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Added a disclaimer on page 662. Many need to post better.
lots of other articles about it, but outright bans for antivax outlets is a good start.
Facebook is the other big player in the antivax space that needs to have a crackdown. Facebook has been a massive detriment to civilized discourse because of how powerfully it amplifies misinformation and lies.
I'm glad the government and powerful corporations are working together to censor people with opinions I don't like about covid. I'm sure this will never be abused for stuff that isn't convenient to them.
If anything, we need more government/big corporations dictating what's acceptable discourse on the internet.
I will clarify this is sarcasm, given some people actively cheer for this stuff
Clearly you can see there is a differnce between opinions and facts right? Also, I hope you can see a differnce between people lying on purpose to make money. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.
Also, what about all the information created by other governments and passed off as peoplrs opinions? How do you balance that logic?
You are correct, I'm glad government and big corporations decide what is fact and what is opinion on the internet, and no one is allowed to question them. We need more of this.
We should do EXACTLY what the experts say, we are not allowed to question any of the wrong stuff they said before, because science changed, and we are not allowed to question anything they currently say because the science might change in the future. Unlike politicians, religious, military figures and other authorative positions, scientists on big corporation and government payrolls, do not have any biases and they all share a single opinion on every topic that must not be questioned. They get to decide how and when the science changes, we should just blindly obey.
On September 29 2021 05:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: [quote]
What is the key difference that makes you against vaccine mandates, while simultaneously being for other sanitation/health/safety mandates? Why is a vaccine mandate an example of unacceptable government encroachment, while the other mandates are acceptable government encroachments? And are you against all vaccine mandates, or just for covid?
Bodily autonomy, mostly.
No, I don't have a blanket opposition to a vaccine mandate just as I don't have a blanket opposition to government lockdowns. My opposition is due to what COVID turned out to be. Very few children are dying of COVID and very few vaccinated adults are dying of COVID. Less than a typical flu season. If children were dying en masse I'd be all for holding people down and vaccinating them. But the data is pretty overwhelming: deaths from COVID (USA) are occurring almost exclusively in unvaccinated adults who have had the opportunity to protect themselves. Frankly, for me it's not a compelling argument to hold people down and inoculate them for their own good. People do stupid things at the expense of their health and longevity all the time and I don't really care.
Thanks for clarifying. Are you against mask mandates as well? Would that infringe upon one's bodily autonomy enough to be an issue, too? Or is a mask mandate an acceptable amount of infringement?
And also, while I agree with you / the data that most deaths (and hospitalizations, too!) are of unvaccinated adults (rather than children or vaccinated adults), there are still the issues of breakthrough cases and the perpetuation of covid, which are both primarily enabled by unvaccinated people. Unvaccinated people are more likely to become infected and infect others, which makes their vaccinated neighbors/families/friends/colleagues more susceptible, and it permits the virus to continue to survive and spread and thrive and mutate into additional strains, which may very well be resistant to outdated vaccines (again, endangering the vaccinated population). So unvaccinated people are not only putting themselves at risk, but they are presently putting vaccinated at risk too, and they'll continue to be putting everyone at risk for as long as covid is around. We already see this, as our vaccines are less effective against newer strains like the delta variant. Thoughts?
I don't really care about mask mandates. Whining about having to cover your nose and mouth seems like the most trivial thing to claim to be oppressed over. But I also eye-roll at the people that lecture other people about about mask-wearing while they themselves wear cloth masks. Personally I only wear hospital -style surgical masks. I believe the science is pretty clear that they do a better job at stopping droplet transmission than cloth masks. They are also only minimally less comfortable than cloth masks at worst. They are cheap and widely available. It seems like if you support mask mandates to prevent transmission then you should not be wearing a cloth mask.
Regarding your other point about the unvaccinated contributing to the spread and more variants. Probably true. People in this thread particularly like to use this argument of the unvaccinated prolonging the pandemic or how we will never end this as long as the unvaccinated are around. Maybe I am wrong but it's my understanding that most experts have already resigned to the fact that we are not going to eradicate COVID with herd immunity and it's here for the long-term with or without vaccine mandates. If there was compelling evidence that we could eradicate COVID with a vaccine mandate I might even jump on board for that.
Yeah I agree with you that wearing a mask is incredibly trivial, and that wearing the *proper* mask (and wearing it correctly, too!) are super important as well. That being said, I find getting vaccinated to be even less of a hassle than wearing a mask. Buying and wearing masks every day, taking them on and off, making sure they stay clean, not being able to see people's faces, etc. vs. getting a few free shots? I've heard a reasonable complaint that some people can't take off work for the few days needed for vaccinations, but the simple counterargument is that infected, unvaccinated people are forced to take off many more days for work. I think it's definitely fair to say that getting an annual shot or two is far less oppressive than being forced to cover half your face every day. Thoughts?
I considered it a privilege to get the COVID vaccine, not a hassle. I didn't miss any work and I had zero side effects minus a little anxiety.
But on the whole, no, I consider it much less oppressive and much less of an assault on bodily autonomy to require mask-wearing than to require an injection into your body. It basically comes down to the giving up liberty for safety idea. Except here the safety you are getting is marginal at best. I already feel quite protected from COVID-19 after being double vaccinated and I'll probably get a booster soon. Basically every adult has the same opportunity for this protection. So it just comes down to how much authority I would want to give to the government over this. I agree with Magic Powers that during times of crisis is when the government is most eagerly looking for ways to increase their power and once they have more power they don't like to give it up. Dying of terrorism is also incredibly rare but it got people to go along with the Patriot Act and foreign wars that cost trillions. I think these are the times you have to be most vigilant about what the government is doing.
We know that the additional safety from being vaccinated is actually incredibly important and significant, since it nearly guarantees that you won't become severely ill or die, and it helps protect those around you, too. It's not marginal for the individual, and lowering the infection rate of covid is not marginal for those of us who are vaccinated but are still forced to be near unvaccinated people (or for those who are immunocompromised and can't get the vaccine, who are forced to rely on the rest of us). The fact that this is a team effort is one of the reasons why I feel it's important to push harder for more people getting vaccinated.
Also, what liberty is someone giving up by being vaccinated? Isn't it even more liberating to get vaccinated? To be free from the worst-case scenarios of a deadly disease? To be able to see loved ones again, without needing to worry about infecting and killing each other? To be able to work again? And even if getting a vaccine is a hassle, dealing with masks seems to be significantly more disruptive to one's life than getting a shot.
The liberty you are giving up with a hypothetical vaccine mandate is the liberty to choose for yourself what you want to put into your body instead of having the government decide for you. I think that's self-evident. Every adult already has the opportunity to get vaccinated. The only thing that changes is who makes the decision.
How do you decide which liberties are okay to restrict (seat belt / air bag laws, previous vaccine mandates, etc.) and which ones we ought not to restrict? Do you have any specific criteria? For example, my primary criterion has to do with the trade-off of personal liberty vs. how others are affected by one's "personal liberty" decision. The freedom to swing my arm ends at the tip of your nose, and I think this is particularly relevant during an infectious disease pandemic, when one's personal liberty to stay unvaccinated infringes on other people's personal liberty to stay safe and healthy. At that point, an anti-vaxxer's personal freedom is restricting the freedom of others. Thoughts?
And, as an aside: Would you consider an enforced government mandate to be generally indistinguishable from all businesses and shops and supermarkets voluntarily enforcing their own mandates (without government pressure)?
There have been roughly 3-4k breakthrough deaths so far in the 9-10 months we've been vaccinating people. It seems unlikely that 100% of those cases were contracted from an unvaccinated person and 100% of those deaths could have been prevented if we had forced vaccinations so at best you are saving some fraction of that 3-4k. A bad flu season can kill 50k+ people. Relatively speaking, If you're double vaccinated, COVID is not that big of a threat to you and therefore the unvaccinated are not that big of a threat to you. Vaccine mandates only make this relatively small risk marginally smaller. If you're double vaccinated you might be better off fighting for flu vaccine mandates than COVID vaccine mandates (being facetious with that last sentence)
For the aside: businesses and shops and supermarkets should be free to have whatever policies they want in terms of enforcing enforcing vaccine mandates, masks, etc.
