It's almost like the existence of vaccines places evolutionary pressure on a mutating virus.
This whole pandemic has highlighted something that I really prefer not to think about, which is just how irrational, selfish, incapable of assessing risk and prone to confirmation bias too many people are.
The vaccine isn't 100% effective in stopping transmission? Or stopping you catching the disease? Or dying? Each of these becomes some pseudo-gotcha moment that leads some down an invermectin-taking path with Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan as the pied piper.
It's basically equivalent to arguing that people wearing seat belts can die in car accidents therefore seat belts are ineffective. Worse, you can suffer an injury from a seat belt so they're net harmful.
What many non-Americans may not understand is that there are a nontrivial number of Americans who still doggedly and genuinely believe that about seat belts to this day and view laws requiring their use as impinging on their ffeedom.
And we want people to make sacrifices for climate change? Yeah, never gonna happen.
> view laws requiring their use as impinging on their freedom.
They are impinging on our freedom. "You must do something" directly means you're less free, there can be no debate about this. The only debate to be had, is whether someone else (the government, the experts, ...) is allowed to force you to do things "in your best interest". There are ideological and practical (e.g. "power invites abuse" and "experts are stupid" as exemplified by the current pandemic) arguments pro/against.
And we want people to make sacrifices for climate change?
The main problems with most proposed solutions are: (1) they ideological (e.g. "meat harms the environment"), (2) they exacerbate inequality ("no flying except private"), (3) they're ignorant ("no nuclear, let's double down on destabilizing solar").
If instead you proposed solutions that were (1) actually "we're all in this together" (e.g. revenue-neutral carbon tax, or a yearly "carbon budget" so that rich people flying private would pay much more), (2) utilized best technology available (nuclear+solar+batteries+synthesised fuel+...), and (3) respected individual liberty (e.g. some people would rather eat less meat, others would prefer to drive less), you'd see much more public support.
The agreement to be a part of the society is an infringement on personal freedoms by definition - individuals agrees to constrain their behaviors to a set of rules, in return getting the benefit of scale.
A healthy society by definition aims to maximize the sum of benefit minus the inconveniences of constraints.
In the old days of the village life one could forfeit the impacts to their personal freedom, abandon society and go live in the forest on their own.
Unfortunately the modern societies do not give this option. It would be truly helpful to give some perspective to people.
Generally you don’t have a right to drive in any way you want on a public road. There are tons of restrictions on your personal liberty that you agree to when you get behind the wheel, including free expression (try to install a red/blue flashing light on your car and claim first amendment protections). And seatbelts are not required on private roads, or in any case the law would not be enforceable (though if that did happen I’d like to learn about it and be proven wrong).
This, as so many viewpoints that claim to be in favor of freedom, completely obsesses on freedom to, while ignoring freedom from.
Freedom to eat meat completely ignores freedom from dying in a climate apocalypse.
Freedom to not get vaccinated completely ignores freedom from dying from a deadly disease.
When two freedoms conflict, the more impactful should be prioritized. In both of these cases it's freedom from.
I just want to point out that your seatbelt analogy isn’t true for all population groups.
Seems some of the vaccines are resulting in heart issues for young, otherwise healthy men.
So would you wear a seatbelt if you had almost zero risk of dying from the crash but an very small chance the seatbelt might choke you while driving and lead to long term harm?
Would you take the risk, solely because the authorities say you must take the risk wearing a potentially unsafe seatbelt to save some old people?
You were saying something about people can’t evaluate risk.
The article specifically calls out this risk as "very low" and quantifies it as less than 1 in 50,000. The death rates from motor vehicle accidents in the US was ~11 per 100,000 people in 2019 [1].
I assume since you're that risk averse, you no longer drive?
This is a good example of how people are bad at risk assessment and also why people have a phobia about air travel but rarely about driving even though air travel is significantly safer.
So using the argument that there are risks with the vaccine is a selective argument that no one applies to virtually every other aspect of their lives and also misses the point: those risks are quantifiably tiny and need to be weighed up against the risks to themselves of NOT taking the vaccine, including hospitalization, death and long Covid as well as the impact that choice has on others, collectively.
> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?
I actually can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not. The optimist in me is choosing to believe it is.
For my age/health group, I view this risk of Covid to be less than the risk of the known issues with the vaccines and the unknown long term risk factors that aren’t yet fully known.
Do you fly on planes with a known safe takeoff statistics but no one has ever landed it before? It’s hard to quantify unknown risk, and I don’t trust people that safe don’t worry about this shot and we aren’t liable if there are side effects!
> For my age/health group, I view this risk of Covid to be less than the risk of the known issues with the vaccines
1. If you extrapolate that out to everyone doing it, we have a ton more people die, many from things unrelated to Covid because hospitals don't have the capacity. That hasn't been factored into your risk assessment;
2. Even with highly-effective vaccines, the death count in the US is at least 700,000. That's likely underreported by a large amount. The absolute worst case for risks of getting the vaccine are orders of magnitude less than that; and
3. Your choices don't affect just you.
(3) is the big one for me. If the net effect of not taking a vaccine was that that person would simply be more likely to die with no consequences to anyone else, I'd just call that evolution in action and move on.
But that's not the case. And the impact on other people is seemingly given absolutely no weight into these anti-vaxx decisions, which is the selfish aspect I was referring to.
Further to that, we get this under control and the vaccinated and unvaccinated both get to share in the benefits of that so it's doubly selfish.
The worst part is this level of selfishness is dressed up as some kind of virtue.
> unknown long term risk factors that aren’t yet fully known
That's just the fudge factor of confirmation bias rearing its ugly head.
100% agree on #3, and also find it odd that it’s frequently missing from the discussion. People complain about how being allowed to do something (or not) impacts themselves, or that another person can or can’t do something impacts that other person. There is less thought spent on how one person’s decisions impact everybody is law though.
How far down the rabbit hole of banning everything because it pisses someone else off do you want to go down?
Do we live in a society where we use authority to enforce the “right choice “ or do we make information and education available for people to decide for themselves how they want to live?
