They're protesting against mandates. Which most of the world is lifting...

And I'm not on the truckers' side per se... But the response from the government has been shocking and I'm sure as hell not on the government's side.

For the record, I'm vaccinated. Not an anti-vaxxer. Literally just went to Europe and came back. Getting out of and back into Canada was the most onerous part of the trip.

Just to be clear, the government of Canada doesn't mandate vaccination of truckers, what it mandates is for non-vaccinated individuals (which includes truckers) that are entering Canada through the border that they must get tested and quarantine on entry.

So if you can't prove vaccination on entry, you need to have a proof of negative test and quarantine a few days.

I just want to point that out, because it seems the media has taken to make it sound like the Canadian government wants to force vaccinations on truckers, it doesn't, but it's enforcing safety measures around border entry, and depending on your vaccination status, those measures are possibly more inconvenient.

The other thing I want to bring up is that in Canada, the government, and I'm turn the tax payers, they subsidize and pay for medical treatment of people who have COVID and need treatment.

So it makes more sense that you'd want to make sure people take necessary preventative measures, otherwise you're having tax payers pay the bill.

Some people in Canada are even suggesting that instead of such preventative measures, if people want to be allowed to take their own risk, then the treatment for COVID for individuals that didn't take preventative precautions shouldn't be offered to them for free and shouldn't be prioritized over other medical interventions. But this is pretty extreme as well, and while reasonable, Canadians don't really want to just let someone in need of medical treatment to not be able to get it. So the general sentiment is that you'd rather make sure everyone is taking necessary precautions and cover people who need treatment no matter what. But as people push back on precautions, the idea to be stricter on who gets access to subsidized treatment will probably become more and more popular, especially with regards to vaccination status.

That requirement is equivalent to barring them from their profession. It's also an absurd requirement for someone who spends the majority of their working time alone. If it's such a sensible requirement then why aren't we mandating that all grocery store workers be vaccinated or be required to self-isolate for 2 weeks after each shift? Why not mandate it for all professions that involve face to face contact?

They're not barred from the profession. There are trucking jobs within the US they can do. As far as going to the US from Canada, you'd have to blame the US on that one.

People whose job requires international travel have always been expected to keep up to date regulations. Truckers were just an exception.

No they are protesting vaccine mandates they are two very different things.

>These people are protesting against vaccines. You are not on the right side of this argument.

You aren't even getting the argument right. They are protesting mandates. I can be pro-sterilization but anti forced-sterilization. There is a big difference. Enough to drive a few trucks through.

Are you sure you are on the right side of the argument yourself?

Suppose next year, the government mandate that you lose weight, or stop smoking or run everyday, all that of course for the "greater good". And then the year after that, it requires that you give pills to your children because that makes them "less indisciplined" and so on and so forth.

Stop being so certain and think a little bit. By accepting this mandate we're not only accepting this jab, we're accepting all the future crazy ideas that the government will come with.

This is a classic slippery slope argument. Losing weight is not the same thing as a pandemic like this. The two-fold reason that these measures are taken is A) over-filling of hospitals and shut-down of all non-emergency services and B) extremely high death rate. Smoking or whatever scary slippery slope you think we're on is not the same thing as the ICU's filling up way over capacity and hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't.

The idea that we should be against common-sense measures to promote herd immunity during a very real pandemic because "the government will make you stop smoking" is frankly an outrageously claim.

It's long been held, since at least America began, that herd immunity is vital to the success and security of a nation. Our militaries require these vaccinations because a fighting force must be healthy. Our schools require these vaccines because sick kids and sick cities don't learn.

The idea that a vaccine mandate is anything more than a century-old, bog-standard, completely required part of the human war against disease is a radical and anti-civilized position. Herd immunity is non-negotiable for our level of modern society to exist.

I swear, we are killing ourselves. Dense civilization requires trade offs, and in the war against pandemic disease, that does include vaccination.

> ICU's filling up way over capacity and hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't

This claim is mostly overblown at this point. It was a legitimate concern early on, but it hasn't been true for some time.

The vaccine claims are also misleading. Herd immunity by vaccination is not the only way to protect society, and the distinct lack of discussion or recognition of immunity from infection is conspicuous. COVID's infection fatality rate for certain cohorts is low enough that vaccination isn't strictly needed, and arguably taking a different tack on this could potentially have saved far more lives.

For instance, consider if we had only isolated and vaccinated those at greatest risk of death and complications from COVID (40 and older, immunocompromised, comorbidities), and then shipped the remaining vaccine supply to the third world to suppress the emergence of variants. We might not have had Delta or Omicron at all. It's not at all clear that this would not have saved more people in the long run.

Beating this vaccine mandate drum is blinding people to other rational solutions. It's not going to end well. This convoy is probably only the beginning.

It's not overblown all across America where the omicron wave did once again force ICU to capacity and cause the cancellation of non-emergency care across the country.

Herd immunity by vaccination is the only way to protect society without requiring infection, which fills hospitals and leads to deaths. Vaccination means you're about 40x less likely to be hospitalized or die, which saves our health system. Do you honestly believe there should be more discussion of infection immunity as a solution, when it results in 40X more hospitalization and death? I've seen anti-vaxxers call public health officials "genociders" for decisions far less death-causing than that.

If you think the vaccine mandate is why this convoy happened, instead of conservative fake news creating vast conspiracy theories from the "NWO" to "Q-ANON", funded by conservatives billionaires and the governments of multiple countries, to help destabilize and bring down the west, then to each their own. But how many Americans are among them? How many fans do they have abroad? It's not about Canadian mandates, it's about the global right wing conspiracy movement.

