> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
The MMR vaccine required by school is sterilizing, once and done. Intramuscular Covid vaccines provide blood/serum antibodies that can reduce the risk of severe disease or death, but they are non-sterilizing. They never promised to prevent infection and the CDC has updated their definitions to make that clear.
Why would employers need legal immunity? Their lawyers may want to look closely at the legal immunity protections of the PREP act, which extend to healthcare professionals who recommend "countermeasures".
Because it alters the risk/benefit calculus. A sterilizing vaccine that stops transmission in its tracks, has a clear public health benefit to every part of society, even if there are risks. A non-sterilizing vaccine does not provide that society-wide public health benefit, leaving the employer to bear risks without benefit.
But the COVID vaccine does provide a society-wide public health benefit. Our best available data indicates that it reduces the risk of transmission, even for Delta [1].
Reducing is not the same as stopping, which is the definition of sterilizing vaccines, which is the common layman perception of "vaccine", including your original example of school-mandated vaccines.
Fortunately, the CDC's Sept. 2021 updated definition makes it clear that non-sterilizing Covid vaccines should not be conflated with the transmission-stopping track record of sterilizing vaccines (e.g. MMR) mandated for school & travel.
Reducing does not have the same scaling effect as stopping, e.g. society must continue to pay an ongoing price for mitigations. Stopping means society can move on after a one-time vaccine cost.
There are intranasal (e.g. inhaler) vaccines under development, which may provide nasal/mucosal antibodies. Until those are available, recovery from natural infection will provide both nasal/mucosal and blood/serum antibodies. This path is available to both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
> Israel was the first country on Earth to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against COVID-19. Now it has one of the world's highest daily infection rates — an average of nearly 7,500 confirmed cases a day, double what it was two weeks ago. Nearly one in every 150 people in Israel today has the virus.
Not a great advertisement for non-sterilizing vaccines.
Why ignore the GPs argument? Israel has vaccinated 61% of their population. Of course the 39% who aren't vaccinated will continue to spread it like before, even more so if restrictions are lifted.
The 61% is misleading because it includes children ineligible for the vaccine. My undertow that they’ve vaccinated something like 80% of adults (one of the highest on the world).
An unvaccinated child has less chance of severe covid compared to a vaccinated adult. Covid is different between child and adults, reasonable to hypothesize that transmission is also different.
> Evidence from studies primarily done before vaccine approval for those 12 years of age and older suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
"less chance of severe covid compared to a vaccinated adult" is an attempt to move the goalposts to an irrelevant point
if they're vaccinated, they count towards the numerator
if they are a person, and thus have a nonzero chance of getting infected, and a nonzero chance of infecting others if infected, they count towards the denominator
You see the sibling comment to that one, about how the UK's "very high vaccination rates" means that we've been out of lockdown for a while, are returning to normal life, and have very few hospitalizations for Covid? Well, we've only vaccinated 65% of our population, barely more than Israel - and I think we have demographics which lean more towards age groups at higher risk from Covid than Israel as well. The headline government figures are higher, but they're for over-16s which are the only group eligible for vaccination here.
I’m from Israel, we were in an excellent condition couple of months ago, but once the vaccination started to lose its potency we see a steep rise in infections and hospitalizations.
Now that we are deep into the booster shot we see the numbers of infections and hospitalizations start to drop again.
Meanwhile here in the UK, with very high vaccination rates, we've been out of lockdown for a while now, are very much getting back to normal life and have low hospitalisation rates. If that's not a 'society wide benefit' I'd like to know what is.
We may need further short tactical lockdowns, and are considering booster shots for the elderly, but the situation here is night and day compared to the US and many other countries thanks to an effective vaccination programme with broad popular support.
It's amazing to me how the political culture of the right has diverged between the US and Europe, and here in the UK particularly. For us responsible behaviour in public and prompt vaccination are conservative touchstones, not exclusively conservative of course but very much seen as not just compatible with conservatism but flowing directly from it's basic principles. What's happened to Republicanism in the US is confusing, and rather horrifying from that perspective.
You might want to read up on Israel before you assume it is because of the high rate of vaccination that you happen to be in a valley of infections again.
Oh we have plenty of infections, tens of thousands of cases per day, but we have much fewer deaths because infected vaccinated people rarely get sick and if they do are extremely unlikely to die.
Early this year we were seeing similar rates of new infections per day, but about a thousand people were dying every day. Nowadays the death rate is about a tenth of that, concentrated among the remaining unvaccinated population.
Israel seems to be having a similar experience, people are catching the virus but those that are vaccinated aren't dying as a result. They're introducing mask mandates and considering tactical lockdowns to try and protect the unvaccinated population. We may need to do the same, nevertheless the best way to protect people who can't be vaccinated is to vaccinate everyone who can be.
whether or not the "scaling effect" is the same is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
whether or not society must continue to pay an ongoing price for mitigations is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
whether or not society can move on after a one-time vaccine cost is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
the goalposts were set at "provides a societal benefit", which it does
Vaccination likely reduces the chance of transmission in any single interaction. However even with a high level of vaccination all of us can expect to be occasionally exposed to the virus no matter what steps we take. The benefits of vaccination are really more about protecting yourself from severe symptoms, and preventing demand spikes on the healthcare system.
Find the word 'delta' in the text of the actual study. It ain't there. And look at the dates of the study. Most of the data is pre-delta.
Your linked ACSH article simply fabricates a conclusion based on no evidence.
The scientific establishment sickens me here. The goal is to get people to vaccinate, which is reasonable enough. The outcome is the opposite, though. The lies are common enough and transparent enough that the whole establishment loses credibility, and a huge swath of the world doesn't believe it about vaccines, climate change, and a slew of other issues.
At least half as many vaccinated people get covid, not getting it means you don't spread it. And of those that do get it, they kick it a lot sooner and thus are not spreading it for as long.
But no, if it isn't 100% perfect you have decided it is worthless.
> Fully vaccinated people with Delta variant breakthrough infections can spread the virus to others. However, vaccinated people appear to spread the virus for a shorter time
Do you understand that "reduce" is not synonymous with "eliminate"?
Because an acknowledgement that fully vaccinated people can spread Delta is not a refutation to the claim that it reduces the spread.
Even the paragraph you quoted says "However, like prior variants, the amount of viral genetic material may go down faster in fully vaccinated people when compared to unvaccinated people. This means fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for less time than unvaccinated people."
I'm summarizing him and everyone else with attitudes like his: the vaccine isn't 100% so it is nothing. Maybe I'm a bit extreme, but at this point I am tired seeing the same ensconce.
My own estimate is that the vaccine is about 50% effective for delta. That's cuts R0 in half, which is huge, but not something you can in any way, shape, or form rely on in isolation. It will likely be even lower for future mutations. Aside from the antivaxer movement, another outcome of extreme pro-vaccine stances, to the level of people lying, is that many people take NO precautions once vaccinated. That's a lot of what's driving some (not all) of the current delta outbreaks.
And on the anti-vaxxer side, once scientists get caught fabricating data, they're not going to be trusted even when they're right.
The argument that vaccines don't prevent delta tranmission are based on headlines, not science.
And unfortunately right now science is playing catch-up.
There simply isn't any evidence on breakthrough transmission with delta testing humans yet because it is recent. The headlines and public health messages are assuming worst case in order to scare vaccinated people into masking up again, while there's actually indications that vaccinated breakthrough infections almost certainly transmit less.
What we know is that while early in the infection viral loads in delta are much higher, but Alpha, delta, and non-VOI/VOC infections feature similar viral trajectories[1], in vaccinated breakthrough infections RNA load declines faster[2] and the ability to culture virus in breakthrough infections is lower[3], we know that vaccines reduced transmission with alpha[4] and apart from scary headlines we still expect that vaccines reduce transmission with delta. While there's documented cases of delta breakthrough infections transmitting to one or two other people, there's not been any studies of how common that is, or how common it is for breakthrough infections to become superspreaders to >10 people, or if that is even possible. Since viral loads are correlated with transmissibility and symptomology/virulence the very high protection against severe disease with vaccination may also protect against severe transmission.
"“The bottom line is, this can happen — it can be true that vaccinated people can spread the virus. But we do not yet know what their relative role in overall community spread is,” says co-author Thomas Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison."
Vaccinations may (or may not) reduce the propensity of vaccinated people to spread Delta but it's very clear at this point vaccinated people can spread Delta to some degree.
It is 100% certain that some breakthrough transmissions can transmit onwards.
If I know that, it should be very apparent that wasn't what I meant.
There are people claiming that vaccines do not prevent any forwards transmission and that vaccination is 100% worthless for ending pandemic spread. Arguing that is wrong does not imply arguing for the exact inverse and that vaccines are perfect. I'm pretty sure that hell is the world where everyone argues in absolutes all the time and that I'm unfortunately living in it.
sigh All of this is irrelevant to the central point. The article fabricated facts. If you're a scientist, your conclusion can be 100% and you're still a fraud if you've baked data to get to that conclusion.
As a footnote, we do have data. My best estimate was that the vaccine reduced the transmission of delta by about 50%. That's based on data in the community I live (and this is context-dependent -- for example, vaccines do a lot more for casual interactions than for close/long ones).
I saw that same estimate replicated by two data scientists I trust, using different data from different places, and different methodologies, so it's somewhat robust. On the other hand, all three were susceptible to Simpson's Paradox and demographic bias, so there is one possible source of correlated error (specifically, more at-risk populations have higher vaccination rates). However, even if we assume a best-case there, though, transmission is reduced by <90%.
And testing rates are probably even lower now that many people have been vaccinated.
This argument is not going to convince the unvaccinated, who are tired of incoherent "scientific" information that changes every month. The field of virology is apparently in its infancy.
> UK for example, have much higher case numbers this summer than last
but much lower hospitalisation rates [0]. Which is the key point of "flattening the curve" if you remember. We're not going to get out of lockdown measures until the hospitals can cope with the load, and the vaccinations are reducing the load on hospitals. Get vaccinated now.
Anyone expecting the scientific establishment (or in fact anyone) to have a clear, consistent and coherent picture right the way through a pandemic caused by a novel virus is being unrealistic.
The advice changes as we know better what we’re up against and anyone who expects to have all the answers is, frankly a fool. Look at the data, follow the science and do the best you can.
Corona viruses aren't novel, the common cold is one of them.
There were no accurate spread models in 2020, no studies how masks would affect the spread of the common cold.
There was ridiculous advice that the famous droplets would sink to the ground before covering a distance > 1.5 meters,
that masks would not help at all and much more.
Now they admit that the virus is airborne!
Sorry, #FollowTheScience slogans and calling others fools does not help.
> There was ridiculous advice that the famous droplets would sink to the ground before covering a distance > 1.5 meters,
This was based on experience with the original SARS virus.
Take this 2003 paper for example: "Effectiveness of precautions against droplets and contact in prevention of nosocomial transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)" [1]
It was a case control study in a Hong Kong hospital that concluded: "Practice of droplets precaution and contact precaution is adequate in significantly reducing the risk of infection …. The protective role of the mask suggests … infection is transmitted by droplets."
Following the science really, really does help. You just need to do it; fools of course don't.
Ding ding. Not to mention natural immunity is much better (6x to 10x) and longer lasting. I already got Covid (a mild flu for 2 days and tired for 5), there is zero benefit to inject, and the more my arm is twisted, the more I will resist.
> (...) who are tired of incoherent "scientific" information that changes every month.
I don't know where you get your information but I saw absolutely zero change in the info on any of the major vaccines since the very same day they've been announced. From day 1 the message was always that these vaccines trained the immune system to lower the severity of Covid symptoms, but otherwise we could still catch it and spread it.
Then only significant change that popped up since last year was due to the inception of the so called Delta variant, which is an entirely new development and had just enough mutations to lower vaccine effectiveness. However, the mRNA vaccines were, from the very start, described as custom tailored to the existing variants, and we're expected to show a drop in effectiveness if the wrong kind of variant occurred.
Personally, when I received my jabs, in both occasions I received a small flier making it quite clear that the current Covid vaccines only trained the immune system to have a fighting chance against Covid, but we were still vulnerable to catch and spread Covid and thus we should continue to practice basic health and safety precautions.
So I really wonder where you got your info, because none of what you said correlates with reality.
When I get the MMR vaccine I don't need to worry about what versions of Measles it is and isn't effective against or how many months later I should start looking at getting another vaccine.
Given that the polio vaccine has >99% efficacy [1] and the fact that US has been polio free since 1979 [2], with the only threat being the occasional traveler to a region with polio, being nonsterlizing doesn't seem to be an issue. Quite different from our current situation.
No, I'm comparing the much higher efficacy of the polio vaccine and low prevalence of the polio disease to the significantly lower efficacy of the Covid vaccines and the high prevalence of Covid at present. That means the fact that the polio vaccine is non-sterilizing isn't very important, while the fact that the Covid vaccines are non-sterilizing is a big deal and undermines some of the public health policy decisions.
actually, the polio vaccine doesn't have much higher efficacy, and the covid vaccines don't have much lower efficacy, they have similar efficacy in reducing severe symptoms
That's not what the referenced links says. It says the polio vaccine has 99 to 100% efficacy. The published numbers for Covid vaccines show the virus vector and mRNA vaccines are around 95% efficacy. That's a large difference.
No. It's controversial because too many people believe idiots on social media who never graduated high school spout off theories about 5G microchipping, lizard people, and Ivermectin Horse DeWormer.
It means that for people with an immune system that's functioning within the normal range, the vaccine entirely prevents infection (100% effectiveness). Population-wide effectiveness isn't 100%, but for most individuals it is.
Vaccines work by teaching the immune system how to fight an intruding virus, so it doesn't have to spend days or weeks figuring it out while the virus destroys your body.
That means vaccinated people get viruses as often as unvaccinated, but defeat it much faster, usually before you notice any symptoms.
My confusion is that I would call the time my immune system spends fighting a virus in my body an "infection", but apparently that is not the established use.
Your confusion is warranted. These aren't terms that are 100% agreed upon and the scientific understanding is still evolving as our tools get better. The Atlantic just published an article about this very topic:
If the immune system fights off the invader before it becomes established and starts freely replicating (before any symptoms, before it can be detected, before it can be transmitted) then it's not an infection. It's just some contamination.
> which extend to healthcare professionals who recommend "countermeasures"
Not quite:
> The term “covered person”, when used with respect to the administration or use of a covered countermeasure, means— (A) the United States; or (B) a person or entity that is— [...] (iv) a qualified person who prescribed, administered, or dispensed such countermeasure;
Prescribing, administering, and dispensing are very different from “recommending”.
> Are we really going to bother digging up the copious video evidence this is a lie?
It seems you're either a bit confused or you didn't bothered to even watch the very same video you posted.
I watched the video and nowhere in it does anyone promise anything about infections magically go away.
In fact, the infection disease specialist in the video says quite clearly that the observed reduction in spread was around 60%, and this statement is repeated in multiple occasions throughout the video.
The video was also posted over 7 months ago, prior to some of the major vaccines having been approved and made available to the public.
Please do not throw baseless accusations of anyone lying when the best proof you can come up with just refutes your accusation entirely.
Funnily enough, The Atlantic just put out an article describing why the idea of "sterilizing vaccines" itself might be a myth and why that doesn't matter from a practical public health standpoint:
Side effects from vaccines are rare, but do occasionally happen. Because of the small risk, there’s a government program to pay money to anybody who suffers a serious side effect from taking a vaccine in exchange for granting legal immunity to vaccine producers ( https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html ). So, to answer your question, schools don’t literally require legal immunity themselves, but they do benefit from legal immunity that that the government gives vaccine manufacturers: there’s no need to sue a school for requiring vaccines when there’s a special program to pay out benefits.
Last I knew, COVID-19 vaccines weren’t covered, but apparently I missed some news, since it’s the first thing listed on https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp .
>pay money to anybody who suffers a serious side effect from taking a vaccine
Nitpick, but really it is a fund to pay for anyone who suffered a side effect that it cannot be proven wasnt a vaccine. In this case vaccines are guilty until proven innocent.
>approximately 70 percent of its payments are the result of a negotiated settlement “in which HHS has not concluded, based upon review of the evidence, that the alleged vaccine caused the alleged injury.”
1) How do you prove it was the vaccine that caused your side effects? You can't. It's not provable in court because "my legs went numb a day or two after I got the jab" isn't exactly concrete evidence.
2) No company should have their liability removed for any reason, especially by the government. This thinking was partly why the 2008 recession happened. I don't want the government taking on the liability of a multi-billion dollar industry because if the company messes up, we're paying more in taxes - guaranteed - to pay for all the settlements.
3) This mandate by the government violates every part of a right to personal autonomy when it comes to your health - there is a MONUMENTAL difference when the mandate comes from government as opposed to private business. This sets (further) precedence for future governments to give them carte blanche as to peoples' health.
Side note - Just a reminder that government-ran health systems like the NHS makes decisions about your health based on the status of the current system - meaning that people who are too costly to fix/repair/KEEP ALIVE will receive palliative care. That's disgusting to me. (The US healthcare system is a whole other topic entirely, this is just an example of government making bad decisions regarding your health)
how much the vaccine injury program has paid out to claimants in the respective FY [1] -- subsidized by our tax dollars on behalf of big pharma, of-course.
