[clairity]

> "I can't be the only one who is incredibly uncomfortable about society going down this path."

it's dystopian. this is power that won't be reliquished by either major party, just like 9/11 surveillance and security theater. unlike some of currently fashionable political impetuses, this one is worth actively resisting, to keep federal powers in check.

[b0sk]

lol. vaccination is the law. you guys can't spread measles anymore and thank god for that.

[_-david-_]

The measles vaccine has been around for decades. There are plenty of long term studies on the efficacy and saftey. How many long term studies have there been on any of the covid vaccines?

[jmcgough]

Has there ever been serious long-term side effects caused by vaccines? Yes, a tiny number of people have had serious short-term complications from them, but I'll take five deaths over 3,000 deaths a day.

mRNA vaccines have been well studied - from a scientific standpoint it's hard to imagine how it even could cause problems.

[artificialLimbs]

You will take 5 deaths, meaning you will choose for others whether to risk that. Do you not realize the implication here?

[pupppet]

No worse than you choosing that the people around you may die from your not vaccinating.

[seriousquestion]

Studied or researched is not that reassuring given the replication crisis. There's a big difference between academia and real world use.

[_-david-_]

A few people have died from covid vaccines which sure seems long term to me.

Here is an example of a long term problem caused by a (traditional, non-mrna) vaccine

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...

As far as I know there hasn't been much research into the long term effects of many vaccines. After decades of availability if they were causing issues I hope somebody would have found a connection if they were causing issues. I would very much like to see research into this though.

I do agree mrna vaccines are unlikely to cause long term issues.

Just to be clear. I am very much in favor of vaccines. I just don't like being required to take it so soon after it was created.

[joshuamorton]

mRNA vaccines have been researched for decades, and the only really novel part of the covid vaccine is the particular protein, which will also be present in a natural infection.

So if you trust the decades of mRNA vaccine research, you should consider the vaccine strictly safer than covid, as getting the disease will expose you to everything the vaccine exposes you to.

[_-david-_]

Do you believe there doesn't need to be long term studies of traditional vaccines? There have been decades of research into them as well.

I believe both mrna and traditional vaccines are safer than covid. I just don't like to take vaccines or medication without longer results than a year. I also agree mRNA vaccines shouldn't have any long term negative effects, but I tend to take the position when in doubt don't take an action.

If in 5 years there hasn't been any widespread negative effects I will probably take it.

[joshuamorton]

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the amount of customization in an mRNA vaccine is much less than in more traditional vaccines, so the room for unexpected problems is essentially just the protein.

This is similar to how flu vaccines vary from year to year, but the mechanisms and changes are well understood so the approval process can be streamlined, but we don't expect issues from this year's flu vaccine that we didn't see last year, even though they are different.

[newacct583]

> it's dystopian

It's already the law, and has been for like half a century (edit: more like 80 years, actually). If you aren't vaccinated you can't attend school. You can't serve in the military. You can't work in many health care fields. We requires our citizenry to be vaccinated against major preventable diseases. We always have.

And this policy is, objectively, the second[1] biggest success story in the last few centuries of public health policy. Period.

Why did no one care about "keeping federal powers in check" in 2019? Why do you only care now? You don't think maybe that there's something polluting your priors?

[1] The invention of antibiotics gets #1.

[akira2501]

> If you aren't vaccinated you can't attend school.

Unless you get an exemption, which can be requested and are often granted on a variety of grounds.

> We requires our citizenry to be vaccinated against major preventable diseases. We always have.

We clearly don't, though. As a citizen you can be entirely unvaccinated and live a completely normal life.

[TravisHusky]

To counter your first point about school vaccination, I live in the US and the state I live in has very few exemptions which also apply to the COVID-19 vaccine. There are religious and medical exemptions, and the religious exemptions are hard to get and basically are not available for 99.9% of people.

So yeah sure, if you have a specific medical problem, or very very limited religious reason, you can be exempted from vaccination, which is the same for the COVID vaccine.

Literally nothing has changed, the COVID vaccine is now just part of the list of required vaccines (and as of right now COVID vaccination is actually not required at most universities as they are waiting for final FDA approval which will likely be here sometime in late August).

[veemjeem]

> We clearly don't, though. As a citizen you can be entirely unvaccinated and live a completely normal life.

This is only because the majority of the populace is vaccinated against polio, measles. If the majority of the population was also unvaccinated, these viruses would make life not fun. Most of us live a very sheltered life and have never directly experienced living with measles or polio.

[newacct583]

> We clearly don't, though. As a citizen you can be entirely unvaccinated and live a completely normal life.

You seem to be arguing technicalities without addressing my point. We have lots and lots of vaccine regulation that ensures that virtually all citizens are immune to diseases like measles, hep, diphtheria, etc... No, it's not absolute, and I don't believe I claimed it was. All policy requires careful tuning.

So let's include covid in the same regime. You agree with that part, right?

[learc83]

Many states don’t have non-medical exemptions for vaccine requirements.

[swader999]

The vaccine passport seems to be a whole other level of show us your papers though. It would have to be backed by a central database with scanning to really work. By definition you could be turned off or geo fenced with it.

[_-david-_]

You can attend school, just not public schools. Private schools are free to not require vaccines.

[slingnow]

Biggest success story? Have you heard about the delta variant and the surge in cases among both unvaccinated AND vaccinated?

[jjulius]

1.) The "success story" they're speaking about is the broader vaccination requirements that have been around for far longer than COVID.

2.) You mean the surge in cases that are seeing vaccinated people faring statistically far better than the un-vaccinated? I don't think that it was ever a secret that the vaccine wasn't going to be bulletproof or capable of complete success against all variants, especially variants that didn't exist at the time of development.

[newacct583]

I have not heard of a surge in cases among the unvaccinated, actually. Do you have a cite? All data I've seen points to a 90%+ effectiveness of Pfizer vs. Delta for infection, and it looks like more than 99% vs. death. It's MUCH MUCH MUCH safer to face potential infection with the vaccine than without.

[myko]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/27/health/cdc-mask-guidance-vacc...

There are many more breakthrough cases with the delta variant. That said, the vaccines are still very good at combatting serious illness:

    We continue to estimate that the risk of a breakthrough 
    infection with symptom upon exposure to the Delta variant 
    is reduced by seven-fold. The reduction of 20-fold for 
    hospitalizations, and deaths," Walensky said during 
    Tuesday's briefing.

[jmcgough]

If you look at the numbers, you're significantly less likely to be infected if you've been vaccinated, and hospitalization rates are 95% lower. The fact that we're seeing a good number of people infected after vaccination is classic Bayes theorem.

If we could get 70% of the population vaccinated we could be done with this and move on with our lives.