I don't understand, if the vaccines work then why the issue? However the vaccines don't stop you catching or spreading the virus, so why is this banning of the unvaccinated a thing?
Uh, source? Media very much likes to simplify these things, but if you think of this in a probabilistic/continuous manner, rather than a "yes spread vs no spread" approach, the vaccines obviously reduce spread?
“ In a November press conference, Tedros Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO, said that the vaccines were 60 percent protective against spreading the virus prior to the arrival of the delta variant. That number has dropped to 40 percent post-Delta. Omicron may worsen the problem, if, as suspected, it is more transmissible and leads to many more breakthrough infections.”
you seem to be ignoring the fact that we’ve ended up with 2 variants that are more contagious… with the purpose of implying vaccines are to blame? complete nonsense
I'm just pointing out that your claim that a vaccine making a virus more virulent being "nonsense" is not supported by >50 years of scientific research. Especially if that vaccine is leaky, which the current vaccines appear to be.
Omicron, which is incredibly infectious, came along after the vaccines did, ergo the infection rate went up after the vaccines were introduced. The two factors have nothing to do with each other though.
You're saying there is no chance that the vaccine facilitated the evolution of the variants (you know, like how not completing a round of antibiotics can foment evolution)?
Both Delta and Omicron came from severely and notoriously undervaccinated countries. They’re prime examples as to why we need first world countries to help with equitable access to vaccines everywhere.
Unmitigated spread accelerates evolution. Mitigating the spread slows it down.
It is fairly clear that is it not a significant factor, even before omicron. I don't know how these claims that lack a solid scientific basis still continue. You cannot attribute a capability to a vaccine that has not been confirmed through high quality evidence.
There are a number of studies both identifying a mechanism for covid to have reduced spread due to vaccine and verifying that this occurs empirically. The difference is decreased with newer variants but:
1. Hybrid immunity is even stronger at reducing spread and only possible with prior vaccination
2. There is still non-negligible reduced spread which can be impactful.
Moving from 100% infected to 100% infected is not a reduction.
At some point, there is no realistic difference between R=10 and R=7. Everyone is getting this. Some of us have known that since March 2020.
If your theory includes "avoid being infected with coronavirus" and you live in a democratic country it is a flawed theory. Only full home isolation or hazmat suit rituals will suffice.
Overwhelmed ICUs and hospitals beg to differ that reducing transmission rate is useless. Reducing virulence is absolutely worthwhile even if eventually everyone will get infected at some point.
In fact the opposite is true. If everyone gets coronavirus in a two week period, ICU is less overwhelmed for the rest of the year. A lot of susceptible people die, of course.
If you attempt to spread it out and succeed, you're at 100% capacity basically all of the time, plus 99% of people get to deal with the fact that coronavirus restrictions are utterly miserable.
Omicron has probably made all of this irrelevant anyway, it's so contagious that effectively everyone who goes outside is getting it this month. 1 in 15 in London right now and that's only the confirmed cases I believe.
I'm vaccinated and effectively boosted. I've been going out tons and not being careful at all. I kissed my girlfriend recently who had as it turns out Omicron at the time. I have yet to catch it.
"Everyone" is a significant stretch. Yeah its seriously contagious but you, an engineer, should know better than deal with such absolutes. Viruses burn out long before they infect everyone, even without vaccines and even if they're extremely contagious.
Happily. And i fully realize that i obviously am not immune to this and could catch it at any point. My point was that just because it's highly transmissible doesn't guarantee transmission.
Well sure. I apologize for using the word "everyone", I'm using it as a colloquialism.
We're not far off 1 in 5 _confirmed_ in the UK and most of that was pre Omicron.
Based on the experience of my friendship group I believe that huge numbers of people have probably had it and not even noticed. I finally had a positive test and it was indistinguishable from the other 30 times I've woken up a bit tired in the morning over the past two years.
You have to remember that a lot of people aren't tuned in to the "omg test every time you move" stuff.
They are mandatory only in the sense you might get a small fine if you happen to be caught and pulled over without one. You still keep your drivers license, and your car, and your job.
Also you can take the seatbelt off when you get out of the car.
It's still nonsense (click it or ticket laws), but you gotta pick your battles. Though I'm ready to murder the people who invented/mandated "beep incessantly if the seatbelt is not clicked, even if the car is stationary".
You can always lose your license in some places if you are not wearing a seatbelt repeatedly.
Remember that a seatbelt also prevents your body from being a projectile that would be launched against other people in an accident, you're not just a danger to yourself when you don't wear one.
>
If a seatbelt doest stop you from dying in 100% of car crashes, I don't understand why they're mandatory?
While I do agree that wearing a seatbelt is in most cases a good idea, there still do exist people who are opposed to the mandatory seatbelt laws (even decades after they were introduced).
Whatever one thinks about seatbelts and the ethics of seatbelt laws, they’re a horrendously bad analogy for “vaccines”. A seatbelt can always be removed after use. A “vaccine” cannot. If somebody is concerned about potential issues with the “vaccine” comparing it to a seatbelt feels disingenuous because the “vaccine” can never be undone.
Your body is undoing the vaccine just fine. It's just ARN, it's discarded after a while. Didn't you learn that in your bio classes or did you think it would never be useful?
The rest is just practice for that precious immune system. What's wrong about it? Don't you trust it to do the right thing?
I personally don't because I know about autoimmune diseases, but hey, you seem to be of that "crowd" who only talks in quotes because they don't understand much.
> Your body is undoing the vaccine just fine. It's just ARN, it's discarded after a while.
Let's not be willfully disingenuous here. Obviously, the types of "vaccine" injuries or potential long-term problems that many people are fearful about don't dissipate into the ether.
> If a seatbelt doest stop you from dying in 100% of car crashes, I don't understand why they're mandatory?
Interestingly, your comparison is relevant, but you are responding to an argument which I don't think is being made. The OP is _not_ arguing that vaccines shouldn't be mandatory because they aren't 100% effective.
On the contrary, the OP's argument is that since vaccines are relatively effective, one person's choice to not get vaccinated will not effect the others, and it should be up to them.
Your seatbelt example is relevant, in that the same "no-harm-to-others" argument can be made in that case too.
Perhaps, I'm really not sure how often would that happen though.
I actually think the analogy is a relatively good one. Parallels also also run for the question of how much "paternalism" do we want (the limits of "for-your-own-good" argument). Interests of insurance providers (whether social or private) is also involved in both cases.
In the case of vaccines, immunocompromised people's health is also a consideration. And there is the issue of side-effects, especially for young people. And there is "bodily autonomy". And the stress on healthcare system, etc.
I think there could reasonable discussion about these issues. However, the sad reality is that things quickly get reduced to repeating trite "rallying cries".
Not wearing a seatbelt puts other passengers at risk. If you are t wearing a seatbelt you have a chance of being flung into someone, even if the other person is wearing a seatbelt. This can cause serious injury.
If some group of the population is responsible for 85 to 90% of the spread of a disease, then they are directly harming also all the other people who can't be vaccinated for health reasons, they are helping the virus spread and mutate more often to promote new variants that the vaccinated people might not be resistant to, and they thus are the main reason why we still need to have measures in most countries to limit the spread.
If you're not seriously doing your part, then you are actively supporting the virus and working against all the rest of the population that is either unable to get critical care or just tirelessly working in the healthcare sector treating all those avoidable critical patients.
> […] one person's choice to not get vaccinated will not effect the others, and it should be up to them.
But it will effect others:
> But here’s the thing. A crankish libertarian – I count myself as one – might understand that seatbelts save lives, and still object to being required to wear one, on personal freedom grounds. That’s perhaps tenable when it comes to seatbelt laws, since the only life in peril from not wearing one is your own.
> But vaccines not only make it less likely that you will be infected, suffer or die: They also make it less likely that you will infect others, to suffer and die – and infect still more people – in their turn. (And yes, despite what you might have heard, the evidence[1] is also clear[2] that vaccines reduce transmission rates.) This is hardly a theoretical concern, in the midst of a pandemic that has already claimed nearly 30,000 Canadian lives.
> So if anything the case for vaccine mandates is even stronger than it is for seatbelt laws. The cost to personal freedom – a jab in the arm – is slight. The risk of adverse side-effects is negligible. The savings in human lives is provably enormous. How on earth could so many otherwise sensible[3] people have persuaded themselves otherwise?
Right, I agree, to some extent it does. I was trying to give a better outline of the general form of @b3nji's argument, as @Ardon's objection seemed to be based on a misunderstanding.
There is a "pragmatic libertarian" argument too, which goes like this: The mandatory jab is much less costly to civil liberties than lockdowns, and if the virus is not quelled, the political support for lockdowns will only increase.
There is a whole bunch of issues and trade-offs involved. [1] People have strong feelings on this [2], and discussion is often reduced to partisan "rallying cries".
[2]: Which is somewhat understandable, some of us have lost loved ones, lost jobs, been down the dumps, felt like being in "house arrest", couldn't even hit the gym, witnessed all the paltering by the media etc.
No one is going to fire you, no store would deny you entrance for that, and no government will deny you basic services if you don't wear your seatbelt.
You can’t really wear a seatbelt into a store but i can cite examples of being denied service for refusing to wear one (taxi, airplane, fun fair ride, etc.)
>> No government will deny basic services to you for that
You get fined by the government if you don’t wear a seatbelt.
Earnestly, yes let’s talk about unhealthy eating and heart disease! Let’s talk about the food system, food education, food availability, pricing, and governmental subsidies. Let’s talk about the socioeconomic factors behind unhealthy lifestyles.
Let’s talk about heart disease! Let’s talk about racial and sex disparities in heart disease. Let’s talk about class disparities in heart disease. Let’s talk about why these disparities exist.
Public health is super fascinating and very complicated. We should be talking about it more!
My understanding is that it’s either, control, money or both. It is not logical public health policy so greed and tyranny are the other possible explanations.
My understanding is that the vaccines aren’t completely effective at stopping you catching/spreading, but they are a whole lot better than being immune naive altogether. Casual googling has given me some Washington state pdf data that says even in the most robust cohort (13-29 year olds) unvaccinated folks get Covid at 3x the rate of unvaccinated and the differences only get more dramatic from there.
If you have more robust information though I’d like to know of it.
Edit: please note this was published in dec 29 2021, with data up to that point, and therefore also incorporates omicron.
There’s an Antarctic research station of entirely triple vaxxed people that is on complete lockdown now because most of them have Covid. I know 22 people who have gotten positive tests in the last two weeks, all vaccinated. Sports leagues practically 100% vaccinated and dozens and dozens and dozens of players out for Covid. I do not believe for one second any public health data today claiming only 1/5 new cases are vaccinated.
Wait, do I understand this correctly that because you have heard of cases happening in vaccinated people, without studying them as broad populations, you think there isn’t a statistical difference in vaccinated and unvaccinated people as a population?
Um… I think we have a fundamental disagreement on what sources of information we cite! Do you have non-governmental sources of information we can mutually agree upon to discuss instead? Thank you!
Edit: it looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. We ban accounts that do it, so please stop doing it.
While I understand where you are coming from, pretty much all the observational evidence is pointing to vaccines not being particularly effective against omicron, which seems to explain the data we are seeing (massive surge in infections and hospitalizations). That alone is enough information to reasonably conclude that the vaccine does not provide a high level of protection against omicron, even if we are nto doing a large-N population comparison.
So is the WA state data invalid/faked/wrong? I mean this is literally a handful of anecdotes vs the department of health's data. Data showing similar results as in both nationwide and other countries (global level conspiracy I guess?). It's like me saying 'I can't believe for a second that Biden won the elections because everyone I know voted for Trump'
If nearly %100 of the nba is vaccinated, then it's more likely that the break thru cases will outnumber the cases on the un-vaccinated, even if the vaccine is very effective at preventing infection. The vaccine does not need to be %100 effective for it to make sense from a public policy perspective.
Some months ago, I had to explain to some folks in my neighbourhood that a vaccine is not like some "magic shield" that we see in video games. A vaccine (mRNA or based on an inactive virus) teaches our body to create anti-bodies. The virus enters the body, the body creates anti-bodies, the virus is dealt with.
The vaccine efficacy (how well it teaches the body) and the body's own anti-body efficacy (how effective the anti-bodies are against the virus) also have a role to play.
Thus, a vaccinated person can still be infected, and can even spread the virus around. The sooner the virus is dealt with within their body, the sooner they no longer have a virus to spread. Isolation helps sooner, too. It is therefore possible for a triple vaccinated person to still get infected and to test positive for the infection.
Among various benefits of being vaccinated are the lowered load on hospital staff. The number of hospital beds and even oxygen cylinders does not matter as much as the availability of hospital staff. This pandemic helped highlight that around the world, there are already only a limited number of doctors and nurses, and that both of them are already over-worked. For e.g., I did not know that 30-hour shifts are considered normal. It got me thinking that I wouldn't want to risk receiving care from an over-worked and tired medical care giver whose judgement might have been impaired from sheer exhaustion.
Many of us vaccinated people are now able to safely isolate at home when we are infected with the Covid virus. We rush to hospitals only when the anti-bodies that we create are unable to deal with the Covid 19 virus. Over-worked hospital staff thus focus on a far lesser number of patients. There are now more beds available for those who need them. These included those vaccinated but ill enough to require external medical care, not-yet vaccinated, vaccine-hesitant, those who can't be vaccinated, those who won't be vaccinated.
Really, this pandemic won't truly end until we isolate and end the spread of the virus. Being vaccinated planet-wide and reducing the load on the hospital is our next best bet to ensure that those who need the medical care have less-overworked staff and beds and oxygen cylinders.
The various successful track record of anti-vaxx conspiracies, the true stories of the greed of medical companies/hospitals, the CIA messing with the polio vaccine in Pakistan + Afghanistan, the might-is-right approach by which some countries grab vaccines and waste them while other countries do not receive even a single dose, the hiding of data to save "face" and reputation, the political attacks based on data, politicians speaking up instead of scientists, scientists not knowing how to speak to media, media irresponsibly reporting news - all of these contribute to a general decline in the acceptance of vaccines.
In my lifetime, polio was almost-eradicated. Smallpox was eradicated even earlier. I am hopeful that in time, we'll all pull up our socks and eradicate Covid-19 as well.
If South Africa ended up fairing far better than a country with similar demographics and higher vaccination rates, it would be relevant, but there's not data to make that comparison, because other countries are much earlier in the Omicron wave.
>And what about South-Africa with a vaccination rate of 26%?
Just pointing out that JAMA says SA has a vaccination rate of 44.3% as of Dec 2021; if you're gonna attack statistics it's a good idea to have the right numbers.
Fortunately for my comment above, I wrote it with a second paragraph characterizing available data, data that contradicts the claim about the vaccines hampering immune response.
>Because the vaccins 'overwrite' the wider protections of the immune system it is not very wise to vaccinate healthy people for this fast mutating virus.
Do you mean vaccination isn’t effective in your circle or as a population level? Or do you mean a different definition of effective? The study I linked to shows there is at least an effect.
As a population they don’t work anymore. They need to produce an omicron-targeted vaccine. This current vaccine simply doesn’t work because it’s targets the wrong spike protein and it shows.
Where’s the omicron data? I specifically said omicron. I don’t see anything that shows omicron especially since it’s only prevalent in the US in the last few weeks.
Ahhh never mind. You didn’t actually read the data. You just scanned through it. If you look look more thoroughly it doesn’t address omicron at all. The last data I could see was from December 14. Omicron was not prevalent at that point, delta was. The vaccine offered some, but not much, protection against infection from delta.
it's unlikely anybody has truly actionable data about the vaccine and omicron yet, but companies that produce vaccines are already working against omicron targets.
If you look at vaccine doses per person over time, and graph of cases per person over time, in one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, you see not only no effect, but the worst effect happening at the most-vaxxed time. If they stop transmission the effect at this point is miniscule. If you didn't label the first graph, you might be tempted to blame it for the second graph.
(nota bene, vaccines show a clear effect in reduction in death.)
This is just false and if you believe in the science, you believe in the scientific method, the scientific method shows that this is false. See this https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc211927
Plenty of people are going to the hospital with omicron so it isn't mild for everyone. It's milder than previous strains and it's especially mild for vaccinated people.
This is obvious dangerous rubbish. Most people contracting the virus don’t do so in offices anyway, so this can’t possibly be true even if it eliminated office transmission completely.
I was sick with 101.5F for a week, excruciating headaches, confirmed by a positive PCR after Moderna vaccination. My girlfriend as well, two months after the second dose. How much higher would our viral load be without Moderna?
> Vaccines reduce spread because of lower viral load. Also reduces severity.
And yet, case counts have never been higher than now, a year into vaccines and infections.
Ah, but Omicron you may say. Well doesn’t that imply that the vaccine isn’t terribly effective against that strain? Yet the answer seem to be “just keep getting more injections of the same vaccine formulation.”
Perhaps one or more of our fundamental assumptions are wrong. Maybe the vaccines aren’t actually that effective (Israel is on dose number 4 within a calendar year…). Or maybe PCR tests cranked to an absurd number of cycles aren’t actually detecting what we think they are (an actual infection versus some dead cells in the nasal passage).
Even in omicron, vaccinated people are less likely to catch Covid than unvaccinated people. It can be simultaneously true that vaccinated people are less likely to have Covid and that Covid vases are rising due to a highly infectious variant.
> Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said.
I'm a bit confused by this article. AFAIK PCR tests are only reporting a positive at 35 cycles. The author of the article is correct that it is run for 40 cycles often, but this is only because a positive between 36-40 cycles indicates "unclear result" and the test is repeated with a different assay targeting a different component of the virus. Positive is only reported at 35 cycles max.
This should not pick up any "dead cells", it will pick up viral mRNA. There is a concern over picking up low loads, but the mRNA is still there.
The vaccines do work by diminishing severity of symptoms and thus reducing rate of hospitalization.
The unvaccinated are banned as means to put social and financial pressure on individuals to get the vaccine. It is an unfortunate misconception that any of the currently-approved intramuscular vaccines reduce transmission to a meaningful degree.
This social and financial pressure is placed on individuals because urban hospitals do not have the money or resources to deal with the rate at which they're admitting patients for severe Covid-19, and most of the patients they're admitting are unvaccinated.
> The unvaccinated are banned as means to put social and financial pressure on individuals to get the vaccine. It is an unfortunate misconception that any of the currently-approved intramuscular vaccines reduce transmission to a meaningful degree.
Vaccination reduces the infection rate. [0] You can't transmit the virus if you aren't infected in the first place. Other studies have shown that people with breakthrough infections have a shorter period in which they can transmit.
Here's the underlying study: Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 transmission to household contacts during dominance of Delta variant (B.1.617.2), the Netherlands, August to September 2021 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34738514/
> It is an unfortunate misconception that any of the currently-approved intramuscular vaccines reduce transmission to a meaningful degree.
This is another misconception. Our best evidence is that they're extremely effective. The problem is they're not quite effective enough to just go back to life as before since newer variants are extremely virulent.
> It is an unfortunate misconception that any of the currently-approved intramuscular vaccines reduce transmission to a meaningful degree.
Even given the typical bias of the media it’s still astonishing that Biden got a complete and utter free pass from the media for propagating this idea by basically giving everyone - vaccinated or not - a “mandate” that they no longer needed to wear a mask this past spring / late summer, all for PR points to make it look like the virus had been defeated.
And the greater problem with science communication regarding intramuscular vaccines, and the political theater surrounding it, is that neither "side" actually gives the full story because they worry nuance would be lost and facts without context used against them.
Yes, intramuscular vaccines for sars-cov-2 work, for about 6 months, to significantly reduce the likelyhood of serious disease in the internal organs. They do this by getting your body to produce serum igG antibodies against the shape of the spike protein produced, or delivered, by whatever mechanism. They also train your T cells to recognize more broad coronavirus epitopes that hold up longer against changes in spike coding.
