I understand you have an axe to grind, as many of your recent posts are anti vaccination in nature. Regardless, public support is robust for the measures being taken to bring the pandemic public health crisis to a conclusion, and with regards to vaccine mandates and terminating those who refuse, so far those actions have been adjudicated as lawful. So, the current administration has to get creative when you have cohorts purposely attempting to subvert public health measures (for whatever benefit they believe there is).

I don’t disagree it’s your right to decline a vaccine, but it’s also your employer’s right to mandate it and terminate you if you decline it. I’m unsure why these are controversial points or are heated conversations; this is the natural conclusion of everyone exercising their rights. This isn’t even novel; vaccine requirements have been standard for some time (hepatitis, measles, etc) in schools and workplaces.

I ask because I am genuinely curious as someone willingly vaccinated.

>So, the current administration has to get creative when you have cohorts purposely attempting to subvert public health measures (for whatever benefit they believe there is).

You didn't address AndrewBissell's point. As others have pointed out, there just aren't enough military pilots who are rated today to fly even a small fraction of Southwest's fleet. Further, assigning a large number of active-duty aviators to gain certification to fly 737s would massively disrupt the US's military posture. This is fact, no matter how "creative" the Biden administration may try to be. (And don't even try to bring up federalizing ANG/Reserve pilots. Most of them are already pilots at other airlines!)

> but it’s also your employer’s right to mandate it and terminate you if you decline it

I don't believe any significant number of employers genuinely want to terminate employees who don't have it. They are being coerced into doing it by the Biden administration, which has actively proclaimed its desire and intention to do just that. This isn't the natural conclusion of free individuals exercising their rights, this is top-down authoritarianism.

If "public support is robust", then why are they actively suppressing news about the cause of this issue? Regardless of what you or I think, it sure seems like whoever is doing these things thinks that we're a hair's breadth away from large-scale rebellion and they don't dare let anyone know why this action was really done or how successful it has been.

> so far those actions have been adjudicated as lawful

This feels more like a dismissive dunk than an attempt at understanding, compassion, or logical argument. It says, we have the power to force you to do it, nobody cares what you think, so shut up and do as you're told or we're going to smash you and nobody will care. The only "rights" being exercised here are the self-proclaimed "rights" of the elite to jam any policy they want down everyone's throat and destroy them using aggressive force if they object or resist.

I am also willingly vaccinated. But I see that these vaccines are clearly much less effective than we were told and have more significant side-effects than anyone is willing to admit. I am against mandating them for anyone who doesn't decide they want one without coercion, and I am becoming increasingly appalled at how many of my fellow citizens are embracing authoritarian measures.

Can you explain employers and schools who previously had vaccine mandates (hepatitis and measles are examples I’ve seen for schools and healthcare workers) and what makes this vaccine different?

If the argument is “mandates are wrong”, we’ve had them for over 150 years. If the argument is it’s not safe, its FDA approved and has been administered over a billion times.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/vaccine-mandates-in-s...

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/guides-pubs/downlo...

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...

EDIT: @LurkingPenguin: While this is a good point, the data shows that vaccination protects against an intense infection resulting in the need of ICU and ventilation care (protection having been infected by COVID and recovering from previously does not).

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e3.htm

Most of the "vaccine mandates" provided as supporting examples for absolute COVID vaccine mandates have exclusions for those who have existing immunity.

For example, individuals who have had a laboratory-confirmed measles infection or can otherwise prove immunity do not need to be vaccinated against measles according to the CDC[1].

Over 44 million Americans have already had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and the science indicates that people who have recovered from infection have significant protection not inferior and perhaps superior to vaccine-based immunity[2].

The vast majority of people who have had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in the US can prove it as easily as people who have been vaccinated can prove they were vaccinated.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/faqs.html

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

They haven't mandated flu shots yet. Once they see how easy it was to manipulate public opinion, wouldn't be surprised to have mandated flu shots in the near future in addition to whatever other gain-of-function research virus they accidentally release next:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-fu...

Surprising how many people downvote blindly without even making an attempt to argue against the data and conclusions of those studies. It's like an anti-critical-thinking cult.

That first link doesn't really back up "zero effect on reducing the spread of covid". It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data.

Their analysis is incredibly shallow, for example comparing Portugal or Iceland (high vaccination rate, mostly open, lots of COVID cases) to Vietnam (low vaccination rate, completely locked down at the time the analysis was done, not many COVID cases). You can't make any inference about the vaccine / caseload relationship when you ignore the fact that one country is completely open and the other had such a strict lockdown that people were struggling to get food.

I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but its effect on reducing transmission is only limited and temporary.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

>It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data.

A discussion published in the European Journal of Epidemiology. It doesn't just look at those two countries; its statistical analysis covers 68 countries and 2947 US counties. You don't think that if the vaccine were effective at preventing spread, there should be at least some evidence of this effect when comparing vaccination rate and spread across different regions?

The discussion completely ignores basically all the potential confounding factors. Two huge ones are lockdown measures and level of testing.

Even in a largely vaccinated population, if you do widespread community testing you will find a lot of asymptomatic cases. If you don't do widespread community testing you won't. So you can have wildly different caseloads in two highly-vaccinated populations, yet no meaningful medical difference in the outcomes (since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death).

Could you please provide a peer reviewed study that takes into account all potentially confounding factors that shows the claim you made in the last sentence related to prevention against deaths?

