I suspect an extremely strong correlation between giving blood and being vaccinated.
I had a classmate who was horrified to learn I checked the organ donor box in my driver's license. Their parents told them if you check that box, the medical staff will be more likely to let you die so they can reuse your parts. I did't have any authoritative answer but the point is there are people out there with fears that sound rational but are completely in the realm of conspiracy theory.
Sadly these fears in the UK are well-founded:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alder_Hey_organs_scandal
* https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/missing...
There were quite a few other similar scandals, particularly in England. The medical profession in this country, for a very long time, has had a remarkable contempt for the lives of people, probably steeped in the classism and elitism traditionally entrenched in university education in Britain. This might be different today (Alder Hey, in particular, triggered new legislation about organ handling in 2004), but it's hard to shake off such a history.
I used to carry a organ-donor card and I'm probably still on some register somewhere, but over the last decade I've kinda soured on the idea. As a clear outsider and a bit of a loner, living in the downtrodden North of England, there would likely be nobody who would oppose an over-eager doctor from pulling the plug on me without even trying to help first, just so that a few waiting lists can be shortened and he can look good with his boss.
If you think that doctors aren't likely to do their level best to save your life and to act in your best interests, you surely have larger problems that you, being braindead at the time, having your organs potentially used to save the lives of others?
>you surely have larger problems
Maybe, but that's one more incentive, and not a small one either. Even the definition of "braindead" is somewhat controversial in many circumstances, nowadays, with doctors having the power to make some pretty radical choices - occasionally even against the explicit wishes of patient and family.
We don't call them that anymore. The new term is "spoiler alert"
In fact your classmate is correct, you also need to be 'alive' for your organs to be harvested, there's an entire ongoing field of debate in the medical community about the ethics of this, which a quick peruse of the literature will get you upto speed on.
If you see them as victims of the system, doesn't refusing to donate your organs literally making things worse for them?
It feels like you're saying "I could save your life, but I won't because the system isn't the way I want it."
Is that a reasonable summary, or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
Distancing, not going to parties etc etc
Given that even highly-vaccinated localities like Iceland (74% vaccinated) keep seeing waves of COVID cases and that COVID waves peak and decline without countries achieving the 90% rate vaccine proponents suggest as the threshold for herd immunity, we have to begin seriously questioning the public health case for mandatory universal vaccination. I wish more people would think critically about this issue instead of adopting an aggressive attitude of enforced conformity to an orthodoxy that doesn't appear to have all its facts lined up.
Looking objectively at experiences of countries around the world, one is forced to conclude that in the case of COVID, with the non-sterilizing vaccines currently available, vaccine passports are neither sufficient nor necessary for safeguarding public health and present serious challenges to privacy, civil liberties, and the rule of law.
There is a point after which the effect of human measures becomes marginal. If anything because most people would have been already exposed to covid, with or without vaccines. I can't say whether we've passed that point or not, but OTOH the draconians have not made their case either. What concrete benefit do people expect from an additional 10% of the population being forced to vaccinate?
Long term there are concerns of vaccine escape. Pfizer CEO raised them recently, it's not just the 5G conspiracists. A new strain emerges for which vaccines aren't that helpful against severe complications. Some people, myself included (I am vaccinated thank you very much) are concerned that creating a population with immune monoculture is likely to result in strains bypassing the monoculture. The nightmare scenario is the emergence of a strain for which the vaccines are a net negative. Hopefully nothing terrible happens. But we don't know. Nobody knows. Perhaps we should not be placing all our eggs in the same basket, e.g. not (force) vaccinate everyone against the exact same protein.
An intact hospital / critical care system.
Given that there are many nurses protesting vaccine mandates, it could be that putting such mandates in place will lead to a lot of them quitting, which could make the hospital system less "intact" and resilient.
Underpaying and understaffing nurses Failing to provide ppe And a whole slew of covid related policies that deny folks “non critical “ care like cancer treatment and surgery. I mean my friends couldn’t even get in to see their pcp for 2 weeks for an illness that presented with fever, finally gave up and hit the er. Vaccines are nice but they won’t fix this
The nurse enters the ER triage room. 'Smoker? Exercise 2 hours a day? Fast food in the past 2 weeks? Drink beer? BMI over 30? Diabetes? Below average safe driver? Cardiac problems in the family?'. God forbid you tick the wrong answer on any of these questions, you are now an undesirable straining the hospital system and we should righteously kick you to the curb to squirm in your earned misery. The 'preexisting conditions' rubric in American medical system is already dark, not sure we want to push harder in the wrong direction.