I rather live free, even if some people make bad choices. The risk of central authority eventually turning evil is too high.
It’s a fair question and I think the response is it scales with your proximity to other people. If you live out in the country and your nearest neighbor is a mile away then by all means do whatever you want as most of your choices will not impact others. If you’re living in a dense metropolis in a 500 unit complex then the equation is different as your choices impact more people quicker.
The irony in your post is that you might also be failing to evaluate risk correctly, because you aren't looking at all of the numbers.
To continue your analogy: even as a young and healthy man, the additional risk of you being choked by the seatbelt is still _very slightly smaller_ than the risk reduction from you wearing it. See e.g. tables 1-4 of https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-statement-se..., which give the comparative risks in the 12-15 age group.
It is true that the difference in risk is very marginal, and so you might reasonably choose to "price in" some additional uncertainty around vaccine risks, and reasonably choose not to get it.
You do also mention that you have survived Covid. I don't have the figures, but I would suspect that also changes the risk calculation in your personal case, in favour of you not getting the vaccine.
But please, whatever you do, look at all the numbers before making a decision. Don't just pick and choose those that fit your case.
> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?
A wish to survive future infections? Solidarity?
Would you take a Covid vaccine if it was guaranteed to save your grandparents?
Can you meet the family of the old people you killed, look them in the eye and say ‘It was my right!’
Anyhow, the risk of catching and dying from covid is higher than the chance of heart complications at basically any age, so the fact that it helps other people is just a bonus.
My grandparents are all dead, but I don’t think my grandparents who lived through the Great Depression would want me to take the risk of heart inflammation as a young man, so they could potentially live a bit longer. In fact my grandmas would probably take a bullet to spare me health concerns.
I don’t buy your moral argument that the young should suffer disability for old people to live longer.
Ban ICE engines today, make everyone buy a Tesla. It’s possible, just like you say it’s possible to force everyone to get vaccinated. There are costs to it, not everyone wants to pay those costs! But it can be done!
My grandfather who lost a brother to polio and himself had to live the rest of his life with a weakened heart would absolutely want people to get vaccinated.
And yes, fossil fuels are a health issue. Combined with the massive climate effects, it's good reason to try to stop burning them.
My grandma lived under fascism in Germany and fled the communists.
I am very afraid that we are heading towards an authoritarian state that is the best (worst) aspects of the most terrifying ideological empires (Nazis and communists).
You're misinterpreting the study; it compares previously infected with previously infected AND vaccinated.
It doesn't say anything about previously infected VS vaccinated but not infected (and there are studies that claim "natural" immunity is more effective; hell even original J&J trial data suggests that!)
Luckily for the CDC they just recently happened to get data proving that naive vaccinees are 5x better protected than recovered unvaccinated against infection. The study is horrible, with so many issues and conflict of interests... but who cares, the CDC published it, it even has a shiny banner for news media to share around!
Car crashes aren’t contagious. COVID-19 presents a far higher risk for heart inflammation than the vaccine. But you know that when you posit it’s fine to spread COVID-19 because it only kills old people.
The heart complications is a result of dumbass nurses in America not aspirating when giving the shot. If you look at people getting shots in different parts of the world it's night and day.
There's a couple of things that could affect your calculation. First one is that, you can get covid again after having it once, immunity from exposure seems to wane even faster than immunity from Vaccination.
So then you're weighing the risks of vaccination against serious side-effects from the vaccine. According to (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...) 4288 people in the 18-29 category have died from covid so far in the US, so even to young people , the risk is obviously not 0.
Logically unless deaths from vaccination in that age group are higher than that number (which AFAIK they're not) it would seem to make sense to get the vaccine.
> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?
First of all, because if enough of us don't take the vaccine, we're all at risk from the virus continuing to spread and mutate.
Secondly, surviving Covid once doesn't mean you're immune from catching it (or a variant) again later on. That link you shared states a 1 in 50 000 chance of developing myocarditis from a COVID-19 vaccine. This recent study [0] finds a rate of reinfection among the surveyed population of 121 in 34 500 males and 148 in 31 697 adults aged 18-39. Either of those is more than 2 orders of magnitude higher than the risk of that heart complication. And catching Covid a second time can also leave you with further health complications.
Finally, I just want to point out that the article you linked literally has this citation from the study author:
> He says the new studies clearly show that the benefits of vaccination against COVID-19 outweigh the risks of people aged 16 and older developing myocarditis. Previous research co-authored by Balicer found that in this age group, becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 made a person 18 times more likely to develop myocarditis — a much more significant risk than is observed following vaccination.
So if you're evaluating risk for potential heart complications, I'd think you still want to get the vaccine at the end of the day (barring any other, as of yet un-mentioned, health complications).
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373524/
> because if enough of us don't take the vaccine, we're all at risk from the virus continuing to spread and mutate.
unfortunately, because the vaccine is leaky, it does little to nothing to stop the spread.
"Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States … At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people."
If you survived Covid without complications, you should not fear a vaccine, because it contains parts of the virus you're already exposed to, so nothing new for your body.
The pandemic has also made me more aware of the same thing. I already knew that people were selfish and bad at risk analysis, but the degree to which they are is what astounded me.
I wish there was some good answer to how to deal with the problem. The government can't get too heavy-handed because that will just drive even more distrust and possibly lead to revolution (the distrust has already happened after lockdowns and vaccine mandates, compounded with any distrust that was already there).
There'd have to be a big culture shift if we wanted people to take societal issues seriously. It's pretty clear this is the case when you consider that people are actually losing friends if they decide to get vaccinated. So much for "my body, my choice" (a phrase which has been stolen and twisted by people opposing the vaccines).
> The government can't get too heavy-handed because that will just drive even more distrust and possibly lead to revolution
The pandemic has taught me to be even more cynic about the limits of democracy that I already was.
