"Information is not yet available about potential long-term health outcomes."
For example, one could question the potential for autoimmune conditions due to the way the mRNA vaccine works and how the immune system typically targets multiple proteins on the cell. There's no data or studies our there about this longterm possibility or even the incidence of autoimmune antibodies produced by vaccination. This likely isn't a problem for the elderly since it can take years or decades to present/progress, and their value proposition is different than for younger people. It starts to get more questionable as the value proposition changes dramatically in the youngest age groups. The question of vaccinating one's child for covid is certainly a topic with a diverse set of opinions and very little data to perform a thorough longterm cost/benefit analysis.
We already know Covid can cause autoimmune issues in some patients, so are you saying the effect you describe is just a subset of these, or different?
So all I'm saying is that the value proposition for an individual is based on the risks associated with vaccination or infection, and that the decision for people in age groups with the lowest known (short term) risks associated with infection have lower known benefits putting more emphasis on the unknown (longer term) risks or benefits. So for someone over 70 with about a 5% IFR, it's easy to say there is more benefit than risk because it's easy to see if a serious side effect is happening at a 5% rate or higher and the time horizon for longterm issues developing is limited by natural lifespan. With the quality of the VAERS data and the much longer time horizon, it's more difficult to discern a benefit for someone with an IFR of .002%. Of course we can't even look at the rates of many of the side effects to compare something other than IFR because the data data quality doesn't allow for that level of sensitivity.
Edit: why downvote?
Other coronaviruses have, but mRNA vaccine technology is about 15 years old - that's how long it's been in development and studied. Long term effects are in fact, known. But if you were concerned about that, you could take J&J or Astrazeneca, both of which are based on adenovirus vector technology and has existed since the 1980s - the clotting side effect is both rare and treatable.
re: Graves disease - [1] is literally a risk of getting COVID-19.
You are engaging in some both-sideism FUD and misrepresenting the technology of vaccines while pretending a brand new novel disease is some well-understood thing.
[1] https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20210519/covid19-m...
"You are arguing "we don't know what'll happen with vaccines" as though you do know the long term risks of COVID-19."
I'm saying that the longterm effects are not known for either.
"Other coronaviruses have, but mRNA vaccine technology is about 15 years old - that's how long it's been in development and studied."
Do you have some links for this? The mRNA technology was used a little differently in the past from what I saw. Most of the research I saw were attempts to correct genetic issues, not trigger immune responses against the proteins created. Not to mention, the OP article even has the FDA stating that they don't know the longterm effects of vaccination, so it seems my statement is consistent with the expert opinion.
"But if you were concerned about that, you could take J&J or Astrazeneca, both of which are based on adenovirus vector technology and has existed since the 1980s - the clotting side effect is both rare and treatable."
It's a similar mechanism, right? You're just using a virus to carry the genetic material, which also involves an extra transcription step in the cell (what is theorized as causing mutations in the spike and thus the stroke/clotting issues). Still quite different from the traditional inactive or protein based ones.
Have either technologies been used in a wide scale way (1M+ people) on the timeframes you mention?
"You are engaging in some both-sideism FUD and misrepresenting the technology of vaccines while pretending a brand new novel disease is some well-understood thing."
First off, it's not FUD. I'm not fear mongering. There's no doubt expressed about known things. Sure, there is uncertainty about both sides, but even the experts acknowledge this in a similarly objective way (ie I lack the motive behind FUD). My statements have been objective about how one may be approaching the decision. Where have I misrepresented vaccine technology? I am not saying covid is well known - in fact, your statement contradicts your other statement about "both-sidism FUD" since I can't possibly be claiming it's well understood and simultaneously claim fear, uncertainty, and doubt about it.
If you read it, you can see the discussion is about how people might be approaching a decision with a mix of fairly well known short term data and relatively little known long term data, and how the value proposition changes.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/05/27/why-are-aztrazeneca...
https://www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com/news/155536/bre...
I don't fully understand what you mean by "the data quality doesn't allow for that level of sensitivity" - we have already had two instances where very rare side effects of Covid vaccines were recognised - blood clotting for AZ and myocarditis for Biontech.
You wrote, and that's what my question was hinting at:
> "one could question the potential for autoimmune conditions due to the way the mRNA vaccine works"
What do you mean by that? What is specific about the mRNA mechanism that could lead to autoimmune issues?
