Ryan754326

I’m quite happy to take my chances in Mexico if it means being able to live a somewhat normal life.... It feels quite safe here, but I’m glad you’re enjoying Thailand. As far as case numbers in Mexico are concerned, I’ve had two jabs and recovered from covid already, so it’s no longer something that I worry about. Concerning case numbers in Thailand and the rest of SEA, all of the people I know there (Thais, Vietnamese, Cambodians - not expats) who came down sick in the past two years, were too terrified of the consequences to report it, so the official numbers are meaningless to me. China, as an example, is still only reporting slightly over 100,000 total cases, and still less than 5000 total deaths. It’s amazing how good you can make things look when you have the power to arrest and imprison people for reporting bad news.

Is there a new study concerning Omicron to comfirm this? Because everything I was reading about Delta a few months ago was saying that the vaccinated could be just as contagious as the unvaccinated when infected. I can’t see any reason why Omicron would be different, considering that it’s even more contagious than Delta, but I’m happy to be shown that I’m wrong.

If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. The vaccines don’t do a good enough job of stopping infection to prevent new mutations from popping up. If you’re infected, the virus is replicating inside your body, and mutation is possible. Vaccinated or not.

Why don’t you acknowledge the vaccinated asymptomatics?

Guess you’re not aware that the vaccinated can do exactly the same. How do you think Omicron spread around the world so fast if nobody can get on a plane without a vaccination and a test?

Yes, they should get vaccinated, and be happy knowing that they are well protected having done so… Then stop worrying about what everyone else does concerning their own health. If we’re going to make it about overcrowded hospitals and wasting public resources, then we’re opening the door to the government having control over a lot more aspects of our lives than just vaccinations. If the vaccine mandate crowd was calling for unvaccinated covid patients to be given last priority at hospitals, then I’d be just fine with that, but if we’re going to start creating a hierarchy of who gets medical treatment first, based on their poor health related choices, then there’s going to be a lot of people finding themselves somewhere near the bottom of that list for many other reasons besides refusing the vaccine.

The fact that you feel safer living in Thailand tells me that, aside from covid, you probably don’t have much to worry about. I guess it just comes down to lifestyle. As someone who drives a truck for a living, I’d feel much better working in the covid infested USA where the roads are relatively safe, than in Thailand where covid is less of a threat. Sorry to keep beating the road fatalities horse, but some of your posts seem to be suggesting that Thias are these responsible and compassionate people who put the safety and well-being of others ahead of their own interests. This might be true in the case of covid, but when they get behind the wheel, that sense of social responsibility disappears, and it becomes every man for himself.

Many (most?) Thais can’t be bothered to put a helmet on their kids before they stack three of them on the back of their scooter and drive off down some of the most dangerous roads in the world. They aren’t better people, they’re just better trained. If the government hammered them with fear and consequences over road fatalities the way they have with covid, they’d follow those rules too, and many lives would be saved, but the elites don’t care, because their kids ride around in cars. If the vaccine had proven to be a silver bullet, and completely eliminated the possibility of being infected, the doors would have been wide open to tourism the day after the last rich Thai got their second jab.

I don’t think my messaging is anti-vax at all, just pro-choice/anti-discrimination. I also think it should be the responsibility of the individual to protect themselves as much as they deem necessary. If I raw-dog my way through Pattaya and catch AIDS, is it her fault for not making me wear a condom? Airborne diseases are nothing new, and they aren’t going away. If people plan on avoiding exposure to them completely, they should invest in a bubble.

Not true where I live. There’s more vaccinated people in hospitals now than unvaccinated. I do understand that as more and more people become vaccinated, they will represent a larger and larger proportion of the total number of people in hospitals, but the fact remains that even without the unvaccinated patients there, it would likely still be too many for the system to cope (basing this assumption on the fact that it couldn’t cope very well before covid came along). This brings us back to those people who are vaccinated, but have otherwise neglected their health, and are suffering from other chronic diseases along with covid. Would they still be hospitalized if they were 50 kilos lighter and could jog a few KM without collapsing? What about if they were 35 and not 75?

