Independent of the rest of your argument, this one is not a good one to hinge on.
"Excess death" is a pragmatic term, not a normative term. The baseline death statistics doesn't mean those deaths were OK, or natural and acceptable to endure. They include many peer to peer (e.g traffic accidents) or institution to peer (many "lifestyle" diseases') deaths too, which in themselves are also excess deaths in comparison to another baseline (e.g. obesity related deaths in comparison to 1960s).
These feeds back to the arguments of risk tolerance and freedoms; there is a mutually tolerated, implicit risk of peer-to-peer death in driving too. I am not saying this is comparable to the risk of death by covid (it is obviously not), but we can't make principled arguments of absolute safety nor absolute freedom without keeping things proportional to the risks and freedoms we're already been balancing.
> Basic human rights were not lost from the world by smallpox or other vaccination mandates.
If we're being anal about it, it is not entirely true. People have a right to keep the functional and structural integrity of their bodies; and even enhancing immunization would be a change in that, and that has an element of intrusiveness to it. Again, being a transmitter of the virus and harming other people's bodies is also a threat to the functional and structural organization of those bodies, and that is (very) intrusive too, but two things can be true at the same time, and therefore this is not the principle to argue from.
The honest argument would be accepting the need for striking a balance, accepting the sense of anxiety from both sides, and not pushing conclusions into people. We have to have people participate in the rationality of the decision making, from a place of empathy and growth.
I hope this is a moment we can also realize that just like public health is a shared resource and lack thereof is a shared liability, public rationality and sound decision making capability is also a shared resource and lack thereof is a shared liability. We've been turning a blind eye to all sorts of media training people to be more and more polarized, using shaming as a short-term compliance tool that has long-term stupefying consequences. Now we depend on all of us coming to our senses to survive this thing; we need a herd immunity against irrational self-deception just as much.
Fully aware of that. The reason I invoked them is to make the pragmatic point that those statistics alone and the correlated rise with covid should tell an analyst that risks associated with the virus aren't the same as "every other year they've been alive." That's a descriptive observation.
Of course, it also invites a normative judgment...
> If we're being anal about it, it is not entirely true.
It's essentially true, and this is important. There have been genuinely compulsory vaccinations in modern free societies... and these compulsions turned out not to be slippery slopes into totalitarian oppression, but the corner case that you'd expect from societies that, as you say, realize this isn't about "absolute safety nor absolute freedom," that both risks and rights can be qualified (and in fact, for rights to be meaningful at all, they must be qualified, since there are always cases where a right reaches a point of tension with another right).
And NY isn't even talking about genuine compulsory vaccination, it's proposing vaccination as a condition of participating in things that people can opt out of. It's not even as compulsory as a fine or paying your taxes or any number of other carrots/sticks that states regularly use to "push conclusions into people" because if you're going to have a society, you're going to blow past the limits of voluntarism at some point, as lovely as it is to try and maximize it within those limits.
> People have a right to keep the functional and structural integrity of their bodies
Yes, I anticipated that and you can see it in my comment where I refer to bodily autonomy. It's a good place to start, but like every other right it isn't unqualified.
What? I have never heard anything like that at all. Rights are absolute.
That sounds like it is coming from the "Sure free speech is fine, so long as it doesn't offend me," crowd.
it's proposing vaccination as a condition of participating in things that people can opt out of.
People here are generally highly attuned to one of the big surveillance ad corps trying to massage people into accepting some invasion of their personal sovereignty, how is this different? You think if something like this is accepted there won't be pushes to go further?
If this infrastructure is put in place, it will be abused, and it will coopted for other things.
Sure you have. It's embedded in the common phrase (invoked earlier) about the right to swing a fist ending at the edge of people's noses. Or in the oft-invoked expression about yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Or the frequent refrain about rights being paired with responsibilities.
> You think if something like this is accepted there won't be pushes to go further?
We don't have to "think" it, we can point to historic and present examples where like compulsory actions existed without devolving into totalitarianism because we have a society shaped by people who understood it's possible to have both substantial general protections and specific exceptions.