Sure. So those two issues are not only rare in relation to the vaccine, but also rare in the general population. In fact the clotting issue is occurring at the same rate as in the general population - 5 per 1M people. The types of stuff that will slip through the cracks will be things that are similarly rare in vaccines, yet more common in the general population and tend to be dismissed as unrelated without concrete evidence of that. For an example, take strokes in patients under 30. You have a general occurrence of about 5K per 1M. In order to show a significant difference, you would need a much higher number of cases reported. I believe there's some research being done about some covid vaccines potentially increasing stroke risk, just as covid has been suggested as doing this. I actually know someone who was hospitalized with a stroke between their first and second dose, and it wasn't reported.
This can be especially hard if even the fairly rare adverse events that have previously known relation to vaccines are being reported as little as 12% of the time. Keep in mind that these two events are listed in the packet inserts and are required by law to be reported by the medical professional and are still being massively under reported. What chance do we have of actually catching the rare events that have statistical "cover" of a large bed of naturally occurring incidents in the general population?
https://gnigh-66270.medium.com/vaers-underreporting-and-the-...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33039207/
"What is specific about the mRNA mechanism that could lead to autoimmune issues?"
This is just a theory. The immune system generally codes off of multiple proteins. If we are exposing a spike protein on a cell wall, then there's a possibility that the immune system may code off of the proteins normally found on our cell in addition to the intended partial spike protein. There's no data that I could find on pre vs post vaccination autoimmune antibody levels. So it seems nobody is looking at this. Even then, little is known about the relation of those antibodies and actual development of autoimmune conditions.
No, blood clotting occurred at roughly 1.5-2x the rate, so ~1 per 100k. Look at the data from the UK, Germany or Norway, which raised the rare side effects independently with the EMA [1].
No doubt that underreporting is a real issue, but how is it different to Covid or any other drug/disease? Wouldn't you agree that underreporting is lowest in a pandemic?
> "This is just a theory."
How likely do you think your theory is? Have you spoken to a medical professional or an immunologist about your theory?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embolic_and_thrombotic_events_...
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56594189
"No doubt that underreporting is a real issue, but how is it different to Covid or any other drug/disease? Wouldn't you agree that underreporting is lowest in a pandemic?"
I don't think it's significantly different. The emergency use order did carry additional reporting requirements, but it also opened it up to be administered by people who would not normally administer vaccines and would not likely be familiar with VAERS, and in some cases patients doesn't know who administered it to contact them to file the report. If you couple this with the massive increase in vaccines administered, I think the number of unreported events are higher now, but the rate is likely similar to before. That's just my guess based on the reasons above and my own experiences. Why do you think it would be lowest now?
"How likely do you think your theory is? Have you spoken to a medical professional or an immunologist about your theory?"
I'm not sure how likely it is. I feel like it depends mostly on the individual, like most autoimmune diseases do. I did discuss this with a doctor and they said that it is a reasonable question and theory that appears not to have any studies looking into either side of it. It's possible we won't know for years or decades, especially since we don't even know how autoimmune antibodies levels lead to disease in general.
"(4) The number of these cases after vaccination with COVID-19 AstraZeneca is statistically significantly higher than the number of cerebral venous thromboses that normally occur in the unvaccinated population. For this purpose, an observed-versus-expected analysis was performed, comparing the number of cases expected without vaccination in a 14-day time window with the number of cases reported after approximately 1.6 million AstraZeneca vaccinations in Germany. About one case would have been expected, and seven cases had been reported."
UK vaccine safety report up to 11 Aug 2021 [2]:
"The overall incidence after first or unknown doses was 14.9 per million doses."
German safety report up to 31 Jul 2021 [3, in German], cf. table 7,8:
Women: 1.462 cases per 100k doses Men: 1.305 cases per 100k doses
Can't find the numbers for Norway, they initially reported the highest number per 100k.
> I'm not sure how likely it is.
Do I understand correctly that there is no mechanism specific to how the mRNA vaccines work? The effect you describe ("we are exposing a spike protein on a cell wall") is far more common in Covid due to how the abundance of expression of the spike protein, correct?
[1] https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/newsroom-en/hp-ne...
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...
[3] https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/newsroom/dossiers...
