[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.