Most of us are in favor of helping those in need. See the push for single payer health care system. Maybe there is hope.
(1) Hoping for traditional vaccines, to mitigate the monoculture problem. E.g. https://www.novavax.com/covid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-candida....
(2) Cue in the 'obesity is not a choice' crowd. Whatever we think the causes are, it was an order of magnitude less of a problem 50 years ago, and I know for a fact that I often have a poor diet and I am unable to incorporate enough physical movement in my own daily routine. So there.
PS. As you are reaching for the flamethrower, try save a bit of that energy to craft a 'getting vaccinated is good for you and your loved ones' message coming from a place of care and not smug vindictive superiority. <3
Problem is that the emergency authorization means that we don't yet know what the cost is aside from the adverse reactions. The latter are described as 'rare' by journalists who prefer that term to quoting freely available data which changes week by week as in the case of boys who we now know suffer x6 risk of myocarditis than the same risk if they contract Covid. Is there a further risk down the road? A number of peer-reviewed papers have pointed out that this cannot be ruled out. When the papers dutifully write 'very unlikely' we know we're looking at a lottery with unknown odds.
The thing is that a treatment having real and tangible benefits is not an adequate justification for the state imposing that treatment by force.
And yes, laws requiring vaccine passports for participation in public life are a use of state force. If the police stop you doing something, that means the state is using force to stop you doing that thing. If the state mandates that businesses require papers under the threat of fines or losing their business license, that's also an application of force on the part of the state.
Informed consent has been the bedrock of medical ethics for the past 70 years and it would be unwise to throw away this principle just to impose a preventative treatment that might be mildly good for people.
People are right to point out that the push for vaccine passports --- because the vaccines are merely preventative individual therapies --- is a gravely concerning break with nearly a century of tradition and law. In general, we don't mandate things merely because they're good for people, and it would be extremely dangerous to start doing that in general.
Look: elsewhere, people have suggested that I'm claiming that because the vaccines can't stop the spread, they have no benefit. That's not true. They do seem beneficial. Lots of things are beneficial. Vitamin D deficiency, for example, is common and vitamin D supplementation would benefit most people. Do we require that people present evidence of vitamin D supplementation to eat at restaurants? No, of course not! That's an individual medical decision.
The whole point of mandating traditional vaccines is that eradicating a disease has huge positive externalities, ones large enough to justify public health measures --- like vaccine requirements for admission into schools --- that would ordinarily fail on civil liberties grounds. COVID vaccines simply do not have the same large positive externalities. Yes, they might be good for you, but this fact alone does not justify coercive state action.
COVID vaccines are not like the vaccines that have been mandated for a long time in public schools and at border crossings. COVID vaccines are non-sterilizing. The previous vaccines were sterilizing. These are two completely different categories of medical tools, and pointing out that we've done thing X with previous vaccines is not an argument that we should do thing X with respect to COVID vaccines.
Do you have examples of the use of force?
> we don't mandate things merely because they're good for people
Vaccinations were already mandated for all sorts of things, from crossing borders to attending schools.
This is some great lying with statistics. The age ranges you're referencing are groups in which the unvaccinated group is much smaller, insanely small comparatively. Of course a group with almost no people are going to show a reduced rate. You'd find a similar ratio if I took 50k people and split them by whether their name was Steve and then measured the likelihood that either group got covid. The Steve group is definitely going to have a lower rate.
For example, that report says that 97% of the blood donors has some kind of antibodies, either from vaccine or previous infection. This number is almost 100% for older people. Maybe blood donors are not representative of the population, but if they are, it's not obvious that the extra 3% buys you anything, even if you could capture it.
For some age groups (Table 4), the vaccinated are more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. I am sure there are good reasons for this, e.g. people more at risk may be more likely to be vaccinated, but whatever the reason is, the vaccine does not seem to be powerful enough to compensate for the extra risk.