"Do I understand correctly that there is no mechanism specific to how the mRNA vaccines work?"
No. Covid does not add a spike protein to an existing cell. It replicates an entire covid cell. So you have covid virus with a spike and a bunch of other covid proteins if you have covid. Or you have a human cell with a partial spike and all the normal human cell proteins. The immune system usually codes off of, or attacks, multiple proteins. It's possible the immune system will identify the spike and some of the normal cell proteins. A similar sort of mimicry is theorized to occur when the proteins in a virus are similar enough to a human protein.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/31/science/virus-s-similarit...
Natural immunity is a thing, just like it always has been. I've heard all of the arguments about why nobody wants to widely acknowledge it, but I just can't agree with them.
Some chance of high probability of damages, vs full chance of low probability of damages.
This is why numbers are important... Fuzzy equation members like 'some', 'high' and 'low' are inadequate for this decision making.
Chances of infection given behavioural patterns, to be defined, × probability of damages post-infection, given demographics etc., to be defined¹
vs
100% for the chance of vaccination, × probability of damages post-vaccine (post 1 week, post 1 month, post 3 months etc.), given demographics etc., to be defined.
Probably you meant that according to available data, the probability of damages post-vaccine seem very low. Some people are concerned because those numbers do not seem to match the anecdotal they have around, so they would like to have better data - because some possible consequences are much more than nuisances. I say, if some entity kept an active monitoring ongoing, of the adverse side effects, much stronger reassurances - or less hesitance owing to confusion - could be given. I could only find passive monitoring around - USA, Europe, Australia, Canada etc.
¹The vagueness is such that in the context of this line, the last article I read mentioned values between 2.3% and 40%.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
Now you can debate the meaning of "safe". And you can make decisions based on anecdotes. And you can say it would be nice to have better data. But that is true for most things in life. Most people go to restaurants and drive their cars on roads with reviewing far less evidence that their car and restaurant they are going to are truly safe.
I know I wouldn’t want to work in person at any place that didn’t have a vaccine mandate. Once vaccines are approved for children, I think people’s options should be to either vaccinate their child or homeschool them, since if I had children I wouldn’t want them exposed to the unvaccinated. The federal and state governments forcing everyone to get the shot would be a step too far for me, but I’m very much in support of it being hard to be a part of society if you refuse to take one of the most basic steps to protect other people in it.
>it being hard to be a part of society if you refuse to take one of the most basic steps to protect other people in it.
there are a huge number of diseases you can knowingly spread with far more severe long term consequences while still being 'part of society'. frankly i do not think free and democratic societies can survive while trying to also fulfill the moral compunction not to let anyone die ever from transmittable illness, it is simply at odds with our biology. we, like all mammals are walking bags of filth and disease and no amount of indefinite containment will ever change that reality.
For the vaccines we do have, public schools in most states already require vaccination. Almost every state already requires that children in public schools have the DTaP, IPV, MMR, Varicella, and HepB vaccines to enter Kindergarten. And I would personally have no problems spreading those and the flu shot as a requirement in the same vein as I stated above either.
We are indeed mammals that are walking bags of filth, but we also have minds that we can use to help deal with that fact. We can’t indefinitely contain, and we can’t completely stop transmittable illness. But coronavirus is one of the handful of diseases we now have a tool to deal with, and not taking advantage of that tool to stop needless death and waste is a massive dereliction of duty to one’s fellow man. This isn’t about “not letting anyone die ever from transmittable illness,” this is about a specific dangerous disease that we have invented a tool to help stop.
On an individual level, maybe sure, but on a population level, enough people are getting sick to cause medical systems to collapse. I live in a G7 country where people are dying at home since they can't get a hospital bed.
Now it's true that chance is probably somewhere around 0.3% assuming you don't live in an area where hospitals are out of ICU beds and vents. But it's your _life_ at risk.
(I'm going from memory and may be a little off on the age ranges, but covid is heavily weighted towards the elderly while influenza is not)
What reasonable limits are, and above that at what point the government should step in and say your actions are too dangerous to your fellow man (or if government should have that power at all) are of course very hard lines to draw.
Flu vaccine? Smoking cessation? Hand washing? Race/gender/religion sensitivity training?
These seem like pretty basic steps. Should we bar entrance to society based on these?
It is a firable offense to not wash your hands if you work in a restaurant.
