What's the difference between: A) smugly telling them to do it so that they won't do it, and B) genuinely telling them to do it because you care about public health, but they interpret it as smug?

Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

> Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

I can't tell if this is tongue in cheek, but it seems to be happening on huge swaths of adults as we speak.

> it seems to be happening on huge swaths of adults as we speak.

I am fully convinced there are vast swaths of legal "adults" who are not fully emotionally developed. On my really bad days, I'm one of them. The one thing that saves me is I tend to snap out of it eventually and think of the long term. I think that many "adults" never do.

Events in recent years have only reinforced this point of view.

When I was 12, I equated a really big house with being very important and successful. Now that I'm a emotional adult, I see that a big house is less effective at being shelter than a modestly sized house and that it is an expression of ego, not practicality. This weekend while taking a walk I saw someone in their 70's exit their 10,000 square foot home. I am fully convinced you're right.

New study shows that 90% of the adult population feels that most of the rest of the adult population are not fully emotionally developed (sidereel: Fundamental Attribution Error said to still be at large)

Why do you think that??

I don't know, most people like to at least have the illusion of making their own choices.

The most highly approved of DMs do tend to be good at concealing the railroad tracks...

I was trying to scroll through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DM but couldn't find anything fitting... Am I too old or two young or too out of touch? :D

I think they mean Dungeon Master, the architect / narrator of multiplayer role playing games. A good DM will guide the players through a well-planned story, in part by making the layers feel that they are in control of the story themselves.

I'm not into gaming so didn't make the connection. Thanks!

This exactly.

Imagine you have a close relative (parent, sibling or child) that you love very much and don't want them to die or get very sick but they are refusing to get vaccinated. You could either keep pestering them about getting the shot, tell them they are stupid for not getting the shot, etc. Or you could sit down with them and listen carefully to their reasons and talk to them about why you decided to get the vaccinated. The first approach will most likely make them defensive and not likely to get vaccinated. The second approach may or may not work, but you would have made your best effort.

I don't need to imagine. You sit them down and you learn that they inhabit a completely different reality from your own. You try to describe your reality, and they dismiss it because it disagrees with their "reality". You try to anchor them in factual reality by pointing to people you both know who died of covid, but not before infecting others... who then also died of covid, etc., but they always have a way to dismiss whatever you have to say because it disagrees with their "reality". Because apparently online propaganda is more real to them than everything they see in person and everything their loved ones tell them.

I envy you if "sitting down" with them worked for you.

I think most people did give their best, repeatedly, only to be blown off, repeatedly. At some point, the people you care about stop being those people and start being abusive assholes, being personally responsible for killing your friends and family with their stupidity, and dragging us all deeper into this crisis.

I had come to accept my brother's COVID denial after this loop played out a few times. Now it looks like the world is going for another spin, and sure enough, the arguments rev up again.

Particularly, Rogan interviewing the quack Peter McCullough set my brother off again. I sent him info on McCullough's membership in AAPS[1][2], which seems to be made up of fringe pseudoscience-enamored doctors. That only changed the goalpost, "It's not about him dude, x and y and z and blah blah".

I find it suspect when my views align with abhorrent people, at the very least giving me a signal to reconsider my conclusions.

I'm sorry for the anecdotal tangent, but your comment fit perfectly with what I'm going through. I am doubly frustrated that I can't seem to muster the intellectual power to figure out how to get him to at least reconsider his viewpoints. I WANT TO FIGURE THIS PROBLEM OUT!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_A._McCullough [2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic...

Or you avoid the topic, keep your fingers crossed that they won't get sick, and can at least have a normal conversation about the weather without hating each other.

Interesting, the Ostrich algorithm as applied to RealLife(tm): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_algorithm

Sure, but that does not solve anything.

That does not help your relationship, because interpersonal relationships where you can't express your honest feelings and ideas are hollow, fake – worse than useless.

That doesn't help anything about COVID, because they're still acting recklessly based on their delusions.

And that doesn't help their deteriorating mental ability as they succumb to propaganda, because their idiocy is left uncontested, only reinforced by their self-selecting ingroup.

At some point you gotta choose what you actually love about such people – their meat and bones, your nominal connection to them (e.g. blood relation), your past shared experience, their personality and ideas, or something else? Because some of those are unaffected by their progressing stupidity and selfishness, but others are poisoned more and more as time goes on and they sink deeper.

I don't have a solution. I just wish people would stop pretending that this brainwashing can be solved by talking, understanding, or simply by ignoring its existence. Often it can't. As a society we're in deep shit, and it has little to do with COVID. It will stay with us well after the pandemic too.

> What's the difference between

How and who says it. A in a patronizing and rude way, B in a way they respect and understand.

1% decrease doesn't diminish their size and political influence substantially, even of the disproportionate elderly population. Then only a fraction of the remainders that lose a loved one would re-evaluate, a large fraction of them would still be bounced back when they realize the other ideas "your group" inherits is even harder to accept as a personality trait. Most of them will inherit just enough to not think further about the matter.

