[cogman10]

> However, preemptively restricting the rights of healthy people, just because they may eventually catch a disease, is unheard of.

It is not. In fact, most quarantines take exactly that form where entire households, communities, or in the extreme case cities are locked down. [1]

COVID is unique in that it is both more deadly and more infectious than the flu. That's why the measures have been so extreme. They are warranted.

Further, COVID has the major issue that a large number of people are asymptomatic. It doesn't work to say "Well, just have people feeling sick stay home" when a large number of people that are spreading the disease don't even know they have it. [2]

> 'you don't have a right to participate in the public'.

I was perhaps unclear, I mean "being infected with a disease removes your right to participate in public". Without the disease modifier, yes, you have a right to public interaction. Just like you have a right to drive without the drunk modifier.

In any event, even the UN agrees that quarantining seemingly healthy people in the face of covid isn't a human rights violation. [3]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/historyquarantine.html

[2] https://hartfordhealthcare.org/about-us/news-press/news-deta...

[3] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/guidance_on_quaran...

[angelzen]

'quarantine' comes from Italian 'quarantina': ‘forty days’. It's not 'persempre'. By its very name it implies a time limited action.

Link 3 does not support your point: 'The term “quarantine” refers to the separation and restriction of movement of non-sick persons to see if they become sick.'. There is no blanket support for indefinite restriction of rights.

Furthermore, the 'line' is muddy. Vaccines are only 66% effective against delta. This means that 33% of vaccinated people are, under your definition, walking public health risks that may catch covid and start shedding virus in the population. Thus we should also indefinitely quarantine vaccinated people.

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021082...

[cogman10]

> Link 3 does not support your point: 'The term “quarantine” refers to the separation and restriction of movement of non-sick persons to see if they become sick.'. There is no blanket support for indefinite restriction of rights.

What "rights" are is muddy. I'm not proposing an outright quarantine. Nobody is. However, I thought it prudent to point out that the "quarantining of healthy individuals" is not unique or unjustified. Your previous comment suggested that all quarantines are human rights violations.

However, what I see from all medical experts is social distancing, masking, and getting vaccination. Those are the "rights" being infringed on at the moment.

At one point, the CDC did recommend that someone vaccinated didn't need to mask up. Unfortunately, that changed with Delta as you correctly point out.

A vaccine + mask would be highly effective at stopping the spread of delta.

[angelzen]

Perpetually quarantining certain classes of people is abject tyranny. Worse, the line is muddy: there are false positives (unvaccinated, but with solid post-covid immunity) and false negatives (vaccinated, but with breakthrough infections). Doing a 40 day isolation to see if there is an active outbreak is completely different than isolation in perpetuity: 'you don't have a right to participate in the public'.

I have yet to see medical evidence that vaccinating under 20s, for which the risk of covid-infection complications are vanishingly small, has significant positive effects for them. There are people that have already got covid, and their immunity to covid is much stronger than that of mRNA vaccinated people (see the OP article). These 2 classes of unvaccinated people should not be forced to undertake an unnecessary medical procedure with an unclear long-term risk profile.

Covid is endemic, there is no path to ZeroCovid. Thus population-level arguments are uncompelling: we are all going to be exposed to one or more covid strains during our lifetime. Given how post-infection immunity is strong (see the OP article), the bulk of the argument comes down to how to manage the first exposure.

Riddle me out: There are vaccines, they work really well, I am vaccinated, you probably are vaccinated. Vaccinate your loved ones. We are safe, to the extent of mRNA vaccines are long-term safe. Why do you have to insist that everyone has to take them, to the extent of proposing abject tyranny to accomplish this goal? What are you afraid of?

Not a rhetorical question, I stumbled upon an intriguing piece recently: https://thestoa.substack.com/p/ontological-flooding-towards-...

> The fears that come online for the COVID thesis: I fear dying from the virus and being responsible for the death of others. I also fear being called dumb for not understanding the science and shamed for being called a bad person by failing to act in ways that would protect others.

> The fears that come online for the COVID antithesis: I fear losing freedoms and giving my power away to top-down control structures that can slip into totalitarianism. I also fear being societally segregated and persecuted by those scapegoating me for this mess.

(If it wasn't clear yet, I also worry about a medical covid antithesis: for <20s, getting the mRNA vaccines is unnecessary and potentially long-term worse than doing nothing.)

[cogman10]

> Perpetually quarantining certain classes of people is abject tyranny.

Where do you see anyone proposing a perpetual quarantine? Do you feel we are currently under one?