Coronavirus is astronomically more dangerous than the flu, but I think that's a little off-topic. Keep in mind that the vaccinated covid deaths you're focusing on don't also include hospitalizations or even milder side-effects that go away after a few days. I don't think it's appropriate to tell someone who's vaccinated "so what if you miss a few days of work or get sick for a little while; you didn't die", when the situation was preventable in the first place. I find the negatives of that situation to be far worse than someone throwing an arbitrary temper tantrum over a vaccine with no serious risks. I don't think I'd be able to tell a few thousand families "oh well; you just have to pay the price for other people being selfish". And keep in mind that new variants of covid can be more resistant to our vaccines, which would make even those who are vaccinated more vulnerable than they currently are, and these new variants would emerge due to the unvaccinated.
For the aside: Could you please elaborate on what the actual difference is between the government having everyone getting vaccinated, vs. every business, shop, and supermarket insisting everyone get vaccinated for a job or service? Aren't they both pragmatically the same in terms of removing an unvaccinated person's right to stay unvaccinated, if they wish to participate in society?
Edit: Is GoTuNk! arguing in good faith? Or is this trolling? The assertion that the government is deciding what's factual - given the countless scientific and medical experts who spent their entire lives researching infectious diseases and running experiments and gathering data - seems too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
On September 29 2021 06:42 BlackJack wrote: [quote]
Bodily autonomy, mostly.
No, I don't have a blanket opposition to a vaccine mandate just as I don't have a blanket opposition to government lockdowns. My opposition is due to what COVID turned out to be. Very few children are dying of COVID and very few vaccinated adults are dying of COVID. Less than a typical flu season. If children were dying en masse I'd be all for holding people down and vaccinating them. But the data is pretty overwhelming: deaths from COVID (USA) are occurring almost exclusively in unvaccinated adults who have had the opportunity to protect themselves. Frankly, for me it's not a compelling argument to hold people down and inoculate them for their own good. People do stupid things at the expense of their health and longevity all the time and I don't really care.
Thanks for clarifying. Are you against mask mandates as well? Would that infringe upon one's bodily autonomy enough to be an issue, too? Or is a mask mandate an acceptable amount of infringement?
And also, while I agree with you / the data that most deaths (and hospitalizations, too!) are of unvaccinated adults (rather than children or vaccinated adults), there are still the issues of breakthrough cases and the perpetuation of covid, which are both primarily enabled by unvaccinated people. Unvaccinated people are more likely to become infected and infect others, which makes their vaccinated neighbors/families/friends/colleagues more susceptible, and it permits the virus to continue to survive and spread and thrive and mutate into additional strains, which may very well be resistant to outdated vaccines (again, endangering the vaccinated population). So unvaccinated people are not only putting themselves at risk, but they are presently putting vaccinated at risk too, and they'll continue to be putting everyone at risk for as long as covid is around. We already see this, as our vaccines are less effective against newer strains like the delta variant. Thoughts?
I don't really care about mask mandates. Whining about having to cover your nose and mouth seems like the most trivial thing to claim to be oppressed over. But I also eye-roll at the people that lecture other people about about mask-wearing while they themselves wear cloth masks. Personally I only wear hospital -style surgical masks. I believe the science is pretty clear that they do a better job at stopping droplet transmission than cloth masks. They are also only minimally less comfortable than cloth masks at worst. They are cheap and widely available. It seems like if you support mask mandates to prevent transmission then you should not be wearing a cloth mask.
Regarding your other point about the unvaccinated contributing to the spread and more variants. Probably true. People in this thread particularly like to use this argument of the unvaccinated prolonging the pandemic or how we will never end this as long as the unvaccinated are around. Maybe I am wrong but it's my understanding that most experts have already resigned to the fact that we are not going to eradicate COVID with herd immunity and it's here for the long-term with or without vaccine mandates. If there was compelling evidence that we could eradicate COVID with a vaccine mandate I might even jump on board for that.
Yeah I agree with you that wearing a mask is incredibly trivial, and that wearing the *proper* mask (and wearing it correctly, too!) are super important as well. That being said, I find getting vaccinated to be even less of a hassle than wearing a mask. Buying and wearing masks every day, taking them on and off, making sure they stay clean, not being able to see people's faces, etc. vs. getting a few free shots? I've heard a reasonable complaint that some people can't take off work for the few days needed for vaccinations, but the simple counterargument is that infected, unvaccinated people are forced to take off many more days for work. I think it's definitely fair to say that getting an annual shot or two is far less oppressive than being forced to cover half your face every day. Thoughts?
I considered it a privilege to get the COVID vaccine, not a hassle. I didn't miss any work and I had zero side effects minus a little anxiety.
But on the whole, no, I consider it much less oppressive and much less of an assault on bodily autonomy to require mask-wearing than to require an injection into your body. It basically comes down to the giving up liberty for safety idea. Except here the safety you are getting is marginal at best. I already feel quite protected from COVID-19 after being double vaccinated and I'll probably get a booster soon. Basically every adult has the same opportunity for this protection. So it just comes down to how much authority I would want to give to the government over this. I agree with Magic Powers that during times of crisis is when the government is most eagerly looking for ways to increase their power and once they have more power they don't like to give it up. Dying of terrorism is also incredibly rare but it got people to go along with the Patriot Act and foreign wars that cost trillions. I think these are the times you have to be most vigilant about what the government is doing.
We know that the additional safety from being vaccinated is actually incredibly important and significant, since it nearly guarantees that you won't become severely ill or die, and it helps protect those around you, too. It's not marginal for the individual, and lowering the infection rate of covid is not marginal for those of us who are vaccinated but are still forced to be near unvaccinated people (or for those who are immunocompromised and can't get the vaccine, who are forced to rely on the rest of us). The fact that this is a team effort is one of the reasons why I feel it's important to push harder for more people getting vaccinated.
Also, what liberty is someone giving up by being vaccinated? Isn't it even more liberating to get vaccinated? To be free from the worst-case scenarios of a deadly disease? To be able to see loved ones again, without needing to worry about infecting and killing each other? To be able to work again? And even if getting a vaccine is a hassle, dealing with masks seems to be significantly more disruptive to one's life than getting a shot.
The liberty you are giving up with a hypothetical vaccine mandate is the liberty to choose for yourself what you want to put into your body instead of having the government decide for you. I think that's self-evident. Every adult already has the opportunity to get vaccinated. The only thing that changes is who makes the decision.
How do you decide which liberties are okay to restrict (seat belt / air bag laws, previous vaccine mandates, etc.) and which ones we ought not to restrict? Do you have any specific criteria? For example, my primary criterion has to do with the trade-off of personal liberty vs. how others are affected by one's "personal liberty" decision. The freedom to swing my arm ends at the tip of your nose, and I think this is particularly relevant during an infectious disease pandemic, when one's personal liberty to stay unvaccinated infringes on other people's personal liberty to stay safe and healthy. At that point, an anti-vaxxer's personal freedom is restricting the freedom of others. Thoughts?
And, as an aside: Would you consider an enforced government mandate to be generally indistinguishable from all businesses and shops and supermarkets voluntarily enforcing their own mandates (without government pressure)?
There have been roughly 3-4k breakthrough deaths so far in the 9-10 months we've been vaccinating people. It seems unlikely that 100% of those cases were contracted from an unvaccinated person and 100% of those deaths could have been prevented if we had forced vaccinations so at best you are saving some fraction of that 3-4k. A bad flu season can kill 50k+ people. Relatively speaking, If you're double vaccinated, COVID is not that big of a threat to you and therefore the unvaccinated are not that big of a threat to you. Vaccine mandates only make this relatively small risk marginally smaller. If you're double vaccinated you might be better off fighting for flu vaccine mandates than COVID vaccine mandates (being facetious with that last sentence)
For the aside: businesses and shops and supermarkets should be free to have whatever policies they want in terms of enforcing enforcing vaccine mandates, masks, etc.
Coronavirus is astronomically more dangerous than the flu, but I think that's a little off-topic. Keep in mind that the vaccinated covid deaths you're focusing on don't also include hospitalizations or even milder side-effects that go away after a few days. I don't think it's appropriate to tell someone who's vaccinated "so what if you miss a few days of work or get sick for a little while; you didn't die", when the situation was preventable in the first place. I find the negatives of that situation to be far worse than someone throwing an arbitrary temper tantrum over a vaccine with no serious risks. I don't think I'd be able to tell a few thousand families "oh well; you just have to pay the price for other people being selfish". And keep in mind that new variants of covid can be more resistant to our vaccines, which would make even those who are vaccinated more vulnerable than they currently are, and these new variants would emerge due to the unvaccinated.