It's 1% of the whole population, but a much larger percentage of certain political ideologies.

well, sure yeah.

far left spiritualists and naturopaths are a tiny population, far right people occupy sparsely populated areas.

funny application of horseshoe theory.

Elections swing on fairly small margins. Also, the older folks are more likely to vote than young ones, so the fact that the virus is more deadly to the elderly increases the effect.

IIRC some swing states were decided by less than 1%?

There was an interesting situation in New York. After the 2020 census, they lost a seat in Congress because their population size shrunk proportional to the rest of the country's. If New York had just avoided 2 or 3 of the larger nursing home COVID outbreaks, they'd have kept the seat.

Very roughly, there's a House seat per 750,000 people in the US. They were really close enough that a couple nursing home populations (in the hundreds) made the difference?

Yes, by 89 people. Incredible.

That would be Arizona (0.31%), Georgia (0.24%), and Wisconsin (0.63%), with 37 electoral votes collectively. The total margin in all those states combined was only about 42k votes.

If Trump had won all of those instead, there would have been an electoral college tie, which would have resulted in the House deciding on a one-vote-per-state basis. It wouldn't have been pretty.

Biden also won Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, by 1.16%.

Consider that causing 1% of the group's population to die might not weaken the group and in fact might make the group stronger.

Disease doesn't kill "weaker" members of a group, it kills susceptible ones.

The Spanish Flu notably had a much higher mortality amongst younger, healthier people.

COVID however is most fatal to the eldery. Letting it simply rage out of control could push back the social security crisis a few years.

I don't think anything as Machiavellian as this is going on. I think it was all just a culmination of decades anti-expert propaganda and knee-jerk obstructionism coming to a head in a terribly fatal way.

The elderly though often serve an important part in society. In particular, they can care for grandchildren.

I didn't mean some sort of darwinian thing where the average strength goes up. I mean that the strength of the group as a whole could very well increase.

He’s effectively describing Trump’s leaked plan to let covid ravage blue urban areas before the election, but here framing it as a liberal plot as a narrative device

Maybe he’s a Republican astroturfer

Someone just learned the root language of real human economics taught to us as abstractions through story and pie chart.

People laughing about people believing in conspiracy theories spreading conspiracy theories. No useful comments come to mind, can only watch in awe.

Consider it a form of entertainment if you can stomach the more morbid aspects of it.

Alternatively, maybe he's a Democratic astroturfer using reverse reverse psychology to convince holdouts to go get vaccinated.

>Trump's leaked plan

Can I get a source?

Yikes don’t say that out loud!

But seriously, the left needs to think more like this. The right plays dirty and if the left plays like this they get the same outcomes of playing dirty but is not saying anything bad or wrong.

The comment you are replying to is not a novel take. This stuff has long since been thought of by some strategists on pretty much every side of every issue for about as far back as we have record of this sort of thing. Heck, revise the wording a little bit and it could pass for something some enlightenment thinker half a century ago would have said about whatever issue they were talking about that minute.

Social conditioning by years of right-wing media to distrust everything any scientist says is what will cause the outcomes we're seeing, not a cartoonish reverse psychology plot.

Breitbart actually published an article making exactly this argument, with an in-built implication in the way it was argued that that meant getting vaccinated was a way to 'own the libs'.

I hope it caused a few more people to get vaccinated.

You do realize that you're responding to a comment reframing the USA left-establishment's covid vaccine rhetoric, right? Point being, how do you know the left isn't playing like this?

My wife does something similar to me all the time. If she knows that I’m uncertain about a fact, she’ll feign a kind of mistaken certainty in the (true) fact to bait me into taking a bet against it. Then I lose the bet.

Same thing in politics - If you know the other side is uncertain about a position that you have high confidence in, stake your position and then politicize it so the other side is forced to either concede or stake their claim to the weaker position.

but why are you so adamant on making everybody so perfectly safe?

there used to be something about freedom and risk; heck, about life and risk.

it's risky to be alive but it was more risky live way back in the day

at what point does safety begin to stifle the drive to live?

we as humans originally evolved in a risky environment, we thrived in it, we made it safer for ourselves; but maybe, just maybe, we also acquired a need for this risky behavior and without it our lives feel emptier?

the point I am trying to make (granted not very eloquently) starts out from this idea [1] that humans are kind of crazy, and that maybe this crazyness is what makes us so successful; so I put that too much safety may undo this crazyness, it puts it to sleep?

see also anti-fragility

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97jBvbmY03g&t=252s

Less about making those people safe and more about making you safe by making those other not spread the disease to you.

For example: Go ahead and drive drunk, I don’t care, just do it on your private property so you don’t kill me.

Similarly: Go and don’t get vaxed, honestly I don’t care. But viruses don’t respect borders like cars do, so if you are going to do it then make sure you are isolated on a private island where you don’t leave, or Antarctica, or mars or something.

But if you've already gotten the shot, you're protected from the disease. So, what is someone else not getting the shot going to do to you?

What it will do is that when those people who haven't got the shots start to be sick, they will throw their beliefs in the bin and go to the hospital. They will stretch the capacity and then when I need to go for an ailment different from this disease, I'll be queued up behind them and the treatment I get would be subpar. Disclaimer: I don't have the stats on hospitalization rates/capacity in places that have low rates of vaccination but high rates of infection.

