Because whenever the government does something, or is given the ability to do something, whether de jure, or de facto, I ask myself "Would I feel comfortable with my worst political enemy having the power to do this?"
EDIT: The answer I was responding to edited his answer before I finished posting, so the original question was just. "Why do you opposse vax mandates?" My answer still stands.
Mass vaccination is the only way to stop transmission, of course, you just can’t have some people vaccinated and others not, vaccines don’t work like that. The exemptions have never been very deep (very few takers each year), but if they exceed something like 5%, then an adjustment must be made. Washington state for example, revoked personal and philosophical exemptions for MMR vaccines after an outbreak. Religious exemptions are still allowed, but those have a much higher bar than a philosophical exemption. Medical exemptions are always allowed, they are one major reason why most everyone else needs to get vaccinated in the first place (because people who can’t get the vaccine are at risk from transmission).
I guess one could argue that everyone that wants to should get vaccinated to better protect those who don’t want to be vaccinated. That makes sense, but hardly seems fair.
Why would that be any different than your preferred political party/politician telling you to get vaccinated?
Just because you don't agree with someone on some (many?) topics, doesn't mean you can't ever agree with them.
We're talking about well established scientifically backed public health advice. It doesn't matter who most recently repeated the advice, it's the advice itself that's important.
For example the creation of the no fly list, red flag laws, drug laws, civil asset forfeiture, hate crime laws, etc.
Laws have a tendency to get divorced from the situation that created them over the many years but seldom are repealed when their original cause is gone.
As such it is often very likely that my political enemy or your political enemy will have the power of those laws.
This just like development one must always think of the edge cases and error path not just the happy path.
Because you've indicated you oppose this vaccine mandate.
We're discussing a specific use of an already existing piece of legislation (Emergencies Act). There's no additional power granted here, the act was pre-existing, it's being applied.
You certainly may take issue with the fact the Emergencies Act could be used for nefarious purposes i.e. that the scope is too large. That's likely a valid concern. Sadly, most laws and legislations are open to interpretation and susceptible to abuse.
However, if this mandate were to be rolled back, the Emergencies Act isn't going anywhere. The Emergencies Acts is still sitting there available to future leaders.
Let's suppose you think a Covid vaccine mandate is a good thing, but you're ideologically opposed to it coming into force via an act that could be abused. Firstly, you're most certainly not on the same page as the majority of people opposing this mandate.
Secondly, what's your plan? Get rid of the Emergencies Act and come up with new legislation for a vaccine mandate, in record time, and with no holes in it, all the while people are unnecessarily dying, hospitals are unnecessarily overloaded and there's unnecessary economic damage... for ideological reasons?
Your appraisal is an example of the slippery slope fallacy. The only slippery slope is encouraging people to evaluate policies by who is proposing them rather than whether the policy is beneficial. Then the person who is proposing policy can get away with policies that are more and more in their interest and less in mine. As long as the standard of evaluating policy by whether it is beneficial is upheld, there is no slippery slope.
The current evidence indicates that the vaccine reduces the spread of the virus by about 50% [1]. It's a preprint, so take it with a grain of salt, but it does seem to match our prior 50% estimate for delta. [2]
That is a significant reduction, especially when we are talking about truckers who are inherently high risk as they tend to visit a lot of small towns.
1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...
Is it justifiable to impose a vaccine mandate, if brown-eyed or type-A/B/O people are not bothering to get vaccinated because they feel safe themselves?
(I'm really more interested in the philosophy and ethics than the facts of the actual situation. I agree that on the factual level in 2022, there's plenty of room to argue about the usefulness or counterproductivity of these mandates. I want to know if vaccine manades are ever justified).
... people don't work like that. :/
> in an alternate reality where the vaccine is super effective at reducing transmission of Omicron, and where Omicron is super deadly
If either of these were true then mandates would be far less required because people would be far more willing to take them voluntarily.
Instinctively though I do want to answer yes, I would support mandates more under higher risk scenarios. In an ideal world though I would probably prefer if communities could self select by risk tolerance i.e it's possible to live/work/party somewhere nearby with like minded people.
> If either of these were true then mandates would be far less required because people would be far more willing to take them voluntarily.
