I know people who travel regularly and no one says anything to them. No quarantine, nothing. Most people on the streets here in Germany give zero fucks, groups of 5-10, no masks (even though there's a curfew between 10pm-5am due to an increase in cases).
And I traveled all the way from Moldova to Germany by car. No one, and I mean no one ever asked for a Covid test (which I had, of course, along with a positive antibodies test). Border guards, Hungarian border patrol, German Zoll, regular Romanian and German police, they cared about what's in the bags, didn't even mention Covid.
Hungarian border guards wanted to see a German work contract for whatever asinine reason, but I repeat, none of them ever asked for a Covid test or to at least keep the mask on (they need to see your face when checking the passport).
Whatever bureaucratic stumbling blocks there are, they have nothing to do with reality, it seems.
I've traveled 2 times now by air from NYC -> London during Covid.
Last year, a 14 day quarantine on both sides, and on the NYC side, a phone call everyday to make sure I was quarantining.
This year on the London side, a 10 day quarantine, 1 negative test before flying, and 2 at home tests while quarantining, with a phone call everyday to confirm. I also got hassled at the airport because I didn't print out the day 2 and 8 receipt, just included the code on my passenger locator form under penalty of perjury.
So, the UK by air does care I suspect because of the increased exposure risk.
I traveled in the opposite direction (more or less: Vienna to Bucarest) more than 3 months ago and wasn't asked either, but on the Hungary-Romania border, they put me in a tiny room (1/3 shipping container or so) with ca. 10 people and gave me quarantine papers. They didn't check bags.
I'm pretty sure they'd check for a test or vaccination now on the way back, I'm not eager to find out and will stay here in the Covid exile for a little longer.
The travel pass is a horrible idea, that effectively will force many to be vaccinated.
That should not be the european way.
> ... that effectively will force many to be vaccinated.
Yup, that’s the point.
No man is an island. You already can’t walk around doing literally whatever you want just because it’s your body you’re doing it with. You depend on other people, and other people depend on you (or at least can’t avoid intermingling with you, especially if you decide to travel internationally). Those who don’t get vaccinated slow down our recovery from the pandemic, putting other people’s health and lives at risk. Society has to make these trade-offs, and this one seems very reasonable to me.
I'm pretty much a high-modernist when it comes to vaccines - I think that having governments build sewage and create vaccines go into the same category of "damn useful for civilization". But it does involve curtailing liberties, and I just can't put it in a "fell good" category.
Requiring vaccination is "curtailing liberties".
Restricting movement due not being vaccinated is "curtailing liberties".
No shit. One can either be part of society or not. Society has minimum requirements if one wants to participate. One is free—exercise their liberty—to live as a hermit if they don't want to do either of these things. That's the price of admission of getting the benefits, whatever they may be, of interacting with other people. Added bonus, the rest of us don't need to hear about hermits complaining about their liberties then too.
Building sewage management infrastructure is not curtailing liberties. There is very little noise made about having to give up liberties because of the majority of other public works. Civilization decided that shitting on the sidewalk is not something that should be encouraged or condoned, so here we are with our sewage management infrastructure. We gain the freedom of not having to dig a hole and maintain an outhouse.
No one is giving up any "liberties" by getting vaccinated, but it's more likely they are acquiring liberties by getting vaccinated. At the very least it's the liberty of reducing the risk of dying.
This is all a "I don't want to do what you said I should do purely because you said it". Fine. The rest of us are at liberty to exclude or chastise these people.
This is exactly the kind of tone and comment I was speaking against. I am _pro_ vaccinations, I am _pro_ making them soft-mandatory, I was even pro other restrictions back before vaccines. All I said, in a rather moderate tone, is that I disagree with being happy about the downsides. Somehow in the kind of comments I'm speaking against, yours included, I don't see happiness that we're getting vaccinated per se. I don't see "yey, poeple won't be dying any more". I see a lot of "chastise these people".