Since 1989, it seems the US govt program has paid out $4,667,496,451 to individuals and attorneys who have sued based on side-effects of vaccines
if qualifying companies don't mandate the vaccine, enterprising lawyers will sue the deepest pockets involved in not making sure employees get vaccinated
yep, turns out lawyers will find stuff to sue folks for, no matter what
so, companies might as well do the right thing and be protected by the federal government than do the wrong thing and have to fight those lawyers all on their own
> Is the federal government going to provide employers with the same legal immunity granted to pharmaceutical vendors via the PREP act
They already did for COVID countermeasures in general. In the first declaration that did that for pharmaceutical companies, public entities managing countermeasure planning and distribution, and others in March of last year.
Unless you mean a very literal "at our expense" as in dollars paid for a highly effective vaccine, are you implying that the vaccine has been a net negative?
When it first came out, the data made the vax an obviously net positive. Given what we now know about cases amongst the vaccinated and how they can spread it... It's no longer an obvious positive. The vax has made covid more pervasive because of bad data at the beginning.
I could maybe buy people being lax about masks and social distancing because of the vaccine, but surely you don't think the vaccine itself has made the virus more pervasive?
Well what is the effect and purpose of the vax other than to make people lax about social distancing and masks. The vaccine was correctly developed expressly for the purposes of rendering both unnecessary.
If the vax had worked to sterilize or mostly sterilize the virus as originally it was sold to us as, then this would be okay.
Instead it did not really work, thus spreading covid more.
So in the end, we locked down and destroyed the economy in hopes of a vaccine, but the vaz didn't fully work and now we're going to have to open anyway to avert major economic and social disaster.
It lowers your chance of getting it and thus spreading it significantly and it severely lowers your chance of having a severe reaction in the case of a breakthrough infection.
The only reason it hasn't worked at a societal level is that not enough people have taken it.
It is not obvious to me this is the case. All available data suggest that between the vaccine and natural immunity, we would have reached herd immunity if such a thing were possible. But we have not, indicating the primary benefit of the vaccine is, and will likely always be, some personal protection. Put differently, we will all get COVID eventually, and would have even if everyone was vaccinated, and the question is just one of the severity of individual cases.
If the vaccine actually prevents getting sick enough to notice, then it means a bunch of vaccinated virus carriers are wandering around in public. Whereas if they were unvaccinated, then by the popular theory that unvaccinated people get very sick from this virus, they would know to stay home.
It always surprises me when conservatives use the economic argument wrt vaccine deployment because doing so means they assume an intrinsic value of $0 on human lives.
mRNA vaccines do not directly stimulate the immune system. They cause the immune system itself to create protein structures that stimulate the immune system.
The definition change is simply to more accurately include this vaccine method.
Most of the Patriot act was to expire after 4 years. It was renewed by Congress multiple times. Parts of it were renewed in separate bills after it eventually expired.
Although, just like Afghanistan, there's no clear end to COVID afaik ... although I disagree with the implication that there's some great benefit the government / other interests are getting out of this ETS, of the same scale that the military-industrial complex/the executive branch got out of the PATRIOT act/Afghanistan.
> there's some great benefit the government / other interests are getting out of this ETS
Pharma is gonna be making some good money out of COVID, no? The amount of tests that have been produced, plus the amount of vaccines being used are certainly not free.
dude, big pharma has been handed a blank check from the government to produce a recurring product that is legally mandated for the entire populace to use. This is the sweetest deal in all of history for them.
For pharmaceutical companies? In comparison to a liability-free, recurring subscription, mandated by the federal government for hundreds of millions? Not so much.
> of the same scale that the military-industrial complex/the executive branch got out of the PATRIOT act/Afghanistan.
Given that covid and the subsequent reaction realized one of the largest wealth transfers from poor to rich in modern history and led to great market returns for those in power, how can you honestly say this?
Look.. like most people on hacker news I am in the top 1% of earners and due to my industry benefitted greatly from covid lockdowns. But just because we benefited, we cannot be blind to the mass robbery that has taken place. We've literally robbed the poor to pay the wealthy.
My concern is why OSHA has not issued emergency mandatory ventilation and air circulation orders, since that's actually within their wheelhouse vs this extension into medical demands which until now had been limited strongly to vague recommendations and couched in informed consent language (e.g. Hepatitis awareness)
Because that requires tremendous capital and labor costs, overhauling HVAC in every private and public building would take years, there aren’t enough electricians and tinners/pipefitters. HVAC equipment is also very expensive and most public institutions have already budgeted for capital costs. Who will pay for it all?
There is going to be a massive enforcement bureaucracy set up. Unwinding that will be nontrivial. Once people's budgets and fiefdoms at work depend on it, they will fight to keep or grow their power. This will be around in some form for a very long time.
It was temporary, originally enacted for four years. Unfortunately, it was extended a few times in whole and then in part before finally being allowed to expire completely after 18 years.
Due to a president that the media declared absolute war against. If Biden or Clinton were in office, they'd have renewed it quietly.
Just because they can't sneak it back in now doesn't mean they don't want to. The new administration has already made bogeyman out of 'domestic terrorism' that it's own fbi cannot find evidence for.
There's a bit in Ron Paul's "Revolution" where he points out that gov programs get added and grow but few are reduced or ended. His politics aside (i..e., regardless of party, he does have plenty of first hand experience), there's plenty of evidence to support this.
Oddly enough, a couple of weeks ago at the local thrift store I picked up "The Secret History of the American Empire" by John Perkins. Even if only half of it is accurate, there's also plenty of reason to believe there are less than noble forces at work given the current changes and the opportunities they create.
if they try to pull this here, I know for a fact my 65-year-old coworker—who has been working from home ever since we were mandated to wear a mask only in the building lobby (this ended July 1st)—won't put up with it, and I won't either, so that's 2/3 of the school district programmers they'd have to fire. thankfully our governor has already stated she's going to take any such actions to court.
absolutely. I was hired this year to learn how the hell all the complicated stuff the 55- and 65-year-old programmers do every day works, and I've only learned a fraction of it so far.
never caught covid when I took care of my mom when she had it last year and I worked as a cashier at Walmart during last year's Sturgis Rally and tourism season, and I somehow survived this year's Rally and tourism season as well... I'm going to be just fine, but I appreciate the "concern" nonetheless.
Right, but there was a source of knowledge (the two older employees) to obtain information from. If one of those older employees is irreplaceable, and they leave, it's going to seriously impact production systems.
These guys work at a school district. They're not working somewhere that it's going to make a huge difference to have some impact on production systems.
Honestly, I'd put my money on it being in the organizations best interests long term if the two older employees did leave them in a rut. A lot of times it's good to purge these types of places of the cruft left behind by legacy.
you wish! the whole point of hiring me was to have somebody younger learn the ropes of how our complex, outdated, and undocumented systems work. if the senior programmer gets fired, especially right as the school year is just starting, there's no way the other programmer can handle 100% of department responsibilities. and that's assuming she's willing to follow such a mandate anyway! she's out of office for a week so I haven't been able to ask her.
Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread? Preventing spread to other people is the only plausible reason to force everyone to take it. I am comfortable catching the disease and even comfortable dying from it (the numbers are vastly on my side). I do far riskier things on a regular basis (extreme sports) and I do not understand the infantilization of society. Join the feedlot if you want but I will not, I have been doing just fine as my own master, I need not the yoke of protection, certainly not from the feds.
False equivalency. The vaccine costs nothing, has insignificant statistical risk, and people are still refusing it. That bed or ventilator can go to someone responsible. If someone chooses not to be vaccinated, they are choosing to die at home.
"Avoiding risky sex costs nothing, has insignificant statistical risk, and they are refusing it. That medical treatment could go to someone responsible. Choose not to have safe sex, choose to die at home."
No one gets an STD at the grocery store or their workplace from close proximity to the infected. Very few people die from STDs (comparatively speaking to COVID) and they are not overloading hospitals.
Well, you brought up hospital space availability as the problem, not culpability for spreading it. If we're back to talking about folks spreading it, look at the fact that the vaccine doesn't prevent spread so why are the control freaks in society trying to force this on the rest of us? Sorry, the rest of us are not going along with it just because you think it's a good idea.
You are free to make your own choices within the bounds government policy. If that means those who choose not to vaccinate lose their jobs and are ineligible for unemployment insurance, I think that’s reasonable during a public health crisis. Even if vaccination did not reduce transmission rate, it increases survival rate in the event of infection, reducing healthcare system load. If you make a choice to unnecessarily burden a strained system, do not be surprised when that system sheds load in ways you did not expect (crisis standards of care, ie rationing [1] [2] [3]).
I am exhausted that people who share your opinion are dragging the pandemic out for whatever illogical reasoning justifies the beliefs and behavior. Your rights end where someone else’s begin, but apparently these people don’t believe their rights end anywhere, regardless of the harm they cause.
> It's ironic that the same camp currently blaming persons with acquired (Gold standard) immunity from prior infection of Covid ... for overwhelming medical systems, when by ignoring the actual immunity status of a person, they are undermining the entire medical system? The crisis they are creating goes against every basic principle of Immunology.
> Essential frontline medical workers last year are highly likely to have already been exposed to Covid at one point, so why does no one simply ask for their immune status, instead of “ Vaccine - or no job”? The vaccine does not stop transmission of the virus, as we know. Why are we instead firing all the workers who may not even have any need for the Jab at all, and aren’t willing to jeopardize their own health by taking it?
I’d argue you don’t want healthcare workers who don’t believe in vaccination practicing healthcare (90-95% of doctors are vaccinated, for comparison, versus closer to 40-50% for nurses). This is filtering out workers who should be filtered out of the healthcare labor pool, workers who would be in close proximity to patients.
They’ve received other vaccinations to work [1]. They’ve been educated how vaccines work. There is no excuse for being unvaccinated as a healthcare professional.
Many healthcare workers know the difference between gold-standard natural immunity, a sterilizing vaccine and non-sterilizing vaccine. It's a false dichotomy to reduce the world to vaccinated/unvaccinated, when vaccination neither stops transmission nor infection.
The most-protected group of people, who pose the least risk to other humans or healthcare systems, are the Covid-recovered, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.
Do you have a source that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced? Last time I checked studies showed that at least for the mRNA vaccines two shots was superior to natural immunity, as was natural immunity + mRNA booster shot.
This is not surprising and in line with many other infectious diseases, see e.g. [1].
I only read the term "gold standard immunity" in a US context and it's almost always politically charged.
> Do you have a source that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced? Last time I checked studies showed that at least for the mRNA vaccines two shots was superior to natural immunity, as was natural immunity + mRNA booster shot.
SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021. The increased risk was significant (P<0.001) for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold (95% CI, 4.85 to 7.33) increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold (95% CI, 5.51 to 9.21) increased risk for symptomatic disease. SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.
To be clear, the study here is talking about immunity 6 months after a final dose. It appears that at least for the Pfizer vaccine, immunity against infection and even symptomatic disease decays fairly rapidly after a couple months. At that time it still appears effective at preventing severe disease and hospitalization, though we might also expect that to decay over the next few months (too early to know).
Natural immunity decays too, but not nearly as rapidly per this study.
You would have to pay for not only your healthcare, but any civil damages to someone who was harmed or had a loss of life because you were occupying a bed they needed for a non COVID related malady [1].
Exercise should be prescribed, but not mandated. The overweight and morbidly obese are not overloading medical systems, so it is less of a pressing concern.
I think “prevent” is too imprecise a term here. The vaccines don’t eliminate the risk of spreading the virus to others. They do materially reduce the risk of spreading the virus to others.
A lot - that’s why I strongly oppose government vaccine mandates except in contexts where the magnitude of that pro-social good is far above the baseline - e.g., for healthcare workers.
Thankfully, the “or test” part distinguishes this from a vaccine mandate. We should have been testing most of the population since last March, and if anything we should have stronger testing requirements than this guidance dictates.
I don't think anyone should be forced to take any medicine against their will as long as they are not in a coma or incapacitated and unable to reason.
I personally had the vaccine because I have very high blood pressure, have pretty high blood sugar (even though I'm fit/in shape) and am almost 40. It was MY CHOICE in the risk vs reward game of numbers it I did it only for myself with a good life insurance already in place that covers death/incapacity from medication too(covers COVID vaccines too).
What if I would of ended up like that BBC presenter? Dead. For me it's down to my family and that is it.
This will be a bit exagerated but (hopefully) shold get the point across: At the end of the day anyone else is disposable as long as my family is safe from harm.
As long as the vaccine is not 100% safe nobody should be allowed to force anyone else to take it.
Edit: One thing that puzzles me though
- Why is nobody talking about those that are immune or already have the antibodies and don't need a vaccine? Why force them to have it if those vaccinated are safe?
> Edit: One thing that puzzles me though - Why is nobody talking about those that are immune or already have the antibodies and don't need a vaccine? Why force them to have it if those vaccinated are safe?
That said, the German "geimpft, getestet, oder genesen" strategy ("vaccinated, tested, or recovered") is explicitly what you suggest.
The tradeoff here, to me, is that:
- If we do not mandate vaccination, people can preserve their individual autonomy and will, nonetheless, probably get infected sooner or later and thus have some immunity. (According to some research, greater than that of vaccinated people against the same strain, but perhaps reduced against other strains.)
- However, that relies upon maintaining sufficient hospital capacity for the additional cases with severe symptoms. So as long as hospital capacity remains an issue, mandatory vaccinations make sense.
From the heart: respect to Germany for that policy.
I'm assuming you're in Germany/know someone in Germany when asking this and you might of heard something about it:
-Is it true that Hungarians are using some sort of medication as treatment? I heard it from a guy at work(hungarian) and was stumped.
Such efforts would likely grind to a halt after the first several waves of vaccination crew member killings. There are a lot of unhinged people out there and forced vaccination crosses a red line.
They increase the risk of asymptomatic transmission, because vaccines suppress the symptoms of infection, which would otherwise signal the infected person to quarantine. The CDC says this can be addressed by regular testing of the vaccinated, https://archive.is/PW9SP
> The agency now advises that vaccinated people be tested for the virus if they come into contact with someone with Covid-19, even if they have no symptoms... “Our updated guidance recommends vaccinated people get tested upon exposure regardless of symptoms,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the agency’s director, said in an email to The New York Times. “Testing is widely available.”
That wasn't the claim. The claim was that an unvaccinated person can self-isolate when they observe symptoms.
As the CDC said above, absence of symptoms is not a sufficient indicator for a vaccinated person. If a vaccinated person is tested regularly, they can self-isolate upon a positive test result, since they can't rely on symptoms as a signal.
> absence of symptoms is not a sufficient indicator for a vaccinated person
Absence of symptoms is not a sufficient indicator for the unvaxed either, so your argument falls apart.
Why isn't 90% reduction in ICU occupation and 70% reduction in chance of infection a sufficient argument for the public benefits? Just because it is not perfect, you'd rather let the country's hospitals overload and shut down?
The problem with COVID-19 all along has been that it is transmissible before being symptomatic. That is why it spread like wildfire when SARS and MERS did not. Listened to a good interview on NPR some months ago with a leading coronavirus expert who went over this in detail, but unfortunately can't remember her name or find the interview right now.
In any case, vaccines don't really change the equation here. Testing for temperature and symptoms with COVID have proven to be ineffective because asymptomatic transmission in the early stages is a thing with COVID-19 even without vaccination.
Some of those who have chosen not to get vaccinated are those already recovered from Covid, who now have natural immunity. This includes many essential workers and first responders, who worked throughout 2020 without the protection of a vaccine.
That leaves the subset of non-immune people who are unvaccinated. If this hypothetical person is reckless (as your comment suggests), should they not have already been infected in the past 18 months? If they were not infected in 18 months, that suggests at least some ability to isolate and self-monitor.
Natural immunity is not as strong as the immunity provided by the vaccines and the immunity provided by both together is much stronger. Having already had COVID is no reason not to get vaccinated.
If this were the case, shouldn't Israel have fewer cases now? No other country has more infections per million than Israel, with a vaccination rate much higher than the US.
Israel's overall vaccination rate is actually not that high. They were first out the gate, but tapered. They have also found the recent spike in cases to be focused in areas with low vaccination rates [1].
With the delta variant every unvaccinated person will likely end up becoming infected at some point. These unvaccinated pockets are where the large spikes are coming from, especially for severe disease.
Again, they recently had (or still have) the highest case per million rate in the world! Compare this to Palestine, with a vaccination rate of about 10% and roughly 1/40 of the cases per million. You could argue that Palestine is one big pocket of unvaccinated people. Why are the cases so much lower? And how would the situation in Israel be without vaccines? Worse than now or the same as in Palestine?
Different countries, different events, different cultures, etc.
There is also the problem of having a sense of security when there is a large vaccinated population which causes the vaccinated population to resume a regular life. Those who are not vaccinated are now exposed to more people in general.
Example, my wife and I prior to being fully vaccinated interacted with less than 10 people in the 1.5 years. We had everything delivered and had someone do our Costco shopping and drop it off at our doorstep. With us both fully vaccinated we go to Costco for our groceries and indirectly come in contact with probably 50 people in a single visit.
>"Blind opposition is just as silly as blindly following the flow"
I think opposition to being pressured regardless of the reasons is quite normal and healthy behavior because in most of the life situations people are being pressured into something that benefits somebody else.
> Because I make my own decisions and my willingness to do something is inversely proportional to how hard it is being pushed on me.