For the aside: Could you please elaborate on what the actual difference is between the government having everyone getting vaccinated, vs. every business, shop, and supermarket insisting everyone get vaccinated for a job or service? Aren't they both pragmatically the same in terms of removing an unvaccinated person's right to stay unvaccinated, if they wish to participate in society?
Edit: Is GoTuNk! arguing in good faith? Or is this trolling? The assertion that the government is deciding what's factual - given the countless scientific and medical experts who spent their entire lives researching infectious diseases and running experiments and gathering data - seems too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
Covid is not astronomically more dangerous for a vaccinated individual than the flu is for an unvaccinated individual. If anything it's the other way around. The point BJ is making is that we are okay with virtually no restrictions during flu season (at-risk individuals getting a flu shot, people who are sick staying home), yet people who are vaccinated against covid (who have less probability to get sick from covid than they, as unvaccinated individuals, have from the flu) still have to comply to more restrictions (than what we see during a normal flu season). The points about 'what about the people who can't get vaccines' or 'people in risk groups that are still at risk even when vaccinated' are fair, but I'm not convinced they're really numerous enough to justify social distancing (when I speak of restrictions, it's not masks, it's whatever restricts social activity and human closeness) as a general recommendation - even if that might seem kinda cold and callous.
Gotunk is also arguing in good faith, but he has a world view that greatly differs from mine or yours. But he's been consistent for many years now, no reason to suspect that he's not genuine. Also at least here, the scientists and medical experts who suggest or dictate government policy tend to be employed by the government, so at least to me, it's not really wrong to state that the government is deciding what is factual. I'm fine with that - my government is highly competent and I generally trust their judgment.
You not being able to get surgeries has no relation to whether covid is more dangerous to a vaccinated individual than what the flu is for an unvaccinated individual. You're even stating that the hospitals are full of unvaccinated people. The statement is quite simple: If you are not vaccinated, then being infected by the flu is a bigger threat to you, as an individual, than what being infected by covid is for a fully vaccinated individual. By 'dangerous', I mean 'is likely to make you seriously ill, hospitalized, or dead'.
I think that's self-evident, tbh. For it not to be the case, the covid-vaccines would have to be really ineffective, but they're not.
Imagine the following scenario: Tomorrow, 100% of the world's population is double vaccinated against covid. 0% of the world's population is vaccinated against the flu. Going into the next 6 month period following that, would you imagine that covid or flu caused more deaths?
On September 29 2021 07:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: [quote]
Thanks for clarifying. Are you against mask mandates as well? Would that infringe upon one's bodily autonomy enough to be an issue, too? Or is a mask mandate an acceptable amount of infringement?
And also, while I agree with you / the data that most deaths (and hospitalizations, too!) are of unvaccinated adults (rather than children or vaccinated adults), there are still the issues of breakthrough cases and the perpetuation of covid, which are both primarily enabled by unvaccinated people. Unvaccinated people are more likely to become infected and infect others, which makes their vaccinated neighbors/families/friends/colleagues more susceptible, and it permits the virus to continue to survive and spread and thrive and mutate into additional strains, which may very well be resistant to outdated vaccines (again, endangering the vaccinated population). So unvaccinated people are not only putting themselves at risk, but they are presently putting vaccinated at risk too, and they'll continue to be putting everyone at risk for as long as covid is around. We already see this, as our vaccines are less effective against newer strains like the delta variant. Thoughts?
I don't really care about mask mandates. Whining about having to cover your nose and mouth seems like the most trivial thing to claim to be oppressed over. But I also eye-roll at the people that lecture other people about about mask-wearing while they themselves wear cloth masks. Personally I only wear hospital -style surgical masks. I believe the science is pretty clear that they do a better job at stopping droplet transmission than cloth masks. They are also only minimally less comfortable than cloth masks at worst. They are cheap and widely available. It seems like if you support mask mandates to prevent transmission then you should not be wearing a cloth mask.
Regarding your other point about the unvaccinated contributing to the spread and more variants. Probably true. People in this thread particularly like to use this argument of the unvaccinated prolonging the pandemic or how we will never end this as long as the unvaccinated are around. Maybe I am wrong but it's my understanding that most experts have already resigned to the fact that we are not going to eradicate COVID with herd immunity and it's here for the long-term with or without vaccine mandates. If there was compelling evidence that we could eradicate COVID with a vaccine mandate I might even jump on board for that.
Yeah I agree with you that wearing a mask is incredibly trivial, and that wearing the *proper* mask (and wearing it correctly, too!) are super important as well. That being said, I find getting vaccinated to be even less of a hassle than wearing a mask. Buying and wearing masks every day, taking them on and off, making sure they stay clean, not being able to see people's faces, etc. vs. getting a few free shots? I've heard a reasonable complaint that some people can't take off work for the few days needed for vaccinations, but the simple counterargument is that infected, unvaccinated people are forced to take off many more days for work. I think it's definitely fair to say that getting an annual shot or two is far less oppressive than being forced to cover half your face every day. Thoughts?
I considered it a privilege to get the COVID vaccine, not a hassle. I didn't miss any work and I had zero side effects minus a little anxiety.
But on the whole, no, I consider it much less oppressive and much less of an assault on bodily autonomy to require mask-wearing than to require an injection into your body. It basically comes down to the giving up liberty for safety idea. Except here the safety you are getting is marginal at best. I already feel quite protected from COVID-19 after being double vaccinated and I'll probably get a booster soon. Basically every adult has the same opportunity for this protection. So it just comes down to how much authority I would want to give to the government over this. I agree with Magic Powers that during times of crisis is when the government is most eagerly looking for ways to increase their power and once they have more power they don't like to give it up. Dying of terrorism is also incredibly rare but it got people to go along with the Patriot Act and foreign wars that cost trillions. I think these are the times you have to be most vigilant about what the government is doing.
We know that the additional safety from being vaccinated is actually incredibly important and significant, since it nearly guarantees that you won't become severely ill or die, and it helps protect those around you, too. It's not marginal for the individual, and lowering the infection rate of covid is not marginal for those of us who are vaccinated but are still forced to be near unvaccinated people (or for those who are immunocompromised and can't get the vaccine, who are forced to rely on the rest of us). The fact that this is a team effort is one of the reasons why I feel it's important to push harder for more people getting vaccinated.
Also, what liberty is someone giving up by being vaccinated? Isn't it even more liberating to get vaccinated? To be free from the worst-case scenarios of a deadly disease? To be able to see loved ones again, without needing to worry about infecting and killing each other? To be able to work again? And even if getting a vaccine is a hassle, dealing with masks seems to be significantly more disruptive to one's life than getting a shot.
The liberty you are giving up with a hypothetical vaccine mandate is the liberty to choose for yourself what you want to put into your body instead of having the government decide for you. I think that's self-evident. Every adult already has the opportunity to get vaccinated. The only thing that changes is who makes the decision.
How do you decide which liberties are okay to restrict (seat belt / air bag laws, previous vaccine mandates, etc.) and which ones we ought not to restrict? Do you have any specific criteria? For example, my primary criterion has to do with the trade-off of personal liberty vs. how others are affected by one's "personal liberty" decision. The freedom to swing my arm ends at the tip of your nose, and I think this is particularly relevant during an infectious disease pandemic, when one's personal liberty to stay unvaccinated infringes on other people's personal liberty to stay safe and healthy. At that point, an anti-vaxxer's personal freedom is restricting the freedom of others. Thoughts?
And, as an aside: Would you consider an enforced government mandate to be generally indistinguishable from all businesses and shops and supermarkets voluntarily enforcing their own mandates (without government pressure)?
There have been roughly 3-4k breakthrough deaths so far in the 9-10 months we've been vaccinating people. It seems unlikely that 100% of those cases were contracted from an unvaccinated person and 100% of those deaths could have been prevented if we had forced vaccinations so at best you are saving some fraction of that 3-4k. A bad flu season can kill 50k+ people. Relatively speaking, If you're double vaccinated, COVID is not that big of a threat to you and therefore the unvaccinated are not that big of a threat to you. Vaccine mandates only make this relatively small risk marginally smaller. If you're double vaccinated you might be better off fighting for flu vaccine mandates than COVID vaccine mandates (being facetious with that last sentence)
For the aside: businesses and shops and supermarkets should be free to have whatever policies they want in terms of enforcing enforcing vaccine mandates, masks, etc.
