The number of comments here that fall back on some sort of a slippery slope argument, based in a worry about government overreach, is really disheartening. If COVID has proven anything in the US, it's how little control the federal government actually has. They've barely been able to enforce mask mandates.
The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water here. I think we can look at the facts - 700,000 people dead, hospitals overwhelmed, countless people injured or disabled from COVID, and no end in sight - and decide that a strong mandate makes sense here, and that a mandate won't make sense in future cases.
The "government is always bad, personal choice should always win" mindset runs deep in this country unfortunately, and from what I can see, it's often based in nothing other than veiled conservatism and a preference for division and anti-cooperativeness.
Above all else, this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.
> The number of comments here that fall back on some sort of a slippery slope argument, based in a worry about government overreach, is really disheartening. If COVID has proven anything in the US, it's how little control the federal government actually has. They've barely been able to enforce mask mandates.
This is by design. We don't want a strong federal government.
> The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water here. I think we can look at the facts - 700,000 people dead, hospitals overwhelmed, countless people injured or disabled from COVID, and no end in sight - and decide that a strong mandate makes sense here, and that a mandate won't make sense in future cases.
here's some more facts that change the landscape significantly. 5% of COVID deaths were without co-morbidities. On average, a person who died of COVID had 4.0 co-morbidities. (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Co...)
The vast majority of those dying are 65+.
We don't have a COVID problem, we have a health problem. Has the government been encouraging people to take vitamin D, get fresh air, exercise, and get to a healthy weight? The rhetoric has been sit down and get the jab.
> The "government is always bad, personal choice should always win" mindset runs deep in this country unfortunately, and from what I can see, it's often based in nothing other than veiled conservatism and a preference for division and anti-cooperativeness.
The government polices are extreme overreactions by any measure of the data, and government doesn't give power back once it has it.
> Above all else, this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.
I can almost agree here, except the pro-choice people seem to overlap heavily with the pro-mandate people. I don't think you can logically hold both of those positions
> We don't have a COVID problem, we have a health problem. Has the government been encouraging people to take vitamin D, get fresh air, exercise, and get to a healthy weight? The rhetoric has been sit down and get the jab.
I'm disabled and it's not my fault. I'm a healthy weight, I have a vegetarian diet high in vegetables, I do my rehab exercises every day and see the doctor frequently. And yet my condition is progressing, because that's the nature of it.
I’m sorry and you’re right, it’s not your fault. But that doesn’t disregard what the person you were replying to was saying. The government has not encouraged taking vitamins or exercise. In Colorado they banned people from going hiking in national forests, state parks, etc. Which is ironic given that’s a great way to socially distance
Would you advocate for government mandates on everyone else for your sole benefit? Or do you feel that you're a representative sample of the high-risk group?
I actually don't think I'm a representative sample. my comorbidities are unusual and I'm probably not at significantly higher risk for covid complications. I was just taking issue with the parent's implication that most health problems can be solved with diet and exercise. a lot of us struggle hard to stay healthy but our bodies betray us.
Having to undergo the inconvenience of weekly tests, to be allowed to do a large fractions of jobs, which makes you undesirable to employers as well to do the cost of testing, is discrimination.
COVID vaccines don't stop transmission enough to provide herd immunuty, so don't reduce the risk posed to others.
In fact not getting vaccinated makes it more likely one will acquire natural immunity from an infection, and people with natural immunity are less likely to transmit the virus, so it may actually be more protective for others if a higher percentage of the population doesn't get vaccinated and acquires natural immunity.
> If not enough people get vaccinated, transmission won’t be stopped.
The comment above yours literally just explained that the vaccine does not stop transmission of the virus! You're repeating catchphrases from 12 months ago when the government was insisting the vaccine stopped the spread of the virus; when they knew perfectly well that wasn't true!
Mutation doesn't happen with transmission. It happens with replication of the virus, which happens continually as long as there is a host.
The mutation rate is dependent on the size of the global population of virus carriers, so one country's policies with respect to covid are highly unlikely to have a significant impact on it.
And like I said, not vaccinating low risk groups could lead to herd immunity through natural infection faster.
Overall, there is very weak justification for a policy as heavy handed as forced vaccination (via instititonalized discrimination against the unvaccinated).
Transmission rates affect host rates. Why is this so difficult to understand? People on HN should be versed in enough math to work out that reduced transmission rates = fewer hosts = fewer chances for mutation.
> And like I said, not vaccinating low risk groups could lead to herd immunity through natural infection faster.
That isn't true at all. Mutations will pick up as long as (a) there is pressure to mutate (which vaccines do cause) and (b) there are enough chances to mutate (transmission + how long the virus stays active in your body).
> Overall, there is very weak justification for a policy as heavy handed as forced vaccination (via instititonalized discrimination against the unvaccinated).
It is very strong justification, just that some people use very strange reasoning to convince themselves otherwise.
The vaccine does not stop 70% of transmission. To date sufficiently large RCTs have not shown that the so-called vaccine reduces transmission by even 1%.
Mutation rate also doesn't have anything to do with transmission. At all.
Yes there are ... You have established that a greater than zero consideration for the people with disabilities exists and that is great.
The question is whether there is a what is the greatest cost you are willing to impose on everyone to provide a small benefit to some specific people.
And, no, you don't get to claim children will do just fine going without face to face contact with other children their age for years for some nonquantifiable benefit that might or might not accrue to a person at risk.
>Has the government been encouraging people to take vitamin D, get fresh air, exercise, and get to a healthy weight?
The government has been advocating for exercise and general health for decades. Despite this, we remain one of the least fit countries in the world. If the government cannot convince someone to take a safe, free shot that might save their lives, how can you reasonably expect them to convince someone to exercise?
Government sponsored marketing campaigns do not compare to mandates for vaccines in the workplace. Until the government mandates food quality standards and people start arguing about whether they can buy/sell Doritos or Pepsi in schools, workplaces, as part of foodstamps, etc as part of their freedoms, then it's a false equivalence.
>Until the government mandates food quality standards
That's a great idea but if you believe that the government mandating workplace safety standards is massive overreach, then how could it possibly tell people what they can and cannot eat?
cynically advocating for a position you don't actually hold is one of the weakest ways to make a point, and the people who resort to it are almost invariably bad at judging what is and isn't comparable
be bold enough to advocate for a position here and defend it
Because obesity will kill them. That's the message that's not being said in a COVID context. Healthy at every size is one of the biggest health lies in America
>Because obesity will kill them. That's the message that's not being said in a COVID context.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in America, and obesity is the #1 risk factor for it. This message has been clear and emphasized since the 1970s. Despite messaging, obesity has gotten worse, not better. You are wrong and oversimplifying the problem if you think COVID can be solved by telling people to lose weight.
It's really not an either-or situation. You can encourage people to be generally healthier, and also encourage them to get vaccinated (or force them).
And if you compare the two, the vaccine is much closer to a magic cure - it's very dependable and takes "1 month" to work (assuming a two shot vaccine). Whereas encouraging people to be less obese is both incredibly hard (as decades of campaigns prove), and even in the best case scenario, would take a long time for most people.
People should definitely be encouraged to get vaccinated too, I agree. But there should be no institutionalized discrimination against the unvaccinated, just as we shouldn't discriminate against the obese to encourage them to eat less.
This is a misleading interpretation of the data in Iceland. According to the parent link, 18 people are hospitalized there, compared to ~80,000 in the US. Adjusted for population, that is a >75% lower overall hospitalization rate. Infection rates in unvaccinated are also more than 2x vaccinated in Iceland. Unless you misinterpret the data, it is undeniable that vaccines reduce transmission and incidence of severe disease.
The higher rates of death and serious illness among the unvaccinated has nothing to do with what I was arguing. You are willfully misinterpreting my argument.
I was arguing that given Iceland, at almost full vaccination, is having its biggest COVID wave yet, means full vaccination does not provide herd immunity, and thus every one will eventually get exposed to COVID irrespective of the vaccination rate.
So you can't make a sound argument that other people's decision to get the vaccine is increasing other people's chance of being exposed to COVID.
> I was arguing that given Iceland, at almost full vaccination, is having its biggest COVID wave yet
By ignoring the denominator you misinterpret your own data. Iceland’s ‘biggest wave yet’ had >2x fewer cases and 4x fewer hospitalizations than the US Delta Wave when adjusted for population. Fewer cases means fewer chances to get infected.
>Can you help me understand why you choose to compare USA vs Iceland (which is fraught with confounding factors)
I didn’t, the parent brought up Iceland. What are the confounding factors?
>Iceland(early) vs Iceland (now)
Ok, at its peak Iceland had 2x the number of new daily cases during its delta wave as its prior wave owing to the increased transmissibility of Delta. Despite this, hospitalizations during their delta wave were 1/3 of the prior wave. Unvaccinated Icelanders were also 2x more likely to be infected during their delta wave. It is undeniable that vaccination reduces hospitalization and infection rate.
>>It is undeniable that vaccination reduces hospitalization and infection rate.
This is completely irrelevant to my argument, yet you continue to repeat this point in an exercise of bad faith sophistry.
My argument is that vaccination does not provide herd immunity, and that thus the virus will continue to propagate until every one has been exposed to COVID, irrespective of the vaccination rate.
The point I'm making is that the argument that being vaccinated protects others is unsubstantiated. If anything, not being vaccinated leads to infection happening sooner, which leads to immunity much stronger than that conferred by vaccination.
Your argument is weak. The only evidence you have provided that vaccination cannot lead to herd immunity is a quote tweet about Iceland which has been discredited. US experts argue vaccination can confer herd immunity. If you disagree present data that supports your case.
The tweet you cite notes that only 18 people are hospitalized in Iceland. Adjusted for population, the US has over 4x as many hospitalizations. This is a huge success and 100% due to the high vaccination rates. Iceland was able to achieve this voluntarily. The US cannot.
That again has nothing to do with my argument, which is about the risk that being unvaccinated poses to others. If you are equally likely to be exposed to COVID if many are unvaccinated as if many are vaccinated, then you can't argue that other people deciding to not get vaccinated puts you at any additional risk.
> If you are equally likely to be exposed to COVID if many are unvaccinated as if many are vaccinated
That’s not true. According to data YOU provided, unvaccinated people are more than 2x more likely to be infected than vaccinated. Less vaccination leads to more infections and more hospitalizations.
But vaccinated people transmit the virus at a sufficiently high rate to prevent herd immunity from being established.
Without herd immunity, the virus will propagate, even if it's at a slower rate, making it inevitable that every one is eventually exposed to the virus.
>
> the pro-choice people seem to overlap heavily with the pro-mandate people. I don't think you can logically hold both of those positions
Well, not from the "governments are either allowed or not allowed to tell people to do things" angle.
From the "what do medical experts suggest we do to minimize unnecessary death and suffering" point of view it's possible to be consistently on the same side though.
It's definitely not consistent from the bodily autonomy angle, though. And that's a pretty major angle, considering how deeply we're connected with our bodies.
Personally, I think anybody who advocates for abrogation of bodily autonomy is an absolute monster, whether an anti-abortionist, a pro-vaccine-mandateist, or an anti-recreational-druggist.
Our bodies are all we have. This is the most important freedom we hold.
"If you want to keep this job you'll stick this needle in your arm" is no different, morally, from "If you want to keep this job you'll stick my dick in your mouth." And tens of thousands of HR departments tasked with preventing the latter will now rush to enforce the former. Absolutely disgusting.
There's a difference between asking people to do something and asking them to do nothing though. In general, bodily autonomy is important and this the best abortion defense in my opinion as an anti abortionist.
While there is a difference, bodily autonomy is about the right to make decision around your own body, not the right for your body to run on it's own. So I would argue it is not a good argument as you say.
But your body runs according to the dictates of nature, not solely your will.
For example, my body often breathes even when I don't particularly will it. I also cannot stop the process of digestion with my mind. If I were to ask for the 'right' to stop digestion by asking a doctor to sever my intestines, it would be good for the government to then charge such an irreputable doctor with assault and maybe murder.
I believe you are misinterpreting that data. 5% of COVID deaths listed COVID as the only cause. The other 95% list additional causes. In some cases, those are pre-existing conditions like "hypertensive diseases" or "diabetes", but not all of them are. Some of the most common causes are things like "influenza and pneumonia", "respiratory failure" and "cardiac arrest".
Pneumonia, respiratory failure and cardiac arrest are symptoms of COVID. They aren't pre-existing conditions that make COVID worse. They are just more specific explanations about the exact mechanism by which COVID killed the person.
> except the pro-choice people seem to overlap heavily with the pro-mandate people. I don't think you can logically hold both of those positions
It’s about how your personal choices impact other people. To be deliberately shocking to help show why these are different:
You can’t cough on me and give me an abortion. I can’t choose to have an abortion and that creates a super spreader event that gives everyone around me an abortion.
You can choose not to get vaccinated, be an asymptomatic spreader, and pass Covid on to other people. Your choice of taking the vaccine or not taking the vaccine can impact lots of people, and even hasten their death.
Societies have various laws that prohibit certain choices you make that can have a negative impact on others. For example see drunk driving, or someones choice to use speech to inflame a riot. Where those lines are drawn, or should be drawn, can certainly be up for debate. Reasonable people can disgree
Exactly. In addition to that, this recurring argument that compares vaccine mandates to mandates prohibiting "bad" acts is odd.
Legally speaking, mandating the vaccine is forcing a person to act (get jabbed) through no act of their own. Mandating abortion bans is prohibiting an act (getting an abortion). So the two scenarios aren't comparable.
they reduce it by a nonzero amount, which I believe to be an appropriate threshold, given the lack of common, significant side effects
you probably have a different threshold, which is okay, but it is likely one you will have to persuade the majority to adopt, if you want to get your way
It doesn't reduce it enough to provide herd immunity, meaning the virus will continue to propagate until every one has been exposed. See Iceland's experience:
There seems to be consensus that the delta wave won't end until the US reaches at least 85% herd immunity (either through vaccination or infection). It's clear from polling that there is a large enough minority of American adults who won't take the vaccine voluntarily (under any circumstances) to achieve this level of immunity, so that leaves infection. Letting covid 'rip' through the remaining unvaccinated population will bring tens or hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths, even with wide availability of current therapeutics.
If you want the pandemic, masking, lockdowns etc to end for good, it seems a vaccine mandate is the only way forward (absent some as-yet-to-be-invented technology). What am I missing here? Is there some other way to 'convince' anti-vaxxers to take it? Is 100k+ Americans dead an 'acceptable loss' to maintain some perception of 'medical freedom?'
> Letting covid 'rip' through the remaining unvaccinated population
Aren't unvaccinated individuals the ones who made this decision? You may disagree with the conclusion of their dubious risk analyses, but if you choose not to get vaccinated then all bets are off.
Or is it that the risk that the unvaccinated pose to the vaccinated are so high that they warrant strong arm solutions?
> Aren't unvaccinated individuals the ones who made this decision? You may disagree with the conclusion of their dubious risk analyses, but if you choose not to get vaccinated then all bets are off.
This is the crux of it. They've made the decision, but when they fill up ICU beds and prevent sick or injured people from getting the quality of care that hospitals can provide, then their decision affects others (and this is not a hypothetical, it is happening daily).
If unvaccinated people agree to sit home and not go into a hospital when they can't breathe, that would demonstrate that they're living with the consequences of their decision.
If that's really the issue (it's not), then this can be addressed far more directly, by penalizing the unvaccinated when allocating ICU beds during shortages. But please be consistent and also penalize those who deliberately engage in other actions that put them at risk of needing medical care, like the obese, or those who abuse drugs and alcohol.
What bothers me is the inconsistency. It's opportunistically seizing on the burden that choosing to not get vaccinated places on medical resources, in a way that the typical vaccine mandate supporter would never dream of doing with other high-risk behavior (e.g. men who engage in extensive high-risk intercourse with other men, making them 100X more likely to contract many STDs, including HIV). The political left's backing of the vaccine mandate is thoroughly unprincipled.
Sexual promiscuity does not clog up hospitals. Speeding motorists do not clog up hospitals. Obese people do not clog up hospitals. Covid patients disproportionately clog up ICUs. Surely you see that difference?
If our health safety net (hospitals) were not being affected, then yes, covid promiscuity would be treated identically to any of the above. There's principles here that you don't want to acknowledge.
Sexual promiscuity imposes massive costs on the healthcare system. HIV treatment costs $1,800 to $4,500 per month, for life. The resources expended on treating those who contract HIV through high-risk sexual activity could have instead been used for medical research to cure other non-preventable diseases, if they hadn't engaged in that behavior.
But of course, it goes without saying that the vast majority of vaccine mandate supporters have never considered supporting laws restricting high risk sexual behavior. They would never have even entertained the thought, no matter what the facts. Their hypocrisy is staggering.
The burden that promiscuity-derived HIV imposes on the healthcare system is not hypothetical.
And no, laws against high-risk sexual activity have to do with discriminating against a behavior, not a protected classes. Gay men are perfectly capable of being monogamous, and avoiding high-risk sexual activity.
But yes, you are advocating that people have their rights infringed upon, when you advocate for a vaccine mandate. And worse, you're being blatantly inconsistent, based on shallow ideological considerations.
Apparently virtue signalling as a supporter of gay rights, or supporter of the obese, is more important for vaccine mandate supporters than minimizing the costs that irresponsible behavior burdens society with. Or maybe minimizing the costs of irresponsibility isn't the real motivation at all - the real motivation is persecuting anti-vaxxer MAGA types, under the pretense of holding people responsible for the costs they burden society with.
You weaken your position by speculating about the motivations of those who support of the vaccine mandates. It is just as easy to speculate about the motivations of those who reject vaccines. Perhaps they just want to create chaos for the current administration.
Your hypothetical HIV vaccine example is not relevant to the situation with Covid. As stated in the original post, the current mandate is to ensure workplace safety. It is not possible to contract HIV in an elevator or under normal workplace conditions.
>>Your hypothetical HIV vaccine example is not relevant to the situation with Covid.
I never posed a hypothetical HIV vaccine example, and your deliberate mischaracterization of my point is another demonstration of the bad faith and manipulative tactics you employ.
No not really. Your claim (perhaps in bad faith) is that HIV and Covid should be treated as equivalents (or that it is at least hypocritical to NOT consider them equivalents). However that is not relevant to this particular discussion or mandate. One is a matter of workplace safety. One cannot be contracted under normal work conditions.
My point was not that at all. My point was that there are a myriad of preventable illnesses, that impose a massive cost on society, that the same members of the left wing tribe that are advocating for a vaccine mandate, would never dream of advocating be combated through any restrictions that violate bodily autonomy, and that this inconsistency reveals that these vaccine mandate supporters are disingenuous when they claim their motivation for advocating for a vaccine mandate is the burden the unvaccinated put on the healthcare system.
Sure it was. You said in reference to 'liberals' who support covid vaccine mandates (but presumably wouldn't support measures to restrict 100% of other risky behaviors): "Their hypocrisy is staggering."
My point, which you continue to ignore, is that the societal cost of other diseases or risky behaviors is irrelevant to the current discussion. The COVID-19 vaccine mandate discussed in the OP is a matter of workplace safety. Cancer, heart disease, HIV etc are not threats to workplace safety. If there are other circulating diseases that present an equivalent scale threat to workplace safety please feel free to present them. Addiction may be, however in the US employers already have wide latitude to test for it and terminate employees in violation.
The more unvaccinated people there are, the more cases of severe covid there will be. This puts tremendous strain on the hospital system, and if they’re uninsured it means the taxpayers are covering the cost of their treatment. Rampant spread also promotes the emergence of new variants.It’s not only a personal decision— declining the shot negatively impacts your community, workplace and the country as a whole.
We have never used this justification to institute invasive laws to prohibit habits that lead to obesity, or to prohibit drug-use or alcohol consumption for that matter. And such laws would always come from the social conservative right, if they were ever instituted, not the people advocating vaccine mandates.
Now socialization of medical expenses is being used to rationalize institutionalized discrimination against the unvaccinated, because it aligns with a particular political tribe's agenda. A tribe that also advocates the socialization of medical expenses.
> We have never used this justification to institute invasive laws to prohibit habits that lead to obesity, or to prohibit drug-use or alcohol consumption for that matter.
Correct, these things are not contagious to others.
They are not equivalent. There is zero evidence you can catch obesity or alcoholism in an elevator from someone you don’t know. And in the context of workplace safety, an alcoholic cannot show up for work drunk.
The real test of whether all of this is really medicine or politics would be if Donald Trump were making sweeping executive-branch mandates, how much support would they get?
It’s not clear what your argument is. I agree with you that reducing medical expenses is being used by some as a justification for vaccine mandates. The data you provided also clearly shows vaccines reduce hospitalizations.
Because you're engaging in bad faith. My argument is clear:
>>We have never used this justification to institute invasive laws to prohibit habits that lead to obesity, or to prohibit drug-use or alcohol consumption for that matter
The question is when we have a right to infringe upon another party's bodily autonomy. None of these vaccine mandate advocates would be calling for any type of infringement if it related to refraining from irresponsible behavior like over-eating, alcohol consumption, drug use, or high-risk sexual activity.
> None of these vaccine mandate advocates would be calling for any type of infringement if it related to refraining from irresponsible behavior like over-eating, alcohol consumption, drug use, or high-risk sexual activity.
It’s a false equivalency. Addiction cannot, today, be cured with a shot.
Deterrence can very often shape behavior. Addictive behavior can be discouraged with legal disincentives. Sexual promiscuity involving high-risk intercourse can be discouraged with harsh prohibitions. Addiction exists on a spectrum, and those further from the extreme addiction end can often be discouraged through strong-arming social intervention.
But for the vaccine mandate supporters, who oppose laws to hold accountable people who burden the healthcare system through over-eating, drug and alcohol abuse or high-risk sexual activity, virtue signalling is more important than saving lives, or punishing MAGA types is more important than respecting rights. Hence the inconsistency.
The so-called progressive movement, which now fully backs the vaccine mandate, has NEVER been for the War on Drugs, even when it hadn't failed. And the kinds of behaviors that the political left regards as protected vices are not limited to those engaged in by addicts. For example, high-risk sexual activity that leads to HIV infection rates 100X higher among gay men than the general population, is not associated with any addiction, and yet the vaccine mandate supporters by and large would be the type that would be aghast at any suggestion of deterring such behavior with punitive government measures.
As I said, the current mandate and OP are matters of workplace safety. You cannot contract HIV under normal workplace conditions, so it is not equivalent or germane to this discussion. Likewise, employers in the US are free to require invasive tests for drugs and alcohol at will, and discriminate against those who abuse them.
I'm not addressing your characterization of a particular group of people (liberals) because that is 100% your opinion and largely speculative.
This thread, and the OP are discussions of a vaccine mandate for workplace safety. OSHA has wide authority to regulate workplace safety and implement standards.
obesity doesn't put as tremendous a strain on the health system, but I figured this would be obvious
look at the total ICU numbers before COVID (obesity still existed then), versus over the past year, to see the difference in strain
also, your unsubstantiated claim that "the contagion argument for mandates is shaky too" seems to be itself shaky, as herd immunity is not required to make a nonzero positive impact
which is good, because a nonzero percent of the population has tried their hardest to screw up every single covid preventative countermeasure, just so they can say 'oh, guess we didn't/can't achieve herd immunity, so now we should do nothing like we said and did all along'
A huge proportion of ICU cases have obesity as the dominant risk factor, INCLUDING COVID.
And the costs of treating obesity related illnesses, like many heart disease, cancer and diabetes cases, are enormous, and dwarf the costs relating to COVID.
Even in COVID's first year in the human population, when it spread like wildfire, heart disease and cancer killed far more people, and obesity is a contributing factor in a significant fraction of cases of these illnesses, particularly heart disease.
>>as herd immunity is not required to make a nonzero positive impact
Without herd immunity, the virus continues to circulate, until every one has contracted it. After they have contracted a COVID infection, they acquire far stronger immunity than provided by vaccination.
> Aren't unvaccinated individuals the ones who made this decision?
Yes. And personally, as callous as this is, I give zero shits about COVID deaths of people who choose to not vaccinate, though I feel terrible for their family members that got vaccinated and couldn't convince them to vaccinate because right-wing media has poisoned their minds.
> Or is it that the risk that the unvaccinated pose to the vaccinated are so high that they warrant strong arm solutions?
This question is highly subjective.
The vaccines are very effective at preventing spread, hospitalization, and death, but not 100%. Look at the statistics coming from any major hospital, and you'll see the trend that around 95% of the people hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated.
The more people are vaccinated, the slower the spread, and the lower total number of breakthrough infections and breakthrough disease (Note: There's a difference between the two!).
Back to your question of if the risk is so high to warrant strong-arm solutions...Currently, I'd say no. But how long until Delta evolves into an even worse form that the current vaccines do nothing for?
I'm curious - of the folks that have not gotten vaccinated, do we have an idea of how many haven't gotten it because they strongly do not want to get it, and how many haven't gotten it for other less strong reasons (inability to get time off work, mixed signals from social media, etc)?
Vaccine protection seems to substantially diminish over time / virus evolution. Israel is boosting with third shot. UK August data shows same rate of infection vax/unvax for over 40s, and only half reduction in infection rate for under 40s. (Yeah, I know, severe infection protection is much better, so far). Pfizer CEO is on-record concerned about vaccine escape and ready to prepare new jabs on a 3 month notice.
Covid is here to stay. What is the long term plan? 'Boost' every 6 months with an ever changing cocktail that has not passed any clinical trials? In perpetuity? This is insanity.
I do not see any long term way out of covid pandemic other than natural immunity. Some studies have shown it is much stronger than vaccine protection. I hope they are right, or else the future is grim. Personally I really really hope that vax + mild infection works.
WE DO have a population for which natural immunity can be acquired at minimum cost: under 18s. For which the risk of covid death is ~1-2% of the already tiny risk of death from all other causes. Leave the kids alone.
What doesn't help: Messaging that so incredibly determined to pretend that natural immunity plays no role and that covid risk for a 10 year old is the same as covid risk for an 80 year old (in fact it is 1/1000).
> I do not see any long term way out of covid pandemic other than natural immunity.
We get annual boosters for many viruses. If you’re really hell bent on getting covid, your likelihood of severe illness is 10x less with at least one dose of the vaccine, and your immunity will be higher than infection alone. The messaging that natural immunity is the only way out, and that getting the virus is somehow ‘better’ than the vaccine is ludicrous.
Tired of personalization of the disease. I'm not 'hell bent' to do anything. Covid is endemic, there is no herd immunity. The only question is how to manage the severity of the disease, for all the infection events to occur in the long run. I'm vaccinated and keep an eye on https://www.novavax.com/covid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-candida.... Or do I need to tattoo 'Pfizer' on my forehead to be allowed to participate in society?
The vaccines are remarkably effective against death and severe disease on all timescales measured. What appears to decline is sterilizing immunity, meaning after 6-8months you may show symptoms if infected. It is unlikely boosters will be mandated for all.
And to be clear, this vaccine denial is a uniquely American problem. In Denmark over 80% of the eligible population is voluntarily vaccinated. They are now able to do away with virtually all Covid restrictions.
The American situation is very concerning. I suspect it is correlated with the high temperature of the American public discourse. Whenever we encounter a different opinion, we assume the worst and immediately reach for the flamethrower.
Not sure what to do about it, I caught myself doing it and I like to believe I am on-guard for this kind of behavior. I substantively edit my messages to remove first draft inflammatory words. Perhaps the old email advice: put it in drafts and send it tomorrow morning.
I've been thinking lately that even on HN having a 'parent upvoted your reply' signal might be an interesting experiment for promoting civil discourse.
Also existence of Denmark with high vax rates does not imply that the problem is uniquely American. To wit, Russia is even farther ahead in that regard. So no, it’s not uniquely American.
Russia has low vaccination rate problem ay least as much as America, therefore the problem of low vaccination rates is not uniquely American, it's a Russian problem too. Does that make sense?
Americans were lining up in the streets to get polio vaccine and were pissed when it was unavailable.
I think a whole lot of this angst boils down to society running well, due to this work in the past. Then people forget, believe it all works differently than it really does.
Now we are faced with a global problem, shared risks, shared resources and a whole lot of relearning to do.
I don't know that there is much data specific to the COVID vaccine, but for vaccines in general the overwhelming concern seems to be the (false) perception that vaccines are not safe:
For me personally, it's decreased general trust. I don't see the establishment as having a lot of credibility at this point.
Bad smells that make me distrust:
Changing definitions of the word vaccine, so that the Covid 19 injections can be considered a vaccine. It becoming impermissible to question the vaccine. If you tell me there isn't room to doubt, then my response to you is bullshit. I've been a skeptic my entire life, and it has served me well. If I'm wrong this time and I die because of it, so be it.
It’s amusing how last year people said they couldn’t trust any vaccine approved by the FDA while Trump was president and running for re-election. Now those same people believe those same vaccines will save the world, not because the FDA released more data or that additional studies have proven the vaccines more effective than they were last year, but because there’s a new president.
If your idea of “trust the science” starts and ends with “who’s in the White House?” you have a different definition of “science” than I do.
I'm not claiming that they aren't vaccines. Words change definition to follow usage. However, Merriam-Webster literally changed their definition of vaccine in the past 6 months or so. [0][1]
My argument is that by including these injections under the term vaccine, they are getting a halo effect from past vaccines that isn't warranted. Questioning vaccines is the lowest of the low, almost unthinkable, but these "vaccines" aren't like the old ones.
Their old definition didn't match usage. Diphtheria and tetanus vaccines use inactivated toxins for example. And the same dictionary said viruses are usually regarded as nonliving extremely complex molecules.[1]
I checked 2 dictionaries from before 2020. Neither said a vaccine had to be made from certain things.
Then why wouldn't you just take one of the vaccines that meets the old definition of vaccine that you hold the esteem for? I get that anything new is less trustworthy by default, but that's only two mRNA "vaccines". The rest are attenuated, or inactivated, or sub-units of other viruses or COVID itself.
In all cases they make your body respond to proteins, that's all. Given the respective effective rates from mRNA vs. traditional vaccine methods if anything it's the halo effect of the effectiveness of the mRNA that are boosting the success rates.
> Letting covid 'rip' through the remaining unvaccinated population will bring tens or hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths, even with wide availability of current therapeutics.
The more cases, the more the variants. Getting everyone infected might bring about herd immunity to one strain, and create a dozen more.
> this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.
Arguments around hypocrisy cut both ways! Consider how weak pro-choice arguments sound right now to people who don't want to be forced to take a vaccine. I'm assuming we will never ever hear "My body, my choice" as a pro-choice argument ever again, it would be absurd at this point.
Also, I wonder how much of this is a left vs right political debate. Most of the conservatives I personally know are vaccinated. It's possible that there are silent dissenters among the progressives that can't really speak up because they will be ostracized.