But the igG antibodies in the body serum produced by intramuscular vaccination do not appear in any useful quantity in the upper respiratory mucosa (a different immune compartment). And the T cells definitely do not get there. The upper respiratory mucosa is where respiratory viral diseases infect. Intramuscular vaccination does not protect against sars-cov-2 infection of the upper respiratory mucosa. It just means that your lungs, which have some serum igG antibodies seep in, are protected and your body organs are protected. You can and do still get infected and transmit the virus to others at the same rate as the un-intramuscularly vaccinated.
The intramuscularly vaccinated should not be exempted from any mask requirements and people really, really have to become aware of this if we're going to stop the pandemic. It's either that or intranasal vaccination, the smart move, like India is pushing towards. Enough of the intramuscular boosters. We need intranasal to stop the spread.
Pretending intramuscular vaccination is some be all end all that stops spread is stupid and deadly. It is only the first partial step.
This is also why if one wishes to mandate weekly tests, those tests should be required of everyone, not just the unvaccinated. Mandating tests for just the unvaccinated is more punitive than scientific and doesn't slow the spread.
This is incorrect. Vaccines DO reduce (to different extents based on people and variant) infection and transmission:
1. It’s harder for the virus to enter your body
2. If it gets in, you will get less sick (lower chance of symptoms)
3. Your body will fight it off faster
4. The virus has a harder time replicating in your body
Due to 2, 3 and 4, the ability to transmit virus to others goes down.
Big American corporations have often made their money through subsidies.
Enforcing everyone to take the jabs increases those subsidies (this enforcement is persistent in all countries submissive to USA). That's what makes sense.
However, don't assert altruism because there isn't any.
The 'save lives' campaign is just a coating to make things easy for the general public to swallow.
> I don't understand, if the vaccines work then why the issue?
Vaccines work the same way car seat belts and airbags do: they improve the/your odds. They make you much less likely to be infected, and because less likely to be infected, less likely to pass it on.
> If seatbelt-wearers outnumber non-wearers by four to one, but account for roughly the same number of deaths, it suggests seatbelt-wearers are about one-fourth as likely to die in an accident as non-wearers. That shocking statistic turns out to be not so shocking as all that.
That is low quality evidence. It's folks doing some mathematical modeling. Mathematical modeling has had a very bad track record during this pandemic. Did you even read the paper you are linking?
You can have a high case load in vaccinated countries and still have vaccines that reduce transmissions. Those two ideas don’t conflict.
It just means the vaccines we have don’t reduce transmission by 100% and you have a disease that is highly infectious. Just because a medical intervention doesn’t work 100% of the time doesn’t mean it’s 0% effective. Most interventions (vaccines, drugs, procedures, surgeries) don’t work at 100.0%.
From the data I’ve seen it appears the mRNA vaccines have some effect in reducing transmission while the other vaccines don’t. It is correct to say that the efficacy against transmission has dropped significantly, but that doesn’t mean it’s 0%.
"Hurr durr look at cases there's more than before" is not how you can tell whether the vaccine has an effect and is not how the scientific method works. It's likely that without vaccines, the omicron variant would have caused an even higher case load than we are seeing now. We know this because there are studies that show the vaccine reduces your likelihood of getting the original strain. Also we have studies that show vaccination reduces your probability of infection by omicron [0]. In addition, without vaccines, there would be more hospitalizations.
These facts don't necessarily support vaccine mandates from a moral POV, but they're still the facts and by ignoring these facts you're the one spreading nonsense.
Horrible logic. Seatbelts are in the same position. They are mandatory and greatly reduce harm done in an accident. Same thing for the vaccines, you won't die and won't likely be using an ICU bed that other patients need.
Seat belts and motorcycle helmets shouldn't be mandatory in countries that don't have public healthcare, but they should be mandatory in countries with public healthcare because everyone else is paying for your medical treatment and seatbelts and helmets reduce the cost of your medical treatment.
Is your next statement something like "Restaurants shouldn't be required to follow food prep laws or other laws like refrigeration temperature requirements"?
Yes it would, if your job is a driver. It happens all the time. Just search for “fired for not wearing seatbelt”, and you’ll find plenty of stories. The reason you can get fired for this is because it’s (1) illegal, (2) unsafe, and (3) a company liability if the company is found to be lax on training.
> The department said if an employee doesn’t report to work or is suspended or terminated for refusing to comply with a vaccine mandate, the employer should indicate that they quit, took a leave of absence or were dismissed – potentially disqualifying them from collecting EI.
Because they were fired for refusing to comply they didn’t quit. If you refused to do a task and were removed by the company for it were you fired or did you quit?
Fraud would require prosecution. Is Edmonton going to prosecute Minister of Employment for the directive? Or the HR dept for the illegal classification (is it illegal if given a Minister directive)? Does this get challenged in Canadian courts?
Vitamin D and air quality is the major underlying factor behind COVID severity - its why the virus exhibits such seasonality. Pushing vaccines doesn't address underlying public health problems.
I would like to push against moral judgement being used to determine if treatment should be offered at all. (To be clear: I’m a fully vaccinated and boosted person that masks consistently.)
My understanding is that the field of medicine is heavily against this because they have historical cases where moral judgement to deprive care have resulted in human rights abuses and medical neglect due to bigotry. It might end up disproportionately affecting the homeless, those afflicted with addiction, single mothers, and the poor.
I agree with this comment and am fully vaccinated as well, and would like to just comment on the
> (To be clear: I’m a fully vaccinated and boosted person that masks consistently.)
Dear COVID scientogists, if you engage in a public discourse where your opponents have to write a disclaimer like this to prevent getting downvoted, you have failed at civic discourses and even if all vaccines were 100% effective and had 0 side effects, your behaviour would still be abhorrent.
I agreed with GP sentiment (and wrote a similar comment myself), but absolutely disagree with your sentiment.
Being able, but unwilling, to get vaccinated substantially shifts my priors of where your comment is coming from. It is useful information, and I appreciate when people disclose it.
If you replace vaccination with an analogous, more politically one-sided limit case (say [not being a Nazi]:[supporting a policy of Hitler] - in typical Godwinian fashion), you can see why this sort of information would be useful.
Your line of thinking is a typical ad hominem; you should evaluate an argumentation based on its merits, not what the meatball behind the online handle happens to do in his free time.
The healthcare isn't free. It is paid for through taxation. They have paid into the same healthcare system (through taxation) as everyone else and should be entitled to the care.
Draconian measures such as what you suggest just make people more suspicious of authority not less.
I am not in favor of sentencing people to death just because their stupidity happened to lie on the vaccination axis, while other stupid people get to live.
Beware what you wish for. There is no bottom to this rabbit hole. Everyone does something potentially harmful to their bodies. Drivers, airplane travelers, meat eaters, people who stress themselves too much, suicide attempt survivors, people who live next to a polluting industrial plant even if they could afford to move elsewhere.
There is a reason why the Hippocratic oath does not have exceptions for currently unpopular groups. Even captured Nazi war criminals weren't denied medical care in prison.
Please do not post flamewar comments to Hacker News, regardless of how wrong other people are, or how much smarter you are, or how wrong you feel they are, or how smart you feel you are. Flamewar hell is not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
We're trying for a different sort of website, one in which people have thoughtful, curious conversation across differences. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the intended spirit in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If you look at my comments more closely you'll see that banning accounts is a small portion of what I do. Mostly I try to persuade and explain to users what kind of site we're trying to have here, what the site guidelines are, and how we apply them.
It always feels like the mods are against you (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but you can't take that as evidence that we disagree with you. The people with opposite views to yours are just as sure that we're secretly agreeing with you and moderating the site to privilege your views. That's just how it goes.
It seems we are heading in a direction where those who don't take the jab will be blocked from receiving government services, prevented from patronizing various businesses, and even restricted from traveling and the ability to work. Are most citizens really okay with this medical apartheid, or are they afraid of speaking out against it?
Could you elaborate a bit on what right you are asserting? I don't think I'm alone in not understanding what right you are fighting for. You're asking me to take a stand without telling me what I'm taking a stand for.
Mandated COVID-19 vaccination of individuals with the current EUA approved vaccines.
The devil is in the details. The EUA designation was pushed through because there was no other, "obvious" treatment (despite proven efficacy of a combination of prophylactic treatments).
They are testing this thing on us. Even if it works I do not consent to be tested on.
"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be
so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment."
The Code has not been officially accepted as law by any nation or as official ethics guidelines by any association. In fact, the Code's reference to Hippocratic duty to the individual patient and the need to provide information was not initially favored by the American Medical Association. Wikipedia
First, you would have to find a jurisdiction that officially accepted the Nuremberg code and move there, second you would have to prove that the Covid vaccination program was a medical experiment and third you would have to explain why you accepted prior vaccinations that were part of a public health program (such as polio vaccinations)
I reject your call to take a stand because I don't think there's anything to stand on or any right that I'm losing.
The current application of the vaccine at scale is not being done with "human subjects" (that research was already done, on consenting subjects).
It doesn't apply in situations where the legal authority has authorized the treatment.
Trotting out the nuremberg code for a vaccine intended to help reduce world suffering (that is being used in a moral ways) is in poor taste, in my opinion. It was written because Nazis were using Jewish and other people in scientific experiments that make vaccine trials look pleasant.
Also, all the necessary information for you to make a decision according to the code has already been provided to you, and the US government (not sure about others) has a constitutionally supported right to mandate that you take a vaccine.
As someone who actually tested a vaccine in phase 3 voluntarily, please do not put yourself in the same group as me.
You got a jab hundreds of millions of people got. I got a jab a few thousand of people got.
I got to install an app and log all sorts of things on it every couple days. You didn’t have to do that.
You received a QR code to allow you to participate in a variety of things. I didn’t, and had to even-more-experimentally mix and match my untested vaccine with an EMA approved one so I could get a Covid safe ticket.
The 15 min wait is because some known side effects manifest within those 15 minutes. Everything else is either minor, or extremely rare, or both. The US has the VAERS system if you want more on side effect reporting, but your doctor is supposed to do the work.
Either way, the vaccine was tested. That it didn't go through a 10 year trial period is because we didn't have the time. Will you suddenly explode or combust in 11 years? I can't prove you won't. I would happily put money on the negative though, care to wager?
That wait is for most or all vaccines, including pre COVID times. Any parent will be familiar with that instruction to wait after the shot.
And you're being deliberately obtuse. Like most medicines, vaccine injections have other ingredients like preservatives, the carrier fluid, etc. People can be allergic to the other ingredients but not the mRNA/TDAP/Influenza/whatever vaccine.
i've always wondered how anti-vaxxers would feel about sending their children to schools exclusively for anti-vaxxers. is this something they would feel no hesitation in doing, or do they actually appreciate that their unvaccinated kids are surrounded by others' vaccinated kids?
and also does there exist a sufficient amount of medical professionals to agree to service an all-anti-vaxxer school without complaint?
Within my family, they weigh the risks of what they believe the side-effects are and the disease.
They all live in very remote areas with few people so the risk is low to begin with. They aren't entirely "unintelligent", and I respect their decisions.
1. infectious disease that can kill others. it's great that they are remote, but they still interact with others sometimes. no one requires them to wear warning signs. as numerous others have pointed out, it's like drunk driving. drinking while driving is not just personal choice, even if it seems like just you minding your own alcohol.
1a. even if the disease itself is not sufficient to kill people but causes them to seek medical attention, beyond the capacity of the healthcare system, this means worse outcomes for those who could not have avoided ending up in the hospital.
2. ask what doctors think about treating them when they get polio or things we havent seen in many generations.
even intelligent people are terrible at assessing risk in areas where they are not professionals. see how many doctors are antivaxxers, how many security professionals click on https://chase.myaccount.com links, etc.
Yes, I am ok with society not supporting those who choose to actively work against its well being. This isn’t a slippery slope situation, let’s not get carried away with that. Either do your patriotic duty, or do the selfish thing and suffer the consequences.
apartheid was a racist policy that discriminated against people based on their skin color… you’re comparing this to mandating a vaccine that dramatically reduces the hospitalization rate during an international pandemic that has killed more than 5 million people in 2 years
Your link does not address age-specific hospitalization effects of vaccination. As a result, it is non-responsive to the GP's position. If you posted the wrong link and meant to post one that addresses GP's point of view, would you mind fixing the link? On the other hand, on the off chance it was intentional, please try to engage with more honesty and more in good faith.
I'm feeling more and more confident that your comments are intentionally snide and personal, so I'm going to bow out. Happy New Year to you and I hope 2022 brings you much joy and happiness.
Which groups are not "at-risk" here? What age? Because it seems like there is a significant % of the population in groups other than 80+ that are in the hospital.
You posted a bunch of flamewar comments in this thread, and have broken the site guidelines in other ways too. That's not cool, and we ban accounts that do it. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
You don't need to share your results, but try to find the answer to that question. I have done so and it's a terrible uphill battle and, for most data points, left only to anecdotal evidence.
In my case I was looking for covid case data in children broken down by age. The only data I found was over 18 and under 18. It wasn't until recently when 0-4, 5-12 and 12-18 age group data was shared. So while I understand your point, it's doing a disservice to the actual problem at hand and thats enabling others to make advised choices.
I've been vaccinated 3 times. But. 5m out of 7 billion on Earth. The WHO is making rumblings of downgrading pandemic to endemic. Your body is all you really have so if someone chooses to not get vaccinated I believe that to be their (and my) right. I won't have that decision made for me and I won't make that decision for another, except my boy, who is too young to decide for himself. Just like my parents vaccinated me against Polio without asking me first.
This is absurd authoritarian double talk. That's like saying you're free to speak your mind, but you're also free to be executed for it.
The government punishing you for an action you take (including indirectly, but purposefully) is a pretty good starting point for a definition of not being free to do it.
That is pretty absurd anti-authoritarian double talk also. Comparing being fired with being executed.
The government isn’t punishing you because you broke a law - your employer (who happens to be the government) fired you for failing to adhere to conditions of employment.
There is literally nothing the government (in any of its capacities) can do to you which would toggle your vaccination status without your consent. Your employer will (dis)incentivise you accordingly towards exercising their freedom of association, but they can’t stick a needle in your arm.
Irrespective of how we define “medical freedom” (because I don’t particularly care about definitional combat) the government NOT handcuffing me and sticking a needle in my arm against my will is precisely how I expect my medical autonomy to work in practice.
Honest question: do you believe that a contract someone signs with a gun to their head is legitimate?
If not, why not? At what point does compelled consent become illegitimate? I think most people agree a person with a gun to their head is under duress. After that it's just a matter of figuring out where the line is.
I personally believe the government threatening peoples' livelihood in order to compell them to be vaccinated is placing those people under duress, and can not be considered legitimate consent.
For what it's worth, I also think most healthy people ought to vaccinate themselves just as a matter of being good member of society.
Honest question: do you think any of the relationships and contracts in Canada were signed with actual guns to anyone’s head? Because your metaphor is emotionally loaded and screams “libertarian bias”.
Do you see all interactions/negotiations with government as having a gun to your head?
From where I am looking it seems wee bit exaggerated and lacking nuance to equate mandates/economic sanctions and contract law to actual violence.
It is precisely because you don’t have to (nor want to) sign the contract which requires you to be vaccinated is why you don’t have to work there any longer.
You get what you want (remain unvaccinated).
Employer get what they want (no unvaccinated employees).
It seems like a win-win negotiation between consenting parties to me?
Are you really straw manning the poster? to say "racism" cannot be compared to covid discrimination and that making the comparison makes him or his argument any “less than” is an emotional character assassination based argument not merits based one.
If you’re looking for a response to your numbers that you pulled out, we still have many worse diseases and our leaders economic policies during covid impacted and hurt more people than the “5 million dead”
I also didn’t see you or anyone complaining about the obesity; diabetes, car crashes; depression and other far worse epidemics that we’ve had induced by our same shitty health agencies that sell us the covid cure today.
Comparing covid vaccine mandates to racism severely minimizes how bad racism was/is. It’s the same reason I roll my eyes when people start making vaccine passport holocaust comparisons, it’s absurd hyperbole.
I can’t spread obesity diabetes and depression to others. Cars are regulated immensely (though I do think it’s better to design cities that don’t need them… and hey people that walk more are less obese, which reduces diabetes risk).
For someone quick to point out a supposed fallacy, you’re heavily leaning on whataboutism. Not that you care, but I am also active in my city for improving pedestrian infrastructure at the expensive of space for cars, and I live in one of the most walkable cities in the country.
So I don’t think we are anywhere close to what you are suggesting.
But if it comes down to it, I’m actually completely ok with such an approach.
How is this any different than mandating the small pox vaccine, or the polio vaccine?
The vaccine dramatically lowers the probability of a severe infection; reduces the burden on healthcare systems - which in, in many countries apart from the US (for instance, Canada) is a public good. And therefore enables hospitals to provide care for patients with other diseases; patients who need urgent surgical procedures.
Even where there is private healthcare, it still is a public resource.
One possible symmetric response to people who refuse to get vaccinated is to deny them access to healthcare if they get a covid infection and need medical care - But I think that is far more draconian and inhumane, and is arguably more akin to medical apartheid, than denying those who chose to remain unvaccinated (without broadly accepted medical reasons) access to public goods when they do not accept their responsibility towards public welfare.
I personally have no issue with this for the well-being of the majority and the medically vulnerables, and to make sure our healthcare system isn't overwhelmed with COVID cases that could otherwise be avoided or at least won't require hospitalization.
Odd thought: Even if ineffective against omicron, why would the government pause distribution of any, safe medicine? Doctor's should still be allowed to use it as they see fit, no?
Quite the hyperbole: not all government services, just employment insurance and that too if you were only fired for not receiving the vaccine. A reminder that in many of these jobs, there was already a requirement for getting a set of vaccines so this is not new. Though for some people, this vaccine is "different" but once you ask them to explain why they can't. So no new rules. You needed vaccines for most of the jobs and this just an additional one.
You will still receive employment insurance for other stuff, irrespective of your vaccination status.
> prevented from patronizing various businesses
You are not prevented from accessing essential businesses and no one checks your vaccination status or even asks for one.
> even restricted from traveling and the ability to work
You are still free to drive to work or take local public transit.
The difference between ICU rates of unvaccinated and vaccinated people in Ontario for example tells us that the vaccination is working:
> "You are still free to drive to work or take local public transit."
Then the whole point of this thing is pointless. We're selectively punishing people. We don't prevent or punish positive cases from going around to work, public transport, etc and infecting others, yet we punish people that choose to simply not vaccinate.
> "If you cannot participate in society moving forward, then you should not expect society to cater to your needs."
Just like to point out that you can use the same line of reasoning for a host of other things, even unrelated to medical themes. Like say allowing facial recognition cameras in all homes to prevent domestic violence and child abuse. Yet most people supposedly stand on principle against it, despite the "pragmatism" of it. Likewise we should be standing here on plain old and impractical "body autonomy" and protecting people's personal medical choices.
It just depends on how far you want to take the hyperbole and how far you want to extrapolate the doomsday predictions that flow from this. E.g. How about state-mandated abortions for down-syndrome? Or preventing pro-creation of known carriers of genetic disorders? Look at how we tip-toed around aids after we eventually acknowledged it.
As a side note, we should all be worried about how this entire world-incident is allowing laws and understandings that we've had and worked on attaining for decades if not centuries to be simply and casually bypassed under some banner of "safety", "science" and pragmatism. There has to be a better way to deal with this and as you say, move society forward instead of backward.
> Then the whole point of this thing is pointless. We're selectively punishing people. We don't prevent or punish positive cases from going around to work, public transport, etc and infecting others, yet we punish people that choose to simply not vaccinate.
It's not pointless. Unvaccinated people are far far more likely to occupy the hospital and the ICU -- see above. How is that pointless? I am not talking about positivity as that is not relevant. See the official numbers above.
Your hyperbole is not valid as these jobs already required vaccinations so I am not sure what the new outrage is.
