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...