Well nothing is risk-free. But in my opinion in any case the risk of allowing climate change to rampantly continue vastly outweighs the infinitesimal risks of nuclear.
One incident caused by a natural disaster that would never happen in a European country like Germany, the other caused by mismanagement and frankly jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence which would also never happen in a country like Germany.
Edit: in response to the large number of people bringing up BER and other infrastructure failures in Germany: yes, BER and others may have been bad, but a completely different kind (and magnitude) of incompetence than that which led to the Chernobyl meltdown. They really aren’t comparable.
One reason amongst many others is the risk of a vaccine-resistant strain emerging. There’d be a pretty enormous evolutionary pressure for that outcome under those circumstances.
I suspect that using past positive tests would make things even more complicated. It’s very easy to underestimate how difficult things are at the “tens of millions of people” scale, particularly for governments.
> You have a government whose vaccine policies are grounded in proper science and medical ethics, reducing the number of vaccine hesitant individuals
Circular argument, no? This point is only relevant to whether natural immunity should be correct if you accept that your own position (natural immunity should be taken into account) is correct.
Vaccinated people are way less likely to get infected.
And I don’t think there’s any evidence that vaccinated people have higher viral loads with less symptoms - that would be extremely surprising if true. I understand that vaccinated people can have high viral loads in breakout cases, but presumably in those cases they’re symptomatic - I don’t recall seeing any analysis of this.
Pros vs cons of taking natural immunity into account:
Pros:
- An extremely small number of people who would get side effects now wouldn’t
Cons:
- Logistics: you now need to perform a blood test on every single person in the country, process the results, send out vaccine invites based on the results, and set up some system where people can prove their blood test results. None of the aforementioned components currently exist. You also need to come up with some arbitrary threshold for “enough” antibodies.
- Cost: the blood test costs 4x as much as the vaccine, from what I see in other comments
- Incentives: you risk incentivising vaccine skeptics to deliberately contract COVID
I think you severely underestimate how hard it would be to organise every single person in the country having a blood test, and then sending out invites etc based on the results of those tests.
I don’t know a single person who was hospitalised from the vaccine, and almost every adult I know has got it.
Conversely, several people I know were hospitalised from COVID, one of whom was killed.
Anecdotal, of course, but in the absence of better data, I’d be interested in other peoples’ experiences.
I’ll also note that in my country someone dying of the vaccine is a news-making story. Someone dying of COVID isn’t, because, sadly, it wouldn’t be “new” at all.
No it isn't. Someone who succumbs to lung cancer after smoking 1000 cigarettes a day for 20 years is still a victim of lung cancer. The definition of victim says nothing about causation.
Maybe. I think at least part of the reason is political though.
Nobody wants to be the person who scraps a security policy and then has a terrorist attack happen as a result of their policy removal. Not politicians, not TSA higher-ups, nobody. That's a career-ending mistake, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Not to mention that it's probably not a particularly popular decision amongst the public. Maybe it's security theatre, but people like it.