>Then the whole point of this thing is pointless. We're selectively punishing people. We don't prevent or punish positive cases from going around to work, public transport, etc and infecting others, yet we punish people that choose to simply not vaccinate.
Simply not true. Defying a public health order is illegal.
Health care worker here in Canada. It’s complete BS. I can’t believe it. Where are the protests I want in. Sadly if you have ever visited r/Canada it is full of people who believe this kind of thing is the right thing to do. I have to believe it is a state campaign with dozens of fake accounts promoting a narrative. This is too messed up for January 1st 2022.
It's incredibly offensive to compare differences in treatment based on some people's choice to knowingly putting others at risk with oppression on the basis of something people could not change.
I for one would be speaking out against it from an idealistic perspective, but I'm tired of my tolerance for regressive views being taken advantage of. The anti-vax thing was cute when it was maybe 5% of the population and just created the occasional localized outbreak. I'm still a libertarian, but the biggest impingement on my freedom here has been because of top-down political disinformation campaigns utterly destroying the public health response. They're playing off the failings of our society to herd people into utterly destructive directions, and following them needs to be called out for what it is rather than letting it continue to be passed off as some manifestation of individual freedom.
I've been asking friends that believe in such punishments whether they would have punished gay people in the 1990s that got AIDS. Condoms are extremely effective at preventing transmission. Invariably no one wants to go there. Gay people with AIDS that didn't use a condom are to be cried over in our society, while those with COVID that didn't take the vaccine are to be punished.
In USA at least vaccination rates strongly correlate with class and so races with more poverty have higher unvaccinated rates - blacks and Hispanics. But the advocates here seem to follow the meme that the unvaccinated are all trump supporting deplorables…
You can’t spread HIV just by sitting next to someone. Your analogy also doesn’t hold at all because countries DO punish people for knowingly infecting others with HIV.
You can spread HIV by having sex with someone and not using a condom. You might not even know you have HIV, so using a condom is essential in any case.
You can spread Covid to an entire roomful of people just by sitting in it. The two things aren’t even remotely comparable. To suggest otherwise is to repeat the homophobic prejudices of the original HIV pandemic.
Beyond the other obvious problems with your comment, you're also missing the fact that many of the people dying of AIDS died 10+ years after contracting the virus, substantially before any of the science on HIV spread was settled.
Most people who "got sick with AIDS in the 1990s" contracted HIV in the 80s. You don't seem to know much about the difference between AIDS/HIV or the latency period.
You don't want to acknowledge the moral dilemma that I'm presenting and instead bickering about the details. I'm a medical professional. I know about HIV and AIDS. You're just being a boob.
and not sure who you're hanging with, but as a sexually active gay man I've never heard of no condom usage for anyone being seen as acceptable unless there is consent between all parties
This is complete BS and I say that as a vaccinated health care worker. They are now considering putting sick but vaccinated workers back to work instead of not sick but unvaccinated. How can they justify that? It seems pretty obvious they are not worried about public health but rather some sort of control over people. Do as we say or you will be punished. I am feeling disgraced as a Canadian. And am sorry for my fellow workers who choose not to get vaccinated and lost their jobs.
EI benefits are generally only given if you lose your employment through no fault of your own (didn't quit or get fired). What this policy does is clarify that losing work hours or your job due to vaccine refusal after a workplace vaccination mandate (outside of medical exemptions) does NOT count as "through no fault of your own", and instructs employers to indicate as such.
So: For the duration of the pandemic, if your workplace mandates COVID vaccination and you refuse and then get fired over it, you're not eligible for EI any more than you would be if you got fired for cause.
That's an interesting point to make and defendable but these declarations mentioned in another comment, I will assume to be true, coming from Trudeau, Canada's president:
“They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist....This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?"
I have taken both shots, and will take the third but these declarations are appropriate for a mad man, not a country leader.
FYI, Canada does not have a president. Trudeau is the prime minister. However, you are right in that his quote (which I think was in French originally) is just awful name-calling.
Yes and this type of doublespeak is coming from the top down in many countries.
It’s alarming because “they don’t believe in science” has become a divisive weapon that hand waves away all scientific nuance.
The vast majority of young healthy people are completely asymptomatic, they don’t need a vaccine, nor would it be a wise investment of limited doses.
Also, previous infection confers protection that is at least as effective as vaccination. This has been consistently observed since the beginning of the pandemic.
Vaccines can save the lives of many vulnerable people though; it’s an amazing tool and its use is certainly justified by science.
But using economic and financial engineering to force everyone to get vaccinated? There is no scientific evidence supporting that decision, and the second and third order consequences are completely unstudied. (evolution of viral resistance is one example; many experts are aware of the phenomenon but commenters here have been misled to believe that an airborne virus circulating the planet can be eradicated ‘if only everyone got vaccinated’)
> The vast majority of young healthy people are completely asymptomatic, they don’t need a vaccine, nor would it be a wise investment of limited doses.
Of course they need a vaccine. Just because you don't have symptoms does not mean (a) that you're not carrying it, and (b) can't infect someone who may not be as healthy as you.
Further it's difficult to predict ahead of time how an individual will react to being infected. A 20-year-old takes up an ICU bed just as effectively as a 40- or 60-year-old: they're less likely, but it can still happen. Which is why people in higher risk profiles get priority. But just because certain folks may get things first doesn't mean other shouldn't later.
COVID can also mutate just as well in a young person as an older person.
> But using economic and financial engineering to force everyone to get vaccinated? There is no scientific evidence supporting that decision, and the second and third order consequences are completely unstudied.
The unvaccinated make up the vast majority of hospital and ICU admissions. And by "majority" we're talking about 90-100% in many places. "Unvaccinated 60 times more likely to end up in ICU with COVID-19, Ontario data shows":
According to the CBC, the lack of available hospital beds pre-dates Covid and exists even when Covid case counts are low. From Why Ontario hospitals are full to bursting, despite few COVID-19 patients:
"The data suggests many hospitals have returned to the overcrowding levels seen before the pandemic, when CBC News revealed hospitals filled beyond capacity nearly every single day, with patients housed in hallways, conference rooms and cafeterias not as exceptional cases, but as a matter of routine.[1]"
It's unfair to scapegoat the unvaccinated for systemic failures that aren't really due to Covid at all.
I'm not claiming it's fine. I'm vaccinated and I try to convince others to get vaccinated.
But many people contribute to the problem with a variety of unhealthy life choices, and blaming one particular group for the problem, and writing policies to punish that group (many of whom also happen to be the PM's political opponents), is the worst kind of politics.
And suggesting that the lack of healthcare in Canada is caused by the unvaccinated is simply dishonest.
> But many people contribute to the problem with a variety of unhealthy life choices, and blaming one particular group for the problem, and writing policies to punish that group (many of whom also happen to be the PM's political opponents), is the worst kind of politics.
Most other unhealthy life choices are low-moving train wrecks and can be accommodated for: it's not like the obesity and diabetes rates go from 15% to 40% in the span of six months. A good portion people's choices can be accommodated for 'simply' by looking at trend lines and planning accordingly.
> And suggesting that the lack of healthcare in Canada is caused by the unvaccinated is simply dishonest.
Any problems that any healthcare system in the world had were (and are being) exacerbated by the sudden surge of COVID patients. The unvaccinated-by-choice are needlessly making things worse for a whole lot of people who need a hospital/ICU bed through no fault of their won.
It's so weird. For a website whose audience largely works in tech, where thinking in terms of systems is part of our education and career training, there is a shocking lack of systems thinking here when it comes to COVID. While it might not make sense individually for a particular person to get vaccinated, it does make sense when you think in terms of the societal system. We are faced with a society-sized problem that requires collective coordinated action, and it's not going to be solved thinking only in terms of what makes sense for each individual in a vacuum.
We never had that many people vaccinated, and we also never had that many cases. Still trying to prove that mass vaccination will prevent the epidemic spread doesn’t belong to a scientific forum. It is becoming anti-experimental at this point.
Mass vaccination is the standard way to minimize the spread of viral infections. For example, there were routine outbreaks of varicella infections amongst children despite the fact more than 99.5% Of the adult population had natural immunity to it. After the vaccine became part of the standard schedule, outbreaks are virtually unheard of.
The same can happen with COVID-19 if the percentage of the population that's vaccinated is high enough. Of course, if that percentage drops below the herd immunity threshold, then outbreaks may occur. In fact, that happened several years ago with the measles virus because asubset of the population refused vaccination.
the scenario you described is for vaccines that prevent infection. This is now obviously not the case with covid and 75% of the pop vaccinated, which still catch and transmit the disease enough to get the numbers we have now.
No vaccine has a 100% success rate in preventing infection. In fact, many of the standard vaccinations are not nearly as effective on an individual level as one may believe. At the population level, they are pretty effective because a high percentage of the population is vaccinated and/or has natural immunity.
Looking at the natural immunity scenario, one can consider the history of varicella. Prior to widespread vaccination, there were yearly outbreaks amongst children, despite the fact that more than 99% of the adult population had immunity due to prior infection. That is, despite the fact that the adult population was largely immune, there were still outbreaks among children.
Once the varicella vaccine became part of the standard vaccine schedule, those outbreaks essentially ceased. That doesn't mean that the virus isn't still being transmitted. It does mean that if enough people refuse getting the vaccine for their children, then there is a risk of another outbreak precisely because the percentage of people immune to the infection dipped below the herd immunity level.
Similarly, with COVID-19, if we can get the vaccination percentage up to more than 90 to 95% (or whatever percentage the data supports), then outbreaks will cease, but the virus will still be out there.
Your comment made sense with the original strains, but already with Delta there were many breakthrough infections and with Omicron two shots don't offer any significant protection against infection and transmission.
So that leaves the personal risk, where I think people should be able to decide by themselves if they want a vaccine or not. It's also fair that they don't get an ICU spot, but instead get whatever other treatment is available. However, most governments seem to shy away from this decision and instead bet everything on vaccination with predictable results.
Vaccinated still can be infected and die from Covid. Most ICUs do have vaccinated there. So having the perception vaccines gives 100% protection is false. You should always keep this in mind as those they opt for no vaccines do weigh this piece of information while those that pro vaccines usually ignore and a lot not aware of it. Also in a world without vaccines, death from Covid is around 4% and at worst under 10% and that is based on denominator with limited testings. Read up on how Singapore overdo testings and you will be very surprised that death rates are well below 1%. Btw, I am pro vaccinations (looking forward for 4th jab booster of booster soon), similar to Elon's thinking. Vaccine is good but forcing people taking it is a no. That is simply too Stalinistic way no matter how much good intentions you have doing that forcing.
Can confirm Trudeau is right. Most of these vocal anti vaxxers are what he claims. It goes with the territory. Those that want to believe everyone else is wrong and they are the sole correct individual also fall into the tropes of superiority complexes's of various ism's. Having good reason to not be vaccinated isn't anti-vax. For example, active blood clotting. Anti vax is where an individual believes, with no knowledge, or misapplied knowledge, believes it's "wrong". Notice the "belief" involved. They don't want to listen to doctors and nobody can tell them nothing. It's the definition of applied ignorance.
These people have killed plenty of others. On the count of people killed and economic costs - it would be anti vaxxers that are the "mad men".
That's very heavy framing in order to make something quite banal - rejecting a medical treatment as is their right - into an evil action. Like it or not, this is what it means to be a liberal democracy.
"These people" haven't killed anyone and there is no court of law that would condemn them. The economic costs are to blame on a bumbling government that failed to prepare for pandemic scenarios and doesn't have any ideas on how to deal with the virus except through vaccines. Unfortunately for them, Omicron's not too fazed about said vaccines, making the whole exercise more and more absurd.
Blaming the people that don't take the vaccine is the last refuge of the incompetent politician. What's even more ridiculous is that there's no way they'll be able to put three vaccines into whoever's left before Omicron comes and goes.
Personally, I don’t think so, but I do think it’s worth asking the question and exploring the space a little bit. There is a certain hypocrisy to refusing to accept safety measures from the government while expecting emergency treatment from the same people when not abiding by the safety measures causes predictable and avoidable harm.
There are cases where people are injured while accidentally not having a seatbelt on, and there are cases where people dogmatically refuse to wear seatbelts and refuse to accept the safety statistics. Maybe it makes sense to differentiate between those kinds of cases somehow? Maybe people who consciously choose to refuse safety measures should still be treated but should be prioritized lower than people who are accepting safety measures?
One of the problems with people who refuse to accept safety policies is they make emergency treatment more expensive for everyone, and they reduce the probability that someone who’s been safe can get emergency treatment in a timely manner. Part of the question is why it’s fair for people who’ve accepted the safety measures to have a non-zero chance not being able to get emergency treatment because someone who refused to be safe got hurt and is already in the only ER/bed left in the hospital.
>“They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist....This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?"
There is social science indicating that employment mandates increase vaccination rates. There is science indicating that vaccines reduce transmission rates.
Regardless, this is a different point than the original comment.
So what are the facts actually? I’m not following covid news 24/7 but at least I’ve heard that developers of such vaccines refuse to release data on its effectiveness
Why are you moving the conversation to something else? Breakthrough cases can be had while still dramatically reducing disease severity, transmissibility, hospitalizations, and chances of long COVID. All those things matter; all those are objectively improved by vaccination, even more by boosters.
The only way you can actually ask this is by trying maliciously move the conversation to a nonsensical point. Neither myself nor anyone else has ever made the point that vaccines protect you completely, which is the entire point why even with vaccination there is still an objective to reduce case counts.
There is no science if reasonable doubts aren't allowed.
The thing with this pandemic is, that the time where you could have a reasonable doubt in the vaccines are over for a while now. We vaccinated half of earths population. If there would have been horrible side effects they would have shown. The more data we gather the clearer the picture becomes and the less reasonable certain doubts become.
The thing about doubt is that one can always doubt anything. You can doubt that a stone in your hand falls to the ground if you let it go, but no amount of doubt will change the outcome if you actually do it. Physical reality for the most part doesn't care for our feelings. If you are a brilliant physicist you could doubt is the explainations why the stone falls to the ground, but you cannot reasonably doubt the fact that it does accelerate towards the ground, because this is what is observed.
You could have the feeling the universe is holographic and all this falling does not occur, however if you cannot create an experiment that would falsify existing, simpler explainations it remains just a interesting feeling and not a reasonable doubt.
You need to justify the marginal benefit of force vaccinating young healthy people. That conversation never properly happened. First it was "that's not even being talked about, fuck off antivaxxer" then the next it was "are you kidding me we already decided this for you, fuck off antivaxxer". You can believe that vaccines are beneficial at preventing serious illness while doubting if they ought be required to a recovered young populous.
False. Things are up for discussion when facts on the ground change and when new evidence arises that makes for a case that paradigms should be reconsidered.
Every piece of available evidence points to the same conclusions, over and over again: the general safety of vaccines, the risks of long COVID, the contagiousness of the Omicron variant, and so on and so forth.
Those things are clearly not up for the discussion given the absolute garbage quality of the proposed counterevidence offered by these "skeptics".
Facts on the ground are continuously changing and have been for the duration of the pandemic: e.g. risk of myocarditis for young males. Medical bodies are reacting to these changes, in that case by recommending against Moderna for people younger than 30.
Another example is the recommendation for AstraZeneca which was first not offered to older people because of unclear efficiency data, and then not offered to younger people because of the risk of blood clots.
Yet another example is the recommendation for boosters against Omicron. Israel's backing off from recommending a fourth to the general population because among other things the faster loss of protection.
If a person cares about holding Government accountable then they demand answers to why action is taken. In my mind, a rational person would say, "what marginal benefit is accomplished by this action." So that is what I ask you, have you seen real estimated numbers for what is hoped to be accomplished here? If not, why is that not important, I thought this was supposed to be motivated by facts and figures. If these decisions aren't being motivated by numbers then what objective basis is being used to make this decision?
Oh please, many events are a "thing" without being likely at all or likely enough to force a mass, obligatory response to them. Every year in the world a small number of children also die of the flu, this hasn't been used to justify forced, mandatory flu vaccinations on a national and global scale. It's very reasonable to argue against these things without self important response like yours. Furthermore, look at the WHO's list of known cases of vaccine side effects. By your own logic of things simply being a "thing" as justification for strict measures, plenty of argument could be made specifically against olbigatory vaccinations, especially of young people.
Well my experience is the bill always comes due later, 10x true with the way medicine is practiced in the US. I'm not at all worried about the vaccine/covid anyway, I take tons of relatively insane risks. My concern is basically saying to my own government: "Yes sir, Ill inject whatever you want, oh yes for the greater good, yes sir." What other way can I see it after enduring nearly 6 months of demonizing propaganda? Personally I think our government has not made a good enough case to be engaged in the tactics they are taking and the broad support of it approaches fascism. That is
"authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy"
This is coming from someone who was deeply concerned by the erosion of precedents under President Trump. I didn't turn off my skepticism when the man I voted for actually got to office. It feels like I'm on the receiving end of my own political retribution and its really made me pause.
I know several mothers squeamish on risking their children to continual rolling of the dice w.r.t the mRNA vector vaccines. Also, I can unequivocally state that no other vaccine have I ever seen that has to be continually boosted to maintain it's efficacy, which sounds to me like a deficiency in memory cell formation. The bigger issue there, is that in spite of that being an interesting quirk of these vaccines to do research on, no one will, because having "this year's model" of vaccine is a jackpot to Pharmaceutical companies. Dat Annual Recurring Revenue producing nothing but upsides for them.
-New repeatably, and reliably recurring business
-Relaxed or increasingly streamlined approval processes to be lobbied for the next time they want to sneak something through
And the downsides being safely (to them) externalizable
-increased attrition of horseshoe crab populations and concomitant environmental knock-on effects
-accumulating social costs in the damage done by implementing the infrastructure for implementing things like vaccine passports, which can be adapted to non-public health use cases.
I mean, I get where you're coming from. However, I've researched the supply chains, and the stuff that is relied upon for QC'ing this stuff (horseshoe crab blood) is not inexhaustible, and the incentives we're manufacturing are not at all ideal. Just because you've stopped analyzing the problem at the physiological effects on the patient does not mean there isn't reason for concern. Everything is interconnected.
> Also, I can unequivocally state that no other vaccine have I ever seen that has to be continually boosted to maintain it's efficacy, which sounds to me like a deficiency in memory cell formation.
The mRNA vaccines don't produce IgA-mediated sterilizing mucosal immunity and they would not have been expected to, and they should never have really been expected to or promoted as providing sterilizing immunity.
The point, though, is to prevent severe disease and death which is mediated through memory cells, which are doing just fine and not waning, and mostly likely responsible for the bulk of the headlines that Omicron is less virulent -- because the vaccines are actually working for their intended purpose (turning severe COVID into a bad cold).
The vaccine misinformation on HN is really crazy. Conflating lack of protection against infection to failure to form memory cells is not a remotely well informed take.
The DYOR crowd does the absolute worst research. I don't have a problem with the policy in the title article because you all don't know what you're talking about.
And a multiple shot series of a vaccine is common, most of them are. The initial interval with the mRNA vaccines was probably too short for hypermutation/maturation to happen (but was necessary to get people protected as fast as possible, and to keep the trials as short as possible) so the "boosters" are the really the second shot of a two shot series.
You didn't address half the concerns I brought up. I'll even give you your points on "not being designed to provide long term sterilizing immunity".
You still haven't addressed the anti-pattern of cranking out "vaccines of the month", the environmental impact of utilizing a protein from a natural source in a QC process intended to track pharma batches for multiple doses for every human on earth, the incentive problem that emerges from vaccinations not designed for long lasting, sterilizing immunity in that it's already been acknowledged by Goldman Sachs analysts that cures are not a good business model and that this approach to vaccine making seems eerily in that vein of taking this advice to heart.
