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Success, in my mind, is any vaccine that renders the illness mild, staying out of hospitals.

That was always the critical factor, for me.  Hospital utilization.

And I would guess that a vaccinated person is much less likely to get mildly sick after contact.

The effectiveness of other vaccines we take are usually in the 90+% range also.  The flu is an exception.

Heard about any polio outbreaks in the US recently?

The January peak in GA was nearly 7400, yesterday down to 2600, in three weeks, no lock downs.  It's a striking drop.

Reported new cases.

Maybe I travel in different circles but I’m not seeing anyone question these things which are obvious. I do see people questioning what is clearly an experimental vaccine, where there are many potential yet unknown risks and weighing that against the risk of surviving Covid which for most healthy people is extremely extremely low.

Not sure anybody could reasonably disagree with that line of thinking.

In that respect I will not say the masses are dumb as much as the masses are lemmings following the main stream media.

The masses, by which I mean most of humanity, is TERRIBLE at properly assessing risk. 

People are afraid of air travel but willing to drive 500 miles someplace despite the statistical fact that deaths per million vehicle miles traveled is far lower for commercial aviation. That's one example, but behavioral psychology will give you hundreds of others. 

This came up recently (I posted the link many pages upthread) when you saw the stories about health care workers who weren't ready to get the vaccines. Because health care workers are a captive audience with very well-known demographics, it was easy to slice and dice the data on who was or was not willing to get the vaccines.

• If the prudent move was to brave COVID without the vaccine, you would expect that the highest proportion of people who were unwilling / not ready to get the vaccines would be the most highly educated of healthcare workers (doctors, specialists, etc). 
• If the foolish move was to brave COVID without the vaccine, you would expect that the highest proportion of people who were unwilling / not ready to get the vaccines would be the least highly educated of healthcare workers (foodservice, janitorial, low-level assistants, etc). 

Guess what they found? The most highly educated of healthcare workers were the MOST likely to want to get the vaccine, and the least educated were the LEAST likely to want to get the vaccine. 

All the available evidence we have is that the risk of COVID for all age groups is higher than the risk of the vaccine. 

I think the issue is that getting the vaccine is an active decision whereas contracting COVID is a passive event. It's a lot harder, psychologically, to CHOOSE to do something with low risks to prevent a CHANCE of something of higher risk happening to you. You say "hey, I probably won't get COVID, and even if I did, it probably won't be that bad for someone of my age/health, so I'll wait on the vaccine" when I'd venture to say that the likelihood of getting COVID and the likelihood of a severe case are MUCH higher than the probability anyone would actually assign to themselves.

could please get this message to the masses?

and then explain it to them in a way that many of them could understand this?

I assumed with new leadership, the messaging would be much better, but it doesn't seem to work that way.

Fauci is now able to speak his mind 

the CDC has a new director 

The masses, by which I mean most of humanity, is TERRIBLE at properly assessing risk.

People are afraid of air travel but willing to drive 500 miles someplace despite the statistical fact that deaths per million vehicle miles traveled is far lower for commercial aviation. That's one example, but behavioral psychology will give you hundreds of others.

This came up recently (I posted the link many pages upthread) when you saw the stories about health care workers who weren't ready to get the vaccines. Because health care workers are a captive audience with very well-known demographics, it was easy to slice and dice the data on who was or was not willing to get the vaccines.

• If the prudent move was to brave COVID without the vaccine, you would expect that the highest proportion of people who were unwilling / not ready to get the vaccines would be the most highly educated of healthcare workers (doctors, specialists, etc).
• If the foolish move was to brave COVID without the vaccine, you would expect that the highest proportion of people who were unwilling / not ready to get the vaccines would be the least highly educated of healthcare workers (foodservice, janitorial, low-level assistants, etc).

Guess what they found? The most highly educated of healthcare workers were the MOST likely to want to get the vaccine, and the least educated were the LEAST likely to want to get the vaccine.

All the available evidence we have is that the risk of COVID for all age groups is higher than the risk of the vaccine.

I think the issue is that getting the vaccine is an active decision whereas contracting COVID is a passive event. It's a lot harder, psychologically, to CHOOSE to do something with low risks to prevent a CHANCE of something of higher risk happening to you. You say "hey, I probably won't get COVID, and even if I did, it probably won't be that bad for someone of my age/health, so I'll wait on the vaccine" when I'd venture to say that the likelihood of getting COVID and the likelihood of a severe case are MUCH higher than the probability anyone would actually assign to themselves.

“All the available evidence we have is that the risk of COVID for all age groups is higher than the risk of the vaccine. “

here lies the problem.  First what you’re stating is clearly an opinion which I may personally agree with but I don’t think it’s based on fact as much as intuition.  Second, we’ve been dealing with this Covid for well over a year and we’ve seen the effects of the vaccine for maybe few months? We have no idea what the long-term effects or efficacy is.  None.

lastly I have seen complete opposite medical opinions on this from many highly decorated physicians and epidemiologists. So they don’t all agree which doesn’t make one side wrong or right but shows to you hopefully that this is really a personal decision and someone else should not be making it for you or mandating it to you.  Agree?

“All the available evidence we have is that the risk of COVID for all age groups is higher than the risk of the vaccine. “

here lies the problem.  First what you’re stating is clearly an opinion which I may personally agree with but I don’t think it’s based on fact as much as intuition.  Second, we’ve been dealing with this Covid for well over a year and we’ve seen the effects of the vaccine for maybe few months? We have no idea what the long-term effects or efficacy is.  None.

lastly I have seen complete opposite medical opinions on this from many highly decorated physicians and epidemiologists. So they don’t all agree which doesn’t make one side wrong or right but shows to you hopefully that this is really a personal decision and someone else should not be making it for you or mandating it to you.  Agree?

On that I certainly agree. I don't think we should be forcibly vaccinating anyone. 

My point is that "the masses" are not making informed and educated decisions about risk, in general. Most don't have the access to the information about the risks nor the intellectual tools to handle it. Their primary information source is their friends and memes on Facebook, most of whom are as ill-informed as themselves.

I do disagree that the what I said about the available evidence is based on intuition rather than fact. The known risks of the vaccine are extremely minimal. The known risks of COVID are not. In order to put the vaccine in a "higher risk" range has to account for unknown risks, which of course might exist, but which haven't shown up in all of the clinical trials, and haven't shown up in the ~50M doses given in the United States so far.

It's like a woman being locked in the house with a physically abusive SO but refusing to call the cops to get help on the off chance that the officer responding will be a serial killer. 

do we have any data or number of people that have died or been hospitalized caused by the vaccine?

or are we discussing side affects such as a sore arm, headache, feeling lethargic?