Just the other day I was having dinner near two men who were drinking heavily and smoking while they loudly claimed they didn’t believe in any of the growing consensus of science.

…a clear trend: the more shots in your arm before your first bout with COVID, the less likely you are to get long COVID. One meta-analysis of 24 studies published in October, for example, found that people who’d had three doses of the COVID vaccine were 68.7 percent less likely to develop long COVID compared with those who were unvaccinated. “This is really impressive,” says Alexandre Marra, a medical researcher at the Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital in Brazil and the lead author of the study. “Booster doses make a difference in long COVID.”

[…]

A study published in November in the BMJ found that a single COVID vaccine dose reduced the risk of long COVID by 21 percent, two doses reduced it by 59 percent and three or more doses reduced it by 73 percent. Vaccine effectiveness clearly climbed with each successive dose. “I was surprised that we saw such a clear dose response,” says Fredrik Nyberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and one of the co-authors of the study. “The more doses you had in your body before your first infection, the better.” That lines up with the findings of several new studies, which similarly show this ladderlike benefit.

Smoking. In 2023. Of course someone puffing on cancer in public would say they disbelieve overwhelmingly consistent science about vaccination benefits. They are still smoking, as if that health ship hadn’t sailed *cough* more than 50 years ago *cough*.

Smoking bans really got underway to protect service workers from being in an unfairly imposed cancerous workplace. So this topic about vaccination success comes back to whether a careless uneducated Typhoid Mary should be reasonably/proportionally restricted from causing harm to society, more than any need to give some airtime let alone authority to whatever such a Mary disbelieves.