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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 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.
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.
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.
Can it be more obvious?
Oh man I so feel aggrieved for these poor schills who instead of being able to just make up shit and send it out to the world as fact they would have to have the same burden of proof as those evil scientist and doctors.
Government and big corporations don't decide what is fact. Government sets out a set of rules that are a minimum level of proof that is needed to declare something as fact often using confidence intervals. I get that when you are trying to get mad at things you don't understand because some on facebook told you there is a big librul conspiracy to take your freedumb that upsets you. And most of the time the rest of us don't mind and let you be as freedumb as you want so you can feel smart making up facts. But when a global health crisis comes it becomes clear that having people on the internet making shit up to sell their snake oil is as dangerous as it was to have companies advertise on TV that cocacola could cure cancer or make your penis grow. So it just makes sense to have those people be able to back up those claims with some kind of proof.
I understand how hard this will be on your world view when you start to realize that facts are not choosen they are prooven and the "facts" you believe and shape your view of the world were the ones made up to "control" you. But it is just the Truth.
On September 29 2021 05:09 BlackJack wrote: [quote]
For the record, I'm not "against the vaccine." I got my first shot in Dec. 2020, only days after it was approved for emergency use. I encourage everyone I know to get vaccinated. Being against vaccine mandates and being against the vaccine isn't the same thing.
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.
I believe in bodily autonomy as well, but I see it in a much stricter sense. I disagree with the government using violence to enforce its policies (in this case vaccination), but using other incentives for compliance and punishments for non-compliance is fair game.
People should be able to choose to not get vaccinated because it's their body, but that says nothing about it being free of consequence. They're bringing great risk to their society, and therefore should be faced with a corresponding great cost.
I completely agree. Libertarian's or republicans would be much more on brand and true to their ideology if their had this outlook. If their position was that they should be able to choose not to get the shot but then they were 100% responsible for the costs associated, that would make more sense. Or if they had to pay much higher premiums for their health insurance, like smokers only it would be much higher than that. It would be a different situation if these large group of people was not trusting the doctors on the vaccine and then if they got sick (which shouldn't happen because its "fake") didn't come to the hospitals to be treated, but that is not the case.
It is very child like and entitled to think that they should get to do whatever they want and the rest of us should have to deal with the risks and the costs (monetarily and socially). Generally the right only looks at the money so I could see and understand if they had that outlook for this. But instead it is this extremely self-interested view that they should get to do whatever they like, say whatever they want, but have no individual consequences.
I believe the reason for this is their dear leader, he is the poster child for spoiled brat. Born a billionaire, given all his wealth, everything that has gone wrong is someone else fault, when business goes bad he goes "bankrupt" keeps his does not pay others, uses his wealth to skip his own military service but talks super tough, and so on and so on. It is actually wrong to view this one Left vs Right, because right now there is no "right" position.
Semi related anecdote. I love hockey, have played much of my life. When I became a adult and joined a "beer" league it was super dirty, tons of slashing, shit talk, tripping cross checking and so on. Body contact was allowed but people were taking it too far. They added a second ref and there was really no change and refs were getting sworn at and even threatened. Then the next year they went back to 1 ref and allowed fighting. There was barely any of it as not to many people wanted to risk black eyes and so on with work the next day but almost all the dirty play went away. All the sudden slashing someone in the back of the legs didn't seem like just a good idea when he could turn around and punch you in the face. Consequences for actions matter, not only after but in the decision making process.
A true conservative would have a different outlook on what is the right thing to do about covid then I would, but it wouldn't be to deny its existence or have society carry the costs of people who make bad decisions. There is a reason that George Washington forced his troops to get inoculated. There is many reasons that our governments that were WAY WAY more conservative in the 1800's and 1900's just forced people to get inoculated.
I like you don't think that forcing is the answer, but I 100% think that there needs to be costs/consequences related to that decision. That so many people are up in arms with having to get a weekly test just shows how FREAKING entitled some people are that they think that is forcing or somehow impacting their human rights. It is actually a really gentle nudge. I would be up for bigger consequences if needed but it appears that peoples "super strong beliefs" are easily swayed by a small weekly inconvenience.
It has been interesting to watch these conservative judges just decimate (super strongly worded rebuttals) of these new Republicans who are trying to make government decide who can have what mask and vaccine rules. These new Republicans don't seem to understand that when they put conservative judges in those places they were going to rule based on conservatism not based on whatever way the populism wind blows. The one I was just reading about was one company is making the accommodation for all those with religious exemptions, that those people could go on leave without pay. The judge ruled in the companies favor. Other companies are not being as harsh, but the bar is still quite high to prove, you can't just say "its against their religion" and most major church are not against vaccination.
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.
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.
Can you source this and define what you mean by dangerous?
As a person who is one of the 100'000s in north America double vaccinated and not able to get surgeries I require because the hospitals are too taxed with unvaxxed people suffering from covid I find it hard to believe. I also do not believe it to be true in areas that have incredibly high spread for the individual.
If you have any data or source that shows it too be true I would be interested in reading it. Thank you.
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 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. 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?
It is most definitely related. You keep bringing up spanish flu numbers with seeming no realization that all those people didn't die from the flu they died because of it. Many died because they couldn't or didn't out of fear get treatment they would have, this is one of the reasons the estimates kept going up from 2 mil, to 5, to 20 to 50.
There is good reason you and BlackJack can't source that Covid is not more dangerous because it is not. You continually do not take transmissibility and spread into account.