There is no legal penalty for refusing the vaccine. You still have the choice to undergo testing instead. Mandating either testing or vaccination is a perfectly reasonable workplace safety requirement during a pandemic. No one's bodily autonomy is being violated by this rule.
I mostly agree with you, but what about the company's autonomy? This isn't coming from the company, it's coming from OSHA. What will the penalty be for companies who don't comply?
I wonder how long there won't be a legal penalty? Biden was visibly and audibly angry when talking about the unvaccinated. I caught a clip of a late night talk show host laughing about denying healthcare to the unvaccinated. The audience laughed. There is some serious demonizing going on right now.
edit: I realize now that I drifted from the original comparison with abortion rights. Although, I don't think the person seeking the abortion is prosecuted either (in most cases).
> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
Side effects from vaccines are rare, but do occasionally happen. Because of the small risk, there’s a government program to pay money to anybody who suffers a serious side effect from taking a vaccine in exchange for granting legal immunity to vaccine producers ( https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html ). So, to answer your question, schools don’t literally require legal immunity themselves, but they do benefit from legal immunity that that the government gives vaccine manufacturers: there’s no need to sue a school for requiring vaccines when there’s a special program to pay out benefits.
Last I knew, COVID-19 vaccines weren’t covered, but apparently I missed some news, since it’s the first thing listed on https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp .
>pay money to anybody who suffers a serious side effect from taking a vaccine
Nitpick, but really it is a fund to pay for anyone who suffered a side effect that it cannot be proven wasnt a vaccine. In this case vaccines are guilty until proven innocent.
>approximately 70 percent of its payments are the result of a negotiated settlement “in which HHS has not concluded, based upon review of the evidence, that the alleged vaccine caused the alleged injury.”
1) How do you prove it was the vaccine that caused your side effects? You can't. It's not provable in court because "my legs went numb a day or two after I got the jab" isn't exactly concrete evidence.
2) No company should have their liability removed for any reason, especially by the government. This thinking was partly why the 2008 recession happened. I don't want the government taking on the liability of a multi-billion dollar industry because if the company messes up, we're paying more in taxes - guaranteed - to pay for all the settlements.
3) This mandate by the government violates every part of a right to personal autonomy when it comes to your health - there is a MONUMENTAL difference when the mandate comes from government as opposed to private business. This sets (further) precedence for future governments to give them carte blanche as to peoples' health.
Side note - Just a reminder that government-ran health systems like the NHS makes decisions about your health based on the status of the current system - meaning that people who are too costly to fix/repair/KEEP ALIVE will receive palliative care. That's disgusting to me. (The US healthcare system is a whole other topic entirely, this is just an example of government making bad decisions regarding your health)
how much the vaccine injury program has paid out to claimants in the respective FY [1] -- subsidized by our tax dollars on behalf of big pharma, of-course.
Since 1989, it seems the US govt program has paid out $4,667,496,451 to individuals and attorneys who have sued based on side-effects of vaccines
The MMR vaccine required by school is sterilizing, once and done. Intramuscular Covid vaccines provide blood/serum antibodies that can reduce the risk of severe disease or death, but they are non-sterilizing. They never promised to prevent infection and the CDC has updated their definitions to make that clear.
Why would employers need legal immunity? Their lawyers may want to look closely at the legal immunity protections of the PREP act, which extend to healthcare professionals who recommend "countermeasures".
Because it alters the risk/benefit calculus. A sterilizing vaccine that stops transmission in its tracks, has a clear public health benefit to every part of society, even if there are risks. A non-sterilizing vaccine does not provide that society-wide public health benefit, leaving the employer to bear risks without benefit.
Given that the polio vaccine has >99% efficacy [1] and the fact that US has been polio free since 1979 [2], with the only threat being the occasional traveler to a region with polio, being nonsterlizing doesn't seem to be an issue. Quite different from our current situation.
No, I'm comparing the much higher efficacy of the polio vaccine and low prevalence of the polio disease to the significantly lower efficacy of the Covid vaccines and the high prevalence of Covid at present. That means the fact that the polio vaccine is non-sterilizing isn't very important, while the fact that the Covid vaccines are non-sterilizing is a big deal and undermines some of the public health policy decisions.
actually, the polio vaccine doesn't have much higher efficacy, and the covid vaccines don't have much lower efficacy, they have similar efficacy in reducing severe symptoms
That's not what the referenced links says. It says the polio vaccine has 99 to 100% efficacy. The published numbers for Covid vaccines show the virus vector and mRNA vaccines are around 95% efficacy. That's a large difference.
But the COVID vaccine does provide a society-wide public health benefit. Our best available data indicates that it reduces the risk of transmission, even for Delta [1].
Find the word 'delta' in the text of the actual study. It ain't there. And look at the dates of the study. Most of the data is pre-delta.
Your linked ACSH article simply fabricates a conclusion based on no evidence.
The scientific establishment sickens me here. The goal is to get people to vaccinate, which is reasonable enough. The outcome is the opposite, though. The lies are common enough and transparent enough that the whole establishment loses credibility, and a huge swath of the world doesn't believe it about vaccines, climate change, and a slew of other issues.
The argument that vaccines don't prevent delta tranmission are based on headlines, not science.
And unfortunately right now science is playing catch-up.
There simply isn't any evidence on breakthrough transmission with delta testing humans yet because it is recent. The headlines and public health messages are assuming worst case in order to scare vaccinated people into masking up again, while there's actually indications that vaccinated breakthrough infections almost certainly transmit less.
What we know is that while early in the infection viral loads in delta are much higher, but Alpha, delta, and non-VOI/VOC infections feature similar viral trajectories[1], in vaccinated breakthrough infections RNA load declines faster[2] and the ability to culture virus in breakthrough infections is lower[3], we know that vaccines reduced transmission with alpha[4] and apart from scary headlines we still expect that vaccines reduce transmission with delta. While there's documented cases of delta breakthrough infections transmitting to one or two other people, there's not been any studies of how common that is, or how common it is for breakthrough infections to become superspreaders to >10 people, or if that is even possible. Since viral loads are correlated with transmissibility and symptomology/virulence the very high protection against severe disease with vaccination may also protect against severe transmission.
"“The bottom line is, this can happen — it can be true that vaccinated people can spread the virus. But we do not yet know what their relative role in overall community spread is,” says co-author Thomas Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison."
Vaccinations may (or may not) reduce the propensity of vaccinated people to spread Delta but it's very clear at this point vaccinated people can spread Delta to some degree.
It is 100% certain that some breakthrough transmissions can transmit onwards.
If I know that, it should be very apparent that wasn't what I meant.
There are people claiming that vaccines do not prevent any forwards transmission and that vaccination is 100% worthless for ending pandemic spread. Arguing that is wrong does not imply arguing for the exact inverse and that vaccines are perfect. I'm pretty sure that hell is the world where everyone argues in absolutes all the time and that I'm unfortunately living in it.
sigh All of this is irrelevant to the central point. The article fabricated facts. If you're a scientist, your conclusion can be 100% and you're still a fraud if you've baked data to get to that conclusion.
As a footnote, we do have data. My best estimate was that the vaccine reduced the transmission of delta by about 50%. That's based on data in the community I live (and this is context-dependent -- for example, vaccines do a lot more for casual interactions than for close/long ones).
I saw that same estimate replicated by two data scientists I trust, using different data from different places, and different methodologies, so it's somewhat robust. On the other hand, all three were susceptible to Simpson's Paradox and demographic bias, so there is one possible source of correlated error (specifically, more at-risk populations have higher vaccination rates). However, even if we assume a best-case there, though, transmission is reduced by <90%.
I'm summarizing him and everyone else with attitudes like his: the vaccine isn't 100% so it is nothing. Maybe I'm a bit extreme, but at this point I am tired seeing the same ensconce.
My own estimate is that the vaccine is about 50% effective for delta. That's cuts R0 in half, which is huge, but not something you can in any way, shape, or form rely on in isolation. It will likely be even lower for future mutations. Aside from the antivaxer movement, another outcome of extreme pro-vaccine stances, to the level of people lying, is that many people take NO precautions once vaccinated. That's a lot of what's driving some (not all) of the current delta outbreaks.
And on the anti-vaxxer side, once scientists get caught fabricating data, they're not going to be trusted even when they're right.
Do you understand that "reduce" is not synonymous with "eliminate"?
Because an acknowledgement that fully vaccinated people can spread Delta is not a refutation to the claim that it reduces the spread.
Even the paragraph you quoted says "However, like prior variants, the amount of viral genetic material may go down faster in fully vaccinated people when compared to unvaccinated people. This means fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for less time than unvaccinated people."
> Fully vaccinated people with Delta variant breakthrough infections can spread the virus to others. However, vaccinated people appear to spread the virus for a shorter time
And testing rates are probably even lower now that many people have been vaccinated.
This argument is not going to convince the unvaccinated, who are tired of incoherent "scientific" information that changes every month. The field of virology is apparently in its infancy.
> UK for example, have much higher case numbers this summer than last
but much lower hospitalisation rates [0]. Which is the key point of "flattening the curve" if you remember. We're not going to get out of lockdown measures until the hospitals can cope with the load, and the vaccinations are reducing the load on hospitals. Get vaccinated now.
Anyone expecting the scientific establishment (or in fact anyone) to have a clear, consistent and coherent picture right the way through a pandemic caused by a novel virus is being unrealistic.
The advice changes as we know better what we’re up against and anyone who expects to have all the answers is, frankly a fool. Look at the data, follow the science and do the best you can.
Corona viruses aren't novel, the common cold is one of them.
There were no accurate spread models in 2020, no studies how masks would affect the spread of the common cold.
There was ridiculous advice that the famous droplets would sink to the ground before covering a distance > 1.5 meters,
that masks would not help at all and much more.
Now they admit that the virus is airborne!
Sorry, #FollowTheScience slogans and calling others fools does not help.
> There was ridiculous advice that the famous droplets would sink to the ground before covering a distance > 1.5 meters,
This was based on experience with the original SARS virus.
Take this 2003 paper for example: "Effectiveness of precautions against droplets and contact in prevention of nosocomial transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)" [1]
It was a case control study in a Hong Kong hospital that concluded: "Practice of droplets precaution and contact precaution is adequate in significantly reducing the risk of infection …. The protective role of the mask suggests … infection is transmitted by droplets."
Following the science really, really does help. You just need to do it; fools of course don't.
Ding ding. Not to mention natural immunity is much better (6x to 10x) and longer lasting. I already got Covid (a mild flu for 2 days and tired for 5), there is zero benefit to inject, and the more my arm is twisted, the more I will resist.
> (...) who are tired of incoherent "scientific" information that changes every month.
I don't know where you get your information but I saw absolutely zero change in the info on any of the major vaccines since the very same day they've been announced. From day 1 the message was always that these vaccines trained the immune system to lower the severity of Covid symptoms, but otherwise we could still catch it and spread it.
Then only significant change that popped up since last year was due to the inception of the so called Delta variant, which is an entirely new development and had just enough mutations to lower vaccine effectiveness. However, the mRNA vaccines were, from the very start, described as custom tailored to the existing variants, and we're expected to show a drop in effectiveness if the wrong kind of variant occurred.
Personally, when I received my jabs, in both occasions I received a small flier making it quite clear that the current Covid vaccines only trained the immune system to have a fighting chance against Covid, but we were still vulnerable to catch and spread Covid and thus we should continue to practice basic health and safety precautions.
So I really wonder where you got your info, because none of what you said correlates with reality.
Reducing is not the same as stopping, which is the definition of sterilizing vaccines, which is the common layman perception of "vaccine", including your original example of school-mandated vaccines.
Fortunately, the CDC's Sept. 2021 updated definition makes it clear that non-sterilizing Covid vaccines should not be conflated with the transmission-stopping track record of sterilizing vaccines (e.g. MMR) mandated for school & travel.
Reducing does not have the same scaling effect as stopping, e.g. society must continue to pay an ongoing price for mitigations. Stopping means society can move on after a one-time vaccine cost.
There are intranasal (e.g. inhaler) vaccines under development, which may provide nasal/mucosal antibodies. Until those are available, recovery from natural infection will provide both nasal/mucosal and blood/serum antibodies. This path is available to both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Meanwhile here in the UK, with very high vaccination rates, we've been out of lockdown for a while now, are very much getting back to normal life and have low hospitalisation rates. If that's not a 'society wide benefit' I'd like to know what is.
We may need further short tactical lockdowns, and are considering booster shots for the elderly, but the situation here is night and day compared to the US and many other countries thanks to an effective vaccination programme with broad popular support.
It's amazing to me how the political culture of the right has diverged between the US and Europe, and here in the UK particularly. For us responsible behaviour in public and prompt vaccination are conservative touchstones, not exclusively conservative of course but very much seen as not just compatible with conservatism but flowing directly from it's basic principles. What's happened to Republicanism in the US is confusing, and rather horrifying from that perspective.
You might want to read up on Israel before you assume it is because of the high rate of vaccination that you happen to be in a valley of infections again.
Oh we have plenty of infections, tens of thousands of cases per day, but we have much fewer deaths because infected vaccinated people rarely get sick and if they do are extremely unlikely to die.
Early this year we were seeing similar rates of new infections per day, but about a thousand people were dying every day. Nowadays the death rate is about a tenth of that, concentrated among the remaining unvaccinated population.
Israel seems to be having a similar experience, people are catching the virus but those that are vaccinated aren't dying as a result. They're introducing mask mandates and considering tactical lockdowns to try and protect the unvaccinated population. We may need to do the same, nevertheless the best way to protect people who can't be vaccinated is to vaccinate everyone who can be.
I’m from Israel, we were in an excellent condition couple of months ago, but once the vaccination started to lose its potency we see a steep rise in infections and hospitalizations.
Now that we are deep into the booster shot we see the numbers of infections and hospitalizations start to drop again.
> Israel was the first country on Earth to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against COVID-19. Now it has one of the world's highest daily infection rates — an average of nearly 7,500 confirmed cases a day, double what it was two weeks ago. Nearly one in every 150 people in Israel today has the virus.
Not a great advertisement for non-sterilizing vaccines.
Why ignore the GPs argument? Israel has vaccinated 61% of their population. Of course the 39% who aren't vaccinated will continue to spread it like before, even more so if restrictions are lifted.
You see the sibling comment to that one, about how the UK's "very high vaccination rates" means that we've been out of lockdown for a while, are returning to normal life, and have very few hospitalizations for Covid? Well, we've only vaccinated 65% of our population, barely more than Israel - and I think we have demographics which lean more towards age groups at higher risk from Covid than Israel as well. The headline government figures are higher, but they're for over-16s which are the only group eligible for vaccination here.
The 61% is misleading because it includes children ineligible for the vaccine. My undertow that they’ve vaccinated something like 80% of adults (one of the highest on the world).
An unvaccinated child has less chance of severe covid compared to a vaccinated adult. Covid is different between child and adults, reasonable to hypothesize that transmission is also different.
> Evidence from studies primarily done before vaccine approval for those 12 years of age and older suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
"less chance of severe covid compared to a vaccinated adult" is an attempt to move the goalposts to an irrelevant point
if they're vaccinated, they count towards the numerator
if they are a person, and thus have a nonzero chance of getting infected, and a nonzero chance of infecting others if infected, they count towards the denominator
whether or not the "scaling effect" is the same is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
whether or not society must continue to pay an ongoing price for mitigations is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
whether or not society can move on after a one-time vaccine cost is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
the goalposts were set at "provides a societal benefit", which it does
Vaccination likely reduces the chance of transmission in any single interaction. However even with a high level of vaccination all of us can expect to be occasionally exposed to the virus no matter what steps we take. The benefits of vaccination are really more about protecting yourself from severe symptoms, and preventing demand spikes on the healthcare system.
When I get the MMR vaccine I don't need to worry about what versions of Measles it is and isn't effective against or how many months later I should start looking at getting another vaccine.
No. It's controversial because too many people believe idiots on social media who never graduated high school spout off theories about 5G microchipping, lizard people, and Ivermectin Horse DeWormer.
> Are we really going to bother digging up the copious video evidence this is a lie?
It seems you're either a bit confused or you didn't bothered to even watch the very same video you posted.
I watched the video and nowhere in it does anyone promise anything about infections magically go away.
In fact, the infection disease specialist in the video says quite clearly that the observed reduction in spread was around 60%, and this statement is repeated in multiple occasions throughout the video.
The video was also posted over 7 months ago, prior to some of the major vaccines having been approved and made available to the public.
Please do not throw baseless accusations of anyone lying when the best proof you can come up with just refutes your accusation entirely.
> which extend to healthcare professionals who recommend "countermeasures"
Not quite:
> The term “covered person”, when used with respect to the administration or use of a covered countermeasure, means— (A) the United States; or (B) a person or entity that is— [...] (iv) a qualified person who prescribed, administered, or dispensed such countermeasure;
Prescribing, administering, and dispensing are very different from “recommending”.
It means that for people with an immune system that's functioning within the normal range, the vaccine entirely prevents infection (100% effectiveness). Population-wide effectiveness isn't 100%, but for most individuals it is.
Vaccines work by teaching the immune system how to fight an intruding virus, so it doesn't have to spend days or weeks figuring it out while the virus destroys your body.
That means vaccinated people get viruses as often as unvaccinated, but defeat it much faster, usually before you notice any symptoms.
My confusion is that I would call the time my immune system spends fighting a virus in my body an "infection", but apparently that is not the established use.
Your confusion is warranted. These aren't terms that are 100% agreed upon and the scientific understanding is still evolving as our tools get better. The Atlantic just published an article about this very topic:
If the immune system fights off the invader before it becomes established and starts freely replicating (before any symptoms, before it can be detected, before it can be transmitted) then it's not an infection. It's just some contamination.
Funnily enough, The Atlantic just put out an article describing why the idea of "sterilizing vaccines" itself might be a myth and why that doesn't matter from a practical public health standpoint:
if qualifying companies don't mandate the vaccine, enterprising lawyers will sue the deepest pockets involved in not making sure employees get vaccinated
yep, turns out lawyers will find stuff to sue folks for, no matter what
so, companies might as well do the right thing and be protected by the federal government than do the wrong thing and have to fight those lawyers all on their own
Unless you mean a very literal "at our expense" as in dollars paid for a highly effective vaccine, are you implying that the vaccine has been a net negative?
When it first came out, the data made the vax an obviously net positive. Given what we now know about cases amongst the vaccinated and how they can spread it... It's no longer an obvious positive. The vax has made covid more pervasive because of bad data at the beginning.
I could maybe buy people being lax about masks and social distancing because of the vaccine, but surely you don't think the vaccine itself has made the virus more pervasive?
Well what is the effect and purpose of the vax other than to make people lax about social distancing and masks. The vaccine was correctly developed expressly for the purposes of rendering both unnecessary.
If the vax had worked to sterilize or mostly sterilize the virus as originally it was sold to us as, then this would be okay.
Instead it did not really work, thus spreading covid more.
So in the end, we locked down and destroyed the economy in hopes of a vaccine, but the vaz didn't fully work and now we're going to have to open anyway to avert major economic and social disaster.
It lowers your chance of getting it and thus spreading it significantly and it severely lowers your chance of having a severe reaction in the case of a breakthrough infection.
The only reason it hasn't worked at a societal level is that not enough people have taken it.
It is not obvious to me this is the case. All available data suggest that between the vaccine and natural immunity, we would have reached herd immunity if such a thing were possible. But we have not, indicating the primary benefit of the vaccine is, and will likely always be, some personal protection. Put differently, we will all get COVID eventually, and would have even if everyone was vaccinated, and the question is just one of the severity of individual cases.
If the vaccine actually prevents getting sick enough to notice, then it means a bunch of vaccinated virus carriers are wandering around in public. Whereas if they were unvaccinated, then by the popular theory that unvaccinated people get very sick from this virus, they would know to stay home.
It always surprises me when conservatives use the economic argument wrt vaccine deployment because doing so means they assume an intrinsic value of $0 on human lives.
> Is the federal government going to provide employers with the same legal immunity granted to pharmaceutical vendors via the PREP act
They already did for COVID countermeasures in general. In the first declaration that did that for pharmaceutical companies, public entities managing countermeasure planning and distribution, and others in March of last year.
mRNA vaccines do not directly stimulate the immune system. They cause the immune system itself to create protein structures that stimulate the immune system.
The definition change is simply to more accurately include this vaccine method.
My concern is why OSHA has not issued emergency mandatory ventilation and air circulation orders, since that's actually within their wheelhouse vs this extension into medical demands which until now had been limited strongly to vague recommendations and couched in informed consent language (e.g. Hepatitis awareness)
Because that requires tremendous capital and labor costs, overhauling HVAC in every private and public building would take years, there aren’t enough electricians and tinners/pipefitters. HVAC equipment is also very expensive and most public institutions have already budgeted for capital costs. Who will pay for it all?
Most of the Patriot act was to expire after 4 years. It was renewed by Congress multiple times. Parts of it were renewed in separate bills after it eventually expired.
Although, just like Afghanistan, there's no clear end to COVID afaik ... although I disagree with the implication that there's some great benefit the government / other interests are getting out of this ETS, of the same scale that the military-industrial complex/the executive branch got out of the PATRIOT act/Afghanistan.
> there's some great benefit the government / other interests are getting out of this ETS
Pharma is gonna be making some good money out of COVID, no? The amount of tests that have been produced, plus the amount of vaccines being used are certainly not free.
dude, big pharma has been handed a blank check from the government to produce a recurring product that is legally mandated for the entire populace to use. This is the sweetest deal in all of history for them.
For pharmaceutical companies? In comparison to a liability-free, recurring subscription, mandated by the federal government for hundreds of millions? Not so much.
> of the same scale that the military-industrial complex/the executive branch got out of the PATRIOT act/Afghanistan.
Given that covid and the subsequent reaction realized one of the largest wealth transfers from poor to rich in modern history and led to great market returns for those in power, how can you honestly say this?
Look.. like most people on hacker news I am in the top 1% of earners and due to my industry benefitted greatly from covid lockdowns. But just because we benefited, we cannot be blind to the mass robbery that has taken place. We've literally robbed the poor to pay the wealthy.
There is going to be a massive enforcement bureaucracy set up. Unwinding that will be nontrivial. Once people's budgets and fiefdoms at work depend on it, they will fight to keep or grow their power. This will be around in some form for a very long time.
It was temporary, originally enacted for four years. Unfortunately, it was extended a few times in whole and then in part before finally being allowed to expire completely after 18 years.
Due to a president that the media declared absolute war against. If Biden or Clinton were in office, they'd have renewed it quietly.
Just because they can't sneak it back in now doesn't mean they don't want to. The new administration has already made bogeyman out of 'domestic terrorism' that it's own fbi cannot find evidence for.
There's a bit in Ron Paul's "Revolution" where he points out that gov programs get added and grow but few are reduced or ended. His politics aside (i..e., regardless of party, he does have plenty of first hand experience), there's plenty of evidence to support this.
Oddly enough, a couple of weeks ago at the local thrift store I picked up "The Secret History of the American Empire" by John Perkins. Even if only half of it is accurate, there's also plenty of reason to believe there are less than noble forces at work given the current changes and the opportunities they create.
Our largest healthcare provider has already mandated vaccines for their staff and insurance companies are now following suit because they got hammered with life insurance payouts for 2020 and first half of 2021.
Waiting for retailers to announce this as well at some point.
Maybe slightly off topic, but it’s always been odd to me how life insurance tests with vigor for tobacco use but lack that enthusiasm for metabolic health / diet.
It depends on the amount of life insurance you get. Mine is of an amount that blood work was required and it definitely affects the rate. One of the things I learned is I have a "fatty liver" - which is indicative of poor metabolic health. I started taking care of that, brought the levels down to normal, and my rate was lowered.
In the US, you are not going to be able to get any decently priced term life insurance without a blood test, height, and weight. The A1C and cholesterol levels, combined with height, weight, medical history, and family medical history probably give them enough information for metabolic health/diet.
They certainly test for basic health, or did with me. I had to give blood and urine, and a nurse came to check other vitals. They also get your basic measurements which gives them BMI. They can then categorize you into "preferred" or other groups.
To get my life insurance 5ish years ago, I had to have a blood test that included tobacco, drug use and cholesterol. My understanding is that is pretty common.
One you qualify though, I don't think they can re-test you.
You often do get tested and rated based on health factors. Maybe not exact diet, but they can surely infer some of that from blood/urine/size/weight/etc. It depends on the insurance company but more likely the size of the policy. I think a lot of $20-$100k policies don't require any tests - they may also be more expensive. I got a decent term 15 years ago, and I had to have an in-home exam from a nurse.
correct many small polices don't require testing, same for group life policies upto a certain amount of benefit. When you get into the 10 million range that's when a carrier really starts digging into family history etc.
Few carriers are currently willing to write anyone over 60 which is affecting key person policies more than anything, in my experience.
>> it’s always been odd to me how life insurance tests with vigor for tobacco use but lack that enthusiasm for metabolic health / diet.
This commenter has never had a major individual life insurance policy. While Tobacco effects underwriting, it's not as major of a factor anymore.
A “food desert” doesn’t account for the person who consistently orders two flavors in their tall iced coffee (usually equates to 6+ oz of simple syrup); that’s a choice — and a severe negative externality.
Indeed. Tax that at point of sale, like cigarettes and other tobacco.
Risk pooling in insurance is simply an added benefit, but a less clear moral approach when the disease is not necessarily controllable by the person. Metabolic disorders exist. Tobacco disorders, not as much except conditioning and addiction.
But, it should be a focus for wellness programs so that metabolic disorders are destigmatized.
Nearly 3/4 of out adults are overweight, thats mostly shitty choices. You say "disorder" like it is something these people got through no fault of their own but that is not often the case. Shitty choices probably we should stigmatize becuase accepting this many fat people have gotten us a public health crisis.
I hear this shtick repeated every time someone doesn't want to fund universal healthcare because they don't want to pay for fat people. Fun fact, obese people actually have lower lifetime healthcare costs than healthy people.
Now, if you wish to reduce obesity because you're more interested in a person's quality adjusted life years, you absolutely do want to treat obesity (and addiction) like a disorder, because compassion and empathy is the only way you're ever going to get someone to make the long term life choices they need to get better.
I referenced overweight which is many more people. They are the ones who live long enough to spend big dollars on healthcare but still cost much more. They arent food addicts or something they just cant be bothered to make gym trips.
I'm doubtful Obamacare would regulate life insurance.
As far as I know, life insurance policies of significant amounts still do medical exams. And care about drug use, tobacco use, high blood pressure, disclosure about things like past cancer diagnosis, lifestyle stuff (skydiving, climbing, and so on) etc.
> We still don't really understand how diet affects health long term.
I thought it was pretty clear that we do. Go talk to any physician and they will tell you the 3 things you control to increase your chances of a long & healthy life are:
Yeh, that's science. As we learn more the guidance is refined. Generally speaking for decades the guidance has been to eat a well balanced diet—that hasn't changed.
There is also a second issue, government agencies have been co-opted by industry to make recommendations not supported by the science. I'm specifically thinking about recommendations around fat&sugar, the same thing you called out that indicates the problem is not the science but rather regulatory capture.
Eh, yes there is data but the association is not clear and straightforward that diet is the necessary or sufficient condition for metabolic or cardiovascular diseases. What you're quoting is, in healthcare, called the "standard of care" and is the workflow that is recommended for doctors (i.e. less likely to be sued for malpractice if they follow the route). Most doctors are technicians, not researchers establishing causal claims with strong data.
Please don't misread, I agree with you in principle. I am simply pointing out there are nuances.
You are wrong. There are great volumes of evidence that keeping a low weight and keeping macronutrients roughly in some gap makes you live longer. I'm not sure what is left to be talking about. Specific fad diets?
Are you seriously arguing edge cases here? It's on level with anti vaxxer claiming his smoking overweight uncle had no problems with corona hence we both don't get vaccinated.
This stuff is presented in middleschool and highschool health classes and pretty much everywhere on the internet if you look for life improvement advice. Weight is perhaps the single most strongly linked indicator of life expectancy.
What is your level of education? I need to know so I can give you sources I am sure you can use.
Sufficient to understand metasurveys of relevant literature and models of dynamical systems, insufficient to grok or critique individual studies outside clear statistical issues.
If you are able to understand this literature I am quite confused as to how you can't find it yourself -- the associations go far deeper, with increased fat intake causing plaque buildup that eventually leads to heart problems. Obesity under class III also shortens life expectancy.
Realize also that per what is laid out in that review someone who is 6" ~180lbs is obese, even if it mostly muscle. Even if it is obesity caused by muscle instead of fat, you don't live as long.
The rate might be higher, but we have our share of anti-vax people - including some violent protests at the Prime Minister lately, causing him to cancel rally events.
In our office, we have a number of people I know aren't vaccinated.
Not true. Germany has the "three g" mandate (and it has faced significant pushback). France has no vaccination mandate but does have policies to encourage it, which have also faced massive protests. Both and the US have first-dose vaccination rates within ten percentage points of each other.
In all three countries, the pushback is primarily from populist/right-wing political movements. This is not a strictly American phenomenon.
>In all three countries, the pushback is primarily from populist/right-wing political movements.
This article says, at least in the US, the poor and young are the least likely to get a vaccine. You have any data for your political assertion that it's primarily right wingers? Keep in mind, politicizing COVID is what got us where we are today.
Besides the (insane and infuriating) politicization of the vaccine, I wonder how much of the problem comes down to a fear of the US healthcare system for those who are uninsured or have catastrophic-only coverage. I worry that people fear they'll go in for a “free” shot and end up getting a $300 bill in the mail, because hidden costs abound in the US healthcare system. (Even though we know that they won't)
"They" might. I blacked out after my second Pfizer shot, and was ambulanced to an ER. This was $4k, not really my choice. Yes, I have health insurance. Everything was repriced to the 'negotiated' insurance rate, and it was still ~$2k. On top of the $1k/month I already pay (me and spouse). I would get the shot again, without a doubt, but it still hits people.
This is extremely insightful. I wonder how many uninsured/underinsured people are afraid of getting hit with an unexpected medical bill? I'll be honest, having insurance I often times don't think of these things.
There was a period of my life in which I was underinsured (catastrophic only). I ended up burning my foot badly enough that the nurse line insisted I do to urgent care. Three people walked in, looked at my foot, told me not to pop the blister. I walked away with two pain pills and a bill for $4,000 that I negotiated down to about $3200.
You’re sure as hell right that it was going to take something catastrophic for me to walk through those doors again.
Edit: I have a job that offers decent insurance now, but my immediate emotional reaction to healthcare in the United States is very negative (even though I quite like my doctor, dentist, etc). I believe our system is corrupted and abusive towards the poor.