My country's government, like many others (including the US, I think?), blatantly lied about masks at the beginning, saying that they didn't work or were counterproductive for laypeople which, honestly, was very hard to believe in the face of common sense as well as the know-how from Asian countries that have been using them routinely for years. When mask shortages ended, the messaging changed and suddenly masks began to be useful or even mandatory. The purpose of the lies was clearly to guarantee supply to medical workers.
Later on, a lot of hyperboles were suggested about vaccines, like that they made you "immune", that vaccination would mean that no restrictions would be needed anymore, or that once a threshold of 70% was reached we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would be over. This was clearly not true, but it pushed many hesitant people into vaccination.
The thing is, I'm a person with principles and thus my gut reaction is that a lying government is a bad thing. But if I place myself in the government's shoes and go back to March 2020, I don't think I can really defend that things should have been done differently. If the efficacy of masks had been acknowledged from the beginning, laypeople would have depleted the supplies, shortages in medical settings would be more severe, and more people would have died. If vaccines or herd immunity had been hyped less, vaccination takeup would be smaller (because many people only seem to think in absolutes, they don't care about risk reduction or spread reduction if they don't have a boolean goalpost) and more people would have died.
With this I don't mean that I'm against democracy, of course. In my own country we had an authoritarian leader who was also a bigot and a moron, so I'm fully vaccinated against authoritarianism. But it seems difficult to dismiss the idea that there are some things, like pandemic management, where you can't really count on laypeople to decide anything.
> Later on, a lot of hyperboles were suggested about vaccines, like that they made you "immune", that vaccination would mean that no restrictions would be needed anymore, or that once a threshold of 70% was reached we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would be over. This was clearly not true, but it pushed many hesitant people into vaccination.
It was true then - it was what the math showed before Delta was around. The required size of population for the herd immunity to take over depends on the contagiousness of the disease - it is pretty much inverse of the R number at least in the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered/Removed) model.
For the original variant, the number was about 75 %, with Delta being more contagious, the number is a out 85 %. Worth to mention that this is of total population that can get the virus - you see news like "country X vaccinated 80 % people" but sometimes that is eligible population which is not the same as all susceptible population. When you see antivaxxers claiming vaccines don't help "because of Israel", this is exactly the difference - Israel had almost 80 % eligible population vaccinated, but only about 60 % of total population, which wouldn't be enough for the original variant, much less for Delta.
> It was true then - it was what the math showed before Delta was around.
True, but it was a very rough estimate (COVID R0 confidence intervals were, and to my knowledge still are, very wide) and the potential for change due to new variants appearing was known and discussed very early in the pandemic (the March 2020 variant that ravaged Europe was already an "updated" version of the original virus). And all this didn't prevent our president from confidently appearing on TV and saying that when we reached 70% vaccination rate, we would have herd immunity. He even provided exact dates when that would be achieved, so some people actually expected that he would hold a press conference that day declaring the pandemic over. Of course, the messaging became diluted later on.
While perhaps not an outright lie, at the very least it was a half truth, and unrealistic hyping.
> At the very least, it was a half truth, and unrealistic hyping.
It was what the data showed at that time. Calling if half-truth because people couldn't predict course of a pandemic year in advance seems over the top. Do you know what will happen in a year?
No idea who is your president, so I can't comment on that specific communication.
> My country's government, like many others (including the US, I think?), blatantly lied about masks at the beginning, saying that they didn't work or were counterproductive for laypeople (...)
You should really revisit those claims because it's quite likely you got them all completely wrong.
I'm also living in a country where its government argued against mass adoption of surgical masks and gloves, but the argument was no way close to your claim.
The rationale was that this mass increase in demand for surgical masks and gloves would deplete the current stockpile and production capacity, thus leaving healthcare professionals and other frontline workers without access to basic protective equipment.
We're talking about a spike in demand that directly lead to the death of healthcare and frontline workers[1].
Consequently, we've saw multiple governments and health officials stating that the public should not go on a shopping binge for protective equipment to lower the pressure from the supply-side.
The same problem was also observed in a run for respirators.
In all these cases, once the production capacity was ramped up, governments naturally started providing incentives and even mandating their use.
> You should really revisit those claims because it's quite likely you got them all completely wrong.
> I'm also living in a country where its government argued against mass adoption of surgical masks and gloves, but the argument was no way close to your claim.
I'm not making wrong claims, because I'm not saying all governments did the same thing. In my country the messaging was definitely as I said. The argument was that masks wouldn't work for laypeople because they needed specialized training to be worn right (another clear lie, my wife is a doctor, has always used masks and never got such training beyond a few simple instructions that can be given in 30 seconds. And that did not change with the pandemic) and we would probably make the problem even worse by wearing them incorrectly, touching them with our hands and contracting the virus.
If your goverment was more sincere and still succeeded in preventing people from hoarding masks, I suppose it can be counted as evidence against my claim that lying was actually the best thing to do. But not all societies are equal. In my country I'm quite convinced that if the government had given the same messaging as in yours, people would have hoarded and made the shortage in healthcare worse. Although of course, this is just from my subjective impression of how my countrymen work and not a scientific claim.
> I'm not making wrong claims, because I'm not saying all governments did the same thing. In my country the messaging was definitely as I said. The argument was that masks wouldn't work for laypeople because they needed specialized training to be worn right (another clear lie, my wife is a doctor, has always used masks and never got such training beyond a few simple instructions that can be given in 30 seconds.
Again, I feel you should really revisit the events and review your claim. Even if we accept it at face value, it only makes any sense to raise concerns over "hey didn't work or were counterproductive for laypeople" if they were advising against mass adoption, and advising people to not go out of their way to buy surgical masks and latex gloves only makes sense if the goal is to mitigate spikes in demand to ensure the medical community still has access to them.
Let's put it this way: did you saw any government at all advising against buying toilet paper?
So much for "my body, my choice" (a phrase which has been stolen and twisted by people opposing the vaccines).
Twisted how. It's exactly the same argument, identical in every way, to the one used for years by abortion supporters. It was seen as noble and obvious correct back then by the same people who deem it to be beyond the pale now. It's obvious they have no internal consistency.