That is a concern, and I think we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need.

There are also other treatments that we know greatly reduce the severity (and thus would decrease the need for hospital capacity) that haven’t been rolled out as widely and aggressively as the vaccine has.

> we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need.

Hospital capacity limits are mostly about personnel and not equipment/space. Equipment and space are issues too, but temporary measures are possible.

Everywhere is having trouble hiring because employers don't want to pay enough wages for people to do the work. The same is true in the healthcare setting, but nursing requires a significant amount of training (AFAIK, 2 years for entry level nursing, I think more time needed for ICU nursing) and doctoring is even more. Hospitals (and healthcare providers in general) are not incentivized to retain enough staff to deal with spikes in demand. AFAIK, there hasn't been increased training, and probably a lot of training was delayed while in-person education wasn't an option. Healthcare workers were also a lot of the early victims. COVID mitigation measures probably reduce healthcare productivity too, requiring even more workers.

Not enough ICU (too late when you get there anyway) is a political problem. In my country they reduced it with state funding (you got money for reducing beds, active monetary incentives) and now they ponder about vaccination mandates.

This is infantile blaming of others in my opinion. Worse, you don't even hold those that are really responsible to account. So my sympathy if you fail to get an ICU is limited.

It is not practical to have hospitals to cater to extreme spikes - it takes trained doctors, nurses, infrastructure to run all which is in limited supply. Further, even if that can be managed, during normal periods, all that excess capacity wouldn't maintain itself. You need a balance of additional capacity and responsible behaviour supported by science/medicine/evidence. Ignoring that is infantile.

True, but that was a policy in the last summer and now non-vaccinated people are blamed. This does not match.

This ^. If the shots are truly protective, I don't understand what the hubbub is all about.

Is it really all about protecting those who truly can't get the shot for whatever reason? I doubt it.

Just because seatbelts are "truly protective" that doesn't mean that getting into accidents is risk free.

Just because driving a car isn’t risk free doesn’t mean you outlaw cars. You take the sensible precautions that are available and accept that a life worth living involves a certain amount of risk.

We did outlaw driving without seatbelts. Against strong protests at the time.

We don’t know what happened in the alternate universe where there were no seatbelt laws. Maybe there are people here who died because they stubbornly refused to ever wear a seatbelt because they had taken a public stance against seatbelts and made not wearing a seatbelt into a noble fight against tyranny. Maybe in the other universe they’re still alive because they were able to come around and change their mind without feeling like they lost a fight and were admitting defeat.

But I guess we’ll never know, because if you think something is a good idea what you should do is immediately use the government to coerce everybody into doing it under threat of fines and punishment.

Are you seriously arguing that without seatbelt laws more people would've been saved by seatbelts?

If we count all the lives saved by extra organs donated, maybe?

Have you never heard of the saying “you catch more flies with honey”?

Is the law really the driving force behind why most people wear seatbelts? I don’t think so.

Exactly! We don't outlaw cars.

But we have speed limits, stop signs, seat belt regulations, airbag requirements, crumble zones, crash tests, driver training and testing, significant drunk driving laws, ...

If we had equivalent sensible precautions for COVID as we have for cars, mask mandates and vaccination requirements would be the minimum and carry significant penalties.

The shots are NOT truly protective.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has an effectiveness of about 91%. That means in about 9% of cases it is not protective.

I'm amazed we are this deep into this pandemic and people still have black and white thinking wrt to vaccinces.

I think most people consider 91% to be “truly” protective. Nothing is 100%. The vaccine is more than effective enough to reduce the risk of Covid to the general background risk level of life in general (things like car accidents, slipping in the shower, eating red meat, contracting a flesh eating amoeba from swimming in a lake etc.)

Car crashes kill 30K people a year in the US. COVID has killed 400K in the US in 2021.

It's literally 10x worse than cars and 30K from cars is horrific.

How many vaccinated people have been killed by Covid? I’m talking about the risk after you’re vaccinated.

91% is truly protective, as long as that effectiveness lasts long enough to be meaningful.

In fact, 91% is an amazingly high number - I don't know if any pre-mRNA vaccine has ever reached that level of effectiveness.

So I return to my original point -- if they're really that effective, why the hubbub?

It's quite clear that the person who wrote the comment I'm replying to believes that "truly protective" means 100% protection, and that if the vaccine was "truly protective" you no longer need to worry about getting COVID.

This is a very dangerous idea and why there is so much confusion and misinformation.

By insisting that 91% is "truly effective" in conversations like this you are not helping.

Not to be condescending, but because people have been saying for a year now or more now that the virus will rapidly evolve and any vaccines will become less effective over time because of it.

And the virus rapidly evolved and the vaccines we have became less effective to new strains, as expected. A quick deployment of vaccines would greatly reduce that risk (see: Japan currently having infections in the double digits following a rapid deployment in vaccines and universal masks, leaving little room for new strains to adapt).

