COVID and other Vaccinations

I got my shots in March. A bit of an accident at first, but whatever.

Lots of people around the country are not getting the shots, for a variety of reasons that sound mostly stupid to me.

"I don't want to get microchipped" -- as though we can make such a thing small enough to go through a shot needle. Which, btw, are apparently 0.5 millimeters on the inside, bigger than I thought.

"It's made of dead baby parts." That is some sick thinking.

"Happy for the rest of you to get it so I don't have to." That can actually work, and someone I know said this to me. Of course, that person is no engineer/scientist, and could not possibly explain to you what the reality of herd immunity is.

"If God wants to me to die, well, that's it" Maybe he wants you to use your brain. Hard to tell.

But separately from all that, since the "refuseniks" aren't going to become convinced by any outside info...

What would the infection rate have to be, and how severe would the consequences have to be, before they would ignore the garbage they choose to hear/believe, and get it anyway? How quickly would it have to be fatal?

I know some people who have gotten it, and gotten over it, or have died. I don't think I know anyone who got it and clearly has long-term issues; not sure about that one.

But, if C19 was low infection rate but absolutely fatal? High infection but the worst you got was permanent Chronic Fatigue?

My suspicion is that there is a "Big Data" opportunity here that hasn't been seen yet, and awaits discovery. Probably needs more longitudinal data collection, which probably awaits the next few waves of infection.

I understand all the data, the models involved with studying this. Somewhere in my software past I've done some similar modeling and numbers work. You can find plenty of visual models online to show roughly how the infection/immunity process behaves; I'm not making yet another one of them :)

So I don't know if 70% is the magic number here for the herd immunity to be the steady-state situation. There are a lot of variables that are relevant. Example: I wasn't personally too worried about how soon the vaccine would get to me, because I have nearly zero interaction with other people over any time-frame you want to use, so my exposure probability was/is close to zero--that's how my life is these days; a few years ago that was simply not the case (I caught the actual flu once ~10 years ago while on the subway).

If we have a mutated next wave that is worse, what will happen? I suspect we can create and distribute faster, now that we have practice, but still: what will be the refusal rate? How long before the refuseniks die off enough that the remainder get the vaccine?