I do my testing very regularly! So I am thinking about other people! Whereas most people don't bother testing and then pass onto other vulnerable people!

I appreciate your support but won't be "reporting" him. If the moderators haven't seen the rule breaking by now, they never will. They have enough to do. Just having to read his stuff and not cry out in dismay would tax the patience of most. We'll see.

I am sorry you got a yellow for such a comparatively mild transgression. When you know that people are complaining about the consistency of referees in the PL it does make you wonder.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

Correct, I did say ‘thus far’ (twice) and the page concerned shows ‘Patients admitted to hospital UK Total’.

No thank you! I am young and healthy, have already had covid and do not consent to it in anyway shape or form.

"Do our bit" or "In this together" is pure brainwashing material!

This dated pronouncement has been overtaken by events. It was never feasible to follow the recommendations. The number of at risk people to protect whilst you ‘let it rip’ would have been far too great and herd immunity potentially impossible due to natural immunity neither lasting nor being effective against mutations. The pronouncement was not peer reviewed and did not stand up to either theoretical or practical tests. Anywhere trying it would have had its medical system swamped like Italy early on and latterly Brazil. It was always better to buy time and then implement a vaccination programme.

There are so many rebuttals I can’t do them justice

The John Snow Memorandum, published in The Lancet, is a response by 80 researchers denouncing the herd immunity approach of the Great Barrington Declaration. Taking its name from John Snow, the epidemiologist who worked on the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, it states that the herd immunity idea is "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by the scientific evidence". It acknowledges that COVID-19 restrictions have led to demoralization, making such an idea attractive, but states that "there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2", adding that "such a strategy would not lead to the end of COVID-19, but instead result in recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination."

The Francis Crick Institute's group leader of the cell biology of infection laboratory, Rupert Beale, said herd immunity is "very unlikely" to be built up before a COVID-19 vaccine is generally implemented. Of the Great Barrington Declaration he said the "declaration prioritises just one aspect of a sensible strategy – protecting the vulnerable – and suggests we can safely build up 'herd immunity' in the rest of the population. This is wishful thinking. It is not possible to fully identify vulnerable individuals, and it is not possible to fully isolate them. Furthermore, we know that immunity to coronaviruses wanes over time, and re-infection is possible – so lasting protection of vulnerable individuals by establishing 'herd immunity' is very unlikely to be achieved in the absence of a vaccine."

I think it's important to remember that Omicron is recent and that a person's history of opting out of vaccination is many months old. We certainly have enough data to know that vaccination reduced a persons chance of contracting covid considerably in prior months, and also where they did contract it, they were significantly less likely to pass it on. People typically live with others or are frequently in contact with family members. If any of them were elderly or vulnerable it was certainly the responsible thing to get vaccinated.

People don't have to choose one or the other (testing or vaccination). That's a false choice.

Edited by BlueJay (23 Dec 2021 1.00am)