I think people are truly terrified of the long-term effects due to over-litigation here in America.
You can't turn on the TV, Facebook, YouTube, etc. without a class action lawsuit message in the form of: "Have you used baby powder in the past 2 years? If so, you may be eligible for compensation under the Talcum Powder Class Action Lawsuit, call us at..."
The seemingly "safe" things in America that we take for granted, like baby powder, or Round-Up weed killer, or even tap water in Michigan has turned out to be not so safe.
I think more it’s an indirect side effect. Healthcare is so expensive that people no longer go to a family doctor but avoid the doctor and get their information/advice from their social circle and the Internet or alternative medicine.
Just to clarify something. When I said minorities I was only talking about Hispanic and black. Not Asian. I should have been more precise in my wording.
Younger people along with Hispanics and blacks are more likely members of the Democratic Party than other parties. I haven't seen the vaccine rate and party breakdown though.
Like it or not, but it's the GOP that fights covid measures tooth and nails and poisons society with insane propaganda while their own supporters die every day. Hopefully any prospect of GOP taking back the house and the Senate will die as well
Your comment was literally "#America", certainly this implies you think it's different in other countries, otherwise, why would you highlight the Americanness?
>>insurance companies are now following suit because they got hammered with life insurance payouts for 2020 and first half of 2021.
Do you have a source for this comment? One thing is certain, more people are purchasing life insurance so if anything Covid has been a windfall for the carriers, for various reasons not just increased sales.
Maybe I read it wrong, but either way, life insurance companies have never required vaccinations after purchasing a policy to my knowledge, and if they did, it would have to be for new policies only. But I also feel like I would have read about it somewhere if that was true.
As far as I understand, ACA does not allow health insurance companies to require vaccinations to be eligible for coverage, but they can offer lower premiums in exchange for vaccinating.
> Our largest healthcare provider has already mandated vaccines for their staff
Seems reasonable to expect people working with many sick and vulnerable patients in a healthcare setting to be vaccinated. That’s one of the highest risk scenarios I can think of for exposure and transmission as well as the most likely place to concentrate vulnerable patients.
Temporarily. I am assuming you had your second shot more than two weeks ago. Soon, the definition of "fully vaccinated" will change to require the third shot and you will be counted among the unvaccinated as it is currently done for people with a single shot or less than two weeks past their second shot when it comes to death/hospitalization stats.
Yeah, there are so many layers to this. I mean, a mandate for employers oversteps what government is allowed to do anyway. But that aside, if it was polio or something and there was one shot that basically ended it, you could see a rational path to a single mandate that got everyone vaccinated (btw I'd be curious to know polio, measles, etc vaccine rates, I think they are very high). But when "vaccinated" is essentially some political flavor of the week, how is it going to get enforced? Will a third shot get rolled in? And if there are more, or if we switch from mrna to another variety, do they get rolled in too? Will you need to have the original 2021 shots, even once they've been subsumed into something else, or can you just get the latest thing.
For all the pretend deference to science, we're in the middle of a rapidly unfolding situation. It seems preposterous, even with clear evidence that the vaccines do work (and ignoring government overreach which is itself absurd and illegal imo) to start mandating something that is not likely to hold 6 months from now, and what, just require that everyone tracks whatever current orthodoxy says? I have my two pfizer shots, and if there is a vaccine later that actually cures covid, maybe I'll go back and get it. But I'm giving up on trying to track the flavor of the week and trying to match whatever the new York times wants me to do, I'll wait until there is actually a reasonable consensus
I agree and support this. People want to conflate the issues of not believing in vaccines (or whatever words they like to put in peoples mouths) and believing in having to provide proof of a personal health situation all over the place. It's convenient to pretend that anyone who is against government and corporate overreach is an "anti-vaxxer" instead of actually engage with the issue.
Can that "zero-tolerance" mindset be productively applied to any problem? We see it in a lot of places, and it never seems to achieve the goals it aims to serve.
They're getting conflated because the people who are against vaccines are referencing freedom to choose as their primary argument, as if the ability to make bad decisions implies some duty to make bad decisions.
I'm against vaccine mandates in principle, but the ultimate cause of the authoritarianism is mass media. Covid has been a fantastic setup for dog and pony shows - political hucksters rail all day about government overreach while inciting their followers to make bad choices. The large scale effects of those bad choices practically demand government intervention. And after the utilitarian system steps in to mitigate the problem, the hucksters take credit for being right about government overreach all along. It's the perfect con for the post-reality media environment - when reality asserts itself and some low level preacher dies of their own kool aid, they just go silent and are replaced by another ignorant voice on the same channel.
If we had a level of societal trust such that you could expect that most everyone would be taking measures to prevent spreading Covid, then coming together in large groups (eg employment) would be less of an issue. But as it stands, why would anybody want to go back into the office when it's likely that at least a third of your coworkers will blithely get you sick? And hence OSHA et al step in, using the same rationale as when preventing operating heavy equipment while drunk - it creates an unsafe work environment.
I would be with you if it weren’t for the “or test” part. “You must get vaccinated” would be problematic, but “you must do a COVID test once a week if you’re not vaccinated” is totally reasonable IMO.
In June of 2020, I waited over 2 weeks for the results of my test. A delay that long makes the test more than worthless for preventing transmission and determining best course of action.
It's "reasonable" in the sense of being slightly less draconian but completely unreasonable from a health perspective.
Think about it: two people enter a workplace. One is unvaccinated but recently tested, so it can be said with good confidence they are not infected. The other is vaccinated but may well be sick and spreading it, especially as effectiveness wanes quickly. The other is waved through, the first is penalized with constant charges. Who is making other people the safest here? It's not the vaccinated guy.
"Recently tested" doesn't mean you definitely don't have the Covid. It could that you weren't far enough along in your sickness at the time you were tested.
It's all about risk. Someone who has been vaccinated has a very low likelihood of being sick with Covid. Someone who has recently been tested also has a low likelihood.
IMO, though, if the tests are a week apart, that's a lot of opportunity for Covid to slip through. There's a reason that 72 hours (and sometimes 48 hours, I think) is the time limit for tests for traveling. Even that isn't a guarantee, though.
I can't find the chart now, but Covid progresses pretty rapidly, so if someone gets tested on Friday and was exposed 1-2 days before that, they can pretty much spread it for an entire week before they get tested on the next Friday.
And even if they were tested on Mondays, they could still be spreading it before the weekend.
Tests prevent someone from spreading it for weeks, but not days.
Vaccines are much more likely to prevent the spread at all.
Preventing the spread of an infectious respiratory virus is a fools errand and we’ve known this forever. No amount of authoritarianism is enough to stop the spread. The mitigation efforts were always to avoid overrunning the hospitals, which we have managed easily.
Take a look around right now, multiple states are at ICU capacity. You don’t need to overrun the hospital system but under sustained stress, you quickly degrade service. Not to mention all the burnout and people leaving the field on top of it all.
Icu beds are a function of staffing long before equipment is a limitation. We've fired nurses and not rebuilt over the last 18 months. If nothing has been done to address staffing for seasonal diseases in that time, it's either incompetence or by design. This is why hospitals run at or near capacity all year round and have capacity issues every flu season. It's a business decision. It also happens to be easily exploited by the narrative.
You can go back and look at 10+ years of UK NHS "hospitals desperately overwhelmed" annual articles. Just because you hadn't heard of it before doesn't mean it isn't normal.
I'm not sure why this is down-voted (but I have my suspicions). ICUs are f-ed because hospital's business models are f-ed. Without people voluntarily electing to get minor surgery and other elective services their balance sheets get turned inside out and they cut staffing. The fact that we had a massive uptick in people who need laborious ICU care (because covid) at the same time that people more or less stopped voluntarily going to hospitals was a double whammy.
The fact that it happens a lot doesn't make it any less true now and the fact we've had sustained stress on the system for a year and a half isn't typical.
In the US, they've relaxed many guidelines and allowed student nurses without gaining licensure yet to practice because of the need [1].
This all pales in comparison to the mandate Biden announced last night for all healthcare staff at facilities which take Medicare/Medicaid to be required to take the vaccine. Probably a good 20% of our nursing staff is at direct risk of being lost because of that new measure.
I think more reasonable stance would be to require employers offer sufficient protective gear for unvaccinated employees. Gas masks aren't that expensive. And any private person can at their own cost also buy such device to fully protect themselves.
Actually having had to wear a gas mask in the military for hours... I would LOVE to see this. If you think an N-95 grade mask is hard to breathe though, try wearing an NBC mask for 8 hours a day. :-)
Just FYI, no amount of coercive mandates and force applied against your fellow human beings to make them take these shots, which are marginally protective against transmission at best, will actually do anything to make you safer from Covid or reduce your paralyzing fear of it. TPTB will continue to menace you with the specter of The Virus as long as it is making you behave in ways useful to them -- namely, by handing them more power.
Oh ok, thanks for the heads up. Can't believe I let all these doctors, medical professionals and scientists cloud my judgement and make me believe them. I should definitely trust a stranger online, believe their conspiratorial drivel on a shadow cabal consolidating power and redpill myself out of this fever dream of a life I've been living.
Created this throwaway to say that there are at least some others who agree but are too scared of the current cultural tone to speak openly about this. I feel thoroughly alienated from my peer-group and family over their fervor for this response and against any who disagree.
I'm sorry, but I think this is time to speak up. We're losing rights month by month, slowly following in Australia's authoritarian footsteps. So many who oppose this are too afraid to say anything, and the result is the appearance of overwhelming support for such measures, mainly because those who do support are much more aggressive, louder, willing to directly attack others personally and even physically.
We shouldn't resort to those tactics, but we do need to make our voices heard, support each other, reassure everyone that we're just as numerous if not more so. It's important, this is our freedom and that of our children on the line.
I'd suggest following Rand Paul on twitter, and as he suggests, refusing to comply with these unscientific and unreasonable orders.
(truly, any mandate that fails to take in to account naturally acquired immunity or vaccine risks to individuals as noted in cdc and fda documents is completely lacking in scientific rigor.)
I'm right there with you. Had an old friend of over 25 years say to me that it was a "blunt cudgel to enforce a social instinct that is shockingly atrophied in people."
Hang in there, you are not alone and we are still in the very early days of this whole operation. Also, you might be able to find a local anti-mask or anti-mandate group on Facebook, I've found having that social support network is really helpful.
> I feel thoroughly alienated from my peer-group and family over their fervor for this response and against any who disagree.
Join the club. You really do need to start speaking out though. This shit has gone on long enough. The idea that it is impossible well intentioned, well reasoned person to object to any part of our current situation is complete rubbish. We are being gaslit and bullied and quite honestly I'm tired of it.
Trucking, food production, Oil & Gas, powerplant workers, linemen, water treatment, etc.
In those essential industries, a small percentage of people walking out may wreck havoc on the whole nation. Those are also the same people that I expect are more anti covid vaccine.
There was a trucker strike in Australia. I got the impression that it was limited to TWU (the equivalent of Teamsters) demanding more money and better working conditions. I never saw what better working conditions actually meant.
I'm more concerned about 20% of the truckers being fired for not taking the vaccine. Logistics is already stretched thin and it would make it much worse.
> except it's not really since you can kill other people if you're not vaccinated.
Not if they are vaccinated. I don't understand why vaccinated people give a hoot about the vaccination status of others. Vaccinations protect them from severe covid issues.
Everybody is gonna get covid. We knew this all the way back in march of 2020.
Yup. And as a sane person I understand that and long since took appropriate actions. And that is my own damn business and I owe you no explanations or medical records!
The FDA application for boosters claims that efficacy against transmission for delta for persons vaccinated when the vaccine became generally available is now 42%. That isn't enough to drop Reff below 1 even with 100% vaccination-- in fact, it leaves delta with an Reff higher than the original L strain had absent vaccination.
"no spread" is R=0.
Vaccinated people are spreading it to vaccinated people as well as unvaccinated. Assuming that vaccinated people don't know that they get it we have essentially created a big cesspool for the virus to spread undetected.
Luckily that's a bad assumption because the vaccines are so bad that they aren't even protecting people from getting very ill.
If R<1 the number of infected people continually decreases until there are no cases. This is also why it's important for the US to provide other countries with vaccines.
Okay, but you claimed that "there would be no spread". But that is not true for 0 < R < 1. Can you just admit you misspoke instead of arguing a pointless point?
Inevitable outcome in a society that is terrified of everything. And to think that our ancestors sailed across the oceans into the unknown and faced diseases, war, famine, and worse. Now we are instituting a surveillance state in the name of a fairly bad flu virus with a 99% survival rate.
We really need a new frontier. Hopefully space travel happens before human beings become completely domesticated.
I never understand this whole "99% survival rate" being presented as if that's low. I don't know about you, but if I'm around something that has a 1 in 100 chance of killing me, I'm going to do everything I can to not let it, because those are NOT low odds.
It also conveniently ignores the known and unknown long-haul effects from Covid, which impacts a significant percentage (20%?). I, for one, like staying in relatively good health.
I'll take a stab at that survival number, which is inaccurate information. Your risk is way less than 1 in 100.
First off, the baseline survival rate is much better than 99%, between 99.8% and 99.9%. That's already an order of magnitude lower, closer to 1/1000 than 1/100. 1% lethality was a bad estimate from early on, before we realized we were undercounting mild cases by a huge multiple.
Second, lethality is highly correlated to comorbidities, including obesity and vitamin D deficiency. 94% of Covid deaths had another condition. If you don't, then your own risk reduces by another factor of 15.
Third, lethality is highly stratified by age. Under age 50 incurs at least 10x fewer deaths than higher age brackets.
Fourth, the vaccines. That also reduces risk by a factor somewhere in the ballpark of 10x again.
Fifth, Delta variant is also less lethal, as seen by the low death rates in India and the UK, although we don't seem to have reliable numbers on that yet.
So if you are young, healthy, not overweight, and vaccinated, multiply all that out and your risk factor really comes to less than one in a million. You take bigger risks every time you drive in your car. You're losing more life-value worrying about Covid than you actually stand to lose from it.
That all said, there is the point to be worried about Covid not for yourself, but for the possibility of spreading it. That's a valid point, but that is a question of politics, of individualism versus collectivism, not of science and statistics.
If they fire you, that's a better option if you don't believe the vaccines are safe (they have NOT been fully tested - you are a guinea pig in the safety trials if you got the jab), the vaccines have NOT been approved (the lie of the claim otherwise is that no currently available vaccine has been approved - they are all still in EUA - they are still experimental while the "approved" Pfizer vaccine has never been made yet, has never been tested either and is NOT available to anyone because it's never been made yet).
It's not a question of "obey or starve," it's a question of "live in and participate in society, or GFTO." If you want to enjoy all the benefits of living in a well governed, well protected society, you're going to have to give up certain things.
If you're not willing to give up certain things that are required to maintain that society, you're welcome to go away. You have that choice.
> “…but if I'm around something that has a 1 in 100 chance of killing me, I'm going to do everything I can to not let it, because those are NOT low odds.”
then you should avoid any and all cars as you have a 1 in 100 lifetime chance of dying in a car accident. or birth, as babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth.
covid suffers severely from availability and recency bias because our lives are so exceedingly safe already. it’s hard to die on accident, even via covid.
I actually do try to stay away from cars. I think we are absolutely horrible at addressing risk accurately, and someday when we have some sort of carless society (or maybe self-driving cars?) we will not understand how we could possibly have accepted the mortality rates associated with cars. Not to mention the less immediate effects on long term health from exhaust, etc.
Although I feel you were trying to make the opposite case, I think events like COVID should illuminate the dangers and inadequacies of other elements of our lives. If you've read "The Maniac of New York" comic, it makes a similar point: a murderer that can't be stopped eventually just becomes accepted by society. Perhaps we have recency bias with COVID, but we have a more worrying complacency bias with other elements of our lives, like cars. Dramatic life extensions and quality of life improvements come when people stop accepting that "meh, people get sick and die," and instead get curious and start pushing for "burdensome" things like public sanitation.
Perhaps more importantly though, the ICU is getting filled up and causing other unrelated ailments to become worse. This isn't the case with most the other things you listed.
> babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth
This one is hard to avoid unfortunately, unless you believe in Pixar's "pre life" world from "Soul". Also, arguably avoiding it leads to 100% mortality depending on how you count "not living". Neither here nor there, but I wasn't really a fan of that movie.
rather than being so dichotomous and partisan, my actual position is that we focus on the wrong problems because of biases and fallacious thinking, both individual and systemic. death by car is a real problem, but we’ve long accepted that and similar risks to our lives (as an aside, cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases are more pressing, to which auto pollution does contribute). covid is comparable to that level of risk and yet there’s no constant uproar and heightened emotion around car deaths. we need to couch novel threats in relation to existing risk tolerances developed over millennia rather than the other way around (because those exist already for good reasons, à la chesterson’s fence).
the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy.
> yet there’s no constant uproar and heightened emotion around car deaths.
I think you may have a recency bias towards the mitigation techniques. The reason it seems like there's no hysteria around cars is because we've already gone through that phase and implemented the best safeguards we could come up with: the right analogy here is to see what a stickler our society is for having car insurance, which is the closest thing to a "car accident vaccine" we could come up with. Given the reality of the frequency of car accidents, and how they can potentially affect others just as much as yourself, we've implemented a system where it is a requirement to have a way to compensate the other person if an accident happens (not to mention the various laws we have around driving, the big deal that was Mothers Against Drunk Driving, breathalyzer checkpoints which could be seen quite analogously to covid testing, the fact that we need a license to drive and are tested for driving proficiency, the penalties for driving unsafely, laws requiring you to buckle your safety belt, laws around safety belts and airbags needing to be included in cars, etc. etc.). If we had an actual hypothetical "car accident vaccine," we'd probably just require you to have that instead of this tremendously complicated and expensive infrastructure around driving.
So I'd argue that what we actually don't see is heightened emotion around this onerous car infrastructure, to the point where you are essentially presenting cars as some sort of model for c'est-la-vie attitudes both from the general population and the government, which couldn't be farther from the truth. The reality is you've just gotten used to the burdens we've taken on to make our activities livable with respect to cars. Go watch the "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel and you'll see just how much of your life is actually completely governed around accommodating cars (and a big part of that is in making their presence safer).
> the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy.
> "The reason it seems like there's no hysteria around cars is because we've already gone through that phase and implemented the best safeguards we could come up with..."
no, we've just collectively decided that we're willing to put up with the small risk. it's nowehere near all that we could come up with. we could be much more stringent (stricter licensing & testing, tougher and more diverse training, more danger-apparent roads, better segregating roads from streets, fewer in-car and out-of-car distractions, more rigorous enforcement, higher carbon/fuel taxes, congestion pricing, stricter pollution standards, dense mixed-use neighborhoods, greater transit investment, etc.) and further reduce that risk, but we've collectively decided that the imposition and cost are not worth it (though i personally disagree). cars are a visible and imminent threat every day, in much the same way that covid is perceived to be, as a new member of the constellation of endemic infectious diseases we now live with.
as for the rest, torturing analogies that way merely to coerce them into fitting a desired explication is cruel and unusual punishment imho. i can't partake in good conscience.
> as for the rest, torturing analogies that way merely to coerce them into fitting a desired explication is cruel and unusual punishment imho. i can't partake in good conscience.
It’s OK to just admit you chose a really bad comparison point, there are others that would probably support your case better, you just happened to choose one of the most heavily regulated areas that has had plenty of constitutional challenges (see everything around breathalyzer checkpoints and the 5th amendment), as well as one of the ones that went through the most hysteria: Ralph Nader built an entire career after publishing “Unsafe at Any Speed” and then testifying to Congress which rocked the automotive world and lead to a ton of regulations. This was all in the 60s though, so easy to forget. But for a more recent example, MADD became a huge “hysteria” to the point of the ACLU fighting against them over the constitutionality of roadblocks. Whether you think it’s justified or not (and to be clear, I’m not arguing either side in this instance), it’s undeniable that car safety was on people’s mind in a big way, and not just in one specific moment in time, but on several separate occasions, over many different issues. I mean, hell, the driver’s license is the closest thing we have to the feared “government ID,” so even the expansion of scope arguments apply.
With regard to “how much we could do” — sure, same can be said with COVID. There’s way more we could do than forcing employees of companies with over 100 people to take a free vaccine or be tested. There’s tremendously more drastic measures that could be taken. As such, the investment is at best comparable (and in reality much smaller) than what we’ve done for cars.
vehicle safety has experienced a decades-long but dilute attention (of which nader and madd are two minor blips) befitting of its risk, the kind we should apply to covid rather than the mass hysteria it currently enjoys. covid doesn't need more attention and mitigation, because none of it will reduce the long-run consequences materially (relative to both the fully-internalized costs and other comparable risks).
Do you think that the OSHA requirement this thread is specifically relating to (which is less strict than vaccine requirements in most schools) qualifies as too much attention, or are you referring to the different levels of attention it has gotten from the various other companies/governments/etc.?
yes, too much of the wrong kind of attention and focus. biden had to do something splashy considering his approval ratings have been hovering in the low 40's for a while, and covid continues to garner the broad mediopolitical attention he needs in that regard. if our collective attention had been on vehicle injuries/deaths, he would have made arbitrary pronouncements in that arena instead.
these current pronouncements require some significant portion (perhaps 40+%) of 100 million people to give in to political aims or face unemployment and potentially destitution, to slow down a virus that is going to burn through the whole population eventually (and do so again and again). presumably by now everyone who's risk-averse or at elevated risk has gotten vaccinated. so now that those folks are vaccinated, why force others to do so, other than for political reasons (and for no other seasonal maladies killing tens to hundreds of thousands)? it won't stop spread, mutation, illness, or even death, but rather will only prolong the pandemic while shoveling federal dollars at pharma, making it a purely political gambit.
on top of the vaccination levels we have now, we can get the same epidemiological slowdown without the socioeconomic costs via some modest distancing indoors and mask wearing by public-facing workers (like cashiers) and in social settings (like at home, not generally out in public where it does practically nothing), but that doesn't have nearly the same political punch.
> on top of the vaccination levels we have now, we can get the same epidemiological slowdown without the socioeconomic costs via some modest distancing indoors and mask wearing by public-facing workers (like cashiers) and in social settings (like at home, not generally out in public where it does practically nothing), but that doesn't have nearly the same political punch.
Maybe if people were willing to wear masks and socially distance, but even this has caused tremendous pushback, with for example DeSantis and Abbott trying to ban mask mandates in their states. So sure, if you could get people to mask up and socially distance, perhaps it would achieve the same goal (not sure if this is actually the case, but just taking that at face value), but that’s currently a harder task given that it’s a thing people need to keep doing, dat after day, as opposed to convincing them to get the vaccine once (well, twice, but you know what I mean).
just to be clear, i'm not suggesting that modest distancing and masking would eradicate the virus long-term. it would just provide the same level of drawing out as the announced mandates, but without the fanfare. absent a veritable miracle, i don't think anything gets us out of a 99+% infection rate long-term. folks worried about serious illness/death can (and do) vaccinate. as such we end up with the same outcome without mandates. hence the assertion that these mandates are purely political, not mitigative.
also, no one of any political persuasion is masking or distancing at home or at private social gatherings, which is where a large portion of transmission happens, so it's not just a certain group of selfish bad people prolonging the pandemic. it's all of us who are not following this limited but most mitigative measure (as opposed to the performative ones).
At this point, long term side effects would be known about: "History tells us that severe side effects are extremely rare, and if they do occur, they usually happen within the first two months"
Maybe? We have been studying vaccines and how they work since the 1800s...we have a lot more history with vaccines and how they work compared to a Coronavirus.
And two of the available vaccines don't even give you a dead infection like most vaccines - you can't get COVID from the COVID shot (Moderna or Pfizer)
That would count if our question was “What are the likely side effects after one year?”
But it’s not. The question is long term side effects. Unless you have a time machine, I’m gonna say we can’t know those for quite a bit - unlike other vaccines which have decades of testing data.
I haven't seen any reason to believe that longER-term side effects will differ significantly from the small amount of side effects we've already seen in the long period of time since the first vaccinations
obviously we can't just wait forever with the worry that in year forever+1 some random side effect completely different from what the evidence currently indicates will manifest itself
In the past, some substances were thought to be safe, but turned out not to be. The “it’s safe” period of time was longer than a year.
Ergo it is reasonable to assume that we can’t know all of the side effects of current novel vaccines. It doesn’t mean there will be any, but it doesn’t mean there won’t be either.
to wit, you have not proven there is a good reason to worry about widespread significant long-term side effects of the COVID vaccines -- specifically, DDT is not a past example of a vaccine resembling any of the COVID vaccines
the lack of evidence pointing to widespread, significant, long-term side-effects so far, however, is evidence enough for us to lean in that direction
I do, however, support your right to avoid the vaccine, as well as your right to avoid any place or activity that requires those present to have it, so at least there's that
"many negative side effects of other vaccines" is a profoundly unscientific statement, particularly when you're trying to prove the likelihood of a completely different vaccine having side effects for other reasons
if I could just offer a piece of friendly advice, for anyone trying to convince the majority that the COVID-19 vaccines show a strong likelihood of negative side effects long-term:
try to show the actual frequency of each long-term side effect you mention, as a proportion of # of those vaccines administered, and explain the physical mechanism by which each of those side effects will manifest in recipients of the COVID-19 vaccines
if you're trying to convince the vast majority of Americans who aren't opposed to vaccine mandates, that they should change their mind, you should probably be able to show that significant side effects occur a significant % of the time in another vaccine,
then explain how that side effect modality would transfer to this vaccine (IE what they have in common which indicates the COVID vaccine will probably have the same long-term side effects)
oh, also, you never answered OP's question: how long do you think is enough?
The early history of the polio vaccine had many situations like this.
In 1960, the rhesus monkey kidney cells used to prepare the poliovirus vaccines were determined to be infected with the simian virus-40 (SV40),[36] which was also discovered in 1960 and is a naturally occurring virus that infects monkeys. In 1961, SV40 was found to cause tumors in rodents.[37] More recently, the virus was found in certain forms of cancer in humans, for instance brain and bone tumors, pleural and peritoneal mesothelioma, and some types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.[38][39] However, SV40 has not been determined to cause these cancers.[40]
SV40 was found to be present in stocks of the injected form of the IPV in use between 1955 and 1963.[36] It is not found in the OPV form.[36] Over 98 million Americans received one or more doses of polio vaccine between 1955 and 1963 when a proportion of vaccine was contaminated with SV40; an estimated 10–30 million Americans may have received a dose of vaccine contaminated with SV40.[36] Later analysis suggested that vaccines produced by the former Soviet bloc countries until 1980, and used in the USSR, China, Japan, and several African countries, may have been contaminated, meaning hundreds of millions more may have been exposed to SV40.[41]
I note that nowhere in the quoted text does it discuss negative effects. In fact, the very next sentences say:
"In 1998, the National Cancer Institute undertook a large study, using cancer case information from the institute's SEER database. The published findings from the study revealed no increased incidence of cancer in persons who may have received vaccine containing SV40."
And beyond that, a full discussion requires comparison of negative side effects of the vaccine vs side effects of the original virus, and the rate of such effects. We know, factually, that there are often some side effects from vaccines. We also know, factually, that often the vaccine side effects are either of less severity and/or less frequency than the effects of catching the original virus. In other words, statistically, most of the time you're better off tempting fate with the vaccine than with the virus.
I read the quote you just provided as well as the entire "side effects" section in your link. I don't see anything that supports your claim that side effects were discovered years after the vaccine had been given to people.
The closest thing was the lingering concern about SV40-contaminated doses (importantly, not the actual vaccine itself) causing increased rates of cancer, although it looks like all major attempts to determine if that was true have so far come back with a null result.
Yes, it’s called looking at past evidence. No past vaccines have presented unknown side effects more than 8-10 weeks out. Viruses regularly do damage we don’t see or understand until many years later.
Of course we are. The long haul effects of COVID are partially known and are super bad. The expected long haul effects of the vaccine are pretty well known (J&J, AZ) or use well understood pathways (Pfizer, Moderna).
I had longcovid for 14 months and was active in the community. Something I saw regularly was people claiming the vaccines CAUSED their longcovid. They made their own subreddit for it:
Like I said, your ancestors had 99% more courage and confidence in the face of danger you can’t even begin to imagine. But, we are a terrified people and so we continue to build a safety space cocoon around ourselves.
Pretty sure my great^9 grandmother who never saw her parents again after leaving an impoverished village in Alsace for Louisiana, married some widower she’d never met, died of one of the epidemics that swept through coastal Louisiana on the regular in the 18th century, or her daughter (my great^8 grandmother) who was married a few months later at age 14 to an older man, pumped out at least 7 children, then died of another epidemic at 24 wouldn’t have minded my life of relative wealth, ease and personal freedom (college! Moving abroad but flying home each year! Marrying around 30! Having a kid only after I really, really wanted to! Vaccination against a new epidemic a mere 18 months after it started!)
The idea that people made their lives intentionally harder in the past is absolutely ludicrous. Almost every person in history would swap places with me right now in a heartbeat.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a good place to start.
Spengler in his works has a cyclical view of civilizations, which you might also enjoy.
Many “cyclical” ideologies also have similar ideas going back millennia. Hinduism for example sees the world as occurring in cycles. According to some, we are in a materialistic age, which is a consequence of losing spiritual values and a focus on comfort and pleasure.
No, I’m saying that when faced with the choice between comfort and difficulty, many people in the past chose difficulty. To insist that they would trade their religious beliefs, for example, for internet and Uber eats is rather myopic.
The ancestors would have taken the vaccine in a heartbeat (as they did with polio). The ancestors worked really hard and faced all that danger to make the world a better, safer place so they didn't have to watch loved ones die. People that don't take the vaccine are spitting in their faces.
> Inevitable outcome in a society that is terrified of everything.
I agree. Lots of folks afraid to take a shot that's been well-studied and given to millions and is, in all probability, quite safe. ;)
I chalk it up to the youth, who are selfish and only able to think about themselves and their Friendster ranks and how many YouTubes they have on the FaceSpace.
I guess I'm just willing to live dangerously. Lots of folks are just too coddled and unwilling to take a risk, even for the greater good.
Back in the good old days, we were really willing to take risks--to cross oceans, even, as the op wrote--to do new things that could benefit our fellow human beings. Now it's all about "Oh no, this is a novel therapy that might infinitesimally increase my personal risk".
>Lots of folks are just too coddled and unwilling to take a risk, even for the greater good.
I'm not sure how you arrived here from my comment. If I was willing to dox myself you'd see that I have probably taken more risks for 'the greater good'™ than you or even most folks on this site. But those days are over, and this whole situation is setting off all of my finely tuned alarm bells.
You should spend less time stereotyping and more time attempting to understand others.