It is a mandate at most companies to take sensitivity training.
Restaurants can reject you for not wearing covered shoes and a suitable jacket.
The recent NYC mandate for example is specifically about attending indoor venues on Manhattan island - restaurants and theatres and such.
Alternative perspective, why should the unvaxed kids be forced into homeschooling? Maybe the parents of vaxed kids should be given the option of putting their vaxed kid in a school that has a mix of vaxed and unvaxed kids, or to homeschool? Given the general demographics of the unvaxed I'd say that's far more likely to happen then a school vax mandate. They would never get away with turning away a bunch of African-American kids going to some of the strapped inner city schools. Food for thought.
An alternative that could happen is vaxed / unvaxed kids in separate classes or schools. Though that wouldn't be possible everywhere.
As for the poor schools, you're right - we have to leave those open.
While I'm a big fan of people having a choice, due to the large amount of misinformation out there people are dying. We have people in my country that could have gotten the vaccine but didn't because of Facebook conspiracies and are now refusing oxygen in hospitals because they're afraid their lungs will explode - due to Facebook conspiracies.
There's no good reason for the majority * of people to avoid the COVID vaccines. They're making a dumb decision.
* Of course there are exceptions, but it's a small percent
Is this still true if unvaccinated takes a hospital bed away from someone else or increases insurance costs to everyone else due to more expensive care?
Those under the FDA do not have that social constraint (free healthcare), to others it is a reality (with responsibilities etc.). And in a way, like in the context of insurance, different personal histories are relevant. Job related health consequences? Unforeseeable consequences? Jamesdean consequences? Not the same.
The whole reality is now completely dystopian. We have people calling for denying healthcare to people who took “my body, my choice” as a right, because they voluntarily chose to not take the vaccine. However, these same people would be completely appalled by the idea of letting a drug addict die on the street from overdose, even though it is also a result of their voluntary choice to take drugs. The very same people who call for denying people things like a right to eat at a restaurant or get groceries without vaccine passport, claim that requiring ID to vote is a violation of civil rights, and all that despite the fact that black Americans are least vaccinated group in US. Total insanity.
I'm not aware of any grocery stores requiring a vaccine passport, but in general, the bar for a private business allowing customers in should be a lot more malleable fluid that voting restrictions.
It's not a contradiction of principles to point this out even if poor black people are among the lowest vaccination groups.
No, that’s very much false. For example, Georgia offers free voter identification card, and yet its new voter ID laws were called “new Jim Crow” by prominent politicians. This is issue purely for partisan reasons, and the eagerness to introduce vaccine IDs while shunning voter ID shows it pretty clearly.
> I'm not aware of any grocery stores requiring a vaccine passport, but in general, the bar for a private business allowing customers in should be a lot more malleable fluid that voting restrictions.
The problem here is that the businesses are not introducing these restrictions out of their own initiative, but they rather are following government regulations. As a result, it is government which is requiring ID to enter a restaurant, but not requiring it for voting, and suggesting it’s actually private businesses enforcing it is just trying to shift the blame.
This decision is a referenced legal precedent cited for masking mandates, stay at home mandates, etc etc. The case -stemmed- from someone protesting being fined, but both the decision, and the ramifications, intentionally, are far further reaching than that.
Yes, it is not a precedent for going door to door and forcibly vaccinating people. No one is advocating for that. What people -are- advocating for is withholding the privileges of society from any who choose not to get vaccinated, and there is a lot of precedent allowing for that. There is, as you note, even precedent for -punitive- actions from the state for failing to have it done.
So if you want to get technical, sure, there is no way to force people in the US to get vaccinated, just like there is no way to force people in the US to do anything; there is only carrot and stick measures to try and coax people to do something. If that was the point...um, okay, but that also isn't arguing against anything that was said. The original post was about taking hospital beds away from those who catch COVID who chose to be unvaccinated, and not letting their COVID bills go to insurance; that isn't forcing them to get vaccinated, that's just introducing new punitive measures for not getting vaccinated.
You are misrepresenting the case. The extent of the penalties was implied here, because the case was about upholding or rejecting particular state law, which listed the specific penalties involved.
> This decision is a referenced legal precedent cited for masking mandates, stay at home mandates, etc etc. The case -stemmed- from someone protesting being fined, but both the decision, and the ramifications, intentionally, are far further reaching than that.