When I look at the pfizer 6 month study (not peer reviewed) I do not see that.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...

When I look at Scotlands data I do not see that.

https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/9475/21-09-29-covid1...

Same with the UK.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Same with Israel

https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general

Every dataset I look says the opposite so I would love to see the peer reviewed study that takes into account all potential confounding factors that led you to your conclusion.

> since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death

Could you please share a meaningful study that comes to this conclusion and does not ignore all potential confounding factors? (I don't mean it in a confrontational way; I'm genuinely curious since I only managed to find heavily confounded data)

Even ignoring all confounding factors it should still be possible to detect an effect via regression. It's like if you try to price S&P off just one of its constituent stocks; you're still going to observe some correlation even when only looking at a single large constituent.

The results of the other article I linked, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7, showing that vaccination does not reduce viral load, supports this notion.

These vaccines are also more dangerous. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-pauses-use-mode... Finland and Sweden have now halted Moderna vaccination for under-30s due to side effects.

Not sure there are any conclusions to draw from this information tidbit. Nordics halted Moderna, true, but Pfizer is offered instead of Moderna.

The conclusion is that because the approval process was expedited, the safety risks Moderna posed to under-30s were not discovered until millions had already taken it. I.e. these vaccines have gone through a much shorter time period of testing than previous ones.

I am not familiar with the Nordic legal environment, but this could be that because Pfizer has a better safety profile than Moderna, so they'd rather use Pfizer. At the same time, both Pfizer and Moderna are much safer than raw covid according to all direct data that I've seen.

not if you're below 30

Haha, not sure about below 30, but below 18 both covid and vaccines have minuscule negative impact. Instead of arguing whether the impact is 1:100,000 or 1:90,000 (AHA, vaccine mandates for children are a moral imperative because after adjusting for adverse effects short term numbers lean oh so slightly in favor of vaccines), perhaps drop the conversation as irrelevant altogether? There are other concerns in life...

> godawful side effect profiles that characterize the Covid vaccines

Can you provide some references regarding the side effect profiles of these vaccines being any worse than a typical vaccine? Genuinely interested, as from casual observation it doesn't seem to be the case.

Well, take a look at e.g. slides 10 and 11 here: https://www.scribd.com/document/530328436/Slides-from-Peter-... That is, adverse reactions from just the COVID vaccines completely dwarf all vaccines from VAERS' entire 31-year history.

The associated talk is here: https://rumble.com/vnbv86-winning-the-war-against-therapeuti...

VAERS data is public. They even provide machine-parsable format.

VAERS is unverified, unfiltered user-generated content.

> “Many of these types of claims that we hear are actually a misrepresentation of the VAERS data,” Vasudevan said.

> The pace of reporting has picked up: In North Carolina alone, roughly 70,000 reports have come in related to the COVID vaccines — more than triple the total back in May, when CBS 17 explained what the database does — and does not — tell you.

> “It is reasonable to expect that reports on VAERS increase whenever there is a new vaccine on the market,” Vasudevan said. “And that’s definitely what we are seeing with COVID.”

> What the system makes perfectly clear: It does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between any vaccine and those side effects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explicitly says the reports “may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.”

> Among the reported side effects of the COVID vaccines in North Carolina: Yawning, fractures, a foot deformity, and wisdom tooth removal.

> She estimates that 85 percent of the reports on VAERS are “either completely unrelated to vaccinations, or about events that pose little to no concern.”

https://www.cbs17.com/community/health/coronavirus/fact-chec...

The SNR is probably pretty high in VAERS in general most of the time, but when we have a misinformation pandemic combined with a real pandemic, it's easy to see how the data becomes polluted pretty fast.

And I agree, the USA should probably have better reporting systems!

Some other countries do, some of them have much better data quality than VAERS, and genuine analysis of them still agrees that the vaccines have a good safety profile. To just select a few English-language systems:

UK: https://coronavirus-yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk

Australia: https://www.ncirs.org.au/our-work/ausvaxsafety

Canada: https://cps.ca/impact

Some more background from McGill University: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking...

> Yeah just have them switch to a completely different type of aircraft without getting trained or checked out at all

Southwest’s fleet is all 737s; is this really a different type from the C-40?

The military only has a small number of pilots trained on the C-40, and they're needed for actual military operations. Even with basic type familiarity, every airline has it's own unique operating procedures and so new pilots always have to pass an extensive training program including classes, simulator time, and rides with check pilots. This is mandatory for safety. No legitimate airline would take shortcuts there just because of a temporary crew shortage. If a Southwest flight crashed because the Captain and First Officer weren't following identical checklist procedures in an emergency that would be far worse than cancelling a bunch of flights.

A fairly high percentage of airline pilots are also part time pilots in the National Guard or Reserves, so they may be simultaneously rated for a certain airliner type as well as a military aircraft. But that doesn't really help for this situation.

28 C-40s built, ever [0]. Southwest has 737 737s in service [1]. (also, lol at the coincidental number)

There's 91 P-8s [2] in USN service, but still not really enough to make up the shortfall. 165 737NGs delivered in military configurations worldwide, according to [3].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_C-40_Clipper

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet#Curre...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_m...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_Next_Generation#Ord...

Oh my yes.

Am I wrong? Those instrument clusters are like Java and JavaScript