Letting others do as they please is also a risk 'for the greater good', by the way.
> I'm not sure how you arrived here from my comment. If I was willing to dox myself you'd see that I have probably taken more risks for 'the greater good'™ than you or even most folks on this site. But those days are over, and this whole situation is setting off all of my finely tuned alarm bells.
Thank you for your service.
In comparison, it seems to me the least I can do is get vaccinated, which is a tiny risk compared to the great deeds you have done.
It is really scary how trustful people are of pharmaceutical corporations. We don’t even need to go back to DDT; the opioid epidemic was quite recent.
What happened to the skeptics?
No, it isn’t comparable, because those diseases wiped out 3/4 of the population. That obviously isn’t the case with COVID, even if our terrified-of-everything populace thinks it is.
Have you considered that we took a lot of precautions that made it possible that as relatively few people died as did? Even with shutdowns, lockdowns, and extreme measures in healthcare, we lost about 0.2% of the population. If we had done nothing, we might have reached 1%. If a group was going door to door randomly killing 1 in every 100 people in your neighborhood, would you consider it reasonable to stop answering the door for a while until they left?
have you considered that if all we’d done was immediate quarantine the aged and infirm (with generously compensated volunteer caretakers), recommend indoor distancing, and perhaps recommend masks in homes, we’d likely be at a similar and possibly lower level, that all the “measures” were not about reducing spread but rather prolonging the time that the mediopolitical machine had to take advantage of the fear and uncertainty they continually manufacture?
The average lifespan for the period you are describing (say, 1492-ish since we're talking about sailing) was their mid-thirties (and probably lower for the people that actually got on those boats). So I think I like our strategy better. And it's not even about "but at least they truly lived!", their lives were miserable. It's a lot easier to "face the unknown" when the "known" is itself often religious persecution, famine, or worse. I might have gotten on those boats too if where I currently was kept switching between Protestantism and Catholicism depending on who rose to the crown.
Consider that perhaps the best way to honor those "fearless" risks is to not waste the world they made possible for us by unnecessarily cutting our own lives short. I certainly hope my descendants have even longer lives than I do! But perhaps that's just my selfish genes talking.
It wasn't much better if you reached adulthood. Seems like mid-forties up to the 1400s, and early fifties up to 1600s, for the nobility in England. So, you know, not the people getting on those boats probably.
I think the mortality rate for teens and adults was something like 3-4 times higher than today. People also lived through epidemics that would cull 5-10% of the population every 20-30 years.
Also my grandmother mentioned that when she was young girl just a 100 years ago old people were absolutely broken. Today a lot of people spend their sixties and seventies in very good health.
Also I remember reading about grave site on a bluff in California that was eroding away. Contained the graves of sailors that died when a ship sank in the 1880's. Before reburying them higher up on the bluff they looked over their bones. They weren't in very good health despite being in their 20-40s.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to be afraid of a virus that has killed 700,000 people in the United States and leaves ~30% with long term side effects and sometimes serious, permanent disability.
Yeah, so many people see boogeymen around every corner, living in fear of deep conspiracies like chemtrails and nanobots and others. It’s amazing how much they’ve let fear overtake their brains.
The ICUs are filling up and people who just need a kidney transplant are dying. That is with just a small fraction of the population actually getting infected. The hospitalizations are also resource intensive and require an ICU bed for 2 or 3 weeks. This isn't just a "bad flu virus". Once around ~10,000 people get infected in a week that's enough to knock over a metropolitan hospital system sending hundreds of people into the hospital.
Our new frontier is trying not to overload our medical system to capacity by trusting science and being proactive and not selfish. We’re failing miserably.
The terrified of everything portion of you comment still applies if we change "fairly bad flu virus with a 99% survival rate" to "extremely safe vaccine with 0.007 risk of adverse effects".
Prior to mandating anything, the US government should step up and ensure that every household has a free weekly delivery of rapid at-home tests. There is no reason for us to be individually flying blind whenever we get a sniffle or headache or other minor symptom.
Additionally, there is evidence that a prior covid infection grants stronger immunity than at least the J&J vaccine, and 40%+ percent of the US population has had COVID. Unless an exemption is made for that 40%, this is unscientific.
Just had a conversation about the J&J vaccine with someone who works at that company in another area and their throwaway comment was, "well, it's not really for our market because the single dose was aimed at non-western countries with weaker governments where the governments couldn't really get after people to do multiple doses."
I agree, easy, free access to rapid tests would be fantastic. They're pretty prone to false results, though, and are no substitute for vaccination.
As for giving exemptions for prior infection, there's no real reason to. Prior infection gives decent immunity, but a vaccination on top of it gives great immunity. It's a small net positive, but anything helps.
Aren't both of these titles editorialised and against guidelines?
The original title of the page is: "Path out of the Pandemic, President Biden's COVID-19 Action Plan", shouldn't that, or a derivative have been used instead?
The subtleties of the title domain are a hell of a rabbit hole, but in the case of the current page, I'd argue that the original title would be misleading at the top of an HN thread. Corporate press releases are often that way- see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We're getting closer to two Americas. Policies like these will only exacerbate the transition. Expect to mass over non-compliance from conservative states and businesses
There's always been two Americas, but there's been a balkanization in recent years. Until a handful of years ago, I had never heard of a president that didn't at least pay lip service to the idea of unity, of serving all Americans and not just those that voted for him. Sure, division has long been a tactics to get elected, but I don't think I've seen it praised as an actual goal before by a leading political figure from a major party.
The Southern strategy was explicitly about creating such a stubbornly supportive majority in the electoral college that they could ignore the rest of the country.
WWII being an outlier of course. I'd like to have the numbers for the 19th C.
There was a time when a state/county/municipality could largely ignore central government diktat. With centralization there'll be a tendency for a single dominant group to get into everyone's business more and more. This can happen via statute, spending, or even lack of law enforcement in desired behaviors.
..and of course it tends to split urban vs. rural, Anglosphere vs. everyone else. The wish or need for central control varies quite a lot between the groups.
I agree, a lot of problems seem to stem from over-reliance on federal authority to solve problems. It can get a bit reductionist but people are essentially mad they are not able to live in the way they want.
Inside vs outside of the city and wealthy inner and middle suburbs is a far more massive cultural divide than red state vs blue state, nominal political party membership, rich vs poor or anything else.
From my own personal, subjective experiences, I've found this to be the big one. I've lived in 8 states now, in all regions except the Northeast, from big cities to smaller towns (SF to towns of ~30,000) and the rural vs. urban divide seems to be the most pronounced to me.
Yes, it's a pretty small town. My undergrad was approximately that size.
Of course, smaller exist! There are functioning towns in East Texas with less than 500 people in them! My favorite is Caledonia; cherished memories are that upon crossing the border my father would pull his best BB King impression and belt out the eponymous tune.
Hah, yeah I suppose it's relative. I guess a really small town I would think of having less than maybe 1,000 people, but 30,000 is about the smallest sized town I'd ever want to live in personally.
Back in 1860s, cotton and other plantation heavy industries where very lucrative, the southern states were very wealthy enough to be able to field a big army for years, while they lacked strong industry to support an extended campaign.
Also manifest destiny and especially Monroe doctorine all pre dated the civil war, there was certainly strong idealogoical belief on who the continent was for.
The south's money/economy was dependent upon slavery, that is true. But every single southern state listed the right to own slaves as one of their reasons for secession.
Your link lists five states - there were eleven in the Confederacy. While I believe most did list slavery as cause of action either directly or obliquely, not all did.
Arkansas was one of the last states to seceded the union. The very second sentence in the ordinance linked is "In addition to the well-founded causes of complaint set
forth by this convention in resolutions adopted". You are more than welcome to look up those "causes and complaints" and let me know whether they are slavery related or not.
While I don’t have time to do that right now, I will make a point to do so. I’m curious now, and haven’t enumerated all of the resolutions before.
I have read a ton of contemporary writings by the various politicians who signed Arkansas’s OoS, and with a couple of exceptions the vast majority claimed at the time to have supported secession in response to the military actions of the Union. There were relatively few slaveholders in the state at the time, and they were largely concentrated in the Delta, along the border with Mississippi.
If you mean the civil war, that wasn't to "keep them together": it was one side forcing the other to get back in line and give up its slaves. It was not a conflict where two somewhat equal partners work out their difficulties, it was a war where the central government fought down an insurrection and during witch the south got utterly devastated and was under occupation for 10 years.
You could also argue that the civil war was about restoring bodily autonomy to a group of people who had been enslaved and forced against their will by corporations and governments.
I’m sure that’s the view from white southerners. The view from black southerners would be a little different.
It’s like the folks who are all nostalgic about the 50s. Sure, they were great if you were a straight cis white man. Not so much if you were gay or trans or black.
If only the slaves had any appreciation to the important component they were in their slave master's culture, they'd probably complain a lot less and try harder to accommodate their agrarian needs.
there's no such thing as a conservative state, look at county level election maps. It's all rural vs Urban, even in New York and California. Suburbs are for the most part purple as well
people who talk about succession and splitting off have no idea what they are talking about, it wouldn't be clean at all
70:30 or more than 2x the GDP generated in blue counties should put the right on notice. Maybe there are wealthy folks in the blue counties that put their cash toward the GOP but it will not sustain them.
I’m not sure how much of that economy would matter in a war time scenario. Most of the industrial factories are outside cities. More sprawling cities like Houston would be a lot more independent than an island like Manhattan, which has only a handful of bridges as land entrances and hardly any heavy industry of its own.
The fact that this has been divided along sociopolitical lines should make it obvious that neither side is genuinely looking at the issue with clear eyes. It’s entirely tribal, as the comments in this thread illustrate.
I don't think it's social lines, socioeconomic lines. Following Karen Armstrong's political philosophy, all politics not local are inherently religious/ideals driven.
Well at least 4chan and hackernews are getting closer together (still miles apart but never thought i'd see the day). I'm not sure what to make if it all.
Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread? Preventing spread to other people is the only plausible reason to force everyone to take it. I am comfortable catching the disease and even comfortable dying from it (the numbers are vastly on my side). I do far riskier things on a regular basis (extreme sports) and I do not understand the infantilization of society. Join the feedlot if you want but I will not, I have been doing just fine as my own master, I need not the yoke of protection, certainly not from the feds.
No, it doesn't absolutely prevent spread, but that's a ridiculous standard (often used to assure a certain rhetorical outcome rather than to shed light on the subject).
I can't believe we're still arguing this on this forum of all places.
The very worst estimates of the vaccines efficacy rate against the Delta variant sit at 30-50% for various measures. People on this forum are ecstatic about improving systems by 2-3% on the regular, and here is a free and easy measure that measurably reduces the mortality rate of yourself and those around you and we are _still_ arguing about it.
I used to think much more highly of the quality of discussion on here.
> Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread? (...) I am comfortable catching the disease and even comfortable dying from it
Became it's not about you, it's about everyone around you as a group. Those who are "comfortable catching the disease" are taking up a non-insignificant portion of available hospital beds, for instance, keeping health workers at their limit and preventing other people from getting treatment for diseases for which there is no accessible, free vaccine to take.
Organizations are expected to do what's best for the majority of those they represent. Sure, some people may not want to wear a helmet all day and would be willing to take the risk. But if one of those people gets impaled and dies it ends up putting a burden in everyone around them, from those picking up the skull pieces and the person's family to the investors.
This reasoning also would justify mandatory colonoscopies, or requiring a 3 mile daily run, for 100 million people. Yes, that might reduce the load on the health care system long term (except the colonoscopy & PT departments ...), but historically in the U.S. that would have been viewed as a galactic overreach.
The crucial difference between cardiovascular diseases and severe COVID is that COVID comes in waves. In a very short period of time a large number of people can end up with the virus, thus having a significant chance to develop serious pneumonia. All at the same time, in a very short time span. While lots of people suffer from cardiovascular diseases and cancer every year, they are distributed over the year. You don't usually see thousands of people having strokes in a given area in the span of a week or two, for instance.
It's this sudden surge of people needing ventilators and ICU beds that overwhelms the healthcare system of an area, causing repercussions on those that are sick for other reasons or get injured in accidents. For instance, in Italy cancer screenings on vulnerable subjects have been postponed for months, if not a year, due to the ongoing pandemic. Who knows how many people have now a higher risk of cancer due to hospitals and clinics being overwhelmed by COVID patients.
COVID vaccines are not sterilizing, but it's getting quite clear that they somewhat reduce the circulation of the virus too by reducing the viral load of symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers. At least they greatly greatly reduce the strain on doctors and avoid disruption of society at large, which is by itself a solid choice for mandating them.
The only possible choices here are to a. neglect the virus, with potentially serious social repercussions and loss of human lives, or b. resort to containment measures, which hamper the economy and are deeply unfair towards vaccinated people which objectively risk much less from the virus, or c. mandate vaccination, which is the only choice that avoids lockdowns and (most) deaths.
Also, vaccine mandates aren't anything new. That's how rubella, diphtheria, polio, smallpox, mumps, .. have become a thing of the past. They've been put in place on for decades, and no-vax movements have always been small and irrelevant before before social media came with droves of dubious content.
The load on the system is apparently hugely different. The system has managed to accommodate people with colon cancer and heart disease, so mandating those things hasn't been as pressing from that perspective. Meanwhile, covid has filled up hospitals and ICUs
> are taking up a non-insignificant portion of available hospital beds
Healthy, non obese young people do not get hospitalized by this disease at any significant rate at all, most aren't even aware they got it. If you're a healthy young person you have rationality on your side to object to a vaccine. Especially one that is trying to hit a moving target as covid is probably now another mutating flu that will be around indefinitely. Especially because you still pass on the disease vaccinated or not.
And yet they can have enough of a viral load to pass it along to any non-healthy people they come in contact with. Which is why this NOT a personal health issue, it's a public health issue.
As I have explained to several of my children's young friends "you are correct, COVID will probably not make you sick, but how will you feel when you find out you killed your grandmother by giving it to her".
As others have mentioned here you pass it along vaccinated or not.
You can also have the vulnerable population take precautions, not the young population. To be frank what kind of sick society pushes the young population to take on risk (novel vaccine incomplete clinical trials, rare heart inflammation issues documented, spike protein membrane break off issue, etc) to protect the elderly population? This is the first time societies have ever called for risking the youth for the elderly and it's not morally right.
Instead of emotionally reducing it to "don't kill grandma" you could join a reasonable discourse on the topic and look at other factors like...
The at-risk can get vaccinated - healthy youth don't get hospitalized - there are antibody and drug therapeutics available - youth don't need to risk novel vaccine adverse affects (they are documented - they are more prevalent in young than old) - you still spread it equally significantly vaccinated or not - the vaccine does not give robust coverage against new strains - natural immunity gives far more robust coverage against new strains than the vaccine (almost suggesting exposure for the low-risk is a better societal outcome).
Hand waving "all youth must get vaccinated" is not a rational course of action.
Resisting this surge of authoritarianism is going to take more than just the unvaccinated standing up for each other. We need the vaccinated to say no and to refuse to comply with any orders for certificates or to pay fines.
You know, “resist” – wasn’t that the recent call-to-arms that got the orange fascist out of office?
Fwiw I know an overweight alcoholic 65 yo woman, cancer survivor, diabetic and has cardiac problems (she had to be in a wheelchair for a couple years). Oh and she's a chain smoker too.
She's the perfect COVID victim. She got it twice, even though it was quite bad never had to be hospitalized and her health is now not worse than before.
>Became it's not about you, it's about everyone around you as a group. Those who are "comfortable catching the disease" are taking... Bla bla...
Then why are you smoking, or why are you eating fast food, why are you not exercising? These actions also put a burden on the health system. Why do covid and not tobacco? You know the answer already. This is not about anyone s health
Tobacco isn't communicable like a virus, doesn't produce symptoms in 2 weeks, hasn't ground the world to a halt and actually serves a purpose as a heretofore deeply ingrained cultural activity. The rest of the comparisons arent any better.
Dont take this as me agreeing with the previous comment but I just want to point out that smoking, fast food, etc are all things that kill you "slowly", therefore has less of a risk of overrunning the healthcare system.
It would have been smarter IMO (though probably not politically possible) to mandate the vaccine for specific age groups. If what they are trying to do avoid hospitalization, they should focus on the groups that are most susceptible. If you're under 40 for example you won't be required to take it but if you're older you would because the risk of a 40 something getting hospitalized is way higher than a 20 something.
They do put a burden on the healthcare system, but last I checked ICUs are not presently being filled up across the country with lung cancer and heart disease patients.
Right now? In the USA? "Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Florida and Arkansas have less than 10% left of their ICU bed capacity, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. (...) Idaho had just four ICU beds available out of the 400 beds total in the state, Gov. Brad Little said."
Per my comment, there are exactly 4 free ICU beds in all of Idaho. If there are more than 4 hospitals in Idaho (Wikipedia lists ~30), all hospitals after the 5th are therefore full.
So these are due to staff shortages. I don't live there now but I use to live in that region and this occurred from time to time...because the hospitals are small and the staff are few...it was normal procedure to fly patients out of state for care. These headlines are misleading because it does not put the issue into context. This is why the National Guard is being considered...because of staff. One reason why there are fewer staff these days is because people are tired of this crap and also may get paid more to sit at home.
Citizen, our records indicate you ate more than your mandate controlled 100g of chocolate and only ran 2.95mi of your mandatory 3mi on our freely available sidewalks.
Your employment has been terminated. You many apply for unemployment benefits after our records show compliance.
I remember having a beer at night with an Apple employee who halfway through started walking around the table. Apparently his smart watch was telling him his group of 5 people were under their target miles for the day and he had to walk a mile right now to have his daily quote done. He didn’t want to disappoint his fellow staff. Including his boss I think.
Not quite what you posted but it certainty is similar.
What you're probably referring to is the "June Fitness Challenge", which is completely optional and just for fun (I don't do it, neither does my boss or half my team). You get a t-shirt or something if your team has a certain number of "active days" per month. It's not as draconian as it sounds.
Yeah I’m sure it seemed worse than it was, it was just funny it happening during a night out, and how it seemed to work on a group obedience emotion in my friend
Similar is my wife getting on a train with 7,000 steps still to go to maintain her x00 day streak of 10k steps/day. She proceeded to march on the spot for some time to keep her streak active. Our room was about 2-3m across.
I read an interesting article a while back, which asked... why were so many of the doctors in Nazi Germany willing to engage in sterilizing mentally deficient people, and other atrocities?[1]
The answer was because, healthcare was viewed as a collective good. Doctors did not treat a patient for their own benefit, they treated a patient for society's benefit.
" In less mathematical terms, the longer the discussion, the more likely a Nazi comparison becomes, and with long enough discussions, it is a certainty."
Seems like a silly "law". In mathematical terms, the longer the discussion, the more likely literally any comparison becomes. With a long enough discussion, every possible comparison being mentioned is a certainty.
Someone gets called a nazi for being in support of vaccine mandates and your response is "well in a infinitely long conversation everyone will get called a nazi" this is the most hackernews comment I have ever read
I think “prevent” is too imprecise a term here. The vaccines don’t eliminate the risk of spreading the virus to others. They do materially reduce the risk of spreading the virus to others.
They increase the risk of asymptomatic transmission, because vaccines suppress the symptoms of infection, which would otherwise signal the infected person to quarantine. The CDC says this can be addressed by regular testing of the vaccinated, https://archive.is/PW9SP
> The agency now advises that vaccinated people be tested for the virus if they come into contact with someone with Covid-19, even if they have no symptoms... “Our updated guidance recommends vaccinated people get tested upon exposure regardless of symptoms,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the agency’s director, said in an email to The New York Times. “Testing is widely available.”
That wasn't the claim. The claim was that an unvaccinated person can self-isolate when they observe symptoms.
As the CDC said above, absence of symptoms is not a sufficient indicator for a vaccinated person. If a vaccinated person is tested regularly, they can self-isolate upon a positive test result, since they can't rely on symptoms as a signal.
> absence of symptoms is not a sufficient indicator for a vaccinated person
Absence of symptoms is not a sufficient indicator for the unvaxed either, so your argument falls apart.
Why isn't 90% reduction in ICU occupation and 70% reduction in chance of infection a sufficient argument for the public benefits? Just because it is not perfect, you'd rather let the country's hospitals overload and shut down?
The problem with COVID-19 all along has been that it is transmissible before being symptomatic. That is why it spread like wildfire when SARS and MERS did not. Listened to a good interview on NPR some months ago with a leading coronavirus expert who went over this in detail, but unfortunately can't remember her name or find the interview right now.
In any case, vaccines don't really change the equation here. Testing for temperature and symptoms with COVID have proven to be ineffective because asymptomatic transmission in the early stages is a thing with COVID-19 even without vaccination.
Some of those who have chosen not to get vaccinated are those already recovered from Covid, who now have natural immunity. This includes many essential workers and first responders, who worked throughout 2020 without the protection of a vaccine.
That leaves the subset of non-immune people who are unvaccinated. If this hypothetical person is reckless (as your comment suggests), should they not have already been infected in the past 18 months? If they were not infected in 18 months, that suggests at least some ability to isolate and self-monitor.
Natural immunity is not as strong as the immunity provided by the vaccines and the immunity provided by both together is much stronger. Having already had COVID is no reason not to get vaccinated.
I don't think anyone should be forced to take any medicine against their will as long as they are not in a coma or incapacitated and unable to reason.
I personally had the vaccine because I have very high blood pressure, have pretty high blood sugar (even though I'm fit/in shape) and am almost 40. It was MY CHOICE in the risk vs reward game of numbers it I did it only for myself with a good life insurance already in place that covers death/incapacity from medication too(covers COVID vaccines too).
What if I would of ended up like that BBC presenter? Dead. For me it's down to my family and that is it.
This will be a bit exagerated but (hopefully) shold get the point across: At the end of the day anyone else is disposable as long as my family is safe from harm.
As long as the vaccine is not 100% safe nobody should be allowed to force anyone else to take it.
Edit: One thing that puzzles me though
- Why is nobody talking about those that are immune or already have the antibodies and don't need a vaccine? Why force them to have it if those vaccinated are safe?
> Edit: One thing that puzzles me though - Why is nobody talking about those that are immune or already have the antibodies and don't need a vaccine? Why force them to have it if those vaccinated are safe?
That said, the German "geimpft, getestet, oder genesen" strategy ("vaccinated, tested, or recovered") is explicitly what you suggest.
The tradeoff here, to me, is that:
- If we do not mandate vaccination, people can preserve their individual autonomy and will, nonetheless, probably get infected sooner or later and thus have some immunity. (According to some research, greater than that of vaccinated people against the same strain, but perhaps reduced against other strains.)
- However, that relies upon maintaining sufficient hospital capacity for the additional cases with severe symptoms. So as long as hospital capacity remains an issue, mandatory vaccinations make sense.
From the heart: respect to Germany for that policy.
I'm assuming you're in Germany/know someone in Germany when asking this and you might of heard something about it:
-Is it true that Hungarians are using some sort of medication as treatment? I heard it from a guy at work(hungarian) and was stumped.
A lot - that’s why I strongly oppose government vaccine mandates except in contexts where the magnitude of that pro-social good is far above the baseline - e.g., for healthcare workers.
Thankfully, the “or test” part distinguishes this from a vaccine mandate. We should have been testing most of the population since last March, and if anything we should have stronger testing requirements than this guidance dictates.
Such efforts would likely grind to a halt after the first several waves of vaccination crew member killings. There are a lot of unhinged people out there and forced vaccination crosses a red line.
If this were the case, shouldn't Israel have fewer cases now? No other country has more infections per million than Israel, with a vaccination rate much higher than the US.
Israel's overall vaccination rate is actually not that high. They were first out the gate, but tapered. They have also found the recent spike in cases to be focused in areas with low vaccination rates [1].
With the delta variant every unvaccinated person will likely end up becoming infected at some point. These unvaccinated pockets are where the large spikes are coming from, especially for severe disease.
Again, they recently had (or still have) the highest case per million rate in the world! Compare this to Palestine, with a vaccination rate of about 10% and roughly 1/40 of the cases per million. You could argue that Palestine is one big pocket of unvaccinated people. Why are the cases so much lower? And how would the situation in Israel be without vaccines? Worse than now or the same as in Palestine?
Different countries, different events, different cultures, etc.
There is also the problem of having a sense of security when there is a large vaccinated population which causes the vaccinated population to resume a regular life. Those who are not vaccinated are now exposed to more people in general.
Example, my wife and I prior to being fully vaccinated interacted with less than 10 people in the 1.5 years. We had everything delivered and had someone do our Costco shopping and drop it off at our doorstep. With us both fully vaccinated we go to Costco for our groceries and indirectly come in contact with probably 50 people in a single visit.
Because the only thing that really matters is that the health system survives. It has never been about individuals. It’s not about you. Vaccines protect from hospitalization, reducing the massive stress forced upon hospitals and health professionals. When a hospital has to deal with a large influx of Covid patients they have to dedicate a lot of their resources (mostly humans), which eventually causes a complete bottleneck: all resources are dedicated to people dying from covid and other patients have to be rejected, lot of them dying.
It’s really not something you want in your country or state. See what happened to Italy, India, Brazil, or is currently happening in overseas French territories, it’s a horrible situation to be in.
Citation needed. This contradicts the most recent research and information available, and all one must do is a quick search to turn up dozens of published papers on this topic. The vaccine reduces the transmission of COVID, and that is an important public health goal.
> Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread?
Well, it does reduce spread, right?
That said,
> Join the feedlot if you want but I will not, I have been doing just fine as my own master, I need not the yoke of protection, certainly not from the feds.
One of the other motivations policymakers have in promoting vaccination is that in many places hospital capacity is dangerously reduced due to the influx of covid cases.
> Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread?
Why do you think it doesn't prevent spread? While breakthrough infections make all the news, the vaccine does lessen the chance of catching COVID if exposed. Less people catching COVID, less spread.
> Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread?
"Why must I go the speed limit if it doesn't prevent an accident? Why wear a seat belt if it doesn't prevent injury? Why have airbags if they don't prevent death?"
There are no guarantees in life (death and taxes, notwithstanding). The bottom line is that vaccines significantly reduce spread.
> I am comfortable catching the disease and even comfortable dying from it (the numbers are vastly on my side)
The argument being that you have a slim chance of having a severe reaction to COVID?
You have an even slimmer chance of a severe reaction to a vaccine. Why not get vaccinated?
If I seriously injured myself (say, in some extreme sport) and needed intensive care in my town right now, I wouldn't get it
ICUs are full, people are dying from stupid preventable shit because they couldn't get care, and from acquaintances' anecdotes staff are burning out at a ridiculous pace
Would you like to have access to healthcare when you need it?
Preventing spread is not the only reason, it also reduces the severity of the illness if you get it, and in any case vaccines do also reduce spread insofar as a vaccinated carrier's viral load is likely to reach a lower maximum for a shorter period of time
That's what health insurance is for. If this was being driven by some sort of rationality, health insurers would just (be allowed to) increase premiums for people who don't take the vaccine. That would force people to properly calculate the true staffing needs imposed by them and pass the costs on to the right people.
This type of mandate does the opposite. Probably because, if you look at the actual risks and data from other countries, the difference in sickliness between the vaccinated and unvaccinated is sufficiently small in absolute terms, and the level of staffing at hospitals assuming healthcare workers are not forced out of their jobs sufficiently good, that the relative cost increase wouldn't work as a form of coercion. And it's now all about the coercion, not about health.
Most likely the vaccine does prevent/reduce spread. Given the amount of skepticism, it's better to just say the truth that the vaccine 'may or may not' prevent the spread rather than pick a side and be proven wrong. It also advantages that people don't think they can avoid COVID as long as everyone else gets the vaccine.
You have the option of getting tested weekly as long as your employer allows for that option. Getting a vaccine is probably less invasive and less of an annoyance then many things employers already require.
Due to it's high transmissibility, pretty much everyone will be exposed to it. When it happens, you'll be in much better shape if you're vaccinated because dying from it is not the only complication.
To put it plainly, problem with COVID-19 is that it makes your own immune system damage your body as it scrambles defenses, confused. With vaccine, much less so.
If you're counting on acquiring immunity naturally consider this:
1. You got sick and now you have antibodies but your internal organs, like lungs are scarred. You'd have likely avoided some if not all of that damage if you were vaccinated.
2. Your immune system might be targeting parts of the virus that are less universal across virus' mutations so it gives you less or little immunity against mutants. mRNA vaccine is specifically targeting the spike protein which so far has been unchanged enough for vaccines to be more or less effective against mutations.
I'm curious about this. I understand "doesn't prevent all spread", but surely it prevents notable amounts of spread by reducing the amount of people walking around with high viral load, reduced hospitalization, herd immunity, and so on.
If you are in decent health, you will likely be OK. I got it this year, and it was rough for a week at home. I got letter from Dr. which states I have the antibodies and have recovered.
I think of it similarly to being required to wear a hard hat if you're in construction.
It's not just about whether you're willing to get hit on the head, it's about an employer's duty of care, and (if you just look at it cynically) the disruption to work caused by an incident that could have been prevented if someone took appropriate measures.
>"Blind opposition is just as silly as blindly following the flow"
I think opposition to being pressured regardless of the reasons is quite normal and healthy behavior because in most of the life situations people are being pressured into something that benefits somebody else.
> Because I make my own decisions and my willingness to do something is inversely proportional to how hard it is being pushed on me.
I don't know you but I find this hard to believe. Which side of the road do you drive on? Do you wear a seatbelt? How fast do you drive? Do you throw your trash in the bin or on the ground? Do you wear clothes outside or go out naked? Do you go around threatening to harm people around you or just keep to yourself?
Unless you are going to tell me otherwise, I would assume you don't actually behave according to how hard you've been pushed to follow those rules but instead behave in ways that provide you the most benefit.
Come on, man, of course I don't hold "must always oppose" as a steadfast rule for everything. As you point out, that would be ludicrous. It's more that if I don't see the merit of doing something, I shouldn't do it anyway just because of peer pressure.
Driving on the designated side of the road is something I see merit in, so I do it. It avoids vehicles hitting each other with a massive success rate (unlike the vaccine, or any of the other totalitarian responses to the mind virus COVID-19).
Likewise, I don't litter because it's a destructive habit for the planet and property. It's rude. It makes all of our lives worse. Those reasons are not rooted in "people push not littering", I avoid littering because I find it distasteful and wrong by my own measures.
"Avoiding risky sex costs nothing, has insignificant statistical risk, and they are refusing it. That medical treatment could go to someone responsible. Choose not to have safe sex, choose to die at home."
No one gets an STD at the grocery store or their workplace from close proximity to the infected. Very few people die from STDs (comparatively speaking to COVID) and they are not overloading hospitals.