The pandemic has been a long chain of some insightful people saying "This bad thing will happen if people don't take X precaution." People say that's a lie--then don't take X precautions. Bad thing happens. People get angry and say they were lied to because bad thing happened when they were told it wouldn't happen (because loads of people took no precautions). Then there's a warning about another bad thing happening, followed by denial.

If you catch the flu once your immune system remembers it and can easily deal with exposure much better, but this memory fades in time. Your immune system isn't perfect either, and there are breakthrough cases, and this is more frequent in the elderly, albeit frequently milder. The vaccine offers protection similar to catching the flu (albeit much better in the case of the mRNA and J&J ones (<10% infected compared to ~50% infected in traditional technology) but protection is not guaranteed.

I'm disappointed I'm explaining this, I thought it's common knowledge that vaccines offer great protection but not invulnerability.

I know all that. I can fully accept that the vaccine doesn’t make me invulnerable. I have the vaccine and am fully prepared to go back to living my normal life while accepting that I still have some risk. I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low). At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom.

Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t. People are free to do other risky things like skydiving or free climbing. If you don’t want to accept the risks of those things you can opt out of doing them.

> I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low).

It objectively does... the hospital capacity risk, the risk of variants spreading among the unvaxed, or the breakthrough cases.

> At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom.

That is an opinion not all agree with.

> Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point.

What about "long covid"? That sounds also miserable.

According to the Mayo Clinic[1] 72.2% of the US population already have at least one dose. Presumably the people with one dose will continue to get the second one.

Among the people who aren't vaccinated, some of them will have already had it and have a natural immunity. Some of them will get the vaccine eventually even without a mandate.

So, there's some number < 27.8% of the US who could theoretically be forced to get a vaccine with a mandate who wouldn't otherwise get it. How much does vaccinating those people really reduce the risks you mentioned?

Only a small percentage of cases require hospitalization. Are we at an extreme risk of hospital overload now?

The variants that have emerged so far seem to be trending toward being less serious and the current vaccine still provides protection against them. So what are we really gaining by forcing more people to get vaccinated?

There is probably a higher risk of contracting a breakthrough case, but how much? And how risky is it to get a breakthrough case anyway? It seems like with the vaccine, if you get it, it's not really all that serious.

Meanwhile, there are real costs in increasing division and creating further animosity among people by mandating a vaccine that the vast majority of people are already willingly getting anyway.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

> So, there's some number < 27.8% of the US

In Wyoming, < 50% of people 18-65yo are vaxxed. (citation: your link). In Massachusetts? Its > 80%. I just picked two states at either end, you see similar pattern for other states. The highly politicized nature of the vaccine also means that some people that should get the vaccine, and normally would, are holding out. This is disservice to everyone. I have extended family members where people have died because an immune-compromised person didnt get the vax because their care-taker was too focused on the politics to help them get it, only to later bring covid into the household.

The issue is not 27% of the US, its 50% of that state. Some localities are more at risk, or at a lower herd immunity potential.

> Only a small percentage of cases require hospitalization. Are we at an extreme risk of hospital overload now?

Yes. [1].

> current vaccine still provides protection against them

still provides protection against them, but less protection.

> So what are we really gaining by forcing more people to get vaccinated?

1. Less hosts for virus, so less room to mutate, or slower mutations. 2. Less hospital beds used by covid patients. See earlier point. 3. Less people sick, and less death. 27% of america is millions of people.

> with the vaccine, if you get it, it's not really all that serious.

We don't know the long-term side affects of the virus if you get it while vaccinated. We know that a statistically significant cohort of un-vaxxed people get "long covid" where they have long-term side affects. We don't have data on breakthroughs yet getting long covid.

> increasing division and creating further animosity

Most people who mandate masks and vaccines are trying to save lives, however misguided or unnecessary you and others think the chosen implementation of that goal is. I've seen (here in HN) people say that getting covid is "basicallly optional" and therefore if hospitals are at capacity we should just turn away covid patients because its their own fault. I think the division and animosity is borne by those that don't seem to care about others very much, tbh, and therefore maybe health policy isn't "divisiveness" as much as a disregard for other's lives.

I appreciate the numbers-game aspect of saying the risk of death is down to x% of 27% of america, (and shrinking). Its the right approach to proving that the costs are being amortized across less lives saved, because one day (today, tomorrow, whatever) we do have to say that we've saved all the lives we can bear and we have to move on. I don't have a target number, and neither do politicians - maybe the CDC or others should state an actual goal to use to base policy decisions off of.

That said, based on the {unknown long covid risk, hospitals still being at capacity, mutation risk, regionalized risk} i personally still support covid policies to continue to be in affect, despite the (truly minor) inconvenience. I don't really care about the animosity of people who think we should let our fellow neighbors die in the street.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...

I never said anyone should be left to die. People should be treated, even if their problems are because of their own poor choices. If we refused to treat anyone who made bad choices, we could close most hospitals, because we wouldn't treat hardly anyone.

WY has 576,851 people. MA has 7,033,469. So, at 50% and 80% vaccinated, there are 288,426 unvaccinated people in WY and 1,406,694 in MA.