So as a private business owner, can I refuse service to those who I suspect might be homeless, if I can prove by showing statistics that they are more likely to steal from my business? How about if I just ask them to produce a piece of identification that shows me they at least have a home address? If someone were a taxi driver in certain American cities, They might look at the statistics involving armed robberies and other violent crime, and conclude that they don’t want to pick up customers who fall into certain ethnic groups. Should that be allowed, if the numbers seem to prove the hypothesis? I’m sure you can show me plenty of evidence saying that someone is less likely to give you covid after being vaccinated, but you can’t produce any evidence to show that it’s absolutely not possible. I think the evidence at this point shows us that it absolutely is possible. So if we are going to allow people to discriminate against others on the basis that it’s “more likely” for that group of people to cause harm to others, what should stop the taxi driver in Chicago from discriminating against those who he can prove with statistics are “more likely” to rob him at gun point?

That’s my entire point. If the triple vaccinated aren’t staying out of the hospital, then why are we still blaming the unvaccinated for all of these restrictions still being placed on society? What good has restricting the unvaccinated done? Omicron didn’t spread around the world in the span of a couple months by stowing away inside the bodies of unvaccinated travelers. They can’t travel.

Got me? I don’t know about that. People choose to drink People choose to smoke People choose to eat garbage food People choose to spend their lives sitting on the couch while doing all of the above, and they’ve only done more of it since they’ve been locked down in their homes. We’ve always known why we use more resources than necessary on healthcare: Because too many people have refused to do what we’ve always known is required to avoid chronic diseases caused by poor overall health - Eat better, don’t smoke, don’t drink, exercise once in a while. I doubt the seasonal overcrowding due to flu would have been the problem it was either, if people simply chose to live healthier lifestyles from the start.

It is now, because it’s been made that way. In the old days it was hippy moms who were worried about vaccines causing developmental issues with their children. Hardly a bastion of the far right. I get you, and I agree it’s become political. Anyone who disagrees with what’s going on is branded a right winger, and when society treats them like outcasts they are pushed further into that box. Those on both sides are making it just about impossible to sit somewhere in the middle of the debate. I believe that anti-vax sentiment mostly comes form people who rejected the lockdowns and restrictions first, and then rejected what was given to them as the only solution. The right, by definition, claims to be against big government and over-regulation, so it wasn’t hard for a few opportunistic right-leaning politicians to drag those people into their camp. With that said, I never understood the connection between Trump and anti-vaxxers. Wasn’t he the one cheering on his “operation warp speed” to get vaccines rolled out faster than ever before? Wasn’t he booed by his own supporters when he endorsed vaccines at one of his own rallies? Maybe I just don’t pay enough attention to Yank politics, but I think I’ll keep it that way.

I don’t see a problem with mingling, as the vaccinated shouldn’t have much to worry about. We all know by this stage in the game that you can catch covid from a vaccinated person too. People should just take it upon themselves to stay home if they are looking for a 100% positive guarantee of safety. Spitting on someone, on the other hand, is, and always was a crime, long before covid ever came along. They should be charged and made an example of…because of their actions, not because of their opinions. By the way, I happen to live on Vancouver island, two hours north of Nanaimo. My hometown just competed a major addition to our hospital a couple of years ago, and my aunt, who is a nurse there, says that everyone knew it would be too small before they began building it. Hospital overcrowding is nothing new in Canada.

Nonsense. Anti-vax thinking was always around. Actress Jenny McCarthy was publicly telling people it caused her Child’s autism years ago, and the media wasn’t afraid to publish her unsubstantiated claims. Politicians have made covid vaccines political because they need to cover for the fact that they’ve dropped the ball on every play.

Right. Who cares? So as long as the unvaccinated aren’t going around coughing in other people’s faces trying to deliberately infect them, then what do I care? Covid is endemic now, so there’s no escaping it. We all just have to adjust according to how much risk we’re willing to accept. Right now there are a lot of unvaccinated people in hospitals taking up resources unnecessarily, but before they came along it was flu patients clogging up the ICUs every winter, and if it wasn’t for them, then history indicates we probably would have scaled back hospital capacity to reduce waste. Eventually those unvaccinated people will either die, or survive and become immune, so I think it will be a short term problem if the vaccines work as well as is being claimed.

Not sure what you mean by this. I’m not undermining anything. I’ve said repeatedly, on this forum and elsewhere, that vaccines are effective in reducing serious illness and death, and I’d encourage others to get theirs, like I got mine. I just don’t think it should be forced on people, any more than they should be forced to quit smoking, eat better, or exercise regularly. If the “vax or die” crowd could just settle down and be happy knowing that they are fairly well protected having had the vaccines themselves, then I’d be on their side laughing at the anti-vaxxers too.