Coronavirus is astronomically more dangerous than the flu, but I think that's a little off-topic. Keep in mind that the vaccinated covid deaths you're focusing on don't also include hospitalizations or even milder side-effects that go away after a few days. I don't think it's appropriate to tell someone who's vaccinated "so what if you miss a few days of work or get sick for a little while; you didn't die", when the situation was preventable in the first place. I find the negatives of that situation to be far worse than someone throwing an arbitrary temper tantrum over a vaccine with no serious risks. I don't think I'd be able to tell a few thousand families "oh well; you just have to pay the price for other people being selfish". And keep in mind that new variants of covid can be more resistant to our vaccines, which would make even those who are vaccinated more vulnerable than they currently are, and these new variants would emerge due to the unvaccinated.
For the aside: Could you please elaborate on what the actual difference is between the government having everyone getting vaccinated, vs. every business, shop, and supermarket insisting everyone get vaccinated for a job or service? Aren't they both pragmatically the same in terms of removing an unvaccinated person's right to stay unvaccinated, if they wish to participate in society?
Edit: Is GoTuNk! arguing in good faith? Or is this trolling? The assertion that the government is deciding what's factual - given the countless scientific and medical experts who spent their entire lives researching infectious diseases and running experiments and gathering data - seems too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
Covid is not astronomically more dangerous for a vaccinated individual than the flu is for an unvaccinated individual. If anything it's the other way around. The point BJ is making is that we are okay with virtually no restrictions during flu season (at-risk individuals getting a flu shot, people who are sick staying home), yet people who are vaccinated against covid (who have less probability to get sick from covid than they, as unvaccinated individuals, have from the flu) still have to comply to more restrictions (than what we see during a normal flu season). The points about 'what about the people who can't get vaccines' or 'people in risk groups that are still at risk even when vaccinated' are fair, but I'm not convinced they're really numerous enough to justify social distancing (when I speak of restrictions, it's not masks, it's whatever restricts social activity and human closeness) as a general recommendation - even if that might seem kinda cold and callous.
Why would we ever compare a person not vaccinated for one disease to a person vaccinated for a completely different disease? We should control for vaccination status by either comparing two vaccinated groups (vaccinated for both covid and flu), or comparing two unvaccinated groups (vaccinated for neither covid nor flu). In either of those cases, covid is way more dangerous than the flu. The flu should also be taken seriously (everyone should get their annual flu shot too), but it hasn't shut down the entire world; it's pretty bad on an absolute scale, but relatively-speaking, it's not "global pandemic" bad, hence far fewer restrictions than our covid situation. Both side effects and infection rates tend to be significantly more substantial for covid than the flu, hence the greater emphasis on restrictions for everyone when it comes to protecting from covid. Personally, I'm still not going to hang out with anyone who has the flu, and it's strongly discouraged that students with flu-like symptoms attend school (even if they only have the flu and not covid), but given the name of this thread, I'd like to focus on covid
Gotunk is also arguing in good faith, but he has a world view that greatly differs from mine or yours. But he's been consistent for many years now, no reason to suspect that he's not genuine. Also at least here, the scientists and medical experts who suggest or dictate government policy tend to be employed by the government, so at least to me, it's not really wrong to state that the government is deciding what is factual. I'm fine with that - my government is highly competent and I generally trust their judgment.
Thanks for clarifying that he's arguing in good faith When it comes to the dangers of covid and the efficacy of the vaccines, I think it's pretty clear that we're not talking about some individual who's been bought out by the government. We're talking about the scientific and medical consensuses here, based on actual data in published, peer-reviewed journals, and suggesting that the "government and big corporations decide what is fact" (as if their private agendas are what matters when it comes to truth, rather than the actual evidence) reads (to me) as a dogwhistle similar to right-wing propaganda about how we ought not to trust information about vaccines and covid because it's all been tainted and biased by politicians and people who say whatever they want, just to get rich. I'm not a fan of that kind of conspiratorial nonsense, especially when millions of people have already died, worldwide.
On September 29 2021 06:42 BlackJack wrote: [quote]
Bodily autonomy, mostly.
No, I don't have a blanket opposition to a vaccine mandate just as I don't have a blanket opposition to government lockdowns. My opposition is due to what COVID turned out to be. Very few children are dying of COVID and very few vaccinated adults are dying of COVID. Less than a typical flu season. If children were dying en masse I'd be all for holding people down and vaccinating them. But the data is pretty overwhelming: deaths from COVID (USA) are occurring almost exclusively in unvaccinated adults who have had the opportunity to protect themselves. Frankly, for me it's not a compelling argument to hold people down and inoculate them for their own good. People do stupid things at the expense of their health and longevity all the time and I don't really care.
Thanks for clarifying. Are you against mask mandates as well? Would that infringe upon one's bodily autonomy enough to be an issue, too? Or is a mask mandate an acceptable amount of infringement?
And also, while I agree with you / the data that most deaths (and hospitalizations, too!) are of unvaccinated adults (rather than children or vaccinated adults), there are still the issues of breakthrough cases and the perpetuation of covid, which are both primarily enabled by unvaccinated people. Unvaccinated people are more likely to become infected and infect others, which makes their vaccinated neighbors/families/friends/colleagues more susceptible, and it permits the virus to continue to survive and spread and thrive and mutate into additional strains, which may very well be resistant to outdated vaccines (again, endangering the vaccinated population). So unvaccinated people are not only putting themselves at risk, but they are presently putting vaccinated at risk too, and they'll continue to be putting everyone at risk for as long as covid is around. We already see this, as our vaccines are less effective against newer strains like the delta variant. Thoughts?
I don't really care about mask mandates. Whining about having to cover your nose and mouth seems like the most trivial thing to claim to be oppressed over. But I also eye-roll at the people that lecture other people about about mask-wearing while they themselves wear cloth masks. Personally I only wear hospital -style surgical masks. I believe the science is pretty clear that they do a better job at stopping droplet transmission than cloth masks. They are also only minimally less comfortable than cloth masks at worst. They are cheap and widely available. It seems like if you support mask mandates to prevent transmission then you should not be wearing a cloth mask.
Regarding your other point about the unvaccinated contributing to the spread and more variants. Probably true. People in this thread particularly like to use this argument of the unvaccinated prolonging the pandemic or how we will never end this as long as the unvaccinated are around. Maybe I am wrong but it's my understanding that most experts have already resigned to the fact that we are not going to eradicate COVID with herd immunity and it's here for the long-term with or without vaccine mandates. If there was compelling evidence that we could eradicate COVID with a vaccine mandate I might even jump on board for that.
Yeah I agree with you that wearing a mask is incredibly trivial, and that wearing the *proper* mask (and wearing it correctly, too!) are super important as well. That being said, I find getting vaccinated to be even less of a hassle than wearing a mask. Buying and wearing masks every day, taking them on and off, making sure they stay clean, not being able to see people's faces, etc. vs. getting a few free shots? I've heard a reasonable complaint that some people can't take off work for the few days needed for vaccinations, but the simple counterargument is that infected, unvaccinated people are forced to take off many more days for work. I think it's definitely fair to say that getting an annual shot or two is far less oppressive than being forced to cover half your face every day. Thoughts?
I considered it a privilege to get the COVID vaccine, not a hassle. I didn't miss any work and I had zero side effects minus a little anxiety.
But on the whole, no, I consider it much less oppressive and much less of an assault on bodily autonomy to require mask-wearing than to require an injection into your body. It basically comes down to the giving up liberty for safety idea. Except here the safety you are getting is marginal at best. I already feel quite protected from COVID-19 after being double vaccinated and I'll probably get a booster soon. Basically every adult has the same opportunity for this protection. So it just comes down to how much authority I would want to give to the government over this. I agree with Magic Powers that during times of crisis is when the government is most eagerly looking for ways to increase their power and once they have more power they don't like to give it up. Dying of terrorism is also incredibly rare but it got people to go along with the Patriot Act and foreign wars that cost trillions. I think these are the times you have to be most vigilant about what the government is doing.
