People who have had COVID and tested positive for it tend to have recent documentation of such. You don't get another tetanus shot if you're on record having had one 6 months ago.
More study is needed in general. I'm not against vaccines, I'm against forcing people to take them with minimal/broad basis in a way that has been used to outright justify atrocity in our own history.
If people want to take the vaccine or get boosters, they should get them. The only real question is who to prioritize among those that want them (I would advocate giving to unvaccinated that want vaccines before giving boosters, if it's a choice between the two).
There must be at least some dishonesty going on here. Not from you, but from the general narrative about case loads in hospitals. Consider:
- There are only four states with a 1st dose vaccination rate < 50%
- The worst state among these 4, Idaho, is at 46%.
- Supposed "bad" states like Texas and Florida are at 59% and 66% respectively. The narrative on FL is particularly stupid, given it's an above-average state in this metric.
- According to any data I can find, vaccinated people almost never die from COVID and are rarely hospitalized for COVID.
- Though notably, if you're hospitalized for any reason and test positive for COVID, it's a "COVID hospitalization", so even among cases that are "hospitalized", the vaccinated hospitalization rate is inflated (as is the rate in general).
If we are to believe vaccinations work (which we should), we expect COVID hospitalization rate to decrease a lot with > 50% vaccination rate, and thus that pressure on hospitals right now is a fraction of what it was in 2020. Not quite a 1:1 decrease with vaccination %, but not too far from that either. That is why people are getting the vaccine, right?
Is that what we observe?
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org...ing-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s-in-august-2021/
Mostly yes. 700 deaths/day is bad, but it's way below the load on hospitals in Apr 2020 (~2000) or especially this past winter (peaked ~3000!). So if hospitals are *****ing about being "full", they are advertising their incompetence, period. We've had two massively higher spikes, the demand is obvious/easily anticipated at this point, and somehow they're floundering anyway. Maybe they shouldn't be dumping personnel/cutting back capacity in the middle of a pandemic and then complaining about it?
Here is AHA's data on it. I don't know WTH Georgia is doing, but it seems most hospitals are otherwise managing
https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals . Unless we're anticipating a major spike in spite of increasing vaccination rates, I don't see why we should buy hospital capacity arguments in the broad sense.