I also see quite a lot of scare quotes and misrepresentation. I didn't say sewage was a restriction - I gave it as positive example. I didn't say (WHO would even say that?) that getting a vaccine is giving up liberties. That's stupid, really, it doesn't even make sense. I will say that not being able to do stuff without being vaccinated is a restriction. A worthy one, yes, and one I totally agree with, but by god, how can you even try to spin ... I'm not even sure what you're trying to spin, because the more I read your comment the more I realize it's just appeal to emotion and void of content.
Are you free to rant against categories of people? Yes. I just said it's not a nice thing to do, is all.
As a person waiting to get his booster shot next week, I find this quite concerning. Those liberties we had and were taken away from us. Nobody cares about people dying. I am sitting now next to my mom who 1 month ago was diagnosed with terminal secondary cancer after all her check-ups were cancelled last year. So yeah, nobody gives a damn about anything else than seeming virtuos and better than others online. But no one cares any more about any other diseases or other people that are suffering, it’s all social signaling for the rich and well off people to show how moral they are, all while their lifestyle is supported by those that can’t afford to have any liberties.
It's not about saving lifes, it's about getting re-elected.
You make it sound as if there is a fixed, god given set of rules for society. That's not the case. Societies rules are constantly being negotiated by society.
So your argument is not an argument at all. It boils down to "you have to follow the rules because you have to follow the rules".
I think society has opinions and ideas that evolve into ethics and morals that are represented in laws.
It’s not a secret. In this case, rights are curtailed to require vaccines. This is deemed acceptable. If you don’t like it, convince your country mates to change their mind. Or move to a country that feels differently. Or move to the wilderness.
I think it also varies from country to country as it varies quite a bit.
But negotiation often isn't occurring in good faith. There's way too much flat-earth- holocaust-denial- style arguments from those who "just don't want to be told what to do". Getting vaccinated doesn't take away someone's liberties; "I don't want to be told what to do" is not an argument against vaccination. Many of these people are just making noise, and it's getting old.
I'm not saying there aren't good arguments for not getting vaccinated, but it falls flat when those same people got vaccinated in order to attend public school or have state issued IDs or use passports or will bitch about a loved one dying because they failed to get vaccinated.
> There's way too much flat-earth- holocaust-denial- style arguments from those who "just don't want to be told what to do".
This is how you want the discourse to look like? Somebody puts an argument, and gets labeled flat earther.
Do you know Gell Mann amnesia? I shared an article the other day on facebook and got it flagged as "out of context". As it happens, it was something not out of context, just slightly against the mainstream. What do you think this did to my confidence in the mainstream?
And before you say that my article must have been wrong, let me remind you that the mainstream was against wearing masks 12 months ago. Hell, CDC was against wearing ffp2 masks... I don't know, 3 months ago?
Civil discourse and tone are much more important long term than just winning conversation points. Sure, go for points if you want. But every time you say things like "flat earth", you take a small chip out of the boat we're all in.
This style of dialogue is not welcome here. Try Reddit.
Let's try and keep it that way.
One dose of the Pfizer vaccine costs €16, while AstraZeneca's is less than €3. This is affordable by any measure.
The cost of Pfizer is a lot more than the per shot cost, you need highly specialised storage and distribution due to the low temperature requirements.
Before mixing, the vaccine may be stored in an ultra-cold freezer between -80°C and -60°C (-112°F and -76°F). Vaccine may be stored until the expiration date.
Before mixing, the vaccine may be stored in the freezer between -25°C and -15°C (-13°F to 5°F) for up to 2 weeks. The total time vials are stored at these temperatures should be tracked and should not exceed 2 weeks.
So once they reach their destination they can be put in a normal freezer, which in turn are abundant and cheap.
It's not a negligible cost but it's far from highly specialized.
I had Astra, so did several people from my social circle. Hell, some took JJ being aware of its level of effectiveness.
The vaccines need to be stored at a low temperature - that's it. I doubt it adds more than €1 to the price.
FWIW, it is not feasible to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 anyway since it can survive in certain types of animals as well. All the germs we eradicated thus far were limited to human hosts.
(Source: A German podcast that interviews professors of virology every week.)