Twisted because a contagious virus is not just a personal issue. The virus will continue to mutate and weaken the efficacy of both natural immunity and the vaccine if its spread is not halted.
Abortion isn't a personal issue - it affects the life of the unborn baby. That's why abortion activists have talk about bodily autonomy so heavily.
Meanwhile, vaccines not only don't stop you spreading COVID but they appear to make it worse as UK and Swedish data shows. Thus there could easily be an argument to force you to not take the vaccine, on the grounds that you don't personally need the protection and it makes the epidemic worse. Would you like that?
It doesn't apply. It makes the (false) claim that anti-vaxxers don't have body autonomy. They do. No one is holding them down and making them take a vaccine. You've given the choice: get the vaccine or don't. But if you don't there are some negative consequences.
This was already the case prior to Covid. For example: sending unvaccinated children to public school.
When the penalty is having your livelihood destroyed yes, people are being forced to take it. No different to how people are "forced" to pay fines or do anything else the government wants - being physically forced is the very last step and most people never get there because they know what happens next. After all, what do you think happens to businesses that refuse to comply? The police turn up and punish them until they do comply.
Stop engaging in mental gymnastics and admit what you are supporting: mass forced violation of people's bodily autonomy.
What I believe based on life experience is that the further removed I am from an information source, the more likely it is to be untrue, outdated, inaccurate, distorted.
What I see with my own eyes is LIKELY to be true, although even the process of perception causes distortion.
What someone I personally know tells me has already been distorted THREE TIMES, but is still probably good information, if they are a trustworthy individual.
Friend-of-a-friend? That's FIVE distortions, count them. This type of information is good for compounding, but is not reliable enough by itself.
Any further than that, and I might as well be flipping coins. Add to that various conflicts of interest, and I'd rather avoid hearing it at all.
On your first comment, as far as I know the big contributor seems to be the Delta variant which arose and became prevalent in India at a time when it had very low vaccination rates (and from a different vaccine). In a hypothetical world without vaccines, we'd still have delta and just be worse off. I don't see any reason to attribute this to selective pressure from vaccines.
Your initial point was "It's almost like the existence of vaccines places evolutionary pressure on a mutating virus". That is implying that the existing observations could be explained by evolutionary pressures, not just that it might be happening in the future.
Delta would have been the dominant strain everywhere without the vaccine as well. Most of the reproductive advantage of Delta did not come from antigenic drift. Blaming vaccines for it like you did is completely, 100% false.
In a world with no vaccines, antigenic drift would happen just the same way, and still gain a reproductive advantage, just from evolving against disease-conferred immunity rather than vaccine-conferred.
Well, they're both impositions on freedom. But semi-forced medical procedures imposed in an emergency and likely driven by special interests are genuinely concerning. Organising protests over seat-belts - while logically defensible - just makes people look stupid.
So in principle, you shouldn't be fined for either. But the vaccine mandates are a hill worth fighting over.
Seatbelt laws shouldn't be forced either. But nobody is going to fight seriously over that because it is inconsequential and non-invasive.
They are not a justification for mandatory vaccination, in an emergency, with what is turning out to be an unknown risk and efficacy profile.
> But unlike seat belt laws, it's not forced.
Good. Keep it that way. But speaking from Australia, the truth of that statement is very context-specific. The government will presumably fine me if I attempt to go for a pub lunch without my smartphone, because then there isn't a way to prove to them that I have been vaccinated. This is a bad, indeed a concerning, thing.
> But semi-forced medical procedures imposed in an emergency and likely driven by special interests are genuinely concerning. Organising protests over seat-belts - while logically defensible - just makes people look stupid.
I'd say both makes people just look stupid, especially when using phrases like "driven by special interests".
Yep. And one of them is a cause which is worth looking a little stupid for while standing up for freedom, because it is an issue where it is more important to be right than to look like part of the crowd. The other one isn't - being seatbelts.
I argue that the fight needs to start with the most unjustified measures. seat-belts, helmets etc.
As long as you have those in place it's only consequential that more protective measures are in place as well - i.e ones that actually do have an protective impact on society
If your plan is to start with the least consequential issues, you should reconsider the plan. Start with the important stuff, work down to the nice-to-haves. Nobody gets everything that they want.
no, it's not about "least consequential" but about "most unjustified".
as long as you have even more unjustified measures in place, you will have a hard time fighting the less unjustified
> Why can I be forced to use seatbelts and vaccine skeptics are not forced to get the shot?
This is a good question.
While I'm 100% for people getting the vaccine, I personally believe that forcibly vaccinating people is a dangerous precedent to set.
Anti-vaxxers like to argue "body autonomy" against vaccine mandates, which is a distortion because you actually do have body autonomy. No one is forcibly vaccinating you. It's just that choice comes with consequences. And for people who are bad at risk analysis, irrational, prone to suggestion, selfish or some combination of the above, they simply don't like there being negative consequences to their actions.
What I find particularly ironic is there seems to be a strong overlap between "body autonomy" anti-vaxxers and those that would deny a 15 year old rape victim from getting an abortion at 7 weeks.
As an "antivaxxer" (not by any reasonable use of the word, but that seems to be the state of the language right now), I would not deny any rape victim from getting an abortion. I don't think I've observed this overlap you mention, other than being referenced in comments like yours.
(I'm sure there are traditional pre-2020 antivaxxers out there, I just never come across them in real life)
On bodily autonomy, I see a lot of this "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you!" kind of argument. Sure, technically nobody is using immediate physical force. By some strict literal interpretation, you are correct. I don't think that's what people have in mind when they say bodily autonomy though.
It's bothersome that people who otherwise make sense equate these two things and totally miss the point about one personal decision having ramifications for society, while the other does not. The elision of that crucial point, or the intentional mixing of all regulations as being equally public necessities, helps prove to vaccine skeptics that rule-thumpers have no respect for individual choices and detracts/distracts from the actual harm that antivaxers do. And it's a position usually put forth by those in favor of public health controls.
