Well good for you, but you actually do need to look on the impact on behavior of the things you advocate for. Unless your goal is purely to punish/harm those that don't share your beliefs rather than some tangible outcome in terms of vaccination or [insert primary endpoint here].
> "We stopped elective inpatient surgeries. We stopped some of our outpatient patient visits. We stopped ICU medical transfers from other referral rural hospitals. ... We've asked for more time to work on strategies with the state to ensure that as many people as possible get vaccinated," said Tom Quatroche, the president and CEO of Erie County Medical Center.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we already know beyond a shadow of a doubt that mass COVID vaccination doesn't magically stop the virus from doing what it does. Israel has absurdly high vaccine uptake - including a sizeable proportion of triply-vaxxed people - and we're still seeing more "cases" than at the same time the previous year. So I wonder how much you've actually looked into the efficacy (in terms of chance of infection and spread) of these vaccines given the data. And I wonder how rigorously you've thought about the second and third order effects when phenomenoms like antigenic drift and immune escape and Marek's disease are very well known.
Anyway, I won't go too far down that rabbit hole since the discussion is more of "assuming vaccination is good and we don't have any ethical qualms with using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product where the manufacturers have literally no liability to the consumer for any adverse reactions, what is the best way to modify behavior" than about examining the premise of the utility of mass vaccination itself. It's probably already obvious that I completely reject the ethics of what you are in favor of. So setting the pesky notion of ethics aside for the time-being, I still think you're failing to see the very obvious harms that come from the brand of coercion that you're advocating for.
Like I said above, we're already seeing the effects of these mandates on healthcare capacity. Firing 5% of one's hospital staff is no small thing. And you seem to very much not see how censoring and suppressing alternate points of view only reinforces those points of view. Implicitly you seem to think that adopting a policy and actually enforcing it in the real-world are the same thing - which is a trap that many a naive intellectual has fallen into since time immemorial.
Hey, I apologize that my stance, as to me it appears to rub you the wrong way. If you're feeling heated or triggered, please accept an apology from an internet stranger.
My stance on the necessity of vaccines isn't a belief. Its from understanding the science of vaccines and the exponential mathematic of pandemics.
Why people choose to deviate from a very clear dominating strategy is simply not necessary for me to understand or research. The simplest assumption is they believe something that is not supported in the science, but have too much ego on the line to accept they are incorrect. This accurately classifies most of the concerns I've seen. I can empathize. We've all made mistakes in who we trust or what we conclude. But in the meantime, people like kids, the especially vulnerable, and those who cannot medically take the vaccine are put at risk. Hence why I am absolutely okay with a mandate to ensure the anti-vaccine advocates burden the social costs for their decisions.
> Why people choose to deviate from a very clear dominating strategy is simply not necessary for me to understand or research.
It's very important for you to understand if you hope to impact the behavior of people who don't share your beliefs. Or am I misunderstanding and you live in a universe where you can wave a magic wand? If so, I'd recommend just using that aforementioned wand to eliminate all mortality :P
> Its from understanding the science of vaccines and the exponential mathematic of pandemics.
It's logistic, not exponential, because the exponential growth tapers off as the proportion of immunity increases. This might seem like a nitpick*, but it's very indicative of the inability of those in your camp to foresee higher order effects. From a purely societal perspective, these vaccines do not offer anywhere near enough protection to actually avoid the propagation of the virus. All they've done is create a rich population of SARS-2-naive vaccinated individuals who provided perfect substrate for a variant like Delta, which possess point mutations on the spike, to rip through the vaccinated (given that, insofar as the vaccines were reasonably effective against "alpha", they prevented the vaccinated from acquiring natural immunity). It is no coincidence that a strain that largely-but-not-entirely bypasses vaccine immunity is now by far the most dominant strain here in the US.
* granted you could counter-nitpick me here by pointing out that the pandemic phase is specifically the exponential part of the epidemic curve
> But in the meantime, people like kids, the especially vulnerable, and those who cannot medically take the vaccine are put at risk.
