[colechristensen]

Regardless of if they were the right thing to do, many of the various covid mandates being enacted through whatever form of decree really didn’t seem like they fit inside the authority of the government executives trying to enact them. Many were also made to be unenforceable so they’d never be tested in court while still influencing people.

The rule of law is important and limiting the power of “rulers” to make large sweeping regulations by themselves is important. Agreeing with what they’re trying to do doesn’t make it right. People have been cheering for authoritarianism more and more and it’s disturbing.

[curiousgal]

Us Americans are so obsessed with government overreach that you'd think our corporate overloads are actually treating us well and that the government is the bad guy.

When the government wants to fuck us over, think what the NSA has been doing, they won't look for precedents so there's no point in treating every decision they make as a potential sliperry slope.

Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

[senorrib]

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

This last sentence is such a massive slippery slope that an answer isn’t even necessary.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

Forgive me, but what is it a slippery slope of? I immediately thought this logic was already applied to things like child toy regulation or lead paint warning regulation or food recall regulation or workplace safety regulation… it’s really common for the government to enforce people to do things (or ban people from doing other things) in certain contexts because of the danger otherwise.

[zdragnar]

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

There's a pretty significant difference between "you may not sell dangerous products" and "you must use X medicine".

Next up, government mandated pedometers with minimum step counts, broccoli consumption, teeth brushing (prevents heart disease that kills people!), flossing, and minimum hours of sleep per night.

Once we've kept the fat, foul-breathed insomniacs out of society, government bans you from going into the wilderness (bears! bee allergies!), driving a car, riding a bike, running with scissors, and using a computer for more than a few hours a day.

Some of these things obviously kill more than others, but heart disease, cancer and "accident" are all leading causes of death in the US, with heart disease and cancer beating out COVID in 2020 and probably 2022.

[Vt71fcAqt7]

I actually think the government can and should regulate food consumption. We already did it with cigarettes and trans fats. Omega-6 fatty acids should be next. A more fair but less politically viable alternative is to tax the healthcare of people with >%30 body fat. But these should probably have 10 year limits with the ultimate goal of changing people's habits.

[LudwigNagasena]

Ok, you want a big brother to tell you what to do. But why would you bring me into this?

[zdragnar]

These are still negative regulations (don't do this), which are fundamentally different than the COVID vaccine regulations.

A comparable analogy would be mandating, under penalty of legally enforced isolation, that you eat a certain amount of vegetables per unit of body weight.

[prottog]

Sounds like the more reasonable solution is to remove taxpayer funding for healthcare. That way, people who make bad choices wouldn't be subsidized by the public.

[realjhol]

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

They don't though.

None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.

And only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID. If you're not in either of those camps, or have natural immunity the risk is negligible.

[colechristensen]

>None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.

The popular narrative being told to people from all sources was that vaccines were to prevent transmission which was quietly toned down when it turned out not to be true and then people now say things like "we never said that" when nobody mentioned it at all in the beginning that vaccines quite possibly weren't going to prevent disease or transmission.

People just move goal posts, fail to outline risks that don't align with their advice before those risks are undeniable, and generally always pretend they were right all along.

[TurkishPoptart]

What's the best source on this? I know it's true, it's just sad and tragic that the Atlantic is still saying they prevent infection.

[mcculley]

> only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID

We should not make policy decisions as long as only the elderly and otherwise vulnerable are at risk?

[prottog]

Yes, exactly. We shouldn't upend everyone's lives for the sake of the elderly and the feeble. The median age of a Covid-associated death in the US is near the average life expectancy[0]. There's a case to be made that the lockdown-related life loss, including the great increase in deaths of despair, as well as future poverty in children who more or less lost two years of schooling, will exceed the Covid death toll. Our policy response has been madness.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

[mcculley]

Not all policy decisions would necessarily result in "upend[ing] everyone's lives".

Many person years were lost: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I sat in the ICU as my father died and listened to the many ventilators as a result of policy failures. I had lots of time to contemplate possible policy decisions. Pretending that the only possible choices were "do nothing" and "do something stupid" is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.

[prottog]

Yes, many person years were lost, mostly among the elderly and infirm. I am truly sorry for your loss, whether your father was in that group or not. But the fact on the ground is that "do nothing" and "do something stupid" were the only two choices that actually happened around the world, and regrettably mostly the latter. Pretending otherwise is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.

There is really no example of a country that successfully "did something well" as a matter of policy; the countries that fared better in terms of death rates did so on the basis of their demographics or their cultural habits. Countries with younger or fitter (less obese) populations did much better. Countries with more group-minded cultures, like the East Asian countries, did better, but those countries are also much less obese so it's unclear how much the habitual masking in those places helped. If you have counterexamples, I would love to hear about them.

In the end, there's not much policy-wise you can do in the face of a highly transmissible airborne disease that's not actually deadly enough to scare people into staying away from each other. Governments can issue as many policy decisions as they would like in the moment, but in the end everyone is going to get it, and some will die.

Long-term policies that encourage people to actually be healthy would help a lot more; but instead many countries, and especially the developed Western ones, did the opposite and encouraged or forced people to stay home, next to their refrigerators, in fear, away from laughter and joy from their social groups, all the while demonizing those who broke the arbitrary and capricious rules at the same time that political leaders were visibly flouting their own rules. I suppose we can agree that we learned a lot about what not to do for the next pandemic.

[spfzero]

Those are the exact people who should get the vaccine. It's great that it exists. Forcing people who are not at risk, to inject something into their bodies which will not help them is authoritarian overreach, even if the vaccine DID protect from infection. Now that everyone admits it does not prevent infection, or "spread", there is not even a bad reason to mandate vaccination.

[mcculley]

I did not ask about vaccine mandates.

[colechristensen]

People like government overreach when they agree with it completely forgetting that they won’t always.

Rights aren’t just for your side.

[seanw444]

Absolutely. This is why I laugh when republicans who support all republican actions try to consider themselves libertarians. I guess it's the trendy term to be now.

If you're a libertarian, you vouch for liberties across the board. Not seesawing utter power against the other side every election cycle.

[int_19h]

Speaking for myself, I'm obsessed with corporate overreach in general. It just so happens that government is the largest and the most well-armed corporation around, so it gets considerable attention as such.

[seanw444]

<insert item here> is a threat to our <choose one of: lives, democracy>, and so these regulations and encroachments must be enacted!