Well, you brought up hospital space availability as the problem, not culpability for spreading it. If we're back to talking about folks spreading it, look at the fact that the vaccine doesn't prevent spread so why are the control freaks in society trying to force this on the rest of us? Sorry, the rest of us are not going along with it just because you think it's a good idea.
You are free to make your own choices within the bounds government policy. If that means those who choose not to vaccinate lose their jobs and are ineligible for unemployment insurance, I think that’s reasonable during a public health crisis. Even if vaccination did not reduce transmission rate, it increases survival rate in the event of infection, reducing healthcare system load. If you make a choice to unnecessarily burden a strained system, do not be surprised when that system sheds load in ways you did not expect (crisis standards of care, ie rationing [1] [2] [3]).
I am exhausted that people who share your opinion are dragging the pandemic out for whatever illogical reasoning justifies the beliefs and behavior. Your rights end where someone else’s begin, but apparently these people don’t believe their rights end anywhere, regardless of the harm they cause.
> It's ironic that the same camp currently blaming persons with acquired (Gold standard) immunity from prior infection of Covid ... for overwhelming medical systems, when by ignoring the actual immunity status of a person, they are undermining the entire medical system? The crisis they are creating goes against every basic principle of Immunology.
> Essential frontline medical workers last year are highly likely to have already been exposed to Covid at one point, so why does no one simply ask for their immune status, instead of “ Vaccine - or no job”? The vaccine does not stop transmission of the virus, as we know. Why are we instead firing all the workers who may not even have any need for the Jab at all, and aren’t willing to jeopardize their own health by taking it?
I’d argue you don’t want healthcare workers who don’t believe in vaccination practicing healthcare (90-95% of doctors are vaccinated, for comparison, versus closer to 40-50% for nurses). This is filtering out workers who should be filtered out of the healthcare labor pool, workers who would be in close proximity to patients.
They’ve received other vaccinations to work [1]. They’ve been educated how vaccines work. There is no excuse for being unvaccinated as a healthcare professional.
Many healthcare workers know the difference between gold-standard natural immunity, a sterilizing vaccine and non-sterilizing vaccine. It's a false dichotomy to reduce the world to vaccinated/unvaccinated, when vaccination neither stops transmission nor infection.
The most-protected group of people, who pose the least risk to other humans or healthcare systems, are the Covid-recovered, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.
Do you have a source that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced? Last time I checked studies showed that at least for the mRNA vaccines two shots was superior to natural immunity, as was natural immunity + mRNA booster shot.
This is not surprising and in line with many other infectious diseases, see e.g. [1].
I only read the term "gold standard immunity" in a US context and it's almost always politically charged.
> Do you have a source that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced? Last time I checked studies showed that at least for the mRNA vaccines two shots was superior to natural immunity, as was natural immunity + mRNA booster shot.
SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021. The increased risk was significant (P<0.001) for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold (95% CI, 4.85 to 7.33) increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold (95% CI, 5.51 to 9.21) increased risk for symptomatic disease. SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.
To be clear, the study here is talking about immunity 6 months after a final dose. It appears that at least for the Pfizer vaccine, immunity against infection and even symptomatic disease decays fairly rapidly after a couple months. At that time it still appears effective at preventing severe disease and hospitalization, though we might also expect that to decay over the next few months (too early to know).
Natural immunity decays too, but not nearly as rapidly per this study.
You would have to pay for not only your healthcare, but any civil damages to someone who was harmed or had a loss of life because you were occupying a bed they needed for a non COVID related malady [1].
Exercise should be prescribed, but not mandated. The overweight and morbidly obese are not overloading medical systems, so it is less of a pressing concern.
If you’re not scared of dying of the virus, why not just get the vaccine? Surely you’re less scared of a vaccine than dying since the numbers are vastly on your side?
Because I am a free man and I make my own decisions. I don't benefit from the vaccine enough to want it of my own volition therefore I don't care how much pressure is placed on me, it comes down to my own math. The virus and vaccine are not a factor.
if they try to pull this here, I know for a fact my 65-year-old coworker—who has been working from home ever since we were mandated to wear a mask only in the building lobby (this ended July 1st)—won't put up with it, and I won't either, so that's 2/3 of the school district programmers they'd have to fire. thankfully our governor has already stated she's going to take any such actions to court.
you wish! the whole point of hiring me was to have somebody younger learn the ropes of how our complex, outdated, and undocumented systems work. if the senior programmer gets fired, especially right as the school year is just starting, there's no way the other programmer can handle 100% of department responsibilities. and that's assuming she's willing to follow such a mandate anyway! she's out of office for a week so I haven't been able to ask her.
absolutely. I was hired this year to learn how the hell all the complicated stuff the 55- and 65-year-old programmers do every day works, and I've only learned a fraction of it so far.
Right, but there was a source of knowledge (the two older employees) to obtain information from. If one of those older employees is irreplaceable, and they leave, it's going to seriously impact production systems.
These guys work at a school district. They're not working somewhere that it's going to make a huge difference to have some impact on production systems.
Honestly, I'd put my money on it being in the organizations best interests long term if the two older employees did leave them in a rut. A lot of times it's good to purge these types of places of the cruft left behind by legacy.
never caught covid when I took care of my mom when she had it last year and I worked as a cashier at Walmart during last year's Sturgis Rally and tourism season, and I somehow survived this year's Rally and tourism season as well... I'm going to be just fine, but I appreciate the "concern" nonetheless.
Whether or not you agree if there is legal authority for mandates for this vaccine or this pandemic, where does it end? The trajectory we're on is for all people to be monitored by the State for compliance with the vaccine programs.
Israel is already saying 4 shots (and more) will required [0] to participate in that society. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are quasi-police states [1] and will probably mandate vaccination+boosters soon.
The writing on the wall is that the 'booster' is being repackaged as a 'series' of vaccines. The health authorities and pharma are going to modify and approve vaccines for endless mutations. Will these be independently tested? I don't expect so, despite using the novel mRNA platform. The end game is to treat Covid vaccines like annual (or semi-annual) flu vaccines. Moderna is already packaging both together [2]. Except flu vaccine is not mandated (yet). There is a LOT of money to be made in mandatory vaccine mandates. Think how easy it would be to grow rich if everyone had to use your products, you had no competition, and the government indemnified you against any responsibility for harm. It's hard to see how this stops. The pandemic is a gift for technocratic-authoritarians everywhere.
Here's a prediction. In a few years, if the people don't stand up against this, the pandemic will not be 'over' politically. Nominally 'free' Western governments will have become de facto CCP-style management firms. We will be required to comply with ongoing health directives from the central authorities for vaccination to prevent further restrictions. Our compliance will be monitored via digital passes (or onerous paper-work for the poor). Our employment and freedom of movement will depend on our compliance. Those who disagree and are foolish enough to say something will find themselves censored (for health disinformation) and fined (or imprisoned [3]). Traveling to see grandma without having gotten the latest booster will risk quarantine.
So, if you're pro-mandates, I invite you to come back in a couple of years and ridicule me and this warning if it's wrong (if it hasn't been scrubbed from the internet). I hope you're right! I wonder what you'll say if you're wrong? Maybe post your predictions for posterity.
I predict that by December of 2021 enough people will have gotten the vaccine or have had COVID that the hospitalization numbers will drop precipitously and then we can all go back to a normal life.
The OSHA requirement will hang around, but people won't be freaking out about it because it will be normal. Within two years there will be a childhood COVID vaccine that is safe and effective and it will be required for school attendance like all the other shots.
All the people freaking out about the vaccine/mask requirements will have matured out of it or will find something else to be outraged about.
If I'm wrong, I will come back and say I was wrong. :-) I may lose an internet point or two.
The big problem is they still want people who've recovered from COVID to get vaccinated. This is a very big deal and I wouldn't be surprised if the whole OSHA plan goes to the Supreme Court.
I've recovered from COVID and stand against vaccine mandates.
I agree with this part - if you can show you have antibodies, I don't care where you got them from (well, I would have preferred they were gotten from a vaccine, but that's besides the point now!).
My only stipulation is that if you say you had it, you need to have an antibody test to prove it, and if the test is negative, you need a vaccine.
Your link doesn't address better protection against variants specifically, just better protection against reinfection in general. The linked study specifically states that it does not include delta.
It does not say that there is non-zero benefit vs variants. This data does not exist, it could be the case that natural immunity is as good, better, or worse vs variants, or perhaps is different depending on variant.
it doesn't have to have non-zero benefit vs. variants, it just has to have non-zero benefit overall to outweigh the negligible cost in the net cost/benefit calculus
Keep in mind this discussion thread is about people who have already contracted Covid and recovered.
The benefits:
Unknown increase in immunity against alpha strain
Unknown increase in immunity against variant strains
...
The Costs:
Chance of currently known adverse effects
Chance of unknown adverse effects specific to vaccination of people with prior immunity.
Some recent data [1] suggests that those with prior covid infection 13X lower chances or reinfection with delta than those with 2 vaccine doses. If this is accurate, it begs the question of how much benefit is gained by vaccination on top of existing immunity in comparison to to the rare but known side effects.
Im sorry, but that is missing the point.Any benefit doesn't equal cost/benefit.
For some with naturally acquired immunity, Both costs and benefits are amazingly small!
If you are a healthy 18 year old (infection fatality 1/100,000)[1] w/o vaccine, plus have previously acquired immunity 13X better[2] than a vaccine 90+% effective, you are talking about about 1/ 10s of millions of chance of death or severe complications IF you are infected. This easily puts it in competition with the more serious vaccine complications.
Looking at just two aspects for this hypothetical individual, you could weigh
1/10 million chance of death with no booster vaccine shot VS 17/100,000 chance of bells palsy[3] and a 60% chance of fever, chills and headache.
A analsys from the previously linked lancet study had a muck larger sample ~500k, but different collection methods and found smaller but nonzero results
>The age-standardised difference for the incidence compared with the background population was 41·5 (95% CI 11·7 to 71·4) for CoronaVac and 17·0 (−6·6 to 40·6) for BNT162b2, equivalent to an additional 4·8 cases per 100 000 people vaccinated for CoronaVac and 2·0 cases per 100 000 people vaccinated for BNT162b2.
Most if not all the vaccine trials saw small increases <1% in serious adverse events in the treatment arm
Getting a vaccine after recovering from covid would be along the lines of getting a booster shot. You'd develop some new antibodies, and strengthen your immune memory for the disease. It'll offer you better protection no matter what.
This exact argument could be used to push back against environmental standards, occupational safety standards, or drinking water standards. I don't want cholera outbreaks and I don't want the health system to collapse because of COVID.
Is this an argument in favor of monitoring individual compliance with environmental standards using some kind of digital pass? That seems like something you should state explicitly.
Occupational safety regulation is typically targeted towards employers, not employees. This mandate actually flies in the face of that standard and the OSHA charter.
If you want an interesting read, check out the battle over seatbelt interlock devices. Optional seatbelts (with perhaps fines for non-use depending on the jurisdiction) was the compromise between none at all and cars not functioning without them being in use.
Except in the highest speed crashes frontal airbags are mostly redundant for belted in passengers (the first S in SRS is there for a reason), especially in this age of seatbelt pre-tensioners.
Side curtain airbags are far more helpful these days.
Are you pro-motorcycle helmet as well? I don't ride but my understanding is there is disagreement about the relative protection of a helmet vs compromised visibility, yet most states in the US mandate helmets. Maybe some motorcyclists could clarify.
No it can't be compared to OSHA or drinking water standards. For people to drink clean water requires a treatment plant to be operating correctly, not for every person that drinks water to be treated with a shot.
We’ve had vaccine mandates (set by the states) to attend school for what, 50 years? Arguments like this are so tired and miss the forest for the trees.
Maybe think of the healthcare professionals so burnt out and quitting because people are so indignant to get the shot and end up taking valuable hospital space. I’d take forcing these hold outs (and trampling on their fREeDoMs) to get the shot in exchange for a functioning national healthcare system any day.
Arguments for thinking of the burnt-out healthcare professionals are tired and miss the forest for the trees. There are many reasons for healthcare professionals feeling burnt-out that pre-date Covid and were exacerbated by it. Where were your tears for them then?
You clearly don't value your liberty. (Maybe you don't even understand what it means, given your mockery.) Liberty refers to your right to govern yourself. If you would rather be governed by unelected administrative agencies, you'll be just fine in the new normal.
The liberty you think ever existed never did, look around. All the "freedom" advocates against the vax just pick and choose how they define freedom. There's no place in the world you can live as a sovereign citizen, so I'd suggest you get on board or buy a boat and live out on open water because that's the only place you'll be "free".
IMO, this type of political nihilism is the natural result of a dispirited populace grown used to delegating its own government to unaccountable managers. I'm not arguing for sovereign citizenship, just regular citizenship. There is a long tradition of political thought regarding liberty and freedom, your cynicism notwithstanding. If you ever find yourself using terms like 'rights', 'free', or 'justice' without quotations then I hope you can resolve your internal contractions.
Citizenship comes with strings attached and I'm under no illusion or delusion that I am "free" in the objective sense. I'm also completely ok with that because society has afforded me great freedom(s) that I could not have elsewhere. I _have_ to work a job, I _have_ to pay taxes, I _have_ to enlist if called upon in the draft, I _have_ to be vaccinated to go to school.
The inconvenient truth may be that as society becomes more interconnected, the less objective freedoms we have because we're trying to scale humanity and reap the collective benefits. Again, I'm completely ok with that because even in software, we have standards that software must abide by in order to interoperate efficiently. You can't just say "I don't want to conform the society's standards" yet reap the benefits the collective has provided.
I'm content with my world view, maybe it's you that needs to look outside of yourself and see what everyone is actually trying to do here (outside of this immediate situation, I mean the species as a whole).
You previously used "freedoms" in mocking quotes. Which freedoms are you referring to now and why do you think they don't deserve the same mockery? You also confidently throw around terms like 'benefits' and 'collective' as if those terms have objective meanings we can all agree on.
What you're describing sounds like the happy path to techno-totalitarianism. You're only saying what you said before, that you'll be fine ("completely ok") with that outcome. Will you be content when you have to present digitally signed 'papers' to participate in what today we would consider normal functions of life? It sounds like the answer is 'yes', because you see it as the cost of 'scaling humanity', whatever that means.
I'm mocking the way people who believe and use the word "freedom" to assert some innate sovereignty over how they are allowed to act in society and faux rights which they don't actually have.
People who use phrases such as "wearing a mask tramples on my freedom". These "freedoms" aren't actually freedoms. They're made up to mean "things I don't like" and in no codified law both common or contemporary.
I'm not describing anything other than the complete lack of perspective and, frankly, will for these people to operate in a society which needs their cooperation in order to function efficiently. These people are more like a virus than anything.
I already have to show physical "papers": passport, license, social security card, birth certificate, etc. Why should I be worried about "digital" papers? Again, completely delusional conspiracy that has no basis in reality.
You've already decided to dehumanize the people who don't agree to take a mandated health intervention. You may feel comfortable comparing people to viruses but I don't. The 20th century has a nasty history of that sort of thing.
As far as delusional conspiracy theories, what's your opinion on social credit systems, central bank digital currencies, and intra-national passports? Last I checked those are on the menu in China and coming to a democracy near you.
I value liberty, but I also recognize that there are situations where action (and when needed, mandates) for the good of the collective outweigh individual liberties.
Unless you choose to live in the woods disconnected from everything and everyone, you are directly benefitting from the modern and civilized society we live in. If you want to continue participating in and benefitting from it, you'll need to cooperate from time to time. The government is giving you an easy out here - don't want the vaccine? Don't participate in a specific portion of societal life (working at a company with 100+ employees.) It's pretty simple.
Any argument that getting a free vaccine is even a sacrifice is a slap in the face of anyone who has died of a communicable disease or can't access a vaccine today.
I also can't help but recognize that the people who are always railing about any perceived loss of liberty do so very selectively. What have you done, and where have you spoken out about abortion rights being trampled on in Texas? Not saying that you can't choose your issues like everyone else does, but don't pretend that you are defending "liberty".
If you consider abortion to be direct murder, there is no right to abortion. Refusing a covid vaccine is at best making a decision that may kill someone else. We allow these sorts of decisions all the time whether it be not limiting the amount of alcohol an adult can legally serve, smoking, etc.
While the arguments against covid vaccine mandates are similar to pro abortion arguments, the similarities are only superficial. The arguments are slightly different because the circumstances are and this is where the comparison breaks down.
The trampling of liberty I'm concerned about has to do with the Federal (central) government abrogating constitutionally mandated restraints on the Federal government and taking over powers that by law belong to the States. The 'right' to abortion is far downstream from the Constitution, whether you agree with it or not.
By that same logic, shouldn't your rights end at the epidermis on my arm? Don't I have a right to be secure in my person, as that phrase implies? That interpretation makes more sense to me than asserting the right to be exempt from natural biological functions like disease.
I would be totally okay with treating it like a driving accident. You're free not to get the shot, but in the case that you contract Covid you then open yourself up to civil liability to everyone you came in contact with.
Should that be the precedent for all communicable disease going forward? What about the common cold your child gave me that caused me to miss work? Will you be liable for that?
Many people's kids are, in fact, sent to school with communicable diseases that are deadly for some, just as Covid is deadly for some. But why stop at death? If your child's cold costs me a day of work, then by your logic, I should sue you for lost wages.
You’re right that some schools have had a vaccine mandate. But neither the private nor public sector ever have. And we didn’t have the accompanying dystopian nightmare as a reality and further threat. So I would say your argument is tired and misses the point entirely, aside from being so brazenly naive to fall for the “if only these last few holdouts got vaccinated everything would be normal!” straw man.
It's amazing how far some people will go (selfishly) to "protect" their perceived "freedom" at the expense of society. There really is something rotten in our society and it's not anything to do with authoritarianism but empathy, good grief.
Not who you're talking to but yes, I will protect my freedom at your expense in every case, for two reasons. One, I am my first responsibility and you are yours, and two, and far more importantly, the only way me protecting my freedom comes at your expense is if you're trying to violate my rights.
If everyone put themselves above society the world would be a much better place.
Lol to think masks and getting vaccinated to help society continue to function is as hyperbolic as you portray, what a way to go through life. I hope you find a way to release your anger and learn to help others.
Are you free to drive a car drunk? Are you free to shoot into a crowd with a gun?
What do you mean by freedom? You live in a country that has laws that restrict your freedom already; this vague grasp that you make toward "freedom" from getting a vaccine is so strange and silly
I mean you're correct, in that since > 80% of Americans got all their required vaccines in childhood there was no need to mandate it for adults, but it's a very oblique sort of correctness.
And yes, if everyone who was unvaccinated went out today and got the vaccine, the COVID infection rate would drop precipitously.
Maybe think of the healthcare professionals who are being fired for refusing to get the vaccine because they believe it is medically improper for them to do so.
Fired for not comprehending the vary thing they're trying to treat and its effects on society/peers? Sounds like they don't belong in those positions to begin with.
In America, I think COVID will fade, everyone will eventually get infected, more deaths and hospitalizations will occur until all the unvaccinated get it, then excess deaths and hospitalizations will return to baseline, and the vaccine will become more of an optional thing, the next GOP president will remove the mandate. Some other unknown crisis will replace COVID as the main story, maybe a huge recession or terrorist event. I guess we will see.
It ends when half a million+ people per year (in the US anyway) aren't dying of a preventable disease - not to mention probably millions more suffering long term effects.
I see a familiar pattern with sentiments like this: showing lots of hand-wringing over civil liberties, but seemingly no concern over all the people who have died and who have been incapacitated. Those people had a right to not be exposed to a deadly virus.
I also see a familiar pattern with sentiments like yours. There is little to no concern for people whose livelihoods or psychological health were harmed by health policies that prioritize the vulnerable minority over everyone else, including children. Health policy diktats aimed at saving every life will inevitably harm many in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Will the cumulative harms ever be counted? Not likely as it would destabilize the comfortable narrative many of us rely on to justify our prejudices.
I don't think I've seen any evidence that there is little to no concern for those things
unless you count "not getting your way" as evidence that nobody is concerned
just consider the possibility that, that other people consider other things to be more harmful to individuals and society,
and thus more important to prioritize when interests compete
This is why the vaccine is great. It vastly helps end the pandemic, while the worst thing 99.99% of people will experience from the vaccine is feeling sick for a day or so at most.
It's possible. We can compare year over year deaths to investigate excess deaths (which is really the best approach to fully appreciate the mortality impact). Such an analysis misses long term side effects like Long COVID, but does capture things like changes to traffic deaths and suicides. The CDC publishes this info.
Suicide is one harm. There are others. If you only care about the binary of life/death then you'd make a good bureaucrat, but you're missing out on a rainbow of human experience.
Authoritarian governments have killed millions of people too. Civil liberties shouldn’t be hand waved as a sort of a selfish privilege when most of them were written in blood after terrible wars and periods of oppression.
Indeed. I believe this is why Biden's approach came after long deliberation. Civil liberties are not something to be trifle with, and this has to be balanced with the government's reason to exist (as per the Constitution preamble, ensure the general welfare).
Please do! I look forward to being wrong. Nobody likes a Cassandra (although Cassandra turned out to be right) and I'll gladly concede these warnings were alarmist if the trends I see discontinue without mass unrest or turning over the governments via voting.
I agree with the consensus about Covid. I don't agree that means we won't have a permanent 'VaxPass' system in place serving as the camel's nose for a CCP-style social credit system based on health compliance. I wonder what you thought about the Patriot Act after 9/11 or Snowden's leaks? 20 years later would you say that all blew over?
> Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are quasi-police states [1] and will probably mandate vaccination+boosters soon.
Regardless of whatever metric you use to define “freedom” all of those countries rank higher than the US pre-Covid for “freedom”[1][2][3]. If your argument is that those countries are fundamentally “less-free” post-Covid due to public health measures, I don’t see the data to support that. To imply that all those countries will shift from the principles that drive them pre-Covid to a police-state post-Covid is very unlikely given the prior right?
As someone who’s lived in one of those countries and the US, I can say that the tendency of the US to argue over every small issue, even if it is overwhelmingly common sense and beneficial, takes away a lot of focus on the big issues that the country needs to solve.
Those rankings are laughably out-of-date. People can't leave the house in Australia without a visit from the police. In any case, these NGO-compiled lists are suspect to begin with. So, you think federal Covid vaccine mandates are a small issue? What are the 'big issues' the country needs to solve, in your opinion?
Maximizing life is always in friction with social entropy. But too authoritarian is not fun either. New normals are normal. Vaccine mandates seem worthwhile from the current vantage point.
I guess I would look at what is actually practically limiting you living your best life; avoid too much extrapolation on the rapid societal changes that are certainly not limited to covid vaccine mandates. Our techno-capitalist-oligarchy social structure is changing everything.
This above-it-all zen stance holds little value for me. I hear a voice saying "Authoritarianism harshes my mellow, man". It reminds me of Nietzsche's "Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon drop off."
America will split into two societies - those who demand a yearly injection (and who knows what else) in exchange for access to basic goods and services, and those who do not. The ones who do not will gather in their own towns, cities, and states where this freedom is respected, and secured by militias. I will be in that latter society.
I haven't spoken to an anti-vaxxer yet. Those that I've seen in the media have been completely irrational (5g/bill gates theories). So, I'm looking forward to learning from a rational person what their motivations are.
What are your reasons to refuse a vaccine? Weren't you vaccinated as a child for polio & chicken pox? Why is this vaccine a hill to die on? Thanks.
Not every anti-mandate person is a anti-vax. Government mandates are a political issue. Depending on the country and its laws, some believe mandates are illegal and constitute government tyranny. They may value rule by law or autonomy over their bodies. They may choose to receive vaccine but don't want to be 'forced to choose'.
Not every anti-covid-vax person is anti-other-vax. The mRNA vaccine is novel. Many believe its long-term safety profile is TBD. They think comparing vaccines with decades of safety data to ones with months is apples to oranges. They may also believe that Covid is not very dangerous to their demographic and don't like the risk/benefit calculation. They may also not trust the pharmaceutical industry and its influence on global health policy. The indemnifications of liability may give them pause to accept all the risk of side-effects. The censorship of contrary opinions on media may also affect their willingness to believe everything they are being told about the safety, efficacy, and necessity of the vaccines.
"Anti-vax" has become a convenient political weapon. It's important to unpack what it means and who is using it and why.
> some believe mandates are illegal and constitute government tyranny
This isn't a vaccine mandate. You are free to choose to be tested or vaccinated. Do you feel being forced to make this choice is tyranny, if so how bad do things have to get before the good of society becomes more important than your personal choice?
I ask you to put your thinking hat on and imagine other scenarios where compulsion is softened by indirection. The 'tested or vaccinated' choice is a temporary choice and unlikely to last. The pressure is firmly in the vaccinate or lose your job direction.
What is the 'good of society' and who decides it? In a pluralistic society there is valid disagreement about which are the goods (plural) of society. It seems you don't agree.
I'm still wondering if the saliva test meets the requirements? Anyone know?
I feel that forcing an uncomfortable nasal swab test is being used as a means of punishment, and not based on science. If it was just saliva I wouldn't feel that way.
Laws against murder and drunk driving are to protect other individuals against having their rights violated by you. Society never comes into the calculation, only the self interest of other individuals.
The agreed-upon surface area of 'the good of society' is smaller than you think. A disease that is %99.99 survivable and likely won't be resolved by non-sterilizing vaccine. is not comparable to the prohibition on murder.
> Not every anti-mandate person is a anti-vax. Government mandates are a political issue. Depending on the country and its laws, some believe mandates are illegal and constitute government tyranny. They may value rule by law or autonomy over their bodies. They may choose to receive vaccine but don't want to be 'forced to choose'.
This makes as much sense as a family member I have who wont wear his seat belt. He admits that seat belts save lives and greatly improve safety, but won't wear his out of spite because "the government shouldn't force me to do it". Imagine deliberately choosing to amplify the danger of driving, every time you drive, purely on principle to "Oppose Tyranny."
To a natural paternalist, the desire for autonomy doesn't make any sense. Regardless of the existential value of 'spite' to your family member, the issue of whether something is legal or not is bigger than 'spite' to those who value rule by law. They are not so ready to trade their legal standing for supposed safety. If you give up your rights so readily it shows how little value they have for you. Don't expect the government to care about them more than you do.
I’m vaccinated, but against this vaccine mandate. My proposed method is this:
1) If you want to get vaccinated, get vaccinated.
2) If you don’t, don’t.
3) If you go to the hospital with a COVID infection, your care is covered by insurance if you are vaccinated. If you are not, your care is not covered by insurance.
This allows people to make decisions about their bodies, while also fending off the two main arguments I see for why everyone should be vaccinated. Those arguments are:
1) Unvaccinated people are hosts for mutations which can break through vaccines. Since we are already going to be doing yearly updates to this vaccine a la flu vaccines, this is not a concern to those who want to be vaccinated as they will get fresh protection each year.
2) Hospital beds are being filled with COVID patients, thus blocking people with e.g. heart attacks, car crash injuries etc. from getting care. With my plan, the unvaccinated will be disincentivized to go to the hospital to get COVID care, thus freeing these beds up. Again, this respects personal choices.
But forcing people to do something to their body? Not cool with me. Also not logically consistent with being pro-choice, which most of my pro-mandate (anti-choice) friends are.
To quote our vice-president, "The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable. The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is their decision, it is their body."
That doesn't address the core hypocrisy of the statement, which is that bodily autonomy is "non-negotiable" for some and non-existent for others. Either the government has authority over your body or they don't, regardless of justification.
I don't see the hypocrisy. Get vaccinated or get tested for covid weekly. It's your choice.
We need to get back to normal, continuing with our previous approach wasn't working, so we have to do something. This seems like a healthy compromise on personal choice and doing what's right for society. What would be a better balance?
The hypocrisy is quite obvious, you are choosing not to see it. If you argue that abortion is a right by virtue of people's bodies not being subject to government control, then you can't simultaneously argue in favor of government control of peoples bodies for some other reason. Be consistent. Either the government has the right to regulate your body or they don't, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're going to argue in favor of abortion then you need to start using a different slogan than "my body my choice", because clearly you don't sincerely believe in bodily autonomy.
However, voluntarily ending pregnancy can cause fathers to-be to lose their child to-be against their will. We've decided that's OK, because the right of an individual over their body supersedes the rights of others with tangential impacts.
> With my plan, the unvaccinated will be disincentivized to go to the hospital to get COVID care, thus freeing these beds up. Again, this respects personal choices.
The fact that this sentiment already exists in America (via private insurance and out-of-network costs) is absolutely abhorrent.
Citizenry should never be disincentivized from seeking out healthcare.
Penalizing the unvaccinated is currently proposed to happen through their employer, with loss of employment (loss of being able to provide for one’s family) being the main incentive.
I am proposing a more direct penalty, which is only put into effect if:
1) you don’t get vaccinated
2) you get COVID
3) you get treatment at the hospital for COVID
The current penalty proposal (getting fired) happens at step 1. I do not agree with that.
In a socialized healthcare system, my penalty would be the same. Instead of your insurance company doling out the penalty (withholding payment), it would be your government, but the effect is the same.
I do not want to force people to do something they don’t want to do to their bodies, and I do not want others to suffer for the unvaccinated’s choices. Therefore, if you decide not to get vaccinated, you pay for your own healthcare if you go to the hospital for COVID treatment.
Personal choice comes with personal responsibility. But personal choice should still be allowed.
Undocumented immigrants take resources up. (If fact they may be uninsured and unvaccinated, too.) You should favor refusing medical care to them (and education to their children) based on this argument from resources. Do you?
Undocumented immigrants actually don’t take resources up statistically because if they did their undocumented status would be more easily uncovered, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. Trying to swap one population for another and arguing it’s the same thing, when only one population is causing the problem, isn’t logical. Please address my concerns as they are.
Those vaccines were properly tested. These vaccines were developed hastily. In Europe they are still treated as test vaccines, so you have to sign a paper and take the full responsibility for any side effects. I've gotten this far without infection although I was exposed. I have decided I just don't wan't to risk it. Also I am prepared to give up my access to ICU if that is what it takes for gov to leave me alone, as far as I see, taking up beds is the biggest issue.
There are some other reasons, but those are purely related to political situation in my homeland.
> In Europe they are still treated as test vaccines, so you have to sign a paper and take the full responsibility for any side effects.
This is not true. They got emergency authorization, but had to go through the same test phases as with normal authorization and will eventually get full authorization. This is not really different than in the USA and does not make it a 'test vaccine'.
Also I was vaccinated in the EU and I did not have to sign any papers or 'take full responsibility for any side effects' in any way, nor did anyone else I know that was vaccinated in the EU. This may be the case in your country (I'd be interested to know which country that is), but it is certainly not a EU wide requirement.
