The "give up and let it be endemic forever" defeatism attitude appears very statistically foolish.
It's likely, yes, but why on earth would we want to just accept that?
The flu, for instance, bounces around in severity and kills tens of thousands per year in the US. Few of those are kids, so what? If we're happy to let the virus continue to transmit in any populations, it'll change in various ways. One year a variant may pop up that'll be more harmful to those kids. At some other point a variant may pop up that'll be more elusive against adult immunity, etc. Over years, how many lives does that add up to? Why wouldn't we aggressively try to vaccinate as many people as possible before those things happen?
Success wouldn't be guaranteed even if people weren't opposed to it for various spurious reasons but it would be nice if we believed we could accomplish hard things...
> The "give up and let it be endemic forever" defeatism attitude appears very statistically foolish.
Well first, that has nothing to do with what I wrote. I made a very specific argument about how fear -- hysteria, really -- is driving our reaction to what is right to do for children.
But second, it isn't "statistically foolish"...it's just a basic understanding of biology and our rather poor history of eradicating viral diseases. Statistics don't come into play here either way.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether or not Covid can be eradicated, but you have to be delusional to think that this will be accomplished on any sort of timeline that is relevant to our lifetimes.
Since there are animal reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2, the virus will always be endemic regardless of what we do. That's not defeatism, just scientific reality.
It's likely, yes, but why on earth would we want to just accept that?
The flu, for instance, bounces around in severity and kills tens of thousands per year in the US. Few of those are kids, so what? If we're happy to let the virus continue to transmit in any populations, it'll change in various ways. One year a variant may pop up that'll be more harmful to those kids. At some other point a variant may pop up that'll be more elusive against adult immunity, etc. Over years, how many lives does that add up to? Why wouldn't we aggressively try to vaccinate as many people as possible before those things happen?
Success wouldn't be guaranteed even if people weren't opposed to it for various spurious reasons but it would be nice if we believed we could accomplish hard things...