Then take the J&J vaccine... Or Sputnik, or Sinovac, or Astrozenica...

They are all based on the spike Protein, at least the once available in EU.

> Even worst dictators didn’t try yet to push a needle and inject some chemical substance into human body without consent.

Very crass statement, esp. considering it's Germany we're talking about.

> Even worst dictators didn’t try yet to push a needle and inject some chemical substance into human body without consent.

This is literally what is done to people that are unconscious and connected to the IV. Yes,.blood is also "some chemical"

Yeah, the Nazis did do a lot of medical experiments on "undesirable people", and so did the Japanese. While I'm strongly pro-vaccination and, working in a hospital, deeply annoyed (an understatement) by the unvaccinated people flooding the ICU, I still think a vaccine mandate is a pretty big consitutional issue. Force-medicating people is really the last resort of the impotent, and it sits really wrong with me. And considering the way things are going, it is completely possible that this could become a yearly thing, what happens if it is the foot in the door for more of these kinds of policies?

> last resort of the impotent

The quote goes "[…] last resort of the incompetent", see <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Foundation_(1951)>.

Impotent does not make sense here, the state is actually the entity that society grants the greatest power: monopoly of violence and decisions over medical autonomy and life and death.

But I do agree that vaccine mandates are concerning.

There's also alternative ways to promote vaccination and, above all, to ensure anti-vaxxers cannot jeopardise public health.

I think it is an illusion to believe the COVID-vaccines are anything else then well researched. Firstly the entire brainpower of the most advanced medical systems in history had this as their number one priority at least since the pandemic — I am not a medical expert, but other medical experts would have brought forth reasonable doubts. So far all doubts by medical personal came by people who don't work in the field or phrased it as gut feeling, not as hard statistical facts or even annectdotal evidence.

Also: over 8.120.000.000 doses have been administered worldwide. If there would have been conaiderable side effects, even the rarest of the rarest ones would have shown up by now. The idea that there are delayed effects showing up after years is a myth that stems from a misunderstanding of the word "long term side effects". The long term here doesn't mean the effects show up after a long term. It means the effects show up nearly immidiately, but came to stay long term.

Any society has to weigh the right of its citizens. If a mass murderer kills a ton of people, he breaks others rights to a high enough level that the state can harm their rights by jailing them. If a person doesn't vaccinate (which in practise does no harm to them besides a little sting, as we know now) they also impact the rights of others: the rest of society has to stay home in lockdowns, businesses have to close, they potentially block the health system and endager themselves and other people, etc.

From a state perspective that has to balance these rights the decision is clear.

By barely protect you mean you’re like 10-20x less likely to die?

My point isn’t the number itself, but are you not being a little bit intellectually dishonest right now?

> had less registered side effects than only BioNTech in one year

Isn't this just some kind of bias? For example reporting and spreading information is easier than it was in 1970s, or that we take any suspected side effect for real these days?

> that barely protect some of the people

The ratio in ICUs is currently 1:5 to 1:10 in my country, showing a protection of 80 to 90% of the people (https://ockovani.opendatalab.cz/statistiky). In other countries, for example Israel (https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general), it's about the same. That's not "barely" and "some", I think this is comparable with efficiency of other vaccines.

They werent mRNA vaccines either right? We've got to realize that biotech research moves forward at a blazing speed too. It might not give you perfect protection, but It's quite unlikely to harm you.

I understand being anti government and fact rejecting is the new green, but I doubt it'll help you long-term.

Why would you assume it's unlikely to harm you without years long studies that were the normal expectation before the last year and a half?

It's about the number of patients, not the time. It's cheaper to run a trial over a longer period of time, a few patients at a time, but they don't continue to track patients for the entire duration. In this case tons of money was thrown at it and they were able to run tons of patients in parallel. Billions of doses of the vaccine have been given - seriously, what more do you want?

Because mRNA vaccines doesn't contain the dangerous virus at all, "just some genetic information" which will trigger your immune system to build antibodies. Things move forward, TTM for software features these days are often shorter because of technical advances, why wouldn't the same be true in biotech?

> Even worst dictators didn’t try yet to push a needle and inject some chemical substance into human body without consent.

Hitler literally used compulsory medical treatment (sometimes via injections) to sterilise people without consent (and sometimes without the victim knowing what had happened): http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/payzer2/.

And here we go, Germany doing Hitler again. Although obvious I didn’t want to mention him in order to avoid Godwin’s law. I was merely referring to todays leaders that are called dictators by NATO, like Putin, Lukashenko, Kim Jong, Xi Jinping and similar. None of them even thinks about mandatory vaccination, but democratic Germany already plans it.

> And here we go, Germany doing Hitler again.

Flamebait like that is egregiously against the site guidelines and will get you banned here. No more of this, please.

We'd appreciate it if you'd please stop posting flamewar comments and ideological battle comments to HN in general. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. I'm not going to ban you, because you've also been posting some good comments, but please stick to those in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you. I feel like I'm going insane sometimes but you said it all.

I mean, we employ an entire police apparatus to prevent individuals from bringing harm to others by doing what they please. It’s just a matter of perspective.

You are not allowed to do certain stuff in a society, and the society has a variety of enforcement mechanisms to enforce compliance.