I consider myself rational (at least enough to work in software). Here's a copy/paste of a comment I made before why I refuse the RNA vaxx...
- I already had long covid (lasted 14 months), and don't want the vaccine to cause a relapse. It did exactly that to a family member who also had long covid, and she's still not better. It's just anecdotal but I've seen on longcovid forums multiple people claiming the vaccine CAUSED their longcovid.
- I don't believe CDC recommendation that increasing antibody titers through vaccination offers better protection against the virus than convalescent immunity through prior infection. Antibody titers are just one aspect of immunity and BCells make antibodies when exposed to a virus again. Actually I'd be worried about training my immune system with only one part of the virus, it's possible that would hurt my robust immunity against variants, not help it.
- CDC is dishonest with numbers by not tracking mild/non-hospitalized breakthrough cases. There is no reason not to track them. From the UK Gov on Page 12... 37 of 73 deaths from Delta variant are vaccinated: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... According to the CDC and media such numbers of deaths among vaccinated would be statistically impossible.
- FDA not approving an inactive virus vaccine is BS. It's a monumental failure of the US government if they want a high % of people vaccinated to only offer DNA/RNA vaccines that are nothing like traditional vaccines people receive as children. China's Sinopharm works at preventing death and is just inactive virus. If required to take a vaccine I'd travel to another country to take that. Actually I'd even pay $10k to have an inactive virus vaccine imported if it prevented me from being discriminated against.
- If there was such a thing as "misinformation" then it should be openly mocked, ridiculed and contested with facts. What's happening now with censorship is unprecedented - we even need a dedicated news site to keep track of it: https://reclaimthenet.org/ . Organizations like the EFF should be presenting legal challenges for many of these things but it seems like everyone has gotten on the "misinformation" bandwagon. Doing that will lead to authoritarianism. Health policy should not be political, but opposing forced medical procedures is a fundamental human right, no exceptions.
Also, since you mentioned Polio and chicken pox, I don't consider those the same because they are not RNA vaccines. All my issues with taking a covid vaxx would be solved if only the FDA approved Sinopharm/Sinovac so I could take an inactive virus vaccine. Instead I'm losing my job soon.
People need to stop thinking critically and accept what they're told so they can get back to a normal that is not at all normal but actually the 'new normal.'
In this case, as with most conspiracy theories regarding COVID, QANON, JFK, and more, "critical thinking" that supports the conspiratorial narrative has diminishing returns to scale.
Have you gotten your swine flu vaccine yet? Fauci says it's completely safe. If you trust the government you should rush out and get it for yourself and any children you know.
Also, the fda has a perfect track record for only approving safe treatments, so why worry?
Look, let's look at the human side here. I understand your fear of the vaccine and possibly rage at people encouraging, exhorting, or even possibly looking down on you for your desire for safety. PM me if you want a safe person to speak with. Whether or not you want to reach out, know that I encourage you to be vaccinated and that the data supports that it is quite safe. The medical tradeoff of myocarditis (the largest observed side effect) is 16 COVID deaths prevented for every case (minor or major).[0]
Within one year there appears to be myocarditis at a rate of 16 COVID deaths per 1 myocarditis case. To my understanding this rare side effect appears to occur within be first two weeks post shot, while the body metabolizes the mRNA and other components of the vaccine. Myocarditis also occurs with some other viral infections, and is concerning though not as concerning as the effects of COVID.
After that time period, you have immune response to the spike components. If that is associated with long term side effects, one would anticipate similar immune responses after the virus itself.
I am aware there is a claim that everyone with the vaccine dies in two years, based on rodent studies.(rodents live 18 months). Beyond that I'm not sure what information is out there regarding longevity. I would be happy to review sources you may suggest.
> Within one year there appears to be myocarditis at a rate of 16 COVID deaths per 1 myocarditis case.
Is that age stratified? E.g. in 18-29y/o males where myo/pericarditis risk is highest? With and w/o commodities would be helpful in the risk benefit calculus as well.
I don't off hand (my focus and research has been in the population health & dynamics for COVID versus vaccine side effects). There was a recent review by the CDC here: https://youtu.be/mfFeocgSKvU
I think you missed my point. I would like to know something you cannot know. We have some good data for the effects after a year, but do not have any data for 5 or 10 years since these vaccines have not been out that long.
Just so you know hn doesn’t have any pm functionality, you also don’t have any contact info in your hn bio, which is how most ppl connect outside of hn.
I will say, however, you’ve been incredibly dismissive and condescending, at times even insulting throughout this entire thread, up and down the page, even as someone who is pro-vaccine, I wouldn’t consider you “safe”. So your offers comes off as more gaslighting than anything else.
I'm not sure what you're reading as dismissive. Perhaps telling someone who hopes for a brutal civil war that they are fetishizing, but that's simply a tongue in cheek response to someone who clearly hasn't considered the outcomes to such events.
Otherwise, my message is consistent. Vaccination is a civic duty and one that is good for society. We need to be vaccinated. If a person wishes to reach out to me, I do not judge them based on differences of opinions.
I appreciate honest dialogue, and again, I’m vaccinated and believe overall the medical community is a net positive for society, but you are neither being genuine nor non-judgmental. You’re so far in your own ideology and echo chamber that you don’t even realize how far apart you are from those who don’t see everything through the same lenses you do.
I wonder should we also start mandating yearly influenza shots from everyone? And bar those who are not tested or vaccinated from work places? It would certainly save some lives wouldn't it?
Yeah what's next? Making other behaviors that have a small but established likelihood of endangering the lives of others or their property illegal at little to no cost to the liberty of an individual? Pretty soon I won't be able to drive my car under the influence, or without proper insurance, or while not wearing a seatbelt, or I won't be able to discharge my firearms in my 0.2 acre backyard in a suburban area.
650,000 people have died and that's with taking some pretty extreme precautions (for what we consider extreme anyway). It's not just the old or the infirm. Healthy people in their 20s and 30s. Toddlers. We have gone to war over much less.
We have a ton of safety regulations that govern how we build homes and infrastructure, how we plan for fires and natural disasters, how you live your daily life, and pretty much anything else because they are effective and do save lives. This one seems reasonable (mandatory COVID vaccination - influenza vaccines are significantly less effective and in general the people that die from it society seems to be ok with).
Florida has been doing almost nothing since April 2020 and still has less deaths per capita than North eastern states with their extreme measures. So your argument that even 600k deaths was only achieved because of lockdown etc does not make any sense. You couldnt tell what state does or does not have strict covid restrictions if you looked at the outcomes.
That's a bit misleading because those NE states got around half of their deaths in April and May 2020.
From June 1 2020 to the present Florida has had 203 deaths per 100k. New York has had 130 deaths per 100k. New Jersey has had 170 deaths per 100k.
From June 1 2021 to the present, Florida has 42 deaths per 100k, New York 7 deaths per 100k, New Jersey 9 deaths per 100k.
For the first ~10% of the pandemic in the US you were statistically safer in Florida than in New York or New Jersey. For the rest of the time you were statistically safer in New York or New Jersey than in Florida.
As another comment said, if the unvaccinated were willing to stick to their "ideals" and die at home instead of an ICU bed, I would be a lot more amenable to arguments against mandates.
But as-is, normal people who took precautions to get vaccinated are being hurt by anti-vaxxers when they get an unrelated illness or injury (car wreck, infection, etc) and then suffer worse outcomes (including death) just because the ICU beds are full of people who could have literally just decided not to be in them (given how effective the vaccine is at preventing hospitalization).
Our society is far too interconnected for almost anything to not at least indirectly affect someone else, even if the first-order effects are well-limited to "just you".
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
> As another comment said, if the unvaccinated were willing to stick to their "ideals" and die at home instead of an ICU bed, I would be a lot more amenable to arguments against mandates.
Can you extend this logic to other groups beyond "unvaccinated"? For example, imagine the ICU beds that would be unoccupied if people who smoke tobacco and drink alcohol chose to "die at home". As a society, we know both of these behaviors are detrimental to health, and yet there are people occupying ICU beds because of their decision to use those 2 substances. Slippery slope and whatnot.... health insurance premiums would also be a lot cheaper if my group health insurance plan wasn't subsidizing treatment for all my coworkers with lung cancer, emphysema, and liver failure.
No we have laws to limit that, so why not have laws that limit where Typhoid Mary and Covid Christ can participate in society. They aren't putting them in jail they're simply giving the choice to get a jab or lose their current job or eating in a crowded restaurant. They are free to still start their own business and remain vaccine free.
>As another comment said, if the unvaccinated were willing to stick to their "ideals" and die at home instead of an ICU bed, I would be a lot more amenable to arguments against mandates.
This depends on where you're at. Where I live we currently are not near capacity in hospitals or ICUs. There isn't an issue and we are not near one.
Should so many be mandated or highly pushed to get vaccinated because of a few hot spots that affect a small part of the population? This is a question I've heard.
Note, there is a difference between believing (or knowing) the positive effects of vaccines, being a proponent, and getting one yourself.
This is about forcing others against their will do to something. I fear this will come back to bite our nation in the future. Both in terms of the willingness to force people and the repercussions that will come from it.
>As another comment said, if the unvaccinated were willing to stick to their "ideals" and die at home instead of an ICU bed, I would be a lot more amenable to arguments against mandates.
This argument falls flat when we do not require mandatory weight loss from other citizens. The point of the vaccine is not to protect oneself from taking up an icu bed, but to protect other people.
> A vaccine that protects me from getting the virus or getting a serious case
But if the vaccine protects you, and you have it, why do you care if I get it or not? By definition, the only people I could hurt are myself or other unvaccinated people.
Society is a closed system. Mandating wearing seatbelts only saves me right? Except that someone will have to go to the effort of scraping me off the sidewalk, attempting to resuscitate me, transporting me to the hospital, resources at the hospital will be consumed that could have otherwise been preserved or applied elsewhere, and if I'm not insured, the cost of most of this will be borne by others. If I don't make it, what happens to my dependents? Friends? Family? People counting on me at work?
Communicable disease and taking reasonable precaution isn't that different. This one is interesting because its virality and fatality rates are apparently on the cusp of what society as a whole agrees are worth doing something about.
Wearing a seatbelt saves others besides you - people die and are injured by getting hit from non-seatbelt wearers, particularly those in the vehicle with them.
Helmet laws for motorcycles? I'm generally against them for the reason that it doesn't affect others (except in really weird edge cases) and I don't think we should mandate people risking their own lives (Except in situations where people don't realize the danger they are in)
Vaccination provides clear social benefit by reducing infections, which limits spread of the virus and potential sources of mutation. It also limits the number of hospital resources that must be allocated to covid patients, freeing up those resources to aid others who are in need of medical care.
In the same way, driving while drunk is tremendously dangerous to yourself but is also a danger to others.
Except the vaccine doesn't just protect you, it's also a layer of protection for anyone you might come in contact with. This is the whole concept of herd immunity. There are some people where the vaccine will not work, and others where it works but for whatever reason they are very susceptible to the virus. When you skip the vaccine you are now putting others at risk.
> When you skip the vaccine you are now putting others at risk.
When you skip the flu vaccine you put others at risk. In a normal year 40k people die of the flu in the US.
At what point do we draw what lines?
I'm not suggesting what that point is. Just that we slow down, think about it, and understand the tradeoff. There is no perfect answer.
There is also the element of the co-founding factors. Things like heart disease. Many of the co-founding factors, though not all, are repercussions of lifestyle (e.g., most heart disease is the result of many years of unhealthy eating).
We don't force people to eat healthy which would avoid a significant amount of disease and related factors in COVID deaths.
I realize this is not all cases... and I'm attempting to push thoughts forward rather than state my own ideas. Thinking this stuff through in depth is important. Seeing folks on the other side is important.
Somewhere. One one side, we don't allow you to shoot anyone you see to protect yourself against COVID. On the other we don't allow people with COVID to intentionally infect people (even sneezing on them in an obviously purposeful way implying you have COVID is getting punished.) So we draw it somewhere.
> Just that we slow down, think about it, and understand the tradeoff.
No. I have no desire to slow down. It's killing people now. It's delaying cancer treatments now. It's causing people to die of burst appendixes because they cannot get treatment now. If we need to revisit, fine. But it has to be after taking action.
Which itself is an epidemic. There are multiple levels of cellular automata at work here, riding on each other like layers of foam.
The Meme of COVID being all of the AJ talking points. The antivaxxers are a surrogate host, they act in symbiosis. The mind virus and the cellular virus reinforce each other.
>In a normal year 40k people die of the flu in the US.
So we draw the line somewhere between 40k and the number of deaths from covid? Note, it's not 650K in the US, those are deaths after all the social distancing, mask wearing, etc and more recently vaccinations. The true number would have been in the millions just in the US if these precautions weren't taken. Actually the IFR/CFR would be at a higher rate than now because hospitals would have been completely pummeled so people who now survive due to hospital care would die at home or in an ambulance waiting for a bed. Not to mention long covid, organ damage etc. The economy would suffer even with everything open.
Are you saying that you would draw the line at more than millions dead in a year in the US for covid because we draw the line higher than 40k per year for the flu?
If anything can be learnt from this, I think the argument can be that we can do more to combat flu every year, make it socially necessary for sick people to stay at home or mask up in subways etc.(like in Japan), increase testing, increase uptake of vaccines, new better MRNA vaccines etc.
>So we draw the line somewhere between 40k and the number of deaths from covid?
Why do we need to draw the line there? Why not at 10k or 1m? It seems like you are advocating we arbitrarily pick the number to not include the flu but to include covid without providing a good reason.
How is 10k or 1m not artbitrary? Society has already drawn the line where I stated. You can make arguments for or against it, for example by stating 1M deaths from a respiratory should be okay.
I am not actually saying it should be 10k or 1m. I am saying your numbers appear to be arbitrary and am asking you why you didn't pick the numbers I listed.
Also, society has not really drawn the line. Politicians and unelected bureaucrats have chosen for us.
Indeed. People who raise this argument tend to ignore the fact that the most important impact of the vaccine is the systemic protection it offers against the irresponsibility of individual choice.
The vaccine does not in fact guarantee person X will not be infected or hospitalized. Widespread vaccination does result in systemic reduction in community spread.
> The vaccine does not in fact guarantee person X will not be infected or hospitalized. Widespread vaccination does result in systemic reduction in community spread.
We aren't going to wipe out COVID. It's here to stay. From people to animals. At some point most of us will likely get it. There has been a fair amount written on this.
If we look at past times we had pandemics (e.g., pandemic of 1889-90) we can see patterns. There the virus hit people and was bad the first year and gradually was less and less until they stopped tracking it. When we get hit the first time we get some immunity. For the virus from that pandemic it happens today as kids. Antibodies fade over time (while T cells remain). That means our nose and throat can easily get reinfected but after the first time we usually just get a simple cold (and first time is usually a simple cold, too).
That situation moved from pandemic to endemic. The same will happen here.
Yet, every year ~40k people in the US die from cold/flu.
We can't stop it. How we treat people along the way will say a lot about us and impact our relationships once we hit the endemic stage.
We'll get to endemic without or without the vaccine. The vaccine will help. Forcing people is going to create enemies and the side effect will live beyond the pandemic.
"How we treat people along the way" is super important.
Associating public health mandates with (EDIT correcting typo) "forcing people is going to create enemies" is the opposite of being respectful of people.
The idea that enemies are made by enforcement of a public health mandate, and that that enemy creation is evidence of poor example of how to treat people and will redound....elides the rather obvious point that those who refuse to volunteer for vaccination in this context are exhibiting...poor treatment of others. In any kind of social context it is grotesque sociopathy. To accede to this notion of "enemy creation" is irrational and cowardly.
Did the MMR vaccine mandates from the 70s and 80s create permanent enemies? Lots of people say this is a huge world-shaking issue for them, and I believe that they believe that, but politically active people are heavily incentivized to learn how to see everything in maximalist terms. If most businesses begin mandating the vaccine and infection rates are low next year, I'm confident the vast majority of people won't remember why it was supposed to be a big deal.
I get branch of questions you are raising, but I don't see anyone educated raising opposition to the vaccine. There could be lots of reasons for this to be true, not seeing them, they are staying quiet, etc.
What we are witnessing in a distrust of non-demogogic power that has been instilled into the Republican base over the last 40 years. The multigrade attack on intellectualism, science, logic. That is like your opinion man. The same qualities of Fascism, the hero worship, the sacrifice of the individual, emotionally charged thinking, all of that is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tools of the enlightenment.
If folks had better understanding of how vaccines work from a mathematical/statistical level their internal framing of "should I get it or not" would be altered. It isn't whether this is a benefit to me directly, but is it good for the heard. For society as a whole.
Thinking of the heard is socialist. Self-centered, me vs the world is another Republican strategy. All of them actually weaken the individual vs the state and the corporation.
Choice, responsibility, individualism are great concepts, but they have been perverted into a form of control that divides and distracts.
The “for the herd” moral argument only makes sense for a vaccine that stops transmission of the virus. In that case, the individualistic argument for not vaccinating is “I’m going to leech off hers immunity.”
Ironically, because COVID vaccinated individuals still transmit the virus, the individualistic argument now favors the vaccine. Since anyone vaccinated is going to reduce social distancing and try to “return to normal,” they will spread the virus. So now the individualistic argument is that you should get the vaccine because the virus will become endemic and on a long enough timeline you will become infected.
No one is asking that you get the vaccine. Go buy 50 acres and subsistence farm by yourself. Or do you mean you'd still want to clog up a hospital bed for two months if you get sick. Because I'm pretty sure that impacts everyone.
This argument implies that we should start mandating mandatory weight loss for the obese. The vaccine is about protecting other people, not hospital space.
Not saying I disagree with you, but all the examples you gave are about some things that are a privilege or just optional (e.g. if you can't build a bridge to follow all the latest standards, you can just postpone it). Working is not really a privilege, you have to do it in order to survive.
but not driving drunk...you choose to drink, which is entirely optional. Driving drunk is something you choose to do. Getting a vaccine by mandate is something the state decides you have to do, with no way around it, if you want to continue working.
I was commenting on the insurance part, not the drunk driving. But we don't even have to go that far, we require licenses to drive, and if you aren't fit to drive, you can be denied that privilege outright.
>Yeah what's next? Making other behaviors that have a small but established likelihood of endangering the lives of others or their property illegal at little to no cost to the liberty of an individual? Pretty soon I won't be able to drive my car under the influence, or without proper insurance, or while not wearing a seatbelt, or I won't be able to discharge my firearms in my 0.2 acre backyard in a suburban area.
I wonder how many lives we could save if we required every car to have a breathalyzer that has to be used to start the car, and maybe a second test once 2 miles have been driven.
Also, if you want to get technical, most of those car laws only apply to public roads. On a private road you can get away with far far more.
“ 650,000 people have died and that's with taking some pretty extreme precautions (for what we consider extreme anyway). It's not just the old or the infirm. Healthy people in their 20s and 30s. Toddlers. We have gone to war over much less.”
Given that 10% of the population has been exposed at this point that makes likelihood of dying in the young age ranges extremely low. So many commonplace things people do in these age ranges have a vastly higher chance of causing death.
Fair point. I'd be curious to see it as data points on the range and variance in opinions on the site. I have less interest in which individual comments are "controversial".
The alternative also has a large cost. Pretending that no lives would be lost under a prohibition scenario ignores the data from times that's been tried either for alcohol or other drugs.
Drunk driving is illegal, as is smoking in public places (with very broad definitions of "public") - I have no idea what you're on about "sexual immorality", although I would point to the horrific law passed in Texas, as well as many of the terrible laws governing our sex lives. Most of those laws aren't because they hurt people, but because people want to tell other people what to do.
Drunk driving is illegal, drinking isn't. Just because drunk driving is illegal doesn't mean people care or are trustworthy to abide. The stats speak for themselves. And as I mentioned, it's not just drunk driving, but homicides and many other problems.
Secondly, see the new research coming out about second or even third hand smoking. It affects everyone.
Sexual immorality does hurt people and society at large. Everyone is paying the cost.
Yes. Based on my traumatized friends that work in ERs in a few different states and the people I know who have died, I would say that it is much more reasonable to believe that those numbers are close to accurate than to suspect a large scale conspiracy, but I guess the world is less interesting and more depressing when you consider the likely reality over shadowy intrigue.
Well, technically smoking kills ~400k a year and has been legal for over a century, so we could start there. We could get into heart disease and diabetes and the legality of unhealthy food if it’s about the raw numbers.
It would probably save lives _and_ lower the cost of healthcare. This is why many employers already offer free on-site "influence" (heh) shots for employees: it makes good business sense.
I'm never sure how to take objections like yours, because there are certainly a few different things to discuss. Is your objection to the government's role in this (such that you'd be fine with private employers enforcing whatever mandates they wish)? Or are you objecting to the mandatory vaccination (in which case, what do you have against spitting into a vial once a week)?
Or are you more of a technocrat, concerned that the ROI (in terms of, say, QUALYs, as economists like to put it) gained through these policies isn't worth the cost?
All strike me as viable arguments, but it's always hard to tell which one is being put forward.
If we lived in a non-influenza world that suddenly experienced influenza for the first time, we would think it's crazy to not only allow, but many times encourage, sick employees to come to work and basically take out the entire office. It's like just committing to losing a week's worth of productivity across the board.
One nice benefit of going more remote is that we can hopefully "personalize" the cold/flu experience vs. making it a de facto office-wide experience, and without the bizarre politics around vaccines/masks/sick-days/etc.
One would hope. My struggle previously with having a cold is that those can stick around for a week or two - until we set this new precedent for working from home I couldn't just disappear for a week because I didn't feel well so I'd inevitably take a day when it was especially bad, but then I'd come in and spread it around anyways.
One of the unfortunate parts about colds is that the range of experiences seems to be fairly large for different people. It sounds that like me, you've never experiencd a "24 hour bug," and a cold is at minimum a one week affair. Not sure if you've looked into it, but there is some research starting to develop around why this is the case, namely, it might be bacteria that inhabit our nose that take advantage when our defenses are down from a cold: https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20181001/colds-espec...
It seems fairly common for a cold to last a week[1]. They wouldn't be debilitating for the whole time - it'd be a day or two of bad symptoms and then a obnoxious sniffle for another week. But I'd still come into the office and be that guy in the corner who was going sniffsniffsniff the whole day, even with a box of kleenex. Thankfully I haven't had one since I moved to working from home - I've come to realize that I need to be more careful with hand washing and general hand/face hygeine.
I count myself extremely fortunate, as [knock on wood] I rarely get the flu. About once every 4 years on average, and most times when I get it, I'm through it in about 48-72 hours. And my clients are always very understanding and I'm able to still deliver while WFH, except in the very worst depths of about 12-24 hours.
There has got to be some genetic component where others have it way worse than I do, and yet still others skate by even better than I do. We know far less about biology than we think we do.
My objection is that it's generally creepy anytime an institution tries to control or monitor the inside of an individual's body. Same reason I find workplace drug tests extremely distasteful. Like you can give me all the arguments you want about why it's a utilitarian positive, but at the end of the day you're asking for a cup of my pee so you can sniff it. That's just fucking weird and dystopian.
And to be clear, I'm fully Covid vaccinated and get flu shots religiously. But when an impersonal institution is coercing and coaxing people into injecting something into their body that they don't want, I'm out. I won't vote for those politicians, I won't work with those companies, I won't cooperate with those federal agencies.
It's weird, it's creepy, it gives my lizard brain a bad vibe that screams "Get Away From Them FAST!" You can go on all you want about QALYs and ROIs and R0s. But that's about as convincing as a man with a pencil mustache and a windowless van explaining to me why he's qualified to babysit my kids. I'm sorry, I won't do it. I won't eat the bugs.
When I was a youth, most public schools mandated a variety of vaccinations. If you didn't get them, you couldn't go to school. Is that no longer the case?
In the US, all 50 states have some type of mandatory vaccination for public schools (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_policy_in_the_Unit...). Most, but not all, allow religious or similar exemptions; some (including California) only allow medical exemptions.
I think your point--which is spot-on--is that a lot of the outraged reactions appear to be from people who are unaware (or unwilling to acknowledge) the very long history of compulsory vaccination (and who probably had such vaccines themselves as children).
That's not to say that any mandatory medical intervention shouldn't be treated with serious consideration, but the unwillingness to acknowledge precedent is bizarre and, I suspect, to some degree dishonest.
This is a bit different. First, the type of vaccine is different - the COVID vaccines don't stop you from getting COVID or -- crucially -- transmitting it to others, whereas the ones that school children require to get do so.
Second, two of the three available are still under EUA, and the one that is approved is of a new type of vaccine that became approved through a very unconventional route, which has some folks cautious. Those other vaccines you mention are well-established and have been proven over time and through clinical testing to be safe and effective. COVID vaccines have proven to be only effective at reducing reactions, but not very effective at reducing spread.
Note that a typical clinical trial lasts years[0] - phase II usually takes 2-3 years and phase III takes an additional 2-4 years. We've had these vaccines for less than one year; if this was a typical vaccine, it'd be only part-way through phase II trials.
And now it's mandated by the government; get this shot, some of which are using new technology, that has had shortened clinical trials or lose your livelihood (because, at $14k per infraction, I don't see many large companies bothering to offer testing as an alternative unless it's for the CEO or other executives; it's just too much liability for an easily-replaceable lower-wage employee).
> but the unwillingness to acknowledge precedent is bizarre
That's because your precedent isn't an exact match, and has had easy alternatives and ways to opt-out.
Now, to be perfectly serious, I do think that any efforts at compulsory--or, as in this case, incentivized, since testing remains an alternative--medical measures exist in a tension between the utilitarian and the libertarian point of view. We should certainly be cautious about mandating any medical procedure, and do our best to preserve alternatives (like testing, or mask wearing, or by limiting mandates to as narrow a scenario as necessary).
But I don't think the debate is helped by getting the facts wrong.
It's also possible that the dissenters are aware and knowledgeable of the history of compulsory vaccines. The question in their minds might be how society determines which vaccines should fall into that mandatory category and what level of force the government and others should use to enforce it.
For example, should flu vaccines be mandatory to attend school? Historically they have not been in any large degree (to my knowledge). If you look at the IFR for those age groups for flu (varies somewhat by strain) and covid, then you'll see that they are generally very close. So we have to ask what changed, because it doesn't appear to be the value proposition.
I don't see the necessary nuance for this debate to be meaningful. As a case in point: the OSHA regulations are for vaccination _or_ weekly testing.
There's probably a reasonable debate to be had about requiring people to disclose vaccination status (but, again, significant precedent)--but I do think the hysterical reactions sound a bit funny when viewed as a reaction to being forced to spit into a cup once a week.
I think we agree that the debate is, as is, not very good. I might be making it worse by highlighting the least productive comments instead of engaging more selectively with the actually constructive ones, but, well...this is the Internet, right? :)
Is it really accurate to call it mandatory when exemptions have been relatively trivial to acquire and use if one desires to?
People keep acting surprised that other people would say no and also object to not having a choice.
Then there's the immunocompromised people who react poorly to vaccines and programs such as this are trying to corral them into a one-size-fits-all mandatory vaccination program.
> I think your point--which is spot-on--is that a lot of the outraged reactions appear to be from people who are unaware (or unwilling to acknowledge) the very long history of compulsory vaccination (and who probably had such vaccines themselves as children).
I think this is a strawman argument as virtually everybody is aware of past childhood vaccine requirements and acknowledges that they existed for a long time.
What might make this Covid vaccination and decision process different from those in many peoples' eyes is that:
* Past vaccines took years of development and testing before being applied to the public and were not rushed through any approval process. Covid vaccines in contrast use a new technology, were rushed through the approval process in a political process, and in fact are still technically in clinical trials. To many people, not enough time has passed to see about any possible long-term health impacts, fertility problems, or other issues. And obviously, discussions of short-term health problems in social media are suppressed or minimized too. Personally, I would argue that trying to vaccinate all people (especially the young) for such a low individual risk is one of the most irresponsible risk-management decisions in human history.
* Dr. Fauci and other health experts have spent much of the last 18 months either lying (remember experts insisting that masks are pointless before doing a 180) or being wrong about many things. Is it a wonder that people don't trust them?
* The media is the boy who cried wolf. They spent the last 5 years hyperventilating about Orange Man to the point that anything they say now is viewed through a partisan lens. Sorry, but if public trust is frittered away on political motives, don't cry now that you're telling the truth this time.
* The medical establishment seemed desperately against even trying alternative medical treatments (HCQ, Ivermectin) due to the vaccines emergency use authorization being tied to no treatments being available. How would a normal person react to the idea that there's a possible alternative treatment from a cheap already tested drug? You'd express some hope and be willing to try it, but express doubts about the treatments due to the limited studies available that don't show good enough results. Instead, we get a pile of propaganda labeling a legitimate medical drug as only a "horse dewormer".
* The focus is not on health and safety (which should be the goal), but only vaccination. Millions of people have had Covid and have natural antibodies: why isn't Covid antibody testing a suitable substitute for vaccination? Has even one health leader recommended steps to lose weight and get some sunshine for instance despite the clear worse Covid health outcomes for fat people with Vitamin D deficiencies? Or take NYC's draconian vaccine requirements to visit a ball game as an example. You're not allowed to attend a game if you're not fully vaccinated, but you can walk from the ballpark to a vaccination clinic, get "the jab (TM)", and immediately go attend the same ballgame even though the science says you're not immune. Everything about public policy is oddly specific about urging vaccines and incredibly creepy right now.
> The medical establishment seemed desperately against even trying alternative medical treatments (HCQ, Ivermectin) due to the vaccines emergency use authorization being tied to no treatments being available.
No, they have always been against use of drugs that have not been shown useful. That is the job of the FDA. It seems you aren’t aware that they did approve some treatments? Didn’t really affect the vaccine development, since the two aren’t really that dependent: their goal is to promote the best option.
> Has even one health leader recommended steps to lose weight and get some sunshine for instance despite the clear worse Covid health outcomes for fat people with Vitamin D deficiencies?
Yes, they are surprising reluctant to engaging in victim-blaming. You aren’t the only person who heard these may be helpful; I think it was pretty widely popularized since the beginning that poor health is a risk factor.
> why isn't Covid antibody testing a suitable substitute for vaccination?
As I noted elsewhere, in many jurisdictions it is, as is testing.
In fact, as the very article upon which you are commenting notes, under the new OSHA rules those who do not want to get vaccinated can simply take a test once a week instead!
I admit, some mornings I have a bit of dry mouth, but after my morning coffee I always have enough spit to hock a loogie into a cup. For science and the greater good.
It's still the case in most (all?) of the US. However, it's generally pretty well accepted that the documentation requirements are lax and that parents can opt out for a variety of reasons.
When I was in school (both K-12 and college), my schools just accepted a paper document (trivially forgeable) that stated what vaccines I had received and when.