Society already excludes many people due to expensive housing, education etc... Living as hermit in a van is not that bad. But society should not expect taxes from excluded people :)
Looking at social media it feels like too many people are celebrating because they've been given another opportunity to show how virtuous they are. They're not one of those people that oppose vaccines and progress, oh no. The clout associated with putting up pictures of you with a needle in your arm is probably the most off-putting thing I'd gotten to gawk at.
My assessment is similar to yours. The situation just kinda is. We've had a novel viral agent, what followed is what you'd expect of a society that optimised for lack of novel viral agents. Now the viral agent is mostly gone and we have two new taxes to show for it: further encumberement of civil liberties and more revenue for the pharmaceutical industry.
It's not a bad result but there's no big win to point at either
It contained a few key words/ideas, so it became immediately polarized. I guess given enough years we'll become inoculated against such failure modes, but meanwhile, it is what it is.
If you don’t want to be vaccinated or pay your taxes, you are, on some level, a danger to society.
Isn't is possible for someone to stab you? So in theory you could have some small degree of worry about your safety. Different people have different places they draw the line for an acceptable amount of worry vs an acceptable amount of freedom restrictions.
In (most of) the EU, it’s illegal to carry a weapon of any kind unless you have a reason to do so (ie, going hunting). You can’t even carry pepper spray.
To take it to the extreme, the law could force you to live in a little cell locked away from everyone. This would prevent you from being stabbed by someone else (except one of the guards).
Like I said, there's a tradeoff between security and freedom.
(As opposed to gun control.)
Use of it should constitute assault, which gets turned into legitimate self defense in various situations, just as if you were hitting someone.
Some of those bans and laws are just reasons to jail or fine people and do not in particular help with safety. After all, anyone can have a knife or martial arts on them anywhere for legitimate reasons, and you better have means to defend against these.
Also, I bet you're vaccinated against polio. Do people feel their freedom has been limited because of being vaccinated against polio?
I don't understand.
If we know that people who recovered from covid are effectively as if they were vaccinated, why do they have to wait until they have the privilege to be in the lucky age group to receive the vaccine before they can go visit a loved one they don't see for more than one year?
Are you assuming that everyone in the world is living in a privileged country where people as young as 30 can already access vaccines?
I read a lot from Americans complaining how bad their country was and all that, but hey, all my American coworkers got vaccinated and I can't visit my mom in Switzerland because she aged 68 just got her first shot yesterday. That's right, Switzerland not some third world country. Switzerland with all its pharma industry can't get the same vaccine production capacity and rollout throughput as your "utterly unorganized federal state that totally botched covid", as I often read Americans.
This is about what other countries want to restrict in terms of non-citizen's entering the country without isolation.
These are countries which have had a significant portion of their economy shut down for more than a year, so unsurprisingly they might want to ensure non-citizens who travel in have done something to limit the risk (even if that is isolating for 2 weeks).
You may say "ok, we don't have yet the beurocratic apparatus to accept natural immunity in our protocols and for the time being we're going to focus on vaccinated people, sorry".
You may not say "we want to force you to vaccinate, that's the whole point, duh"
That's a dangerous attitude. It feeds vaccine skeptics or denialists, who use this attitude as a proof that there is as much dogma in the "official scientific community" who are in big pharma's pockets. They are a bunch of nuts, but they are infecting otherwise reasonable people I know all around me.
Let's avoid setting up official policies and discourse tones which effective feed the trolls.
They are only going to let people in they want, and they don't want people who could spread the virus, or bring it in.
Besides they are allowing people in with natural immunity too - as defined by a positive antibody test.
(But it should be noted that many states are not doing as well)
There are also many diverse ways the individual states have handled restrictions, it will be interesting to see if some consensus will be reached regarding keeping restrictions or not.
My family is vaccinated, but I don't see why this should be forced on people. Anaphylaxis and Thrombosis are rare reported conditions after vaccination - some even causing deaths. Vaccination should be a choice.
"An unvaccinated worker set off an outbreak at a U.S. nursing home where most residents were immunized." One vaccinated resident died.
https://www.businessinsider.com/kentucky-nursing-home-unvacc...
