Dr StrangeJab or: How I Learned to Love the Vax Pass

  At the moment in Australia we are seeing more and more bizarre logic, like that represented in this tweet, bandied around regarding the concept of vaccine passports and segregating the vaccinated away from the unvaccinated. 

Again if you’re an anti - vaxxer & want absolute freedom to do what you want from not wearing a mask to no vaccination, that’s your right. It’s also right of others to say “I cannot be safe around you so you cannot come into my pub, workplace, home etc.” Choices have consequences

— Kon Karapanagiotidis (@Kon__K) September 7, 2021

Its even more egregious when it is coming from individuals who work for human rights organisations like the ASRC who one would think would know better. However leaving aside the many human rights concerns about this current push let us just look at the utterly insane illogic of this mans statement. He claims “I, as a vaccinated person, can not be safe around you as an unvaccinated person”. This is a completely fallacious argument and makes zero sense.

It seems like people are trying to conflate some of the arguments that people were making last year in the masked vs. unmasked people debate. In that argument people were claiming that an unmasked person was a threat as they may leave droplets on surfaces that even a masked person may come into contact with at some point and make them sick. 

If they really believed masks worked however the masked person should have been afforded some level of protection from the unmasked person but there was still logically an avenue of infection transmission that may arise from an unmasked person. Hence the unmasked person is branded a ‘threat’.

This argument completely breaks down however when one moves to vaccination. If one believes the vaccines work then a vaccinated person is completely safe around an unvaccinated person as they have immunity to the disease. Indeed this is why in a vaccine roll out we roll out the vaccine to health care workers first, so they are protected from the ill unvaccinated people they are still treating in the early stages of a vaccine roll out. 

If you are vaccinated then an unvaccinated person is absolutely no risk to you. Indeed that is the entire point to the vaccination to begin with. So why is there a rush to make out that unvaccinated people are some sort of plague carrying unclean caste in society? It is extremely bizarre.

Even if you want to argue that, as is definitely the case with this generation of vaccines, the vaccines themselves do not offer full protection from being able to catch the virus, this still does not make an unvaccinated person an increased risk to you as a vaccinated person. If you believe that the vaccine vastly lowers your risk of severe illness and death, then it is similarly completely safe to be around an unvaccinated person if you are vaccinated. If you do not believe the vaccine offers any such protection then what is the point to the vaccine at all? 

If the vaccine has given you a much better chance to metabolise the disease then in fact it may even be a good thing to be exposed to the disease whilst your vaccination immunity is at its highest. This will be like receiving a free booster shot from the unvaccinated person and after having had your bout with the illness, you will have an even more robust and longer lasting immunity to the disease. 

Indeed in this scenario you as the vaccinated person are a far bigger risk and danger to the unvaccinated person. For if the unvaccinated person were to catch the disease from you as a vaccinated carrier then they have the normal statistical risk of severe disease and death that the disease comes with, whereas you will be able to risk the virus and have the benefits of surviving illness with your vaccine enhanced immunity. So again the question remains what is the point of pretending Vaccinated people are some sort of holier than though caste in society compared with the unvaccinated?

It seems like they are once again conflating another argument in this case. There is an argument that has been used to keep unvaccinated children out of schools and childcare establishments. That argument goes that because in school there are young children who are too young to receive their vaccines yet but they have every intention to when they reach the correct age, that it is unfair to them if an older child who is unvaccinated by choice spreads a disease to them before they have had the opportunity to vaccinate themselves against it. Therefore these older unvaccinated children should be excluded. 

The moral reasoning behind this argument completely breaks down when we are talking about adult populations however. In an adult population if an adult has made the conscious choice not to get vaccinated then the risk is totally on them. If they get sick or die after catching the disease, either from a vaccinated person or another unvaccinated person, that is completely their choice and is no ones fault. Again in this scenario it is still the UNVACCINATED who are at risk not the vaccinated. The vaccinated do not need to be hiding behind castle walls viewing everyone else as a zombie in an utter panic like they currently are. 

About the only logical argument that the vaccinated could have with the unvaccinated is that they are concerned that so many unvaccinated people will get severe illness from the current pandemic that they will fill up all the hospital beds in the hospital system. Then if the vaccinated individual has a car crash, or some sort of health emergency, whilst going about their daily lives then they will not have a bed available to them for treatment to help them. However this is a very different proposition to the way the argument is being framed now, that the unvaccinated are a direct threat to your physical health just by walking into a room and saying hello to you as a vaccinated person. 

Indeed locking the unvaccinated out of your premises and businesses does absolutely nothing to address this issue. Unless you are advocating for euthanising all the unvaccinated, who knows at this point given the utterly unhinged rhetoric we are seeing on social media these days, then the unvaccinated will continue to circulate on the fringes of society, even if you have locked them out, and will have just as much risk of eventually coming into contact with the pathogen, getting sick and filling up those same hospital beds.  So the entire concept of the vaccination passport and the two-tier society yet again makes absolutely no sense from a disease control perspective.  

It seems that the whole thing is some cult like behaviour that has grown up in the pandemic as a combination of bad social media actors and fear of disease; such as we have seen in previous pandemics. Indeed people have started to treat vaccines like they are some black magic talisman in this pandemic and its like wearing garlic around the neck to ward off the evil of the unvaccinated vampires. Its amazingly stupid and illogical and anti science behaviour. 

It has been shocking to see how a nominally sensible country such as Australia has so rapidly devolved into a land of knuckle dragging, mouth breathing Primates who can barely string three coherent thoughts together anymore, in the face of this pandemic. It will be interesting to see if they can get their vaccine passports operational whether they will take the next logical step and begin disemboweling cats to read their entrails and burning witches in the town square.

(Australians attending a daily pandemic briefing)