But we do strongly encourage condom usage and tests. There are education resources and awareness campaigns. Knowingly infecting someone or non disclosure of positive infection status during possible transmission activities is a jailable offense. It's not like HIV is something we simply ignore. There are still strong public health measures and laws protecting the public health.

Most of the anti-mandate people (I'm not one, to be clear) would be quite happy with a world where the interventions around COVID were awareness campaigns. And just as some people insist on not wearing condoms despite the risks, the same will be true of mask wearing and vaccines.

Would they be happy with "Knowingly infecting someone or non disclosure of positive infection status during possible transmission activities is a jailable offense" for COVID?

Ultimately these interventions, mandates and other public health measures, which wind up as a mix of education, awareness and mandates or laws become a balancing act between personal inconvenience and public good; so the work done for HIV is different from the intervention for covid-19 for that and other reasons.

The standard for criminal HIV transmission (in California, at least; it varies by state) is not "accidentally infecting someone while not knowing your status." It's not even "infecting someone without disclosing that you're HIV-positive while knowing you're HIV-positive." It's "intentionally infecting someone with HIV." And, explicitly, your knowledge of your positive status is not sufficient to establish intent.

smoking, and indoor second hand smoking laws ... we know the principles here

>But we do strongly encourage condom usage and tests. There are education resources and awareness campaigns.

Nobody is saying we shouldn't strongly encourage vaccines. But there is a difference between education/awareness campaigns and a mandates.

The same people trying to prevent unvaccinated people from being a part of society would have flipped out if you had to show PrEP status at gay bars in 2019.

>Knowingly infecting someone or non disclosure of positive infection status during possible transmission activities is a jailable offense.

But you aren't charged just because you don't wear a condom or take PrEP while you don't know you have HIV.

So we did do that, and there is a bit of irony there. Back in the 80s AIDS was used to push homophobia and lots of states passed laws making promoting homosexuality illegal. At the time Dr.Fauci went on national television to tell the public you could get AIDS simply by touching or being in proximity to someone who had the virus. So if you want to talk about moralizing science, well actually…

"states passed laws making promoting homosexuality illegal."

Did they? Seems laws have only gone one way, decriminalizing since the late 70s

I mostly agree, but I think the core difference with HIV is how it's transmitted. You're more in control of your transmission risk.

That's less true with Covid given its contagiousness through the air.

I'm of the opinion that private companies have every right to require restrictions they see fit. I'm more mixed about government restrictions now that we're post vaccine (with the exception that requiring vaccine mandates for healthcare workers seems reasonable).

What gets to me about this whole thing is it's not binary but people often talk like it is (probably just political tribalism).

Vaccinated people who are infected spread the disease like the unvaccinated, that's true - but since vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected on exposure things like the vaccine mandates for restaurant entry do have an affect and are not just theater. They reduce the overall probability of positive people in the restaurant.

I think people like Bret Weinstein have done a lot of harm and I'm often surprised by the extent to which intelligence is independent from accuracy.

It's really interesting in the context of this book review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

Basically, the argument in that is a little reason (incompletely applied or understood) can be a dangerous thing and blindly following consensus is sometimes the adaptive behavior. It's a little misapplied to vaccines since in that case someone did actually know the details and understand the mechanism, but it's possible for a cultural understanding to be entirely selected by natural selection and the reason for it was never understood by anyone!

When we see animals do complex behavior we don't usually assume it's because they understand fully why that mechanism is adaptive, but we often misapply this understanding to ourselves.

Mostly getting off topic, but I thought this was an interesting thing to think about.

vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected on exposure?

With Omicron, vaccinated people are MORE likely to get infected, 90 days post-vaccine.

Source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...

Yeah, more likely to get infected on exposure than an unvaccinated person that has not previously had the disease.

The source link supports that claim as far as I can tell from what's on that page and doesn't say anything about vaccinated people being more likely to get infected vs. unvaccinated (both without natural immunity).

The study excluded previously PCR-positive individuals in both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. So it's vaccinated and no prior exposure and unvaccinated and no prior exposure.

The infection rate 60 days post-vaccination were higher in the vaccine group.

"The negative estimates in the final period arguably suggest different behaviour and/or exposure patterns in the vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts causing underestimation of the VE. This was likely the result of Omicron spreading rapidly initially through single (super-spreading) events causing many infections among young, vaccinated individuals."

Yeah, I think it's more likely that this is the explanation. At least I'd need to be persuaded that the more unlikely explanation is the correct one.

yah, difficult to control for that for sure. But most polling indicates unvaccinated folks are far less concerned about COVID in general and less likely to modify their behavior.

Source: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-co...

