I take my mask with me everywhere and wear it in stores etc. here in Rhode Island where almost all public facing places of business have mask and social distancing signage. Since I’m fully vaccinated I would feel fine going in without it except that it would be a dick move.
The data coming in from the field indicates that the vaccines offer reasonable sterilizing immunity in addition to the disease immunity they were tested for. (I’m assuming you know the difference between disease immunity and sterilizing immunity but if not, here.) The phase three trials all focused on disease immunity of course because the priority was to get people to stop getting sick and dying. But the indications are now that my vaccine also makes me much less likely to become asymptomatically infected. Yes I still could, and could even get COVID-19, but this is all about probability, and the probability of those things happening is small. No one is offering certainty. We should stop asking about it.
Those of us who masked, distanced, stayed home and in many cases sacrificed greatly made very heavy weather about trusting the science. So we should do that ourselves even though the science has become somewhat murkier. The biggest problem is the number of people who aren’t getting vaccinated. In many cases it is about hardship. This will require still greater outreach. In other cases about legitimate fear regarding, say, immigration status. How to reassure such people? The hard core anti-vaxers are probably unreachable.
One way to get a lot of people vaccinated would be to remove all immigration restrictions except a requirement to be vaccinated as the condition of entry but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
President Biden did a fantastic job facilitating the distribution of vaccines but we are now in the more difficult stage. There are still a lot of people who would get the jab but for fear of missing work due to side effects. Mandate time off? We had a moratorium on evictions so why not?
I hope you are vaccinated. I have to ask because the way you are talking if I had to guess I’d say no. These are good vaccines, and the data from the field indicates that they are better than expected. Trust the science.
If you want really solid information in a fun format I strongly suggest the on line town hall meetings run by the American Virological Association. You can get your individual questions answered by people who have devoted their lives to the study of viruses and immunology.