I don't know you but I find this hard to believe. Which side of the road do you drive on? Do you wear a seatbelt? How fast do you drive? Do you throw your trash in the bin or on the ground? Do you wear clothes outside or go out naked? Do you go around threatening to harm people around you or just keep to yourself?
Unless you are going to tell me otherwise, I would assume you don't actually behave according to how hard you've been pushed to follow those rules but instead behave in ways that provide you the most benefit.
Come on, man, of course I don't hold "must always oppose" as a steadfast rule for everything. As you point out, that would be ludicrous. It's more that if I don't see the merit of doing something, I shouldn't do it anyway just because of peer pressure.
Driving on the designated side of the road is something I see merit in, so I do it. It avoids vehicles hitting each other with a massive success rate (unlike the vaccine, or any of the other totalitarian responses to the mind virus COVID-19).
Likewise, I don't litter because it's a destructive habit for the planet and property. It's rude. It makes all of our lives worse. Those reasons are not rooted in "people push not littering", I avoid littering because I find it distasteful and wrong by my own measures.
Grow up. We do not let you make your own decisions about what kind of vehicle you get to drive because we are not willing to let you put everyone around you in danger. We do not let you make your own decisions about disposing of toxic waste on your own property because we are not willing to let you put everyone around you in danger.
And now we are telling you to get the vaccine or get tested weekly because we are not willing to let you put everyone else in danger.
Most likely the vaccine does prevent/reduce spread. Given the amount of skepticism, it's better to just say the truth that the vaccine 'may or may not' prevent the spread rather than pick a side and be proven wrong. It also advantages that people don't think they can avoid COVID as long as everyone else gets the vaccine.
You have the option of getting tested weekly as long as your employer allows for that option. Getting a vaccine is probably less invasive and less of an annoyance then many things employers already require.
> Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread? (...) I am comfortable catching the disease and even comfortable dying from it
Became it's not about you, it's about everyone around you as a group. Those who are "comfortable catching the disease" are taking up a non-insignificant portion of available hospital beds, for instance, keeping health workers at their limit and preventing other people from getting treatment for diseases for which there is no accessible, free vaccine to take.
Organizations are expected to do what's best for the majority of those they represent. Sure, some people may not want to wear a helmet all day and would be willing to take the risk. But if one of those people gets impaled and dies it ends up putting a burden in everyone around them, from those picking up the skull pieces and the person's family to the investors.
This reasoning also would justify mandatory colonoscopies, or requiring a 3 mile daily run, for 100 million people. Yes, that might reduce the load on the health care system long term (except the colonoscopy & PT departments ...), but historically in the U.S. that would have been viewed as a galactic overreach.
The load on the system is apparently hugely different. The system has managed to accommodate people with colon cancer and heart disease, so mandating those things hasn't been as pressing from that perspective. Meanwhile, covid has filled up hospitals and ICUs
The crucial difference between cardiovascular diseases and severe COVID is that COVID comes in waves. In a very short period of time a large number of people can end up with the virus, thus having a significant chance to develop serious pneumonia. All at the same time, in a very short time span. While lots of people suffer from cardiovascular diseases and cancer every year, they are distributed over the year. You don't usually see thousands of people having strokes in a given area in the span of a week or two, for instance.
It's this sudden surge of people needing ventilators and ICU beds that overwhelms the healthcare system of an area, causing repercussions on those that are sick for other reasons or get injured in accidents. For instance, in Italy cancer screenings on vulnerable subjects have been postponed for months, if not a year, due to the ongoing pandemic. Who knows how many people have now a higher risk of cancer due to hospitals and clinics being overwhelmed by COVID patients.
COVID vaccines are not sterilizing, but it's getting quite clear that they somewhat reduce the circulation of the virus too by reducing the viral load of symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers. At least they greatly greatly reduce the strain on doctors and avoid disruption of society at large, which is by itself a solid choice for mandating them.
The only possible choices here are to a. neglect the virus, with potentially serious social repercussions and loss of human lives, or b. resort to containment measures, which hamper the economy and are deeply unfair towards vaccinated people which objectively risk much less from the virus, or c. mandate vaccination, which is the only choice that avoids lockdowns and (most) deaths.
Also, vaccine mandates aren't anything new. That's how rubella, diphtheria, polio, smallpox, mumps, .. have become a thing of the past. They've been put in place on for decades, and no-vax movements have always been small and irrelevant before before social media came with droves of dubious content.
Citizen, our records indicate you ate more than your mandate controlled 100g of chocolate and only ran 2.95mi of your mandatory 3mi on our freely available sidewalks.
Your employment has been terminated. You many apply for unemployment benefits after our records show compliance.
I remember having a beer at night with an Apple employee who halfway through started walking around the table. Apparently his smart watch was telling him his group of 5 people were under their target miles for the day and he had to walk a mile right now to have his daily quote done. He didn’t want to disappoint his fellow staff. Including his boss I think.
Not quite what you posted but it certainty is similar.
What you're probably referring to is the "June Fitness Challenge", which is completely optional and just for fun (I don't do it, neither does my boss or half my team). You get a t-shirt or something if your team has a certain number of "active days" per month. It's not as draconian as it sounds.
Yeah I’m sure it seemed worse than it was, it was just funny it happening during a night out, and how it seemed to work on a group obedience emotion in my friend
Similar is my wife getting on a train with 7,000 steps still to go to maintain her x00 day streak of 10k steps/day. She proceeded to march on the spot for some time to keep her streak active. Our room was about 2-3m across.
I read an interesting article a while back, which asked... why were so many of the doctors in Nazi Germany willing to engage in sterilizing mentally deficient people, and other atrocities?[1]
The answer was because, healthcare was viewed as a collective good. Doctors did not treat a patient for their own benefit, they treated a patient for society's benefit.
" In less mathematical terms, the longer the discussion, the more likely a Nazi comparison becomes, and with long enough discussions, it is a certainty."
Seems like a silly "law". In mathematical terms, the longer the discussion, the more likely literally any comparison becomes. With a long enough discussion, every possible comparison being mentioned is a certainty.
Someone gets called a nazi for being in support of vaccine mandates and your response is "well in a infinitely long conversation everyone will get called a nazi" this is the most hackernews comment I have ever read
Right now? In the USA? "Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Florida and Arkansas have less than 10% left of their ICU bed capacity, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. (...) Idaho had just four ICU beds available out of the 400 beds total in the state, Gov. Brad Little said."
I asked for FULL hospitals. There are none apparently. 97% is concerning but not full and that is what these beds are for...looks like everything is fine. I also think it is interesting how I get voted down for just asking the question.
Per my comment, there are exactly 4 free ICU beds in all of Idaho. If there are more than 4 hospitals in Idaho (Wikipedia lists ~30), all hospitals after the 5th are therefore full.
So these are due to staff shortages. I don't live there now but I use to live in that region and this occurred from time to time...because the hospitals are small and the staff are few...it was normal procedure to fly patients out of state for care. These headlines are misleading because it does not put the issue into context. This is why the National Guard is being considered...because of staff. One reason why there are fewer staff these days is because people are tired of this crap and also may get paid more to sit at home.
>Became it's not about you, it's about everyone around you as a group. Those who are "comfortable catching the disease" are taking... Bla bla...
Then why are you smoking, or why are you eating fast food, why are you not exercising? These actions also put a burden on the health system. Why do covid and not tobacco? You know the answer already. This is not about anyone s health
Tobacco isn't communicable like a virus, doesn't produce symptoms in 2 weeks, hasn't ground the world to a halt and actually serves a purpose as a heretofore deeply ingrained cultural activity. The rest of the comparisons arent any better.
They do put a burden on the healthcare system, but last I checked ICUs are not presently being filled up across the country with lung cancer and heart disease patients.
Dont take this as me agreeing with the previous comment but I just want to point out that smoking, fast food, etc are all things that kill you "slowly", therefore has less of a risk of overrunning the healthcare system.
It would have been smarter IMO (though probably not politically possible) to mandate the vaccine for specific age groups. If what they are trying to do avoid hospitalization, they should focus on the groups that are most susceptible. If you're under 40 for example you won't be required to take it but if you're older you would because the risk of a 40 something getting hospitalized is way higher than a 20 something.
> are taking up a non-insignificant portion of available hospital beds
Healthy, non obese young people do not get hospitalized by this disease at any significant rate at all, most aren't even aware they got it. If you're a healthy young person you have rationality on your side to object to a vaccine. Especially one that is trying to hit a moving target as covid is probably now another mutating flu that will be around indefinitely. Especially because you still pass on the disease vaccinated or not.
Fwiw I know an overweight alcoholic 65 yo woman, cancer survivor, diabetic and has cardiac problems (she had to be in a wheelchair for a couple years). Oh and she's a chain smoker too.
She's the perfect COVID victim. She got it twice, even though it was quite bad never had to be hospitalized and her health is now not worse than before.
And yet they can have enough of a viral load to pass it along to any non-healthy people they come in contact with. Which is why this NOT a personal health issue, it's a public health issue.
As I have explained to several of my children's young friends "you are correct, COVID will probably not make you sick, but how will you feel when you find out you killed your grandmother by giving it to her".
As others have mentioned here you pass it along vaccinated or not.
You can also have the vulnerable population take precautions, not the young population. To be frank what kind of sick society pushes the young population to take on risk (novel vaccine incomplete clinical trials, rare heart inflammation issues documented, spike protein membrane break off issue, etc) to protect the elderly population? This is the first time societies have ever called for risking the youth for the elderly and it's not morally right.
Instead of emotionally reducing it to "don't kill grandma" you could join a reasonable discourse on the topic and look at other factors like...
The at-risk can get vaccinated - healthy youth don't get hospitalized - there are antibody and drug therapeutics available - youth don't need to risk novel vaccine adverse affects (they are documented - they are more prevalent in young than old) - you still spread it equally significantly vaccinated or not - the vaccine does not give robust coverage against new strains - natural immunity gives far more robust coverage against new strains than the vaccine (almost suggesting exposure for the low-risk is a better societal outcome).
Hand waving "all youth must get vaccinated" is not a rational course of action.
You're completely wrong about robustness against strains. Via mrna vaccine your body only learns how to target the spike proteins that (inadvertently) break off the cell membranes and travel throughout your body. On the other hand actually getting covid your body explores various vectors against the virus not just spike proteins.
Resisting this surge of authoritarianism is going to take more than just the unvaccinated standing up for each other. We need the vaccinated to say no and to refuse to comply with any orders for certificates or to pay fines.
You know, “resist” – wasn’t that the recent call-to-arms that got the orange fascist out of office?
That's what health insurance is for. If this was being driven by some sort of rationality, health insurers would just (be allowed to) increase premiums for people who don't take the vaccine. That would force people to properly calculate the true staffing needs imposed by them and pass the costs on to the right people.
This type of mandate does the opposite. Probably because, if you look at the actual risks and data from other countries, the difference in sickliness between the vaccinated and unvaccinated is sufficiently small in absolute terms, and the level of staffing at hospitals assuming healthcare workers are not forced out of their jobs sufficiently good, that the relative cost increase wouldn't work as a form of coercion. And it's now all about the coercion, not about health.
Due to it's high transmissibility, pretty much everyone will be exposed to it. When it happens, you'll be in much better shape if you're vaccinated because dying from it is not the only complication.
To put it plainly, problem with COVID-19 is that it makes your own immune system damage your body as it scrambles defenses, confused. With vaccine, much less so.
If you're counting on acquiring immunity naturally consider this:
1. You got sick and now you have antibodies but your internal organs, like lungs are scarred. You'd have likely avoided some if not all of that damage if you were vaccinated.
2. Your immune system might be targeting parts of the virus that are less universal across virus' mutations so it gives you less or little immunity against mutants. mRNA vaccine is specifically targeting the spike protein which so far has been unchanged enough for vaccines to be more or less effective against mutations.
Because the only thing that really matters is that the health system survives. It has never been about individuals. It’s not about you. Vaccines protect from hospitalization, reducing the massive stress forced upon hospitals and health professionals. When a hospital has to deal with a large influx of Covid patients they have to dedicate a lot of their resources (mostly humans), which eventually causes a complete bottleneck: all resources are dedicated to people dying from covid and other patients have to be rejected, lot of them dying.
It’s really not something you want in your country or state. See what happened to Italy, India, Brazil, or is currently happening in overseas French territories, it’s a horrible situation to be in.
> Because the only thing that really matters is that the health system survives. It has never been about individuals.
This is a confession of the most profound confusion. It's a complete reversal from the truth. We're killing people in order to save hospitals. The real pandemic is simply one of insanity.
I think of it similarly to being required to wear a hard hat if you're in construction.
It's not just about whether you're willing to get hit on the head, it's about an employer's duty of care, and (if you just look at it cynically) the disruption to work caused by an incident that could have been prevented if someone took appropriate measures.
> Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread?
Why do you think it doesn't prevent spread? While breakthrough infections make all the news, the vaccine does lessen the chance of catching COVID if exposed. Less people catching COVID, less spread.
If you’re not scared of dying of the virus, why not just get the vaccine? Surely you’re less scared of a vaccine than dying since the numbers are vastly on your side?
Because I am a free man and I make my own decisions. I don't benefit from the vaccine enough to want it of my own volition therefore I don't care how much pressure is placed on me, it comes down to my own math. The virus and vaccine are not a factor.
I'm curious about this. I understand "doesn't prevent all spread", but surely it prevents notable amounts of spread by reducing the amount of people walking around with high viral load, reduced hospitalization, herd immunity, and so on.
Citation needed. This contradicts the most recent research and information available, and all one must do is a quick search to turn up dozens of published papers on this topic. The vaccine reduces the transmission of COVID, and that is an important public health goal.
> I do not understand the infantilization of society.
The real infantilization would be catering to people that aren't prepared to do their bit for society. These are the children, that in the face of the evidence, will do ANYTHING to prevent the bruising of their egos.
The real infantilization would be catering to people that aren't prepared to do their bit for society by AVOIDING SODA, CEREAL, AND SUGAR SO THEY CAN LOSE 30 POUNDS and walk up a flight of stairs.
No, it doesn't absolutely prevent spread, but that's a ridiculous standard (often used to assure a certain rhetorical outcome rather than to shed light on the subject).
I can't believe we're still arguing this on this forum of all places.
The very worst estimates of the vaccines efficacy rate against the Delta variant sit at 30-50% for various measures. People on this forum are ecstatic about improving systems by 2-3% on the regular, and here is a free and easy measure that measurably reduces the mortality rate of yourself and those around you and we are _still_ arguing about it.
I used to think much more highly of the quality of discussion on here.
> Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread?
Well, it does reduce spread, right?
That said,
> Join the feedlot if you want but I will not, I have been doing just fine as my own master, I need not the yoke of protection, certainly not from the feds.
One of the other motivations policymakers have in promoting vaccination is that in many places hospital capacity is dangerously reduced due to the influx of covid cases.
If I seriously injured myself (say, in some extreme sport) and needed intensive care in my town right now, I wouldn't get it
ICUs are full, people are dying from stupid preventable shit because they couldn't get care, and from acquaintances' anecdotes staff are burning out at a ridiculous pace
Would you like to have access to healthcare when you need it?
Preventing spread is not the only reason, it also reduces the severity of the illness if you get it, and in any case vaccines do also reduce spread insofar as a vaccinated carrier's viral load is likely to reach a lower maximum for a shorter period of time
If you are in decent health, you will likely be OK. I got it this year, and it was rough for a week at home. I got letter from Dr. which states I have the antibodies and have recovered.
> Why must I be vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't prevent spread?
"Why must I go the speed limit if it doesn't prevent an accident? Why wear a seat belt if it doesn't prevent injury? Why have airbags if they don't prevent death?"
There are no guarantees in life (death and taxes, notwithstanding). The bottom line is that vaccines significantly reduce spread.
> I am comfortable catching the disease and even comfortable dying from it (the numbers are vastly on my side)
The argument being that you have a slim chance of having a severe reaction to COVID?
You have an even slimmer chance of a severe reaction to a vaccine. Why not get vaccinated?
Trucking, food production, Oil & Gas, powerplant workers, linemen, water treatment, etc.
In those essential industries, a small percentage of people walking out may wreck havoc on the whole nation. Those are also the same people that I expect are more anti covid vaccine.
There was a trucker strike in Australia. I got the impression that it was limited to TWU (the equivalent of Teamsters) demanding more money and better working conditions. I never saw what better working conditions actually meant.
I'm more concerned about 20% of the truckers being fired for not taking the vaccine. Logistics is already stretched thin and it would make it much worse.
Created this throwaway to say that there are at least some others who agree but are too scared of the current cultural tone to speak openly about this. I feel thoroughly alienated from my peer-group and family over their fervor for this response and against any who disagree.
I'm right there with you. Had an old friend of over 25 years say to me that it was a "blunt cudgel to enforce a social instinct that is shockingly atrophied in people."
Hang in there, you are not alone and we are still in the very early days of this whole operation. Also, you might be able to find a local anti-mask or anti-mandate group on Facebook, I've found having that social support network is really helpful.
I'm sorry, but I think this is time to speak up. We're losing rights month by month, slowly following in Australia's authoritarian footsteps. So many who oppose this are too afraid to say anything, and the result is the appearance of overwhelming support for such measures, mainly because those who do support are much more aggressive, louder, willing to directly attack others personally and even physically.
