> Is r/lockdownskepticism also skeptical of vaccination? It's a very heterogenous sub, but I don't think you'll find the kind of anti-vax thinking that sugges

> Is r/lockdownskepticism also skeptical of vaccination? It's a very heterogenous sub, but I don't think you'll find the kind of anti-vax thinking that suggests that, eg, childhood vaccination is unhelpful to a society, if that's what you're asking. If you are asking more strictly about sentiment toward the currently available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, I think that by and large we think they're a marvel of engineering, but have an array of assessments and opinions regarding pandemic-timeline vaccination, what it's meant to accomplish, and whether genuine public health decisions in such a context can ever be made independently of profit motivations of vaccine makers. As for the mod team, I think I can confidently say that we view the vaccines as very useful tools and owe the engineering teams (both who have worked these decades to make mRNA platforms a reality and those who lost sleep to crank these vaccines out) a debt of gratitude. > And do you think covid is worse than or same as the flu? By "the flu", I presume you mean the H3N2 influenza which began as the 1968 pandemic and has since been endemic, causing seasonal outbreaks most years, rather than epidemic influenza which of course happens from time to time (eg, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic). I don't think there's any remaining need to speculate: the wealth of evidence clearly demonstrates that COVID-19 is far more likely than seasonal influenza to result in hospitalization and death for the elderly with comorbidities, less likely than influenza to do so in young and middle-aged healthy people, and similarly likely as influenza for people in the middle. This has been evident, and has held true, since last summer, when John Ioannidis published this paper on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935120307854 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512... I want to point out that opposition to lockdowns, almost without exception, does not turn on the population mortality rate of the pathogen in question. In fact, if the pathogen were even more dangerous, we suggest that lockdowns are likely to be an even worse idea. Lockdowns necessarily cause stratification by socioeconomic status rather than by risk. Even in an 'effective' lockdown, we still see spread among the "essential workers" who keep society going, and in their households, which are disproportionately likely to be multigen. To the degree that lockdowns actually slow spread, this means that people in the high-risk tier (in this case, mostly elderly people) have to isolate _longer_ to wait for the spread to complete among the lower risk tiers. This may be acceptable for affluent households with remote jobs and the ability to have all of their needs met via delivery, but is obviously untenable for our marginalized neighbors who cannot afford periods of extended isolation.