Kids are not at serious risk of COVID-19. How can you claim to "understand the science" if you won't even admit this very basic fact? The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is dramatically lower than Influenza, and we never pulled kids out of in-person schooling for two years straight when presented with pandemic Influenza. (Yet if we applied COVID risk standards, we would have)
Note that this is usually where people come in and make a bunch of unfounded assertions about long COVID and how the kids will be crippled for life. I hope you're not going to take that route :)
> the especially vulnerable, and those who cannot medically take the vaccine are put at risk.
Ignoring the ethical issue of how much responsibility someone has to ingest a pharmaceutical product with no manufacturer liability, I think a much more accurate statement is that those individuals are put at risk by those who have not acquired natural immunity. Briefly:
The difference between a SARS-2-naive vaccinated individual and a SARS-2-naive unvaccinated individual is real, but quite minor in the context of Delta in terms of infection & transmission. The difference between a SARS-2-recovered unvaccinated individual and a SARS-2-naive vaccinated individual is absolutely massive. (https://pastebin.com/8yR3y5NA to avoid cluttering this comment)
So, while ethically I don't accept the notion of assigning blame to transmission of highly infectious endemic respiratory viruses, if we're gonna assign blame, the relevant criteria is "previous exposure to SARS-2", not vaccination status.
>we don't have any ethical qualms with using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product where the manufacturers have literally no liability to the consumer for any adverse reactions,
Where, exactly, is anyone in the US "using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product"?
At most, folks are being required to either get vaccinated or regularly tested in order to keep working. Which is AIUI, at least under US labor law, absolutely legal.
So I ask again: where, exactly, is "using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product" happening?
Well personally I'm an ancap so I consider all laws/executive orders to be implicitly (and often explicitly) backed by the police power of the state. You can say that the government requiring employees to be vaccinated isn't violent police power because they're not holding them down and injecting them, but what exactly will the state do if the employer doesn't comply? They'll send in the guys with guns to enforce.
Really it's such a small thing to be splitting hairs over though. If you prefer, just read what I wrote and mentally s/violent police power/coercion
Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough. It’s being used in places like Biden’s federal mandate that will (when they announce the actual OSHA rule) slap private companies with massive fees if they have unvaccinated employees
We're already seeing the impact of vaccine mandates in places like New York: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-mandate-new-york-...
> "We stopped elective inpatient surgeries. We stopped some of our outpatient patient visits. We stopped ICU medical transfers from other referral rural hospitals. ... We've asked for more time to work on strategies with the state to ensure that as many people as possible get vaccinated," said Tom Quatroche, the president and CEO of Erie County Medical Center.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we already know beyond a shadow of a doubt that mass COVID vaccination doesn't magically stop the virus from doing what it does. Israel has absurdly high vaccine uptake - including a sizeable proportion of triply-vaxxed people - and we're still seeing more "cases" than at the same time the previous year. So I wonder how much you've actually looked into the efficacy (in terms of chance of infection and spread) of these vaccines given the data. And I wonder how rigorously you've thought about the second and third order effects when phenomenoms like antigenic drift and immune escape and Marek's disease are very well known.
Anyway, I won't go too far down that rabbit hole since the discussion is more of "assuming vaccination is good and we don't have any ethical qualms with using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product where the manufacturers have literally no liability to the consumer for any adverse reactions, what is the best way to modify behavior" than about examining the premise of the utility of mass vaccination itself. It's probably already obvious that I completely reject the ethics of what you are in favor of. So setting the pesky notion of ethics aside for the time-being, I still think you're failing to see the very obvious harms that come from the brand of coercion that you're advocating for.
Like I said above, we're already seeing the effects of these mandates on healthcare capacity. Firing 5% of one's hospital staff is no small thing. And you seem to very much not see how censoring and suppressing alternate points of view only reinforces those points of view. Implicitly you seem to think that adopting a policy and actually enforcing it in the real-world are the same thing - which is a trap that many a naive intellectual has fallen into since time immemorial.