I don't know whether that would necessarily be the case. We have seen how easily people are manipulated via misinformation campaigns.
I'm also not against a small amount of natural selection. People choosing their own fates helps to keep everyone happy and some Darwinism is probably a good outcome for humanity in the long term.
Self selected communities are another good answer although I imagine it's hard to totally bubble communities up along the axis of vaccine-opinionation without any overlap.
It might depend on how selective the lethality is! If a small population is vulnerable then I don't have a problem with them protecting themself to the best of their own abilities (no mandates). This is fairly common already with the immunocompromised etc.
If a large portion of the population is vulnerable then it becomes more grey. I'm pretty uncomfortable with there being a large amount of preventable suffering but intellectually my brain wants to take a long term view. The best possible society in the future seems like one where humans have stronger immune systems and take fewer vaccinations, not more. Is this something we can evolve towards? Is my poor knowledge of biology leading me astray? Who knows!
Given I know nothing I'm happy to fall back onto the distributed decision making apparatus (individual choice).
For me, this hypothetical is more a situation where we're talking about one's freedom to make choices that endanger those around them, in addition themselves. When the principal danger is to oneself I think restrictions are rarely justified, but when the consequences are borne by others, I think it's more justified. For example, when operating cars, we don't allow you to drink and drive, run red lights, or drive on the sidewalk, primarily because it creates at least as much risk for your neighbours as it does for yourself.
I think this point makes broad sense but needs refinement. For example if we assume there is a vaccine available that:
- Reduces personal injury - Does not prevent transmission
Using the above logic would mean that after taking the vaccine restrictions are more justified because the burden of the disease has shifted. I don't think that's what you intended and probably means that there still needs to be reference to absolute harm and taking reasonable minimization measures.
In that sense, if a vaccine purely reduced transmission even without offering any other protection, mandating it could still be justified for certain activities, just like a driver's license is considered reasonable today.
I'm sure driver's licenses were considered very controversial restrictions on personal freedom back when they were first introduced.
Taken to the extreme this kind of thought becomes pretty anti-human (thanos, global warming)
> mandating it could still be justified for certain activities
Yeah it could be justified for sure - I just don't think there's any way of ignoring that it's a judgement call/balance.
Of course, we could allow that freedom and then just penalize people in court when they happen to injure others with their car. But it might be even more dangerous to set a precedent where you can take someone to court for transmitting a virus to you, or get charged with murder for being part of a transmission chain that results in a death.
Anyway, so I agree with you that it's about balance, and I do agree that Canada's policies are not getting that right (and, in many instances, lacking common sense).
The various vaccine mandate restrictions really aren't about protecting the young and healthy. We'll be fine. It's about limiting the most dangerous, transmission risk areas (eg. bars) to people who are best able to handle the disease (ie. are vaccinated) as others are more likely to die of the disease and more likely to catch it in these places.
This kind of lunacy, where nothing has meaning, since everything is "just like everything else" has got to stop. There's a big difference between the accepted norm of wearing clothing and being forced to inject your body with drugs. Expecting people to explain it to you is a bad faith attempt to let them say enough words so that you can argue semantics endlessly with them.
Canada is kind of in a difficult place, because refusing medical treatment is an even bigger taboo then forcing vaccination. But the publicly funded medical system is having to pay a high price both in cost and in capacity due to that remaining 20%.
This is why people are looking for ways to reduce that. Refusing medical care is not currently seen as a viable option, thus vaccine incentives are being explored, like restricting what someone can do if unvaccinated.
In Ontario, today, over half the ICU cases are vaccinated.
In Ontario, today, almost 75% of the hospital cases are vaccinated.
In Ontario, today, 70% of reported cases are among the vaccinated.
The idea that the unvaccinated are somehow driving, causing, or are to blame for the pandemic is completely wrong. For most of January, in Ontario, the rate of infection was higher among the vaccinated than among he unvaccinated!
The case for vaccine mandates or vaccine passes make absolutely no sense when you look at the actual data, actual reality. Even if you could magically force-vaccinate everyone today, you would only reduce the strain on the healthcare system a tiny amount. And yet people support governments forcing people to get vaccinated?
I really don't understand how you can say the rate of infection is higher in vaccinated using this data? It points to the complete opposite, with the smallest percentage of population 15% accounting 2x to 3x more in hospitalization and ICU.