If people can't separate emergencies (temporary) from other conditions, or the things that only affect one person from those that affect society, and use the virus and vax campaign as an excuse to reduce individual choice in a permanent way - by of all things, tying it to laws against harmful personal vices or other stupid choices - they will be speaking to their own echo chamber of fellow virtue signalers without accomplishing either of their supposed aims.
the point here is that It seems entiterly arbitrary to enforce seat-belts but not enforce vaccine-shots.
in a constitutional state mandates should not be arbitrarys, that's a defining characteristic actually.
so either you have seatbelt laws and vaccine mandates,
or you have no vaccine mandates, but also don't enforce seatbelts.
then if you decide to enforce seatbelts, where do you stop?
smokeing, obesity, extreme sports, going outside without a proper reason ... you needed to outlaw all of these "risky-activities" for the good of society then!
One difference is that you can decide to stop wearing your seatbelt if we learn at some point that seat belts are actually more harmful than helpful.
Rather than saying if we mandate one thing, we should mandate everything, we could just evaluate each of them individually. And since that's what we actually do, and these decisions are made by different people at different times (because of elections, appointments, etc), some inconsistency seems inevitable.
It's not arbitrary. There is a clear, bright line between things individuals do that only endanger themselves - or which are wildly unlikely to endanger others - versus those which do endanger others. That's why drunk driving is a felony and not wearing a seatbelt is a minor violation. Even more importantly, it's why drunk driving or not being vaccinated is unethical, while not wearing a seatbelt is merely unlawful.
it's up to my passengers then - their personal decision - take the risk without me wearing the seatbelt, not riding with me or convince me to put on one.
Not wearing a seatbelt while driving does actually increase the risk to those around you. If you need to make a sudden swerve to avoid something that suddenly gets in your way such as a deer leaping into the road in front of you, wearing a seatbelt should increase your chances of maintaining control during and after the swerve.
It was really fun in the old days when we didn't have seatbelts and cars often had bench seating in front, so that on a sudden left turn (in the US) the driver could slide could slide far to the right.
I'm pro-vax, but I can see the argument of the anti folks: why actively take action to have something put in your body that (they've read) might harm you? I guess in their minds, if they get Covid at least it would happen passively.
I don't like the analogy. I think seat belt and helmet laws are impositions on your right to kill yourself. Refusing to wear a seat belt doesn't generally endanger anyone else. If antivaxers were only harming themselves, then let em be idiots and die. The problem is, they're not only endangering themselves. Second hand smoke would be a better analogy to vaccine refusal, although it's a pale comparison as it would take a LOT of second hand smoke over many years to achieve the negative health results that a single infected person can inflict on others in the course of a plane flight.
> Refusing to wear a seat belt doesn't generally endanger anyone else.
What if people are in passengers’s seats? Their bodies can be launched with a lot of kinetic force killing people in the front seats. Eventually with enough force, the driver can be launched out of the car and hurt somebody else.
Granted, it is not always happening. The same way someone infected do not always pass the virus to somebody else before getting better or dying.
In my opinion the analogy is quite fitting. People think it is about them, not noticing how it can impact others.
One person with covid will infect on average 3-5 others directly. Multiply that out. One person can only have one car crash, ever, in which their body becomes a projectile capable of killing someone nearby. One is a public health crisis and the other isn't. Conflating the two is an absurdity and a disservice to any attempt at getting antivaxers to understand the seriousness of the situation.
> One is a public health crisis and the other isn't. Conflating the two is an absurdity
Well, it is called an analogy, isn’t it? No one said it is exactly the same.
> One person can only have one car crash, ever, […]
Except not. As people who can be infected, infect others, fall sick again, and so on. People can have multiple accidents with varying degree of charm for themselves and others. Also, you forget that car crashes can also have more than 2 vehicles involved, especially on highways.
> a disservice to any attempt at getting antivaxers to understand the seriousness of the situation.
Well, I took for granted I am not talking to one. I would certainly need to use a different approach then. The issue with antivaxxers is that the reasons for their behavior often seems orthogonal to logical arguments, and aligns more with emotional responses like fear of the unknown and political and/or religious views.
Right, but my point is that the degree of risk and probability of harm an individual places on others is the only logical basis by which to determine the degree to which society should restrict or coerce certain behaviors. If we proceed from the idea that individuals should have as much freedom as possible, then on the scale of things society should concern itself with viz the individual's behavior, spreading an airborne virus with a 1.5% mortality rate demands much harsher measures than even speeding or drunk driving. Whereas not wearing a seatbelt or a helmet doesn't even register on the same scale. That's why it does matter that one thing is a public health hazard and the other is a personal one. They are of such different degree that they are materially totally incomparable to one another.
Realistically the risk is that everything surrounding the vaccine is and was extremely suspicious. I've never had a vaccine before where the nurse urged me to keep moving my arm for the remainder of the day. Realistically the clotting of the vaccines was a real issue due to the poor testing, and I'm not sure if it's still a problem because I haven't heard about it being talked about for a while. In addition, there were potential risks known about the vaccine via research financed by Pfizer for months after it was released that were not present in the media or on any waivers for months after the potential interactions began appearing in lab tests, and the information was not effectively delivered to people who got the vaccine or considered the vaccine. I've seen the heart issues mentioned by people in the comments, what I haven't seen is that Pfizer financed lab research on samples of lung and heart tissue and found a potential for interaction that was never told to anyone until it became a problem.
Then we can talk about how the vaccine companies got immunity from being sued if people had any problems down the road from it.
^ Not all optimal links but they are what I pulled from a quick search on Google Scholar regarding the subject. All date prior to wide discussion on potential issues caused by the vaccination.
No idea what your nurse was on about, but in my country neither me nor anyone I know was recommended to move their arm. And to my knowledge, there were no clotting incidents at all with Pfizer, only with adenovirus-based vaccines J&J and AstraZeneca (and they were extremely rare, although I still was very happy to get an mRNA vaccine because zero risk is better than very low risk, and they have also turned out to be better in almost every respect).