If there are, that should be the exceptions, rather than the norm.
Also, the parent asked if there won't be "pushes". So the implication is that there will be an overwhelming push in that direction, and very weak countering "pull" in the opposite direction.
And it is clear what direction it will ultimately go. So that is the danger in setting a precedent. So that further pushes in a "bad" direction will require much less effort, and only matter of time it is accepted to be the "new normal"..
So the idea that "it is clear what direction it will ultimately go" is... kinda correct, actually. It is clear that general autonomy can remain a valued principle with specific exceptions. It is clear that they are the exceptions rather than the norm. And that the pull in the other direction isn't weak.
Sure. It is the ever increasing number of "specific exceptions" that people should be worried about.
1A text: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." [0]
So is the right to the freedom of speech absolute? Not according to the body authorized to definitively interpret the law, the Supreme Court, which ruled that laws abridging the freedom to defame people through speech or press are constitutional.
Thus the right to the freedom of speech has limits and is not absolute.
"In United States constitutional law, false statements of fact are statements of fact (as opposed to points of law) that are false. Such statements are not always protected by the First Amendment. This is usually due to laws against defamation, that is making statements that harm the reputation of another." [1]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact
As an easy example: how do you reconcile that rights are absolute with the over-used “can’t shout fire in a theatre” case that curtails freedom of speech. Many would argue that rights must be qualified, or exist in relationship with each other. All of these are humanist arguments, mind you. Nobody is trying to throw human rights out with the humans.
Incorrect.
https://www.theusconstitution.org/news/there-are-no-absolute...
What are the odds that anyone is right about everything? We ought to be confident in our reasoned decisions, yes, but then not be surprised that someone else’s reasoned decisions disagree with our own.
Am I missing something? It seems to be clear for well over a year that "this thing" is not some existential threat that threatens our very survival. Why are people talking as if it is, and seeking to craft policy as if it is?
Personally, I believe that the global excess deaths figures will be bigger this year than last, due to all the developing world where vaccines are not available.
What do excess deaths of vaccinated people look like?
> "Basic human rights" may well not quite reach into unqualified access to "indoor dining, in indoor fitness facilities, indoor entertainment facilities."
This is disingenuous. Freedom of peaceful assembly is widely recognised as a basic right.
Who's doing this in a movie theater? It's clearly meant to protect public protests.
VAERS currently reports 11,000 deaths (50% in USA mainland) after Covid vaccines. VAERS only has a subset of data on vaccine adverse events, so the true number when private/HMO databases are included will be some multiple (5x to 100x) of the VAERS total, https://openvaers.com/. A German pathologist has estimated that 30% of post-vaccine deaths were caused by vaccination. We need more autopsies in other countries, along with earlier post-vaccine clinical observation, https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
> pathologists therefore worked with public prosecutors, the police and resident doctors, reports Schirmacher. More than 40 people have already been autopsied who died within two weeks of being vaccinated. Schirmacher estimates that 30 to 40 percent of them died from the vaccination. In his opinion, the frequency of fatal consequences of vaccinations is underestimated
Existing Covid vaccines are non-sterilizing, i.e. they do not prevent infection or transmission. In fact, because a non-sterilizing vaccine suppresses symptoms, an infected vaccinated person doesn't know to isolate (unless they get tested after exposure, as recommended by CDC) and can infect others. A non-vaccinated person would show symptoms and can self-isolate, ending the transmission chain.
Natural immunity is sterilizing, i.e. NYC essential workers who have already recovered from Covid are much better for public health than anyone vaccinated with a non-sterilizing Covid vaccine, https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/558757-the-ill-advise...
> During the pandemic, the professional laptop class protected themselves by working from home while exposing the working class that brought them food and other goods. It is now the height of hypocrisy to recognize immunity from vaccinations but not immunity from those exposed while serving the laptop class.
US Covid deaths peaked in early January, three months before US daily vaccines peaked in mid-April (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/us-daily-covid-vaccine-do...), and VAERS deaths peaked in March-April, https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?GRAPH=ON&GRO...