And the data gets worse if you look only at adults.
I'm not saying unvaccinated are causing the pandemic, but they are currently the reason for the continued restrictions. It's because we fear that without restrictions they'd create a sudden surge in cases needing hospitalization and ICUs which the healthcare system might not be able to handle.
That's what people mean when they say that the unvaccinated are preventing us to lift restrictions and to make the pandemic endemic.
Asking to both be unvaccinated, and for all restrictions to be removed, but also asking to be promptly and freely treated if you catch COVID and need to be hospitalized or put in an ICU is a nice thing to demand, but it's not realistically feasible. Based on the data, it is likely to create a surge to the healthcare system that it couldn't handle.
It isn't right now, but it was in Ontario up until January 27th. Scroll down to the section "COVID-19 cases by vaccination status", and look at the graph.
Note: This data is true but misleading! Antivaxxers are claiming that this is evidence that the vaccines make you more susceptible to infection, but that is probably not true, because all of this data is missing information about previous infection. The unvaccinated cohort is more likely to have natural immunity than the vaccinated one, which skews the data.
> It points to the complete opposite, with the smallest percentage of population 15% accounting 2x to 3x more in hospitalization and ICU.
You started the paragraph talking about infections, and then switched to talking about hospitalizations. The rate of hospitalization and ICU patients is higher among the unvaccinated, yes. And at the same time, the rate of cases was higher among the vaccinated, in January, in Ontario.
> It's because we fear that without restrictions they'd create a sudden surge in cases needing hospitalization and ICUs which the healthcare system might not be able to handle.
Yes, but that fear was completely unfounded, as evidenced by the peak numbers. Canada passed the Omicron peak in cases over a month ago.
And again, you're blaming a minority of infected, a minority of hospital and ICU patients. The majority of patients are vaccinated, and yet you assign zero blame to them.
> Based on the data, it is likely to create a surge to the healthcare system that it couldn't handle.
Denmark lifted all restrictions two weeks ago, despite having the highest number of cases/capita in all of Europe. They already had much less restrictions in place then, than Canada has now. Denmark is fine. Canada will be fine. The Omicron wave has followed the same pattern in every US state, despite wildly different amounts of restrictions. No-one was overwhelmed, and now the wave is over.
There might be future waves, in the fall, because the virus is highly seasonal, and they will be even milder, because there will be even more immunity among the population by then. It'll be fine. We'll be fine.
> The case for vaccine mandates or vaccine passes make absolutely no sense when you look at the actual data, actual reality.
Except it does.
And, relevant for this discussion, also trucking across borders.
Or if they are necessary, show me the data that supports it.
Reaching for a mandate 'just because', is poor government.
This is exactly what happened with the TSA. If people don’t stand up against mandates, like people failed to do after the War on Terror, we’ll still be wearing masks at airports and proving our vaccine status decades from now.
Very, very different, and unprecedented for the general public.
How do you think we eradicated Smallpox?
Yes we did:
> In 1901 a deadly smallpox epidemic tore through the Northeast, prompting the Boston and Cambridge boards of health to order the vaccination of all residents. But some refused to get the shot, claiming the vaccine order violated their personal liberties under the Constitution.
> One of those holdouts, a Swedish-born pastor named Henning Jacobson, took his anti-vaccine crusade all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation's top justices issued a landmark 1905 ruling that legitimized the authority of states to “reasonably” infringe upon personal freedoms during a public health crisis by issuing a fine to those who refused vaccination.
The point is even with smallpox some people refused to get the vaccine. People are weird.
It's ridiculous to even compare the two.
...of five dollars back then, which would be ~$160 today.
The difference between a $160 fine and being fired from your job is enormous, but you just ignored that part to make your argument.
By quarantine and contact tracing, after vaccination failed.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/end-smallpox
> Contrary to popular belief smallpox was not eradicated by mass vaccination. Though tried initially it proved difficult to implement in many countries and was abandoned in favour of surveillance-containment. This involved trained workers searching for cases, with rewards for those who found them. Cases and their contacts were then isolated; contacts were vaccinated. Interestingly this strategy incorporated elements of a system devised in 1778 by John Haygarth in Chester. The last natural case occurred in Somalia in 1977 and after exhaustive enquiries the 1980 WHO Assembly concluded that smallpox had been eradicated.