No, when you were a youth enough people were vaccinated that the RE dropped to almost nothing, meaning there were no breakouts. They never gave 100% immunity.
They were also more numerically effective at keeping people from turning into a carrier, but they had the benefits of decades of tuning.
If vaccines never gave immunity how come people who had the natural immunity from having the disease naturally were not required to be vaccinated? Actually even in my older years all I had to present as a proof of vaccination to the US government was my blood with antibodies.
I am not sure where did you get the 100% thing but for the record I am not claiming that. What I am noticing is that it used to be an objective criterion for the inoculation, seemingly based on the concept of immunity.
I got the "100% thing" when I said it in the first post, and you started responding "if vaccines don't give immunity", yada yada. In response to me saying tehy don't give 100% immunity.
Some states (including big ones like California and NY and conservative ones like Mississippi and West Virginia) have no exemptions to school vaccine requirements other than medical exemptions.
California used to have more exemptions and they were used heavily by new age/hippie types (i.e. not conservatives) to skirt vaccination requirements so the laws were changed recently.
Since the change there have been a number of doctors willing to grant medical exemptions to any who want them. [0] It isn't as much of an impediment as it appears.
The article you linked talks about a new law that invalidated those exemptions from that doctor because they were not supported by clinical guidelines.
It's just an example. There are lots more doctors who will give exemptions just to make parents happy. There is clearly friction between parents/doctors/state over this policy.
It's an example that you provided a source that says the exact opposite of your example. In California there is a new law designed to specifically combat your example and it's been quite effective.
The flu doesn't overwhelm hospitals in recent history. Covid-19 regularly causes governors to declare state-of-emergency in order to care for the massive number of people who need medical attention due to the disease.
I can't help but think like your comment is more intended provoke heated responses than encourage constructive discussion.
The flu definitely did something in 2017-2018 (although that was a standout year). However, that "overwhelming" was mostly dealt with by telling people to go home and take theraflu (and OTC medication). As in, literally a press at the ER/admitting, which resulted in people needing to be examined before they were turned away. And doctors/nurses had to work overtime to do that!
But the ICU beds never got overwhelmed. In hospital treatment never failed.
The response then was "if you have a flu, call your GP who will just prescribe you the medicine over the phone". The exact same situation that most non-COVID patients have been in for months.
Here in Quebec they were overwhelmed. Actually our hospitals were constantly at over 100% capacity, and were almost empty during most of the pandemic. Even at the peak of covid they weren't as full simply because most of the critical cases died in nursery homes or at home before reaching a hospital, thanks to the negligence of the government.
Smoking kills 500,000 people per year in the US - which is only slightly less then COVID at current rates - I don't see anyone rushing to shut that down.
Heart disease kills 650,000 per year, but there is still a McDonalds and Taco Bell on every corner.
There are absolutely enormous anti-smoking adversing and education campaigns. Cigarettes are mandated by law to have very specific packaging that loudly lists the risk of death. Large taxes are placed on them. In a great many places you are not allowed to smoke in public. Smokers have higher health insurance premiums and cannot access certain kinds of medical care like various organ transplants. Selling a cigarette to a child is a crime. Exposing children to second hand smoke can be abuse.
And yes, there are a large number of people who sue Cigarette manufacturers for their role in the deaths of these people with the attempt of completely destroying the industry.
The could save the lives of 500,000 per year if they just forbid the sale. Why do you suppose the 500,000 that die from smoking and the 500,000 that die from COVID are treated differently?
If you come to my workplace and smoke indoors and refuse to stop, you'll be fired. At this point, I'd wager that the large majority of jobs in the US ban smoking indoors at the workplace. There are also various state (and perhaps federal?) laws that prevent indoor smoking in a great many locations.
Clearly I was talking about getting fired for smoking in the privacy of your own home/car etc. Restrictions on locations of smoking are not even close to national Jab or Job policy.
Then get weekly tested. That's also allowed. That is a mechanism of ensuring that you are not harming others while allowing you to do whatever the heck you want on your own time.
And when that option gets removed in a few months (already being mused by DC talking heads) will you be singing a different tune? I doubt it. You can go straight to hell, I hope my unvaxxed cooties scare the shit out of you and your demented ilk. Funny how only the vaccinated live in fear.
Evil never recognizes itself as evil. That was the lesson people still haven't learned after WWII--everyone was an enlightened good-guy, especially the eugenicists purifying humanity.
OSHA limits workplace exposure to some smoking products like CO (which can motivate employer policies on smoking that restrict the behavior); many states have more specific limits on workplace smoking. These reduce the employability of unwilling or unable to restrain their smoking.
The difference being that people's general livelihoods are not being affected by these campaigns and requirements. The choice is still available to people even if there are restrictions on use and distribution. That is not the case with the vaccine.
In my state, if I work at a restaurant and I smoke indoors on the job that is against the law. A tremendous number of jobs ban indoor smoking among employees and will absolutely fire you if you don't comply.
A) Typically ban smoking indoors because the state has banned smoking indoors
B) Also typically provide areas for smokers outside the building in compliance with local regulations. Are those places generally outside? No. Is the onus of responsibility on the business should an employee smoke inside? No, the employee is the one that would face the consequences, including possible termination and/or criminal charges. A business doesn't have much in the way to worry about.
There is no such provision for the vaccine. You either need to get the vaccine to continue working there, get tested every week, or find a different job. This is also without taking into account two things:
1) While the testing is offered according to OSHA, with potential fines up to 14k per instance what are the odds that employers are actually going to offer that to their employees? You actually, as a business, face less fines for leaving a piece of paper in plain sight that has someone's SSN, Name, and Address than you do for not potentially following this regulation.
2) That we are also looking at good odds of the testing option going away. It's not an option for federal employees, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that it will be going away for those under this mandate in the near future.
They should introduce scales in addition to big events, since we know the obese are the main ones that overflow the hospitals. Pandemic over 1.5yrs now.. Plenty of time to do your job and lose weight.
Haha! That is the perfect and natural conclusion - want to see a movie? Or attend the big game? First we need to check your temperature and weigh you in.
The IRS can be in charge of making sure every American purchased at least one ADA approved toothbrush, submit your proof with your tax return.
We can give ration books for processed meat products - if you can’t choose wisely then the state will choose for you.
You know what kills more than COVID? Sugar which causes cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. If we're going to go after COVID for the havoc it causes, there's a long list of similar issues that could be tackled with the same type of mandate.
I don't look forward to our health-police state we apparently decided was a great idea. Well we didn't decide, because that would have required congress to pass a law. This was just some old man skipping congress, likely knowing this will be overturned by the Supreme Court, but desperately needing to change the national debate away from Afghanistan.
Downvoted because you assert a simplistic and erroneous equivalence between damage caused by sugar consumption and that caused by a communicable disease.
If you eat sugar, you don't endanger others' health. If you don't get vaccinated, you put others at risk. See the difference?
Heart disease kills more people than covid because heart disease is an umbrella term for thousands of conditions, while covid-19 is one disease. Same for cancer, there are hundreds of types of cancer.
Why not prevent such cancers in the first place? Forbidding sales of sugar, cigarettes, and trash food would go a long way to prevent cancer, diabetes, heart disease and obesity. Sh*t happens, you can't have a vaccine for everything.
If flu vaccines were paid for entirely by the government I'd imagine that mandating companies hold onsite influenza vaccine clinics yearly would be largely uncontroversial and fairly effective.
When this all started and the stats for influenza deaths came out (usually as a poor attempt to downplay the seriousness of COVID) I was shocked at my own ignorance as to the effect of influenza. I'd previously tried to but been inconsistent in getting my flu shot, but now that I understand the human cost that's changed for me.
It amazes me that people would be hesitant to get it and that there'd even be need to mandate it now. None of the same arguments can be made against the flu shot that can be made against the COVID vaccine (and in fact if we had yearly COVID vaccines those arguments would be moot there as well), but I'm sure we'd have a ton of vaccine deniers there, which really just proves it's ideology and feelings over any sort of real concern.
I've said this in another thread, but many I've talked to who don't want the vaccine are hesitant because of the accelerated timeline. A typical vaccine goes through 3 phases of clinical trials, with phase 1 lasting 1-10 years, phase 2 lasting 2-3 years, and phase 3 lasting 2-4 years.
That means you have anywhere from 5 to 17 years worth of data to look at and determine if there are long-term effects.
And that's what I meant by "and in fact if we had yearly COVID vaccines those arguments would be moot there as well" - in a few years the "it's rushed" argument (which I understand to be a misunderstanding of the vaccine approval process - just because it usually takes a process two decades to complete doesn't means it's less trustworthy if it completes in a year under different circumstances) stops holding water.
At some point you have enough money, as a famous beloved man once said, and issues like agency become far more important (he didn't say that last part).
Mississippi might be a poor state, but its GDP is still higher than most European countries.
Net GDP? Mississippi is a small state, why would you compare net?
And its economy per capita is somewhere between Israel's and Slovenia's, hardly bad economies. And this from a state where more than half the kids grow up in small rural schools.
I don’t think most people have an issue with voluntary vaccination. The problem is when nefarious actors use the situation to create a surveillance state, social credit system, and then exclude people from doing simple human things like eating at a restaurant.
>If that exists, it existed before COVID, and vaccinations against COVID certainly haven't changed that.
Australia is taking it to the next level and using covid as an excuse. Do you believe that they will end their programs in 5 years when all of this is over?
>Are you referring to mandates? These have been a thing, in the U.S., for many decades
Vaccine passports are starting to be required to go to concerts, grocery stores, ball games, etc. If you do not do what the state wants you to do you will become a second class citizen with restrictions. This is similar to the social credit system in China.
>Vaccine mandates have excluded people from things far more important than restaurants, such as education, for many decades. This is not new to COVID.
No one is restricted from education. You can go to a private school or get an exemption.
For example, requiring almost everyone to get a vaccine? That's not new. That's been happening for decades.
The only difference is there's a new vaccine that needs to be rolled out to everyone, as quickly as possible.
Most people get their mandatory vaccines as children, in a staggered way.
Because of the current situation, it's happening all at once, and the restrictions that enforce the vaccine are also being changed, based on the age of the people required to get the vaccine. What am I missing here?
When was it common to prevent people from entering a restaurant unless they were vaccinated with a vaccine that itself had only been developed 15 months prior?
Apparently, in the past, the Supreme Court even allowed knocking down people's doors in order to force vaccinations.
"That was a relatively easy no for the court. In a 7-2 ruling in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, it decided that jurisdictions do have the right to require people to get vaccinated. Back then, the government was much more forceful about it, knocking down people’s doors to get them vaccinated, the New York Times says."
This meme about “Jacobson vs. Massachusetts” doesn’t seem as strong an argument as the useful idiots believe. It’s an example of the court affirming the right of a State Legislature. It says nothing about the right of the executive branch of the federal government to forbid private transactions between employers and employees, unless the employee submits to a medical procedure mandated by executive order.
I’m sure the argument falls apart in many other ways. You can probably find the counter arguments in the same Twitter thread where you found your talking points – just make sure to unhide the tweets containing them.
The poster above was replying to a comment about mandates to enter restaurants. Those mandates have been entirely state directed. So it does not fall apart at all.
You're comparing denying education to children to denying non-essential services, such as restaurants, to adults. One is an essential right, the other is not.
If anything the restrictions people are putting in place to enforce the vaccine mandate have been less extreme. As workplace mandates get rolled out, this will become more even, as the right to work is comparable to the right to an education.
As I tried to communicate before, curtailing basic rights in order to enforce vaccinations for everyone is not new. The only difference is that these usually happen based on age, instead of happening to everyone, all at once.
As in most such trade-offs, the "cost to freedom" and "infringing of rights", to the extent they actually exist, factor into the cost/benefit decision of whether or not to ultimately go through with the mandate
since everybody has their own opinion on where that balance is, there will always be individuals unhappy with what decision makers decide
aside from the trade-off discussion above, it looks like you also have opinions about the constitutionality of this move
it is, of course, totally okay to have an opinion on that, but an opinion does not necessarily grant decision power, or even veto power, so ultimately you aren't the one who gets to decide what constitutes a right, and you aren't the one who gets to decide what constitutes a violation or an infringement of a right
I'm not trying to slam you here, because I am also not the one who gets to decide that -- I'm just one of hundreds of millions of Americans, the majority of which do not have a problem with this move
now, of course, if someone/you believes this move is an unconstitutional violation of rights, they/you can bring it to SCOTUS, who will let them/you know if they/you are right
and if SCOTUS does ultimately say that this specific mandate is unconstitutional, then of course I agree with you that such a decision should be respected unless and until We The People change the constitution, which would be okay, too
No I’m simply rejecting your framing of the discussion. Rights are not a question of votes. It is not up for deciding democratically. To frame the question this way is to fundamentally misunderstand how rights work.
it does -- SCOTUS is the one who will decide whether or not you are correct when claiming this move is a violation or an infringement on constitutional rights
I can't keep repeating the same thing over and over again
Just to be extra clear — the constitution does not grant rights. It acknowledges rights that were “endowed by our creator.” They exist by default, and they… oh, you know, the thing…
> Just to be extra clear — the constitution does not grant rights
Just to be clear, it absolutely does establish such rights in law and thereby grant them as legal rights. It may be that some of authors and ratifiers (and some current constituents) of the Constitution have a (quasi- or literally) religious belief about the metaphysical preexistence of and/or independent ethical universal necessity of exactly such rights (or a super- or subset of them) against any legitimate government, but that's...largely immaterial except in terms of arguments between people sharing such views as to what rights should be established in law, or social science analysis of why the particular rights chosen were established in the Constitution.
That is certainly one theory of government, but it is not the only one, or probably even the most popular one. For instance, we have many laws that infringe free speech rights, and the great majority of people are perfectly fine with that. Your platonic ideal of “rights” isn’t the way rights actually work in the real world.
> For instance, we have many laws that infringe free speech rights, and the great majority of people are perfectly fine with that.
I think you'll find that most people who are okay with the laws you are referencing likewise disagree that those laws infringe free speech rights, rather, they view them as operating in a space outside of the proper conception of the right to free speech; the complexity isn't as much in the operation of rights as in the parameters of rights.
let me weigh in as one of the above sample points to say, that sounds like "sometimes that right can be infringed" with more words, which yeah, I am okay with
an alternate interpretation with the exact same implications might be "that right isn't absolute", which, yeah, I am okay with
ultimately it's just semantics that fails to meaningfully address GP's comment
If, as real property analogy, I have fee simple title to a parcel part of which is subject to utility easement, the utility company’s access within the scope of the easement is not an infringement of my right of exclusive control, it is outside of the scope of that right.
Similarly, most people who support laws that you see as “infringing” on the right of free speech who agree that a right with that name exists view the definition of the scope of that right more narrowly than the people who see the law as an infringement.
> you've twice said "most people" don't view the "fire in a theater" analogy to be a limitation on a right,
No, I haven't.
In fact, I’ve said nothing in this thread about that analogy (and nothing at all about it, IIRC, on HN except [in summary form] that it has fuck-all to do with the actual law, either now or when it originally appeared as dicta in an abomination of a decision.)
Nor have I said anything about what “most people” view as a “limitation” on a right. What I’ve said is about that most people who support a given law that others characterize as an “infringement” of the right do bot view it as an infringement, but as an act outside the scope of the meaning of the right.
> yet here I am, one of those people
Even if literally everything you said preceding this wasn't false, “one” ≠ “most”, except in a particular degenerate case where it is also “all”.
so far, of the data you've presented plus the data we see here, the sample size is 1, me, and 100% of respondents disagree with your proposition, so it's unclear where you are getting "most" from -- but let's ignore all that and grant you the point for now
if I am understanding you correctly, you are saying there is a difference between society viewing something as outside the boundaries of a right, versus society viewing something as an allowed, permitted-by-society infringement on a right
if we assume that is true, then what are the implications to OP's post?
e.g. the vaccination mandate can be presented as either "outside the boundaries of the right" for whatever right those protesting the mandate cite, or an allowed, permitted-by-society infringement on that right
"We violate rights therefore it is fine to violate rights"
The whole idea of rights is that they cannot be violated, period. There's no reason to even have for example a UN Declaration on Human Rights if they can just be violated for Good Reasons™. Rights are absolute or they don't exist.
You miss my point. It doesn't matter if it has never happened, that just means we have failed ourselves. What matters is defining the concept of rights, exploring what they mean and what they are. I'm not talking about if they exist in practice in any specific country, I'm talking about "what are rights?"
Rights are things reserved for individuals to hold unilaterally, sovereign over them, no democratic process or other consideration can take them away. That's the whole idea. That's at the core of the definition of the concept. Without that, the concept of rights doesn't exist.
Influenza is not shutting down the country and making us miserable. It's a much less disruptive disease. Just because you don't want to get a jab doesn't mean society should shut down for you. That's why this should be done through employers and other methods requiring you not participate if you won't participate in something to help society. If you don't want to get a jab don't work for them. Easy choice. Start your own Jab Free Lawn Service.
After I lose my job I plan to be a company of 1 working on my SaaS or doing contract work... but I'm not confident that restrictions won't get harsher the more that people get vaxxed. The vaccines will work less and less, and the unvaxxed will be blamed more and more, leading to them being treated as criminals.
At what point does the US government freeze my bank account? At 95%? 98% vaccinated? I'm planning to leave the country before then.
It's pretty egregious that there is no mention of accommodation for individuals who have already acquired effective immunity through previous infection. Other countries are well ahead of the U.S in this regard.
These mandates appear to completely neglect entire aspects of scientific consensus.
Even if that were true, and it's not clear that it is, the side effects of infection are far, far worse than whatever side effects the vaccine might have.
So far vaccine immunity fades with time as well. The Pfizer Gang have experienced that already at 6mo or so, but Moderna protection has faded much more slowly.
That's right, but the fact is that the president's goal is to get everyone who can receive the vaccine to be vaccinated. He lacks the authority to issue a simple vaccine mandate for everyone and is just doing what he does have the authority to do. The vaccine is not just about workplace safety and people who work from home should still get the shot.
I call this "late fee" logic. Often times an apartment will want to charge $X for rent but only charges $Y. They make up the difference by imposing fees and other restrictions so by the end you are basically at $X. I hate these policies because I hate people lying to me. Cut the shit with these late fees and just raise the damn rent.
Likewise, if the goal is to vaccinate the entire country, don't try to beat around the bush and have OSHA do it, actually mandate it.
I'm not in favor of vaccine mandates, I just hate when poeple tell me to my face "Oh well we need to do this because of A, B and C" where everyone knows it's really "We're doing this because it will accomplish X, Y and Z"
The president does not have the legal authority to make such a general mandate. Congress might be able to do so, but congress works slowly and this needs to happen as soon as possible.
Like it or not, that is the system we have in the US.
"the legislature is too slow" is a purposeful design to avoid tyranny of short term thinking. When you hear the executive proclaiming this it never results in more civil liberties.
I am not anti-vax, but I STRONGLY oppose this vaccine mandate. Looking at the CDC data here: (https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...) there have been 3,043 covid deaths in the 18-29 year range out of 103,738 total deaths in that same age range.
I'm 29 and in good health. I know I'm much more likely to die from activities I enjoy like rock climbing, farm work, skydiving, driving my car, but I don't wan't my employer mandating I can't do those things. I have weighed the risks. I want to get covid eventually if I haven't already for better protection against future variants that could have worse survival rates for my age range (https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...) If I were older, I would choose to get the vaccine.
Also, people will say that I'm going to spread it to others. Well the CDC states that "preliminary evidence suggests that fully vaccinated people who do become infected with the delta variant can spread the virus to others" and recommends they wear masks! (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...) I suspect that if I get covid and quarantine, I'll be less likely to spread the delta variant than someone who is vaccinated after I recover (people who have had been vaccinated are 13 times more likely to get infected than unvaccinated people who were previously infected with covid according to the science.org article I linked above)
There are so many conveniently chosen facts and holes in your argument that I don’t even know where to begin.
The CDC dataset you cite above only reflects death, not the serious illness and disability ~30% of people end up with.
Yes, vaccinated individuals can spread COVID, but this is dramatically less likely if you are vaccinated.
You assume you’ll be less likely to spread delta because you’ll quarantine, but you ignore the fact that much of the transmission we see is from asymptomatic spread, before people even know they are sick.
All of the mental gymnastics, for what? Getting vaccinated is barely even an inconvenience and we have real proof from hundreds of millions of doses that it’s safe and effective.
The selfishness and unwillingness to cooperate for the greater good is mind blowing.
Who cares about covid spread? We have vaccines that protect you and anybody who takes them. Covid spread doesn't matter. It's here forever. Not going away.
If you get your shot, you are done. Stop worrying about the vaccination status or mask-wearing status of others. You are gonna get covid either way. But at least you won't have a chance of being hospitalized or dying.
Covid is here forever. We need to switch our messaging to learning to live with that and moving on with our lives. All this crap does is keep everybody living in fear and dividing us even more. End it!
> Who cares about covid spread? We have vaccines that protect you and anybody who takes them.
People who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons. People for which the vaccine doesn't work. People who care about people who won't vaccinate. People in hospitals who have to take care for infected/sickened people.
It's not about you dying. It's about you catching it, passing it to someone who might need to be hospitalised and fucking up the whole healthcare system.
The vaccine does not stop you from catching the virus and spreading it. This has been settled science for months and months. Stop spreading disinformation.
Saying “I’m not anti-vax” before parroting every anti-vax talking point and admitting you’re not vaccinated doesn’t make you any less of an anti-vaxxer.
Based on that study from Israel, it seems like the highest level of protection is being vaccinated + natural immunity, followed by natural immunity by itself, then vaccination itself. But natural immunity is not considered an alternative in this mandate, which makes it feel highly political and not science based.
I can completely understand the risk analysis of someone who has already had Covid not wanting to get the vaccine based on the available data.
Why should people with natural immunity after having contracted covid be required to be vaccinated? That doesn't make sense. They have better immunity than the vaccinated.
How do you prove you have natural immunity? Because it's not always clear whether you have natural immunity, even with bloodwork. Is it antibodies, t-cells, or some other mechanism that's providing immunity? What if we test for one thing and are wrong? The immune system is a complex thing.
Assuming we can trust doctors, you get a letter from your doctor. I mean a medical doctor, not a fake doctor working in a medical establishment like Fauci's wife has been pretending.
Note how she has the first spot under the 'meet our doctors' heading which is misleading because she is not a medical doctor like others in the list.
https://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/meet-our-doctors/cgrady.html
For those of you arguing against getting vaccinated, please go volunteer at a local hospital.
I'm currently in the hospital in the "red" part of my purple state. I had an acute appendicitis, and had to wait in a temporary, crowded, understaffed holding area in the ER for over 18 hours before getting admitted for treatment. My roommate in the hospital has an infected foot, and waited over 24 hours to be admitted. He may now loose his foot. The nurses on this non-COVID floor are on a skeleton staff to shift resources to care for COVID patients, the majority of which are unvaccinated. Around the country, some hospitals are pausing "elective" treatments, like cancer surgeries due to the flood of unvaccinated critically ill COVID patients.
I almost wish that the anti-vaxxers would just stick to their science-rejecting principles and reject all health care, not just the vaccine. If they were to just die at home instead of clogging up the health care system unnecessarily, the vaccine would not be such a big deal.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Arguing that the other side should die is beyond the pale—I realize people on the internet are going there with alacrity, but it's exactly the kind of thing we don't want here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. Please don't post like this to HN.
I can certainly understand why you feel strongly under the circumstances and hope you get excellent care and get well soon.
Not saying this isn't happening, but the phrasing here is a little disingenuous - there are plenty of beds, just not enough doctors and nurses to staff them. And why is that? In many cases, it's because the doctors and nurses themselves refuse to take an experimental vaccine and are being furloughed or terminated.
Stop saying "experimental vaccine" because that's entirely untrue. It might have been true for barely reasonable interpretations of the term months ago, but it's certainly untrue now.
It's literally FDA approved at this point. My brain melts every time I read a COVID discussion on HN -- it's actually worst than Reddit at this point because people here believe they're _just so much smarter than everyone else_. Even more so than Reddit, which I previously believed was impossible.
In either case, the man died due to anti-vaxx sentiment. Either because anti-vaxx people were flooding the ICU, or because anti-vaxx staff were getting furloughed for non-compliance.
There are some serious issues with FDA approval,for example the potential conflict of interest with pharmaceutical companies providing funding to the same entity approving their drugs
Is there data about how much of the staffing shortage is due to staff refusing to take a (non-ezperimental) vaccine, vs. staff deciding they'd rather have a job that doesn't expose them to covid every day, vs. staff that have died?
The reason I am annoyed about a vaccine mandate is that I take care of my health. I eat healthy, exercise regularly, don't do drink or take any illegal drugs, and have been consistently taking vitamin D everyday for the last 3+ years.
These are all things that everybody should be encouraged to do, but the government has not been putting in almost any concentrated effort to encourage people to do these things at all. Then when Covid starts spreading and mostly killing unhealthy people I should be the one risking my health, taking a vaccine that is way less tested than any other FDA approved vaccine, to help the people who practice unhealthy lives and are the ones most at risk of dying from Covid?
I am 19 years old and had to stay inside for the last 1.5 years for a virus that I am not afraid of and almost certainly would not kill me if I were to contract it. My mental health has been deteriorating for the whole quarantine, years of my youth are being taken away because of something that simply doesn't affect me. Unhealthy old people have screwed my life up and taken years away from me so if they expect me to take a knee to help them then they can go to hell. You lock people in doors for years of their life make them wear masks everywhere in public and now are gonna make me stick a needle up my arm so I can keep my job? Go to hell, I rather die than be yanked around like this to appease people who don't care about me and a government who treats me like shit and insults me. And their is still no timeframe for when this bullshit will be over.
The point I was trying to make is that neither I, nor my roommate (the only other patient I've had a conversation with) realized exactly how bad of shape the hospitals were in until we showed up at the ER and experienced it in person. The relentless media coverage is easy to tune out after a while, but actually experiencing the effects of a COVID surge personally brings it home. I'm not sure how else to suggest someone experience a hospital as a non-patient..
According to the staff, the temporary holding area I was in (an office cube farm converted to holding patients in recliners) was new, as was the practice of lining every available hallway with people in beds. I went to this hospital specifically because it was close to home (riding in a car with an appendicitis is agony), and because it advertised low wait times. It turns out the low wait time was to be triaged, not to be treated.
Sure but now the times are astronomical and they may take one look at you and say you're too far gone and let you die because ICU simply doesn't have any beds. So some dummy who wouldn't get the vaccine just killed (by proxy) your relative most likely.
Thank you for this needed comment. ER wait times were a problem before Covid. I've experienced waiting in an ER with a loved one who was convulsing, it was extremely scary and sobering to see how long we waited (about an hour or so). This was before covid.
I was hospitalized with the FLU Jan 20th 2016, that day this particular Hospital (a major university hospital in a large US city) reached a record for number of patients admitted. That record still stands to this day.
Please point a time out where it was spread across the country in recent memory at our current scale. You can't. No one is saying some regional event won't do it (hurricane for example). However currently it's a much bigger issue particularly in states that are still saying covid is basically the flu while their hospitals are over full and they're begging traveling doctors and nurses to come and help out.
No, my sister is an RN at a hospital in Los Angeles and vaccinations are optional for her. She is vaccinated, but if she wasn't, she would have to get a covid test twice a week. A few of her co-workers complained to administration that they don't want to be vaccinated, but now also complain that they now must be poked in the nose semi-weekly.
Anecdotally I don't know of any physician I've met in person (my SO and most of her family are all physicians) who isn't vaccinated. I've heard of a couple through stories so it might be 1-2% in my 1st and 2nd level of connections? Meanwhile every single physician I've spoken to about it knows at least a handful of nurses who aren't vaccinated and cite pseudoscientific nonsense as the justification.
Nurses are great but the difference in bar to entry and education between a physician and a nurse is staggering.
Two things can be broken. But people who choose to be unvaccinated are imposing themselves as an added burden on society, and are acting selfish, though they're not even doing that because they're failing to protect themselves too.
> blame unvaccinated people instead of our broken healthcare system. That makes 100% sense
There hasn't been a healthcare system that didn't break in the past year (well, assuming a functional one to start with.) Whereas, there have been groups of people who broke the system (the unvaccinated, including groups pre-vaccine) and those who didn't (the vaccinated)
My sister is a nurse in a "red" state. During Covid they CLOSED 3 entire floors of the Hospital due to inactivity, she was PISSED because those floors could have easily been used as overflow.
And yes thay are "full" now because operational capacity has been significantly reduced.
>>"I almost wish that the anti-vaxxers would just stick to their science-rejecting principles and reject all health care, not just the vaccine. If they were to just die at home instead of clogging up the health care system unnecessarily, the vaccine would not be such a big deal."
Comments like this are just pure disgraceful and disgusting. What sort of degenerate would wish this upon others blows my mind.
Please don't respond to flamebait by taking the thread further into full-out flamewar. That's exactly what we don't want here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
> During Covid they CLOSED 3 entire floors of the Hospital due to inactivity, she was PISSED because those floors could have easily been used as overflow.
>yes thay are "full" now because operational capacity has been significantly reduced.
Well, most hospitals aren't limited by literal space. They are limited by personnel, or supplies, or even ICU capacity. Not square footage.
> What sort of degenerate would wish this upon others blows my mind.
He's not wishing anything on them. People I know are being turned (well, advised) away from seeking medical care because the unvaccinated are dominating the hospitals. Is it really wrong to request that if they want to use our health care system they take basic care of themselves?
> Is it really wrong to request that if they want to use our health care system they take basic care of themselves?
At least in the US, there is no "our" health care system.
My employer and I pay about $500 / month in premiums for just me. My insurance company has made contractual agreements with the vast majority of health care providers (they've become more and more consolidated over the years) to provide service to their CUSTOMERS. On top of that, most Americans now have thousands of dollars in deductibles which are used to directly subsidize Obamacare recipients.
But you're right, we should expect people to "take basic care of themselves" if they want to freeload on MY health care system. So along with those who are unvaccinated, let's toss out:
* homosexual men. The rates of infectious diseases, including HIV which has a 100% fatality rate, are off the charts due to their very promiscuous lifestyles. Do you know the number of sexual partners an average gay man in the US has by middle age? It's shocking...
* Young black men. Lifetime chances of using ER services due to violence are so high, it'd make sense just to deny them outright.
* In fact, just deny all blacks in the US. After gay men, it turns out heterosexual black women are now the biggest carriers of HIV, and that is almost always caused by their choices (i.e. promiscuous lifestyles). On top of that, their obesity rates are so high that along with the fact they disproportionately freeload off the system (Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies, etc), our system would be improved drastically if we could cut that burden off.