We shouldn't resort to those tactics, but we do need to make our voices heard, support each other, reassure everyone that we're just as numerous if not more so. It's important, this is our freedom and that of our children on the line.
I'd suggest following Rand Paul on twitter, and as he suggests, refusing to comply with these unscientific and unreasonable orders.
(truly, any mandate that fails to take in to account naturally acquired immunity or vaccine risks to individuals as noted in cdc and fda documents is completely lacking in scientific rigor.)
> I feel thoroughly alienated from my peer-group and family over their fervor for this response and against any who disagree.
Join the club. You really do need to start speaking out though. This shit has gone on long enough. The idea that it is impossible well intentioned, well reasoned person to object to any part of our current situation is complete rubbish. We are being gaslit and bullied and quite honestly I'm tired of it.
I would be with you if it weren’t for the “or test” part. “You must get vaccinated” would be problematic, but “you must do a COVID test once a week if you’re not vaccinated” is totally reasonable IMO.
In June of 2020, I waited over 2 weeks for the results of my test. A delay that long makes the test more than worthless for preventing transmission and determining best course of action.
I think more reasonable stance would be to require employers offer sufficient protective gear for unvaccinated employees. Gas masks aren't that expensive. And any private person can at their own cost also buy such device to fully protect themselves.
Actually having had to wear a gas mask in the military for hours... I would LOVE to see this. If you think an N-95 grade mask is hard to breathe though, try wearing an NBC mask for 8 hours a day. :-)
It's "reasonable" in the sense of being slightly less draconian but completely unreasonable from a health perspective.
Think about it: two people enter a workplace. One is unvaccinated but recently tested, so it can be said with good confidence they are not infected. The other is vaccinated but may well be sick and spreading it, especially as effectiveness wanes quickly. The other is waved through, the first is penalized with constant charges. Who is making other people the safest here? It's not the vaccinated guy.
"Recently tested" doesn't mean you definitely don't have the Covid. It could that you weren't far enough along in your sickness at the time you were tested.
It's all about risk. Someone who has been vaccinated has a very low likelihood of being sick with Covid. Someone who has recently been tested also has a low likelihood.
IMO, though, if the tests are a week apart, that's a lot of opportunity for Covid to slip through. There's a reason that 72 hours (and sometimes 48 hours, I think) is the time limit for tests for traveling. Even that isn't a guarantee, though.
I can't find the chart now, but Covid progresses pretty rapidly, so if someone gets tested on Friday and was exposed 1-2 days before that, they can pretty much spread it for an entire week before they get tested on the next Friday.
And even if they were tested on Mondays, they could still be spreading it before the weekend.
Tests prevent someone from spreading it for weeks, but not days.
Vaccines are much more likely to prevent the spread at all.
Preventing the spread of an infectious respiratory virus is a fools errand and we’ve known this forever. No amount of authoritarianism is enough to stop the spread. The mitigation efforts were always to avoid overrunning the hospitals, which we have managed easily.
Take a look around right now, multiple states are at ICU capacity. You don’t need to overrun the hospital system but under sustained stress, you quickly degrade service. Not to mention all the burnout and people leaving the field on top of it all.
Icu beds are a function of staffing long before equipment is a limitation. We've fired nurses and not rebuilt over the last 18 months. If nothing has been done to address staffing for seasonal diseases in that time, it's either incompetence or by design. This is why hospitals run at or near capacity all year round and have capacity issues every flu season. It's a business decision. It also happens to be easily exploited by the narrative.
You can go back and look at 10+ years of UK NHS "hospitals desperately overwhelmed" annual articles. Just because you hadn't heard of it before doesn't mean it isn't normal.
The fact that it happens a lot doesn't make it any less true now and the fact we've had sustained stress on the system for a year and a half isn't typical.
In the US, they've relaxed many guidelines and allowed student nurses without gaining licensure yet to practice because of the need [1].
This all pales in comparison to the mandate Biden announced last night for all healthcare staff at facilities which take Medicare/Medicaid to be required to take the vaccine. Probably a good 20% of our nursing staff is at direct risk of being lost because of that new measure.
I'm not sure why this is down-voted (but I have my suspicions). ICUs are f-ed because hospital's business models are f-ed. Without people voluntarily electing to get minor surgery and other elective services their balance sheets get turned inside out and they cut staffing. The fact that we had a massive uptick in people who need laborious ICU care (because covid) at the same time that people more or less stopped voluntarily going to hospitals was a double whammy.
Just FYI, no amount of coercive mandates and force applied against your fellow human beings to make them take these shots, which are marginally protective against transmission at best, will actually do anything to make you safer from Covid or reduce your paralyzing fear of it. TPTB will continue to menace you with the specter of The Virus as long as it is making you behave in ways useful to them -- namely, by handing them more power.
Oh ok, thanks for the heads up. Can't believe I let all these doctors, medical professionals and scientists cloud my judgement and make me believe them. I should definitely trust a stranger online, believe their conspiratorial drivel on a shadow cabal consolidating power and redpill myself out of this fever dream of a life I've been living.
I agree and support this. People want to conflate the issues of not believing in vaccines (or whatever words they like to put in peoples mouths) and believing in having to provide proof of a personal health situation all over the place. It's convenient to pretend that anyone who is against government and corporate overreach is an "anti-vaxxer" instead of actually engage with the issue.
They're getting conflated because the people who are against vaccines are referencing freedom to choose as their primary argument, as if the ability to make bad decisions implies some duty to make bad decisions.
I'm against vaccine mandates in principle, but the ultimate cause of the authoritarianism is mass media. Covid has been a fantastic setup for dog and pony shows - political hucksters rail all day about government overreach while inciting their followers to make bad choices. The large scale effects of those bad choices practically demand government intervention. And after the utilitarian system steps in to mitigate the problem, the hucksters take credit for being right about government overreach all along. It's the perfect con for the post-reality media environment - when reality asserts itself and some low level preacher dies of their own kool aid, they just go silent and are replaced by another ignorant voice on the same channel.
If we had a level of societal trust such that you could expect that most everyone would be taking measures to prevent spreading Covid, then coming together in large groups (eg employment) would be less of an issue. But as it stands, why would anybody want to go back into the office when it's likely that at least a third of your coworkers will blithely get you sick? And hence OSHA et al step in, using the same rationale as when preventing operating heavy equipment while drunk - it creates an unsafe work environment.
Can that "zero-tolerance" mindset be productively applied to any problem? We see it in a lot of places, and it never seems to achieve the goals it aims to serve.
"no spread" is R=0.
Vaccinated people are spreading it to vaccinated people as well as unvaccinated. Assuming that vaccinated people don't know that they get it we have essentially created a big cesspool for the virus to spread undetected.
Luckily that's a bad assumption because the vaccines are so bad that they aren't even protecting people from getting very ill.
If R<1 the number of infected people continually decreases until there are no cases. This is also why it's important for the US to provide other countries with vaccines.
Okay, but you claimed that "there would be no spread". But that is not true for 0 < R < 1. Can you just admit you misspoke instead of arguing a pointless point?
The FDA application for boosters claims that efficacy against transmission for delta for persons vaccinated when the vaccine became generally available is now 42%. That isn't enough to drop Reff below 1 even with 100% vaccination-- in fact, it leaves delta with an Reff higher than the original L strain had absent vaccination.
> except it's not really since you can kill other people if you're not vaccinated.
Not if they are vaccinated. I don't understand why vaccinated people give a hoot about the vaccination status of others. Vaccinations protect them from severe covid issues.
Everybody is gonna get covid. We knew this all the way back in march of 2020.
Yup. And as a sane person I understand that and long since took appropriate actions. And that is my own damn business and I owe you no explanations or medical records!
Temporarily. I am assuming you had your second shot more than two weeks ago. Soon, the definition of "fully vaccinated" will change to require the third shot and you will be counted among the unvaccinated as it is currently done for people with a single shot or less than two weeks past their second shot when it comes to death/hospitalization stats.
Yeah, there are so many layers to this. I mean, a mandate for employers oversteps what government is allowed to do anyway. But that aside, if it was polio or something and there was one shot that basically ended it, you could see a rational path to a single mandate that got everyone vaccinated (btw I'd be curious to know polio, measles, etc vaccine rates, I think they are very high). But when "vaccinated" is essentially some political flavor of the week, how is it going to get enforced? Will a third shot get rolled in? And if there are more, or if we switch from mrna to another variety, do they get rolled in too? Will you need to have the original 2021 shots, even once they've been subsumed into something else, or can you just get the latest thing.
For all the pretend deference to science, we're in the middle of a rapidly unfolding situation. It seems preposterous, even with clear evidence that the vaccines do work (and ignoring government overreach which is itself absurd and illegal imo) to start mandating something that is not likely to hold 6 months from now, and what, just require that everyone tracks whatever current orthodoxy says? I have my two pfizer shots, and if there is a vaccine later that actually cures covid, maybe I'll go back and get it. But I'm giving up on trying to track the flavor of the week and trying to match whatever the new York times wants me to do, I'll wait until there is actually a reasonable consensus
It's pretty egregious that there is no mention of accommodation for individuals who have already acquired effective immunity through previous infection. Other countries are well ahead of the U.S in this regard.
These mandates appear to completely neglect entire aspects of scientific consensus.
Even if that were true, and it's not clear that it is, the side effects of infection are far, far worse than whatever side effects the vaccine might have.
So far vaccine immunity fades with time as well. The Pfizer Gang have experienced that already at 6mo or so, but Moderna protection has faded much more slowly.
I reluctantly support this. I also think a bunch of companies that have many/most employees who can work from home were hoping that they could get through this without widespread mandates given that the reluctant mostly didn’t have to come into the office or customer sites.
If they can safely work from home this is clearly not an occupational safety and health issue and osha doesn't have any business getting involved. So this is either clearly an overreach or osha was just the vector biden used to exert power he didn't have on his own.
I don’t even completely disagree. But his objective is to get more people vaccinated and most large employers will be happy to go along. It’s at most a minor nuisance for them to fire people who refuse to comply. Especially if the execs agree with the goals. HR will have zero patience for a conversation about how the rules shouldn’t apply.
Since the only person who answered properly was (correctly) flagged and banned, I'll answer your rhetorical question as accurately as I can:
Italian Fascism promoted a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in associations to collectively represent the nation's economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.[0]
Could you please stop creating accounts to post like this to HN?
I'm sure you have good reason to feel strongly, but when you post like this, you're just discrediting your own position. That doesn't help you, and it hurts the people who agree with you.
I want to point out this is not a dupe of the "Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers" thread. This thread is talking about private employers with 100 or more employees; not necessarily federal employees.
It's the same announcement and therefore the same story. The titles picked different details to emphasize. Of course that affected the threads considerably, which is why I didn't merge them.
The private employer story is much more impactful/news-worthy IMO than a federal employee mandate. Also the whitehouse.gov link seems more authoritative than NPRs coverage of it.
I understand the need to keep flamewars down, but hiding this thread doesn't feel right to me. Just my 2 cents.
I agree - that's why we turned the flamewar detector off and unhid this thread. I probably should have added that to my comment above; I think I assumed everyone reading this would see that it was back on the front page.
I'd originally commented when it was still pretty new and went back to find it on the frontpage and didn't see it. That's when I originally replied to you. I see it high ranked again.
Aren't both of these titles editorialised and against guidelines?
The original title of the page is: "Path out of the Pandemic, President Biden's COVID-19 Action Plan", shouldn't that, or a derivative have been used instead?
The subtleties of the title domain are a hell of a rabbit hole, but in the case of the current page, I'd argue that the original title would be misleading at the top of an HN thread. Press releases are often that way- see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It would be overreach were our country's stability not being undermined by large pockets of selfish lemmings that clearly cannot apply logic and critical thinking to their decision making.
I don't want to pay even more for everything in my life due to inflation caused by social parachutes because some toothless hillbillies in the South my taxes are ALREADY propping up don't understand their insecurity is being monetized by grifters.
If you don't want mandates, perhaps evaluate the consequences of applying the same level vitriol to every single request made of you by the collective regardless of its reasonability.
Historically, mandated vaccines weren't mandated before we knew they were safe longer-term. We're still awaiting FDA approval for a majority of the available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in the US, yet many folks would be mandated to receive one.
Many folks will see this as being mandated to be a test subject, which is why there has been substantial legal pushback against the mandate less than 24 hours after Biden announced it.
Every time I traveled, we had to have "our shots."
These were 100% mandated by the country we were coming to. Since my "home base" was in Africa, we had some fun bugs, and I had to get a whole battery of shots.
I have several vaccination scars on my body, and I developed a lifelong fear of needles, as a result of the giant horse needles they used for the thick sludge they'd jab me with (which left me feeling like I'd lost a fistfight with a gorilla).
When I got my COVID vaccination shots, I didn't even feel it, as the needle was so tiny.
How is this different from requiring hard hats? A hard hat won’t save you from getting a cut on your head from a dropped hammer but it will save you from having it break your head in two. Should OSHA stop requiring PPE?
Asbestos fire-proofing made a substantial difference. We did not - in fact - go from "Let's make things fire-proof with asbestos" to "Eh, asbestos is bad, guess everything will burn down instead" but instead moved to fire-proofing with new materials in countries that could afford to do that.
Lots of older buildings have asbestos that's preventing fires and won't cause noticeable harm so long as it's undisturbed. The fibres are a problem, but a sheet of material under a layer of plaster isn't breaking off fibres that can get into your lungs. If your job is to rip out plaster and re-model buildings then that's a huge problem, but if you just live in a building you're getting much more benefit from it not catching fire than you'd get from very minutely reducing your risk of lung damage from asbestos.
In fact even for a brand new building, although it's banned in some places, "Let's use asbestos" makes more sense than "Eh, so what if it burns down and a few dozen people die", so if those are the available choices you should go with asbestos.
So it is with the available COVID-19 vaccines. SARS-CoV-2 is very dangerous and, outside of New Zealand and a handful of Pacific islands, widespread, so you're just way more likely to get very sick or die as a result of not being vaccinated than suffer a serious side effect, known or hypothetical.
I am required to wear (chemical-infused) flame retardant clothing on oil and gas wells. Some people have to work despite the chemicals rubbing their skin all day.
Yeah, I suppose deaths are always possible from anything. You could give out a million lollipops and someone would choke. Someone has probably had an infection just from the needle itself.
I'm not certain I'm using VAERS correctly, but it looks to me as if there are 2,292 death reports associated with Pfizer's vaccine in the US alone, or 321 if I specify ages below 60. Whatever number of reports there are in VAERS is likely to be a small fraction of the true total.
This post brought to you some crazy number of minutes late due to rate limiting.
Indeed. You should read some of these reports. It sounds like you haven’t.
If someone gets the vaccine and dies the next day, sure it is very possible it is not the cause. But it should be reported. And when many people have the same symptoms after a vaccine, it becomes a common side effect.
“The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database contains information on *unverified* reports of adverse events (illnesses, health problems and/or symptoms) following immunization with US-licensed vaccines. *Reports are accepted from anyone*…”
Ignoring that VAERS is unverified data, and taking that 45k as "all these people died directly due to the vaccine", it's still only 45k out of 378M doses administered - 0.012%.
(For comparison, 2021 has 31k gun deaths[1] through September and 21.5k road deaths through the first 6 months.)
It also says "The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event."
Also, on the download page, "However, in general coding terms in VAERS do not change based on the information received during the follow-up process. VAERS data should be used with caution as numbers and conditions do not reflect data collected during follow-up."
Which is just different ways of saying "this data is probably unreliable", no?
That's interesting, my very official competing VAERS shows that the vaccine has caused several thousand people to have spontaneously come into existence! I welcome you to submit your data, as I accept any reports from anyone regardless of political axe to grind.
Great point, thank you for letting me know a hard hat isn't a medical procedure. If my aunt had wheels, she'd be a tea cart. I'm sure I can find someone who died BECAUSE they were wearing protective head PPE - a hat strap got caught and strangled them, whatever.
The more important point that you ignore is people are horrible at weighing relative risk. You're obviously intelligent and aware of the biases inherent in judging vaccination risk. I'm sure you know crossing the street is far more risky. There is a consistent pattern of unvaccinated, dying covid patients claiming they underestimated the risk of the illness and wish they had gotten vaccinated. People are literally unable to make that choice for themselves. There's proof.
What's the point of "freedom" if we're all stuck in our houses hiding from variant after variant because we refuse to acknowledge that our government needs to make a decision that will save lives [1] when our actual survival is at risk.
I’m not so inclined to agree at this stage, and I’m a hawk when it comes to this kind of thing. (A few days ago I was downvoted for criticizing the Colorado pay transparency law as an overreach).
This is certainly the best way to keep workers safe during a pandemic and given the information we have on the Pfizer vaccine — billions of doses given, 1.5 years of watching for adverse long term effects, full FDA approval — this move strikes me as appropriate for OSHA. OSHA requirements are supposed to be aggressively protective of the worker.
I'm not in the US so I can't speak for y'all, but the regulation isn't a bad thing.
While you might not be affected personally, because you've been successful, it's better for the government to have your back than it is to entrust it to the free market. There's a hell of a lot of misery because the gov. doesn't step in enough, doesn't take care of its citizens.
This was learned the hard way in 1929 and, for whatever reason, was quickly forgotten.
That said, I can see why it's undesirable to some.
