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.