Wrongly so. See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906452
There's a lovely bit in the Wikipedia article where it cites the decision. While it is not, obviously, the entire case, I feel it stands pretty well to show that the court was setting broader precedent than that one particular law. Certainly, it is very hard to say "this law is okay because (reason)" without also saying "(reason) is a good criteria to make laws from". At that point it's only a question of extent; there are laws and court precedents to prevent them from being arbitrary, oppressive and unreasonable, but, again, this case still clearly allowed for punitive penalties for non-compliance, in exactly this situation.
>> Wrongly so.
Citing an opinion by a single assistant professor of an unheard of law school that says he doesn't believe this case should be used as precedent doesn't do anything to disprove my statement that it HAS been used as precedent (a statement of historical fact that I made), nor does it really strike me as particularly compelling that it SHOULDN'T be used as a precedent (a statement of opinion that maybe you assumed I was implying, but which nevertheless is immaterial to the argument being made).
Edit:
Obesity source: 1. https://www.axios.com/bmi-obesity-severe-risk-factors-covid-...
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughl...
BaSeLeSs BrO ScIeNcE
You were saying something mate? CDC is bro science?
And the current vaccines have not ended the pandemic, if they had there wouldn't be a need for a booster shot.
Moreover, is covid the only disease on the planet now? Those overweight people are at higher risk of dying of other diseases too, or do you think its okay for them to die of cancer, heart attack etc but just not okay to die of covid
You stay happy with your biannual booster shots ( and at the same time cry here on HN, twitter etc ) and I'll take care of my health and follow that strategy.
For those of us who got the vaccine, we’re still having to take precautions because of the delta variant spikes, largely from people who didn’t get a vaccine. Where is our choice?
But not smoking in your car or at home. There are tons of American parents who hotbox their kids with cigarette or marijuana smoke on a daily basis which not only harms them with second hand smoke but increases their chances of smoking themselves by an astronomical factor.
Parents legally harm their children constantly by setting bad diet patterns (child obesity), or substance abuse patterns just to name a few ways. Should we make that illegal and have the state raise those kids?
You are also strawmanning to assume that laws that punish bad parenting would immediately skip to the state raising the kids.
All laws restrict freedoms to protect the wider society. This isn't a novel concept. Not being able to murder is a freedom deprived of you. The question of "should any freedom that could possibly be abused to harm others be eventually outlawed" is obviously "No". Law is not the only tool to encourage better behavior.
But passing laws to outlaw any of your examples doesn't mean we're saying "Yes" anymore than outlawing murder does. Those are just specific laws. The question is "which freedoms should be restricted to prevent individuals from harming others". Your original framing of the question makes it an all or nothing case, but its not.
The state does deprive people of rights to raise their kids if they're really awful parents. That does not mean that making smoking in a car with kids illegal guarantees that this would be the associated punishment.
Comparing choosing to drive drunk with not choosing to take a particular action that has an infinitesimally small probability of directly causing tragedy are not remotely comparable.
We’re in a tech forum do I really need to explain this? The probability of an individual hard drive failing is small. If you’re building a gaming rig, you don’t need to worry about it, if you’re building a data center that small probability becomes a problem.
How can you possibly believe those choices aren’t having an effect when we are living the consequences of those actions? The number of cases are going up, younger people are dying, hospitals are filling to capacity.
While I'm all for 'personal choice', I feel like COVID cases should be de-prioritized for ICU access.
Literally hundreds of renowned virologists and epidemiologists, that's who.
The way the discourse has evolved in the past two years is unbelievable. You see people deride fundamental concepts of democracy like freedom, the right to protest, and bodily autonomy.
If the vaccines are effective, then the only people at risk are those that refuse to get it. Everyone is subject to the consequences of their autonomous choice alone.
The same is true for potential long term negative effects of the vaccines. Those that refuse to get it are subject to the potential long term effects of COVID, if they get it. And those that get the vaccine are guaranteed to be subject to the long term effects of having done so.
Either you believe the vaccines work or you don't. The variants dominated highly vaccinated places like the UK and Israel, so don't blame the unvaccinated for bringing it about. The selective pressure applied to the virus by leaky vaccines is far greater than natural immunity.