I don't see how the gov't respond to an economical crisis has anything to do with modern authoritarianism. Regulation without oversight and checks and balances does lead to tiranny, more often than it doesn't
Of course, but I'd contend that regulation without oversight/checks and balances is tautological. Regulation in and of itself is the oversight, or the check and balance, and that responsibility is delegated to a specialised agency or department (that has a longer term scope than a single election cycle) rather than being directly managed by the administration in office at the time.
An authoritarian regime isn't going to spin up a bureaucracy like that to do regulation-without-oversight, it's just going to lower its boot onto the population's collective face. You can hardly call that regulation.
Perhaps we're just debating semantics here, but I think there's a distinction between regulating corporate behaviour (you must do X Y Z if you want to run a business in this country, for reasons A B C) and introducing a totalitarian regime (you must do X Y Z because I said so).
The US legislature has the right to regulate commerce in the US according to the US Constitution. Healthcare of workers and the overall impact of covid are two things directly affecting the economy.
The legislature already has the former of these covered by the creation of OSHA in the 1970s. OSHA is a regulatory agency under the Department of Labor, which is part of the executive cabinet.
The executive is now using these powers granted by the legislature to ensure workers are protected in their work environments.
Our largest healthcare provider has already mandated vaccines for their staff and insurance companies are now following suit because they got hammered with life insurance payouts for 2020 and first half of 2021.
Waiting for retailers to announce this as well at some point.
Maybe slightly off topic, but it’s always been odd to me how life insurance tests with vigor for tobacco use but lack that enthusiasm for metabolic health / diet.
Your comment was literally "#America", certainly this implies you think it's different in other countries, otherwise, why would you highlight the Americanness?
Not true. Germany has the "three g" mandate (and it has faced significant pushback). France has no vaccination mandate but does have policies to encourage it, which have also faced massive protests. Both and the US have first-dose vaccination rates within ten percentage points of each other.
In all three countries, the pushback is primarily from populist/right-wing political movements. This is not a strictly American phenomenon.
>In all three countries, the pushback is primarily from populist/right-wing political movements.
This article says, at least in the US, the poor and young are the least likely to get a vaccine. You have any data for your political assertion that it's primarily right wingers? Keep in mind, politicizing COVID is what got us where we are today.
Besides the (insane and infuriating) politicization of the vaccine, I wonder how much of the problem comes down to a fear of the US healthcare system for those who are uninsured or have catastrophic-only coverage. I worry that people fear they'll go in for a “free” shot and end up getting a $300 bill in the mail, because hidden costs abound in the US healthcare system. (Even though we know that they won't)
"They" might. I blacked out after my second Pfizer shot, and was ambulanced to an ER. This was $4k, not really my choice. Yes, I have health insurance. Everything was repriced to the 'negotiated' insurance rate, and it was still ~$2k. On top of the $1k/month I already pay (me and spouse). I would get the shot again, without a doubt, but it still hits people.
This is extremely insightful. I wonder how many uninsured/underinsured people are afraid of getting hit with an unexpected medical bill? I'll be honest, having insurance I often times don't think of these things.
There was a period of my life in which I was underinsured (catastrophic only). I ended up burning my foot badly enough that the nurse line insisted I do to urgent care. Three people walked in, looked at my foot, told me not to pop the blister. I walked away with two pain pills and a bill for $4,000 that I negotiated down to about $3200.
You’re sure as hell right that it was going to take something catastrophic for me to walk through those doors again.
Edit: I have a job that offers decent insurance now, but my immediate emotional reaction to healthcare in the United States is very negative (even though I quite like my doctor, dentist, etc). I believe our system is corrupted and abusive towards the poor.
I think more it’s an indirect side effect. Healthcare is so expensive that people no longer go to a family doctor but avoid the doctor and get their information/advice from their social circle and the Internet or alternative medicine.
I think people are truly terrified of the long-term effects due to over-litigation here in America.
You can't turn on the TV, Facebook, YouTube, etc. without a class action lawsuit message in the form of: "Have you used baby powder in the past 2 years? If so, you may be eligible for compensation under the Talcum Powder Class Action Lawsuit, call us at..."
The seemingly "safe" things in America that we take for granted, like baby powder, or Round-Up weed killer, or even tap water in Michigan has turned out to be not so safe.
Just to clarify something. When I said minorities I was only talking about Hispanic and black. Not Asian. I should have been more precise in my wording.
Younger people along with Hispanics and blacks are more likely members of the Democratic Party than other parties. I haven't seen the vaccine rate and party breakdown though.
Like it or not, but it's the GOP that fights covid measures tooth and nails and poisons society with insane propaganda while their own supporters die every day. Hopefully any prospect of GOP taking back the house and the Senate will die as well
The rate might be higher, but we have our share of anti-vax people - including some violent protests at the Prime Minister lately, causing him to cancel rally events.
In our office, we have a number of people I know aren't vaccinated.
A “food desert” doesn’t account for the person who consistently orders two flavors in their tall iced coffee (usually equates to 6+ oz of simple syrup); that’s a choice — and a severe negative externality.
Indeed. Tax that at point of sale, like cigarettes and other tobacco.
Risk pooling in insurance is simply an added benefit, but a less clear moral approach when the disease is not necessarily controllable by the person. Metabolic disorders exist. Tobacco disorders, not as much except conditioning and addiction.
But, it should be a focus for wellness programs so that metabolic disorders are destigmatized.
Nearly 3/4 of out adults are overweight, thats mostly shitty choices. You say "disorder" like it is something these people got through no fault of their own but that is not often the case. Shitty choices probably we should stigmatize becuase accepting this many fat people have gotten us a public health crisis.
I hear this shtick repeated every time someone doesn't want to fund universal healthcare because they don't want to pay for fat people. Fun fact, obese people actually have lower lifetime healthcare costs than healthy people.
Now, if you wish to reduce obesity because you're more interested in a person's quality adjusted life years, you absolutely do want to treat obesity (and addiction) like a disorder, because compassion and empathy is the only way you're ever going to get someone to make the long term life choices they need to get better.
I referenced overweight which is many more people. They are the ones who live long enough to spend big dollars on healthcare but still cost much more. They arent food addicts or something they just cant be bothered to make gym trips.
I'm doubtful Obamacare would regulate life insurance.
As far as I know, life insurance policies of significant amounts still do medical exams. And care about drug use, tobacco use, high blood pressure, disclosure about things like past cancer diagnosis, lifestyle stuff (skydiving, climbing, and so on) etc.
In the US, you are not going to be able to get any decently priced term life insurance without a blood test, height, and weight. The A1C and cholesterol levels, combined with height, weight, medical history, and family medical history probably give them enough information for metabolic health/diet.
> We still don't really understand how diet affects health long term.
I thought it was pretty clear that we do. Go talk to any physician and they will tell you the 3 things you control to increase your chances of a long & healthy life are:
Eh, yes there is data but the association is not clear and straightforward that diet is the necessary or sufficient condition for metabolic or cardiovascular diseases. What you're quoting is, in healthcare, called the "standard of care" and is the workflow that is recommended for doctors (i.e. less likely to be sued for malpractice if they follow the route). Most doctors are technicians, not researchers establishing causal claims with strong data.
Please don't misread, I agree with you in principle. I am simply pointing out there are nuances.
You are wrong. There are great volumes of evidence that keeping a low weight and keeping macronutrients roughly in some gap makes you live longer. I'm not sure what is left to be talking about. Specific fad diets?
Are you seriously arguing edge cases here? It's on level with anti vaxxer claiming his smoking overweight uncle had no problems with corona hence we both don't get vaccinated.
This stuff is presented in middleschool and highschool health classes and pretty much everywhere on the internet if you look for life improvement advice. Weight is perhaps the single most strongly linked indicator of life expectancy.
What is your level of education? I need to know so I can give you sources I am sure you can use.
Sufficient to understand metasurveys of relevant literature and models of dynamical systems, insufficient to grok or critique individual studies outside clear statistical issues.
If you are able to understand this literature I am quite confused as to how you can't find it yourself -- the associations go far deeper, with increased fat intake causing plaque buildup that eventually leads to heart problems. Obesity under class III also shortens life expectancy.
Realize also that per what is laid out in that review someone who is 6" ~180lbs is obese, even if it mostly muscle. Even if it is obesity caused by muscle instead of fat, you don't live as long.
Yeh, that's science. As we learn more the guidance is refined. Generally speaking for decades the guidance has been to eat a well balanced diet—that hasn't changed.
There is also a second issue, government agencies have been co-opted by industry to make recommendations not supported by the science. I'm specifically thinking about recommendations around fat&sugar, the same thing you called out that indicates the problem is not the science but rather regulatory capture.
To get my life insurance 5ish years ago, I had to have a blood test that included tobacco, drug use and cholesterol. My understanding is that is pretty common.
One you qualify though, I don't think they can re-test you.
They certainly test for basic health, or did with me. I had to give blood and urine, and a nurse came to check other vitals. They also get your basic measurements which gives them BMI. They can then categorize you into "preferred" or other groups.
You often do get tested and rated based on health factors. Maybe not exact diet, but they can surely infer some of that from blood/urine/size/weight/etc. It depends on the insurance company but more likely the size of the policy. I think a lot of $20-$100k policies don't require any tests - they may also be more expensive. I got a decent term 15 years ago, and I had to have an in-home exam from a nurse.
correct many small polices don't require testing, same for group life policies upto a certain amount of benefit. When you get into the 10 million range that's when a carrier really starts digging into family history etc.
Few carriers are currently willing to write anyone over 60 which is affecting key person policies more than anything, in my experience.
>> it’s always been odd to me how life insurance tests with vigor for tobacco use but lack that enthusiasm for metabolic health / diet.
This commenter has never had a major individual life insurance policy. While Tobacco effects underwriting, it's not as major of a factor anymore.
It depends on the amount of life insurance you get. Mine is of an amount that blood work was required and it definitely affects the rate. One of the things I learned is I have a "fatty liver" - which is indicative of poor metabolic health. I started taking care of that, brought the levels down to normal, and my rate was lowered.
Maybe I read it wrong, but either way, life insurance companies have never required vaccinations after purchasing a policy to my knowledge, and if they did, it would have to be for new policies only. But I also feel like I would have read about it somewhere if that was true.
As far as I understand, ACA does not allow health insurance companies to require vaccinations to be eligible for coverage, but they can offer lower premiums in exchange for vaccinating.
> Our largest healthcare provider has already mandated vaccines for their staff
Seems reasonable to expect people working with many sick and vulnerable patients in a healthcare setting to be vaccinated. That’s one of the highest risk scenarios I can think of for exposure and transmission as well as the most likely place to concentrate vulnerable patients.
>>insurance companies are now following suit because they got hammered with life insurance payouts for 2020 and first half of 2021.
Do you have a source for this comment? One thing is certain, more people are purchasing life insurance so if anything Covid has been a windfall for the carriers, for various reasons not just increased sales.
Biden: Monoclonal antibodies have been shown to reduce hospitalization of UNVACCINATED covid patients by 70%
Also Biden, in the same speech: We're gonna force everyone we can get away with forcing to take a shot still under emergency use authorization that is only supposed to be valid if there is NO other viable treatment.
The Covid monoclonals are also only available under EUAs.
And no one is being strapped down and vaccinated, some consequences are being imposed for some choices. For instance, for workers at larger companies that don't get vaccinated, there is an expectation that the employer will check weekly for negative test results.
So, here's the thing. You don't catch an infectious disease through an act of God. You catch it from an act of man.
Right now, you have zero recourse if your employer, or your co-workers are creating a dangerous environment. You have no legal standing if your employer's policies are the reason that you catch COVID, which can be financially ruinous - or lethal. Your employer is explicitly protected from any liability their action or inaction creates in this space.
We either need the tools to hold employers liable for creating a dangerous work environment - because they are not taking basic precautions against the spread of a deadly disease...
Or we can shield them from this liability, and mandate that they take those precautions.
> So, here's the thing. You don't catch an infectious disease through an act of God. You catch it from an act of man.
I think the same but with a different tack. If you get an infectious disease from another person, and that person didn’t want the disease either and wouldn’t want to spread it, then why are they?
How do people not know they have Covid and are giving it to their friends, coworkers, etc?
The same reason that people crash their cars. Oftentimes with friends and family inside them.
Sometimes, it's because they did everything they could, within reason, to prevent it.
Sometimes it's because they were reckless, negligent, and should not have been behind the wheel.
We call the first an accident, and the second (if it kills someone) vehicular manslaughter. We litigate to determine which is which.
We also give people leeway in how negligent they want to be. A BAC between 0 and 0.08 is fine... Unless you hit someone - at which point, it will be used against you. A BAC above 0.08 is immediate grounds for arrest, regardless of whether you hurt anyone.
That is what personal responsibility on one end, and enforced social responsibility on the other end looks like. Right now, nobody can be held personally accountable for reckless behaviour with COVID. Either we lift that protection, or we double down on enforcing social responsibility.
This doesn't go far enough. I think that state governments need to start mandating vaccinations for all eligible citizens. Such mandates are clearly constitutional and have a great deal of historical precedent (see Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld vaccine mandates in 1905).
That case was against a law and not against an executive order. I'm tired of presidents ruling by decree - this should stop long time ago but it's getting worse with every president.
Let me guess, seat belt mandates are also “authoritarian”?
What about measles vaccine requirements? Have you complained about those recently? Believe it or not, there was a time when measles wasn’t a thing and very few question the need for a measles vaccine now.
What about the broad polio vaccine rollout?
Vaccine hesitancy has been a thing, but never this strongly along party lines
You're forgetting about driver's licenses, pilots licenses, cosmetology licenses, ID requirements and searches to fly on a plane, having to be over 21 to buy alcohol and tobacco, selective service, income taxes, property taxes, traffic laws, building codes...
Most of those examples do not apply to persons who are not engaged in commerce.
21+ to buy products should be 18. At some age children become adults.
Study the personal income tax and you will find it is primarily enforced through your employer. If each of us had to save and write a check there would be little compliance.
For non-commercial property, if the property is not cataloged by county assessor, it doesn't get taxed. Dig in on this bit and be amazed.
Did government go to your door and make you sign the contract of non-commercial driver license? Or did you go to a government office and volunteer? This was litigated at USSC decades ago.
Federal personal income tax does generally apply to federal government employees. When a non-govt employer withholds from your paycheck it does become difficult to then get out of volunteering to pay.
Are you a commercial driver and also federal employee? Or like most people do you shuffle in to the lines to voluntarily contribute?
I am an independent software developer and like most business owners I contribute because it's required by law and failure to do so carries harsh penalties.
Are you telling me that you do not pay federal and or state income taxes? That you do not contribute to FICA? Are you under the impression that because you are not a federal employee that you are not required to pay federal income taxes?
Structure your affairs correctly so you do not become a taxpayer (federal income tax) and no need to file. Definitely do not file, as they use the signed form against you and they call it frivolous and add penalties.
This initially takes effort.
Still pay sales tax, use tax, TSA groping tax, etc.
The main problem that I and many others have is not the policy of the month but how targets are shifting. When the measels vaccine was introduced it was clear that after one or two shots you were safe for many years if not for life. Seatbelts are not an irreversible medical procedure.
So my problem and the problem of many others is not focused on the policies in effect right now, but the direction in which the policies evolve.
If I had thought one or two years ago how the CCP was going to handle the pandemic, it would be pretty much the way the US, Germany and France handle it right now.
> If I had thought one or two years ago how the CCP was going to handle the pandemic,
In that case, it would be quite an inaccurate prediction on your part given that the CCP/China actually handled their lockdowns and continue to manage quarantining with far more stringency than the US, Germany, and France. You're drawing a comparison between the three western countries and a fictional China that wasn't borne out in reality.
As I mentioned, I replied to the wrong thread. Requiring vaccines doesn’t make us fascist. The tight integration of big corporations and the US government arguably does. By that definition, we’ve been fascist for a long time.
But yes. I think the more intertwined business interests and government becomes, the worse things will get in the US.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 506 ms ] threadDoes this mandate incorporate the Sept 2021 CDC definition of vaccine, https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article25...
> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
Why would employers need legal immunity? Their lawyers may want to look closely at the legal immunity protections of the PREP act, which extend to healthcare professionals who recommend "countermeasures".
My fundamental question is that schools already have tons of vaccine requirements, so why should this one be considered special?
1. https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/09/07/covid-19-vaccines-preve...
Fortunately, the CDC's Sept. 2021 updated definition makes it clear that non-sterilizing Covid vaccines should not be conflated with the transmission-stopping track record of sterilizing vaccines (e.g. MMR) mandated for school & travel.
There are intranasal (e.g. inhaler) vaccines under development, which may provide nasal/mucosal antibodies. Until those are available, recovery from natural infection will provide both nasal/mucosal and blood/serum antibodies. This path is available to both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
All you have to do is get the growth factor below 1.0 and the virus will die out as it can't infect enough people to stay alive.
> Israel was the first country on Earth to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against COVID-19. Now it has one of the world's highest daily infection rates — an average of nearly 7,500 confirmed cases a day, double what it was two weeks ago. Nearly one in every 150 people in Israel today has the virus.
Not a great advertisement for non-sterilizing vaccines.