To put that number into context, you are 944 times more likely to die if you catch covid than if you get a vacine in the US. That's right the anti-vaxer take on the VAERS numbers say getting a vaccine is 1000 times better than not getting a covid vaccine. Even in the country with the lowest reported (0.1% which is not necessarily the actual) death rate per covid case you are 100x better off getting the vaccine.
https://medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?TABLE=ON&GROUP1=...
Big piece of the puzzle you are ommiting there.
In the US, over 300 million doses of covid-19 vaccines have been administered so far. Reported deaths of any cause (regardless of any established connection with the vaccine) among this group was on the order of 6000 people as of the end of July. [0]
US covid-19 cases are around 35 million and 600k deaths. How many of those were "young to not that old"? Well, one count[1] would put us at about 28k under 50, 10k under 40.
Let's be generous to the "vaccines are a threat to the young" position and assume for the sake of argument that ALL of the 6000 VAERS reported deaths were in fact caused by the vaccine and were ALL people under 40. Even making those assumptions, the order-of-magnitude difference in vaccination events vs infection events makes it utterly clear that covid itself is at least 10x more dangerous to people under 40 than receiving a vaccination is.
And if you dig into the adverse vaccine event specifics, my bet is that you find a pretty similar distribution of adverse effects -- sure, some of them are young people, just like some covid deaths are young people, but not most of them.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
People do work with numbers like "Years of Life Lost," and FWIW I think that can inform some conversations even though I don't think it helps much with this one. It is not the end-all-be-all, though. You could, for example, look at the social costs of losing the accumulated experience/wisdom/social capital of people over a certain age, which may be why some societies emphasize respect for the elderly.
Considering that we still don't know the long terms effect of the vaccine, I can understand that someone between 20 and 30 without comorbidities would think that it's reasonable to wait and see, especially if he's less at risk (lives in the countryside for example, remote work, things like that).
> You could, for example, look at the social costs of losing the accumulated experience/wisdom/social capital of people over a certain age, which may be why some societies emphasize respect for the elderly.
That's a good point. You could also add a different value for years depending on the age, as people often value their youth more. 1.5 years lost when you're in college or starting your first job is not the same as when you're in your 70s and retired.
Otherwise, you risk being lumped in with the multitude of bad takes made by people who misunderstand what VAERS is, and don't understand statistics.
> US Covid deaths peaked in early January, three months before US daily vaccines peaked in mid-April, and VAERS deaths peaked in March-April.
I find an April peak in VAERS deaths entirely unsurprising, since that's exactly when the rate of vaccination was highest.
If so, they've always had limits when it came to impacts on others. The freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of someone's nose
Whoa, you've got that horridly twisted.
It's not a human right to demand that others undergo a medical procedure for your own perceived interest. It's not a human right to demand others undergo a medical procedure, or be injected with something, because you've been told it will benefit you in some way. Every individual has complete choice and autonomy as to the medical procedures they undergo. That is the human right.
>Article 6 – Consent
1. Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31058&URL_DO=DO_TO...
The obvious good reason is you have one of the many pre-existing conditions that prevent you from getting the vaccine without causing yourself further risk of long term organ damage/failure caused by you previously taking other mandatory vaccines on a regular basis (healthcare workers, vasculitis is one such group of diseases common among the RN population - but what do they know, those front line workers with their anti-vaxx mumbo-jumbo).
The other obvious reason is another simple one - it seems its completely unnecessary for any relatively "healthy" person such as myself to worry about this virus. Our immune systems are designed for this battle, and based on the death rates, it seems despite the US population being very obese and largely unhealthy with a fairly high diabetes rate, we're somehow not dying in droves.
Third reason, vaccinations against every single little virus that comes along is effectively practicing negative selection. I think we all can assume where that leads especially with a leaky vaccine like this one - large scale true extinction event. We're breeding superbugs by vaccinating large scale populations, instead of small targeted vaccine administration.