This seems entirely non-sequitur. We don't have condom mandates because there is no practical way to enforce them. We don't have mandates that you need to wear a mask in your bedroom, either. If we allowed sex in stores and restaurants and didn't have condom mandates for people having sex in stores and restaurants, you'd have a point, but we don't allow sex in public. Porn performers don't have condom mandates, but they do have a mandate requiring them to show proof of a recent negative test before they're allowed to perform. I suspect many people you think are level-headed would be entirely supportive of legally mandated condom usage for non-cohabitating partners if there was any remotely realistic way to do it.

And, of course, we do have an absolute shit ton of mandated vaccines, so mandating one for Covid is not at all novel. It's even already a condition of federal employment in a lot of cases. If you're serving in the state department or military or something where you need to go overseas to places where anthrax or malaria are risks, you need to get vaccinated, and that's been normal and in-bounds for half a century.

> And yet we don't go around forcibly shutting down gay bathhouses, bars, and Grindr and implementing condom and prep mandates, even though they would be effective at reducing its spread. And for good reason: it'd be a massive (and homophobic) violation of civil liberties

Actually, following some FUD by a now famous doctor, this had a lot of political and popular support back then: https://www.congress.gov/98/crecb/1983/07/14/GPO-CRECB-1983-...

Check page 28, July 14 1983.

It's not the fact that it's red tribe coded, it's the fact that the arguments against these things started from very stupid places.

Mask and vaccine resistance is stupid tribe coded, even if now there might be some valid reasons for talking about it. Stupid tribe and red tribe do happen to overlap, but it's the stupid part that upsets people so universally, not the red part.

Also, HIV is not even remotely as contagious as SARS-CoV-2, so it's not really a fair comparison. We absolutely would have shut down whatever we needed to if HIV were airborne.

I really don’t see how you could reasonably talk with someone that isn’t vaccinated and convince them to get vaccinated by calling them stupid. It’s demeaning and completely dismissive of their apprehensions, fears, or any other reason they haven’t been vaccinated.

I would likely find myself much more reluctant to get vaccinated if the person attempting to convince me is calling me an idiot and just shouting that i’m wrong instead of providing me data on the subject, and being honest enough to openly discuss the subject.

A small amount of humility and respect go a very long way.

Who said anything about convincing people? I'm explaining why it's a challenge to consider a position that may be more valid now, but wasn't valid or was substantially less valid in the past.

It was an abjectly stupid position, held by stupid people. Now, it's possible that the situation has changed and it's marginally less stupid of a position, or even not a stupid position at all, given new information.

It's hard for people to make that switch.

I don't have to worry about getting HIV every time I go out in public just because some jerk decided he has a god-given right to breathe viral particles into my lungs even though a simple and safe vaccine is readily available.

This makes no sense. It's incredibly clear at this point that vaccinated people with covid spread it just the same as an unvaccinated person with covid.

IIRC vaccinated people spread smaller quantities of the virus, and the viral droplets they do spread tend to include antigens since their body is actively fighting the infection while they spread it... you know, because their system was primed for the fight thanks to the vaccine.

I think this Fridman podcast interview explored such things, either way it was quite informative on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G433fa01oMU

Yeah, and a car crash does the same damage regardless of Blood Alcohol Concentration. We should still punish a drunk driver for irresponsible behavior.

> just the same

AFAIK that's not true.

My understanding, from a study that may be outdated by now, is the window to spread covid is slightly bigger in the unvaccinated, but not by much.

1-3 days of additional self-quarantine solves this issue.

This is perilously close to "people who get COVID are innocent victims so forcible interventions are justified, while people who got HIV chose to do it so those same nterventions are less justified."

I agree that, for the average person, COVID is easier to contract than HIV. But by the same token, COVID is much less severe than HIV, even with modern treatment plans. It's not at core about some abstract principle about how preventing disease spread trumps all other concerns but is instead a cost benefit analysis. Keeping the country shut down perpetually is an extreme cost that we are continually incurring.

> Keeping the country shut down perpetually is an extreme cost that we are continually incurring.

Which country is this that is perpetually shut down? Even the most mask and vaccine forward (ergo "shut down perpetually") parts of the US are pretty operational. Offices are open as are restaurants and schools Disneyland is packed.

We've learned how to keep society running during the pandemic: vaccines, masks, testing, and occasionally heightened indoor occupancy restrictions during large waves to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.

That's nothing at all like a "perpetual shutdown".

> This is perilously close to "people who get COVID are innocent victims so forcible interventions are justified, while people who got HIV chose to do it so those same nterventions are less justified."