Why do you lie, vaccinated people spread the virus just as much
tbh the concept of herd immunity doesn't care about who the law says can get vaccinated
> Evidence from studies primarily done before vaccine approval for those 12 years of age and older suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
if they're vaccinated, they count towards the numerator
if they are a person, and thus have a nonzero chance of getting infected, and a nonzero chance of infecting others if infected, they count towards the denominator
that's how you determine vaccination rate
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
We may need further short tactical lockdowns, and are considering booster shots for the elderly, but the situation here is night and day compared to the US and many other countries thanks to an effective vaccination programme with broad popular support.
It's amazing to me how the political culture of the right has diverged between the US and Europe, and here in the UK particularly. For us responsible behaviour in public and prompt vaccination are conservative touchstones, not exclusively conservative of course but very much seen as not just compatible with conservatism but flowing directly from it's basic principles. What's happened to Republicanism in the US is confusing, and rather horrifying from that perspective.
Early this year we were seeing similar rates of new infections per day, but about a thousand people were dying every day. Nowadays the death rate is about a tenth of that, concentrated among the remaining unvaccinated population.
Israel seems to be having a similar experience, people are catching the virus but those that are vaccinated aren't dying as a result. They're introducing mask mandates and considering tactical lockdowns to try and protect the unvaccinated population. We may need to do the same, nevertheless the best way to protect people who can't be vaccinated is to vaccinate everyone who can be.
whether or not society must continue to pay an ongoing price for mitigations is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
whether or not society can move on after a one-time vaccine cost is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
the goalposts were set at "provides a societal benefit", which it does
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
The actual study the article claims the summarize:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Find the word 'delta' in the text of the actual study. It ain't there. And look at the dates of the study. Most of the data is pre-delta.
Your linked ACSH article simply fabricates a conclusion based on no evidence.
The scientific establishment sickens me here. The goal is to get people to vaccinate, which is reasonable enough. The outcome is the opposite, though. The lies are common enough and transparent enough that the whole establishment loses credibility, and a huge swath of the world doesn't believe it about vaccines, climate change, and a slew of other issues.
But no, if it isn't 100% perfect you have decided it is worthless.
It says:
* Vaccinated people are leas likely to get COVID, even with the Delta variant.
* Vaccinated people who do get breakthrough infections remain infectious for a shorter time than unvaccinated, even with Delta
It does note that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections can spread Delta, but that is not the same as “just as much as the unvaccinated”.
"COVID-19 vaccines reduce the risk of people spreading the virus that causes COVID-19."
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythings...
Because an acknowledgement that fully vaccinated people can spread Delta is not a refutation to the claim that it reduces the spread.
Even the paragraph you quoted says "However, like prior variants, the amount of viral genetic material may go down faster in fully vaccinated people when compared to unvaccinated people. This means fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for less time than unvaccinated people."
Your summary of their position is so bad I've flagged your comment: "if it isn't 100% perfect you have decided it is worthless."
You are very extreme, and people like you are exactly why many people take a polarizing view on the other end of the spectrum.
This is a nice video on polarization:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
My own estimate is that the vaccine is about 50% effective for delta. That's cuts R0 in half, which is huge, but not something you can in any way, shape, or form rely on in isolation. It will likely be even lower for future mutations. Aside from the antivaxer movement, another outcome of extreme pro-vaccine stances, to the level of people lying, is that many people take NO precautions once vaccinated. That's a lot of what's driving some (not all) of the current delta outbreaks.
And on the anti-vaxxer side, once scientists get caught fabricating data, they're not going to be trusted even when they're right.
And unfortunately right now science is playing catch-up.
There simply isn't any evidence on breakthrough transmission with delta testing humans yet because it is recent. The headlines and public health messages are assuming worst case in order to scare vaccinated people into masking up again, while there's actually indications that vaccinated breakthrough infections almost certainly transmit less.
What we know is that while early in the infection viral loads in delta are much higher, but Alpha, delta, and non-VOI/VOC infections feature similar viral trajectories[1], in vaccinated breakthrough infections RNA load declines faster[2] and the ability to culture virus in breakthrough infections is lower[3], we know that vaccines reduced transmission with alpha[4] and apart from scary headlines we still expect that vaccines reduce transmission with delta. While there's documented cases of delta breakthrough infections transmitting to one or two other people, there's not been any studies of how common that is, or how common it is for breakthrough infections to become superspreaders to >10 people, or if that is even possible. Since viral loads are correlated with transmissibility and symptomology/virulence the very high protection against severe disease with vaccination may also protect against severe transmission.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.16.21251535v...
[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v...
[3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.20.21262158v...
[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/80-of-vaccinated-covid-carrier...
That is not the case.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1
"“The bottom line is, this can happen — it can be true that vaccinated people can spread the virus. But we do not yet know what their relative role in overall community spread is,” says co-author Thomas Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison."
Vaccinations may (or may not) reduce the propensity of vaccinated people to spread Delta but it's very clear at this point vaccinated people can spread Delta to some degree.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/12/21-1792_article
It is 100% certain that some breakthrough transmissions can transmit onwards.
If I know that, it should be very apparent that wasn't what I meant.
There are people claiming that vaccines do not prevent any forwards transmission and that vaccination is 100% worthless for ending pandemic spread. Arguing that is wrong does not imply arguing for the exact inverse and that vaccines are perfect. I'm pretty sure that hell is the world where everyone argues in absolutes all the time and that I'm unfortunately living in it.
As a footnote, we do have data. My best estimate was that the vaccine reduced the transmission of delta by about 50%. That's based on data in the community I live (and this is context-dependent -- for example, vaccines do a lot more for casual interactions than for close/long ones).
I saw that same estimate replicated by two data scientists I trust, using different data from different places, and different methodologies, so it's somewhat robust. On the other hand, all three were susceptible to Simpson's Paradox and demographic bias, so there is one possible source of correlated error (specifically, more at-risk populations have higher vaccination rates). However, even if we assume a best-case there, though, transmission is reduced by <90%.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases
And testing rates are probably even lower now that many people have been vaccinated.
This argument is not going to convince the unvaccinated, who are tired of incoherent "scientific" information that changes every month. The field of virology is apparently in its infancy.
but much lower hospitalisation rates [0]. Which is the key point of "flattening the curve" if you remember. We're not going to get out of lockdown measures until the hospitals can cope with the load, and the vaccinations are reducing the load on hospitals. Get vaccinated now.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
There were no accurate spread models in 2020, no studies how masks would affect the spread of the common cold.
There was ridiculous advice that the famous droplets would sink to the ground before covering a distance > 1.5 meters, that masks would not help at all and much more.
Now they admit that the virus is airborne!
Sorry, #FollowTheScience slogans and calling others fools does not help.
This was based on experience with the original SARS virus.
Take this 2003 paper for example: "Effectiveness of precautions against droplets and contact in prevention of nosocomial transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)" [1]
It was a case control study in a Hong Kong hospital that concluded: "Practice of droplets precaution and contact precaution is adequate in significantly reducing the risk of infection …. The protective role of the mask suggests … infection is transmitted by droplets."
Following the science really, really does help. You just need to do it; fools of course don't.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12737864/
Droplets themselves are being questioned now:
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00869-2/full...
Have fun following the science! Reading might help.
I don't know where you get your information but I saw absolutely zero change in the info on any of the major vaccines since the very same day they've been announced. From day 1 the message was always that these vaccines trained the immune system to lower the severity of Covid symptoms, but otherwise we could still catch it and spread it.
Then only significant change that popped up since last year was due to the inception of the so called Delta variant, which is an entirely new development and had just enough mutations to lower vaccine effectiveness. However, the mRNA vaccines were, from the very start, described as custom tailored to the existing variants, and we're expected to show a drop in effectiveness if the wrong kind of variant occurred.
Personally, when I received my jabs, in both occasions I received a small flier making it quite clear that the current Covid vaccines only trained the immune system to have a fighting chance against Covid, but we were still vulnerable to catch and spread Covid and thus we should continue to practice basic health and safety precautions.
So I really wonder where you got your info, because none of what you said correlates with reality.
That's a pretty big difference for most people.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-dur...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/polio-us.html
maybe your source says that 99 is "much higher" than 95, and I just missed it?
I'm a bit confused by the term "infection" here.
Let me split some hairs:
Vaccines work by teaching the immune system how to fight an intruding virus, so it doesn't have to spend days or weeks figuring it out while the virus destroys your body.
That means vaccinated people get viruses as often as unvaccinated, but defeat it much faster, usually before you notice any symptoms.
My confusion is that I would call the time my immune system spends fighting a virus in my body an "infection", but apparently that is not the established use.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/steriliz...
Not quite:
> The term “covered person”, when used with respect to the administration or use of a covered countermeasure, means— (A) the United States; or (B) a person or entity that is— [...] (iv) a qualified person who prescribed, administered, or dispensed such countermeasure;
Prescribing, administering, and dispensing are very different from “recommending”.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
Are we really going to bother digging up the copious video evidence this is a lie? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xcur3kwCyg
It seems you're either a bit confused or you didn't bothered to even watch the very same video you posted.
I watched the video and nowhere in it does anyone promise anything about infections magically go away.
In fact, the infection disease specialist in the video says quite clearly that the observed reduction in spread was around 60%, and this statement is repeated in multiple occasions throughout the video.
The video was also posted over 7 months ago, prior to some of the major vaccines having been approved and made available to the public.
Please do not throw baseless accusations of anyone lying when the best proof you can come up with just refutes your accusation entirely.
Headline: The Science is in: Elephants are White
Pushback: No, elephants are not white.
Twitter: NO ONE EVER CLAIMED ELEPHANTS ARE WHITE. or STOP SPREADING MISINFORMATION THAT ELEPHANTS ARE BLACK.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/steriliz...
Last I knew, COVID-19 vaccines weren’t covered, but apparently I missed some news, since it’s the first thing listed on https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp .
Nitpick, but really it is a fund to pay for anyone who suffered a side effect that it cannot be proven wasnt a vaccine. In this case vaccines are guilty until proven innocent.
>approximately 70 percent of its payments are the result of a negotiated settlement “in which HHS has not concluded, based upon review of the evidence, that the alleged vaccine caused the alleged injury.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/vaccine-s...
2) No company should have their liability removed for any reason, especially by the government. This thinking was partly why the 2008 recession happened. I don't want the government taking on the liability of a multi-billion dollar industry because if the company messes up, we're paying more in taxes - guaranteed - to pay for all the settlements.
3) This mandate by the government violates every part of a right to personal autonomy when it comes to your health - there is a MONUMENTAL difference when the mandate comes from government as opposed to private business. This sets (further) precedence for future governments to give them carte blanche as to peoples' health.
Side note - Just a reminder that government-ran health systems like the NHS makes decisions about your health based on the status of the current system - meaning that people who are too costly to fix/repair/KEEP ALIVE will receive palliative care. That's disgusting to me. (The US healthcare system is a whole other topic entirely, this is just an example of government making bad decisions regarding your health)
> $217,890,161.54 -- 2021
how much the vaccine injury program has paid out to claimants in the respective FY [1] -- subsidized by our tax dollars on behalf of big pharma, of-course.
Since 1989, it seems the US govt program has paid out $4,667,496,451 to individuals and attorneys who have sued based on side-effects of vaccines
[1] https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/hrsa/vaccine-compen...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/23/lawsuit-o...
Sovereign immunity doesn’t prevent the filing of a suit.
The suit was dismissed. https://www.foodprocessing.com/industrynews/2021/meat-worker...
> But, he added, courts have no jurisdiction to force OSHA to take action and “the remedy lies with the Legislature and not the courts.”
yep, turns out lawyers will find stuff to sue folks for, no matter what
so, companies might as well do the right thing and be protected by the federal government than do the wrong thing and have to fight those lawyers all on their own
They already did for COVID countermeasures in general. In the first declaration that did that for pharmaceutical companies, public entities managing countermeasure planning and distribution, and others in March of last year.
If the vax had worked to sterilize or mostly sterilize the virus as originally it was sold to us as, then this would be okay.
Instead it did not really work, thus spreading covid more.
So in the end, we locked down and destroyed the economy in hopes of a vaccine, but the vaz didn't fully work and now we're going to have to open anyway to avert major economic and social disaster.
It lowers your chance of getting it and thus spreading it significantly and it severely lowers your chance of having a severe reaction in the case of a breakthrough infection.
The only reason it hasn't worked at a societal level is that not enough people have taken it.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
The definition change is simply to more accurately include this vaccine method.
Well, I guess one should never let a good crisis go to waste...
For the COVID ETS from this June, OSHA has been coordinating with the CDC monthly to determine if it is still necessary. See https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/ets#:~:text=to%20assess%20t...
Although, just like Afghanistan, there's no clear end to COVID afaik ... although I disagree with the implication that there's some great benefit the government / other interests are getting out of this ETS, of the same scale that the military-industrial complex/the executive branch got out of the PATRIOT act/Afghanistan.
Pharma is gonna be making some good money out of COVID, no? The amount of tests that have been produced, plus the amount of vaccines being used are certainly not free.
2x sweet.
For pharmaceutical companies? In comparison to a liability-free, recurring subscription, mandated by the federal government for hundreds of millions? Not so much.
Given that covid and the subsequent reaction realized one of the largest wealth transfers from poor to rich in modern history and led to great market returns for those in power, how can you honestly say this?
Look.. like most people on hacker news I am in the top 1% of earners and due to my industry benefitted greatly from covid lockdowns. But just because we benefited, we cannot be blind to the mass robbery that has taken place. We've literally robbed the poor to pay the wealthy.
Low hanging fruit.
One is easy to order, cheap to implement, and cheap to verify, the other would be expensive to implement and even more expensive to verify.
Not sure if you're aware, but it expired in 2020
To call 20 years 'temporary' is a big stretch.
Just because they can't sneak it back in now doesn't mean they don't want to. The new administration has already made bogeyman out of 'domestic terrorism' that it's own fbi cannot find evidence for.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution:_A_Manifesto
Oddly enough, a couple of weeks ago at the local thrift store I picked up "The Secret History of the American Empire" by John Perkins. Even if only half of it is accurate, there's also plenty of reason to believe there are less than noble forces at work given the current changes and the opportunities they create.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-secret-history-of-the-amer...
So it'll only be around for 20 years?
Honestly, I'd put my money on it being in the organizations best interests long term if the two older employees did leave them in a rut. A lot of times it's good to purge these types of places of the cruft left behind by legacy.
Let's explore this line of reasoning, Mr. Dehumanizer:
What about people who engage in risky sex? Should they be refused treatment?
What about fat people?
What about people who don't exercise?
I am exhausted that people who share your opinion are dragging the pandemic out for whatever illogical reasoning justifies the beliefs and behavior. Your rights end where someone else’s begin, but apparently these people don’t believe their rights end anywhere, regardless of the harm they cause.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...
[2] https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/news/2021-09-07/idaho-...
[3] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Newsroom/Articles/ID/2916/Statement-o...
You are free to make your own choices in your prison cell.
> Even if vaccination did not reduce transmission rate, it increases survival rate in the event of infection
Taking away ones livelihood is a great way to increase survival and improve health.
> I am exhausted
Authoritarianism, fascism, and doublespeak are all very exhausting indeed.
Un-scientific mandates affect the supply of healthcare workers, https://tamicam.substack.com/p/are-government-vaccine-mandat...
> It's ironic that the same camp currently blaming persons with acquired (Gold standard) immunity from prior infection of Covid ... for overwhelming medical systems, when by ignoring the actual immunity status of a person, they are undermining the entire medical system? The crisis they are creating goes against every basic principle of Immunology.
> Essential frontline medical workers last year are highly likely to have already been exposed to Covid at one point, so why does no one simply ask for their immune status, instead of “ Vaccine - or no job”? The vaccine does not stop transmission of the virus, as we know. Why are we instead firing all the workers who may not even have any need for the Jab at all, and aren’t willing to jeopardize their own health by taking it?
They’ve received other vaccinations to work [1]. They’ve been educated how vaccines work. There is no excuse for being unvaccinated as a healthcare professional.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/publications/topic/vaccinationlaws....
The most-protected group of people, who pose the least risk to other humans or healthcare systems, are the Covid-recovered, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.
This is not surprising and in line with many other infectious diseases, see e.g. [1].
I only read the term "gold standard immunity" in a US context and it's almost always politically charged.
[1] https://twitter.com/ENirenberg/status/1412865782862725125
From this recent study out of Israel: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021. The increased risk was significant (P<0.001) for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold (95% CI, 4.85 to 7.33) increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold (95% CI, 5.51 to 9.21) increased risk for symptomatic disease. SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.
To be clear, the study here is talking about immunity 6 months after a final dose. It appears that at least for the Pfizer vaccine, immunity against infection and even symptomatic disease decays fairly rapidly after a couple months. At that time it still appears effective at preventing severe disease and hospitalization, though we might also expect that to decay over the next few months (too early to know).
Natural immunity decays too, but not nearly as rapidly per this study.
Also, what's your view on government mandated exercise?
Exercise should be prescribed, but not mandated. The overweight and morbidly obese are not overloading medical systems, so it is less of a pressing concern.
[1] https://abc7.com/us-army-veteran-daniel-wilkinson-michelle-p... (US Army vet's mother demands change after son dies of non-COVID illness while waiting for ICU bed)
Good, I'm wearing you out. Can't wait for your side to fold.
You didn’t paste the whole quote. I guess this is going to be a long pandemic.