WY is also nearly 10x larger at 97,914 sq mi. vs. 10,565 sq mi. in MA. So, in MA there are ~133 unvaccinated people per sq mi and a little less than 3 per sq mi. in WY.

If you want to minimize your chances of encountering an unvaccinated person, your odds are much much better in WY, despite the percentages! It's misleading to talk about percentages when the absolute numbers are so different.

Also, think about a rancher living on 1,000 acre ranch in WY who spends most of their time outdoors chasing cattle (and is in great shape) and goes into town for groceries every other week vs. a sedentary office worker in MA who takes the T into downtown Boston every day. Very different risk profiles for catching Covid and having a serious case. You're not gaining a whole lot by forcing the rancher to get vaccinated.

> The highly politicized nature of the vaccine also means that some people that should get the vaccine, and normally would, are holding out.

And who politicized it? Who wrote articles comparing the percentages of "Red State" vaccinations vs. "Blue State" vaccinations? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't the people in the Red States. Now the vaccine is tied in to people's identities. Now getting the vaccine is a "liberal thing" so now people are forced to go against their tribe to get the vaccine. Sure, I guess it helps you score political points with your in-group and get lots of likes on Twitter when you can dunk on the dumb conservatives who won't get vaccinated, but it is literally killing people. The mandates are not about saving lives, they're about having a political cudgel to make one party look good and the other look bad. People are getting vaccinated anyway, they would be getting vaccinated faster and with less resistance if one party were not trying to use it is a ploy to appear sanctimonious.

As a bit of anecdata, both of my parents are conservative Republicans. My dad especially is an ardent Trump supporter. They both got vaccinated the second it was available to them and got the booster as soon as that was available. So, it's not even an accurate characterization. The vaccine was developed under Trump (although back then, it was Biden, Harris, and the rest of the Democratic party who were pushing vaccine hesitancy). There was an opportunity to paint this as a bipartisan triumph that could have brought people together, but that wasn't allowed to happen.

What about people who have already survived Covid?

Studies are pretty clear that they're somewhat more immune than folks who've had the shot.

And if you can still transmit the disease even after getting the shot, then it doesn't protect those people anyway. They will still have to exercise whatever caution is necessary to protect themselves, which they would have to do anyway, because there are other diseases as well.

Yeah, it's a partial measure that carries no guarantees... which makes it a poor candidate for a fix to roll out to everyone, in my opinion.

It doesn't make sense to me why officials aren't focusing just on getting as close to 100% as possible of the vulnerable vaccinated. It's well known that surviving covid is a much better protection, and thus contributes more to herd immunity, than the mRNA shot+boosters.

Perhaps "following the money" can provide answers? A vaccine mandate is a great way of making a lot of money for some people...

> it's well known that surviving covid is a much better protection,

Getting sick sucks though. Especially when people get "long covid" that doesn't ever go away.

> Perhaps "following the money" can provide answers?

Perhaps the answer is not a secret conspiracy but a rational, human desire to protect people.

> Getting sick sucks though.

Yeah, but that's really up to me, isn't it? There's a reason I choose not to live in China, Laos, or Vietnam.

Now that the vaccine is so widely available: (a) health officials should drop all orders and regulations, and (b) hospitals ought to say "look, here's our COVID capacity; if we're full we can't serve you, sorry" -- with that capacity set at a reasonable, sustainable number for them.

... unless the shot isn't what they say it is in terms of effectiveness or safety. But if it is really that effective and safe, I don't see any reason not to implement (a) and (b).

> Perhaps the answer is not a secret conspiracy but a rational, human desire to protect people.

That's not what I see when people's basic human rights and freedoms are being removed. People in Australia are being kept in freakin' internment camps.

When a 91+% effectiveness shot is available for free to everyone, the bar of rationally protecting people has been more than cleared. This doesn't appear to be about that anymore.

> Yeah, but that's really up to me, isn't it?

No. You can still get breakthrough cases with the vaccine. Your chance is higher the more un-vaxxed people around you. You can't control that number easily. People who work in service industry really cant control that.

Additionally, the more the virus spreads the more it'll mutate to avoid the vaccine, so the more likely that you lose that control.

> There's a reason I choose not to live in China, Laos, or Vietnam.

Well, really you were born where ever you were born, which is probably where you are now, and getting a visa to one of those countries really isn't solely up to you, because they need to let you in. I vaguely see your point (except most people dramatically overstate global mobility), but if you actually wanted to avoid getting sick you'd move to australia because their rates are really low - for reasons you allude to.

> hospitals ought to say "look, here's our COVID capacity; if we're full we can't serve you, sorry" -- with that capacity set at a reasonable, sustainable number for them.

But we don't do that here, in the civilized world. We don't turn people away. Its inhumane to not help people and turn them away. Doctors take an oath to help all in need.

It would solve the hospital problem to say "tough s*t if you get sick, did you try the vax?" but thats not a practical response. No politician or organization wants to take responsibility for that measure, and no doctor would turn away someone sick.

In what world is turning sick and ill people away at the hospital a valid response to all this? I would MUCH rather wear a mask than have hospitals turn people away.

> people's basic human rights and freedoms are being removed.

