[gamacodre]

This has bugged me since the beginning of this mess. It ought to be possible to say "Hey this looks kind of funny, could the vaccines be having weird effects in this .0000001% of the population?" without daggers coming out all around.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that "The SARS-Cov-2 vaccines occasionally cause health problems" and "Almost everyone should get vaccinated/boosted" are both entirely true statements.

[danhak]

The issue is that there were coercive government mandates.

"Almost everyone should get vaccinated" does not mean the government should coerce everyone into making the correct medical decision by barring them from employment or access to private establishments.

Absent a very compelling reason, people should be free to go against medical advice. People have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies. People have the right to make the wrong choice.

In this case, the reason given for overriding that freedom was a highly specious argument that the unvaccinated were putting other people at significant risk. That argument did not pass the smell test from the very beginning.

[gamacodre]

> ...does not mean the government should coerce everyone...

Here you're presuming that the government's role in a pandemic is to wring their hands and issue PSA's. That might be what some folks want them to do these days, but when the legal foundations of public health policy were laid the government was expected to do quite a bit more.

> People have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies.

This might be your opinion, but the majority of your fellow citizens disagree with you. Try asking them about drug use, abortion, suicide, and other "purely personal" matters.

> People have the right to make the wrong choice.

Many wrong choices come with severe state-imposed consequences. We in the US long ago delegated to our elected representatives the authority to force some choices onto individuals, including in a health emergency. We are of course vigorously debating whether they used that authority wisely this time, but it was theirs to use.

[RhysU]

And... They... Just... Keep... On... Using... It.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/us-extends-covid-public-heal...

[lamontcg]

> a highly specious argument that the unvaccinated were putting other people at significant risk.

The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

[koolba]

> The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

> Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

My right to choose my own treatment outweighs any right you have to feel safer. That includes you feeling safe that the local hospital system will not be at capacity if you have to be admitted.

It’s no different than having a bunch of chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system. People have the right to make potentially destructive choices that are not directly harmful to those around them.

[lamontcg]

> chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system.

That's the normal load and it is scaled for it[*].

COVID is like a DDoS.

And there is no elastic cloud scaling for nurses, you can't just turn up more instances from a ready pool.

[*] Well maybe not any more, and lets not get into a discussion of the for-profit health care system.

[kennyloginz]

Interesting way to look at it , a DDoS on healthcare. Makes me think of a Cold War sci-fi story called “Wasp”.

[bsder]

> It’s no different than having a bunch of chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system.

These aren't comparable. Obesity or alcoholism aren't communicable and don't lead to outbreaks. If they did, we'd be having similar discussions as to Covid.

[bsder]

> My right to choose my own treatment outweighs any right you have to feel safer.

No problem. Please sign this document stating that you will not seek treatment for Covid and that hospitals can legally refuse to treat you if you contract Covid.

But, see, that didn't happen. Instead what we wind up with are anti-vaxxers begging for the vaccine after they have been put on ECMO. Yeah, unfortunately it's too late at that point.

And even worse you are now soaking up a hospital bed for 4+ months that should have gone to someone who wasn't stupid.

And even worse that that is the dying person's family giving grief to the hospital staff because someone anti-vax dying of Covid doesn't fit their reality narrative. I could at least have some sympathy for the uneducated following foolish leaders. I have NEGATIVE sympathy for those who then abuse people trying to help them when the consequences come home to roost.

When I can see tears of relief in the eyes of a nurse simply by saying "Don't worry. I'm pro-vax." we have let the idiots have too much leeway.

[koolba]

> No problem. Please sign this document stating that you will not seek treatment for Covid and that hospitals can legally refuse to treat you if you contract Covid.

Why? Do you expect someone who doesn’t get a measles vaccine to sign a waiver refusing treatment if they get I’ll? Do you expect someone who refuses to wear a condom to refuse treatment if they contract an STD?

[bsder]

> Do you expect someone who doesn’t get a measles vaccine to sign a waiver refusing treatment if they get I’ll?

Perhaps? The advantage that we have with measles is that the vaccine can reach "herd immunity" and the measles vaccine is extremely effective. If enough people started dropping the measles vaccine because "Muh Choices!" that we fell below that and it started clogging the hospitals, yeah, maybe. The enclaves that refuse the measles vaccine find out about every 5-10 years why that's a bad idea.