Because if I put something in my body only because my master tells me to, I am a slave. Through and through. Bodily autonomy is absolute. It's different than the Modern American definition of slavery, which is mostly based on the New World forms of slavery, which are related to but different than the Old World forms of slavery. But they are all slavery. Either you have control of your corpus or you do not.
It is about me. A population is made up of individual people. Those individual people have rights. Given a choice of a population of X size who surrender the rights to govern their body, vs a population of free willed humans of (X - (00.03 * X)), I would gladly take the latter, including as a casualty. Humanity under authoritarianism is never morally acceptable, regardless of how benevolent my dictator appears to be.
From your comment:
> Because if I put something in my body only because my master tells me to, I am a slave.
So don't do it for that reason. Do it because it will save your (and other people's) life.
That's an entirely reasonable position to take.
How do you know he wasn't already infected and thus has natural immunity? So how is this saving her or his life?
Why aren't we testing for those who actually need this vaccine or not (because antibody tests don't work very well and no one wants to improve that metric because thats not where the money is)
Concern over long term effects of the spike protein presented by COVID-19, both attached to the virus and free-floating within my body as a result of mRNA therapy.
Concern over long term ability for my cells to accurately recreate the spike protein. From what I've read, this is actually low concern on my scale, the capping seems pretty thorough.
Concern over my body creating an immunoresponse to organs/nearby cells/systems where the spike protein has accumulated
Concern over my immune system being able to form a strong defense in the future over different coronaviruses when it's been trained to work outside it's normal operational parameters.
Concern over the hubris of mankind and the house of cards that is our trust in the peer review system.
Concern over the lack of experiment replication done in the modern medical fields
Concern over the fact that some of these companies have shady history, including knowingly selling me asbestos to keep my testicle dry during the summer heat.
Concern over the lack of transparency in the bridges between pharma lobbyists and government, politicians and media, and media and pharma corps.
Concern over the lack of transparency in more broader sense.
Concern over the obvious astroturfing on social media, of multiple "influencers" posting the same copy and pasted messages, the bot responses, the general fiscal funding behind this debate.
Concern over the future implications of us accepting, as a society, the weaponization of fear, and the saving graces of corporations.
Concern over our willingness to change our lives in drastic manners because of the justification that it may save a life, which I see as an endless justification opportunity for future world leaders.
Concern over turning fear into a virtue.
The country’s Health Ministry reported last week that the two-dose vaccine is now just 39% effective in Israel where the highly transmissible delta variant is the dominant strain. The shot still works very well in preventing people from getting seriously sick, Israeli officials said, demonstrating 88% effectiveness against hospitalization and 91% effectiveness against severe illness.[1]
So 88% effective against Delta-strain COVID causing hospitalization. That seems pretty good!
I think many people saying "look at Israel" are looking at the decreased effectiveness in stopping any symptoms against Delta-COVID and think that - disappointing - headline figure (39%) is the protection against hospitalisation rate. It's not, fortunately.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/delta-variant-israel-to-give...
It sure is! Once it has had a look at the virus to know to act against it.
That is literally what a vaccine is - a way to give your immune system an early look at a pathogen so it knows to act next time it sees it.
because of the nanoparticle adjuvant that enacpsulates the subunit? yeah that's been on the top of my mind too, but covaxin is a traditional inactivated virus and it confers 70+% efficacy. my question is, if a vaccine that is the same genetic material (maybe a little less, but not heavily modified like mrna or run through the moth/tree approach like novavax) then why are we ignoring those who were actually infected?
food for thought: long covid is H O R R I B L E, and that should be everyones reason to take a vaccine.. but if you don't want to, just be prepared to sit on the sidelines for a year or maybe more. once the pandemic, as defined by the government, ends then you are on your own. there is already less patience for those who need to take extended time from work for a covid positive result
Your anecdotal evidence from a friend isn't data.
Your link shows what exactly? That yes, the majority of people with Covid currently, and majority of hospitalized (severely ill other words) are fully vaccinated.
You seem to think this is bad or something? As the vaccine rate increases of course more patients will be vaccinated. If the vaccine rate was 100% then 100% of people seen would be vaccinated!