We know that the additional safety from being vaccinated is actually incredibly important and significant, since it nearly guarantees that you won't become severely ill or die, and it helps protect those around you, too. It's not marginal for the individual, and lowering the infection rate of covid is not marginal for those of us who are vaccinated but are still forced to be near unvaccinated people (or for those who are immunocompromised and can't get the vaccine, who are forced to rely on the rest of us). The fact that this is a team effort is one of the reasons why I feel it's important to push harder for more people getting vaccinated.
Also, what liberty is someone giving up by being vaccinated? Isn't it even more liberating to get vaccinated? To be free from the worst-case scenarios of a deadly disease? To be able to see loved ones again, without needing to worry about infecting and killing each other? To be able to work again? And even if getting a vaccine is a hassle, dealing with masks seems to be significantly more disruptive to one's life than getting a shot.
The liberty you are giving up with a hypothetical vaccine mandate is the liberty to choose for yourself what you want to put into your body instead of having the government decide for you. I think that's self-evident. Every adult already has the opportunity to get vaccinated. The only thing that changes is who makes the decision.
How do you decide which liberties are okay to restrict (seat belt / air bag laws, previous vaccine mandates, etc.) and which ones we ought not to restrict? Do you have any specific criteria? For example, my primary criterion has to do with the trade-off of personal liberty vs. how others are affected by one's "personal liberty" decision. The freedom to swing my arm ends at the tip of your nose, and I think this is particularly relevant during an infectious disease pandemic, when one's personal liberty to stay unvaccinated infringes on other people's personal liberty to stay safe and healthy. At that point, an anti-vaxxer's personal freedom is restricting the freedom of others. Thoughts?
And, as an aside: Would you consider an enforced government mandate to be generally indistinguishable from all businesses and shops and supermarkets voluntarily enforcing their own mandates (without government pressure)?
There have been roughly 3-4k breakthrough deaths so far in the 9-10 months we've been vaccinating people. It seems unlikely that 100% of those cases were contracted from an unvaccinated person and 100% of those deaths could have been prevented if we had forced vaccinations so at best you are saving some fraction of that 3-4k. A bad flu season can kill 50k+ people. Relatively speaking, If you're double vaccinated, COVID is not that big of a threat to you and therefore the unvaccinated are not that big of a threat to you. Vaccine mandates only make this relatively small risk marginally smaller. If you're double vaccinated you might be better off fighting for flu vaccine mandates than COVID vaccine mandates (being facetious with that last sentence)
For the aside: businesses and shops and supermarkets should be free to have whatever policies they want in terms of enforcing enforcing vaccine mandates, masks, etc.
Why is death the only factor that matters? Should all of society have to pay the costs associated with caring for unvaxxinated? How about their children? How about all the surgeries canceled? How about all the Cancers found later and so on?
I know you believe covid to not be dangerous to children because you only look at death but what about the 30,000 kids with 25% of them in ICU in just August? (20,000-40,000 children a year usually end up in the hospital with the flu? How about the fact that low vaccinated places and 3.5x as many children in hospitals as higher vaccinated places? In Aug Child hospitalizations went up 5X and 10x for children under 4?
Edit: side note for people who think covid killing 3x the number of children in the US as the highest recorded flu season in just 3/4 of year is a big deal. That has happened. And most of it since july. In Florida 17 Children have died from Covid, Since July 10 children in Flordia have died. So 18 months 7, uncontrolled spread open everything 10 in three months. (highest flu season deaths 188, average below 100, Covid deaths so far 2021 561 up to sept 25th with not all states reporting)
Businesses come to the government to have them do a framework because that is way cheaper, consistent and fair. Having each business reinvent the wheel 6.1 million times is extremely inefficient.
I don't think you have read the data correctly. Covid-19 is not very dangerous for kids. It says that only around 50 of 100k infected children 0-17 gets hospitalized, which equals ro 0,05%, and another source told me most of them are out within 2 days.
That ICU number of yours of among hospitalized kids, not infected.
If increased hygiene makes them more vulnerable to outbreaks of for example Rota virus, any benefit to shielding children against covid is quickly lost.
On September 29 2021 07:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: [quote]
Thanks for clarifying. Are you against mask mandates as well? Would that infringe upon one's bodily autonomy enough to be an issue, too? Or is a mask mandate an acceptable amount of infringement?
And also, while I agree with you / the data that most deaths (and hospitalizations, too!) are of unvaccinated adults (rather than children or vaccinated adults), there are still the issues of breakthrough cases and the perpetuation of covid, which are both primarily enabled by unvaccinated people. Unvaccinated people are more likely to become infected and infect others, which makes their vaccinated neighbors/families/friends/colleagues more susceptible, and it permits the virus to continue to survive and spread and thrive and mutate into additional strains, which may very well be resistant to outdated vaccines (again, endangering the vaccinated population). So unvaccinated people are not only putting themselves at risk, but they are presently putting vaccinated at risk too, and they'll continue to be putting everyone at risk for as long as covid is around. We already see this, as our vaccines are less effective against newer strains like the delta variant. Thoughts?
I don't really care about mask mandates. Whining about having to cover your nose and mouth seems like the most trivial thing to claim to be oppressed over. But I also eye-roll at the people that lecture other people about about mask-wearing while they themselves wear cloth masks. Personally I only wear hospital -style surgical masks. I believe the science is pretty clear that they do a better job at stopping droplet transmission than cloth masks. They are also only minimally less comfortable than cloth masks at worst. They are cheap and widely available. It seems like if you support mask mandates to prevent transmission then you should not be wearing a cloth mask.
Regarding your other point about the unvaccinated contributing to the spread and more variants. Probably true. People in this thread particularly like to use this argument of the unvaccinated prolonging the pandemic or how we will never end this as long as the unvaccinated are around. Maybe I am wrong but it's my understanding that most experts have already resigned to the fact that we are not going to eradicate COVID with herd immunity and it's here for the long-term with or without vaccine mandates. If there was compelling evidence that we could eradicate COVID with a vaccine mandate I might even jump on board for that.
Yeah I agree with you that wearing a mask is incredibly trivial, and that wearing the *proper* mask (and wearing it correctly, too!) are super important as well. That being said, I find getting vaccinated to be even less of a hassle than wearing a mask. Buying and wearing masks every day, taking them on and off, making sure they stay clean, not being able to see people's faces, etc. vs. getting a few free shots? I've heard a reasonable complaint that some people can't take off work for the few days needed for vaccinations, but the simple counterargument is that infected, unvaccinated people are forced to take off many more days for work. I think it's definitely fair to say that getting an annual shot or two is far less oppressive than being forced to cover half your face every day. Thoughts?
I considered it a privilege to get the COVID vaccine, not a hassle. I didn't miss any work and I had zero side effects minus a little anxiety.
But on the whole, no, I consider it much less oppressive and much less of an assault on bodily autonomy to require mask-wearing than to require an injection into your body. It basically comes down to the giving up liberty for safety idea. Except here the safety you are getting is marginal at best. I already feel quite protected from COVID-19 after being double vaccinated and I'll probably get a booster soon. Basically every adult has the same opportunity for this protection. So it just comes down to how much authority I would want to give to the government over this. I agree with Magic Powers that during times of crisis is when the government is most eagerly looking for ways to increase their power and once they have more power they don't like to give it up. Dying of terrorism is also incredibly rare but it got people to go along with the Patriot Act and foreign wars that cost trillions. I think these are the times you have to be most vigilant about what the government is doing.
We know that the additional safety from being vaccinated is actually incredibly important and significant, since it nearly guarantees that you won't become severely ill or die, and it helps protect those around you, too. It's not marginal for the individual, and lowering the infection rate of covid is not marginal for those of us who are vaccinated but are still forced to be near unvaccinated people (or for those who are immunocompromised and can't get the vaccine, who are forced to rely on the rest of us). The fact that this is a team effort is one of the reasons why I feel it's important to push harder for more people getting vaccinated.
Also, what liberty is someone giving up by being vaccinated? Isn't it even more liberating to get vaccinated? To be free from the worst-case scenarios of a deadly disease? To be able to see loved ones again, without needing to worry about infecting and killing each other? To be able to work again? And even if getting a vaccine is a hassle, dealing with masks seems to be significantly more disruptive to one's life than getting a shot.
The liberty you are giving up with a hypothetical vaccine mandate is the liberty to choose for yourself what you want to put into your body instead of having the government decide for you. I think that's self-evident. Every adult already has the opportunity to get vaccinated. The only thing that changes is who makes the decision.