Condescend on the DYOR folks all you want. If someone didn't, none would ever get done. I, for one, will continue to learn as much as I can, and will encourage people to do as much thinking for themselves as I can. Funny thing I noticed is half the people who say "leave it to the experts" tend to own stock in said experts.
I probably do way more research than you do, but it all reinforces what the experts actually say because I don't spend all my time trolling blogs for counter intuitive takes so I can feel intellectually special.
Many people seem to expect "vaccinated" to mean "enjoy utter immunity to". Kinda like some World of EverDungeon video game, where having the Amulet of Foozaz makes you utterly immune to any & all poisons.
Anti-vaxer's love to play up that meme.
A better analogy would be the body armor that Marines wear in combat zones. No Marine is stupid enough to believe that wearing body armor will make him completely immune to bullets. And certainly no Marine is stupid enough to say "I won't wear it, because it doesn't make me completely immune to bullets".
Yup. And besides, it's been clear for a good while now that it boils down to personal protection and keeping hospital capacity at bay. Yet there is so much illogical fear of "antivaxxers/unvaccinated" in the vaccinated crowd.
You know how 64x1.2 GHz multicore CPUs can be faster than one single 1.2 GHz CPU?
The same principle works in medicine. Instead of one institute doing 10 trials over 5 years you can also have 10 institutes doing 10 trials in a year (Note: these are not actual numbers, just a show of peinciple).
The trials for the corona vaccines have not been done at a worse quality, as far as I can tell the opposite is actually the case. No vaccine ever had this many critical eyes on it.
While it's very unlikely, we simply don't know if some unknown side-effect will pop up in 10 years and the only way to find out is to wait 10 years and verify empirically.
This is a non-argument. We simply don't know many things before we actually observe them. We don't know whether the stone we let fall a thousand times will still fall after thousand-and-one times. But we can assume it does not, because this wouldn't match the rest of the rules we observed so far.
Granted, RNA vaccines are quite new (although a lot older than the pandemic), but the mechanisms behind RNA are older still. Out cells produce RNA all the time. What you propose is, that RNA produced by our cells today, will somehow miraculously show an effect a decade after it is gone. What is true for the RNA triggered by the vaccine must be true for our own RNA as well. That means our body would have to remember every piece of RNA produced in every cell for a decade.
I am not a medical expert, but I think this is highly unlikely. That would be like drinking a bottle of Schnaps today and being drunk 10 years after it left your body.
While you're technically correct, gravity vs. side-effects from vaccines are in wholly different categories.
I don't know enough to judge by myself and agree that it's highly unlikely, but I've noticed that we've been surprised before by these new vaccines: the AZ blood clots came out of the blue and it took about a year for the cause to be discovered - I remember reading that the culprit was accidental injection in the bloodstream after all. Myocarditis is still a mystery.
I call this the "vaccines will turn us into zombies" theory. Quite laughable, but we'll have to wait and see. :-)
I did not claim this is the case in general, but the phases the vaccine trials were conducted more parallel than usually would be the case. See Nature.com:
> The world was able to develop COVID-19 vaccines so quickly because of years of previous research on related viruses and faster ways to manufacture vaccines, enormous funding that allowed firms to run multiple trials in parallel, and regulators moving more quickly than normal.
No amount of parallelism is going to impact the fundamental time constraint of 1 human body. So it goes with pregnancy and so it must go for trusting long term impact. In an ideal world we'd know the second generational impact which would necessarily take 20-40 years. Referring to the awesome parallelism is a red herring to distract from the lack of long term controlled study.
It is reasonable, if it’s true. It was reasonable initially. Unfortunately, that narrative isn’t very true or honest, and it’s getting less true over time. This vaccine’s method was developed for years before COVID hit, and specific mRNA vaccines can be developed faster than other kinds. It took the normal amount of time to get testing and FDA approval, and at this point, the vaccine has been both approved and more widely tested than almost all other vaccines in history. At this point, the doubt should by all historical markers be fading into the ether.
I am glad you have declared the time for reasonable doubt is over. How about this: Would it be reasonable to say there should be long-term random trial studies instead of no saying no short-term side effects have occurred, yet, since that is how science is (was?) done? Pfizer eliminated their long-term control study group by vaccinating them. Would it be reasonable for scientists to review the FDA's approach and data they used to quickly approve the vaccines? Why does the FDA want to have 55 years to release the data? Is that reasonable given current technology to search, sort, filter, and redact or organize what they want to share to comply with the FOIA request? And the review could prove that people are at risk if errors or omissions are found, so they should staff up, and comply. Would it be reasonable for those of us who have had COVID to wonder why natural immunity is being totally ignored by the US government? It's a pandemic of the immune vs. the non-immune, and not the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated. Or the old and unhealthy vs. the rest. Why a privately funded study on natural immunity by John Hopkins being done because our unquestionable CDC has done barely any given most studies show natural immunity is equal if not better than the vaccine more in line with how natural immunity has been viewed for decades? As rare as myocarditis is, vaccine causes it more in 16-24-year-old males than a COVID infection, and your risk of a serious COVID infection in that age group assuming you're not obese and suffering from other comorbidities is small enough that you should have the right to decide on whether it is good for you or not to get jabbed. If you are winded and have trouble making a flight of stairs, you have other issues aside from COVID you should be addressing. And if you get vaccinated, you need to get boosted soon thereafter to be in the "in crowd". Is it reasonable to point out that more than three quarters of hospitalizations and deaths involve older aged people and involve comorbidities such as obesity and diabetes, and expect policies to be more intelligent and discriminatory in using data to make societal decisions that minimize COVID serious hospitalizations and deaths while also minimizing impact to the well being of the younger, healthier population that are not in the same risk category, our economy, mental health, and quality of life with reasonable risk? They post an article of a six-year old that says they were otherwise healthy, and then you see a photo, and the child is beyond a doubt, obese, and who knows what other comorbidities were at work. Great to way to scare mass vaccination of healthy children as human shields for uninformed fearful parents and adults. Where is the healthy skepticism of people pre-COVID when big pharma was not given a pass without scrutiny? Aren't we at present dealing with the opioid crisis they helped create? I am shocked people trained in science have bought the current version of "The Science" which is nothing other than shut up and do it or else. I and my family are not anti-vax. We have had our vaccinations for everything other than COVID, except we had COVID and recovered. Why is my job being put on the line over a jab I don't need, and does not protect anyone else given my status? I get tested weekly in order to be able to go to my office (pre-mandate policy), yet 6 of 175 people have had a COVID infection after a double jab, and at least 2 of those had a booster! How come they don't need to be tested? They can give it to me, other vaccinated people, and anyone who is not vaccinated nor immune. And boy, do the miracle vaccines seemingly become less miraculous each month as studies show how quickly their effectiveness fades or is downgraded. A vaccine has to show 50% effectiveness for the FDA to approve it. They are touted as helping the majority of the population, which is at lower risk for serious hospitalization or death. I am not suggesting you wait and get COVID, but I am asking for you to think about the n...
No, they can believe what they want as far as I’m concerned. Completely physically excluding them from society is enough. If they want to ‘protect’ themselves from the vaccine they have that right, absolutely, but the rest of us also have the right to protect ourselves from them.
Unvaccinated people are a threat to the public on many grounds. Many of these points are already all over this discussion here, but you’re asking so here they are.
Unvaccinated people with covid on average have the infection for longer and have higher viral loads, so they are more likely to spread the virus to others than vaccinated people are. They are much more likely to need hospitalisation, putting a burden on the health system which hurts health care workers, and uses up health care resources needed by others.
People with non-covid illnesses, or people with covid because they can’t be vaccinated for various legitimate reasons, are dying in some cases because health care systems are so busy caring for sick or dying vax deniers with covid.
So these people are a clear danger to the public, and our health care systems in particular. Their choices are putting unreasonable and unfair demands on health care workers, and even killing people.
I haven't seen data for Canada, but in the US, at no time in the past two years have more than 80% of ICU beds been occupied. At no time have more than 25% of ICU beds been occupied by Covid patients. And the impact of Covid on overall inpatient hospitalization has been negligible. [1]
Are you sure Trudeau isn't gaslighting you into believing the problems with Canadian healthcare are due to the unvaccinated, and not due to a failing health care system whose problems pre-date Covid?
In Why Ontario hospitals are full to bursting, despite few COVID-19 patients the CBC reported:
> The data suggests many hospitals have returned to the overcrowding levels seen before the pandemic, when CBC News revealed hospitals filled beyond capacity nearly every single day, with patients housed in hallways, conference rooms and cafeterias not as exceptional cases, but as a matter of routine.[2]
If you select each state you can see near 100% levels for Alabama, Florida, California, Idaho, Texas, etc.. You can't ship desperately ill patients around the state very easily to fill ICU beds, so smaller cities/regions absolutely hit 100%.
Furthermore, as they approach 100% they start enacting "crisis standards of care" such that people who would have been admitted are not. They're put in hospital conference rooms, hallways, or regular rooms without the normal life saving equipment present.
We have a terminology problem, and nobody seems to notice or care. Everyone is using sloppy language and has been for most of this thing.
In reality, there are more bits here than just vaccine status, and even that isn't binary, unless you start talking about the moving target of "fully vaccinated".
An unvaccinated person who has been infected and recovered is not at all the same as a person who has not. Yet here you are righteously and confidently proclaiming that "these people are a clear danger to the public".
Your statement is a serious accusation, and it is sloppy and imprecise, and plain wrong for some significant chunk of the people it is being lobbed at. Yet not many people will bat an eye, because its the same sloppy language everyone else is using.
Does what you just said somehow make it better that you (and virtually everyone else I see talking about this stuff) is saying things that are more than a little inaccurate? What do you think that does for good will in these kinds of conversations?
When you (the royal you, not just you specifically) are going to get into proclaiming what we all can or cannot do, it seems like there should be some care paid to being precise, and being correct. Its no skin off your back if you're a little loose with your terminology, but there are many millions of folks that you're maligning by doing so, folks that you need to come along with whatever policies you're proposing, unless you want to go full on despot mode.
Better terminology would go a long way towards getting people on the same page.
So you're willing to pay to keep anti-vaxxer's alive right? You're willing to pay for their housing, food, healthcare, etc. so long as you can keep them away from everyone else?
They’re a danger to themselves and others. I have family members that work in health care that are affected by this. I don’t see why any further justification is necessary.
I don’t agree with those equating this with crimes and prison. Those are not equivalent, these people aren’t criminals and rounding up or imprisoning them is abhorrent. But to participate in society is about obligations as well as rights, and I think withdrawing certain privileges in the face of wilful disregard of one’s obligations is reasonable if it is necessary to protect others.
> They’re a danger to themselves and others. I have family members that work in health care that are affected by this. I don’t see why any further justification is necessary.
There is a lot more justification needed, because "They’re a danger to themselves and others." is a generalization that is potentially not true. Vaccinated people can still infect others, while an unvaccinated person can be more strict about testing and masking, which could in practice lead to better protection than just being vaccinated. Especially if the vaccination has been developed for the alpha strain and omicron seems not impressed by it, while for males under 40 the chance to contract myocarditis from vaccination is higher than for contracting it from covid.
I don't think that society has any right to bully individuals into taking a vaccine that has not been shown to really stop the spread and is not really efficient against the dominating strains of the virus. For making this an obligation, the results of the vaccine are not good enough, while this and the other counterarguments are not being discussed enough.
My dad spent his life working in public health, including vaccinations. “Doesn’t believe in science and progress” and “very often misogynistic and racist” is how Trudeau would describe your typical villager in Asia or Africa—the people my dad spent a lifetime serving. But Trudeau’s unrelated moral crusades are utterly irrelevant to the issue of public health, and he’s deeply damaging the public health effort by trying to tie them together. This is public health 101. You don’t use health as a vehicle for ideological issues because that destroys trust. E.g. if your Muslim villager won’t see a female doctor you find a male doctor. If pregnant women in Bangladeshi villages don’t trust western educated doctors, you build referral relationships with traditional midwives. (That one is a true story.) Health is the first and last consideration.
He's making the same mistake we see all over social media these days. The collective assumption that everyone who disagrees with any ONE popular narrative, must also disagree with ALL other popular narratives.
Anti-vaxxers must also be climate change deniers and racists and anti-abortion, etc...
It makes it easier to hate people you disagree with if they're fundamentally evil in all the same ways. It saves you from having to have discussions with them, from having to think for yourself, and from any ethical dilemma when you mistreat them.
There’s more nuance to this than you’re portraying because wedge issues exist. Once groups take sides on an issue the predictive power of knowing what someone thinks on one issue implying their stance on every issue skyrockets.
It’s not about thinking for yourself more than it’s a consequence of people being good at mounting a defense for their own ideas whatever they are or wherever they originate. The more “research” you do on an issue the more likely you’ll come away with nothing more than better arguments for your existing stance.
And I’m not claiming to be above it, you can play this game with me too. I am exactly the bleeding heart snowflake liberal.
It also doesn’t matter what people’s beliefs are. In my (Muslim) home country homosexuality and abortion are illegal. But they’re still entitled to public health services. For public health, and science more generally, to be trusted, it must be above all the other political, religious, etc., debates.
Its more of the same tactic in politics as used by chief nazi propagandists: "Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred."
It still surprises me how efficiently all our worlds leaders shifted blame from them for our shitty covid health response to the unvaccinated as though the vaccine was available from the beginning.
Lumping all the people you hate makes, and assuming they all share all the same negative characteristics, makes it easy to hate just anyone who doesn't agree with absolutely everything you say.
It's just another modern flavor of intolerance and authoritarianism.
Edit: Whoops, Privacy Badger had deleted the embedded video. Check that if you're not seeing it.
OK, so he said that we all know people who are hesitant to get the vaccine and we'll be considerate of them, but there is also a small group that is unequivocally opposed to the vaccine (who don't believe in science, who are often racist, mysoginist etc). About them we have to make a choice: Do we tolerate them, or do we say look, most people are vaccinated, we want to go back to the things we like doing, and these people are blocking us.
So yeah, throwing in the racist and mysoginist thing was in poor taste. Hardly Watergate material, though.
There is a video in your first link. Trudeau does in fact say that, though in French (and as someone who speaks French and has just listened to the first-hand recording, yes, the translation is more or less correct).
I'm inclined to give him more leeway than the rest of the commenters here, as I think the unvaccinated do need to be censured, and in developed countries where information is abundant suggesting that it is safe and everyone should take it, it is increasingly unforgivable and intolerable for folks to be unvaccinated. As someone below quite aptly said: "If they want to ‘protect’ themselves from the vaccine they have that right, absolutely, but the rest of us also have the right to protect ourselves from them."
Virtually everyone I know voted for Biden, doesn't hate black people or women, and is tired of covid measures. The virus isn't going anywhere, we're all vaccinated, it's time to move on. Even if the 10-20% of the population that isn't vaccinated gets vaccinated it would not make the virus go away. There is a optimal amount of risk like there is an optimal amount of dirt in my home.
Trudeau's rhetoric is shocking. Biden would never stoop to that level nor would have Obama. It's "deplorables" all over again and in addition to being cruel it's poor politics.
"My liberal friends" show that this is not a wedge issue as the previous poster suggested. They are "anti-lockdown" and to a large extent "anti-mask" but they don't hate women, blacks, or science.
But the point is that anti-vaccine people tend to be the hateful ones. Vaccines are a wedge issue. Lockdowns aren’t as much - if you’re already vaccinated.
Honestly - almost no one really disagrees with that statement either. We all know it might not be helpful to get people vaccinated but we also know it’s true.
>But the point is that anti-vaccine people tend to be the hateful ones.
Hi Trudeau! Listen, the issue here is that you cannot clump two uncorrelated issues together, and even if they were correlated, it wouldn't be fair as for sure there's people that (please sit down, this may me quite shocking to you) do not want to get the vaccine BUT are also not part of whatever group you refer to as "the hateful ones".
Nowhere does “vaccines, masks, and lockdowns became a wedge issue picked up by large groups of people largely associated with hate” and “anyone who is anti-vax must be a part of that group.”
You absolutely can clump unrelated issues together when they’re specifically adopted by people who organize under a common banner or label. You don’t think that issues that make up “the liberal agenda” are reasonably well defined? Does it mean that literally every single liberal cares about all of them with the same fervor? Hell no, but it strongly predicts the views of someone who uses the label and the issues are cut so cleanly you can even make statements like “the typical person who cares strongly about native peoples identifies as a liberal.”
I don't see how your behavior is any different from assuming all black men are criminals. I think you're wrong for same reason that assumption is wrong.
A year ago this would've been called a conspiracy theory. Saying that this would happen on Facebook or Twitter would've been called misleading or even got you banned.
The disease has changed to reduce the effectiveness of the vaccines to the point where they don't show any significant ability to stop the spread. The current vaccines may help the individual against Omicron but does nothing to help the collective.
The efficacy for reducing disease severity is super high and it's what's keeping many jurisdictions from not getting hospitals stuffed with Omicron patients.
The vaccine isn't experimental, stop with that stupid trope. How many billions more patients do you want before you'll consider the known data definitive?
Ah I wasn't aware that reduction in rates of hospitalization by a factor of 20 do nothing to help the collective. What kind of ridiculous argument is this?
South Africa with only 23% double vaccinated, reported the same. R0 overtaken by hospitalization probability. Leading to an overall reduction in 80% of hospitalizations
> The reason the powers of states in the west were limited to a degree - it was because the person was held as sacred. Most of the old judges deeply understand this. The politicians don't.
This conception is more mythos than reality. You should look at some of the early laws passed in many of these countries if you think we had a tradition of "strong" natural rights that are only being abrogated in our modern era.
It used to be illegal to publish content critical of the government [0], not to mention the fact that the franchise was restricted to those holding property, and definitely not considering ongoing active slavery.
I don't understand your connection to demonization of the poor.
I can understand why the push for vaccines even though they don't stop spreading and catching it. They seem to improve chances of survival and lessen chances of severe disease.
That said, if the government takes away benefits, then it should give back all the taxes withheld on one's salary before it does that.
On another note, personally I don't see any other solution to the pandemic, other than everybody/most people gaining some kind of natural immunity. Places requiring some form of green pass are none other than VIP superspreader events, where the Green Pass is the VIP ticket. People holding the Green Pass, will then go to meet others who may or may not be vaccinated, but who will eventually catch Covid.
> That said, if the government takes away benefits, then it should give back all the taxes withheld on one's salary before it does that.
That’s not how government, taxes or being part of civil society works at all.
> personally I don't see any other solution to the pandemic, other than everybody/most people gaining some kind of natural immunity
This is scientifically illiterate as Omicron bypasses all “natural” immunity whereas a vaccine gives stronger protection. What’s to stop future variants doing exactly the same?
Maybe if youre boosted and its been 14 days but not greater than 45 days. But citation needed anyway. Natural immunity was not totally bypassed. South Africa kicked Omicron's ass with regard to case fatality rate.
Citation? I literally just watched the deputy chief medical officer for England (Van Tam) explain how infection and the vaccines work on BBC iPlayer last night.
No, NAP is pretty clear. It's just some people treat it as a silver bullet, when it's only a fundamental building block. Libertarians are not against having contractual jurisdictions which would mandate being vaccinated on a certain territory, as long as you can quit that jurisdiction at any time.
It's not clear that getting vaccinated would stop you from spreading the virus though.
> as long as you can quit that jurisdiction at any time.
Nobody is going door to door and arresting unvaccinated people. It’s not like the anti-choice law in Texas that criminalizes two people working together to stop a woman from being pregnant against her will. You still have your freedom under the NAP. But as soon as you present a threat to infect other people by being unvaccinated, there are reasonable restrictions in place.
Edit: I’m seeing replies saying the NAP is strictly about physical violence.
To that I ask, are bioweapons fine to use in libertarianland? Can I hold a city hostage with weaponized anthrax because the libertarianism is, at its root, a cover for voting Republican and not a coherent political philosophy?
> Should infecting others with a flu also be considered violence?