In america? I haven't seen any freedoms being removed except the freedom to feel safe. Vaccine mandates and masks aren't an infringement on your freedoms. What bill of rights protects your right to not breath through paper?

Hell, speaking of freedom, if everyone who complained about masks and vaccine mandates in america cared equally about the infringed freedoms of minorities then this nation would be the land of the free for everyone.

> Your chance is higher the more un-vaxxed people around you.

People keep repeating that line, as if unvaccinated folks who have survived Covid present the same risk as those who have had neither. In fact, surviving Covid is more protective than the vaccine (studies have shown this).

Conflating unvaccinated Covid survivors with those who actually put the population at risk is at best disingenuous.

Classical epidemiology teaches us that everyone will eventually get Covid, just like everyone will eventually get influenza. Treating it like the plague (which it isn't) is creating a concentration of power among certain elites, which is never good for society.

> Vaccine mandates and masks aren't an infringement on your freedoms.

Masks aren't, but vaccine mandates and other regulations certainly can be, depending on how they are enforced. For example, restrictions on freedom of assembly (which is articulated in the bill of rights), including churches (who did sue in California and win on constitutional grounds).

> But we don't do that here, in the civilized world. We don't turn people away. Its inhumane to not help people and turn them away. Doctors take an oath to help all in need.

> It would solve the hospital problem to say "tough s*t if you get sick, did you try the vax?" but thats not a practical response. No politician or organization wants to take responsibility for that measure, and no doctor would turn away someone sick.

> I would MUCH rather wear a mask than have hospitals turn people away.

Great points, I appreciate your thoughts.

> It doesn't make sense to me why officials aren't focusing just on getting as close to 100% as possible of the vulnerable vaccinated.

That's what the priority classes were for. But at this point we have plenty of shots for everyone, at least in the US. So anyone who will take the shot is a good target.

> A vaccine mandate is a great way of making a lot of money for some people...

We've already done so many shots that a vaccine mandate wouldn't be that much in terms of profits. And in the longer term it could easily mean less shots total, if we shut down the virus.

Yes, broadly speaking. That is the principle of herd immunity. We managed to eradicate smallpox with mandatory vaccination programs without all this political fuss.

Smallpox was way, way worse than Covid. If Covid were killing and permanently disfiguring children en masse, you can be sure there would be no resistance to the vaccine.

Because 0.3 * 1 = 0.3

And

0.3 * 0.3 = 0.09

"Our vaccines are working exceptionally well. They continue to work well for Delta with regard to severe illness and death - they prevent it, but what they can't do anymore is prevent transmission,"

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky

Hmm did he mean that it doesn’t affect transmission (as in reduce R0) or that it literally can’t prevent transmission (R0 reduced, but still >>0)?

The latter is trivially true. I’m guessing he said it anyway because it was intended for a different audience.

I don’t think they literally reduce illness and death to zero, but just pretty close. I would assume they were using the same definition of “prevent” in both places in that sentence.

Preventing transmission != reducing transmission rates.

The vaccines absolutely do the later.

This seems to be so hard for some to understand that it smacks of dis-ingenuity.

are you sure about that? - seems right now the most vaccinated states also seem to have the largest spike in cases - I agree the vaccine, at this point anyway, seems to be reducing deaths - but not sure I agree on transmission - seems like it it still spreading worse than before.

And no, I am not an antivaxxer i I am triple vaxxed myself and work in the healthcare field.

The only real overlap right now is new england, places like the PNW have high vaccinations and low case rates. Regardless, there are so many factors that affect transmission, you can't easily learn much from geographic comparisons due to the impossibility of eliminating the confounds.

However the science is clear, all else being equal, covid vaccines reduce transmission rates.

Why does someone unvaccinated pose a risk to you?

Vaccines don't prevent spread of Covid.

They do reduce it, by a lot, enough to avoid overwhelming hospitals -- which are borderline right now in many countries and being filled up by anti-vaxxers. Those freedom loving people are taking up valuable beds, putting the lives of people at risk that have other medical issues.

Essentially, all of these anti-vax arguments boil down to: "You cannot definitively, absolutely, completely prove that the vaccines are 100.00% effective AND 100.00% safe for everyone always. I mean sure, you're not technically forcing me to take it, but your suggestion that I do my duty to society is too authoritarian. I would prefer to think of myself as a universe onto myself and take the personal chance of death comparable to climbing Mount Everest or driving F1 cars. Because freedom! Or something..."

Also: "Grandma can take her chances with getting COVID from me on the odd occasion that I visit her in the cheapest hospice I could find to offload her onto."

I don't think there is any proof of that - look at VT, or in fact most of the New England states - among the highest percent of vaccinated people anywhere in the US and yet for many of those states, the cases are at a much, much higher level than at any time during the pandemic.

Look at Florida, decent % of people are vaxxed, but nearly as many (as a %) as in most new england states and yet the spread of cases is much more muted on a population adjusted basis. These data anomalies need better explanation from non-political scientists - one is not an anti-vaxxer for pointing these inconsistencies out.