Thankfully, the “or test” part distinguishes this from a vaccine mandate. We should have been testing most of the population since last March, and if anything we should have stronger testing requirements than this guidance dictates.
I personally had the vaccine because I have very high blood pressure, have pretty high blood sugar (even though I'm fit/in shape) and am almost 40. It was MY CHOICE in the risk vs reward game of numbers it I did it only for myself with a good life insurance already in place that covers death/incapacity from medication too(covers COVID vaccines too).
What if I would of ended up like that BBC presenter? Dead. For me it's down to my family and that is it.
This will be a bit exagerated but (hopefully) shold get the point across: At the end of the day anyone else is disposable as long as my family is safe from harm.
As long as the vaccine is not 100% safe nobody should be allowed to force anyone else to take it.
Edit: One thing that puzzles me though - Why is nobody talking about those that are immune or already have the antibodies and don't need a vaccine? Why force them to have it if those vaccinated are safe?
The mRNA vaccines do appear to reduce risk (of infection and of symptoms) in recovered patients as well. (See e.g. https://theconversation.com/if-ive-already-had-covid-do-i-ne...)
That said, the German "geimpft, getestet, oder genesen" strategy ("vaccinated, tested, or recovered") is explicitly what you suggest.
The tradeoff here, to me, is that:
- If we do not mandate vaccination, people can preserve their individual autonomy and will, nonetheless, probably get infected sooner or later and thus have some immunity. (According to some research, greater than that of vaccinated people against the same strain, but perhaps reduced against other strains.)
- However, that relies upon maintaining sufficient hospital capacity for the additional cases with severe symptoms. So as long as hospital capacity remains an issue, mandatory vaccinations make sense.
I'm assuming you're in Germany/know someone in Germany when asking this and you might of heard something about it: -Is it true that Hungarians are using some sort of medication as treatment? I heard it from a guy at work(hungarian) and was stumped.
Vaccine requirements have been commonplace for decades now, and society has greatly benefited from it.
> The agency now advises that vaccinated people be tested for the virus if they come into contact with someone with Covid-19, even if they have no symptoms... “Our updated guidance recommends vaccinated people get tested upon exposure regardless of symptoms,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the agency’s director, said in an email to The New York Times. “Testing is widely available.”
As the CDC said above, absence of symptoms is not a sufficient indicator for a vaccinated person. If a vaccinated person is tested regularly, they can self-isolate upon a positive test result, since they can't rely on symptoms as a signal.
Absence of symptoms is not a sufficient indicator for the unvaxed either, so your argument falls apart.
Why isn't 90% reduction in ICU occupation and 70% reduction in chance of infection a sufficient argument for the public benefits? Just because it is not perfect, you'd rather let the country's hospitals overload and shut down?
In any case, vaccines don't really change the equation here. Testing for temperature and symptoms with COVID have proven to be ineffective because asymptomatic transmission in the early stages is a thing with COVID-19 even without vaccination.
I'm not sure that people who have chosen not to get vaccinated by this point are going to be the people who follow self-quarantine rules well.
That leaves the subset of non-immune people who are unvaccinated. If this hypothetical person is reckless (as your comment suggests), should they not have already been infected in the past 18 months? If they were not infected in 18 months, that suggests at least some ability to isolate and self-monitor.
With the delta variant every unvaccinated person will likely end up becoming infected at some point. These unvaccinated pockets are where the large spikes are coming from, especially for severe disease.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1420059122725183491.html
There is also the problem of having a sense of security when there is a large vaccinated population which causes the vaccinated population to resume a regular life. Those who are not vaccinated are now exposed to more people in general.
Example, my wife and I prior to being fully vaccinated interacted with less than 10 people in the 1.5 years. We had everything delivered and had someone do our Costco shopping and drop it off at our doorstep. With us both fully vaccinated we go to Costco for our groceries and indirectly come in contact with probably 50 people in a single visit.
If your employer paid you to come in early or stay late to get the vaccine -- why refuse?
Because I make my own decisions and my willingness to do something is inversely proportional to how hard it is being pushed on me.
Blind opposition is just as silly as blindly following the flow.
I think opposition to being pressured regardless of the reasons is quite normal and healthy behavior because in most of the life situations people are being pressured into something that benefits somebody else.
I don't know you but I find this hard to believe. Which side of the road do you drive on? Do you wear a seatbelt? How fast do you drive? Do you throw your trash in the bin or on the ground? Do you wear clothes outside or go out naked? Do you go around threatening to harm people around you or just keep to yourself?
Unless you are going to tell me otherwise, I would assume you don't actually behave according to how hard you've been pushed to follow those rules but instead behave in ways that provide you the most benefit.
Driving on the designated side of the road is something I see merit in, so I do it. It avoids vehicles hitting each other with a massive success rate (unlike the vaccine, or any of the other totalitarian responses to the mind virus COVID-19).
Likewise, I don't litter because it's a destructive habit for the planet and property. It's rude. It makes all of our lives worse. Those reasons are not rooted in "people push not littering", I avoid littering because I find it distasteful and wrong by my own measures.
And on and on.
And now we are telling you to get the vaccine or get tested weekly because we are not willing to let you put everyone else in danger.
https://odysee.com/@percep7ioneer:e/Julie-Ponesse-Ethics-Pro...
You have the option of getting tested weekly as long as your employer allows for that option. Getting a vaccine is probably less invasive and less of an annoyance then many things employers already require.
Became it's not about you, it's about everyone around you as a group. Those who are "comfortable catching the disease" are taking up a non-insignificant portion of available hospital beds, for instance, keeping health workers at their limit and preventing other people from getting treatment for diseases for which there is no accessible, free vaccine to take.
Organizations are expected to do what's best for the majority of those they represent. Sure, some people may not want to wear a helmet all day and would be willing to take the risk. But if one of those people gets impaled and dies it ends up putting a burden in everyone around them, from those picking up the skull pieces and the person's family to the investors.
It's this sudden surge of people needing ventilators and ICU beds that overwhelms the healthcare system of an area, causing repercussions on those that are sick for other reasons or get injured in accidents. For instance, in Italy cancer screenings on vulnerable subjects have been postponed for months, if not a year, due to the ongoing pandemic. Who knows how many people have now a higher risk of cancer due to hospitals and clinics being overwhelmed by COVID patients.
COVID vaccines are not sterilizing, but it's getting quite clear that they somewhat reduce the circulation of the virus too by reducing the viral load of symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers. At least they greatly greatly reduce the strain on doctors and avoid disruption of society at large, which is by itself a solid choice for mandating them.
The only possible choices here are to a. neglect the virus, with potentially serious social repercussions and loss of human lives, or b. resort to containment measures, which hamper the economy and are deeply unfair towards vaccinated people which objectively risk much less from the virus, or c. mandate vaccination, which is the only choice that avoids lockdowns and (most) deaths.
Also, vaccine mandates aren't anything new. That's how rubella, diphtheria, polio, smallpox, mumps, .. have become a thing of the past. They've been put in place on for decades, and no-vax movements have always been small and irrelevant before before social media came with droves of dubious content.
Your employment has been terminated. You many apply for unemployment benefits after our records show compliance.
Combating obesity is for the good of society.
Not quite what you posted but it certainty is similar.
The answer was because, healthcare was viewed as a collective good. Doctors did not treat a patient for their own benefit, they treated a patient for society's benefit.
And I see echoes of that here.
[1] - https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/fernande...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Seems like a silly "law". In mathematical terms, the longer the discussion, the more likely literally any comparison becomes. With a long enough discussion, every possible comparison being mentioned is a certainty.
https://www.wktv.com/content/news/These-5-states-have-less-t...
Then why are you smoking, or why are you eating fast food, why are you not exercising? These actions also put a burden on the health system. Why do covid and not tobacco? You know the answer already. This is not about anyone s health
It would have been smarter IMO (though probably not politically possible) to mandate the vaccine for specific age groups. If what they are trying to do avoid hospitalization, they should focus on the groups that are most susceptible. If you're under 40 for example you won't be required to take it but if you're older you would because the risk of a 40 something getting hospitalized is way higher than a 20 something.
Healthy, non obese young people do not get hospitalized by this disease at any significant rate at all, most aren't even aware they got it. If you're a healthy young person you have rationality on your side to object to a vaccine. Especially one that is trying to hit a moving target as covid is probably now another mutating flu that will be around indefinitely. Especially because you still pass on the disease vaccinated or not.
She's the perfect COVID victim. She got it twice, even though it was quite bad never had to be hospitalized and her health is now not worse than before.
As I have explained to several of my children's young friends "you are correct, COVID will probably not make you sick, but how will you feel when you find out you killed your grandmother by giving it to her".
You can also have the vulnerable population take precautions, not the young population. To be frank what kind of sick society pushes the young population to take on risk (novel vaccine incomplete clinical trials, rare heart inflammation issues documented, spike protein membrane break off issue, etc) to protect the elderly population? This is the first time societies have ever called for risking the youth for the elderly and it's not morally right.
And you're comparing a very small risk for the youth (getting a vaccine) versus a very large risk for the elderly.
They're your grandparents though, so I guess that's your decision.
The at-risk can get vaccinated - healthy youth don't get hospitalized - there are antibody and drug therapeutics available - youth don't need to risk novel vaccine adverse affects (they are documented - they are more prevalent in young than old) - you still spread it equally significantly vaccinated or not - the vaccine does not give robust coverage against new strains - natural immunity gives far more robust coverage against new strains than the vaccine (almost suggesting exposure for the low-risk is a better societal outcome).
Hand waving "all youth must get vaccinated" is not a rational course of action.
It's your grandmother. You can choose how to treat her.
Also, the immunization provides more robust immunity than having had Covid.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.abi9915
Resisting this surge of authoritarianism is going to take more than just the unvaccinated standing up for each other. We need the vaccinated to say no and to refuse to comply with any orders for certificates or to pay fines.
You know, “resist” – wasn’t that the recent call-to-arms that got the orange fascist out of office?
This type of mandate does the opposite. Probably because, if you look at the actual risks and data from other countries, the difference in sickliness between the vaccinated and unvaccinated is sufficiently small in absolute terms, and the level of staffing at hospitals assuming healthcare workers are not forced out of their jobs sufficiently good, that the relative cost increase wouldn't work as a form of coercion. And it's now all about the coercion, not about health.
However, the vaccine does prevent spread.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
To put it plainly, problem with COVID-19 is that it makes your own immune system damage your body as it scrambles defenses, confused. With vaccine, much less so.
1. You got sick and now you have antibodies but your internal organs, like lungs are scarred. You'd have likely avoided some if not all of that damage if you were vaccinated.
2. Your immune system might be targeting parts of the virus that are less universal across virus' mutations so it gives you less or little immunity against mutants. mRNA vaccine is specifically targeting the spike protein which so far has been unchanged enough for vaccines to be more or less effective against mutations.
It’s really not something you want in your country or state. See what happened to Italy, India, Brazil, or is currently happening in overseas French territories, it’s a horrible situation to be in.
This is a confession of the most profound confusion. It's a complete reversal from the truth. We're killing people in order to save hospitals. The real pandemic is simply one of insanity.
It's not just about whether you're willing to get hit on the head, it's about an employer's duty of care, and (if you just look at it cynically) the disruption to work caused by an incident that could have been prevented if someone took appropriate measures.
Why do you think it doesn't prevent spread? While breakthrough infections make all the news, the vaccine does lessen the chance of catching COVID if exposed. Less people catching COVID, less spread.
I'm curious about this. I understand "doesn't prevent all spread", but surely it prevents notable amounts of spread by reducing the amount of people walking around with high viral load, reduced hospitalization, herd immunity, and so on.
Citation needed. This contradicts the most recent research and information available, and all one must do is a quick search to turn up dozens of published papers on this topic. The vaccine reduces the transmission of COVID, and that is an important public health goal.
> I do not understand the infantilization of society.
The real infantilization would be catering to people that aren't prepared to do their bit for society. These are the children, that in the face of the evidence, will do ANYTHING to prevent the bruising of their egos.
https://archive.is/fCv5F (National Geographic) https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-ri...
That's why states with higher vaccination rates are seeing less spread than states with low vaccination rates.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/highly-vaccinated-states-keep-w...
No, it doesn't absolutely prevent spread, but that's a ridiculous standard (often used to assure a certain rhetorical outcome rather than to shed light on the subject).
The very worst estimates of the vaccines efficacy rate against the Delta variant sit at 30-50% for various measures. People on this forum are ecstatic about improving systems by 2-3% on the regular, and here is a free and easy measure that measurably reduces the mortality rate of yourself and those around you and we are _still_ arguing about it.
I used to think much more highly of the quality of discussion on here.
Well, it does reduce spread, right?
That said,
> Join the feedlot if you want but I will not, I have been doing just fine as my own master, I need not the yoke of protection, certainly not from the feds.
One of the other motivations policymakers have in promoting vaccination is that in many places hospital capacity is dangerously reduced due to the influx of covid cases.
ICUs are full, people are dying from stupid preventable shit because they couldn't get care, and from acquaintances' anecdotes staff are burning out at a ridiculous pace
Would you like to have access to healthcare when you need it?
Preventing spread is not the only reason, it also reduces the severity of the illness if you get it, and in any case vaccines do also reduce spread insofar as a vaccinated carrier's viral load is likely to reach a lower maximum for a shorter period of time
If you are in decent health, you will likely be OK. I got it this year, and it was rough for a week at home. I got letter from Dr. which states I have the antibodies and have recovered.
"Why must I go the speed limit if it doesn't prevent an accident? Why wear a seat belt if it doesn't prevent injury? Why have airbags if they don't prevent death?"
There are no guarantees in life (death and taxes, notwithstanding). The bottom line is that vaccines significantly reduce spread.
> I am comfortable catching the disease and even comfortable dying from it (the numbers are vastly on my side)
The argument being that you have a slim chance of having a severe reaction to COVID?
You have an even slimmer chance of a severe reaction to a vaccine. Why not get vaccinated?
Trucking, food production, Oil & Gas, powerplant workers, linemen, water treatment, etc.
In those essential industries, a small percentage of people walking out may wreck havoc on the whole nation. Those are also the same people that I expect are more anti covid vaccine.
I'm more concerned about 20% of the truckers being fired for not taking the vaccine. Logistics is already stretched thin and it would make it much worse.
Hang in there, you are not alone and we are still in the very early days of this whole operation. Also, you might be able to find a local anti-mask or anti-mandate group on Facebook, I've found having that social support network is really helpful.
Isolating dissenters. Make them feel like lone crazies.
We shouldn't resort to those tactics, but we do need to make our voices heard, support each other, reassure everyone that we're just as numerous if not more so. It's important, this is our freedom and that of our children on the line.
I'd suggest following Rand Paul on twitter, and as he suggests, refusing to comply with these unscientific and unreasonable orders.
(truly, any mandate that fails to take in to account naturally acquired immunity or vaccine risks to individuals as noted in cdc and fda documents is completely lacking in scientific rigor.)
Join the club. You really do need to start speaking out though. This shit has gone on long enough. The idea that it is impossible well intentioned, well reasoned person to object to any part of our current situation is complete rubbish. We are being gaslit and bullied and quite honestly I'm tired of it.
We require vaccinations for schooling and for healthcare already (e.g TB). This is no huge stretch.
Think about it: two people enter a workplace. One is unvaccinated but recently tested, so it can be said with good confidence they are not infected. The other is vaccinated but may well be sick and spreading it, especially as effectiveness wanes quickly. The other is waved through, the first is penalized with constant charges. Who is making other people the safest here? It's not the vaccinated guy.
It's all about risk. Someone who has been vaccinated has a very low likelihood of being sick with Covid. Someone who has recently been tested also has a low likelihood.
IMO, though, if the tests are a week apart, that's a lot of opportunity for Covid to slip through. There's a reason that 72 hours (and sometimes 48 hours, I think) is the time limit for tests for traveling. Even that isn't a guarantee, though.
I can't find the chart now, but Covid progresses pretty rapidly, so if someone gets tested on Friday and was exposed 1-2 days before that, they can pretty much spread it for an entire week before they get tested on the next Friday.
And even if they were tested on Mondays, they could still be spreading it before the weekend.
Tests prevent someone from spreading it for weeks, but not days.
Vaccines are much more likely to prevent the spread at all.
You can go back and look at 10+ years of UK NHS "hospitals desperately overwhelmed" annual articles. Just because you hadn't heard of it before doesn't mean it isn't normal.
In the US, they've relaxed many guidelines and allowed student nurses without gaining licensure yet to practice because of the need [1].
[1] https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200327.71403...
Mumps
Smallpox
SARS1
MERS
Chickenpox
Tuberculosis
To name a few.
Not a fools errand. Important to get vaccinated to prevent worse variants.
I'm against vaccine mandates in principle, but the ultimate cause of the authoritarianism is mass media. Covid has been a fantastic setup for dog and pony shows - political hucksters rail all day about government overreach while inciting their followers to make bad choices. The large scale effects of those bad choices practically demand government intervention. And after the utilitarian system steps in to mitigate the problem, the hucksters take credit for being right about government overreach all along. It's the perfect con for the post-reality media environment - when reality asserts itself and some low level preacher dies of their own kool aid, they just go silent and are replaced by another ignorant voice on the same channel.