How is it not violence to infect others with a serious disease? It causes bodily harm.
It is assault to knowingly expose others to a communicable disease.
However, using the flu as an example isn’t very good as spreading the common cold doesn’t carry criminal consequences. If you are referring to Covid as a “flu” then it’s another matter.
The NAP is very basic and fundamental (in stark contrast to all the laws we have on book). And in order to be so and not open to too-much interpretation, it has a very narrow and explicit scope that has emergent properties. If you expand it you're back into "government" and "interpretation" territory and have made the NAP meaningless.
Just look at this thread and all the disagreement about vaccine policy; even without the NAP at play and with supposed "social contract" and "laws" and "constitutions" and "UN Declaration of human rights" we still can't agree how to coexist and deal with this pandemic. Meanwhile, the authoritarian CCP/Chinese government is handling it just fine, and probably laughing their asses off right now at the rest of the world's inability to deal with this. The rules are currently stacked in favor of bullies, whether that's an overreaching government like Canada in this case, China and international law that allows it to not be punished for this world-scale disaster, or everyday bullies that are effectively victim-blaming people who are discriminated against because of their medical choices.
Pretty arrogant of you to assume that liberals aren't arming themselves to protect against people that have been threatening violence and advocating for coups to overturn democratic results.
Pretty arrogant of you to think jumping on the bandwagon at the last second would help.
Fortnite is not great training material chump. It's rich to see the same people crying about taking people's guns now want guns. Better to think liberals gun owners that have never used a gun talk about life long gun owners whose kids could even smoke you. Lol. Rookie.
Edit: It looks like your account has been doing this a lot, and also using HN primarily for ideological battle. We need you to stop doing those things if you don't want to get banned here. They're not what this site is for, and they destroy what it is for.
As part of that, please make sure you're using HN primarily for intellectual curiosity, not primarily for political or ideological battle. Those things are disjoint and we need accounts to stay on the curiosity side of the line. The pattern of your last several comments is on the wrong side of the line; if you'd please correct this, we'd appreciate it.
You can't do a comparison like that because there are absolutely no 2 countries like each other and how they count cases is also different so that data does not exist.
You can however look at what's happening in a single country despite the vaccination: Portugal, with close to 90% vaccination rate, is getting the highest rates of infection ever as we speak. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/portugal/
For a vaccine that's supposed to slow or stop the spread, sorry but that kind of trend is not very convincing.
This argument is scientifically (which you wanted) void: since you are not making a comparison with a low vaccination country, it does not make any sense. Try harder.
I'll give you an example: Russia with relatively low vaccination rates has close to the highest number of excess deaths per capita. Portugal you mentioned is not even close.
> are absolutely no 2 countries like each other
fortunately there are like 200+ of them, so one should be able to see a trend. Even the 50 US states would work.
From what I see you are the one not understanding science and ignoring facts here. You just dismissed my first link based on an irrelevant claim that countries with high vaccination rates still have outbreaks (duh).
> You just dismissed my first link based on an irrelevant claim that countries with high vaccination rates still have outbreaks (duh).
you mentioned the first step is hindered. Which is completely not proven by the fact that countries with high vaccination rates should effectively have a R trending towards zero if the vaccines even worked half as well as they should. Instead you see major outbreaks which completely contradicts the "hindrance" you refer to.
> From what I see you are the one not understanding science and ignoring facts here.
And you just made a new claim with 0 backing in numbers.
I don't know if you are arguing in good faith here, but definitely in low quality. Show us the numbers supporting your point. You just implied R is not affected by vaccination status, but you have provided 1 data to back this.
Whereas I provided a cumulative of thousands of cases, that directly support my point.
"the fact that countries with high vaccination rates should effectively have a R trending towards zero if the vaccines even worked half as well as they should" (implying they do not have R trending to 0 vs unvaxxed).
yeah, vaccine is marketing-speak. We should call these shots something else, because that's not what people typically understand by the word "vaccine". But that ship to fight on the name has sailed for a long time.
It's amazing that the unvaccinated are being blamed for the vaccine not working.
I mean, look at BC in Canada where the most at-risk people have a vaxx rate of 99%+ and overall rate of ~90% for the rest of the eligible population, the government still saw fit to shut it all down 3 days before Christmas. Compliance doesn't ensure freedom.
That's because hospitals are still too full. If my grandmother has a heart attack, or your brother gets hit by a drunk driver around New Years, that person will need healthcare.
And while ~80% of the eligible population has been vaccinated, the 18% of the population that's unvaccinated is responsible for 67% of hospitalizations, and nearly 80% of ICU admissions [0]. Note for the source - while it's fun to play with and look around, I'm sourcing my numbers from the Doughnut Charts section
Please keep tedious generic flamewar off this site. It's repetitive and usually turns nasty. No one does it out of curiosity, therefore it's off topic here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We have systems in place for people who want to refuse standard vaccinations: live in a religious enclave like the Amish. You don't want to participate in our society? Then don't participate in our society. Go be Amish and see how that works out for you.
I am responding to your comment - you say that asserting your rights by not taking the vaccine won't end the pandemic, while I am saying that taking it won't end it either.
Like if a group of people banded together and said that they didn't want to associate with unvaccinated people, should they have the freedom to do that without interference from the unvaccinated?
If that were true, and you were willing to allow me the same level of freedom as you demand for yourself then surely my freedom to harm you trumps your well-being?
Note that the Supreme Court validated Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, supporting the right of the government to mandate vaccines (remember, George Washington mandated vaccines for his troops) and showing that the power of the state ultimately trumps the freedoms of people.
Honestly, you're making arguments (in multiple comments) that make you look petulant, rather than providing a reasonable argument againt vaccine mandates.
No, it is very much relevant. And, systematic denial of employment, education, access to government services etc to a group based on a medical condition very much is apartheid. It is in poor taste to deny it, but I guess the apologists in South Africa were legalistically talking about “nature of the government’s power” too.
As it happens I am a naturalized South African - married to a black woman who had to endure apartheid.
I recited your argument to her and I am quoting her response in saying… “you are a f-ing idiot - I had no choice in being born black and I had no way of becoming white to avoid the consequences of apartheid. The unvaccinated have a choice - they are just choosing not to exercise it.”
You have falsely equated the two scenarios by
abstracting away the thing which matters most: the choice to improve your situation.
If discrimination is only wrong because of lack of choice of the discriminated trait, then why is it wrong to discriminate based on people's religion? Or would you say that it isn't?
I would say that there is not a single non-religious human being on this planet.
Human rights are a religion - they don’t exist. We made them up so we can coexist; and so that we can improve the quality of our lives.
What makes discrimination wrong is that it diminishes the well-being of the discriminated against.
So you are welcome to insist that your well-being is being diminished by vaccine mandates but it would be a peculiar argument since most people are choosing to vaccinate because it improves their well-being.
You seem to be struggling with the fact that objective morality is a social construct.
It's not about WHO makes the decision. It's about the inherent quality of the decision being made irrespective of who makes it.
Of course it's your choice to drive your car into a wall at 200km/h, but in the way society uses the word "objectively" and "true" it is objectively true that driving into a wall at 200km/h is detrimental to your well-being. And it is objectively true that in doing so you are making a bad decision.
In the same way that is objectively true that seatbelts save lives, it is objectively true that vaccines save lives. Therefore not doing what's conducive to your well-being is a bad choice.
The metrics, measurements and methods used to arrive at these conclusions are as objective as empiricism allows for.
>Those who don't want to vaccinate also choose to do so because it improves their well-being
Yes. They using the exact same words. Are you convinced by their arguments? I am not.
What I am convinced of is how intellectually dishonest they are in parroting words without bringing evidence to the table.
The Supreme Court also validated slavery and other actions that proved to be incredibly damaging to the society.
As for George Washington, if you are attempting to make the argument that the government has a right to inoculate it’s military soldiers during war time against a disease, so be it, there is your precedent to argue upon. Furthermore, Washington has a habit of requiring many things, including the Militia Acts which required every able bodied male to own a military firearm. I don’t currently see an argument to enforce that idea. Pick and choose.
But using his small pox inoculation program from the 1700’s and a tiny military of rag tag farmer soldiers as a basis to go after an entire free and educated society of hundreds of millions in the 2000’s for an experimental vaccine, you are stretching this further than it could go.
The information is out there for people to make decisions now. They’ve made it, make a better argument.
If you're referring Dred Scott, I agree the Supreme Court validated slavery (this is at least one of the causes of the Civil War). That is, the decision had such consequence that the nation was nearly split, and after the war, several amendments were added that overrode the Court.
I don't see anybody gearing up to have a civil war over vaccines, just a bunch of "make a better argument for why you have the right to tell me I have to do this, with economic or social consequences if I don't" responses. The military already exited folks who didn't comply with COVID vaccines, and the Biden administration has already requested that the SC officially rule on workplace mandates (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21A244/206997/2021...).
The reality of the situation seems to be that we have all decided upon the proper collective course of action and you are the one who is in denial.
You are the one who seems to have no clue why nations form, why this particular nation came into being, and what demands it has made over and over upon its citizens for the benefit of their fellow Americans. If you do not like it then you are the one who should leave. We, the many, are happy to show you the door and will help you pack your bags. Seriously.
“We, the many, believe so much in the narrative that these vaccines are effective, despite the consistent spread of the disease it was aimed to stop, so much so that we will kick anyone out of society that does not agree with the collective mob. Most of which who are scientifically illiterate and get their news from talking heads and the revolving door of medical officials/pharma execs.”
Covid is now endemic - that is the scientific consensus.
Are you suggesting that we permanently give up our right to decide what medications to take?
Taking a vaccine is a forced medical procedure for the benefit of someone other than the individual. I'm fully vaccinated and boosted, but I recognize that effectively forcing this upon people by denying them fundamental rights and services, is not ethical, and sets an intolerable precedent.
Several vaccines are already mandated for a variety of travel to countries, jobs etc.
Covid is not new in that regard and all this nonsense about an “intolerable precedent” is ridiculous. The precedent has been around with us for a long time and we’ve been fine with it. The only reason this comes up now is because of increased visibility on it.
I will gladly take an FDA approved vaccine like any other for such reasons.
None of the available ones right now are. Yes even Pfizer isn’t as the approved Pfizer vax (Comirnaty) is not the same exact vaccine as the one currently available/being used.
Edit: In short, many of us fear that the regulatory processes that govern our healthcare have been hijacked by corporate interest. We all know this leads to corners being cut as that’s inevitably how businesses are run.
Why do you think specifically this has to do with corporate interests?
Doesn’t Occam’s razor say that it’s just the fact the pandemic is destroying society and there is immense pressure from everywhere to accelerate usually very slow and bureaucratic processes because the risk reward ratio is completely different than the one for a vaccine for more contained diseases?
Yes, this virus is brutal and highly dangerous, which is why we need to do everything we can to stop it, not just somethings that are highly lucrative.
Why hasn’t the news or our medical governance brought up the fact that a small intranasal injection can greatly prevent transmission?
We're having trouble since the beginning of the pandemic getting people to wear a simple cloth mask. You want them to inject stuff up their nose on a regular basis now?
When you say "why isn't x happening" I'd like to invite you to think about what x would look like, in practice, and what it is you actually are expecting.
This has nothing to do with how lucrative it is. Just how practical. Note the author doesn't even say this measure can replace PPE and other preventative measures.. just add to them.
This vaccine is different in that it is only partially effective, and unless you are in a high risk group, taking it is primarily for the benefit of others, not you.
Also, prior to covid, only students were required to take vaccines - all for illnesses that were much more severe than covid. There were few or none for adults - aside from a small number of countries requiring foreigners to vaccinate for illnesses they were attempting to eradicate.
That's all very different than requiring it for your own citizens so that they can work, travel, and receive government services.
Then how about you practice your own damn rules? This one in particular
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
In the strongest possible interpretation (had you assumed good faith) my comment is NOT inflamatory.
I am pointing out that pandemics are a PvE (Player vs Environment) game, not PvP (Player vs Player) game. And I am stating the ovious: the E in PvE doesn't care about your rights.
Interpretations can differ, obviously, but I wouldn't say that was a borderline call. Your comment was snarky and aggressive on a divisive topic. That's a flamewar comment.
There's an interesting phenomenon where, in responding to moderation comments, people often explain what they originally meant in a form that would have been much better to say in the first place. It seems to me you did that here:
> pandemics are a PvE (Player vs Environment) game, not PvP (Player vs Player) game.
That's an interesting observation which could have formed the nucleus of a thoughtful comment. However, you didn't post anything like that in the GP. The trouble is that you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) have your meaning in your head, but the rest of us don't have access to that, so if it's to come across, you need to explain it explicitly. Making a snarky comment that somehow presupposes your meaning doesn't do this. That is, it does it for the person speaking (who has access to the implicit meaning) but for everyone else, only the snark comes across, not the argument. For best results, you should include the argument and drop the snark. That's what the site guidelines are trying to get at.
>There's an interesting phenomenon where, in responding to moderation comments, people often explain what they originally meant in a form that would have been much better to say in the first place.
I am surprised tha this surprises you. It is generally true that in responding to any evolving dialogue, people often explain what they originally meant in a form that would've been much better to say in the first place.
Because that's how dialogue works, and that's what dialogue is for. Elucidating meaning.
What is baffling me in this interaction is that you seem perfectly aware of the fact that my meaning is in my head, but then you also expected to find it in my words without any dialogue.
Perhaps this will be clearer: (1) don't post snarky, low-information comments to HN; (2) do say something thoughtful and substantive.
Having something substantive in your head does not justify posting a snarky low-information comment. You need to make the substantive comment explicitly, and without the snark.
Perhaps this will be clearer: (1) Don't interpret my post as snarky (2) don't judge my comment as thoughtless and non-substantive when a thoughtful and substantive interpretation to my laconic comment exists (as you have become aware).
I heard you have a rule about that. Maybe you could lead by example.
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Lots of people in this thread are arguing the "do the vaccines reduce spread thing" as justification for or against this policy. I don't think that even matters.
These vaccines have risks that are not being opening discussed. There is an unprecedented systematic campaign of censorship, deception and propaganda aimed at people who question anything about these vaccines. Vaccine injuries are real. The performance of these vaccines are not meeting expectations. They should not be mandated, full stop. We need a system based on informed consent, not coercion.
There have been extensive studies of the risks of these vaccines, both during their trials and after public use, and these studies are continuing.
The regulators on several counties including the US have even publicly registered concerns about several of the vaccines, particularly the J&J single dose vaccine. None of these studies have been suppressed or censored, and they are ongoing and I see debate about them going on in the press and on forums like this all the time.
Some social media platforms ban provably false statements on this and other topics, and sometimes those restrictions go too far. That is not the same thing as banning all public debate.
> That is not the same thing as banning all public debate.
It is throwing water on discussion at critical times simultaneous to strong government intervention which resets the discussion to the new overton window. You don't need to ban public debate you just play talk to the hand and call anyone who disagrees with you probably racist and or russian dissonance.
There have not been extensive studies. The original long term safety studies from the vaccine trials were stopped. There are huge issues in the original trials, they were not done with the rigor that we've come to expect from previous vaccines.
There are plenty of examples of people who have disagreed with current vaccine policy and them being censored or destroyed- and have the bills to show for it! We even have emails from leaders of the federal government that show they engage in these tactics routinely. Honestly I don't know how people don't see these tactics being played every day.
Your "side" is led by a man who claims "he is science" and anyone who disagrees with him is "disagreeing with science." Give me a break.
There are extensive, long-term trials, with results being published every day, on vaccine effectiveness for every vaccine and every variant from all sorts of public and private institutions all over the world.
Do you even "do your own research"? There's new papers coming out that you can read on /r/covid19, easily summarized and explained, and they all points towards similar conclusions over and over again.
This idea that "there are huge issues" seems to be a repeated meme without any epidemiological basis.
> extensive studies of the risks of these vaccines
How and when? This time last year (when trump said a vaccine was less than a year away) these same medical professionals were warning us that vaccine testing takes years in the best case.
Yep, they were crapping on the vaccines and now they're forcing people to take the same ones. People too easily forget what politicians spew. Critical thinking is lost on many.
Vaccine testing takes as long as it takes to expose enough of the trial participants to see a statistically significant difference between the test and control groups. There isn't a bioaccumulation issue because the vaccine isn't administered daily, so the only long term harms would show up in the time it takes systems to react to it, which would be on the order of days. We have clearly observed long term harm from infection, starting a few days after infection, but no such harm from the vaccine, except for very low rates of myocarditis in young men.
599 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadVery odd.
Vaccines reduce spread. Even if it doesn’t stop spread completely it’s still a significant factor.
In this case, they don't.
You're right that there's no definite answer to this, but the general consensus among doctors is that it doesn't prevent the virus from spreading.
OTOH, the measures that are being implemented for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated are out of proportion based on the evidence we have.
“ In a November press conference, Tedros Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO, said that the vaccines were 60 percent protective against spreading the virus prior to the arrival of the delta variant. That number has dropped to 40 percent post-Delta. Omicron may worsen the problem, if, as suspected, it is more transmissible and leads to many more breakthrough infections.”
Unmitigated spread accelerates evolution. Mitigating the spread slows it down.
There are a number of studies both identifying a mechanism for covid to have reduced spread due to vaccine and verifying that this occurs empirically. The difference is decreased with newer variants but:
1. Hybrid immunity is even stronger at reducing spread and only possible with prior vaccination
2. There is still non-negligible reduced spread which can be impactful.
At some point, there is no realistic difference between R=10 and R=7. Everyone is getting this. Some of us have known that since March 2020.
If your theory includes "avoid being infected with coronavirus" and you live in a democratic country it is a flawed theory. Only full home isolation or hazmat suit rituals will suffice.
If you attempt to spread it out and succeed, you're at 100% capacity basically all of the time, plus 99% of people get to deal with the fact that coronavirus restrictions are utterly miserable.
Omicron has probably made all of this irrelevant anyway, it's so contagious that effectively everyone who goes outside is getting it this month. 1 in 15 in London right now and that's only the confirmed cases I believe.
"Everyone" is a significant stretch. Yeah its seriously contagious but you, an engineer, should know better than deal with such absolutes. Viruses burn out long before they infect everyone, even without vaccines and even if they're extremely contagious.
We're not far off 1 in 5 _confirmed_ in the UK and most of that was pre Omicron.
Based on the experience of my friendship group I believe that huge numbers of people have probably had it and not even noticed. I finally had a positive test and it was indistinguishable from the other 30 times I've woken up a bit tired in the morning over the past two years.
You have to remember that a lot of people aren't tuned in to the "omg test every time you move" stuff.
Also you can take the seatbelt off when you get out of the car.
It's still nonsense (click it or ticket laws), but you gotta pick your battles. Though I'm ready to murder the people who invented/mandated "beep incessantly if the seatbelt is not clicked, even if the car is stationary".
A better example would be driving drunk, given that you are at an increased risk of injuring others.
Remember that a seatbelt also prevents your body from being a projectile that would be launched against other people in an accident, you're not just a danger to yourself when you don't wear one.
While I do agree that wearing a seatbelt is in most cases a good idea, there still do exist people who are opposed to the mandatory seatbelt laws (even decades after they were introduced).
I personally don't because I know about autoimmune diseases, but hey, you seem to be of that "crowd" who only talks in quotes because they don't understand much.
Let's not be willfully disingenuous here. Obviously, the types of "vaccine" injuries or potential long-term problems that many people are fearful about don't dissipate into the ether.
Interestingly, your comparison is relevant, but you are responding to an argument which I don't think is being made. The OP is _not_ arguing that vaccines shouldn't be mandatory because they aren't 100% effective.
On the contrary, the OP's argument is that since vaccines are relatively effective, one person's choice to not get vaccinated will not effect the others, and it should be up to them.
Your seatbelt example is relevant, in that the same "no-harm-to-others" argument can be made in that case too.