I agree vaccine seems to be keeping people alive and that is a good thing, and despite your snide remarks, it is actually possible to be in favor of people getting the vaccine (I am tripled vaxxed myself) and yet still valid to question the official (and always changing) narrative we are being fed that this is only a pandemic of the unvaccinated - the facts don't back that up.

Vaccines didn't prevent the spread of smallpox either, until they finally did.

We're not smallpoxing Covid out of existence without a much better vaccine.

> We're not smallpoxing Covid out of existence without a much better vaccine.

Are you sure? At this point we can vaccinate almost everyone, and we wouldn't have to reduce the R factor by all that much.

It might not be a feature of the vaccine, but a feature of the combination immune system + virus which doesnt allow us to smallpox Covid out of existence.

Because it brings the healthcare system crashing down with them. It's not a personal liberty if it's at the direct expense of the lives of others. Get the fucking shot.

> the point I am trying to make (granted not very eloquently) starts out from this idea [1] that humans are kind of crazy, and that maybe this crazyness is what makes us so successful; so I put that too much safety may undo this crazyness, it puts it to sleep?

You are blurring the lines between taking a personal risk in one occasion at a specific time and taking the risk of not wearing a mask or washing hands or cooking meat every day all year long.

Craziness for the sake of craziness is just random trial and error.

What is wrong with cooking meat?

there should be a "not" in front of it :/. I should have used "washing vegetables" or "not cooking chicken" or something less ambiguous.

What does this have to do with the actual topic of the parent post?

Ok but what's the point of taking risks for its own sake? It makes sense to take risks if you stand to gain something. But a risk with only downside is just a bad idea.

some people, mostly young people, might consider it 'fun'.

also, at a certain point, a real experiment may yield nothing in return, i.e. a risk was undertaken yet nothing at all was gained.

sure, but on one hand, you have being mildly inconvenienced by a shot, and on the other hand, you have conspiracy theories that can get loads of people filled. People are crazy, we should embrace that, but that doesn't mean you let everyone drive drunk.

If 'You' is a goverment in a country with socialised healthcare, you want your population as healthy as possible to keep costs down. Preventative care (vaccines) is much cheaper.

You had me until the last paragraph. If "smugly" insisting X would make them dig in their heels, what are we supposed to do? Say "Oh of course it's totally in your rights, please send your unvaccinated children to the same school my kids go to"? Because I don't think it will change their minds either.

What happened to "personal responsibility" that these people like so much? If the whole country tells these people to get vaccinated, they don't, and they die, then I don't think I should be held responsible for being smug, or snarky, or whatever.

The vaccines don't prevent those things. They do lower the probability - or at least, that's the claim. That's not perfection, but it's not nothing, either.

As to whether the claim is accurate... that's outside the scope of this comment.

Who's claiming that? My impression is that official sources are now acknowledging it does nothing but lessen the chance of serious illness & hospitalisation for the person taking it.

Your impression is wrong, infection protection is still on the table.

That claim is pretty widespread and ubiquitous among the scientific literature. You might consider reassessing your news sources if they have been telling you otherwise.

I believe that the emphasis on the reduction of the chance of serious illness & hospitalization is because people believe that all the people who would be motivated to get vaccinated out of altruism are already vaccinated.

Pretty crazy how every single vaccinated person I know has tested positive for Covid since. I guess I and they must be outliers.

If there is some protection from spread, it's garbage protection.

That you anecdotally know vaccinated people who got Covid and that Covid vaccines lower the chance of being infected with Covid can both be true?

Yes, I knew I would get called out for an anecdote on this website. Thanks for not disappointing.

Perhaps you shouldn’t knowingly use flawed arguments if you don’t wish for the flaw to be called out

Meanwhile, among the many people I know who have been vaccinated, there's been just a single breakthrough case, and that case was due to catching covid from an unnvaccinated co-worker.

Since you seem a bit confused, here's what we know and don't know AFAIK:

1) Vaccination reduces your chance of getting infected. The efficacy depends on the strain of covid and the vaccine, but I have yet to see any science indicating that any vaccine has no efficacy against any strain.

2) Vaccination may or may not reduce your infectiousness while you are sick

3) Vaccination does reduce the average duration of infection, which means that while you may be as infectious as a non-vaccinated person while you are sick, you have a shorter window in which to spread that sickness.

So despite the unclearness of #2, we are very clearly able to say that vaccines reduce transmission because of #1 and #3.

Thanks for the assessment, but I'm not "confused" at all. Maybe if the pro-vaccine-mandate crowd wasn't so snide and insufferable people might take you more seriously.

Where do you see me advocating for vaccine mandates?

If there is a part of my comment you found snide, please let me know as that was not my intent.

That's not my impression. My impression is that official sources are claiming that it reduces the chances that you get it at all, and maybe reduces the chances that you'll pass it on as well.

I have never (that I recall) seen an official source saying what you claim. (Mind you, I'm not saying that you're wrong in your assessment of the effectiveness of the vaccine. I'm not even saying that you're wrong in your read of what officials are claiming - just that I have never seen it.)

Can you point me to someone official making that claim? And, what country are you in?

