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.