I’m not arguing for that. Im arguing for people’s ability to make their own choices when it comes to the risks they take in life. The vaccines have been here for a year now. The argument that someone else needs to stay home or wear a mask to protect you is wearing thin.

This is where your’s and my opinion differ. I don’t think things would be much different, even if 110% of the world’s population had been vaccinated already. At this point, there’s still too many vaccinated people taking up hospital beds, even if you took all of the unvaccinated out of the picture. As far as deaths go, I really don’t care if an anti-vaxxer dies of covid, any more than I care when someone who smoked for 50 years gets lung cancer. The freedom to make poor choices is important to me, and I think it’s worth a few lives in order to keep it. I’ve been vaccinated, so I don’t see anti-vaxxers as a threat to my personal health, and I don’t view their unnecessary occupation of hospital beds as being any worse than someone who receives insulin at taxpayer expense, yet refuses to lose weight and change their diet. As I’ve indicated in previous posts, I think the anti-vaxer debate has become more political than anything. Thank god - for politicians - that we have them around, otherwise who would they blame when our neglected healthcare systems still failed to keep up with the number of vaccinated individuals using up beds?

Half of all people where? Certainly not in Thailand or the rest of SEA. The USA, UK, EU, Canada? sure. Half of the people are old there too. If western countries, who’s populations are old and fat, had a death rate comparable to many third world countries who’s populations are young and skinny, I think we’d probably have forgotten about covid by now. The biggest problem since the beginning has been our reluctance to admit who’s actually at a real risk from this disease, and focus on them, rather than the population as a whole. Many of us young healthy people, who had to continue working through the early stages of the pandemic when there was no vaccine available at all, have grown tired of the never ending restrictions on our lives now that the vaccines are available for those who want them, and deaths/serious illness in our age group has been brought down to basically zero.

we were led to believe that 70-80% of the population being vaccinated would be enough to get those numbers down to an acceptable level, and end the social restrictions and masks. Nothing “right wing” about it. At one point I even remember an American politician saying that the pandemic could be over in a month if people would just wear their masks. You might have been aware that the vaccines wouldn’t neutralize covid completely. I was aware, but was called a pessimist (among others things) for trying to tell anyone or show them the evidence. The mainstream media sure didn’t make it very clear to the general public.

I don’t address Q because I haven’t met anyone in real life who actually subscribes to all that nonsense; the same as how I don’t know any white supremacists, even though the media would have me believe that I’m surrounded by them, and they are the latest “greatest threat” to our way of life. Some people think the world is flat, and plenty of people still believe in god. There’s nothing I can do about them, but I don’t think they have the power to change any thinking person’s mind. All I see is politicians looking for a scapegoat because the plan hasn’t gone quite as well as people were led to believe it would. Western countries are well ahead of the vaccination targets that politicians and health authorities themselves set, and implied repeatedly, would be enough to get us out of this mess. They were wrong. Now that their credibility is being questioned by a good chunk of their constituents, they need someone to put the blame on, and who better to blame than a small segment of the population who is already inherently anti-government?

Was it said in error, or was it said because it was politically beneficial? There were scientists at the time pointing to the effectiveness of flu shots; showing that while they do reduce serious illness and deaths in those who are most vulnerable, they are not (and should not be expected to be) capable of eradicating the disease itself. These scientists (the other side) were pushed to the back of the room where nobody would hear them, IMO. The impression I get from the VAST MAJORITY of people I talk to, is that they were never all that scared of covid to begin with, but did hope that the vaccines would put an end to all the misery that it has caused. That’s why many of them got vaccinated to begin with. Not necessarily because they thought they’d die if they didn’t get it.

Whether or not that was really what was sold to the public, it would appear that’s what most of them thought they were buying. I remember having arguments with friends and family at this time last year, trying to show them articles written by scientists who said that the vaccines could not realistically be expected to stop the spread and put and end to covid. They were all planning vacations, weddings, and family reunions for the summer, and I was “just being negative”. (I was also accused of “being negative” and “making things up” when I said that these vaccines would be like a flu shot, and require periodic boosters to keep up with new mutations) If health authorities weren’t selling the idea that the vaccines would end covid altogether, they should have been a lot more clear about it to the average news consumer, who doesn’t read medical journals. This is not to say that the vaccines don’t reduce serious illness and death (gotta throw that in there). What I’m saying, is that politicians would have had a much less patient populace on their hands if they’d been more honest, and told us that the masks and social restrictions would quite possibly have to remain for months, or even years after the vaccines were rolled out.