Wall Street seems to agree with you, based on the current prices of MRNA and BNTX, both of which I own. I don’t see why people over 60 or with risk factors won’t get the annual shot in similar numbers to flu shots. Do you disagree? (I project like 25% of the population, Wall Street projects approximately 0%.)
This probably depends a lot on the characteristics of the next variant. I am guessing it will be true for most of the range of variants, but not all, so logically we’d expect to have a bad escape variant every so often. What “every so often” amounts to, who knows? Once a year? Once every few?
Terrible line on my part. Should have just taken it off the board.
Is it too much to hope that the posters who died were posting dumb anti-vax shit up until they got into the ICU and people were going full NBZ on them after.
Turning into an authoritarian is worse than losing. I also don’t like the Left’s chances to out authoritarian the GOP. It wasn’t that long ago that preserving Democracy was the country’s north star. Returning to that should be our goal.
The big thing Nate ignores is that it’s a public transit mandate. So, expect a lot of buses and trains to be mask optional soon. AMTRAK has already announced they are optional. I guess some of the bluest cities might hold out, but given that DC area metro has already gone mask optional tonight too, I doubt it will be for too long.
I can’t imagine being immunocompromised and booking a flight under the assumptive risk that everyone will be wearing masks and then in the middle of the flight at 33k ft when you have no choice in the matter, the pilot announces over the intercom, okay everyone you can all take off your masks!
The average American spends only a few moments each day sticking their fingers in their eyes, nose and mouth, so hand washing is very unlikely to make a major difference in public health.
Fox News could easily turn this around completely if they wanted to, just point out how many TSA staff are people of color getting paid by Big Government to do a monumentally useless job that personally inconveniences the Fox News viewer personally. The Big Stupid Wall is fine - nobody actually has to wait in line while they build the wall, but enough people hate airport security personally that Fox could get it eliminated no problem.
This is not an apt analogy, because every non smoker I know basically demands that they never come in contact with a smoking smoker, and society has accepted that it’s fine and good to inconvenience smokers. The systematic othering, inconveniencing, and banishing of smokers should have been the template all along for dealing with unvaccinated people. You wanna smoke? Feel free, outside, not within 10 feet of the door of any public building. You wanna go voluntarily unvaccinated? That’s your right, Captain Freedom, outside, not within 10 feet of the door of any public building.
For those of you wondering how the philly mask mandate is going this time around, it seems it is being completely ignored at large venues. The casino and the 76ers games had zero enforcement. I did see one usher at the game who was trying to tell people but everyone just walked by without acknowledging him.
And the Dem politicians in the city are getting absolutely raked over the coals for it by pretty much everyone. I fear November is going to be a red wave bloodbath even in the bluest parts of the state.