce the risk of infection, and does greatly reduce the risk of transmission seems very strong and unambiguous. No, it's not 100% effective - but nor are a lot of vaccines. Something doesn't have to be perfect to be worth doing.
I don't really know what's going on in the United States to make so many Americans think that vaccines aren't working as well as they do seem to be here and in a lot of other places. I don't know if that's reality - in which case, I think Americans need to be looking very carefully at what might be different in America - or if it's just perception.
In Australia, we're currently seeing among our highest infection rates - but that's at a time when our society is largely open up - they haven't gone dramatically up as we've opened up, they just haven't gone down a lot either. But our hospitalisation and death rates are much lower now than they were. And that isn't because people have acquired natural immunity through infection - only a very small proportion of Australians have ever been infected compared to most countries. Vaccination does seem to be the difference.
But at least 80% and probably more like 90% of Australians were going to get vaccinated without any mandates - so they seem pretty pointless. They will not change the numbers much at all.