Nope. The existence of simple, effective countermeasures and ease of accessing them set the level of moral culpability for refusing and then infecting someone else as a result.

I'd agree that the cost-benefit is nearing the point of "fuck it, let the selfish jerks have what they want."

Now disease is a matter of "moral culpability"?

It's far easier to accidentally infect someone with COVID than it is to infect someone with HIV, and the harm of the former is less than the harm of the latter. The latter per incident is significantly more costly to society as well.

Should the government require Grindr and gay bars to require customers to show an up-to-date negative status and proof of being on PreP in order to be allowed to participate? With poz people banned from participating at the venue/platform?

> But by the same token, COVID is much less severe than HIV, even with modern treatment plans.

Do you have a source for this? This wouldn't surprise me for the Omicron variant, but I'm surprised that (for example) someone getting the Delta variant in 2021 was "much less severe" than someone getting HIV in 2021.

COVID19 has, since the beginning, had a 0.6% IFR. The odds of someone under 40 without comorbodities dying of it were and are more or less zero.

HIV was and is invariably fatal. Yes, current drug regimens are remarkably effective. They are also very complex, required for the rest of your life, and do not affect the odds of you infecting someone else by unprotected sex.

*No one*, not even the most ill centenarian, would choose HIV over COVID19 if required to be infected by one.

Minor point of correction: someone who is HIV positive but has an undetectable viral load is very unlikely to give someone else HIV. It's riskier to have sex with a random at a bar of unknown status than it is to have sex with someone with an undetectable viral load. (If you trust that they do indeed have an undetectable viral load and strictly adhere to their medication protocol.)

Thank you for the correction.

I'm still amazed that the person I responded to thought that HIV would be preferable to COVID19! What does that say about the effectiveness, so to speak, of media campaigns about COVID19's dangers?

You've misquoted me twice in a short period of time, I didn't say that HIV would be preferable to the Delta variant. You're right, I would "prefer" COVID over HIV, but my personal preference is not a good metric of the overall severity.

In abstract, given the choice between something that had a (say) 30% chance to kill me but was mostly harmless in the long-run and HIV, I would "prefer" the former over the latter. But I also think that the former is more severe. In my view you're equating two things which are not the same.

For some context, I lost 6 family members in a short period of time to the Delta variant of COVID. My experience with COVID is not "media campaigns" but funerals.

>You've misquoted me twice in a short period of time, I didn't say that HIV would be preferable to the Delta variant.

You wrote

>I'm surprised that (for example) someone getting the Delta variant in 2021 was "much less severe" than someone getting HIV in 2021.

I do not think that my

>No one, not even the most ill centenarian, would choose HIV over COVID19 if required to be infected by one.

and

>I'm still amazed that the person I responded to thought that HIV would be preferable to COVID19!

are so far off.

>In abstract, given the choice between something that had a (say) 30% chance to kill me but was mostly harmless in the long-run and HIV, I would "prefer" the former over the latter.

If the only two choices were infection by something that had a 30% chance to kill me, or HIV (presumably followed by the appropriate drug regimen to control it), I think I'd probably take HIV!

But that's not a choice between COVID19 and HIV. Let me repeat: COVID19 has a 0.6% IFR. Yes, IFR increases by age, but even 85-year olds' IFR is 15%; not great, but (as I understand it) pretty comparable to the flu for the cohort.

>But I also think that the former is more severe.

This is more support for the accuracy of my paraphrasing of you.

>For some context, I lost 6 family members in a short period of time to the Delta variant of COVID. My experience with COVID is not "media campaigns" but funerals.

I am sorry to hear that about your family. But (thankfully for society, if not so much for you or your loved ones) your experience is very atypical. Unless all had multiple comorbidities (immune suppression + obesity + something else), what happened to your family members was very, very, very rare.

> But (thankfully for society, if not so much for you or your loved ones) your experience is very atypical. Unless all had multiple comorbidities (immune suppression + obesity + something else), what happened to your family members was very, very, very rare.

Agreed, I wasn't attempting to extrapolate it over the general population. But you may consider your "media campaigns" comment from my POV.

The point I was attempting to make is that (as a relatively young man) I would risk many illnesses over a long-term debilitating illness that affected my sexual health, even if the former were objectively worse for my overall health. That's why I don't think severity and preference are necessarily correlated. Anyway, the "8 replies deep semantics argument" is not a good use of time for either of us, especially since I don't think our viewpoints are that far off.

If nothing else, I have learned more about HIV from this subthread than I expected, so there is that.

If you are so worried about covid... don't go outside. Or if you do, triple mask and wear a face shield. I don't care. Just don't force me into taking measures to make you less fearful--that's pretty selfish.