Some takeaways:
* Elderly, especially with underlying illnesses should be vaccinated.
* One vaccinated elderly person died, though there are not many details in the article.
* 90% or 74 out of 83 residents were vaccinated.
However, getting vaccinated should also help reduce the transmission of the disease to people who haven't yet had a chance to get a vaccination even though they could; the pandemic will end faster than if you let it run its natural course.
There may be a few people who can not be vaccinated (old and very sick), but it hardly seems appropriate to restrict billions of people just to protect those few. It would be more efficient to isolate them, which most of them probably already are (in care homes or hospitals).
Requiring certain vaccines for travel has been something that has existed for decades and was never controversial.
Also the comparison with other vaccines does not automatically make sense. All vaccines are not the same. At least in my country, so far recommendations for vaccinations had been "conservative" to only vaccinate against things that seem especially risky. There is a reason why people are not simply being vaccinated against all possible diseases.
We mandate that people take all kinds of minor risks in life; that’s always been part of being in a society.
The reason vaccine advice is conservative is because anti-intellectualism and belief in conspiracy theories has gone off the charts and politicians now have to coddle these people. It’s a collective mental illness.
Scale and proportion is the reason. 7 per 1,000,000 risk of blood clotting if you are a woman between 18-49 (and basically no risk if you're a man or outside that range, or use one of the vaccines that have not shown this risk). This is on the level of shark attacks and getting hit by lightning. Actually getting COVID has more serious risks and a much higher rate of being affected by them.
We regularly ask of citizens to do things that have a 7 per 1,000,000 risk of injury; it's a reasonable ask.
What other risky things to we ask citizens to do, exactly? People certainly choose to do other risky things. But how many are mandated?
Anyway, I'm done feeding a troll account created today.
Well then good news, COVID-19 is "especially risky".
In any case, yes, both disease and vaccination have risks, that should be weighed against each other. Matters are complicated because risks differ among different age groups.
Good. It’s not like a concentration camp. There are other options if you don’t want to vaccinate.
You can just stay at home (I’ve been declined Schengen visa in the past for no reason), you can get PCR-tested. You also can get ill with Covid and then recover (hopefully).
>(CBS) — The largest biotech firm in the world wasted no time in offering to build and run COVID testing labs in Washington, contacting its governor right after the first major COVID outbreak in the U.S. occurred there. The Chinese company, the BGI Group, made the same offer to at least five other states, including New York and California, 60 Minutes has learned. This, along with other COVID testing offers by BGI, so worried Bill Evanina, then the country’s top counterintelligence officer, that he authorized a rare public warning. “Foreign powers can collect, store and exploit biometric information from COVID tests” declared the notice. Evanina believes the Chinese are trying to collect Americans’ DNA to win a race to control the world’s biodata.
https://www.klfy.com/national/u-s-intelligence-officials-say...
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bill-gates-china-23m...
>China's push to control Americans' health care future: U.S. officials say the Chinese government is trying to collect Americans' DNA, and they believe a recent offer from a Chinese company for assistance in COVID-19 testing was suspicious. Jon Wertheim reports.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biodata-dna-china-collection-60...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/02/china-bgi...
If you’re afraid of getting your DNA sequenced while doing PCR test, please read up on the process of test, equipment, materials and costs involved.
>"I haven't bothered to read, but I'm dismissing it as a conspiracy theory"
I hope you can appreciate the problems with that reasoning.
Yes, there are costs involved in data collection. If the data is valuable, organizations will foot those costs. We've seen this in the tech sphere. Why is it hard to imagine it in the health/biosecurity realm?
We are attempting to discuss the topic. Dismissing the speaker out of hand because he sounds a certain way isn't helpful. Similarly, dismissing an article because it "sounds like conspiracy theory" isn't helpful.
There's a bit irony there.
I ask this as I understand your concern about politics forcing personal decisions, yet I am not finding a pragmatic workable solution to the current crisis.
