you're not being forced onto a team. no one is making you identify with a party or group. you're doing that to yourself by buckling to whatever social pressures you perceive around you. you can simply stop buckling and still hold the same beliefs.
and science is not a team. that's politization talking. science is a process for generating a working body of knowledge, a body that asymtoticallly approaches truth but is not (yet) truth. for any given subject (medicine, for instance), it can even be very far from the truth and still be the best we have (so far).
this is exactly the perniciousness of partisanship in a nutshell. forget parties and sides. reach your own independent conclusions first (and continuously), and act on that, rather than succumbing to identitarianism.
The discussions I have had today sor far (this one included) have felt very "two sided".
Whereas I'm a tad ambivalent about the situation.
I suspect the decision will have a good (from the authorities point of view) effect on vaccine procrastinators, a bad but manageable effect on die hard antivaxxers, and a terrible, unpredicable and underestimated effect on the people who where hesitant, but will have to get their jab to keep their job.
Time will tell if it was worth it. That's what I hate - having to pick a side on what's the best outcome based on a relatively short span of data (every days gets us farther from the vaccine "bad surprise", but 6+ months of hindsight stills leaves me freightenned, sorry ! Not gonna lie.)
I'm not going to protest and ask for anyone's head yet. I wrote my Mom to express reasonable doubt and practical concerns, but beyond that I will of course bow to the decision of the democratically elected body.
That does not make conversation will concerned loved friends and loved ones any simpler.
objectively so far, both covid and vaccines have tiny risk of death (<0.1%), though one tiny is an order of magnitude or two larger than the other.
with that said, it’s generally ok for people under uncertainty to reach different conclusions (assuming relative independence) based on the same data. it’s not ok for some people to try to clobber the conclusions of others under uncertainty, which is what vaccinations being mandated effectively does.
when the uncertainty can be bounded objectively to being really tiny with high confidence (which may take many years, even decades), then a mandate might make sense (e.g., mmr vaccines for kids). but absent that high confidence, this one sounds premature.
you're not being forced onto a team. no one is making you identify with a party or group. you're doing that to yourself by buckling to whatever social pressures you perceive around you. you can simply stop buckling and still hold the same beliefs.
and science is not a team. that's politization talking. science is a process for generating a working body of knowledge, a body that asymtoticallly approaches truth but is not (yet) truth. for any given subject (medicine, for instance), it can even be very far from the truth and still be the best we have (so far).
this is exactly the perniciousness of partisanship in a nutshell. forget parties and sides. reach your own independent conclusions first (and continuously), and act on that, rather than succumbing to identitarianism.