* Undocumented immigrants. They rarely pay into the system. They tend to not use preventative care due to lack of insurance, thus they disproportionately use ER services which is a disadvantage to those of us like me who pay for the system.
I could go on, though I don't think you'd like who ends up being denied service because they "don't take basic care of themselves" and don't pay into the system.
The US certainly has a health care system. It's existence is divorced from details of implementation (such as paying for it.) If you want to claim ownership of it because you pay more, you probably think that they are your police employees because your taxes pay their salary. But if paying more for better treatment makes you sad, I'm happy to join you in advocating for single-payer.
I'm just going to ignore the rest of your troll comment.
HIV does not have anywhere close to a 100% fatality rate anymore, everything about this comment is just completely inflammatory and misinformed. Plus if a vaccine existed for it gay men would take it in a heartbeat.
> And yes they are "full" now because operational capacity has been significantly reduced.
This is the kicker. It affects different areas disproportionately at different times; but on a response level we're pretending "my region!" is all areas in these discussions at all times.
> Comments like this are just pure disgraceful and disgusting. What sort of degenerate would wish this upon others blows my mind.
I want to be clear - he prefaced it with a simple "I almost...", not a "I wish". It's simply a comment on how hard it is that anti-vaxxers are actively killing others currently with forced-ration care; and how frustrating the lack of individual responsibility is.
Why should Alice die from (misc non-covid-related complication) because that care she needed went to John-from-accounting who was afraid of microchips in vaccines; but still went to that football game last week and can't breath now?
That's not to say that's happening everywhere; but it's definitely happening.
Ask people who have waited for health care, or had loved ones die due to delayed care.
Hospitals were closed due to inactivity LAST YEAR, before vaccines, because people were AFRAID TO GET COVID and expected to get it when going to a hospital.
I can assure you that the hospital I'm in has no closed floors.
Those floors are still closed Drew, and my sister is still pissed off about it.
You've been on all of the floors in that hospital? <- Notice Drew cannot say this for sure.
>>because people were AFRAID TO GET COVID and expected to get it when going to a hospital.
Wrong, one of the floors closed was the 7th floor where heart attack and stroke patients go. They closed due to lack of patients having heart attacks and strokes. These floors could be open right now and taking capacity from other full floors and hospitals.
I'll add that they laid off a number of staff, many of which have not been added back on. In this hospital and many others, square footage is at a premium because operational capacity has been reduced.
> In the midst of a pandemic, the advice from medical professionals to “stay home, save lives” may be preventing patients from seeking medical care when symptoms of stroke arise due to fear of contracting COVID-19. Anecdotal reports across the United States are highlighting missed care during the current COVID-19 pandemic...
i.e., yes, "people are afraid to get covid and expect to get it when going to a hospital" is an accurate description. The lack of patients having heart attacks and strokes is a lack of people willing to go to a hospital, not a lack of heart attacks and strokes.
Yeah, basically your freedom (to not get vaxxed) shouldn't overrule society's freedom as a whole to move on and get back to a decent semblance of what it was .
>During Covid they CLOSED 3 entire floors of the Hospital due to inactivity
Wasn't that because there weren't many cases due to people social distancing and opting out of elective surgeries and healthcare because of fear of infection? Hospitals are private institutions and will reduce staff. I think the proposed CARES act last had funding but wasn't passed during the then administration.
>Comments like this are just pure disgraceful and disgusting. What sort of degenerate would wish this upon others blows my mind
Whatever happened to personal responsibility? People (ab)use freedom they don't want the consequences of doing so? They nod to all the politicians, talking heads, social media posts demonizing medical scientists, healthcare workers, doctors and then run to the hospital once sick? Don't you think there's a problem here with minimizing the dangers of covid and promoting unproven magic cures? Anyway I think unvaccinated people should be deprioritized if hospitals are full, unless they have a proven medical reason to not get vaccinated.
Reread it. They're not wishing death on anyone. But the healthcare system is overloaded primarily due to people rejecting the vaccine that the healthcare system has been begging people to get for quite some time.
that's what some people are saying yes. other possibly reasons include obesity, smoking habits, alcoholism, vaccine mandates on hospital staff, poor budgeting and planning by the hospital administrators on predicting ICU capacity.
It's so easy to reduce this one variable thinking. But the oversimplification is what is dividing us
There's no degeneracy here. It's a perfectly defensible line of moral reasoning.
The constraint is, there simply is not enough capacity to treat everyone. If there was, there would be no problem. So should you prioritize care for people who are intentionally making themselves ill, or those who aren't?
You have to choose one, after all. Are you advocating that people with illnesses other than covid should get delayed or denied care? Is that not just as degenerate?
This is a well-explored situation in other cases of shortages. Suppose that there is a severe famine and the government imposes food rationing. The Smiths abide by the rations and eat small but barely sufficient meals for a month. The Joneses refuse (for whatever reason), buy lavish amounts of ingredients, and throw out leftovers. At the end of the month the Joneses have blown through their ration cards and say they will starve the next month unless the Smiths share some of their rations.
The morally defensible answer is no, despite the danger that the Joneses may die, because if you say yes, now both the Joneses and the Smiths will be malnourished, this is an unacceptable harm to the Smiths, and being willing to answer yes will just encourage other people to act like the Joneses.
It's a trolley problem. You always want to just stop the trolley of you can or get people off the tracks. But if you can't, you have to make a choice about who it hits. Being in the position of making that choice doesn't inherently make you a murderer.
>>The constraint is, there simply is not enough capacity to treat everyone. If there was, there would be no problem. So should you prioritize care for people who are intentionally making themselves ill, or those who aren't?
You're missing the point, floors closed create the deficit in operational capacity.
No, I addressed that. Ideally you stop the trolley or you untie people from the tracks. But if you can't, you have to choose where the trolley goes. Ideally we reopen the floors and have sufficient capacity to treat everyone. But if you can't do that, then you're making some judgment on who to treat.
All 50 states require children to be vaccinated for a range of other diseases. So, we already do that in the interest of public safety. What's different here? What is the absolute freedom that is applicable here that is not applicable for other vaccination requirements?
This crowd of anti-vaxxers skews heavily to one political orientation. I am not sure they are genuinely against forced government anything (the same crowd will vote for anti-abortion laws, heavy police powers and so on)
> People are against _forced_ medical procedures by a government.
No, they really aren't. No one is against eye tests as part of driving. No one is against a hospital saving an unconscious person's life without prior consent. No one was even against vaccinations to go to school.
And this isn't even a "forced medical procedure". It's a requirement for large corporations, not people.
Yeah most of the people refusing vaccines are conspiracy nuts and afraid of it because they've heard a talking head (that for whatever they trust) tell them not to take it.
Trust is indeed at issue here, but in my opinion, it's more about a lack of trust in authorities rather than trust in the "wrong talking heads". However, this is all conjecture on both our parts.
The more time passes, the more I'm convinced that the right strategy would have been to make the vaccines initially cost $35,000 a dose, so that the outcry would have been that the Illuminati was making it impossible for the common man to get access to these life-saving drugs. Then, after months of argumentation, people could have had the victory of having the vaccines "liberated" and offered for free, such that getting the vaccine would be sticking it to the elites.
That's the Captain Cook approach. To get his crew to eat sauerkraut, which was thought to prevent scurvy, he started out by only serving it at the officers table. The crew then asked if they could have it too.
I immediately thought of Antoine Parmentier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine-Augustin_Parmentier) who was trying to get the potato accepted in France and hired armed guards to protect his potato field to convince people they were valuable... but let people steal as many as they wanted.
Advised acquaintence in a PR company and reporters at beginning of this that they should "find" stories that the wealthy and celebrities were flying to countries where they could jump the queue for vaccination if they wanted to get more uptake. Response was government had other plans.
Given my previous work in digital identity, I was getting inquiries from vaccine passport companies in the summer of last year. This was always about the passport.
Where are these magic passports then? You keep talking about these high tech passports but my vaccination card is basically a piece of toilet paper with 2 stickers on it (that you can easily buy off Ebay by the way) and the nurse telling me "don't lose that!"
SMART Health is the technology, using data from WHO's covax program, which was pushed down to public health units via govt health ministries and departments.
A teardown of the tech applied in Quebec was posted on HN several weeks ago.
Won't work. They will just say celebrities get saline or a different vaccine. I've actually seen this happen already when big politicians got jabbed first.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, because such things can work. Just look at what Antoine-Augustin Parmentier did with potatoes. Same mental trick.
I was commenting to a critical comment that was, in my opinion, controversial but acceptable.
I don't know who flagged it and why, and it's now disappeared.
Please, please, please: I'm the most provax person out there, but limiting the contrary voices won't lead this conversation anywhere constructive.
The comment was saying the the policies against Covid so far were aimed at the distruction of normal.
Here's what I would have replied:
I can see part of your point. But how do we deal with the fact that the resistance to what you call "the destruction of normal" is mostly made by people that refuse science, fall victim to conspiracy theory, and have in general a tendency to apply magical thinking to policy making?
I'm fully vaccinated and highly critical of how the crisis was handled. But here in Germany the no-vaxxers and the anti-maskers are a crowd of strongly individualistic people that span from tree-hugging spiritual healers to neonazis.
There is no logical thinking in their thesis, and every critique is based on the rebuttal of statistics, numbers, and data-based decision making.
I suspect it was my comment, probably flagged for comparing the ID mandates to jim crow laws, but I'd say your response question reduces to, "we are an elite, how do we deal with these ignorant proles?" which is begging the question.
The connection between data and policy is mostly fictional, other than it is used to support chosen narratives, and not to illuminate truth. I look at the resistance as a human instinct, where some can convert it to articulated objections and clearly, and others have limited tools, but what they have in common is a clear and united desire.
Anyone who knows anything about data (let alone govt) knows that data at very best only loosely informs policy decisions, it does not make them. Leaders may hide behind it, but they ignore it just as often if not moreso, and that these people reject data as censored, cherry picked, fudged, fabricated, is consistent with how policymakers handle it.
> There is no logical thinking in their thesis, and every critique is based on the rebuttal of statistics, numbers, and data-based decision making
The worst part is that the data on almost every part of the pandemic is freely available online and updated daily.
For instance, the odds of getting myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine is something like 1:125000. This is significantly less than the risk of child having a seizure from the MMR vaccine at 1:30000.
Your numbers are being used to lie: You only have to get the MMR vaccine once. But you'll have to get the covid vaccines over and over and over. Just four covid jabs would make these events equally likely. But it's most likely that more than four will be required.
> But you'll have to get the covid vaccines over and over and over.
Citation please, my impression was that whether the vast majority needs a third shot ist still not decided but it's possible which is why governments prepare.
>> There is no logical thinking in their thesis, and every critique is based on the rebuttal of statistics, numbers, and data-based decision making.
This is exactly what every person following the religion of scientism was saying when we were spraying kids with DDT, while those in touch with their intuition and insticts knew better.
Sounds pretty much like a fallacy to me.
It is a different time and different age. The stats about mortality from covid and from vaccines are quite different and easily accessible.
Let me guess, seat belt mandates are also “authoritarian”?
What about measles vaccine requirements? Have you complained about those recently? Believe it or not, there was a time when measles wasn’t a thing and very few question the need for a measles vaccine now.
What about the broad polio vaccine rollout?
Vaccine hesitancy has been a thing, but never this strongly along party lines
The main problem that I and many others have is not the policy of the month but how targets are shifting. When the measels vaccine was introduced it was clear that after one or two shots you were safe for many years if not for life. Seatbelts are not an irreversible medical procedure.
So my problem and the problem of many others is not focused on the policies in effect right now, but the direction in which the policies evolve.
If I had thought one or two years ago how the CCP was going to handle the pandemic, it would be pretty much the way the US, Germany and France handle it right now.
> If I had thought one or two years ago how the CCP was going to handle the pandemic,
In that case, it would be quite an inaccurate prediction on your part given that the CCP/China actually handled their lockdowns and continue to manage quarantining with far more stringency than the US, Germany, and France. You're drawing a comparison between the three western countries and a fictional China that wasn't borne out in reality.
You're forgetting about driver's licenses, pilots licenses, cosmetology licenses, ID requirements and searches to fly on a plane, having to be over 21 to buy alcohol and tobacco, selective service, income taxes, property taxes, traffic laws, building codes...
Most of those examples do not apply to persons who are not engaged in commerce.
21+ to buy products should be 18. At some age children become adults.
Study the personal income tax and you will find it is primarily enforced through your employer. If each of us had to save and write a check there would be little compliance.
For non-commercial property, if the property is not cataloged by county assessor, it doesn't get taxed. Dig in on this bit and be amazed.
Did government go to your door and make you sign the contract of non-commercial driver license? Or did you go to a government office and volunteer? This was litigated at USSC decades ago.
Federal personal income tax does generally apply to federal government employees. When a non-govt employer withholds from your paycheck it does become difficult to then get out of volunteering to pay.
Are you a commercial driver and also federal employee? Or like most people do you shuffle in to the lines to voluntarily contribute?
I am an independent software developer and like most business owners I contribute because it's required by law and failure to do so carries harsh penalties.
Are you telling me that you do not pay federal and or state income taxes? That you do not contribute to FICA? Are you under the impression that because you are not a federal employee that you are not required to pay federal income taxes?
Structure your affairs correctly so you do not become a taxpayer (federal income tax) and no need to file. Definitely do not file, as they use the signed form against you and they call it frivolous and add penalties.
This initially takes effort.
Still pay sales tax, use tax, TSA groping tax, etc.
As I mentioned, I replied to the wrong thread. Requiring vaccines doesn’t make us fascist. The tight integration of big corporations and the US government arguably does. By that definition, we’ve been fascist for a long time.
But yes. I think the more intertwined business interests and government becomes, the worse things will get in the US.
So, here's the thing. You don't catch an infectious disease through an act of God. You catch it from an act of man.
Right now, you have zero recourse if your employer, or your co-workers are creating a dangerous environment. You have no legal standing if your employer's policies are the reason that you catch COVID, which can be financially ruinous - or lethal. Your employer is explicitly protected from any liability their action or inaction creates in this space.
We either need the tools to hold employers liable for creating a dangerous work environment - because they are not taking basic precautions against the spread of a deadly disease...
Or we can shield them from this liability, and mandate that they take those precautions.
> So, here's the thing. You don't catch an infectious disease through an act of God. You catch it from an act of man.
I think the same but with a different tack. If you get an infectious disease from another person, and that person didn’t want the disease either and wouldn’t want to spread it, then why are they?
How do people not know they have Covid and are giving it to their friends, coworkers, etc?
The same reason that people crash their cars. Oftentimes with friends and family inside them.
Sometimes, it's because they did everything they could, within reason, to prevent it.
Sometimes it's because they were reckless, negligent, and should not have been behind the wheel.
We call the first an accident, and the second (if it kills someone) vehicular manslaughter. We litigate to determine which is which.
We also give people leeway in how negligent they want to be. A BAC between 0 and 0.08 is fine... Unless you hit someone - at which point, it will be used against you. A BAC above 0.08 is immediate grounds for arrest, regardless of whether you hurt anyone.
That is what personal responsibility on one end, and enforced social responsibility on the other end looks like. Right now, nobody can be held personally accountable for reckless behaviour with COVID. Either we lift that protection, or we double down on enforcing social responsibility.
I see this as an unmitigated good and the only way we move forward on normalcy. May it inspire others to do similar so we can address vaccinations here then move our surplus abroad.
More than 100 million (maybe closer to 150 million) Americans are estimated to have recovered already and have earned their immunity the hard way. Tell me why that doesn't count.
More specifically, herd immunity is necessary for people who cannot receive the vaccine to be protected. These types of folks are often the immunocompromised.
Herd immunity kicks in when the proportion of folks with sufficient antibodies is high enough, formally modeled as H >= 1 - 1/R_0, where H is the herd immunity level and R_0 is the average rate of cases caused per each case. R_0 (or more appropriately R_t) is dependent both on the intrinsic attributes of the virus as well as behavior of the organisms the virus infects.
So ensuring a large population with strong, effective prevention is in the national interest, is in the evolutionary interest based on all available science, and is in the interests of vulnerable populations.
Results are mixed on whether prior infection is on par with vaccination. For Delta the current understanding that vaccines are 70% to 90% efficacious, and prior infection is 60% to 80% efficacious. Being both vaccinated and having prior infection shows much stronger immune response.
Can you check your link? I think those are serology studies which cannot give an indication of efficacy. I believe you that recovered+vaccine gives stronger measurable antibodies but above some threshold more antibodies does not really give any indication of the two most important factors:
1) transmissibility
2) patient outcomes
What do you find when we compare recovered vs vaccine for those factors?
Reinfection rates are pretty low, partially due to immunity, partially due to behavior (if you've had it you probably know you have it again), and partially because of data drift (federated data sources don't cleanly connect despite reporting to CDC). Vaccination breakthrough rates at point of testing are something like 1/20 to 1/100 versus the canonical susceptible population, without stratifying for ages or patient outcomes or correcting for population biases.
A tangent: the UK has some of the best monitoring implemented and sees antibodies in about 95% of its population. That said, reinfection rate as of June 2021 (roughly pre-Delta) was 0.4% over that population cohort.
“Normalcy” is gone for good. If you’re actually still hoping for some future that looks like the pre-COVID times, you’re going to be disappointed. Hoping to avoid war is more in alignment with reality, at this point.
Unless you want to live naked in a tribe on the African savannas, "normalcy" has been changing for tens of thousands of years, and very fast for the couple hundred, and extremely so for the last hundred. It should not be a surprise that it continues to do so, and "you have to get certain vaccines" has been a thing for any kid going through public schools and/or college for decades. This is nothing new.
Not the GP, but I'd love if employers would enact policies that enabled and encouraged their employees to stay home when they get sick. Covid tore through my office early on because someone felt he had to come in and get work done despite being sick. It tore through my office, killing two people and hospitalizing multiple others, definitely costing more productivity than we gained by the one person coming in to work.
You think all this vaccine passport and mask crap is going away anytime soon? This crap is gonna be with us for a long, long time. We will be flying with masks on for years after this, mark my words (and I fully expect people to reply on why this is a good thing).
There is a large group of people who refuse to move on from covid. We have a vaccine that keeps you out of the hospital. Once you take it, you have a moral right to return to full normal.
I haven't looked into the specific policy, but in the vast majority of cases policies like this have exceptions for e.g. people who can't get vaccinated due to medical conditions, but those exceptions do not get reported because they're exceptions and not relevant to most readers.
(Especially since such policies often have as an explicit goal to provide protection for people who can't get vaccinated.)
Every time I traveled, we had to have "our shots."
These were 100% mandated by the country we were coming to. Since my "home base" was in Africa, we had some fun bugs, and I had to get a whole battery of shots.
I have several vaccination scars on my body, and I developed a lifelong fear of needles, as a result of the giant horse needles they used for the thick sludge they'd jab me with (which left me feeling like I'd lost a fistfight with a gorilla).
When I got my COVID vaccination shots, I didn't even feel it, as the needle was so tiny.
Historically, mandated vaccines weren't mandated before we knew they were safe longer-term. We're still awaiting FDA approval for a majority of the available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in the US, yet many folks would be mandated to receive one.
Many folks will see this as being mandated to be a test subject, which is why there has been substantial legal pushback against the mandate less than 24 hours after Biden announced it.
I'm not in the US so I can't speak for y'all, but the regulation isn't a bad thing.
While you might not be affected personally, because you've been successful, it's better for the government to have your back than it is to entrust it to the free market. There's a hell of a lot of misery because the gov. doesn't step in enough, doesn't take care of its citizens.
This was learned the hard way in 1929 and, for whatever reason, was quickly forgotten.
That said, I can see why it's undesirable to some.
I don't see how the gov't respond to an economical crisis has anything to do with modern authoritarianism. Regulation without oversight and checks and balances does lead to tiranny, more often than it doesn't
Of course, but I'd contend that regulation without oversight/checks and balances is tautological. Regulation in and of itself is the oversight, or the check and balance, and that responsibility is delegated to a specialised agency or department (that has a longer term scope than a single election cycle) rather than being directly managed by the administration in office at the time.
An authoritarian regime isn't going to spin up a bureaucracy like that to do regulation-without-oversight, it's just going to lower its boot onto the population's collective face. You can hardly call that regulation.
Perhaps we're just debating semantics here, but I think there's a distinction between regulating corporate behaviour (you must do X Y Z if you want to run a business in this country, for reasons A B C) and introducing a totalitarian regime (you must do X Y Z because I said so).
The US legislature has the right to regulate commerce in the US according to the US Constitution. Healthcare of workers and the overall impact of covid are two things directly affecting the economy.
The legislature already has the former of these covered by the creation of OSHA in the 1970s. OSHA is a regulatory agency under the Department of Labor, which is part of the executive cabinet.
The executive is now using these powers granted by the legislature to ensure workers are protected in their work environments.
How is this different from requiring hard hats? A hard hat won’t save you from getting a cut on your head from a dropped hammer but it will save you from having it break your head in two. Should OSHA stop requiring PPE?
Great point, thank you for letting me know a hard hat isn't a medical procedure. If my aunt had wheels, she'd be a tea cart. I'm sure I can find someone who died BECAUSE they were wearing protective head PPE - a hat strap got caught and strangled them, whatever.
The more important point that you ignore is people are horrible at weighing relative risk. You're obviously intelligent and aware of the biases inherent in judging vaccination risk. I'm sure you know crossing the street is far more risky. There is a consistent pattern of unvaccinated, dying covid patients claiming they underestimated the risk of the illness and wish they had gotten vaccinated. People are literally unable to make that choice for themselves. There's proof.
What's the point of "freedom" if we're all stuck in our houses hiding from variant after variant because we refuse to acknowledge that our government needs to make a decision that will save lives [1] when our actual survival is at risk.
Yeah, I suppose deaths are always possible from anything. You could give out a million lollipops and someone would choke. Someone has probably had an infection just from the needle itself.
“The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database contains information on *unverified* reports of adverse events (illnesses, health problems and/or symptoms) following immunization with US-licensed vaccines. *Reports are accepted from anyone*…”
Ignoring that VAERS is unverified data, and taking that 45k as "all these people died directly due to the vaccine", it's still only 45k out of 378M doses administered - 0.012%.
(For comparison, 2021 has 31k gun deaths[1] through September and 21.5k road deaths through the first 6 months.)
It also says "The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event."
Also, on the download page, "However, in general coding terms in VAERS do not change based on the information received during the follow-up process. VAERS data should be used with caution as numbers and conditions do not reflect data collected during follow-up."
Which is just different ways of saying "this data is probably unreliable", no?
That's interesting, my very official competing VAERS shows that the vaccine has caused several thousand people to have spontaneously come into existence! I welcome you to submit your data, as I accept any reports from anyone regardless of political axe to grind.
Indeed. You should read some of these reports. It sounds like you haven’t.
If someone gets the vaccine and dies the next day, sure it is very possible it is not the cause. But it should be reported. And when many people have the same symptoms after a vaccine, it becomes a common side effect.
Asbestos fire-proofing made a substantial difference. We did not - in fact - go from "Let's make things fire-proof with asbestos" to "Eh, asbestos is bad, guess everything will burn down instead" but instead moved to fire-proofing with new materials in countries that could afford to do that.
Lots of older buildings have asbestos that's preventing fires and won't cause noticeable harm so long as it's undisturbed. The fibres are a problem, but a sheet of material under a layer of plaster isn't breaking off fibres that can get into your lungs. If your job is to rip out plaster and re-model buildings then that's a huge problem, but if you just live in a building you're getting much more benefit from it not catching fire than you'd get from very minutely reducing your risk of lung damage from asbestos.
In fact even for a brand new building, although it's banned in some places, "Let's use asbestos" makes more sense than "Eh, so what if it burns down and a few dozen people die", so if those are the available choices you should go with asbestos.
So it is with the available COVID-19 vaccines. SARS-CoV-2 is very dangerous and, outside of New Zealand and a handful of Pacific islands, widespread, so you're just way more likely to get very sick or die as a result of not being vaccinated than suffer a serious side effect, known or hypothetical.
I am required to wear (chemical-infused) flame retardant clothing on oil and gas wells. Some people have to work despite the chemicals rubbing their skin all day.
I’m not so inclined to agree at this stage, and I’m a hawk when it comes to this kind of thing. (A few days ago I was downvoted for criticizing the Colorado pay transparency law as an overreach).
This is certainly the best way to keep workers safe during a pandemic and given the information we have on the Pfizer vaccine — billions of doses given, 1.5 years of watching for adverse long term effects, full FDA approval — this move strikes me as appropriate for OSHA. OSHA requirements are supposed to be aggressively protective of the worker.
Since the only person who answered properly was (correctly) flagged and banned, I'll answer your rhetorical question as accurately as I can:
Italian Fascism promoted a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in associations to collectively represent the nation's economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.[0]
I want to point out this is not a dupe of the "Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers" thread. This thread is talking about private employers with 100 or more employees; not necessarily federal employees.
It's the same announcement and therefore the same story. The titles picked different details to emphasize. Of course that affected the threads considerably, which is why I didn't merge them.
The private employer story is much more impactful/news-worthy IMO than a federal employee mandate. Also the whitehouse.gov link seems more authoritative than NPRs coverage of it.
I understand the need to keep flamewars down, but hiding this thread doesn't feel right to me. Just my 2 cents.
I agree - that's why we turned the flamewar detector off and unhid this thread. I probably should have added that to my comment above; I think I assumed everyone reading this would see that it was back on the front page.
I'd originally commented when it was still pretty new and went back to find it on the frontpage and didn't see it. That's when I originally replied to you. I see it high ranked again.
Could you please stop creating accounts to post like this to HN?
I'm sure you have good reason to feel strongly, but when you post like this, you're just discrediting your own position. That doesn't help you, and it hurts the people who agree with you.
IMO there is only one argument for not dropping all restrictions and a complete return to normalcy, it's "what about the children?"
Here is their BS response:
"The FDA is undergoing a process now to evaluate a vaccine for children under the age of 12, and under the President’s plan, the Administration will do whatever it takes to support those efforts, while continuing to respect and defer to the scientific decision-making of the agency."
I feel like our entire society has been held hostage by the FDA. I think a bold plan to completely get rid of the FDA would have been more appropriate. Just dismantle the whole organization. It's too broken to fix.
Figuring out if the vaccine is safe for children under 12 takes a maximum of 8 weeks (1 week to administer, 6 weeks to watch, 1 week to organize results).
It's been 4 weeks since the association of pediatric doctors reviewed the data and begged the FDA to lift the ban.
It has been well over a year now since phase II safety results were in from adults. It's been many months.
I don't understand why there isn't a wide, bipartisan push to remove the FDA from our lives. Multiple presidents, multiple heads, all a complete and total catastrophe.
> I don't understand why there isn't a wide, bipartisan push to remove the FDA from our lives.
Don't understand, or feel contempt based on ideology without understanding? Even if you disagree with how the FDA has handled COVID vaccines - largely in the face of pressure and infiltration by an administration sharply opposed to any regulatory mission - there are many other things that it does. Would you forego all FDA oversight of food, drugs (not just vaccines), medical devices, and radiation-emitting products? Throw that all into the courts, which can never address a harm until after the fact and even in those cases is even less equipped to handle the issues under FDA's mandate?
People who've done at least minimal diligence can certainly disagree with some of the things FDA does. There's plenty of room for that, but "fail to understand" why others don't share your spitting hatred of the agency as a whole? Sorry, but that's not even a position that deserves to be taken seriously.
There's also the reason that dropping all restrictions means hospitals become overwhelmed (which we are currently seeing in some parts of the country). This means that quality of emergency medical care is potentially severely compromised for both Covid and non-Covid patients, and it means that non-emergency medical care must be postponed (and just because it's non-emergency doesn't mean there aren't negative consequences of postponing it).
Nature.com doesn't agree with you. At least in 2019 it wasn't controversial to say so:
"Because mRNA falls into the broad vaccine category of genetic immunogens, many of the guiding principles that have been defined for DNA vaccines (162) and gene therapy vectors (163,164) can likely be applied to mRNA with some adaptations to reflect the unique features of mRNA." [0]
And still in 2021, Nature.com felt they were gene therapies:
"However, these mRNA vaccines, which have been developed and approved within a few months, signify a breakthrough in the field of gene therapy, which has battled to achieve ordinary acknowledgement due to a large number of sceptical and conservative scientists and other claimed safety and translational concerns."[1]
And the FDA disagrees with that definition of gene therapy:
"Gene therapy is a technique that modifies a person’s genes to treat or cure disease. Gene therapies can work by several mechanisms:
Replacing a disease-causing gene with a healthy copy of the gene
Inactivating a disease-causing gene that is not functioning properly
Introducing a new or modified gene into the body to help treat a disease" [1]
Yes there are competing definitions. However the important part of the grandparent remains unchanged. mRNA are extremely unlikely to modify genetic information of your body.
Biden: Monoclonal antibodies have been shown to reduce hospitalization of UNVACCINATED covid patients by 70%
Also Biden, in the same speech: We're gonna force everyone we can get away with forcing to take a shot still under emergency use authorization that is only supposed to be valid if there is NO other viable treatment.
The Covid monoclonals are also only available under EUAs.
And no one is being strapped down and vaccinated, some consequences are being imposed for some choices. For instance, for workers at larger companies that don't get vaccinated, there is an expectation that the employer will check weekly for negative test results.
I reluctantly support this. I also think a bunch of companies that have many/most employees who can work from home were hoping that they could get through this without widespread mandates given that the reluctant mostly didn’t have to come into the office or customer sites.
If they can safely work from home this is clearly not an occupational safety and health issue and osha doesn't have any business getting involved. So this is either clearly an overreach or osha was just the vector biden used to exert power he didn't have on his own.
I don’t even completely disagree. But his objective is to get more people vaccinated and most large employers will be happy to go along. It’s at most a minor nuisance for them to fire people who refuse to comply. Especially if the execs agree with the goals. HR will have zero patience for a conversation about how the rules shouldn’t apply.
This doesn't go far enough. I think that state governments need to start mandating vaccinations for all eligible citizens. Such mandates are clearly constitutional and have a great deal of historical precedent (see Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld vaccine mandates in 1905).
That case was against a law and not against an executive order. I'm tired of presidents ruling by decree - this should stop long time ago but it's getting worse with every president.
The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water here. I think we can look at the facts - 700,000 people dead, hospitals overwhelmed, countless people injured or disabled from COVID, and no end in sight - and decide that a strong mandate makes sense here, and that a mandate won't make sense in future cases.
The "government is always bad, personal choice should always win" mindset runs deep in this country unfortunately, and from what I can see, it's often based in nothing other than veiled conservatism and a preference for division and anti-cooperativeness.
Above all else, this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.