But if you just want to be very specific lets look a Georgia the US state. They participate in the Influenza surveillance reporting system and they are one of the states who has recently let covid spread pretty freely with little restrictions.
Georgia is part of the Influenza monitoring network. 2018-2019 was a bad year for the flu. Georgia has had lots of Covid spread lets compare the numbers.
In week 40 Sept 29- oct 5 2019 they had 0 deaths and 3 hospitalizaons.
Notice I will be comparing a full week in 2019 to a single day and the day is WAY worse and it is much better then a few weeks ago!
Yesterday they had 265 total covid hospitalizations and 129 deaths'.
They do not on the daily release the numbers vaccinated vs unvaccinated but from the various news reports it ranges from 84-92% of the hospitalizations are unvaccinated. 13% of 265 is 34.5 DRAMATICLY higher than 3, agree?
Only 3% of the deaths since January have been vaccinated. So they would have 8 Vaccinated people die yesterday (based on averages) compared to 0 for the entire week in 2019. DRAMATICLY higher then 0, agree?
Maybe you are thinking it is a crazy week.
so lets look at 2021.
There were 10,055 covid deaths. 553 of those were fully vaccinated individuals. There were 2118 hospitalizations of vaccinated people.
At influenza including A B A nd B and unknown. This is cumulative data since sept 27,2020 40 weeks. Deaths from the flu 3, Hospitalizations 38!!!!!
CAN WE PLEASE STOP PRETENDING THAT COVID AND FLU ARE IN THE SAME BALL PARK!!!!!!!!
If you look at rates you can be tricked into thinking they are not that different but that does not take into account transmissibility. If two things have similar rates of mortality but one infects 100x more people the one that infects 100x more, is 100x more dangerous.
If you have questions on the numbers feel free to PM me your email and I'll send you the data sets I Downloaded and walk you through them.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not misreading the data, it is the same thing, if you look at the rates per 100,000 you are correct they are low. The issue is transmissibility. I go into much more detail in the post above with Drone. But the basics are that the Flu has similar rates but infects not nearly as many children, and by not nearly I means factors of 10 to 100. It ends up being both true that the rates are similar and WAY more children end up in the ICU and hospital with Covid than the flu. Not quite as dramatic on raw numbers in regards to children as it is adults, but far more dramatic when you talk about the social and emotional cost of losing children.
And you are right, most are out with 2 days, only 25% end up in the ICU, that is still a lot for something that is almost completely preventable. Children toys and products get pulled from the shelf for sending a handful of kids to the hospital or killing one. But somehow with covid many people are completely OK with 3x the number dying of the worst flu season, when almost none need too.
I'm not unaware of the absolute risks. I send my one child to school and the other to daycare, my wife is a teacher and she goes to work. With spread under control, and high vaccination rates there is extremely low risk to children. When the spread gets way higher then the % don't change but the absolute numbers do.
As an individual I can understand taking the small risk. As a society it makes no sense to increase the risk by a factor of 3.5 (and if you were to compare even higher vaccinated places then northern states to the low vaccinated southern states that factor would only increase)
Children are not the main reason a society should get vaccinated, but people who are saying it does not effect them are wrong. Child mortality is extremely low (YEAH for medical science and safety regulation!) the 3rd leading cause from sickness (like not injury, car crash, firearm, so on) is Heart disease at 599 in 2016. Covid is going to blow past that. If you could eliminate Heart disease by inoculating adults, which would in turn save your country billions in health care costs, save way more adults, so on and so forth, of course you would. And those 600 saved children and their families would be extremely grateful. The reason people are fighting this has nothing to do with risk and numbers it is all politics and being lied too.
In a way it is like all these extreme car seats we put our children in. The actual % chance of you getting in a car accident that is bad enough that it would have killed your child without it but not so bad that it kills them anyways is infinitesimally small. Even every car trip you take added up together is infinitesimally small, likely smaller than covid. We regulate it because 1 preventable child death is way to many, a few extra minutes each car trip is not a big deal (but certainly a much bigger deal then two or 3 appointments at the pharmacy). Most people don't mind because the guilt of having their own child killed (or injured but for some reason with covid no one cares about that on this thread or the even long term consequences) would be way to much to bare. Child seat rules are some of the least penalized because that is not the reason most people do it.
But their calculus changes completely when it is someone else's child, or they have been told its "safe" because generally people are really really bad with understanding risk. Very few if any parents are making these types of mathematical calculations to make their decisions because if they were they would be living completely different lives in a whole host of other ways un-covid related. I guarantee you could find 100's of examples of products parents by, food they feed them, and so on that reduces their kids risk of death far less then covid inoculation that they are investing WAY more time and money in.
On October 01 2021 00:55 Liquid`Drone wrote: 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.
That is not what I think, not what I said and your continual use of it as a strawman helps to show why you are both disenegious and fake. I think what I said. I put far more more effort into it, I ACTUALLY source my claims and back them with ACTUAL data.
It is clear at this point that either through confirmation bias or lack of horse power you can't even bother to argue your point. You choosing ignorance is not on me. But so obvious when you jump to strawman instead of trying to back up your extremely incorrect claims with evidence.
You said that Covid was less dangerous to vaccinated people than the Flu. I showed with actual real world data that is not even close to be true when spread is high.
You are wrong, you are stating your faulty assumptions as facts, your posting quality on this subject is horrible which makes the arrogance and condensing attitude so much worse .