As far as I can see the vaccination rhythm is decreasing in some countries and it is not even approaching 50% of population. It might be because of the back and forth with Astra Zeneca the EU did or it might be because EU is pretty big as in diverse with respect of culture, set of beliefs, approach to health …
Anyhow everyone is demanding EU to do something so their response will not be “wait so that everybody wants to be vaccinated”. Also because being that big means that heard immunity will not be reached.
At least in Italy, movement was restricted inside regions (sometimes provinces) of the same country due to the epidemy.
It's not nice for anyone involved, but the primary goal is to stop/limit the contagion. I'm an expat, so it goes against one of my interests, but I'm in favor of limiting border crossings, unless you can show that you won't spread COVID around.
So I think in this case (we are in a global pandemic) it makes sense to see freedom of movement not in a binary way (yes/no) but more in shades: allow more movement of more people as we get better at containing the pandemic.
Also please note EU is not a federal state, nor many of the founding members want that to be. So countries have a lot of power to decide how to handle pandemic. Still I think EU as a block did a good job negotiating vaccines in the context of not having a unity or a fast decision process.
So while I don't agree with restricting rights, I also don't agree with restricting rights of people who can move (like the ones vaccinated or immunised naturally) just because everybody cannot do it (cannot get vaccinated for personal or medical reasons).
And "random" it might be as much as 50% of the passing cars.
You can use UK to gauge how the Covid situation will become and i dont think anyone will say there is a crisis now. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
This isn't rocket science. I don't know where people get this idea that international travel was some kind of libertarian utopia before covid. There are a lot of things that restrict your ability to travel, and vaccinations are one of the least problematic.
You are obviously not referring to the EU, where, within Schengen, international travel was a libertarian utopia and one of the main reasons this bureaucratic construct had so many supporters despite the downsides.
For, and only for, EU citizens. Which is a good start at utopianising travel, but not complete.
Seems like you had to follow rules regulations when travelling before, so explain to me what is the exact difference now?
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/designated-civil-surgeons/vaccin...
Immigration to the U.S. is of course, a regulated activity. They can make you take a physical, pay a fee, inspect your background, call your mom and make sure you're a good person, etc, before accepting you as an immigrant. Sure. There's no limits to that, because there's no U.S. Constitutional protection for non-U.S. citizens and immigration can be stopped altogether if desired (assuming it's enforced).
The fourteenth amendment plainly says “people” not citizens. There are others, but this is the most obvious one.
> nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
But this kind of arguments are precisely the point when it comes to concern about precedents. It becomes less of a barrier to adding new rules just because the law already has vaguely similar rules.
https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/networks/europe...
All rights have limitations of course.
If you don’t want to take measures to protect others, you can sit home for a while. It won’t kill you, and it won’t kill the people around you.
How is limiting state power during a particular emergency situation a terrible precedent? The state can always grab more power at a later emergency, as history has shown. The difficult task is getting them to give up power once it is no longer needed for the emergency.
There is even a ECHR decision to this effect.
Or are you arguing that the vaccines don't work?
You must be trolling, no way you're so self-centered.
"I like to drive with 200km/h through cities, those who don't like it or are scared of my driving can stay home"
"I like to take my aggressive pitbull for a walk without a leash, if you don't like it you can stay home"
"I like to play with guns, if you don't like me handling guns in public you can stay home"
It's all recklessness, and of course not acceptable. You know what's the better solution for those 100 vaccinated people? To force you to stay at home. Because they're 100, and you're 1. It's not the whole world that needs to adapt to you, it's the other way around.
Self-centered? The people demanding the nonvaccinated cease existing in society because of their fears are the selfish ones. I'm saying nothing about anyone else's choices or activities whatsoever. Restricting someone else's behavior and bodily autonomy is the selfish act.
100 people forcibly removing 1 person from society who has done nothing wrong? That's a concentration camp. This is mob rule, you're just okay with it because you're part of the mob.
If it bothers enough people, you can't do it. Call it law, call it mob rule, call it whatever you wish - it's just how the world works.
And the 100 vs 1 argument is very poorly thought out; we have just had a year of people shut in their homes for the sake of the few who were at risk. For the argument to suddenly swing on its axis, it would strongly suggest an authoritarian thrilled at the opportunity to exercise their will on others.