The number of people being hospitalised has decreased hugely though.
> Everyone (each company) that has worked on mRNA vaccines in the last 10 years+ are facing the same ethical dilemma, as all of the compounds have not been approved for human use.
Well this isn't true at all.
> I would stay with Sputnik or the Sino vaccines especially if you have a history of blood clots or genetic predisposition to heart conditions.
I don't know much about the Sino vaccine, but Sputnik is a adenovirus-based vaccine (the same as AstraZeneca). It probably has the same blood clotting issues as AZ, but the places it has been deployed have much less robust post vaccine medical surveillance.
But it's good you'd take it! I'd encourage you to do so ASAP.
The blood clots from AstraZeneca have not been thoroughly investigated - we don't know the pathways involved. By the way, the mRNA vaccines are producing many more blood clot calls into triage lines and offices than AZ (prolly because of slow rollout here).
>I'd encourage you to do so ASAP.
Why would you encourage me to do something my body doesn't need?
It's now clear that these injections do not have the efficacy of what has traditionally been termed a "vaccination," but they're definitely being marketed as a preventative, or therapeutic medical intervention.
Weird comment this one...
Eroding liberty by restricting free association would have certainly been considered a violation of rights by the folks that listed them in the Constitution.
In fact, they put it first.
Like when we put barbed wire up in Chinatown, San Francisco in 1900 after allowing all the white people to leave? [1]
Or when we incarcerated 30,000 women in WWI because they may be "unclean" and held them even after their mandatory STD tests came back negative? [1]
Or what we did to immigrant Russian Jews in 1892? [2]
Did you know that up until 2009 we banned HIV positive people from entering the U.S.? [2]
Yes, of course the U.S. has a long history of quarantine. We also have a long history of abusing those powers for racist and political reasons.
The PA Supreme Court, at least, agrees. [3]
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/10/30/3601204...
[2] https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/cure-worse-dise...
[3] https://www.alston.com/en/insights/publications/2020/09/cons...
I think you're misunderstanding the conversation. The thread is talking about the risk _to vaccinated people_. What excess death statistics are you thinking of that show a categorical increase in risk for those vaccinated?
There is a false equivalence here that freedom to opt-out of a commercial product, is excising one's freedom to "spread diseases".
To make it clear, would you want to pass a law that prevents someone with a genetic defect from marrying and having children? Because they would be "spreading" generic disorders, and by having offspring, they are "exercising their freedom to spread a genetic disorder", right?
You can say that any one that is not breathing through a mask is exercising their freedom to spread diseases, and so everyone should wear a mask all the time..
Basically, the point is there is a line where your right to be safe and the right of the rest of the world to exist in freedom is in balance. And arguments like the one that is being made is pushing that line to reduce the latter, and if we are not careful, the latter will be reasoned out, in the name of increasing the "protection" of the 0.01% of people from 95.02 to 95.03% (Just made up numbers to illustrate the point).
And it is not hard to imagine who benefits from it.
May be we need a "Citizen freedom index" for every country so that we will know when we are draining it.
Because if it is hard to improve what that cannot be measured, its hard to know when you are draining it as well..
The excess death statistics would like to have a word with you, but more importantly:
> If I ever become so afraid of death that I demand that other people give up their basic human rights
Are basic human rights really what we're talking about here?
If so, they've always had limits when it came to impacts on others. The freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of someone's nose; the freedom to spread certain pathogens might end there as well.
Of course, the article here is talking about vaccination as a condition for participation in venues where density and proximity is a concern. "Basic human rights" may well not quite reach into unqualified access to "indoor dining, in indoor fitness facilities, indoor entertainment facilities." Hell, it's hard to actually make an totally unqualified case for bodily autonomy itself, even though that's a good principle to start from, it isn't the only one.
Basic human rights were not lost from the world by smallpox or other vaccination mandates. They wouldn't be destroyed even if there were going to be a federal mandate for covid vaccination, which doesn't even seem to be on the horizon. They are certainly not going to be destroyed by proof of vaccination being required for entry to restaurants and gymns.