Of course it's required. I know you are rubbish at logic but I did think you understood science

You think we can just let the virus run free.

Genuinely I despair. There is no freedom of choice here, if a young person exercises it in the 'wrong' direction other people will lose their choices and potentially their lives or at least quality of life.

You have never really been big on shared societal responsibility have you. Each for their own eh? You grew up in a very selfish era.

You must live in a yurt

Do you not know anyone that died from Covid-19? Or that’s been in ICU? Or that has long Covid. Or do you just not care?

This isn’t like the flu. Unless you count the Spanish flu.

When did I appeal to emotion

I am appealing to facts. Somehow you don't tend to believe them so I wondered if your personal experience bore any resemblance to the known facts. You historically have said this is just another flu type disease

Here are some facts about that from the Lancet:

89,530 patients with COVID-19 and 45,819 patients with influenza were hospitalised in France during the respective study periods.

The presentation of patients with COVID-19 and seasonal influenza requiring hospitalisation differs considerably. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is likely to have a higher potential for respiratory pathogenicity, leading to more respiratory complications and to higher mortality. In children, although the rate of hospitalisation for COVID-19 appears to be lower than for influenza, in-hospital mortality is higher

So more people catch it and a higher proportion of those die.

If it's like the flu then it's as if the flu has been turbo-charged and then a super-charger added on top whilst using a Nitrous Oxide boost kit. These figures pre-date the latest wave and the new strain.

Edited by Mapletree (16 Jan 2021 6.46pm)

There is a flying by the seat of their pants element to who to vaccinate and when, most definitely.

Some interesting data on the Pfizer vaccine after one dose:

"A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine stated that the efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 52.4% between the first and second dose (spaced 21 days apart).5 However, in its “green book” Public Health England said that during the phase III trial most of the vaccine failures were in the days immediately after the first dose, indicating that the short term protection starts around day 10.6 Looking at the data from day 15 to 21, it calculated that the efficacy against symptomatic covid-19 was around 89%."

"The second dose is expected to bring immunity levels to some 95% after about a week".

and the Oxford vaccine:

"In the case of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, PHE said, “High protection against hospitalisation was seen from 21 days after dose one until two weeks after the second dose, suggesting that a single dose will provide high short term protection against severe disease . . . An exploratory analysis of participants who had received one standard dose of the vaccine suggested that efficacy against symptomatic covid-19 was 73%”

There's a lag due to covid incubation period, but the recent Israel study would appear to suggest that people are much less likely to pass on covid post vaccination too, which is a fantastic sign. Vaccination should put a sudden and serious dent in the numbers of new hospitalisations and deaths starting in a couple of months time.

It may be that they'll try to roll out dose two after vaccinating as many people in other groups as possible. If numbers of covid cases within those vaccinated start to creep up at all they might see that as a sign to get moving with it faster. Ideally they will stick to the timescale they'd previously stated, as that would seem optimal, but I've given up second guessing things!

But anyway, my point is that people will hopefully have a substantial degree of protection even if there are some delays, unless it endlessly gets pushed back.

It’ll be like painting the Forth Bridge. They’ll get to the end and have to start again and this will be the excuse for forever locking us down and keeping pubs closed.

Yes, we’ll need to be regularly immunised in all likelihood, like with annual flu jabs

Your second point is simply classic of your approach to everything. Get a life will you.