Your right to not be vaccinated does not trump public health concerns, or shouldn't.
Note however that we still don't know exactly what long-term consequences Covid19 may have, so even with this, if we can avoid infecting young children, we should.
Is it? Far fewer of them still will get severe symptoms. And this of course requires the unvaccinated person to actually be infected. From what I read, my risk (of at least an unpleasant time) is worse if that person had some other virus instead, since I'm much more likely to catch it and guaranteed to have unpleasant symptoms if so. At some point there needs to be a cutoff in risk level where it's low enough for a free society.
A bigger concern in my mind is that as long as the virus is spreading it is mutating, potentially becoming dangerous again to the vaccinated too. But this seems to be increasingly not likely with this particular category of viruses.
Agree, let's not be reckless–restricting movement for public health only has over seven hundred years of precedent [1].
From the linked article:
>For travellers who have recovered from the virus: date of the positive test result, an issuer of the certificate, date of issuance, validity date
EU Travel Pass doesn't care about your antibodies.
Hmm, you are right :(
The rules are still evolving. They will need to care, since the people who recovered after a positive test are much fewer than people who recovered without being tested.
From https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
> The period of relevance of certificates depends on scientific evidence and will be determined by the verifiers following their national rules. As new scientific evidence is emerging, the periods for which certificates are relevant for waiver of applicable public health requirements could be adjusted ...The regulation also introduces some basic principles, for example, setting the maximum validity period of the certificate of recovery at 180 days. These principles could be adjusted by the Commission through delegated acts to align with new scientific evidence once it is available.
Going strictly by the text above, what would happen to the recovered people after 180 days? If they have immunity they cannot get another positive test, so no recovery certificate and no travel? Or if you already recovered more than 6 months ago, you cannot travel?
It will come down to some metric of immunity, which is apparently "TBD" but will almost immediately be a concern, as all stakeholders look more closely at the rules, logic and implications.
The EU and many western governments are not dictatorships, relying on human judgement to enforce policy. If proposed policies fail basic checks of reason and fairness, humans at border checkpoints can exercise judgement. If and when policy makers find their policy is not enforceable, they can improve the policy until it is supported by science, citizens and enforcers.
The travel industry expects these passes to bring their customers back. They will not sit quietly while their recovered/immune customers are blocked by incompetent bureaucracy from spending money across the EU, without a substantive scientific case.
At most, they could insist that recovered people continue to get PCR tested: either you're negative and free to travel, or it will be a false positive, then you wait two (?) weeks and get a magical DHCP lease for 6-month "recovery certificate".
That would equate to a PCR-test industry tax on travel, which opens up several avenues for legal/policy challenge, e.g. test types, costs, subsidies, profit margins, supply chain ownership, benefits, numerical parameters, equipment calibration, performance (false positives/negatives).
Ludicrous rules don't punish people (who find workarounds), they decrease state power and credibility, reducing compliance with other, sensible, regulations. Sanity will eventually prevail, as long as citizens hold all policy proposals to high standards of transparency, reason and science.
Airplanes and hotels and tourist-destination cities want their customers back, and they will advocate on their behalf. The key is to avoid fights about specific interventions (like decade-old vaccines) and focus on laws (including liability) developed over centuries, and immune systems battle-tested even longer than laws.
With billions of dollars at stake on multiple sides of proposed policy, there is sufficient financial incentive to study very closely the mechanisms of both natural and artificial immunity.
Policy makers can selectively highlight or ignore science, but not forever. In the US, some early policies were overturned by later court rulings, as data became available for lawsuits.
I keep hearing this, but what power are they supposed to be consolidating, exactly?
I'm not allowed to shop at most stores in my neighborhood at the moment, but I'm allowed to buy from Amazon. Until recently I wasn't allowed to buy non essentials from family owned stores deemed non essential, but Walmart was still allowed to sell them.
> For travellers who have recovered from the virus: date of the positive test result, an issuer of the certificate, date of issuance, validity date
The bureaucratic stumbling block will be agreement on antibody and T-cell testing definitions across country borders.