> to prevent

This is absolutely false. And that’s as it should be.

The police, and law enforcement more broadly, generally do not prevent crime, rather they investigate and charge after crime has occurred.

As a consequence of that, perhaps, some future crimes may be prevented.

Mandating medical intervention and limitations on those who refuse is idiotic because it’s ham fisted and will obviously radicalise at least some people, for very debatable gains.

> This is absolutely false.

I think that for example the law forbidding you from burning plastic trash in your furnace, or running a diesel car without a DPF, can be well classified as "to prevent individuals from bringing harm to others by doing what they please".

The gains in case of covid seem to be to prevent costly impact on healthcare system (non-covid care getting postponed, staff burning out and quitting).

You make a good point, and perhaps I was overly critical of the comment by focusing on the first paragraph rather then the overall point.

None of these things are being done on the basis of harm. Someone who is vaccinated but has a coronavirus infection is doing more harm than someone who is uninfected and unvaccinated.

Policing people based on an abstract statistical potential to do harm is an unworkable approach to running a society. And has disturbing implications.

Someone driving drink but not having an accident is doing less harm than someone driving sober and having an accident.

Where is my freedom to drive drunk?

Yeah. And if you drive your car into someone and cause an accident that is worse than driving drunk and you should face worse penalties.

Both of those are bad. Negligent driving is also criminal; there is a legal expectation that you are in control of your vehicle. And that is what is being attacked by the law.

The vaccine mandates aren't based on how in control your immune system is over the coronavirus; I won't rehash the natural immunity arguments but as an example they apply here.

And none of this is going to save you from the coronavirus. The evidence is that it is here to stay and we're all going to get it eventually. The vaccines aren't good enough to wipe it out and there is already an impressive number of vaccine escapes being seen. It isn't like an accident where you could go your whole life without being in one.

The vaccine is supposed to lower hospitalization rates. Maybe even it only dampens the numbers. But still, you don't overrun your hospitals to the extent there are no beds for both covid and non-covid patients.

I commend you to support vaccines even when I know They aren't 100% effective in reducing severe disease, and the effectiveness is going down. They don't prevent you from becoming infected and they don't prevent you from infecting others. This is what masks and social distancing are for.

I understand your concern. But even if you are convinced a government is your enemy, the vaccine is not that enemy.

Keep in mind that some interest groups were already pushing agaisnt vaccines before coronavirus. There is gain to be had from social unrest.

Not driving drunk is also not saving everyone from injuries and accident on the road, it just reduces it.

And while vaccinated people can still carry the virus, they are much less likely to carry it than non vaccinated people. You can't deny that.

Where I live, many places now mandate to show both a vaccination certificate, and a negative test result.

Aren’t infected people required to quarantine for a period of time? “Preventing both relatively larger and smaller harms, because they are both too large to tolerate,” doesn’t seem contradictory to me. And “not being vaccinated” is a pretty concrete property.

> Aren’t infected people required to quarantine for a period of time?

No?

Only some subset of those who are infected are required to isolate / quarantine.

Those who don’t get tested are free to meander.

> Those who don’t get tested are free to meander.

And we should call them for what they are: mobile biohazards.

There are established protocols and procedures for dealing with such.

All humans are disease vectors.

I’m not convinced we, here in Australia anyway, have achieved a balance sufficient to satisfy my particular set of beliefs - as far as they go in this five minute period.

> Those who don’t get tested are free to meander.

Since worklplaces and public transport require at tests for the unvaccinated now, those walking around untested are mostly the vaccinated.

> This is all true

The tetanus vaccine takes up to 5 shots and then still usually doesn't provide lifetime sterilizing immunity. If Pfizer's COVID vaccine takes three doses before sticking, that'd still do better.

Also, none of those other diseases are current pandemics.

> and the fact that the mRNA vaccines does not "kill" the virus in the same way the SmallPox vaccine did,

…? Actually, it has exactly the same effect as the smallpox vaccine. It vaccinated, aka immunised. What are you on about?

> What are you on about?

I guess what is commonly called sterilizing immunity. Immunity which is so effective that the illness doesn't occur and which makes it impossible to infect others.

In this context I was recently pointed to the story of Marek's disease [0], which went from a "quite low death rate" to "100% lethal" in a few decades. I think it's worth to know about this and have a long, hard think about the potential consequences of universal, non-sterilising vaccination. We might be locking ourselves into a situation with no escape.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention

This has nothing to do with mRNA (to the best of my knowledge). mRNA is just a means to an end to get an immunogen into your body. Issues of effectiveness are (as far as I know) entirely due to the immunogen and not the delivery method (ie mRNA).

Vaccines vary in effectiveness. Both the extent of immunity they confer and how long those effects last. A vaccine that's less effective than we might like is still a vaccine. I don't think arguments over what should officially constitute "immunity" are very interesting or insightful - it's a meaningless line in the sand. Ask instead about (relative to the unvaccinated) incidence of death, incidence of permanent effects, severity of symptoms, rate of hospitalization, rate of spread to others, and similar.

Well put! The singular focus on death rate in this kind of discussions feels narrowminded, bordering on ignorance, as the severity of symptoms and brutal long term effects for many are just as awful