The following Points of Unity act as the scientific and ethical consensus of Covid Safe Furs: what we believe and why we do what we do. They are intended to be broad, with room for differences in opinion and without implying a specific level of personal caution.

Scientific

1. The pandemic has not ended. People continue to be infected and die of Covid every day.
2. Infection carries an unknown risk of developing Long Covid, which can degrade quality of life for an unknown period of time and increase the risk of future illness and death.
3. Vulnerable populations such as the immunocompromised, the disabled, the elderly, the poor and underprivileged, etc. are at greater risk of adverse outcomes from Covid. However, adverse outcomes are also possible in seemingly low-risk individuals.
4. Covid can cause lasting immune damage, including with repeated infection. Each new infection is a new opportunity for mutation, giving rise to new variants, new waves of infection, and new challenges for mitigation. Therefore, combating the pandemic requires reducing infections, not simply addressing individual outcomes of infection.
5. While vaccines are safe and have been effective at reducing death and severe acute illness so far, they have not eliminated these outcomes, stopped spread, or prevented Long Covid. The long-term effectiveness of the current vaccines is unknown. Therefore, they cannot be relied upon as the sole mitigation.
6. Mitigations such as masks and tests are effective at controlling spread. No mitigation is perfect, but a multi-layered approach offers the most opportunities to control spread.
7. Mitigations are most effective when applied at the community level and up. They are still useful on the individual level, but their effectiveness is limited. It is much more difficult for individuals to avoid infection through their own efforts alone without cooperation from the community.

Ethical

8. People should be empowered to evaluate risks and to take steps to protect themselves and others from death, illness, and disability. They deserve respect and dignity and should not be viewed as extreme or threatened with social exclusion for doing so.
9. The lives of vulnerable populations such as the immunocompromised, the disabled, the elderly, the poor and underprivileged, etc. are equally valuable and equally worthy of protection as everyone else. It is not enough to protect the majority while excluding or abandoning the minority.
10. While each person is free to decide how much risk they are willing to accept to themselves, they still have a responsibility to consider the impact of their actions on others who may not have accepted the same amount of risk.
11. At the same time, Covid is a societal-level problem and cannot be explained by individual failures alone. While individuals should have a sense of responsibility to others, their culpability for adverse outcomes must be weighed against social, economic, and other disincentives that often make it difficult or impossible to prioritize safety. It is often better to focus on educating and finding solutions for the future in good faith, rather than blaming and shaming for past behaviors.
12. All efforts in the direction of greater safety should be encouraged, even if they are not perfect.