They lower your chance of getting covid by about 50% if exposed and lower your chance of spreading it if you get it by about 50%.

So.. It's not perfect at stopping transmission but you can see how it would definitely reduce the R0 enough to prevent outbreaks in the non-vaccinate pops.

>You realize that smugly insisting that those people should "get the shot" will make them dig in their heels and insist they will never do any such thing

LOL

We just have to wait till the mid terms to see how much the tribe has been reduced... I mean you have to be right, the TV said the same thing!

> We just have to wait till the mid terms to see how much the tribe has been reduced

I realize you are saying this just to be snarky and wage ideological battle, but the fact is that we don't.

The data is readily available about political affiliation as a predictor for vaccination rates, and vaccination status as a predictor for COVID mortality. 90+% of Democrats are vaccinated, and mortality rates are around 20 times higher among the unvaccinated. It is not an exaggeration to say that materially all of the COVID deaths over the past few months have been among conservatives.

May I gently suggest that 100,000+ preventable deaths among your ideological fellow-travelers deserves reflection beyond the political consequences next November?

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/10/01/for-covid-1...

https://dshs.texas.gov/immunize/covid19/data/vaccination-sta...

I like the thought experiment, but i would counter that i suspect the 1% that would die would be replaced by a larger volume of new group members - due to the divisive nature of "us vs them", everyone has to choose, and so the forced unity ends up increasing overall members. Forcing people to choose increased membership of both parties.

Not a statement, just a thought.

There is also the old fashioned way of earning people's trust, by being honest and demonstrating with your actions that you are trustworthy. Censoring discussions, enforcing vaccinations, displaying double standards (elite partying unmasked) and so on are the opposite of that.

Also, to many it may be acceptable to risk some lives in exchange for freedom. In fact society does that all the time, sending people to police the streets, or to wars. Individuals also do risky things for the sake of freedom all the time, for example riding motorbikes or seeking adrenaline kicks in dangerous sports.

That would be a very, very bad plan we are not talking about, because it would make people so radical, that in the end they rather shoot people of the other tribe, than getting the shot. (and that already happened)

It would make them form secret circles, where they only talk or listen to each other further radicalising themself. And they do not have a choice, because they have their dogma of vaccine == poison - so they feel pushed to connect stronger in their own circles of "awakened minds".

And with the deadly disease not at all deadly enough to kill them all out - this "no talk about plan" will just make them stronger effectivly.

Before they were just weirdos spread out. Now the weirdos are organizing and arming themself.

So I mean, the very first antivaccine movement involved firebombs (https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/1/82) not to mention some questionable research ethics; maybe none of this is really new.

Your comment reminds me of something I read a few years back and CANNOT find again which I think said something like:

* The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for a delusional disorder have sort of a carve-out for religion.

* Specifically if a lot of people live together in a community and all believe something disconnected from reality but it isn't hurting their day-to-day life this isn't a mental illness, it's just part of their culture and it should not be diagnosed as a mental illness.

* Modern use of the Internet has made it easy for people who share common interests to come together in a community and hang out together, where previously they would have formed an extreme minority of their community and had what were obviously non mainstream views.

* For example, people who believe that radiation causes terrible illness (electromagnetic hypersensitivity) can all live together in a city with no cell phones or power lines and maybe none of them would have any kind of mental illness because their beliefs were a norm - which previously would have been impossible.

I was struck by this observation but could never find it written down again.

Well, I don't know anyone who has the absolute truth, and people claiming they do is a good sign for me to avoid them.

So in general I am very tolerant for weirdos and the general right of people to live their own ways, if they are not harming me.

But I think it is a bad idea pushing people further into radicalisation amd isolation and this is what I see is happening now worldwide, on a new scale unseen before.

If Democrats/the left could pull back enough to model the minds of Republican voters, they could have framed the vaccine as "the war against China's virus". They could have talked about a great foreign threat to our nation, and that we need to band together as Americans to fight it. Degenerates in other countries might not be taking the fight seriously, but Americans are, because we are the greatest nation on earth with the best people.

Who cares if it leaves out a lot of nuance, and is not literally true, if it works?

You know we could have. We could have sacrificed a whole lot of our values to capitulate to people who think Facebook posts counter decades of research, we could have capitulated to one of their several abhorrent values like xenophobia so that they might finally go along with something that’s good for themselves and the country.

Frankly I’m not interested in that sort of capitulation anymore. I’m not even interested in the phrasing of the argument. The unvaxxed masses need to figure out how to capitulate to us. They need to step back and model our minds to figure out how to frame their views in an acceptable manner.

Otherwise they can continue to lose their jobs, get kicked off internet platforms, and keep filling hospital beds gasping for the vaccine after it’s far too late to help them.

Fuck em

I think this would work in the scope of vaccines, but I fear the effects of inflaming xenophobia. There were plenty of reports of random violence against asians the past year; I'd rather avoid increasing that.

Isn't the reasoning that few might die for vaccine, but overall it's a better result?

Correction - it's not 1%, it's 100%. Of both tribes.

could you please elaborate on this?

The vaccine does not grant immortality. So when you take the long view, everybody dies.