Yea but India is only going through it's second wave now, and they have a lot more people there than both the US and UK combined...nevermind the poverty there
thats why you look at percentage of population not brute numbers.
and tbh as an outsider india and the US don't seem that different. granted the extremes of poverty in india are a little more extreme than the US, but under trump you both had very nutty characters in charge, both have insane levels of wealth inequality and environmental pollution. i've lived in the states and used to visit twice a year. not been to india but can't imagine going would change my perception. only difference is, as the wealthiest country in the world, the US has no excuses.
Now when you make the decision to get the shot, all of those risks from the shot apply to you
yes i understand that. those incredibly minimal risks. i don't understand why they are unacceptable, but the much higher risks of getting severely ill upon contracting covid are acceptable.
i have never claimed there is a 100% chance of getting covid. i pointed to figures between 7-10% of people who have caught it so far in the UK and the US in the post you just quoted, so why do you think i'm claiming your chance of getting covid is 100%?
but if i get neither the shot or covid, then what?
you can't guarantee you won't get covid unless you literally never interact with another human being. its not a choice.
even if you get it and are asymptomatic, you still pose a threat to those around you that the shot would decrease. its about responsibility to society as well as personal risk.
re your point about anything about these vaccines being proven: technically nothing in science is ever proven. it is logically impossible to deduce exactly which model, out of the infinite number of possibilities, instantiates the axioms (data, or reltionships between data points) we have. all we get is data and new data. the data on the vaccines so far shows that they reduce transmission and biologically plausible mechanisms have been proposed for why this isn't the case. so yes, these shots have not been proven to reduce transmission, it doesn't mean that its not true (also, logically, truth is undefineable, tarski's undefineability of truth is one of my favourite theorems, i digress). you can say the same about gravity, semiconductors, antibiotics.
this is the case even where we have a formalism that admits proof, which theoretical physics just about has but that life sciences absolutely do not.