But I do not believe that the vaccine anti-mandate stuff is anything more than todays convenient whip for the very powerful forces of conservative media control to use to continue their war after Trump lost. Just another issue politicized for convenience, as until conservative media flipped the switch, vaccine hesitancy was almost entirely left-wing. Even in America anti-vaccination attitudes on the right did not start until post-election and post-vaccine rollout, and there's a large group of vaccinated conservatives who regret it because now it's seen as a mistake in that ideology.

As someone who works in a healthcare type field and with a nurse in the family... No, it's not overblown.

Availability of ICU beds here in Ontario has basically been flat since September, with a slight reduction recently due to Omicron:

https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations

Furthermore, unvaccinated people are occupying fewer beds than vaccinated people in terms of numbers. Even if they all got vaccinated, we'd be basically in exactly the same place, so how do you expect vaccine mandates to help here?

The reason Ontario (and Canada in general) is doing well is because they have a much higher vaccination rate and a healthier population in general. In the US, the high numbers of hospitalization and death are overwhelmingly unvaccinated and/or extremely unhealthy individuals. Also, comparing absolute numbers is disingenuous when the vaccination rate is so high.

Yes, Canada does have a higher vaccination rate, but Canada and Ontario in particular has a very low number of ICU beds per capita compared to other nations in the developed world, so the picture presented by those numbers is actually pessimistic. That's also why we've had far more lockdowns here than the US, because our underinvestment in healthcare has come back to bite us.

In any case, I think it's clear that the claim I responded to that "hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't" is overblown regardless of these numbers. The people dying are mostly the elderly and the sickly, which are exactly the people who we would in fact expect to die suddenly, and healthy people would not be dropping dead in those numbers even if the ICUs were overflowing.

This thread doesn't deserve your patience, and yet we are still blessed by this comment. We could all (myself included) try to be more like you.

Ok so what about lockdowns then?

No, that's absurd. You need to think a bit first. Those things are more easily taxed to "solve". And you being fat doesn't impact me in the least, unless I am unfortunately stuck next to you on a plane. I can't catch it from you. So that isn't comparable to COVID.

Notice how smoking has long been regulated and limited, but not banned? That slippery slope argument doesn't work either.

And the bit about giving kids pills is paranoid nonsense. And ironically, kids have had required vaccines for a very long time. With no sliding down any slopes.

>By accepting this mandate we're not only accepting this jab, we're accepting all the future crazy ideas that the government will come with.

No we're not. Accepting mandates doesn't somehow force everyone to automatically accept anything any politician claims or does in the future. That's not how anything works.

> That's not how anything works.

That's how everything works, it's called a precedent.

In this case, the precedent would be *vaccine mandates*, not government-mandated kale with every meal.

You're conflating mandates for which there are precedents with completely novel and exotic government actions.

Exotic like what, lockdowns for example? How crazy of me...

Quarantines are not a novel or exotic public health measure. Try again.

You specifically called out the government making you quit smoking or forcing you to eat better in your original post.

Lockdown and quarantine are very different.

And it's you who mentionned "completely novel and exotic government actions", to which I point out that it's already happened with lockdowns.

There's nothing in history that resemble what has happened in those last 2 years, whether you agree or not won't change that fact.

1918 had some cities implement lockdowns as a response to the rapidly spreading Spanish Flu. And then there were anti-lockdown protests which caused some cities to lift their lockdowns early and the virus surged. Business owners also railed against the lockdowns, and were sometimes successful in getting them lifted.

There was a similar situation with mandatory masks, and then loud anti-mask protests which resulted in the lifting of some mask mandates.

What happened over the past two years has happened before, and will probably happen again. You can find examples of lockdowns in other pandemic eras. Venice partially locked down in 1575 due to the plague.

You may disagree with lockdowns, but there's plenty of precedent. Your "fact" is incorrect.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-citie...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/breaking-poin...

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/historical-precedents-lock...

Your last link says it all: "COVID-19 has triggered lockdown measures for billions of people around the world."

A lockdown at such a scale never happened before covid. Your "counter-fact" is incorrect.

My dude, "nothing in history" is a very strong statement. You should read up about what state actors did to limit the spread of the plague. I'm sure someone could find something older, but lockdowns are attested to as a public health measure since at least ~500 BCE (whenever Leviticus was written).

I don't feel like you're engaging in good faith, so I'm going to go ahead and quit responding.

Keep your condescending tone for your friends "my dude".

That's not even how a precedent works.

Oxford definition: "an earlier event or action that is regarded as an example or guide to be considered in subsequent similar circumstances."

The operative word there is "similar."

Yes, similar as in "if we don't do that, insert_whatever_crazy_idea_here, we're gonna overwhelm the hospitals!!!"

Because it's been the justification from day 1: "not overwhelm hospitals".

Yeah, that's not how precedent works. Precedent is used to justify the means, not to point out that past actions had the same or similar ends.

There's literally people in this thread that are justifying vaccine mandates because we had them before.

In order to show that literally it turned out fine. It didn't turn into us being mandated to lose weight or whatever that commentator is scared of happening

It's justification for the sake of allaying that commentator's fears. Most people that support the mandate support it because it makes sense and they've thought about it. In fact, I'd wager that those who are against the mandate are more often susceptible to being brainwashed than those who are enthusiastically for it

Let's see, those for freedom and individual choice would be more brainwashed that those against?

Interesting theory.

That's a pretty cool slippery slope you just constructed. You've almost convinced me, but you forgot to tell me that they'll take my guns and make me gay.

I can't catch fat. Suppose next year, people who are asymptomatic typhoid carriers aren't allowed to work in food service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

This strikes me as a false equivalency made in bad faith.

They're protesting public health in general. Not just vaccines.