I got the vaccine with knowledge of the risks after researching it. The issue is a lot of people did not have knowledge of the risks since it was not in readily available places which caused widespread distrust in the vaccine.
> Then we can talk about how the vaccine companies got immunity from being sued if people had any problems down the road from it.
I think this makes sense, given governments were forcing their hand to get it on a fast track process. When you pressure someone to rush something I think it's fair to accept the responsibility for the greater risks rushing it caused, I think that's fair. I would absolutely understand the public suing the government if it turned out that rushing it and forcing everyone to get it early caused issues however.
> Realistically the risk is that everything surrounding the vaccine is and was extremely suspicious. I've never had a vaccine before where the nurse urged me to keep moving my arm for the remainder of the day.
This is the very first time I ever saw anyone make this extraordinary claim, or anything close to it. Practically everyone I know is fully vaccinated and there was absolutely no reference to any thing remotely like that. Ever. At all.
Personally, the only out of the ordinary thing I experienced was getting a leaflet with a FAQ on the vaccines. Other than this, I sat down, took the jab, got up, went to the waiting room for a bit, and afterwards went on with my daily life. Boring as hell, and happened on both jabs.
I'm really skeptical regarding your claim, to the point I doubt it ever happened. Do you happen to have any way, other than your word, to back it up?
> Realistically the clotting of the vaccines was a real issue due to the poor testing, and I'm not sure if it's still a problem because I haven't heard about it being talked about for a while.
There is nothing realistic about your claim. Entire countries have taken the vaccine and, even though there are rare cases where patients react poorly to the vaccine, the scenario you've depicted is not factual or grounded on reality.
Do you actually have anything that supports your extraordinary claim, or is this something you believe in in spite of evidence?
Added source links to my post from links I pulled from Google Scholar. Not all are perfectly relevant but in terms of potential known but not discussed impacts I suggest [3] from February 2021 or [4] from January 2021 to have a look at which discusses the potential for heart and lung issues from the vaccine, alongside the need for booster shots, which were noted during the development before the mass deployment.
In terms of my visit, all I can really say is I got the vaccine at the Cleveland Clinic in May 2021, I don't really have any hard evidence of what happened during my visit other than my vaccination card.
Also in terms of the clotting I'm surprised you haven't heard of it? (not Google Scholar links, it's just that it's on many news sources from a quick Google search)
The third link says 28 people had a problem after 9 million doses were administered.
If you hear that and think "the vaccine is risky", you need to adjust your risk tolerance.
I agree with the others about the nurse saying you had to move your arm. There's nothing specific about this vaccine that changes the requirement for mobility. I think you're just overly concerned.
> Added source links to my post from links I pulled from Google Scholar.
Sorry, you dumped a bunch of links but none of them seem to be related to any of your claims.
Can you explain the relationship between any of your links and the points you tried to make? Because dumping a bunch of unrelated links not only does not work as a reference but also feels like something done in bad faith[1].
"The challenge for modern vaccinology is to be able to provoke all the requisite steps leading to immune system activation in vivo, and to provide a non-virulent, harmless type of a given agent capable of generating a strong and adequate immune response tailored against specific viral attack (Moser and Leo, 2010). Thus, some questions arise regarding the development of the vaccine (see Table 1 for current development state of COVID-19 vaccines) that will be administered to billions of people at risk of COVID-19 infection."
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"As mentioned earlier, ACE2 is the route of SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, this receptor plays a vital role in both innate and adaptive immune responses by modulating the antigen present antigen cells that interact with T cells to initiate defense initiatives (Bernstein et al., 2018). This receptor of transmembrane protease acts in the conversion of angiotensin 1-8 (Ang II) to angiotensin 1-7 (Ang 1-7), prompting diuresis/natriuresis, preserving renal function, and attenuating cardiac and vascular reformation (Vickers et al., 2002; Santos et al., 2008; Zhang et al., 2010). ACE2 also has an important role in the nervous system, and disruption of this receptor can trigger neurological disorders (Kabbani and Olds, 2020)."
I read this as: depending on the immune response the vaccine creates, it can cause potential damage to various organ systems
"In rare cases, antibodies that the body produces as a side effect of the vaccine lead to uncontrolled activation of platelets. This causes both low platelet counts and blood clots to form in unusual areas. VITT is not associated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines. "
I read this as: the vaccines have the potential to cause clots, but this isn't proven for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines
In terms of the tissue tests in lab by Pfizer, I wasn't able to find the paper I that read on that, so I don't have hard proof of that.
Sounds to me like you're not a scientist or doctor and misread the text. Most specifically, I think you're taking exceptially rare events, thinking they're ultra common.
>It's almost like the existence of vaccines places evolutionary pressure on a mutating virus.
All the major variants of concerns came into being in countries with very little vaccination. Delta started in India for example. Most viruses have a very hard time mutating to evade vaccines, since that requires evading the human immune system (with the exception of influenza which is very good at creating new strains which avoid immunity - vaccine or no vaccine).
There are a great, great number of people who believe _both_ that the vaccine works on some level but disagree with the way it's being used in medical apartheid, the lack of exit plans, and changes to daily life, and so on. There are a great number of valid complaints.
But mentioning them and commenting in a more measured way probably wouldn't get you so many upvotes.
This is such a baseless and inflammatory mischaracterization. It's like the tamer version of those who have unironically compared mask and vaccine mandates to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.
No one is being forcibly vaccinated so arguments about "body autonomy" are completely irrelevant. It's just that not getting vaccinated has consequences and people don't like there being negative consequences to their (irrational) actions.
You need to have a bunch of vaccines to attend public schools in most places. This is nothing new.
Yet people lose their shit because they're told to wear a mask on a plane when that policy was known before they even bought the ticket.
To characterize any of this "apartheid", just like the comparisons to Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany, belies an ignorance and diminishes the suffering of black South Africans in Apartheid.