If we had a level of societal trust such that you could expect that most everyone would be taking measures to prevent spreading Covid, then coming together in large groups (eg employment) would be less of an issue. But as it stands, why would anybody want to go back into the office when it's likely that at least a third of your coworkers will blithely get you sick? And hence OSHA et al step in, using the same rationale as when preventing operating heavy equipment while drunk - it creates an unsafe work environment.
Camp 1: Pro vaccine, pro mask, pro lockdown, pro doing anything and everything the government says.
Camp 2: Anti vaxx, anti mask, anti lockdown, trump supporter, Jan 7th attendee, etc.
And it seems that now more than ever, if you're not 10000% in Camp 1, you're automatically assumed to be in Camp 2
Luckily that's a bad assumption because the vaccines are so bad that they aren't even protecting people from getting very ill.
If R<1 the number of infected people continually decreases until there are no cases. This is also why it's important for the US to provide other countries with vaccines.
Not if they are vaccinated. I don't understand why vaccinated people give a hoot about the vaccination status of others. Vaccinations protect them from severe covid issues.
Everybody is gonna get covid. We knew this all the way back in march of 2020.
Temporarily. I am assuming you had your second shot more than two weeks ago. Soon, the definition of "fully vaccinated" will change to require the third shot and you will be counted among the unvaccinated as it is currently done for people with a single shot or less than two weeks past their second shot when it comes to death/hospitalization stats.
We are close to living in Arcadia[1].
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4377942/
For all the pretend deference to science, we're in the middle of a rapidly unfolding situation. It seems preposterous, even with clear evidence that the vaccines do work (and ignoring government overreach which is itself absurd and illegal imo) to start mandating something that is not likely to hold 6 months from now, and what, just require that everyone tracks whatever current orthodoxy says? I have my two pfizer shots, and if there is a vaccine later that actually cures covid, maybe I'll go back and get it. But I'm giving up on trying to track the flavor of the week and trying to match whatever the new York times wants me to do, I'll wait until there is actually a reasonable consensus
These mandates appear to completely neglect entire aspects of scientific consensus.
- You aren't required to get the vaccine, you can undergo weekly testing instead
Unlike yours, the study linked last in that comment has been peer reviewed.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
Vaccine antibodies bind more broadly to cover new variants, vs. antibodies from previous infection.
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/scitranslmed.abi9915
So why is "accommodation" necessary?
Italian Fascism promoted a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in associations to collectively represent the nation's economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.[0]
[0] Andrew Vincent. Modern Political Ideologies. Third edition. Malden, Massaschussetts, USA; Oxford, England, UK; West Sussex, England, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2010. Pp. 160. URL: https://books.google.com/books/about/Modern_Political_Ideolo...
Maybe you can also explain why do you think it is "correct" to ban proper answer?
P.S. I'll take it back. I see that the person was banned for something else rather that for this "proper answer"
Go kill yourselves you biofascist fucking pieces of shit!
I hope you die in a fucking housefire.
FUCK YOU! KILL YOURSELF!
I'm sure you have good reason to feel strongly, but when you post like this, you're just discrediting your own position. That doesn't help you, and it hurts the people who agree with you.
You can't even call yourself a liberal.
You're just a fucking FASCIST FUCKING CULTIST that needs BULLETS IN YOUR FUCKING HEAD!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
DEATH TO MASKERS!
Emailing hn@ycombinator.com might help. This topic affects 10's of millions of Americans.
It's also a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472856.
I want to point out this is not a dupe of the "Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers" thread. This thread is talking about private employers with 100 or more employees; not necessarily federal employees.
I understand the need to keep flamewars down, but hiding this thread doesn't feel right to me. Just my 2 cents.
I'd originally commented when it was still pretty new and went back to find it on the frontpage and didn't see it. That's when I originally replied to you. I see it high ranked again.
Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472856 - Sept 2021 (262 comments)
The titles are emphasizing two different things, but it's the same announcement.
The original title of the page is: "Path out of the Pandemic, President Biden's COVID-19 Action Plan", shouldn't that, or a derivative have been used instead?
I don't want to pay even more for everything in my life due to inflation caused by social parachutes because some toothless hillbillies in the South my taxes are ALREADY propping up don't understand their insecurity is being monetized by grifters.
If you don't want mandates, perhaps evaluate the consequences of applying the same level vitriol to every single request made of you by the collective regardless of its reasonability.
Historically, mandated vaccines weren't mandated before we knew they were safe longer-term. We're still awaiting FDA approval for a majority of the available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in the US, yet many folks would be mandated to receive one.
Many folks will see this as being mandated to be a test subject, which is why there has been substantial legal pushback against the mandate less than 24 hours after Biden announced it.
Every time I traveled, we had to have "our shots."
These were 100% mandated by the country we were coming to. Since my "home base" was in Africa, we had some fun bugs, and I had to get a whole battery of shots.
I have several vaccination scars on my body, and I developed a lifelong fear of needles, as a result of the giant horse needles they used for the thick sludge they'd jab me with (which left me feeling like I'd lost a fistfight with a gorilla).
When I got my COVID vaccination shots, I didn't even feel it, as the needle was so tiny.
What if, knowing what we do now about it, OSHA required asbestos-lined jackets?
Lots of older buildings have asbestos that's preventing fires and won't cause noticeable harm so long as it's undisturbed. The fibres are a problem, but a sheet of material under a layer of plaster isn't breaking off fibres that can get into your lungs. If your job is to rip out plaster and re-model buildings then that's a huge problem, but if you just live in a building you're getting much more benefit from it not catching fire than you'd get from very minutely reducing your risk of lung damage from asbestos.
In fact even for a brand new building, although it's banned in some places, "Let's use asbestos" makes more sense than "Eh, so what if it burns down and a few dozen people die", so if those are the available choices you should go with asbestos.
So it is with the available COVID-19 vaccines. SARS-CoV-2 is very dangerous and, outside of New Zealand and a handful of Pacific islands, widespread, so you're just way more likely to get very sick or die as a result of not being vaccinated than suffer a serious side effect, known or hypothetical.
I weighed up the options and decided it was by far the lower risk option.
I think people need to be free to make that choice.
Freedom is so valuable.
We're a small population so it's significant.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/126225003/...
This post brought to you some crazy number of minutes late due to rate limiting.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaers-9318/fact-ch...
Here is some great information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfFeocgSKvU
(For comparison, 2021 has 31k gun deaths[1] through September and 21.5k road deaths through the first 6 months.)
[1] https://www.gunviolencearchive.org [2] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/prelimina...
Also, on the download page, "However, in general coding terms in VAERS do not change based on the information received during the follow-up process. VAERS data should be used with caution as numbers and conditions do not reflect data collected during follow-up."
Which is just different ways of saying "this data is probably unreliable", no?
The more important point that you ignore is people are horrible at weighing relative risk. You're obviously intelligent and aware of the biases inherent in judging vaccination risk. I'm sure you know crossing the street is far more risky. There is a consistent pattern of unvaccinated, dying covid patients claiming they underestimated the risk of the illness and wish they had gotten vaccinated. People are literally unable to make that choice for themselves. There's proof.
What's the point of "freedom" if we're all stuck in our houses hiding from variant after variant because we refuse to acknowledge that our government needs to make a decision that will save lives [1] when our actual survival is at risk.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/covid-19-vaccines-sav...
I believe these are coercive tactics and the government should avoid coercion at all costs.
This is certainly the best way to keep workers safe during a pandemic and given the information we have on the Pfizer vaccine — billions of doses given, 1.5 years of watching for adverse long term effects, full FDA approval — this move strikes me as appropriate for OSHA. OSHA requirements are supposed to be aggressively protective of the worker.
While you might not be affected personally, because you've been successful, it's better for the government to have your back than it is to entrust it to the free market. There's a hell of a lot of misery because the gov. doesn't step in enough, doesn't take care of its citizens.
This was learned the hard way in 1929 and, for whatever reason, was quickly forgotten.
That said, I can see why it's undesirable to some.
An authoritarian regime isn't going to spin up a bureaucracy like that to do regulation-without-oversight, it's just going to lower its boot onto the population's collective face. You can hardly call that regulation.
Perhaps we're just debating semantics here, but I think there's a distinction between regulating corporate behaviour (you must do X Y Z if you want to run a business in this country, for reasons A B C) and introducing a totalitarian regime (you must do X Y Z because I said so).
The US legislature has the right to regulate commerce in the US according to the US Constitution. Healthcare of workers and the overall impact of covid are two things directly affecting the economy.
The legislature already has the former of these covered by the creation of OSHA in the 1970s. OSHA is a regulatory agency under the Department of Labor, which is part of the executive cabinet.
The executive is now using these powers granted by the legislature to ensure workers are protected in their work environments.
Waiting for retailers to announce this as well at some point.
OSHA is America-based, yes?
In all three countries, the pushback is primarily from populist/right-wing political movements. This is not a strictly American phenomenon.
This article says, at least in the US, the poor and young are the least likely to get a vaccine. You have any data for your political assertion that it's primarily right wingers? Keep in mind, politicizing COVID is what got us where we are today.
https://www.vox.com/22587443/covid-19-vaccine-refusal-hesita...
You’re sure as hell right that it was going to take something catastrophic for me to walk through those doors again.
Edit: I have a job that offers decent insurance now, but my immediate emotional reaction to healthcare in the United States is very negative (even though I quite like my doctor, dentist, etc). I believe our system is corrupted and abusive towards the poor.
You can't turn on the TV, Facebook, YouTube, etc. without a class action lawsuit message in the form of: "Have you used baby powder in the past 2 years? If so, you may be eligible for compensation under the Talcum Powder Class Action Lawsuit, call us at..."
The seemingly "safe" things in America that we take for granted, like baby powder, or Round-Up weed killer, or even tap water in Michigan has turned out to be not so safe.
Breakdown by age
https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...
Here is a breakdown by race in each state
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
In our office, we have a number of people I know aren't vaccinated.
A “food desert” doesn’t account for the person who consistently orders two flavors in their tall iced coffee (usually equates to 6+ oz of simple syrup); that’s a choice — and a severe negative externality.
Risk pooling in insurance is simply an added benefit, but a less clear moral approach when the disease is not necessarily controllable by the person. Metabolic disorders exist. Tobacco disorders, not as much except conditioning and addiction.
But, it should be a focus for wellness programs so that metabolic disorders are destigmatized.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2225433/
Now, if you wish to reduce obesity because you're more interested in a person's quality adjusted life years, you absolutely do want to treat obesity (and addiction) like a disorder, because compassion and empathy is the only way you're ever going to get someone to make the long term life choices they need to get better.
Fun fact, obese people actually have lower lifetime healthcare costs than healthy people.
Edit: oh life insurance, thanks.
As far as I know, life insurance policies of significant amounts still do medical exams. And care about drug use, tobacco use, high blood pressure, disclosure about things like past cancer diagnosis, lifestyle stuff (skydiving, climbing, and so on) etc.
The effects of smoking OTOH are extremely clear.
I thought it was pretty clear that we do. Go talk to any physician and they will tell you the 3 things you control to increase your chances of a long & healthy life are:
1. Limit alcohol/tobacco 2. exercise frequently 3. eat a healthy diet
Are you suggesting for #3 they have no data to back that recommendation up?
Please don't misread, I agree with you in principle. I am simply pointing out there are nuances.
Thanks. Very succinct, and helps me frame my medical interactions a bit more clearly now.
Were I to argue, I would have included source references.
What is your level of education? I need to know so I can give you sources I am sure you can use.
A lay explanation at https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-find.... This is simply the first I found.
If you are able to understand this literature I am quite confused as to how you can't find it yourself -- the associations go far deeper, with increased fat intake causing plaque buildup that eventually leads to heart problems. Obesity under class III also shortens life expectancy.
Realize also that per what is laid out in that review someone who is 6" ~180lbs is obese, even if it mostly muscle. Even if it is obesity caused by muscle instead of fat, you don't live as long.
~10 years ago they still thought eating fat made you fat, and recommended high carb diets.
Perhaps the 2021 recommendations are finally the correct ones. But how do I know that?
There is also a second issue, government agencies have been co-opted by industry to make recommendations not supported by the science. I'm specifically thinking about recommendations around fat&sugar, the same thing you called out that indicates the problem is not the science but rather regulatory capture.
One you qualify though, I don't think they can re-test you.
Few carriers are currently willing to write anyone over 60 which is affecting key person policies more than anything, in my experience.
>> it’s always been odd to me how life insurance tests with vigor for tobacco use but lack that enthusiasm for metabolic health / diet.
This commenter has never had a major individual life insurance policy. While Tobacco effects underwriting, it's not as major of a factor anymore.
As far as I understand, ACA does not allow health insurance companies to require vaccinations to be eligible for coverage, but they can offer lower premiums in exchange for vaccinating.
Seems reasonable to expect people working with many sick and vulnerable patients in a healthcare setting to be vaccinated. That’s one of the highest risk scenarios I can think of for exposure and transmission as well as the most likely place to concentrate vulnerable patients.
Life insurance companies - maybe?
But for most demographics, statistics that would concern an actuary have not changed.
Do you have a source for this comment? One thing is certain, more people are purchasing life insurance so if anything Covid has been a windfall for the carriers, for various reasons not just increased sales.
So life insurance companies are requiring COVID vaccines? Or health insurance companies, or both?
Also Biden, in the same speech: We're gonna force everyone we can get away with forcing to take a shot still under emergency use authorization that is only supposed to be valid if there is NO other viable treatment.
And no one is being strapped down and vaccinated, some consequences are being imposed for some choices. For instance, for workers at larger companies that don't get vaccinated, there is an expectation that the employer will check weekly for negative test results.
Right now, you have zero recourse if your employer, or your co-workers are creating a dangerous environment. You have no legal standing if your employer's policies are the reason that you catch COVID, which can be financially ruinous - or lethal. Your employer is explicitly protected from any liability their action or inaction creates in this space.
We either need the tools to hold employers liable for creating a dangerous work environment - because they are not taking basic precautions against the spread of a deadly disease...
Or we can shield them from this liability, and mandate that they take those precautions.
It seems we are taking the less litigious option.
I think the same but with a different tack. If you get an infectious disease from another person, and that person didn’t want the disease either and wouldn’t want to spread it, then why are they?
How do people not know they have Covid and are giving it to their friends, coworkers, etc?
Sometimes, it's because they did everything they could, within reason, to prevent it.
Sometimes it's because they were reckless, negligent, and should not have been behind the wheel.
We call the first an accident, and the second (if it kills someone) vehicular manslaughter. We litigate to determine which is which.
We also give people leeway in how negligent they want to be. A BAC between 0 and 0.08 is fine... Unless you hit someone - at which point, it will be used against you. A BAC above 0.08 is immediate grounds for arrest, regardless of whether you hurt anyone.
That is what personal responsibility on one end, and enforced social responsibility on the other end looks like. Right now, nobody can be held personally accountable for reckless behaviour with COVID. Either we lift that protection, or we double down on enforcing social responsibility.
Writhing there under our thumb
And say to Ben you couldn't keep
A Republic, when with him you weep
On foreign plane, your rights as gone
As your life, while we soldier on
All the free to subjugate
Within Administrative State
So is this a no-op for people who work from home exclusively? that seems like a pretty major thing to just gloss over
What about measles vaccine requirements? Have you complained about those recently? Believe it or not, there was a time when measles wasn’t a thing and very few question the need for a measles vaccine now.
What about the broad polio vaccine rollout?
Vaccine hesitancy has been a thing, but never this strongly along party lines
21+ to buy products should be 18. At some age children become adults.
Study the personal income tax and you will find it is primarily enforced through your employer. If each of us had to save and write a check there would be little compliance.
For non-commercial property, if the property is not cataloged by county assessor, it doesn't get taxed. Dig in on this bit and be amazed.
I and a lot of people do have to save a write a check (I pre-pay estimated actually). You do not want to get on the wrong side of the IRS.
Federal personal income tax does generally apply to federal government employees. When a non-govt employer withholds from your paycheck it does become difficult to then get out of volunteering to pay.
Are you a commercial driver and also federal employee? Or like most people do you shuffle in to the lines to voluntarily contribute?
I am an independent software developer and like most business owners I contribute because it's required by law and failure to do so carries harsh penalties.
Are you telling me that you do not pay federal and or state income taxes? That you do not contribute to FICA? Are you under the impression that because you are not a federal employee that you are not required to pay federal income taxes?
If so, the IRS has plenty to say about it: https://www.irs.gov/privacy-disclosure/the-truth-about-frivo...
This initially takes effort.
Still pay sales tax, use tax, TSA groping tax, etc.
So my problem and the problem of many others is not focused on the policies in effect right now, but the direction in which the policies evolve.
If I had thought one or two years ago how the CCP was going to handle the pandemic, it would be pretty much the way the US, Germany and France handle it right now.
In that case, it would be quite an inaccurate prediction on your part given that the CCP/China actually handled their lockdowns and continue to manage quarantining with far more stringency than the US, Germany, and France. You're drawing a comparison between the three western countries and a fictional China that wasn't borne out in reality.
Unbelievable…
Edit: I think I replied to the wrong thread, actually. The thread I was on asked: “What’s the term for the fusion of state and corporate power?”
But yes. I think the more intertwined business interests and government becomes, the worse things will get in the US.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-bosses-cant-ask-about-employee...
The same is true for most EU member states.
Get fired from your job? Bad
Can’t go out for a meal? Annoying