In an incident, an un-seat-belted occupant can turn into a projectile and harm or kill others in the vehicle that might be wearing seatbelts.
I actually think the analogy is a relatively good one. Parallels also also run for the question of how much "paternalism" do we want (the limits of "for-your-own-good" argument). Interests of insurance providers (whether social or private) is also involved in both cases.
In the case of vaccines, immunocompromised people's health is also a consideration. And there is the issue of side-effects, especially for young people. And there is "bodily autonomy". And the stress on healthcare system, etc.
I think there could reasonable discussion about these issues. However, the sad reality is that things quickly get reduced to repeating trite "rallying cries".
If you're not seriously doing your part, then you are actively supporting the virus and working against all the rest of the population that is either unable to get critical care or just tirelessly working in the healthcare sector treating all those avoidable critical patients.
But it will effect others:
> But here’s the thing. A crankish libertarian – I count myself as one – might understand that seatbelts save lives, and still object to being required to wear one, on personal freedom grounds. That’s perhaps tenable when it comes to seatbelt laws, since the only life in peril from not wearing one is your own.
> But vaccines not only make it less likely that you will be infected, suffer or die: They also make it less likely that you will infect others, to suffer and die – and infect still more people – in their turn. (And yes, despite what you might have heard, the evidence[1] is also clear[2] that vaccines reduce transmission rates.) This is hardly a theoretical concern, in the midst of a pandemic that has already claimed nearly 30,000 Canadian lives.
> So if anything the case for vaccine mandates is even stronger than it is for seatbelt laws. The cost to personal freedom – a jab in the arm – is slight. The risk of adverse side-effects is negligible. The savings in human lives is provably enormous. How on earth could so many otherwise sensible[3] people have persuaded themselves otherwise?
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-is-the-case-...
* https://archive.fo/ayjkf
There is a "pragmatic libertarian" argument too, which goes like this: The mandatory jab is much less costly to civil liberties than lockdowns, and if the virus is not quelled, the political support for lockdowns will only increase.
There is a whole bunch of issues and trade-offs involved. [1] People have strong feelings on this [2], and discussion is often reduced to partisan "rallying cries".
[1]: e.g. see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29759089
[2]: Which is somewhat understandable, some of us have lost loved ones, lost jobs, been down the dumps, felt like being in "house arrest", couldn't even hit the gym, witnessed all the paltering by the media etc.
That's the difference.
https://www.hrreporter.com/labour/news/fort-mcmurray-alta-tr...
>> No store would deny you entrance for that
You can’t really wear a seatbelt into a store but i can cite examples of being denied service for refusing to wear one (taxi, airplane, fun fair ride, etc.)
>> No government will deny basic services to you for that
You get fined by the government if you don’t wear a seatbelt.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/worl...
Let’s talk about heart disease! Let’s talk about racial and sex disparities in heart disease. Let’s talk about class disparities in heart disease. Let’s talk about why these disparities exist.
Public health is super fascinating and very complicated. We should be talking about it more!
If you have more robust information though I’d like to know of it.
Edit: please note this was published in dec 29 2021, with data up to that point, and therefore also incorporates omicron.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...
Why?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. We ban accounts that do it, so please stop doing it.
Actual studies that look at evidence and test hypotheses seem to suggest that mRNA vaccines are effective.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270
The vaccine efficacy (how well it teaches the body) and the body's own anti-body efficacy (how effective the anti-bodies are against the virus) also have a role to play.
Thus, a vaccinated person can still be infected, and can even spread the virus around. The sooner the virus is dealt with within their body, the sooner they no longer have a virus to spread. Isolation helps sooner, too. It is therefore possible for a triple vaccinated person to still get infected and to test positive for the infection.
Among various benefits of being vaccinated are the lowered load on hospital staff. The number of hospital beds and even oxygen cylinders does not matter as much as the availability of hospital staff. This pandemic helped highlight that around the world, there are already only a limited number of doctors and nurses, and that both of them are already over-worked. For e.g., I did not know that 30-hour shifts are considered normal. It got me thinking that I wouldn't want to risk receiving care from an over-worked and tired medical care giver whose judgement might have been impaired from sheer exhaustion.
Many of us vaccinated people are now able to safely isolate at home when we are infected with the Covid virus. We rush to hospitals only when the anti-bodies that we create are unable to deal with the Covid 19 virus. Over-worked hospital staff thus focus on a far lesser number of patients. There are now more beds available for those who need them. These included those vaccinated but ill enough to require external medical care, not-yet vaccinated, vaccine-hesitant, those who can't be vaccinated, those who won't be vaccinated.
Really, this pandemic won't truly end until we isolate and end the spread of the virus. Being vaccinated planet-wide and reducing the load on the hospital is our next best bet to ensure that those who need the medical care have less-overworked staff and beds and oxygen cylinders.
The various successful track record of anti-vaxx conspiracies, the true stories of the greed of medical companies/hospitals, the CIA messing with the polio vaccine in Pakistan + Afghanistan, the might-is-right approach by which some countries grab vaccines and waste them while other countries do not receive even a single dose, the hiding of data to save "face" and reputation, the political attacks based on data, politicians speaking up instead of scientists, scientists not knowing how to speak to media, media irresponsibly reporting news - all of these contribute to a general decline in the acceptance of vaccines.
In my lifetime, polio was almost-eradicated. Smallpox was eradicated even earlier. I am hopeful that in time, we'll all pull up our socks and eradicate Covid-19 as well.
However this is again a casual Google for a single state. If you have more information that says otherwise please let me know. Thank you!
Among those infected with Omicron, hospitalization and intensive care rates are much higher in unvaccinated...
If South Africa ended up fairing far better than a country with similar demographics and higher vaccination rates, it would be relevant, but there's not data to make that comparison, because other countries are much earlier in the Omicron wave.
Just pointing out that JAMA says SA has a vaccination rate of 44.3% as of Dec 2021; if you're gonna attack statistics it's a good idea to have the right numbers.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...
Bullshit. Stop spreading misinformation.
Ahhh never mind. You didn’t actually read the data. You just scanned through it. If you look look more thoroughly it doesn’t address omicron at all. The last data I could see was from December 14. Omicron was not prevalent at that point, delta was. The vaccine offered some, but not much, protection against infection from delta.
If you look at vaccine doses per person over time, and graph of cases per person over time, in one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, you see not only no effect, but the worst effect happening at the most-vaxxed time. If they stop transmission the effect at this point is miniscule. If you didn't label the first graph, you might be tempted to blame it for the second graph.
(nota bene, vaccines show a clear effect in reduction in death.)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Actually Denmark has even more vaccines, and an even greater case uptick: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
This is just false and if you believe in the science, you believe in the scientific method, the scientific method shows that this is false. See this https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc211927
Plenty of people are going to the hospital with omicron so it isn't mild for everyone. It's milder than previous strains and it's especially mild for vaccinated people.
Antivaxxers can be execrated for all I care - dumbest way to enforce your freedom
Or maybe it saved yours and your girlfriend’s life.
It’s hard to say on a case-by-case basis which is why we depend on population-level data.
And yet, case counts have never been higher than now, a year into vaccines and infections.
Ah, but Omicron you may say. Well doesn’t that imply that the vaccine isn’t terribly effective against that strain? Yet the answer seem to be “just keep getting more injections of the same vaccine formulation.”
Perhaps one or more of our fundamental assumptions are wrong. Maybe the vaccines aren’t actually that effective (Israel is on dose number 4 within a calendar year…). Or maybe PCR tests cranked to an absurd number of cycles aren’t actually detecting what we think they are (an actual infection versus some dead cells in the nasal passage).
c'mon, you're at least a year behind the conspiracy theory state of the art, we're on vaccine infertility now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...?
I'm a bit confused by this article. AFAIK PCR tests are only reporting a positive at 35 cycles. The author of the article is correct that it is run for 40 cycles often, but this is only because a positive between 36-40 cycles indicates "unclear result" and the test is repeated with a different assay targeting a different component of the virus. Positive is only reported at 35 cycles max.
This should not pick up any "dead cells", it will pick up viral mRNA. There is a concern over picking up low loads, but the mRNA is still there.
The unvaccinated are banned as means to put social and financial pressure on individuals to get the vaccine. It is an unfortunate misconception that any of the currently-approved intramuscular vaccines reduce transmission to a meaningful degree.
This social and financial pressure is placed on individuals because urban hospitals do not have the money or resources to deal with the rate at which they're admitting patients for severe Covid-19, and most of the patients they're admitting are unvaccinated.
Vaccination reduces the infection rate. [0] You can't transmit the virus if you aren't infected in the first place. Other studies have shown that people with breakthrough infections have a shorter period in which they can transmit.
[0] BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Mass Vaccination Setting https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2101765
Vaccines absolutely do reduce transmission from the vaccinated outward.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newscientist.com/article/22...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-l...
This is another misconception. Our best evidence is that they're extremely effective. The problem is they're not quite effective enough to just go back to life as before since newer variants are extremely virulent.
Even given the typical bias of the media it’s still astonishing that Biden got a complete and utter free pass from the media for propagating this idea by basically giving everyone - vaccinated or not - a “mandate” that they no longer needed to wear a mask this past spring / late summer, all for PR points to make it look like the virus had been defeated.
Yes, intramuscular vaccines for sars-cov-2 work, for about 6 months, to significantly reduce the likelyhood of serious disease in the internal organs. They do this by getting your body to produce serum igG antibodies against the shape of the spike protein produced, or delivered, by whatever mechanism. They also train your T cells to recognize more broad coronavirus epitopes that hold up longer against changes in spike coding.
But the igG antibodies in the body serum produced by intramuscular vaccination do not appear in any useful quantity in the upper respiratory mucosa (a different immune compartment). And the T cells definitely do not get there. The upper respiratory mucosa is where respiratory viral diseases infect. Intramuscular vaccination does not protect against sars-cov-2 infection of the upper respiratory mucosa. It just means that your lungs, which have some serum igG antibodies seep in, are protected and your body organs are protected. You can and do still get infected and transmit the virus to others at the same rate as the un-intramuscularly vaccinated.
The intramuscularly vaccinated should not be exempted from any mask requirements and people really, really have to become aware of this if we're going to stop the pandemic. It's either that or intranasal vaccination, the smart move, like India is pushing towards. Enough of the intramuscular boosters. We need intranasal to stop the spread.
Pretending intramuscular vaccination is some be all end all that stops spread is stupid and deadly. It is only the first partial step.
1. It’s harder for the virus to enter your body 2. If it gets in, you will get less sick (lower chance of symptoms) 3. Your body will fight it off faster 4. The virus has a harder time replicating in your body
Due to 2, 3 and 4, the ability to transmit virus to others goes down.
Enforcing everyone to take the jabs increases those subsidies (this enforcement is persistent in all countries submissive to USA). That's what makes sense.
However, don't assert altruism because there isn't any. The 'save lives' campaign is just a coating to make things easy for the general public to swallow.
Vaccines work the same way car seat belts and airbags do: they improve the/your odds. They make you much less likely to be infected, and because less likely to be infected, less likely to pass it on.
> If seatbelt-wearers outnumber non-wearers by four to one, but account for roughly the same number of deaths, it suggests seatbelt-wearers are about one-fourth as likely to die in an accident as non-wearers. That shocking statistic turns out to be not so shocking as all that.
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-is-the-case-...
* https://archive.fo/ayjkf (for paywall)
"Unvaccinated 60 times more likely to end up in ICU with COVID-19, Ontario data shows"
* https://globalnews.ca/news/8230051/covid-vaccine-hospitaliza...
It just means the vaccines we have don’t reduce transmission by 100% and you have a disease that is highly infectious. Just because a medical intervention doesn’t work 100% of the time doesn’t mean it’s 0% effective. Most interventions (vaccines, drugs, procedures, surgeries) don’t work at 100.0%.
From the data I’ve seen it appears the mRNA vaccines have some effect in reducing transmission while the other vaccines don’t. It is correct to say that the efficacy against transmission has dropped significantly, but that doesn’t mean it’s 0%.
These facts don't necessarily support vaccine mandates from a moral POV, but they're still the facts and by ignoring these facts you're the one spreading nonsense.
[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270
The vaccines reduce contraction, transmission and severity
Go spread your FUD elsewhere.
There are many occurrences where someone died because the body of a person in a crash who wasn't wearing a seatbelt just crashed into them.
Is your next statement something like "Restaurants shouldn't be required to follow food prep laws or other laws like refrigeration temperature requirements"?
And government wouldn't prevent my care even if they did.
Yes it would, if your job is a driver. It happens all the time. Just search for “fired for not wearing seatbelt”, and you’ll find plenty of stories. The reason you can get fired for this is because it’s (1) illegal, (2) unsafe, and (3) a company liability if the company is found to be lax on training.
Why isn't this fraud?
Do fat people, smokers, and drinkers next.
Healthy people with long, drawn-out illnesses use the greatest healthcare and pension resources.
https://taxfoundation.org/new-study-shows-smokers-and-obese-...
Vitamin D and air quality is the major underlying factor behind COVID severity - its why the virus exhibits such seasonality. Pushing vaccines doesn't address underlying public health problems.
My understanding is that the field of medicine is heavily against this because they have historical cases where moral judgement to deprive care have resulted in human rights abuses and medical neglect due to bigotry. It might end up disproportionately affecting the homeless, those afflicted with addiction, single mothers, and the poor.
> (To be clear: I’m a fully vaccinated and boosted person that masks consistently.)
Dear COVID scientogists, if you engage in a public discourse where your opponents have to write a disclaimer like this to prevent getting downvoted, you have failed at civic discourses and even if all vaccines were 100% effective and had 0 side effects, your behaviour would still be abhorrent.
Being able, but unwilling, to get vaccinated substantially shifts my priors of where your comment is coming from. It is useful information, and I appreciate when people disclose it.
If you replace vaccination with an analogous, more politically one-sided limit case (say [not being a Nazi]:[supporting a policy of Hitler] - in typical Godwinian fashion), you can see why this sort of information would be useful.
Ad hom is only fallacious if the information really is irrelevant to the argument [0][1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/e01b9z/is_ad...
Draconian measures such as what you suggest just make people more suspicious of authority not less.
I am not in favor of sentencing people to death just because their stupidity happened to lie on the vaccination axis, while other stupid people get to live.
There is a reason why the Hippocratic oath does not have exceptions for currently unpopular groups. Even captured Nazi war criminals weren't denied medical care in prison.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: actually, you've been breaking the site guidelines so egregiously that I've banned the account. It's not ok to post like this here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29674183
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29674176
We're trying for a different sort of website, one in which people have thoughtful, curious conversation across differences. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the intended spirit in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
This goes against the spirit of HN. We value open discussion here.
Your actions should be brought to PGs attention. It seems you are abusing your power as moderator. This is not in HN’s best interest.
Just because you disagree with someone doesnt mean you should ban or silence them.
It always feels like the mods are against you (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but you can't take that as evidence that we disagree with you. The people with opposite views to yours are just as sure that we're secretly agreeing with you and moderating the site to privilege your views. That's just how it goes.
I desperately urge others who are also capable to take such a hit to follow suit.
Edit: Note, I'm also vaccinated. J&J March 2020.
The devil is in the details. The EUA designation was pushed through because there was no other, "obvious" treatment (despite proven efficacy of a combination of prophylactic treatments).
They are testing this thing on us. Even if it works I do not consent to be tested on.
"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment."
First, you would have to find a jurisdiction that officially accepted the Nuremberg code and move there, second you would have to prove that the Covid vaccination program was a medical experiment and third you would have to explain why you accepted prior vaccinations that were part of a public health program (such as polio vaccinations)
I reject your call to take a stand because I don't think there's anything to stand on or any right that I'm losing.
Trotting out the nuremberg code for a vaccine intended to help reduce world suffering (that is being used in a moral ways) is in poor taste, in my opinion. It was written because Nazis were using Jewish and other people in scientific experiments that make vaccine trials look pleasant.
Also, all the necessary information for you to make a decision according to the code has already been provided to you, and the US government (not sure about others) has a constitutionally supported right to mandate that you take a vaccine.
You got a jab hundreds of millions of people got. I got a jab a few thousand of people got.
I got to install an app and log all sorts of things on it every couple days. You didn’t have to do that.
You received a QR code to allow you to participate in a variety of things. I didn’t, and had to even-more-experimentally mix and match my untested vaccine with an EMA approved one so I could get a Covid safe ticket.
I’m fine by the way.
All I got was, “sit here for 15 minutes”.
I don't remember that for any other vaccine I’ve ever taken.
The 15 min wait is because some known side effects manifest within those 15 minutes. Everything else is either minor, or extremely rare, or both. The US has the VAERS system if you want more on side effect reporting, but your doctor is supposed to do the work.
Either way, the vaccine was tested. That it didn't go through a 10 year trial period is because we didn't have the time. Will you suddenly explode or combust in 11 years? I can't prove you won't. I would happily put money on the negative though, care to wager?
And you're being deliberately obtuse. Like most medicines, vaccine injections have other ingredients like preservatives, the carrier fluid, etc. People can be allergic to the other ingredients but not the mRNA/TDAP/Influenza/whatever vaccine.
and also does there exist a sufficient amount of medical professionals to agree to service an all-anti-vaxxer school without complaint?
They all live in very remote areas with few people so the risk is low to begin with. They aren't entirely "unintelligent", and I respect their decisions.
1. infectious disease that can kill others. it's great that they are remote, but they still interact with others sometimes. no one requires them to wear warning signs. as numerous others have pointed out, it's like drunk driving. drinking while driving is not just personal choice, even if it seems like just you minding your own alcohol.
1a. even if the disease itself is not sufficient to kill people but causes them to seek medical attention, beyond the capacity of the healthcare system, this means worse outcomes for those who could not have avoided ending up in the hospital.
2. ask what doctors think about treating them when they get polio or things we havent seen in many generations.
even intelligent people are terrible at assessing risk in areas where they are not professionals. see how many doctors are antivaxxers, how many security professionals click on https://chase.myaccount.com links, etc.
When administered to the at risk population. When required for young, hospitalization system impact would be marginal.
https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2...
Please cite your sources.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...
Which groups are not "at-risk" here? What age? Because it seems like there is a significant % of the population in groups other than 80+ that are in the hospital.
So maybe find the source and share it here since you are the one who made the argument? Burden of proof is on you, not me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In my case I was looking for covid case data in children broken down by age. The only data I found was over 18 and under 18. It wasn't until recently when 0-4, 5-12 and 12-18 age group data was shared. So while I understand your point, it's doing a disservice to the actual problem at hand and thats enabling others to make advised choices.
The government punishing you for an action you take (including indirectly, but purposefully) is a pretty good starting point for a definition of not being free to do it.
The government isn’t punishing you because you broke a law - your employer (who happens to be the government) fired you for failing to adhere to conditions of employment.
There is literally nothing the government (in any of its capacities) can do to you which would toggle your vaccination status without your consent. Your employer will (dis)incentivise you accordingly towards exercising their freedom of association, but they can’t stick a needle in your arm.
Irrespective of how we define “medical freedom” (because I don’t particularly care about definitional combat) the government NOT handcuffing me and sticking a needle in my arm against my will is precisely how I expect my medical autonomy to work in practice.
If not, why not? At what point does compelled consent become illegitimate? I think most people agree a person with a gun to their head is under duress. After that it's just a matter of figuring out where the line is.
I personally believe the government threatening peoples' livelihood in order to compell them to be vaccinated is placing those people under duress, and can not be considered legitimate consent.
For what it's worth, I also think most healthy people ought to vaccinate themselves just as a matter of being good member of society.
Do you see all interactions/negotiations with government as having a gun to your head?
From where I am looking it seems wee bit exaggerated and lacking nuance to equate mandates/economic sanctions and contract law to actual violence.
It is precisely because you don’t have to (nor want to) sign the contract which requires you to be vaccinated is why you don’t have to work there any longer.
You get what you want (remain unvaccinated). Employer get what they want (no unvaccinated employees).