The full on assault on the right to work is reminiscent of the worst abuses of the XX century. Technically Stalin didn't mass murder the kulaks, he just decided they had a bad influence on the general population and offered them jobs in Siberia. "Look how many survived, even their poster boy, Solzhenitsyn, came back and had a very successful career." Plenty in the West applauded and downplayed their plight for decades. Some still do.
How are the unvaccinated supposed to put food on their table when they are being kicked out of the military, fired from their place of employment, or told that they must comply even if operating a self-owned-work-from-home business?
These people are being forced out of regular society into an underclass that will have to operate in a grey economy to survive.
Again this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the origin, meaning and reality of "apartheid".
Black South Africans didn't choose to be black. They couldn't choose to be white to escape the segregation, loss of rights and brutality.
No one is being held down and forcibly vaccinated. Even in the military, which is pretty strict about this, your choices are to comply or to face disciplinary procedures, possibly including being discharged from the military.
That's a choice.
Side note: military service members already have to comply with all sorts of medical requirements including shots. Why Covid is being singled out now is the only interesting part to this.
>>>Again this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the origin, meaning and reality of "apartheid".
The etymology of the world is separateness or "apart-hood". We can debate whether the concept requires immutable physical/racial characteristics, but in most Western minds the word "apartheid" is more common to communicate concepts of enforced second-class-citizen status than others, such as in India's caste system, or burakumin here in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin
>>>No one is being held down and forcibly vaccinated.
They are simply being forced into unemployment, and whether they eventually starve due to their lack of income, well, that's not YOUR fault, right? It's the most cowardly, passive-aggressive way to eliminate undesirables.
This is like Israel saying they aren't actively murdering Palestinians, so what's the problem? Meanwhile they maintain a blockade that prevents import of basic stuff that has at times included wheelchairs, tin cans, livestock, and construction materials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip#Lim...
>>>Side note: military service members already have to comply with all sorts of medical requirements including shots. Why Covid is being singled out now is the only interesting part to this.
Because the tons of other shots that we get (including that stupid, painful anthrax booster) don't have anywhere near the rate/risk of side effects that come with COVID vaccination!
And when we're exposed to stuff that DOES negatively impact our health, it has often led to the government getting sued for compensation afterwards. Examples: Agent Orange, Iraq "burn pits", USS Ronald Reagan and Fukushima radiation, etc...
Upon further research, you can get VA Benefits for side-effects linked to older, bad batches of anthrax shots: https://ptsdlawyers.com/anthrax-vaccine-presents-long-term-e... So the government recognizes that it screwed up giving us dangerous vaccinations in the 90s and is compensating veterans, and that's for something with a LOWER risk profile than COVID vaccination. But for COVID, the entire adult population of the country is being told to either comply or join the breadlines.
>>>That's a choice.
Yes, and sooner or later, as people feel increasingly suppressed by the government, they will simply stop debating and "make the choice" to resort to violence. En masse. And I don't think the bulk of the people who are oh-so-smug-and-confident about the need/importance for this current trend of government authoritarianism fully appreciate what that means.
Ah yes, the classic position of all authoritarians: "My Way or the Highway!"
And what do you tell the minorities who view vaccination mandates as yet another example of government oppression, under which they've already suffered?
I think it's quite brilliant! Unvaccinated people hurt others by spreading the disease to the vulnerable and clogging the hospitals (at much higher rate than vaccinated). Turning this around and making it so that their unvaccinated status is hurting them too, seem like a great balancing act.
And talk is cheap. I remember article about how police unions in whatever US city claimed that 10 000 police officers will quit if they have to get vaccinated. The mandate went through and the number who quit was 36 or so.
If less than 1 % of antivaxxers really mean it, when push comes to shove, that means we can still save the world.
But I also have no patience anymore, so I'm not the best role model of a delicate approach to those things.
>>>And talk is cheap. I remember article about how police unions in whatever US city claimed that 10 000 police officers will quit if they have to get vaccinated. The mandate went through and the number who quit was 36 or so.
I wonder what city this would be? Maybe LA? Chicago had to pause the mandate for law enforcement due to the union backlash.[1] New York lost ~9,000 public workers (not all police though) due to their mandate.[2]
>>>when push comes to shove, that means we can still save the world.
Except that the vaccine efficacy falls off of a cliff over time, so unless all 7 billion of us are gonna get boosters every 3 months, what is the real plan to "save the world"? If COVID is here to stay, at some point we need to add "COVID patients" to our baseline stats that drive our understanding of ICU bed requirements, and then just return to normal. At the very least "Asia normal" where people just understand to wear masks most of the day in crowded places.
The reason only 36 were fired is because they had thousands apply for "religious exemption". In the end they either accept them as exempt making the mandate moot or they will end up having to terminate them.
> * Ah yes, the classic position of all authoritarians: "My Way or the Highway!"*
Isn't that the core tenet of anti-vax militants? That not only are they entitled to refuse to follow the most basic health and safety precautions but also that they, somehow, are entitled to put at risk everyone around them because they feel like it?
And their sense of entitlement runs so deep that anyone around them not playing along with their sense of entitlement warrants personal attacks such as the one you've just mounted?
Pray tell, if you honestly placed any value on personal freedom how come you place a higher value on your personal whims than the health and safety of everyone around you?
>>>Isn't that the core tenet of anti-vax militants?
No their core tenant is "My Body My Choice."
>>>That not only are they entitled to refuse to follow the most basic health and safety precautions but also that they, somehow, are entitled to put at risk everyone around them because they feel like it?
There is a baseline level of risk that society tolerates, consequences be damned. That's why we un-banned alcohol, and why motorcycles are (thankfully) still legal.
>>>personal attacks such as the one you've just mounted?
Actions have consequences, right? Take an authoritarian position, get called out for being an authoritarian. If being identified as an authoritarian feels like a personal attack to you, you can always chose to not espouse authoritarian policy implementations.
>>>Pray tell, if you honestly placed any value on personal freedom how come you place a higher value on your personal whims than the health and safety of everyone around you?