How do you decide which liberties are okay to restrict (seat belt / air bag laws, previous vaccine mandates, etc.) and which ones we ought not to restrict? Do you have any specific criteria? For example, my primary criterion has to do with the trade-off of personal liberty vs. how others are affected by one's "personal liberty" decision. The freedom to swing my arm ends at the tip of your nose, and I think this is particularly relevant during an infectious disease pandemic, when one's personal liberty to stay unvaccinated infringes on other people's personal liberty to stay safe and healthy. At that point, an anti-vaxxer's personal freedom is restricting the freedom of others. Thoughts?
And, as an aside: Would you consider an enforced government mandate to be generally indistinguishable from all businesses and shops and supermarkets voluntarily enforcing their own mandates (without government pressure)?
There have been roughly 3-4k breakthrough deaths so far in the 9-10 months we've been vaccinating people. It seems unlikely that 100% of those cases were contracted from an unvaccinated person and 100% of those deaths could have been prevented if we had forced vaccinations so at best you are saving some fraction of that 3-4k. A bad flu season can kill 50k+ people. Relatively speaking, If you're double vaccinated, COVID is not that big of a threat to you and therefore the unvaccinated are not that big of a threat to you. Vaccine mandates only make this relatively small risk marginally smaller. If you're double vaccinated you might be better off fighting for flu vaccine mandates than COVID vaccine mandates (being facetious with that last sentence)
For the aside: businesses and shops and supermarkets should be free to have whatever policies they want in terms of enforcing enforcing vaccine mandates, masks, etc.
Coronavirus is astronomically more dangerous than the flu, but I think that's a little off-topic. Keep in mind that the vaccinated covid deaths you're focusing on don't also include hospitalizations or even milder side-effects that go away after a few days. I don't think it's appropriate to tell someone who's vaccinated "so what if you miss a few days of work or get sick for a little while; you didn't die", when the situation was preventable in the first place. I find the negatives of that situation to be far worse than someone throwing an arbitrary temper tantrum over a vaccine with no serious risks. I don't think I'd be able to tell a few thousand families "oh well; you just have to pay the price for other people being selfish". And keep in mind that new variants of covid can be more resistant to our vaccines, which would make even those who are vaccinated more vulnerable than they currently are, and these new variants would emerge due to the unvaccinated.
For the aside: Could you please elaborate on what the actual difference is between the government having everyone getting vaccinated, vs. every business, shop, and supermarket insisting everyone get vaccinated for a job or service? Aren't they both pragmatically the same in terms of removing an unvaccinated person's right to stay unvaccinated, if they wish to participate in society?
Edit: Is GoTuNk! arguing in good faith? Or is this trolling? The assertion that the government is deciding what's factual - given the countless scientific and medical experts who spent their entire lives researching infectious diseases and running experiments and gathering data - seems too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
Covid is not astronomically more dangerous for a vaccinated individual than the flu is for an unvaccinated individual. If anything it's the other way around. The point BJ is making is that we are okay with virtually no restrictions during flu season (at-risk individuals getting a flu shot, people who are sick staying home), yet people who are vaccinated against covid (who have less probability to get sick from covid than they, as unvaccinated individuals, have from the flu) still have to comply to more restrictions (than what we see during a normal flu season). The points about 'what about the people who can't get vaccines' or 'people in risk groups that are still at risk even when vaccinated' are fair, but I'm not convinced they're really numerous enough to justify social distancing (when I speak of restrictions, it's not masks, it's whatever restricts social activity and human closeness) as a general recommendation - even if that might seem kinda cold and callous.
Gotunk is also arguing in good faith, but he has a world view that greatly differs from mine or yours. But he's been consistent for many years now, no reason to suspect that he's not genuine. Also at least here, the scientists and medical experts who suggest or dictate government policy tend to be employed by the government, so at least to me, it's not really wrong to state that the government is deciding what is factual. I'm fine with that - my government is highly competent and I generally trust their judgment.
Consistency and sincerity are not antithetical to arguments posed in bad faith, that concept applies to a wide range of ways that a party to a discussion engages with ideas in a problematic way. Here, it is absolutely bad faith to transform the position of folks arguing in favor of following government guidelines into an unquestioning, anti-skeptical scarecrow that no one here has advocated for. Instead of addressing the reality of what folks like DPB and NewSunshine have advocated for, that being an informed agreement with medical consensus turned government policy, GoTuNk! would rather tilt at windmills of his own creation. That's a common tactic among conspiracy theorists of all kinds given how routinely they take issue with the status quo, and it's inaccurate out of the box given the wide variety of reasons folks decide to agree with mainstream consensus at any given time. It's a way to rob a discussion of nuance and that's pretty clearly not a good faith effort to grapple with what people actually believe.
On September 29 2021 14:54 BlackJack wrote: [quote]
I don't really care about mask mandates. Whining about having to cover your nose and mouth seems like the most trivial thing to claim to be oppressed over. But I also eye-roll at the people that lecture other people about about mask-wearing while they themselves wear cloth masks. Personally I only wear hospital -style surgical masks. I believe the science is pretty clear that they do a better job at stopping droplet transmission than cloth masks. They are also only minimally less comfortable than cloth masks at worst. They are cheap and widely available. It seems like if you support mask mandates to prevent transmission then you should not be wearing a cloth mask.
Regarding your other point about the unvaccinated contributing to the spread and more variants. Probably true. People in this thread particularly like to use this argument of the unvaccinated prolonging the pandemic or how we will never end this as long as the unvaccinated are around. Maybe I am wrong but it's my understanding that most experts have already resigned to the fact that we are not going to eradicate COVID with herd immunity and it's here for the long-term with or without vaccine mandates. If there was compelling evidence that we could eradicate COVID with a vaccine mandate I might even jump on board for that.
Yeah I agree with you that wearing a mask is incredibly trivial, and that wearing the *proper* mask (and wearing it correctly, too!) are super important as well. That being said, I find getting vaccinated to be even less of a hassle than wearing a mask. Buying and wearing masks every day, taking them on and off, making sure they stay clean, not being able to see people's faces, etc. vs. getting a few free shots? I've heard a reasonable complaint that some people can't take off work for the few days needed for vaccinations, but the simple counterargument is that infected, unvaccinated people are forced to take off many more days for work. I think it's definitely fair to say that getting an annual shot or two is far less oppressive than being forced to cover half your face every day. Thoughts?
I considered it a privilege to get the COVID vaccine, not a hassle. I didn't miss any work and I had zero side effects minus a little anxiety.
But on the whole, no, I consider it much less oppressive and much less of an assault on bodily autonomy to require mask-wearing than to require an injection into your body. It basically comes down to the giving up liberty for safety idea. Except here the safety you are getting is marginal at best. I already feel quite protected from COVID-19 after being double vaccinated and I'll probably get a booster soon. Basically every adult has the same opportunity for this protection. So it just comes down to how much authority I would want to give to the government over this. I agree with Magic Powers that during times of crisis is when the government is most eagerly looking for ways to increase their power and once they have more power they don't like to give it up. Dying of terrorism is also incredibly rare but it got people to go along with the Patriot Act and foreign wars that cost trillions. I think these are the times you have to be most vigilant about what the government is doing.
We know that the additional safety from being vaccinated is actually incredibly important and significant, since it nearly guarantees that you won't become severely ill or die, and it helps protect those around you, too. It's not marginal for the individual, and lowering the infection rate of covid is not marginal for those of us who are vaccinated but are still forced to be near unvaccinated people (or for those who are immunocompromised and can't get the vaccine, who are forced to rely on the rest of us). The fact that this is a team effort is one of the reasons why I feel it's important to push harder for more people getting vaccinated.
Also, what liberty is someone giving up by being vaccinated? Isn't it even more liberating to get vaccinated? To be free from the worst-case scenarios of a deadly disease? To be able to see loved ones again, without needing to worry about infecting and killing each other? To be able to work again? And even if getting a vaccine is a hassle, dealing with masks seems to be significantly more disruptive to one's life than getting a shot.
The liberty you are giving up with a hypothetical vaccine mandate is the liberty to choose for yourself what you want to put into your body instead of having the government decide for you. I think that's self-evident. Every adult already has the opportunity to get vaccinated. The only thing that changes is who makes the decision.