It seems like a win-win negotiation between consenting parties to me?
If you’re looking for a response to your numbers that you pulled out, we still have many worse diseases and our leaders economic policies during covid impacted and hurt more people than the “5 million dead”
I also didn’t see you or anyone complaining about the obesity; diabetes, car crashes; depression and other far worse epidemics that we’ve had induced by our same shitty health agencies that sell us the covid cure today.
I can’t spread obesity diabetes and depression to others. Cars are regulated immensely (though I do think it’s better to design cities that don’t need them… and hey people that walk more are less obese, which reduces diabetes risk).
For someone quick to point out a supposed fallacy, you’re heavily leaning on whataboutism. Not that you care, but I am also active in my city for improving pedestrian infrastructure at the expensive of space for cars, and I live in one of the most walkable cities in the country.
But if it comes down to it, I’m actually completely ok with such an approach.
How is this any different than mandating the small pox vaccine, or the polio vaccine?
The vaccine dramatically lowers the probability of a severe infection; reduces the burden on healthcare systems - which in, in many countries apart from the US (for instance, Canada) is a public good. And therefore enables hospitals to provide care for patients with other diseases; patients who need urgent surgical procedures.
Even where there is private healthcare, it still is a public resource.
One possible symmetric response to people who refuse to get vaccinated is to deny them access to healthcare if they get a covid infection and need medical care - But I think that is far more draconian and inhumane, and is arguably more akin to medical apartheid, than denying those who chose to remain unvaccinated (without broadly accepted medical reasons) access to public goods when they do not accept their responsibility towards public welfare.
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2021/12/23/us-paus...)
Odd thought: Even if ineffective against omicron, why would the government pause distribution of any, safe medicine? Doctor's should still be allowed to use it as they see fit, no?
Quite the hyperbole: not all government services, just employment insurance and that too if you were only fired for not receiving the vaccine. A reminder that in many of these jobs, there was already a requirement for getting a set of vaccines so this is not new. Though for some people, this vaccine is "different" but once you ask them to explain why they can't. So no new rules. You needed vaccines for most of the jobs and this just an additional one.
You will still receive employment insurance for other stuff, irrespective of your vaccination status.
> prevented from patronizing various businesses
You are not prevented from accessing essential businesses and no one checks your vaccination status or even asks for one.
> even restricted from traveling and the ability to work
You are still free to drive to work or take local public transit.
The difference between ICU rates of unvaccinated and vaccinated people in Ontario for example tells us that the vaccination is working:
https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2...
^ Please see the above graph.
If you cannot participate in society moving forward, then you should not expect society to cater to your needs.
Then the whole point of this thing is pointless. We're selectively punishing people. We don't prevent or punish positive cases from going around to work, public transport, etc and infecting others, yet we punish people that choose to simply not vaccinate.
> "If you cannot participate in society moving forward, then you should not expect society to cater to your needs."
Just like to point out that you can use the same line of reasoning for a host of other things, even unrelated to medical themes. Like say allowing facial recognition cameras in all homes to prevent domestic violence and child abuse. Yet most people supposedly stand on principle against it, despite the "pragmatism" of it. Likewise we should be standing here on plain old and impractical "body autonomy" and protecting people's personal medical choices.
It just depends on how far you want to take the hyperbole and how far you want to extrapolate the doomsday predictions that flow from this. E.g. How about state-mandated abortions for down-syndrome? Or preventing pro-creation of known carriers of genetic disorders? Look at how we tip-toed around aids after we eventually acknowledged it.
As a side note, we should all be worried about how this entire world-incident is allowing laws and understandings that we've had and worked on attaining for decades if not centuries to be simply and casually bypassed under some banner of "safety", "science" and pragmatism. There has to be a better way to deal with this and as you say, move society forward instead of backward.
It's not pointless. Unvaccinated people are far far more likely to occupy the hospital and the ICU -- see above. How is that pointless? I am not talking about positivity as that is not relevant. See the official numbers above.
Your hyperbole is not valid as these jobs already required vaccinations so I am not sure what the new outrage is.
Simply not true. Defying a public health order is illegal.
The company has had petty CEOs that did shady things with users posts and data.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
and not sure who you're hanging with, but as a sexually active gay man I've never heard of no condom usage for anyone being seen as acceptable unless there is consent between all parties
EI benefits are generally only given if you lose your employment through no fault of your own (didn't quit or get fired). What this policy does is clarify that losing work hours or your job due to vaccine refusal after a workplace vaccination mandate (outside of medical exemptions) does NOT count as "through no fault of your own", and instructs employers to indicate as such.
So: For the duration of the pandemic, if your workplace mandates COVID vaccination and you refuse and then get fired over it, you're not eligible for EI any more than you would be if you got fired for cause.
“They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist....This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?"
I have taken both shots, and will take the third but these declarations are appropriate for a mad man, not a country leader.
It’s alarming because “they don’t believe in science” has become a divisive weapon that hand waves away all scientific nuance.
The vast majority of young healthy people are completely asymptomatic, they don’t need a vaccine, nor would it be a wise investment of limited doses.
Also, previous infection confers protection that is at least as effective as vaccination. This has been consistently observed since the beginning of the pandemic.
Vaccines can save the lives of many vulnerable people though; it’s an amazing tool and its use is certainly justified by science.
But using economic and financial engineering to force everyone to get vaccinated? There is no scientific evidence supporting that decision, and the second and third order consequences are completely unstudied. (evolution of viral resistance is one example; many experts are aware of the phenomenon but commenters here have been misled to believe that an airborne virus circulating the planet can be eradicated ‘if only everyone got vaccinated’)
Of course they need a vaccine. Just because you don't have symptoms does not mean (a) that you're not carrying it, and (b) can't infect someone who may not be as healthy as you.
Further it's difficult to predict ahead of time how an individual will react to being infected. A 20-year-old takes up an ICU bed just as effectively as a 40- or 60-year-old: they're less likely, but it can still happen. Which is why people in higher risk profiles get priority. But just because certain folks may get things first doesn't mean other shouldn't later.
COVID can also mutate just as well in a young person as an older person.
> But using economic and financial engineering to force everyone to get vaccinated? There is no scientific evidence supporting that decision, and the second and third order consequences are completely unstudied.
The unvaccinated make up the vast majority of hospital and ICU admissions. And by "majority" we're talking about 90-100% in many places. "Unvaccinated 60 times more likely to end up in ICU with COVID-19, Ontario data shows":
* https://globalnews.ca/news/8230051/covid-vaccine-hospitaliza...
And then if someone who is vaccinated perhaps has a serious (car) accident or heart attack and there are no ICU beds for them.
According to the CBC, the lack of available hospital beds pre-dates Covid and exists even when Covid case counts are low. From Why Ontario hospitals are full to bursting, despite few COVID-19 patients:
"The data suggests many hospitals have returned to the overcrowding levels seen before the pandemic, when CBC News revealed hospitals filled beyond capacity nearly every single day, with patients housed in hallways, conference rooms and cafeterias not as exceptional cases, but as a matter of routine.[1]"
It's unfair to scapegoat the unvaccinated for systemic failures that aren't really due to Covid at all.
1: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-hospital-occu...
But many people contribute to the problem with a variety of unhealthy life choices, and blaming one particular group for the problem, and writing policies to punish that group (many of whom also happen to be the PM's political opponents), is the worst kind of politics.
And suggesting that the lack of healthcare in Canada is caused by the unvaccinated is simply dishonest.
Most other unhealthy life choices are low-moving train wrecks and can be accommodated for: it's not like the obesity and diabetes rates go from 15% to 40% in the span of six months. A good portion people's choices can be accommodated for 'simply' by looking at trend lines and planning accordingly.
> And suggesting that the lack of healthcare in Canada is caused by the unvaccinated is simply dishonest.
Any problems that any healthcare system in the world had were (and are being) exacerbated by the sudden surge of COVID patients. The unvaccinated-by-choice are needlessly making things worse for a whole lot of people who need a hospital/ICU bed through no fault of their won.
The same can happen with COVID-19 if the percentage of the population that's vaccinated is high enough. Of course, if that percentage drops below the herd immunity threshold, then outbreaks may occur. In fact, that happened several years ago with the measles virus because asubset of the population refused vaccination.
Looking at the natural immunity scenario, one can consider the history of varicella. Prior to widespread vaccination, there were yearly outbreaks amongst children, despite the fact that more than 99% of the adult population had immunity due to prior infection. That is, despite the fact that the adult population was largely immune, there were still outbreaks among children.
Once the varicella vaccine became part of the standard vaccine schedule, those outbreaks essentially ceased. That doesn't mean that the virus isn't still being transmitted. It does mean that if enough people refuse getting the vaccine for their children, then there is a risk of another outbreak precisely because the percentage of people immune to the infection dipped below the herd immunity level.
Similarly, with COVID-19, if we can get the vaccination percentage up to more than 90 to 95% (or whatever percentage the data supports), then outbreaks will cease, but the virus will still be out there.
So that leaves the personal risk, where I think people should be able to decide by themselves if they want a vaccine or not. It's also fair that they don't get an ICU spot, but instead get whatever other treatment is available. However, most governments seem to shy away from this decision and instead bet everything on vaccination with predictable results.
These people have killed plenty of others. On the count of people killed and economic costs - it would be anti vaxxers that are the "mad men".
"These people" haven't killed anyone and there is no court of law that would condemn them. The economic costs are to blame on a bumbling government that failed to prepare for pandemic scenarios and doesn't have any ideas on how to deal with the virus except through vaccines. Unfortunately for them, Omicron's not too fazed about said vaccines, making the whole exercise more and more absurd.
There are cases where people are injured while accidentally not having a seatbelt on, and there are cases where people dogmatically refuse to wear seatbelts and refuse to accept the safety statistics. Maybe it makes sense to differentiate between those kinds of cases somehow? Maybe people who consciously choose to refuse safety measures should still be treated but should be prioritized lower than people who are accepting safety measures?
One of the problems with people who refuse to accept safety policies is they make emergency treatment more expensive for everyone, and they reduce the probability that someone who’s been safe can get emergency treatment in a timely manner. Part of the question is why it’s fair for people who’ve accepted the safety measures to have a non-zero chance not being able to get emergency treatment because someone who refused to be safe got hurt and is already in the only ER/bed left in the hospital.
>Canada's Justin Trudeau on the unvaccinated:
>“They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist....This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?"
https://twitter.com/KevinBardosh/status/1476838517007257600
My patience with COVID cultists is starting to run quite thin.
There is no science demonstrating that withholding unemployment reduces transmission rates.
Regardless, this is a different point than the original comment.
With current experience from UK and France, this line (even though true up to a point) is irrelevant.
The only way you can actually ask this is by trying maliciously move the conversation to a nonsensical point. Neither myself nor anyone else has ever made the point that vaccines protect you completely, which is the entire point why even with vaccination there is still an objective to reduce case counts.
We both know that vaccine , in general, is intended to “greatly minimize risk”.
Every mainstream medium is telling it loud and clear: 20-fold reduction in ICU admissions and deaths. There is nothing to debate here.
There is no science if reasonable doubts aren't allowed.
The thing with this pandemic is, that the time where you could have a reasonable doubt in the vaccines are over for a while now. We vaccinated half of earths population. If there would have been horrible side effects they would have shown. The more data we gather the clearer the picture becomes and the less reasonable certain doubts become.
The thing about doubt is that one can always doubt anything. You can doubt that a stone in your hand falls to the ground if you let it go, but no amount of doubt will change the outcome if you actually do it. Physical reality for the most part doesn't care for our feelings. If you are a brilliant physicist you could doubt is the explainations why the stone falls to the ground, but you cannot reasonably doubt the fact that it does accelerate towards the ground, because this is what is observed.
You could have the feeling the universe is holographic and all this falling does not occur, however if you cannot create an experiment that would falsify existing, simpler explainations it remains just a interesting feeling and not a reasonable doubt.
Every piece of available evidence points to the same conclusions, over and over again: the general safety of vaccines, the risks of long COVID, the contagiousness of the Omicron variant, and so on and so forth.
Those things are clearly not up for the discussion given the absolute garbage quality of the proposed counterevidence offered by these "skeptics".
Another example is the recommendation for AstraZeneca which was first not offered to older people because of unclear efficiency data, and then not offered to younger people because of the risk of blood clots.
Yet another example is the recommendation for boosters against Omicron. Israel's backing off from recommending a fourth to the general population because among other things the faster loss of protection.
"authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy"
This is coming from someone who was deeply concerned by the erosion of precedents under President Trump. I didn't turn off my skepticism when the man I voted for actually got to office. It feels like I'm on the receiving end of my own political retribution and its really made me pause.
I know several mothers squeamish on risking their children to continual rolling of the dice w.r.t the mRNA vector vaccines. Also, I can unequivocally state that no other vaccine have I ever seen that has to be continually boosted to maintain it's efficacy, which sounds to me like a deficiency in memory cell formation. The bigger issue there, is that in spite of that being an interesting quirk of these vaccines to do research on, no one will, because having "this year's model" of vaccine is a jackpot to Pharmaceutical companies. Dat Annual Recurring Revenue producing nothing but upsides for them.
-New repeatably, and reliably recurring business -Relaxed or increasingly streamlined approval processes to be lobbied for the next time they want to sneak something through
And the downsides being safely (to them) externalizable
-increased attrition of horseshoe crab populations and concomitant environmental knock-on effects -accumulating social costs in the damage done by implementing the infrastructure for implementing things like vaccine passports, which can be adapted to non-public health use cases.
I mean, I get where you're coming from. However, I've researched the supply chains, and the stuff that is relied upon for QC'ing this stuff (horseshoe crab blood) is not inexhaustible, and the incentives we're manufacturing are not at all ideal. Just because you've stopped analyzing the problem at the physiological effects on the patient does not mean there isn't reason for concern. Everything is interconnected.
The mRNA vaccines don't produce IgA-mediated sterilizing mucosal immunity and they would not have been expected to, and they should never have really been expected to or promoted as providing sterilizing immunity.
The point, though, is to prevent severe disease and death which is mediated through memory cells, which are doing just fine and not waning, and mostly likely responsible for the bulk of the headlines that Omicron is less virulent -- because the vaccines are actually working for their intended purpose (turning severe COVID into a bad cold).
The vaccine misinformation on HN is really crazy. Conflating lack of protection against infection to failure to form memory cells is not a remotely well informed take.
The DYOR crowd does the absolute worst research. I don't have a problem with the policy in the title article because you all don't know what you're talking about.
And a multiple shot series of a vaccine is common, most of them are. The initial interval with the mRNA vaccines was probably too short for hypermutation/maturation to happen (but was necessary to get people protected as fast as possible, and to keep the trials as short as possible) so the "boosters" are the really the second shot of a two shot series.
You still haven't addressed the anti-pattern of cranking out "vaccines of the month", the environmental impact of utilizing a protein from a natural source in a QC process intended to track pharma batches for multiple doses for every human on earth, the incentive problem that emerges from vaccinations not designed for long lasting, sterilizing immunity in that it's already been acknowledged by Goldman Sachs analysts that cures are not a good business model and that this approach to vaccine making seems eerily in that vein of taking this advice to heart.
Condescend on the DYOR folks all you want. If someone didn't, none would ever get done. I, for one, will continue to learn as much as I can, and will encourage people to do as much thinking for themselves as I can. Funny thing I noticed is half the people who say "leave it to the experts" tend to own stock in said experts.
We're still using the same OG strain vaccine that we started with and we're not doing this.
The ancestral mRNA vaccines still protect against death and hospitalization even with Omicron.
If you're doing your own research, then watch a course on virology and try to learn something:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3MhWWi6n4&list=PLGhmZX2NKi...
I probably do way more research than you do, but it all reinforces what the experts actually say because I don't spend all my time trolling blogs for counter intuitive takes so I can feel intellectually special.
There’s a new flu vaccine every year.
If they actually protected you against the virus that would have shown too, though.
Anti-vaxer's love to play up that meme.
A better analogy would be the body armor that Marines wear in combat zones. No Marine is stupid enough to believe that wearing body armor will make him completely immune to bullets. And certainly no Marine is stupid enough to say "I won't wear it, because it doesn't make me completely immune to bullets".
Definition before late-2020:
"a product that stimulates a person's immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, thereby protecting against that disease",
To
"a preparation used to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific disease".
Now, we are realising that the Covid vaccines are helpless against the new variants, so I guess the definition will be changed even further.
Compared to something like the Smallpox vaccine (lifelong/multi-decade immunity), the Covid vaccine is mostly useless.
The same principle works in medicine. Instead of one institute doing 10 trials over 5 years you can also have 10 institutes doing 10 trials in a year (Note: these are not actual numbers, just a show of peinciple).
The trials for the corona vaccines have not been done at a worse quality, as far as I can tell the opposite is actually the case. No vaccine ever had this many critical eyes on it.
Granted, RNA vaccines are quite new (although a lot older than the pandemic), but the mechanisms behind RNA are older still. Out cells produce RNA all the time. What you propose is, that RNA produced by our cells today, will somehow miraculously show an effect a decade after it is gone. What is true for the RNA triggered by the vaccine must be true for our own RNA as well. That means our body would have to remember every piece of RNA produced in every cell for a decade.
I am not a medical expert, but I think this is highly unlikely. That would be like drinking a bottle of Schnaps today and being drunk 10 years after it left your body.
I don't know enough to judge by myself and agree that it's highly unlikely, but I've noticed that we've been surprised before by these new vaccines: the AZ blood clots came out of the blue and it took about a year for the cause to be discovered - I remember reading that the culprit was accidental injection in the bloodstream after all. Myocarditis is still a mystery.
I call this the "vaccines will turn us into zombies" theory. Quite laughable, but we'll have to wait and see. :-)
> The world was able to develop COVID-19 vaccines so quickly because of years of previous research on related viruses and faster ways to manufacture vaccines, enormous funding that allowed firms to run multiple trials in parallel, and regulators moving more quickly than normal.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03626-1
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
Unvaccinated people with covid on average have the infection for longer and have higher viral loads, so they are more likely to spread the virus to others than vaccinated people are. They are much more likely to need hospitalisation, putting a burden on the health system which hurts health care workers, and uses up health care resources needed by others.
People with non-covid illnesses, or people with covid because they can’t be vaccinated for various legitimate reasons, are dying in some cases because health care systems are so busy caring for sick or dying vax deniers with covid.
So these people are a clear danger to the public, and our health care systems in particular. Their choices are putting unreasonable and unfair demands on health care workers, and even killing people.
Are you sure Trudeau isn't gaslighting you into believing the problems with Canadian healthcare are due to the unvaccinated, and not due to a failing health care system whose problems pre-date Covid?
In Why Ontario hospitals are full to bursting, despite few COVID-19 patients the CBC reported:
> The data suggests many hospitals have returned to the overcrowding levels seen before the pandemic, when CBC News revealed hospitals filled beyond capacity nearly every single day, with patients housed in hallways, conference rooms and cafeterias not as exceptional cases, but as a matter of routine.[2]
1: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend
2: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-hospital-occu...
Furthermore, as they approach 100% they start enacting "crisis standards of care" such that people who would have been admitted are not. They're put in hospital conference rooms, hallways, or regular rooms without the normal life saving equipment present.
In reality, there are more bits here than just vaccine status, and even that isn't binary, unless you start talking about the moving target of "fully vaccinated".
An unvaccinated person who has been infected and recovered is not at all the same as a person who has not. Yet here you are righteously and confidently proclaiming that "these people are a clear danger to the public".
Your statement is a serious accusation, and it is sloppy and imprecise, and plain wrong for some significant chunk of the people it is being lobbed at. Yet not many people will bat an eye, because its the same sloppy language everyone else is using.
Vaccination status can be recorded and tracked, and supplemented with booster shots to maintain efficacy, so it’s a reliable indicator.