"you you you you"....You seem to be assuming that I'm unvaccinated. I'm not. Nor do I have a COVID-risky lifestyle. I couldn't care less about lockdowns ending since I don't go out anymore anyway. I go to work (largely with vaccinated coworkers), I go to the supermarket/gas station/convenience store, I go home. I wear masks in public at all times. The only things I miss are Friday Night Magic and easy international travel. COVID has been "business as usual" for the lifestyle of many introverts.
I'm anti-mandate. And yes, my value equation places higher utility on personal freedom than health & safety. I assess that kowtowing to overbearing government intervention will calcify over time as it so often does, and trend towards misuses of power that will be a net loss for all of us. As it so often does.
"You can vote your way into Communism or fascism, but you have to SHOOT your way out of them."
Here's a better compromise in the interim: if hospital ICU capacity falls below 10%, the hospital has the right to refuse unvaccinated patients seeking admission for COVID treatment, in order to retain capacity for non-COVID-related conditions (both vaxxed and unvaxxed patients). BUT....I want to see this policy extended to the obese as well. If your BMI is over 30 and you have a heart attack...you get told "No Vacancy".
>It's basically equivalent to arguing that people wearing seat belts can die in car accidents therefore seat belts are ineffective. Worse, you can suffer an injury from a seat belt so they're net harmful.
For what is worth, I remember when seatbelts were about to become mandatory in my country as a kid and people argued exactly that. They weren't feeling unsafe in the first place to want to go through the inconvenience. It took a lot of traffic cop posts and fines until people got the habit rather than a rational argument about small chances which people are bad at reasoning about.
Though in all fairness that's the same country that is at the bottom of the vaccination charts and top of the deaths charts in Europe and due to corrupt government there's an abnormal distrust in authority there.
Those laws only exist to generate revenue for the police. Dying in car crashes is not an infectious condition, and never constituted a public health emergency. Put another way, it's no harm to society if you go through a windshield, but you can be fined for not wearing a seatbelt... while it's measurably harmful and morally questionable to refuse a vaccine, and no one will ever fine you for it.
> It's almost like the existence of vaccines places evolutionary pressure on a mutating virus.
This is true, however, in this case, the vaccines are losing effectiveness against the same strains over time. Which is unsurprising, actually, early reports from China on natural immunity showed that it doesn't last as long as usual. It was hoped that a vaccine would be more targeted but it seems effectiveness fades there also.
are you unconcerned by the trend? whats to say the vaccine efficacy won't decline further?
people are going about their normal routines assuming they're safe now, when in reality almost 2 years later there's still no clear path to universal lasting immunity.
It seems HN is quite eager to upvote vaccine skepticism of all kinds. It could provide quite the distorted view of reality if I were to trust HN karma over the near-universal medical scientific consensus (FDA approving vaccines for 5-11 year olds with a universal vote). I wouldn’t be surprised if HN starts advocating for ivermectin soon.
Approving vaccines for children is nowhere near being a near-universal medical scientific consensus. Far from it. Lots of people in medicine think that's clearly insane. See the testimony of Peter Doshi to the Senate recently for an example.
> Lots of people in medicine think that's clearly insane.
But not the people who matter. The FDA panel was unanimous. Stop listening to fringe voices in fields you aren’t an expert in. Peter Doshi was invited by Republicans to sow FUD. He doesn’t think the vaccines are saving lives.
The people who matter are there because they purged any rational people a long time ago. The UK JVCI has gone through multiple rounds of purges by now. Government health agencies have no credibility as neutral bodies by now, that's long shot.
Peter Doshi is a doctor and editor of a prestigious medical journal - the fact you consider him a "fringe voice" shows just how far off the reservation, and just how dangerous, views like yours have become.
> The vaccine isn't 100% effective in stopping transmission? Or stopping you catching the disease? Or dying? Each of these becomes some pseudo-gotcha moment that leads some down an invermectin-taking path with Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan as the pied piper.
What saddens me the most is that when I got my first jab (european country) I was given a leaflet clearly stating that a) the vaccine works by giving your immune system a workout to get it better prepared to fight the infection, b) the vaccine is not a silver bullet in stopping you from contracting and spreading the disease, c) even with the vaccine we need to continue respecting basic health and safety precautions like wearing masks and social distancing.
The message was clear: the vaccine significantly mitigated the impact of the pandemic, such as the need for lockouts, but the problem doesn't go away.
Consequently, where I am we're seeing vaccination rates close to 80% and pretty much everything went to normal. The infection rates are increasing slightly right now, but it's a far cry from the shitshow that we've endured around the spring of 2020.
This is really concerning be because it seems the world already forgot that this first batch of vaccines were nothing more than an emergency stopgap solution to buy the world some time until it figures out how to put a stop to it. Even though we're no longer seeing emergency response teams piling up dead bodies in makeshift tents, the root problem is still there, completely unaddressed.
> it seems the world already forgot that this first batch of vaccines were nothing more than an emergency stopgap solution to buy the world some time until it figures out how to put a stop to it
The world gave up. Didn’t you? In many countries vaccines have been fully available for 6+ months and a significant portion of the population still won’t take them. COVID will never be solved because of people who believe Bill Gates put microchips in their medicine.
This whole pandemic has highlighted something that I really prefer not to think about, which is just how irrational, selfish, incapable of assessing risk and prone to confirmation bias too many people are.
The vaccine isn't 100% effective in stopping transmission? Or stopping you catching the disease? Or dying? Each of these becomes some pseudo-gotcha moment that leads some down an invermectin-taking path with Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan as the pied piper.
It's basically equivalent to arguing that people wearing seat belts can die in car accidents therefore seat belts are ineffective. Worse, you can suffer an injury from a seat belt so they're net harmful.
What many non-Americans may not understand is that there are a nontrivial number of Americans who still doggedly and genuinely believe that about seat belts to this day and view laws requiring their use as impinging on their ffeedom.
And we want people to make sacrifices for climate change? Yeah, never gonna happen.