How do you decide which liberties are okay to restrict (seat belt / air bag laws, previous vaccine mandates, etc.) and which ones we ought not to restrict? Do you have any specific criteria? For example, my primary criterion has to do with the trade-off of personal liberty vs. how others are affected by one's "personal liberty" decision. The freedom to swing my arm ends at the tip of your nose, and I think this is particularly relevant during an infectious disease pandemic, when one's personal liberty to stay unvaccinated infringes on other people's personal liberty to stay safe and healthy. At that point, an anti-vaxxer's personal freedom is restricting the freedom of others. Thoughts?
And, as an aside: Would you consider an enforced government mandate to be generally indistinguishable from all businesses and shops and supermarkets voluntarily enforcing their own mandates (without government pressure)?
There have been roughly 3-4k breakthrough deaths so far in the 9-10 months we've been vaccinating people. It seems unlikely that 100% of those cases were contracted from an unvaccinated person and 100% of those deaths could have been prevented if we had forced vaccinations so at best you are saving some fraction of that 3-4k. A bad flu season can kill 50k+ people. Relatively speaking, If you're double vaccinated, COVID is not that big of a threat to you and therefore the unvaccinated are not that big of a threat to you. Vaccine mandates only make this relatively small risk marginally smaller. If you're double vaccinated you might be better off fighting for flu vaccine mandates than COVID vaccine mandates (being facetious with that last sentence)
For the aside: businesses and shops and supermarkets should be free to have whatever policies they want in terms of enforcing enforcing vaccine mandates, masks, etc.
Coronavirus is astronomically more dangerous than the flu, but I think that's a little off-topic. Keep in mind that the vaccinated covid deaths you're focusing on don't also include hospitalizations or even milder side-effects that go away after a few days. I don't think it's appropriate to tell someone who's vaccinated "so what if you miss a few days of work or get sick for a little while; you didn't die", when the situation was preventable in the first place. I find the negatives of that situation to be far worse than someone throwing an arbitrary temper tantrum over a vaccine with no serious risks. I don't think I'd be able to tell a few thousand families "oh well; you just have to pay the price for other people being selfish". And keep in mind that new variants of covid can be more resistant to our vaccines, which would make even those who are vaccinated more vulnerable than they currently are, and these new variants would emerge due to the unvaccinated.
For the aside: Could you please elaborate on what the actual difference is between the government having everyone getting vaccinated, vs. every business, shop, and supermarket insisting everyone get vaccinated for a job or service? Aren't they both pragmatically the same in terms of removing an unvaccinated person's right to stay unvaccinated, if they wish to participate in society?
Edit: Is GoTuNk! arguing in good faith? Or is this trolling? The assertion that the government is deciding what's factual - given the countless scientific and medical experts who spent their entire lives researching infectious diseases and running experiments and gathering data - seems too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
Covid is not astronomically more dangerous for a vaccinated individual than the flu is for an unvaccinated individual. If anything it's the other way around. The point BJ is making is that we are okay with virtually no restrictions during flu season (at-risk individuals getting a flu shot, people who are sick staying home), yet people who are vaccinated against covid (who have less probability to get sick from covid than they, as unvaccinated individuals, have from the flu) still have to comply to more restrictions (than what we see during a normal flu season). The points about 'what about the people who can't get vaccines' or 'people in risk groups that are still at risk even when vaccinated' are fair, but I'm not convinced they're really numerous enough to justify social distancing (when I speak of restrictions, it's not masks, it's whatever restricts social activity and human closeness) as a general recommendation - even if that might seem kinda cold and callous.
Why would we ever compare a person not vaccinated for one disease to a person vaccinated for a completely different disease? We should control for vaccination status by either comparing two vaccinated groups (vaccinated for both covid and flu), or comparing two unvaccinated groups (vaccinated for neither covid nor flu). In either of those cases, covid is way more dangerous than the flu. The flu should also be taken seriously (everyone should get their annual flu shot too), but it hasn't shut down the entire world; it's pretty bad on an absolute scale, but relatively-speaking, it's not "global pandemic" bad, hence far fewer restrictions than our covid situation. Both side effects and infection rates tend to be significantly more substantial for covid than the flu, hence the greater emphasis on restrictions for everyone when it comes to protecting from covid. Personally, I'm still not going to hang out with anyone who has the flu, and it's strongly discouraged that students with flu-like symptoms attend school (even if they only have the flu and not covid), but given the name of this thread, I'd like to focus on covid
I mean if you want to argue that that's a silly comparison to make, that's fine, but it is the one that was made, and from the point of view of an individual living in a country where others aren't willing to vaccinate, I think it's reasonable.
Like, I got my vaccines pretty much as early as I could. I did it both for me, and for the rest of society. But if the rest of society were a bunch of idiots not willing to vaccinate, then my options would be a) live my life normally, berate them for being idiots, or b) live my life normally, wish that society would force those other jerks to vaccinate. Option C, 'socially distance because I still worry about covid', was not an option - after getting double vaccinated the chances that I get seriously ill are really low - much lower than what the chances that I get ill from the flu is - and I have never even contemplated getting a flu shot, although I think those make sense for people that are more at risk.
I mean, I think it's absolutely abhorrent that people with the flu would in any way be expected to go to work or to school and that they'd be penalized in any way for staying at home while they have the flu, but I understand that sick laws are very different in Norway and the US.
Jimmy, I see no point in responding to that. I don't think you understand what I think about Covid, I don't think it's my fault for not expressing myself clearly enough, but I also don't care enough about going further with this. It's entirely cool with me that you think Covid is a much bigger problem than what I think it is, and if you want to think it's as big of a deal today as the spanish flu was 102 years ago, that's also fine with me.
On October 01 2021 00:20 Liquid`Drone wrote: You not being able to get surgeries has no relation to whether covid is more dangerous to a vaccinated individual than what the flu is for an unvaccinated individual. You're even stating that the hospitals are full of unvaccinated people.
I want to address this claim in particular, because without more context I consider it very strongly misleading. Many media outlets have done their usual goof by withholding the number/rate of positive tests taken in cases of hospitalization. All-cause =/= covid-19 infections.
MedCram uploaded a video that shows data from 9 different states in the US regarding covid hospitalization. In his analysis he shows that - even though the numbers are quite evenly distributed between vaccinated and unvaccinated - the estimated rate of hospitalization is actually several factors apart. To give a number, it could be 7 unvaccinated to 1 unvaccinated. Another ratio gives 6 : 1. Only when singling out the oldest age group (>=75) does the ratio approach 3 : 1.
This demonstrates how much better vaccinated people fare in comparison to unvaccinated, and it also shows that they're at least several times less likely to clog up the hospitals. I recommend watching the whole video, but if you want to skip to the sheet showing the ratios, you'll find it at around 3m 5s. He does a detailed breakdown of the ratios.
Not only that, but there's also the question of the ratio of vaccinated people in the population. When you look at that data, the conclusion becomes even more overwhelming that it's clearly unvaccinated people who are taking up critical space, time and resources in hospitals.
I know statistics suck, they're not fun, and it's easy to get them wrong. But that's exactly why we shouldn't just believe what any of the media tells us. Most of them are severely underequipped for this (and some are even spreading misinformation on purpose).
On September 30 2021 13:52 Magic Powers wrote: I decided to take data from various countries to compare the vaccination progress to CFR and see if there's a meaningful correlation. The answer is yes, there's a very strong correlation.
Forgive the dumb question, what is CFR?
CFR means case fatality rate, which is the mortality rate among people who've fallen ill.
I'm sorry, did you just respond to me stating that Jimmy stated (which I agreed with) that unvaccinated people are much more likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people with 'I want to address this claim in particular, because without more context I consider it very strongly misleading' before you give data confirming that the statement is correct? Seriously?
On October 01 2021 01:03 Liquid`Drone wrote: I'm sorry, did you just respond to me stating that Jimmy stated (which I agreed with) that unvaccinated people are much more likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people with 'I want to address this claim in particular, because without more context I consider it very strongly misleading' before you give data confirming that the statement is correct? Seriously?
It was a claim from Jimmi, of course. My intention wasn't to pin anyone down individually, certainly not you, but I think not Jimmi either. If someone should take the blame, it'd have to be the media that's doing a poor job at reporting their interpretation of data. But I don't think it's about blame anyway, it's about helping people understand what is really going on and why they need to be cautious with the information they're absorbing.
