A question for those of you who like to brand unvaccinated people stupid and/or selfish: What do you hope to achieve? I can only assume it’s a way for you to let off steam rather than a strategy for actually changing anyone’s mind. I can’t imagine a more counterproductive approach to getting someone on side than insulting them.
On posts here, it's all as rebuttals to anti-vax talking points and misrepresentations or actual falsehoods. Along with being a valid description of the decision.
None of it is to convince someone to get vaccinated. In fact, most of the posters saying those things are already vaccinated, they're just spreading noise to encourage/support others not getting vaccinated.
Actual posters that have been here over the last year with personal concerns about vaccination have all been met with support and encouragement to get vaccinated. I think most (all?) of them ended up getting vaccinated eventually then, even if it took a few months for some.
In general, there is no way to convince those anti-vaccine to change their minds and hasn't been for a long time already. The ones that respond to polls with "never get it", and even the "unlikely to get". Instead, and this is where most of the conversation has been for months, we need to provide alternative reasons for them to get vaccinated despite them being anti-vaccine. The mandates are the simplest example of this. This allows those people to be both "right" that they're never going to get the vaccine, an opinion that defines part of them for whatever reason, they do not need to give up that identity, do not need to change their mind. Instead, they get vaccinated for some other reason, to keep a job, go to concert, visit someone, travel, avoid frequent extra testing, whatever.
This type of resolution doesn't involve convincing anyone to change their mind on the topic. There is no need to confront if a prior decision was right or not, or any impact that prior decision had. It becomes a new independent decision that is completely independent of the first.
Cash rewards and lotteries were the earliest example of this. It didn't matter if you were anti-vaccine or not. If you wanted the reward, you would get vaccinated anyway. In fact, you could easily hold the decision that you only did it for the reward.
Work mandates are raising the level on that. They're generally working too, with few hold outs. For the same reason, it's easy to hold the decision that you only got vaccinated to keep a job and are still anti-vaccine at heart and true to yourself.
Work mandates, assuming it all settles out and end up true for everyone over 100 employees is probably the most effective. Even if 2% of people opt out to go work for smaller employers. That could still get us to 95% vaccinated. Assuming 95% is enough with Omicron, we can afford to have some hold outs, there's just to many right now.
