Quote Originally Posted by baldburke View Post
If you get get the virus, vaxed or not, then what is the point of the shot? I realize if you get a flu shot, you can still get the flu. But how many people do you know that get the MMR shot and come down with with measles, mumps or rubella?
I can't help myself.

That's akin to asking, "Why wear seatbelts if I can still die while wearing one?" Because it is protective, but not 100% preventative. It can't keep the virus from entering your body, but it makes it a LOT harder to get sick, and even harder to get "I need to go to the hospital" sick.

I mean, birth control isn't 100% effective. Does that mean that someone who doesn't want to get pregnant shouldn't even bother?

You get vaccinated to help build up protection for yourself and society. To make it harder for the virus to continue to find a safe haven with which to mutate into something even worse. Yes, people certainly should be free to choose for themselves whether or not to get the vaccine. HOWEVER, with choices come consequences, and you must also accept those consequences. In this case, that could mean unemployment, a change in lifestyle (not being allowed to attend certain events, travel, etc), and even hospitalization and death. Freedom allows you to make the choice, but it does not allow you to change the consequences of that choice.

And, yes, in many places the hospitals are in crisis. My wife is a surgeon. She's not an ER doc, but she is on-call every 3rd night to deal with anything surgical. Ruptured appendix, trauma, etc. The hospital here is full of COVID patients. The surrounding hospitals are as well. The problem with this is that COVID patients don't exactly "turn over" very quickly....they stay in the hospital for weeks as compared to a lot of other types of hospitalization which usually requires just a few days. So, now, if I have a heart attack and have to go to the ER, and the hospital is full, they'll try to transfer me somewhere else. But the hospitals in the next closest town are also full (my wife also works there), so they'll look farther-afield. They might have to transport me to Richmond, Charlotte, or who knows how far. I know that she has had hospitals that are 6 hours away calling her trying to get their patients transferred here because they have no room. They are starting to cancel what they call "non-emergent" surgeries because they have no place to put them for recovery. Guess what is considered "non-emergent"? Cancer. Yep. You got a tumor in your liver or breast? Sorry, we can't operate on you because Joe "Fox News" Jones thinks that the government wants to track him so they've concocted this elaborate hoax just to put a microchip in his bloodstream and now he has COVID and is slowly suffocating upstairs.

And we actually have a 60% vaccination rate. 95% of the COVID patients in our hospital are unvaccinated. I can only imagine what it's like in our surrounding states which are far worse off...West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, etc.