Vaccines aren't a binary 100% or 0% effective tool, it's somewhere in the middle. If my 10 coworkers all get the vaccine, it reduces the probability of me contracting the virus, even if I got vaccinated myself. There is a communal aspect to the vaccine that you are missing here.
Leaky vaccines work the same way antibacterial soap did to create MRSA. They leave enough virus present to mutate to evade the mechanism originally intended to fight against it, so only the most robust mutations remain.
You do know that there's a ton of investment going into curing Covid, right? But you can't just "magic" a cure out of thin air.
> Among 3410 total cases of suspected but unconfirmed COVID-19 in the overall study population, 1594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1816 in the placebo group. Suspected COVID-19 cases that occurred within 7 days after any vaccination were 409 in the vaccine group vs. 287 in the placebo group.
Why are there suspected but not confirmed cases of COVID-19? The document doesn't say. But here's what we know: not all participants received PCR tests to confirm their status, only those that presented some set of symptoms.
Smelly analogy is smelly. You're talking about the difference between very specific behaviors being prohibited versus blacklisting half of the population from participating in society with vaccine mandates (many of whom are black, by the way). It's not even close to a valid comparison.
I get the sense that the overlap of people who are pro-mandatory-vaccine and pro-choice is pretty high, being that they are both liberal positions. "My body, my choice" is just fine for women's reproductive rights, even if it meant taking away a baby's chance to live. All of a sudden "my body, my choice" doesn't sound so good?
I got both of my shots but I am so tired of people blaming anti-vaxxers. Give me a vaccine good enough that I don't have to worry about it. Today, I'm literally going to get a COVID test despite having both my vaccine doses. Why? Apparently my government isn't capable of providing useful guidance to keep me safe. We keep hearing about masks, but the mandate got dropped and there was never any talk about mandating the clearly superior KN95 or N95 masks.
Anti-vaxxers have been consistent from the beginning that they're not getting vaccinated. You know whose position keeps changing? FDA & CDC. Whether it's how effective the vaccine is, what the side effects are, do we need to wear masks, how much social distancing is required, whether or not a booster is useful...
You and everyone else blaming anti-vaxxers are letting the government redirect blame for its own failures.
> Anti-vaxxers have been consistent from the beginning that they're not getting vaccinated. You know whose position keeps changing? FDA & CDC. Whether it's how effective the vaccine is, what the side effects are, do we need to wear masks, how much social distancing is required, whether or not a booster is useful...
> You and everyone else blaming anti-vaxxers are letting the government redirect blame for its own failures.
Science adapts and adjusts based on new information.
The lack of willingness to adapt when confronted with new evidence has an unfortunate name.
Lifting the mask mandate was a political move, and it was a poor one. Not pushing KN95/N95 when it was basically guaranteed to be increased protection was a poor move. Taking us out of lockdown, and failing to reinstate the lockdown, was a political move. Also a poor choice.
You're over here talking about science. Half of these decisions are being made based on politics. Wouldn't surprise me if the vaccine approval were also.
Not every government out there is super abusive.
The alternative is that they're all crazy (and/or malicious), and that's a <<very>> difficult thing to prove. So difficult that the simpler explanation is that they are following scientific processes, slightly mixed with politics and also... full of mistakes because we're all human.
> The alternative is that they're all crazy (and/or malicious), and that's a <<very>> difficult thing to prove.
You don't have to assume the government is crazy or malicious. People are tired of lockdowns, they're tired of COVID, they're tired of wearing masks. Businesses, like restaurants, have been put in a tough spot. I get all that. So do our government officials.
That doesn't mean that there isn't room to criticize government for its mistakes. We already knew there were anti-vaxxers before the pandemic started.
> So difficult that the simpler explanation is that they are following scientific processes
They are _trying_ to. They're not. Lifting the lockdown just because things got better for a bit was a fucking stupid idea, and we're paying the price for that.
You would have been much better off maintaining the lockdown for some period and letting restaurants and other struggling businesses figure out how to pivot.
And for gods sake, the stupid shit like OSHA suspending vaccine side effect reporting requirements is just playing into the hands of anti-vaxxers (https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/faqs#vaccine).