On September 29 2021 20:15 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: [quote]
Yeah I agree with you that wearing a mask is incredibly trivial, and that wearing the *proper* mask (and wearing it correctly, too!) are super important as well. That being said, I find getting vaccinated to be even less of a hassle than wearing a mask. Buying and wearing masks every day, taking them on and off, making sure they stay clean, not being able to see people's faces, etc. vs. getting a few free shots? I've heard a reasonable complaint that some people can't take off work for the few days needed for vaccinations, but the simple counterargument is that infected, unvaccinated people are forced to take off many more days for work. I think it's definitely fair to say that getting an annual shot or two is far less oppressive than being forced to cover half your face every day. Thoughts?
I considered it a privilege to get the COVID vaccine, not a hassle. I didn't miss any work and I had zero side effects minus a little anxiety.
But on the whole, no, I consider it much less oppressive and much less of an assault on bodily autonomy to require mask-wearing than to require an injection into your body. It basically comes down to the giving up liberty for safety idea. Except here the safety you are getting is marginal at best. I already feel quite protected from COVID-19 after being double vaccinated and I'll probably get a booster soon. Basically every adult has the same opportunity for this protection. So it just comes down to how much authority I would want to give to the government over this. I agree with Magic Powers that during times of crisis is when the government is most eagerly looking for ways to increase their power and once they have more power they don't like to give it up. Dying of terrorism is also incredibly rare but it got people to go along with the Patriot Act and foreign wars that cost trillions. I think these are the times you have to be most vigilant about what the government is doing.
We know that the additional safety from being vaccinated is actually incredibly important and significant, since it nearly guarantees that you won't become severely ill or die, and it helps protect those around you, too. It's not marginal for the individual, and lowering the infection rate of covid is not marginal for those of us who are vaccinated but are still forced to be near unvaccinated people (or for those who are immunocompromised and can't get the vaccine, who are forced to rely on the rest of us). The fact that this is a team effort is one of the reasons why I feel it's important to push harder for more people getting vaccinated.
Also, what liberty is someone giving up by being vaccinated? Isn't it even more liberating to get vaccinated? To be free from the worst-case scenarios of a deadly disease? To be able to see loved ones again, without needing to worry about infecting and killing each other? To be able to work again? And even if getting a vaccine is a hassle, dealing with masks seems to be significantly more disruptive to one's life than getting a shot.
The liberty you are giving up with a hypothetical vaccine mandate is the liberty to choose for yourself what you want to put into your body instead of having the government decide for you. I think that's self-evident. Every adult already has the opportunity to get vaccinated. The only thing that changes is who makes the decision.
How do you decide which liberties are okay to restrict (seat belt / air bag laws, previous vaccine mandates, etc.) and which ones we ought not to restrict? Do you have any specific criteria? For example, my primary criterion has to do with the trade-off of personal liberty vs. how others are affected by one's "personal liberty" decision. The freedom to swing my arm ends at the tip of your nose, and I think this is particularly relevant during an infectious disease pandemic, when one's personal liberty to stay unvaccinated infringes on other people's personal liberty to stay safe and healthy. At that point, an anti-vaxxer's personal freedom is restricting the freedom of others. Thoughts?
And, as an aside: Would you consider an enforced government mandate to be generally indistinguishable from all businesses and shops and supermarkets voluntarily enforcing their own mandates (without government pressure)?
There have been roughly 3-4k breakthrough deaths so far in the 9-10 months we've been vaccinating people. It seems unlikely that 100% of those cases were contracted from an unvaccinated person and 100% of those deaths could have been prevented if we had forced vaccinations so at best you are saving some fraction of that 3-4k. A bad flu season can kill 50k+ people. Relatively speaking, If you're double vaccinated, COVID is not that big of a threat to you and therefore the unvaccinated are not that big of a threat to you. Vaccine mandates only make this relatively small risk marginally smaller. If you're double vaccinated you might be better off fighting for flu vaccine mandates than COVID vaccine mandates (being facetious with that last sentence)
For the aside: businesses and shops and supermarkets should be free to have whatever policies they want in terms of enforcing enforcing vaccine mandates, masks, etc.
Coronavirus is astronomically more dangerous than the flu, but I think that's a little off-topic. Keep in mind that the vaccinated covid deaths you're focusing on don't also include hospitalizations or even milder side-effects that go away after a few days. I don't think it's appropriate to tell someone who's vaccinated "so what if you miss a few days of work or get sick for a little while; you didn't die", when the situation was preventable in the first place. I find the negatives of that situation to be far worse than someone throwing an arbitrary temper tantrum over a vaccine with no serious risks. I don't think I'd be able to tell a few thousand families "oh well; you just have to pay the price for other people being selfish". And keep in mind that new variants of covid can be more resistant to our vaccines, which would make even those who are vaccinated more vulnerable than they currently are, and these new variants would emerge due to the unvaccinated.
For the aside: Could you please elaborate on what the actual difference is between the government having everyone getting vaccinated, vs. every business, shop, and supermarket insisting everyone get vaccinated for a job or service? Aren't they both pragmatically the same in terms of removing an unvaccinated person's right to stay unvaccinated, if they wish to participate in society?
Edit: Is GoTuNk! arguing in good faith? Or is this trolling? The assertion that the government is deciding what's factual - given the countless scientific and medical experts who spent their entire lives researching infectious diseases and running experiments and gathering data - seems too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
Covid is not astronomically more dangerous for a vaccinated individual than the flu is for an unvaccinated individual. If anything it's the other way around. The point BJ is making is that we are okay with virtually no restrictions during flu season (at-risk individuals getting a flu shot, people who are sick staying home), yet people who are vaccinated against covid (who have less probability to get sick from covid than they, as unvaccinated individuals, have from the flu) still have to comply to more restrictions (than what we see during a normal flu season). The points about 'what about the people who can't get vaccines' or 'people in risk groups that are still at risk even when vaccinated' are fair, but I'm not convinced they're really numerous enough to justify social distancing (when I speak of restrictions, it's not masks, it's whatever restricts social activity and human closeness) as a general recommendation - even if that might seem kinda cold and callous.
Why would we ever compare a person not vaccinated for one disease to a person vaccinated for a completely different disease? We should control for vaccination status by either comparing two vaccinated groups (vaccinated for both covid and flu), or comparing two unvaccinated groups (vaccinated for neither covid nor flu). In either of those cases, covid is way more dangerous than the flu. The flu should also be taken seriously (everyone should get their annual flu shot too), but it hasn't shut down the entire world; it's pretty bad on an absolute scale, but relatively-speaking, it's not "global pandemic" bad, hence far fewer restrictions than our covid situation. Both side effects and infection rates tend to be significantly more substantial for covid than the flu, hence the greater emphasis on restrictions for everyone when it comes to protecting from covid. Personally, I'm still not going to hang out with anyone who has the flu, and it's strongly discouraged that students with flu-like symptoms attend school (even if they only have the flu and not covid), but given the name of this thread, I'd like to focus on covid
I mean if you want to argue that that's a silly comparison to make, that's fine, but it is the one that was made, and from the point of view of an individual living in a country where others aren't willing to vaccinate, I think it's reasonable.
Like, I got my vaccines pretty much as early as I could. I did it both for me, and for the rest of society. But if the rest of society were a bunch of idiots not willing to vaccinate, then my options would be a) live my life normally, berate them for being idiots, or b) live my life normally, wish that society would force those other jerks to vaccinate. Option C, 'socially distance because I still worry about covid', was not an option - after getting double vaccinated the chances that I get seriously ill are really low - much lower than what the chances that I get ill from the flu is - and I have never even contemplated getting a flu shot, although I think those make sense for people that are more at risk.
I'm not quite sure about the whole option A vs. B dichotomy, since there's overlap there and berating might not be as effective as communicating / engaging / educating / convincing those anti-vaxxers. I think I don't understand what you were implying there. I would love for people to stop being idiots on their own accord, and that would be my preference, but depending on the risk of having those idiots coexisting alongside me and others, I might also approve of external pressures that push for change that apparently isn't happening voluntarily.
I mean, I think it's absolutely abhorrent that people with the flu would in any way be expected to go to work or to school and that they'd be penalized in any way for staying at home while they have the flu, but I understand that sick laws are very different in Norway and the US.
I 100% agree with you here. The way my country only pretends to care about physical health (to say nothing of how dismissive we are in regards to mental health) is embarrassing.
EPT