[XiraceFulufuke]

Fortunately you can't stop the countdown till the moment you realize that the idiot was you.

[bsder]

If contracting a bad case of Covid 19 is enough to get anti-vax people to change their beliefs, perhaps that's pretty good evidence that maybe they haven't thought out the consequences of their position very well, after all.

As the kids say: "Fuck around. Find out." Or, as the olds say: "Play stupid games; win stupid prizes."

[Izkata]

> The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

Except that wasn't happening, and so much not happening that hospitals were reducing capacity. The emergency capacity built in early 2020 was dismantled after only a month or so and never brought back.

You can find individual hospitals reaching capacity all the time every year forever, but it was never the problem the news made it out to be. Current headlines include gasp hospitals at 80% capacity! ...Except that's normal. The more empty beds they have, the more money they lose - they try to run at around 80-90% full.

[bombcar]

> Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

I wonder how that would apply to obesity and unprotected sex.

[kurthr]

Um, obesity is an individual issue (at least at the current levels of hospital load associated with it) so your insurance and bills go up. Unprotected sex has two people involved and can be assault (if not agreed to) and if done by someone who knows they are HIV positive and infects another who dies... manslaughter.

[bombcar]

But we've shown that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, so not getting it is an individual issue ...

[kurthr]

So you filling up ICUs where there's no room for people who bothered to help their fellow citizens with heart attacks, car crashes, or cancer treatment is transmission? That is a different definition of transmission than I am aware of.

Can you please provide a dictionary or other reference?

In case you were wondering when ICUs were full of respiratory diseases, that would be last week.

[gjsman-1000]

Well... the awkward part about this is right now, it is now the opposite problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/environment/covid...

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20221127/more-vaccinated-peo...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinate...

[lamontcg]

As even that top article points out we'd expect the rate of unvaccinated people to approach the base rate which is 76% of the population having received one dose. And since old people are at more risk and are more vaccinated, we'd expect it to reach even higher eventually. But that happens because eventually the unvaccinated do all pick up natural immunity and the effect we're measuring is that the excess load caused by the unvaccinated is declining. We could have gotten to this point much quicker by having 100% vaccination rates (and 100% of the people still being admitted with COVID would then be vaccinated) but with an order of magnitude less load on the hospital system.

The top article you cite has all this information in it, and even mentions the base rate fallacy. It is criticizing the framing of the pandemic as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" and trying to focus attention on the elderly, but that is orthogonal to the question of if the unvaccinated are disproportionately clogging up the hospital system. Both statistics are true. Everyone should still get vaccinated to reduce the load on the hospital system (although this concern is now fading as antivaxxers actually do pick up immunity the hard way). We should also focus on the elderly more.

As a simple example: if a population begins entirely susceptible and there's a vaccine from day 1 which is available and reduces the risks of hospitalization by 9x and 90% of the people get the vaccine, then the rates of hospitalization will be split 50/50 between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Vaccinating the rest of the population would increase vaccination rates by 10% but would decrease overall hospitalization rates by 44%.

[ajross]

> the government should coerce everyone into making the correct medical decision by barring them from employment or access to private establishments.

But... the government has been doing that for decades and decades, since the very invention of the vaccine! Why is that "The Issue" when there's suddenly a pandemic and it's important, vs. when you needed to show your vaccination records to join the military or go to school in the 90's or whatever?

You see that the concern you're showing seems, to those of us on the other side, maybe a little insincere?

[danhak]

What about my position seems insincere to you?

You see no philosophical difference between the government mandating vaccination records for schools and public institutions like the military vs. them mandating vaccination records for private establishments such as gyms, irrespective of the wishes of the owners of those establishments?

Should the government have the right to mandate vaccination records for entry to a private home, irrespective of the wishes of the homeowner?

[enaaem]

Pandemics are not a private issue. It's similar to a war. It can kill a significant percent of the population and it requires collective action to stop it.

[wpietri]

The government has the right (and I'd argue, the duty) to quarantine people with diseases that are both contagious and dangerous if that's the best way to keep them from harming others. More details here: https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

[emmelaich]

AIDS/HIV sufferers would like a word with you.

Speaking of which, Fauci's early statements on AIDS in the initial outbreak were interesting.

[wpietri]

Your theory is that the best way to prevent AIDS deaths is quarantining people? That seems extreme.