> has significant positive effects for them

Because covid has something like a 1->2% mortality rate among the unvacinated, for 98%+ of the entire population a covid vaccine doesn't provide any positive effects.

Indeed, most diseases we vaccinate follow a similar pattern.

So why should any vaccination be applied?

At the end of the day it's a numbers game, the more people that are vaccinated and continue to keep their vaccinations up to date, the fewer people will be killed by illness. Vaccinations prevent more suffering than they cause. A little arm soreness is a small price to pay if it saves several lives.

This is especially important for herd immunity. The more people are vaccinated the more protected vulnerable populations are (including the vaccinated population).

> Covid is endemic, there is no path to ZeroCovid. Thus population-level arguments are uncompelling: we are all going to be exposed to one or more covid strains during our lifetime. Given how post-infection immunity is strong (see the OP article), the bulk of the argument comes down to how to manage the first exposure.

Sadly, I agree that we are past ever eliminating COVID. So next steps are what's reasonable.

With that, I think we aren't out of the woods for government and public actions against covid. We are currently in a state of being overwhelmed in our ICUs by covid. That says to me that masking and vaccination pushes should be pushed longer. Until we've exited the stage where our ICUs are overburdened it's hard to think that we should be lifting restrictions. [1]

> Riddle me out: There are vaccines, they work really well, I am vaccinated, you probably are vaccinated. Vaccinate your loved ones. We are safe, to the extent of mRNA vaccines are long-term safe. Why do you have to insist that everyone has to take them, to the extent of proposing abject tyranny to accomplish this goal? What are you afraid of?

I think saying that a vaccination mandate is "abject tyranny" is hyperbole. The vast majority of children have vaccine mandates against a bunch of diseases. Are they under an oppressive thumb? Are their lives ruined or harmed?

It is reasonable to push, and push hard, for people to be vaccinated. It isn't asking people to sell their souls, chop off an arm, or anything else. It's a small prick that you've been through. Anyone can get it, nobody is restricted from getting it.

The "tyranny" they'd experience by refusing to take the vaccine is the same sort of "tyranny" someone would experience if they decided to walk around a public park refusing clothing.

What freedoms are actually lost by a vaccine mandate? Vaccines aren't an inherent quality of anyone. It's not immutable like age or race. Tyranny is specifically persecution over aspects individuals can't control. Tyranny doesn't have a quick escape hatch of being poked in the arm.

The fact is, a switch out of the oppressed group takes 10 seconds.

The fear that this is a "slippery slope" is moot, because we already have vaccine mandates for other diseases. The only slip here is adding one more disease to the list.

You fear tyranny, can you see why I'd see that as irrational? Are you really afraid that the unvaccinated will be sent to the gas chambers? Even if this were a slope, how do you see the next steps of tyranny? "Oh, we mandated a vaccine and that went well, now let's round up the xxxxxx and oppress them!".

[1] https://www.kmvt.com/2021/08/18/covid-19-cases-are-rising-id...

[angelzen]

abject tyranny = 'you don't have a right to participate in the public'. I have a right to participate in society. My kids have a right to participate in society. Nobody can take away that right in perpetuity, under no circumstances. Including conditioning on (miraculous, but shoddy) mRNA vaccines.

Covid does not have 1-2% mortality rate among the unvaccinated. The difference between <20s and >70s is orders of magnitude. From BBC: 'Data from the first 12 months of the pandemic in England shows 25 under-18s died from Covid. [...] 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities [...] 6 had no underlying conditions recorded in the last five years. [...] 25 deaths in a population of some 12 million children in England gives a broad, overall mortality rate of 2 per million children.' For comparison, the death rate from drowning for 5-19s in US is 1/100k, 5x larger (20x if we only count healthy children). For 1-4s the drowning death rate is a calamitous 3/100k, 15x larger (60x if we only count healthy children). And that's just drowning.

We need to get a grip.

Traditional vaccines provide long term, often lifelong protection against nasty diseases. Some of them are sterilizing the virus, leading to eradication of the disease. mRNA vaccines do not prevent infection, do not prevent transmission, need a 6 month booster and are at risk of becoming obsolete and require a different vaccine strain (and then we boost each vaccine strain every 6 months?!)

> Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told Fox it was likely a vaccine-resistant variant would emerge.

> Bourla said Pfizer could make a shot tailor-made for such a variant within 95 days of its discovery.

> The CDC director said the virus could be "a few mutations" away from evolving to evade vaccines.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db149.htm

https://www.insider.com/pfizer-ceo-vaccine-resistant-coronav...