:-))
What I'm saying is that if large groups of people, of different dispositions, intentions, cultures, etc. all over the world are doing mostly the same thing, then that means that there are some forces in play that they all can't really control. In this case those forces are social.
that’s a very different comparison to something like going to a private business
what about driving drunk on your own land away from anyone
Governments regulate comings and goings of people to and from private businesses all the time. We don't allow people under 21 to go to bars or people under 18 to go to strip clubs, for example.
>what about driving drunk on your own land away from anyone
If you wanna walk around on your own land away from anyone without getting vaccinated and/or while having covid? Have at it.
You're welcome to choose not to get vaccinated, and not to go to any such employers, colleges, etc.
Regardless, your argument doesn't make any sense. If anyone -- vaccinated or not -- has COVID, they should be required to stay home. If an unvaccinated person does not yet have COVID, we should push them to get vaccinated, because then they will be much less likely to get the disease, and if they do get it, serious illness or hospitalization will be vanishingly unlikely.
Vaccination also reduces the "breeding ground" for mutations. At this point it's critical that we slow down the creation and spread of new variants that might do a better job of getting around our existing vaccines.
2 Shots of vaccine to end covid -> Most Americans will have to take booster shots -> Booster shots may not be one time thing
This is why getting spread under control is so important: each time the virus replicates there’s a chance of a new advantageous mutation making the problem harder. Wearing masks and vaccination are how we break that cycle.
The vaccine hesitant's tendency to move the goalposts when their reason du jour for refusing vaccination is invalidated is based on misinformation and unfounded fear. The exact opposite of good reasons to change your mind about something.
It would have been entirely possible for Fauci et. al to say "The vaccine data appears to show 95%+ efficacy, but we will be waiting to lift lockdown mandates be sure". That kind of messaging shows both a respect for science and a commitment to everyone's health. However, it was an unpopular political decision, so mandates were lifted.
This isn't the first time they've changed their course after making a decision prematurely. To the vaccine hesitant, why is this FDA approval any different? There's massive political pressure to approve these vaccines.
I care because humanity has been screwed over by this virus for a year and a half now, and the virus could be completely controlled by now in any country with a sufficient vaccine supply. But it's not, because people refuse to do their part in helping to take care of their community. That's disgusting and unforgivable to me. The blame for any COVID-related death that occurs in the US now falls squarely on the shoulders of the unvaccinated.
Other people are much more leaning towards frowning upon the partytime people "let us hug and stay together and forget about it all". Those other people believe that if people had been careful, the damages would have been minimal. Using some of your words,
«the virus could be [...] controlled by now in any country with a sufficient» carefulness in the population.
Demonizing unvaccinated people is the language of an abuser: "Look what you're making me do to you." The way out of abuse isn't ever to comply with the abuser's demands.
See how silly that sounds?
Also, the comparison is nonsense. If someone drinks and drives, they did intake something into their system which made them a risk to others. What you want is the reverse. Everyone is by default a risk to the society, and only if the get a biannual shot from the latest and greatest experimental medicine, you deem them no danger to society. You are trying to outlaw the human condition. There are people who think this is a big deal and needs to be opposed. I agree.
Making it a stance about personal freedoms is often used but it detracts discussion about facts of approved vaccinations, positive or negative they may be.
Meanwhile in Japan: people living freely their lives with no lockdowns, no forced vaccination, no vaccine pass. Another model is possible but the Western governments are addicted to their power trip.
70% is enough for the original Covid. Covid moved the goalposts to Delta which needs different numbers. This is not experts moving the goalposts, this is Covid changing on us - as was always expected to happen and why experts said we don't know what % is required until Israel showed 70% was enough for the original Covid strain.
It was probably updated once we found out more about Covid-19 Alpha, and later for Delta.
What changed was whether the surrounding people were receptive to infection and capable of spreading it.
Herd immunity happens when a disease can't spread because all people surrounding the infected person have enough immediate immunity to stifle its progress. Delta seems to be able to spread to people in the gap before the immune system recognises it, so it may be something that can't be stopped by herd immunity.
Other models are certainly possible, but only work in places where people have higher trust in their government, and think about collective welfare over their own individual selfishness. Unfortunately, people in the US (and much of the West) care too much about "mah lib-ur-tee" than doing their part to help keep their neighbors healthy.
Also I think your focus on Japan is a little weird; they went through their own bad time with COVID, and even consider the recent case of the large flare-ups surrounding the Olympics.