Regardless, it's not one of the diseases listed on the linked page, and it's very different in nature than the ones there, so that sounds like a red herring to me.

[bombcar]

The "vaccine mandates" that have been around since the 90s have been relatively weak or non-existent, via any number of possible exemptions.

Perhaps the military had some say but it's relatively easy to not accidentally enlist.

[ethanbond]

You don't get to dismiss an argument by just declaring that it "didn't pass the smell test." That guidance was exactly in line with every counter-pathogen campaign since, Idk, before germ theory?

[mrguyorama]

The worst part is that we have already comprehensively litigated all of this. The spanish flu had people protesting being forced to wear masks and other societal health measures and the Supreme court affirmed the US's right to mandate those kind of large scale health things.

[briandon]

The mask push then was because, for a while (and despite evidence of infectious agent passing through too-small-for-a-bacterium filters) they believed influenza was being caused by a bacterium, not a virus. Even then, they knew that the masks available would not stop airborne viruses. And masking didn't work then either (areas with enforced masking fared no better than areas where masking was optional). You're welcome to dig into accounts of the pandemic and medical journal articles written during and in the immediate aftermath of the influenza pandemic and confirm this for yourself.

Likewise, the initial (honest) advice not to bother with masks for covid was based on the fact that covid, like other coronaviruses and influenza, is aerosol-borne and aerosol particles pass through surgical mask material easily (so wearing a 2nd tight-fitting mask over a surgical mask to get a better fit doesn't matter).

The u-turn on masks for covid wasn't based on science. The justification later given was that the earlier, correct advice not to bother with masks was a noble lie to conserve supplies of masks for healthcare workers. At the time, the reversal was publicly predicated on hand-wavey (and false) claims that covid might be droplet-spread (droplets are larger than aerosol particles and droplet emissions could conceivably be greatly reduced by well-fitted surgical masks with no gaps).

[ethanbond]

The initial advice on masks was that we don’t know that they help. This is a truthful and different claim than the claim that we do know they don’t help.

The only record you’ll find of a public health official saying we DO know they DON’T help is USSG Jerome Adams.

It’s weird that you’re writing this implying that we now know masks don’t work. That’s not true. We DO know that SOME masks work, others work hardly at all or none at all.

[mixmastamyk]

Yes, the binary thinking unfortunately continues. Masks were/are/will never be 0% or 100% effective. Reducing the number of viruses transmitted at once could mean the difference between life and death for covid though.

Closing the beach however, was 100% BS.

[lmm]

Has this kind of vaccine mandate (for everyday life, not for travel) ever been imposed before? I remember the possibility of denying public services (e.g. schooling) to children who weren't vaccinated against measles being discussed but being extremely controversial, and that was for a vaccine that was far more reliable and well-tested.

[ethanbond]

Which mandate are you talking about?

[lmm]

Requiring restaurants/gyms/etc. to require customers to be vaccinated.

[ethanbond]

Yep, states have more or less complete authority to mandate things like this.

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...

[svnt]

It is a basic tragedy of the commons problem. Solving this is basically the reason why we have government.

[jsnell]

> It ought to be possible to say "Hey this looks kind of funny, could the vaccines be having weird effects in this .0000001% of the population?" without daggers coming out all around.

That's one in a billion. No, it's not possible to reason about a weird effect affecting less than one person in all of EU + US combined.

But we do actually know what happens when there is a legit safety concern with the vaccines affecting a slice of the population, since it has happened. The AZ vaccine turned out to have rare (but not one in a billion rare), serious and even lethal, complications for young women. The public health authorities picked up on this within a month, and acted to stop the use of that vaccine first for that at-risk group and later for everyone.

That was all fairly low drama.

[jfengel]

Yeah, it sure ought to be.

But the same people who believe that evolution and climate change are hoaxes are also convinced that COVID is a hoax. (The disease is a hoax, the vaccine is a hoax, the hoax disease that doesn't need to be cured by the hoax vaccine is an attack by China -- and the coverup is a hoax.)

And those people are ~40% of the US population, with an outsized thumb on the scale of elections due to accidents of geography and history. So instead of talking cogently about tradeoffs, we're barely fending off turning conspiracy theories into policy. And by "barely" I mean "succeeding slightly more often than we fail".

Yeah, we ought to be able to discuss things cogently. That ship sailed a long time ago.