When you (the royal you, not just you specifically) are going to get into proclaiming what we all can or cannot do, it seems like there should be some care paid to being precise, and being correct. Its no skin off your back if you're a little loose with your terminology, but there are many millions of folks that you're maligning by doing so, folks that you need to come along with whatever policies you're proposing, unless you want to go full on despot mode.
Better terminology would go a long way towards getting people on the same page.
How does your right to protect yourself lead to a right to exclude someone else from society?
Honest question.
I don’t agree with those equating this with crimes and prison. Those are not equivalent, these people aren’t criminals and rounding up or imprisoning them is abhorrent. But to participate in society is about obligations as well as rights, and I think withdrawing certain privileges in the face of wilful disregard of one’s obligations is reasonable if it is necessary to protect others.
There is a lot more justification needed, because "They’re a danger to themselves and others." is a generalization that is potentially not true. Vaccinated people can still infect others, while an unvaccinated person can be more strict about testing and masking, which could in practice lead to better protection than just being vaccinated. Especially if the vaccination has been developed for the alpha strain and omicron seems not impressed by it, while for males under 40 the chance to contract myocarditis from vaccination is higher than for contracting it from covid.
I don't think that society has any right to bully individuals into taking a vaccine that has not been shown to really stop the spread and is not really efficient against the dominating strains of the virus. For making this an obligation, the results of the vaccine are not good enough, while this and the other counterarguments are not being discussed enough.
Anti-vaxxers must also be climate change deniers and racists and anti-abortion, etc...
It makes it easier to hate people you disagree with if they're fundamentally evil in all the same ways. It saves you from having to have discussions with them, from having to think for yourself, and from any ethical dilemma when you mistreat them.
It’s not about thinking for yourself more than it’s a consequence of people being good at mounting a defense for their own ideas whatever they are or wherever they originate. The more “research” you do on an issue the more likely you’ll come away with nothing more than better arguments for your existing stance.
And I’m not claiming to be above it, you can play this game with me too. I am exactly the bleeding heart snowflake liberal.
It still surprises me how efficiently all our worlds leaders shifted blame from them for our shitty covid health response to the unvaccinated as though the vaccine was available from the beginning.
Whew, hyperbole of the year.
It's just another modern flavor of intolerance and authoritarianism.
OK, so he said that we all know people who are hesitant to get the vaccine and we'll be considerate of them, but there is also a small group that is unequivocally opposed to the vaccine (who don't believe in science, who are often racist, mysoginist etc). About them we have to make a choice: Do we tolerate them, or do we say look, most people are vaccinated, we want to go back to the things we like doing, and these people are blocking us.
So yeah, throwing in the racist and mysoginist thing was in poor taste. Hardly Watergate material, though.
Edit 2: Whoops, deleted the video link, but it's already in another comment. https://westernstandardonline.com/2021/12/trudeau-calls-the-...
Edit 3: I had originally said there was no video to look at. Please don't downvote the respondent.
I'm inclined to give him more leeway than the rest of the commenters here, as I think the unvaccinated do need to be censured, and in developed countries where information is abundant suggesting that it is safe and everyone should take it, it is increasingly unforgivable and intolerable for folks to be unvaccinated. As someone below quite aptly said: "If they want to ‘protect’ themselves from the vaccine they have that right, absolutely, but the rest of us also have the right to protect ourselves from them."
Trudeau's rhetoric is shocking. Biden would never stoop to that level nor would have Obama. It's "deplorables" all over again and in addition to being cruel it's poor politics.
Honestly - almost no one really disagrees with that statement either. We all know it might not be helpful to get people vaccinated but we also know it’s true.
Hi Trudeau! Listen, the issue here is that you cannot clump two uncorrelated issues together, and even if they were correlated, it wouldn't be fair as for sure there's people that (please sit down, this may me quite shocking to you) do not want to get the vaccine BUT are also not part of whatever group you refer to as "the hateful ones".
You absolutely can clump unrelated issues together when they’re specifically adopted by people who organize under a common banner or label. You don’t think that issues that make up “the liberal agenda” are reasonably well defined? Does it mean that literally every single liberal cares about all of them with the same fervor? Hell no, but it strongly predicts the views of someone who uses the label and the issues are cut so cleanly you can even make statements like “the typical person who cares strongly about native peoples identifies as a liberal.”
Even he admits he doesn't believe stuff he writes sometimes, but he does it to show why there's dissent.
Soooo…
Initially started with the medicine standard herd immunity of 65%, which includes vaccinated and recovered
And now even 90% vaccinated is supposedly unacceptable
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56722186
Are you ignorant of that?
The vaccine isn't experimental, stop with that stupid trope. How many billions more patients do you want before you'll consider the known data definitive?
So will they revise and lower the vaccination targets?
Omicron up to 70% less likely to need hospital care https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59769969
Omicron Has 80% Lower Risk of Hospitalization in South Africa https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-22/omicron-h...
Omicron has passed peak in South Africa, causing relatively few deaths and hospitalizations, authorities say https://www.yahoo.com/news/omicron-passed-peak-south-africa-...
This conception is more mythos than reality. You should look at some of the early laws passed in many of these countries if you think we had a tradition of "strong" natural rights that are only being abrogated in our modern era.
It used to be illegal to publish content critical of the government [0], not to mention the fact that the franchise was restricted to those holding property, and definitely not considering ongoing active slavery.
I don't understand your connection to demonization of the poor.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
That said, if the government takes away benefits, then it should give back all the taxes withheld on one's salary before it does that.
On another note, personally I don't see any other solution to the pandemic, other than everybody/most people gaining some kind of natural immunity. Places requiring some form of green pass are none other than VIP superspreader events, where the Green Pass is the VIP ticket. People holding the Green Pass, will then go to meet others who may or may not be vaccinated, but who will eventually catch Covid.
Not true, they do reduce infection and spread.
> That said, if the government takes away benefits, then it should give back all the taxes withheld on one's salary before it does that.
That’s not how government, taxes or being part of civil society works at all.
> personally I don't see any other solution to the pandemic, other than everybody/most people gaining some kind of natural immunity
This is scientifically illiterate as Omicron bypasses all “natural” immunity whereas a vaccine gives stronger protection. What’s to stop future variants doing exactly the same?
Maybe if youre boosted and its been 14 days but not greater than 45 days. But citation needed anyway. Natural immunity was not totally bypassed. South Africa kicked Omicron's ass with regard to case fatality rate.
It's not clear that getting vaccinated would stop you from spreading the virus though.
Nobody is going door to door and arresting unvaccinated people. It’s not like the anti-choice law in Texas that criminalizes two people working together to stop a woman from being pregnant against her will. You still have your freedom under the NAP. But as soon as you present a threat to infect other people by being unvaccinated, there are reasonable restrictions in place.
Edit: I’m seeing replies saying the NAP is strictly about physical violence.
To that I ask, are bioweapons fine to use in libertarianland? Can I hold a city hostage with weaponized anthrax because the libertarianism is, at its root, a cover for voting Republican and not a coherent political philosophy?
Should infecting others with a flu also be considered violence? What about blasphemy? What about just being mean?
People have very varying opinions on whether spreading COVID should be considered violence, hence contractual jurisdictions.
How is it not violence to infect others with a serious disease? It causes bodily harm.
It is assault to knowingly expose others to a communicable disease.
However, using the flu as an example isn’t very good as spreading the common cold doesn’t carry criminal consequences. If you are referring to Covid as a “flu” then it’s another matter.
Why should spreading "flu" not be considered violence? Not deadly enough? Then who is going to decide where is the line drawn?
The libertarian answer to protecting yourself from viruses is private discrimination, not redefining NAP however you see fit.
Just look at this thread and all the disagreement about vaccine policy; even without the NAP at play and with supposed "social contract" and "laws" and "constitutions" and "UN Declaration of human rights" we still can't agree how to coexist and deal with this pandemic. Meanwhile, the authoritarian CCP/Chinese government is handling it just fine, and probably laughing their asses off right now at the rest of the world's inability to deal with this. The rules are currently stacked in favor of bullies, whether that's an overreaching government like Canada in this case, China and international law that allows it to not be punished for this world-scale disaster, or everyday bullies that are effectively victim-blaming people who are discriminated against because of their medical choices.
Fortnite is not great training material chump. It's rich to see the same people crying about taking people's guns now want guns. Better to think liberals gun owners that have never used a gun talk about life long gun owners whose kids could even smoke you. Lol. Rookie.
Edit: It looks like your account has been doing this a lot, and also using HN primarily for ideological battle. We need you to stop doing those things if you don't want to get banned here. They're not what this site is for, and they destroy what it is for.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
As part of that, please make sure you're using HN primarily for intellectual curiosity, not primarily for political or ideological battle. Those things are disjoint and we need accounts to stay on the curiosity side of the line. The pattern of your last several comments is on the wrong side of the line; if you'd please correct this, we'd appreciate it.
More explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
citation needed for the full cycle: healthy -> contracted -> transmitted
My current understanding is that at least the first step is hindered. See e.g. https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiOTAzYzY0NjktMWYwNC0... shows approximately 4.5x reduction of the chances to contract (and therefore to spread further).
You can however look at what's happening in a single country despite the vaccination: Portugal, with close to 90% vaccination rate, is getting the highest rates of infection ever as we speak. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/portugal/
For a vaccine that's supposed to slow or stop the spread, sorry but that kind of trend is not very convincing.
I'll give you an example: Russia with relatively low vaccination rates has close to the highest number of excess deaths per capita. Portugal you mentioned is not even close.
> are absolutely no 2 countries like each other
fortunately there are like 200+ of them, so one should be able to see a trend. Even the 50 US states would work.
From what I see you are the one not understanding science and ignoring facts here. You just dismissed my first link based on an irrelevant claim that countries with high vaccination rates still have outbreaks (duh).
you mentioned the first step is hindered. Which is completely not proven by the fact that countries with high vaccination rates should effectively have a R trending towards zero if the vaccines even worked half as well as they should. Instead you see major outbreaks which completely contradicts the "hindrance" you refer to.
> From what I see you are the one not understanding science and ignoring facts here.
Ad-hominem attacks won't get you points here.
And you just made a new claim with 0 backing in numbers.
I don't know if you are arguing in good faith here, but definitely in low quality. Show us the numbers supporting your point. You just implied R is not affected by vaccination status, but you have provided 1 data to back this.
Whereas I provided a cumulative of thousands of cases, that directly support my point.
Where?
> And you just made a new claim with 0 backing in numbers.
which claim?
"vaccinated people not understanding the science"
> which claim?
"the fact that countries with high vaccination rates should effectively have a R trending towards zero if the vaccines even worked half as well as they should" (implying they do not have R trending to 0 vs unvaxxed).
Then we do not have a vaccine, by the pre-vaccine definition of vaccine.
So no, it doesn't. You may as well say that exhaling CO2 is causing global warming.
I mean, look at BC in Canada where the most at-risk people have a vaxx rate of 99%+ and overall rate of ~90% for the rest of the eligible population, the government still saw fit to shut it all down 3 days before Christmas. Compliance doesn't ensure freedom.
And while ~80% of the eligible population has been vaccinated, the 18% of the population that's unvaccinated is responsible for 67% of hospitalizations, and nearly 80% of ICU admissions [0]. Note for the source - while it's fun to play with and look around, I'm sourcing my numbers from the Doughnut Charts section
[0] http://www.bccdc.ca/health-professionals/data-reports/covid-...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758737.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Almost as if an abstract social construct as “rights” is more important to you than actual health.
Like if a group of people banded together and said that they didn't want to associate with unvaccinated people, should they have the freedom to do that without interference from the unvaccinated?
Your freedom not to get vaccinated? Evidently, since getting vaccinated is a medical procedure. I can't force you to go through it.
I can physically attack you if I want to and in your very own words my freedom is infinitely more important than your health.
What is confusing you?
What on earth makes you think your personal freedom is more important than the health of others?
You have no right to harm others.
Don't like it, leave. Seriously.
Strength in numbers. Economies of scale. Division of labour.
The collective well-being of individuals.
If you don’t like all the social perks and safety nets you are enjoying - go be a hermit.
Honestly, you're making arguments (in multiple comments) that make you look petulant, rather than providing a reasonable argument againt vaccine mandates.
I recited your argument to her and I am quoting her response in saying… “you are a f-ing idiot - I had no choice in being born black and I had no way of becoming white to avoid the consequences of apartheid. The unvaccinated have a choice - they are just choosing not to exercise it.”
You have falsely equated the two scenarios by abstracting away the thing which matters most: the choice to improve your situation.
Human rights are a religion - they don’t exist. We made them up so we can coexist; and so that we can improve the quality of our lives.
What makes discrimination wrong is that it diminishes the well-being of the discriminated against.
So you are welcome to insist that your well-being is being diminished by vaccine mandates but it would be a peculiar argument since most people are choosing to vaccinate because it improves their well-being.
It's not about WHO makes the decision. It's about the inherent quality of the decision being made irrespective of who makes it.
Of course it's your choice to drive your car into a wall at 200km/h, but in the way society uses the word "objectively" and "true" it is objectively true that driving into a wall at 200km/h is detrimental to your well-being. And it is objectively true that in doing so you are making a bad decision.
In the same way that is objectively true that seatbelts save lives, it is objectively true that vaccines save lives. Therefore not doing what's conducive to your well-being is a bad choice.
The metrics, measurements and methods used to arrive at these conclusions are as objective as empiricism allows for.
>Those who don't want to vaccinate also choose to do so because it improves their well-being
Yes. They using the exact same words. Are you convinced by their arguments? I am not.
What I am convinced of is how intellectually dishonest they are in parroting words without bringing evidence to the table.
As for George Washington, if you are attempting to make the argument that the government has a right to inoculate it’s military soldiers during war time against a disease, so be it, there is your precedent to argue upon. Furthermore, Washington has a habit of requiring many things, including the Militia Acts which required every able bodied male to own a military firearm. I don’t currently see an argument to enforce that idea. Pick and choose.
But using his small pox inoculation program from the 1700’s and a tiny military of rag tag farmer soldiers as a basis to go after an entire free and educated society of hundreds of millions in the 2000’s for an experimental vaccine, you are stretching this further than it could go.
The information is out there for people to make decisions now. They’ve made it, make a better argument.
I don't see anybody gearing up to have a civil war over vaccines, just a bunch of "make a better argument for why you have the right to tell me I have to do this, with economic or social consequences if I don't" responses. The military already exited folks who didn't comply with COVID vaccines, and the Biden administration has already requested that the SC officially rule on workplace mandates (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21A244/206997/2021...).
You are the one who seems to have no clue why nations form, why this particular nation came into being, and what demands it has made over and over upon its citizens for the benefit of their fellow Americans. If you do not like it then you are the one who should leave. We, the many, are happy to show you the door and will help you pack your bags. Seriously.
Is this what you’re saying?
Galileo is rolling over in his grave.
Edit: also you didn’t decide shit.
In my proffessional experience faux-perfectionists tend to be rather incompetent pragmatists.
Are you suggesting that we permanently give up our right to decide what medications to take?
Taking a vaccine is a forced medical procedure for the benefit of someone other than the individual. I'm fully vaccinated and boosted, but I recognize that effectively forcing this upon people by denying them fundamental rights and services, is not ethical, and sets an intolerable precedent.
Covid is not new in that regard and all this nonsense about an “intolerable precedent” is ridiculous. The precedent has been around with us for a long time and we’ve been fine with it. The only reason this comes up now is because of increased visibility on it.
I will gladly take an FDA approved vaccine like any other for such reasons.
None of the available ones right now are. Yes even Pfizer isn’t as the approved Pfizer vax (Comirnaty) is not the same exact vaccine as the one currently available/being used.
Edit: In short, many of us fear that the regulatory processes that govern our healthcare have been hijacked by corporate interest. We all know this leads to corners being cut as that’s inevitably how businesses are run.
Doesn’t Occam’s razor say that it’s just the fact the pandemic is destroying society and there is immense pressure from everywhere to accelerate usually very slow and bureaucratic processes because the risk reward ratio is completely different than the one for a vaccine for more contained diseases?
Why hasn’t the news or our medical governance brought up the fact that a small intranasal injection can greatly prevent transmission?
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8026810/
When you say "why isn't x happening" I'd like to invite you to think about what x would look like, in practice, and what it is you actually are expecting.
This has nothing to do with how lucrative it is. Just how practical. Note the author doesn't even say this measure can replace PPE and other preventative measures.. just add to them.
I’ve also read claims that these respiratory viruses are on the order of microns and most masks are pointless, unless specifically designed for this.
Also, prior to covid, only students were required to take vaccines - all for illnesses that were much more severe than covid. There were few or none for adults - aside from a small number of countries requiring foreigners to vaccinate for illnesses they were attempting to eradicate.
That's all very different than requiring it for your own citizens so that they can work, travel, and receive government services.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758995.)
I am pointing out that pandemics are a PvE (Player vs Environment) game, not PvP (Player vs Player) game. And I am stating the ovious: the E in PvE doesn't care about your rights.
There's an interesting phenomenon where, in responding to moderation comments, people often explain what they originally meant in a form that would have been much better to say in the first place. It seems to me you did that here:
> pandemics are a PvE (Player vs Environment) game, not PvP (Player vs Player) game.
That's an interesting observation which could have formed the nucleus of a thoughtful comment. However, you didn't post anything like that in the GP. The trouble is that you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) have your meaning in your head, but the rest of us don't have access to that, so if it's to come across, you need to explain it explicitly. Making a snarky comment that somehow presupposes your meaning doesn't do this. That is, it does it for the person speaking (who has access to the implicit meaning) but for everyone else, only the snark comes across, not the argument. For best results, you should include the argument and drop the snark. That's what the site guidelines are trying to get at.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I am surprised tha this surprises you. It is generally true that in responding to any evolving dialogue, people often explain what they originally meant in a form that would've been much better to say in the first place.
Because that's how dialogue works, and that's what dialogue is for. Elucidating meaning.
What is baffling me in this interaction is that you seem perfectly aware of the fact that my meaning is in my head, but then you also expected to find it in my words without any dialogue.
Having something substantive in your head does not justify posting a snarky low-information comment. You need to make the substantive comment explicitly, and without the snark.
I heard you have a rule about that. Maybe you could lead by example.
These vaccines have risks that are not being opening discussed. There is an unprecedented systematic campaign of censorship, deception and propaganda aimed at people who question anything about these vaccines. Vaccine injuries are real. The performance of these vaccines are not meeting expectations. They should not be mandated, full stop. We need a system based on informed consent, not coercion.
The regulators on several counties including the US have even publicly registered concerns about several of the vaccines, particularly the J&J single dose vaccine. None of these studies have been suppressed or censored, and they are ongoing and I see debate about them going on in the press and on forums like this all the time.
Some social media platforms ban provably false statements on this and other topics, and sometimes those restrictions go too far. That is not the same thing as banning all public debate.
It is throwing water on discussion at critical times simultaneous to strong government intervention which resets the discussion to the new overton window. You don't need to ban public debate you just play talk to the hand and call anyone who disagrees with you probably racist and or russian dissonance.
There are plenty of examples of people who have disagreed with current vaccine policy and them being censored or destroyed- and have the bills to show for it! We even have emails from leaders of the federal government that show they engage in these tactics routinely. Honestly I don't know how people don't see these tactics being played every day.
Your "side" is led by a man who claims "he is science" and anyone who disagrees with him is "disagreeing with science." Give me a break.
There are extensive, long-term trials, with results being published every day, on vaccine effectiveness for every vaccine and every variant from all sorts of public and private institutions all over the world.
Do you even "do your own research"? There's new papers coming out that you can read on /r/covid19, easily summarized and explained, and they all points towards similar conclusions over and over again.
This idea that "there are huge issues" seems to be a repeated meme without any epidemiological basis.
How and when? This time last year (when trump said a vaccine was less than a year away) these same medical professionals were warning us that vaccine testing takes years in the best case.