1902 letter about the Leicester, UK method that was later adopted elsewhere, https://ia601300.us.archive.org/28/items/b24765430/b24765430...
> I am far from saying that vaccination is a delusion, but the experience of Leicester during the past thirty years has been unique, and shows that compulsory vaccination is not essential for the effectual control of smallpox, for despite the neglect of vaccination, the authorities here have been successful in stamping out numerous outbreaks of smallpox, the deaths from the disease have been very few, and the expense involved, when compared with that in other well-vaccinated towns, has been trifling. Under these circumstances I have ventured to publish the following paper, read at the Congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health, held at Exeter, in August, which explains in detail what is known as the “Leicester system of dealing with smallpox.”
COVID vaccines, however, are not effective at preventing the transmission of COVID, this is well established science at this point. So, that said, why the mandate?
At the moment hospitals are overwhelmed and so at this point the vaccine mandates are about keeping hospital admissions from exploding.
It depends on the mandate but the gun barrel is generally at the end of a long chain of escalating non-cooperation that starts with a sternly worded letter.
Some governments are more trigger-happy than others, but at least in gentler societies, to get to the point where you're looking at a gun barrel, you'd probably have to respond somewhere along that chain with significant violence yourself.
In societies where you are allowed to carry a gun, the government having an even bigger gun is rather implied by the word enforced, because a mandate couldn't be called enforced if the police could only hand sternly-worded letters to you while you ignore it and shot at them.
So is enforcement of contracts between private parties. Are you against private property as well?
By and large, the government does not come take away your freedom for breach of private party contracts. There are some exceptions, where we wrote law (government mandate) elevating some types of private party contract.
But generally, no, me violating your NDA won't escalate to the government shooting me, no matter how uncooperative I am.
Ultimately, enforcing (almost) any law does come down to use of force if the guilty party is intransigent enough. Exceptions are when some thing can be "snatched" away and held truly inaccessible to the guilty party, such that they cannot possibly retrieve it.
Not sure what happens if you have a civil judgement entered against you and then quit having income. (Not reporting income is probably a real Crime, and they’d go after you for that)
1. debtor's prison isn't a thing anymore
2. look up "judgement-proof"
If we are, neither private contracts nor vaccine mandates are directly enforced at the barrel of a gun - the RCMP aren't busting down people's doors to shoot them for failing to get vaccinated, just as people aren't immediately killed by the feds for violating legal contracts.
If we're talking about how they're ultimately enforced, if all else fails...well, they're both enforced the same way.
For private disputes, it’s also not uncommon to have an armed officer help enforcement. Consider an extremely common private contract dispute - an eviction - where the police may come to remove the tenant.
The “barrel of a gun” is of course a metaphor, but first order enforcement can be closer than you think.
This is a nice article about immunization requirements in Canada a decade before Covid hit.
In 2011, only 3 provinces had mandates for students and also had plenty of exceptions.
And this is for vaccines with decades of use and highly effective at preventing transmission and disease.
Heck, if the right country wants you in jail for the right reasons, you could flee somewhere else and have the _Air Force_ used against you.
Maybe in some very extreme case they would, but it is better that someone escapes custody than someone (including the suspect dying).
Then again, just a cop drawing a weapon or firing a weapon usually makes the news.
They won't arrest you the next chance they get (say, when your plate shows up on a scanner)?
I'd propose that avoiding jail indefinitely will eventually lead to violence in any halfway-organized jurisdiction. And if you start shooting, eventually the government will shoot back.
All over a driving misdemeanor. We just assume that reasonable people won't let these things escalate that far, but yes: Every law written is ultimately enforced by a man (or woman) with a gun.
Bottom line: If you are not a danger to anyone, they will let you escape rather than kill anyone (including you), even if it means you are never brought to justice.
It makes a lot of sense, if you don't have a revenge based justice system.
why? could you explain your stande on other mandates/requirements and what's this vax mandate does that makes it so different? (eg. you need a passport/visa-like thing to enter, you need clothes, if you arrive by car that needs papers and a valid safety profile, you need to use the seatbelt, and so on)