FDA grants full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid shot
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Well, it was supported by a personage like Oliver Wendell Holmes. I will quote, and then add my own emphasis:
"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes."
Let me repeat: The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. From the Supreme Court, no less. You can read about Buck v. Bell on your own time, but even in 1978 that sort of thing was rippling down to a minor being sterilized without her consent and the judge responsible prancing away scot-free (Stump v. Sparkman).
Any vaccine mandate needs to come with a hell of a lot of fences (thou shalt not change vaccines) and traps (if you try to extend this past vaccines we cut off your head on the steps of the White House). It needs to be surrounded by thou-shalt-nots to avoid the kinds of overreach that are actual matters of historical record.
More importantly, political slogans are not logical arguments, so one should not rely on them to prove things.
So the explanation for why this is not inconsistent is because “my body, my choice” has an unstated caveat.
Other's have already pointed out the false equivalence of this statement but for a moment let's ignore it.
Your logic here is that, again (incorrectly) assuming equivalence, that people that are pro-choice are being hypocrites by asserting a contradictory policy of a vaccine-mandate. The assumption here is that to avoid contradiction these people must either a.) reject their pro-choice beliefs or b.) reject their vaccine mandate belief...
but this is a gun with a barrel that points both ways... because the same hypocrisy holds for the person making this critique! If you are "pro-life" and anti-mandate you are also, according to this argument, in a position of contradiction. You can either a.) reject pro-life beliefs or b.) reject anti-mandate beliefs
By the internal logic of this argument either we have a vaccine mandate and have make abortion illegal, or don't have one and therefor never question a woman's right to choose again.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if everyone that holds the pro-choice/pro-mandate "contradiction" responded with to this issue with "you're right! forget the mandate, and I expect I'll never see another protest outside of an abortion clinic by anyone else against a mandate again!" many people relying on this argument would be quite upset.
This of course is really just demonstrating that the false equivalent is inherent because otherwise this contradiction would not be present in both sides of the argument. You can't evade hypocrisy simply by being the first to point it out.
You have to be more specific than mere "harm," which is the point of why I posted that. You need boundaries, clear ones, pre-defined and inviolable, else you are setting yourself up for the scenario which has already happened once in history.
1. The freedom to choose what goes into one's own body, in the context of receiving (or not) a vaccine shot.
2. The freedom to choose what goes into one's own body, in the context of an unwitting carrier of an infectious disease breathing SARS-COV-2 into your face.
A lot of the "I shouldn't be forced to receive a vaccine" people seem to be unwilling to make any accommodation for the people most interested in the second kind of freedom. If you don't want to get the vaccine, that's your choice. You should not be forced to do that. But you _also_ don't get to force other people to risk infection with SARS-COV-2 because of your decision.
The same applies to mask mandates, social distancing, etc. You are free to make those choices, but you are not free to stomp all over the liberties of those who are (legitimately) concerned about the potential health consequences of contracting COVID-19 - a disease that has killed over 600,000 Americans in under two years.
Regardless of your level of statistical literacy, it should be abundantly clear that the vaccine kills fewer people than COVID-19. If you consider yourself a "data driven" person, you should probably get the shot.
"This code change reduced response latency by only 50%, so we should probably revert and leave things as they are" is not a thing anyone would say.
You can see headlines like “vaccinated people spread coronavirus at the same rate as unvaccinated people”
Personally I am fine if someone wants to be mask and vaccine free on a deserted island, but when your directly putting others lives at significant risk it’s not just about personal freedom.
What we now know is that viral culturability is lower in vaccinated individuals at the same Ct count:
https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.03...
We've also known that Ct counts themselves drop faster in vaccinated individuals:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v...
Nobody has done a study on actual transmissibility and e.g. the household attack rate of Delta in vaccinated individuals. Signs are very clearly pointing to expectations that it would be lower now. It looks like vaccinated individuals with the same amount of symptoms have similar amounts of mRNA loads, but those have less culturable virus and clear faster than unvaccinated infections (which makes like ABSOLUTELY TONS of logical sense since the vaccination allows the immune system to get ahead of the virus and the immune system is dismantling infected cells faster in vaccinated individuals so there's more "dead soldiers" around and the battle is over quicker -- analogy breaks down though because the viral debris stimulates the immune system as well which causes symptoms).
There's statements in the media that "asymptomatic vaccinated individuals might be silently spreading Delta" which have been backed up with no research other than wild extrapolation from the headline Ct values. Meanwhile we know that for a fully asymptomatic course of illness (as opposed to the presymptomatic phase of an illness) that the household attack rate is down by a factor of 10 (although with old-school D614G).
I'm still waiting for evidence that vaccinated individuals are even found to cause superspreading events (where a single vaccinated individual infects > 10 other people at an event). My default hypothesis is that the R0 of delta in vaccinated individuals is probably less than 1.0 and I haven't seen any ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE to suggest otherwise. There was one study done in Israel that found that 80% of breakthrough cases passed it on to nobody and with 1-3 cases for the rest of the 20% that puts the R0 below 1.0, but that was done during Alpha so I always lose that argument in favor of fearmongering over uncertainty.
Yes, masks work. No, they don't grant 100% protection. Yes, vaccines work. No, they don't grant 100% protection.
These things are true at the same time. Learn to think with some nuance.
>Learn to think with some nuance.
unnecessarily rude
Since vaccinated folks can still transmit covid (even if the chance is lower) as well as other diseases, following your logic, everyone should wear masks as much as possible - even when vaccinated. Do you agree?
If new case rates are very low, the probability of asymptomatic transmission is very low, and universal mask wearing is probably not warranted.
If new case rates are very high, the probability of asymptomatic transmission is correspondingly higher, and universal mask wearing is probably warranted.
Another important input the the equation would be the % of the population with some level of prior immunity to disease.
I'm not in favor or against any given intervention, I'm anti deadly infectious disease transmission.
There are the people who are generally against vaccines and who even come up with conspiracy theories - often arguing that their approach is better for health and ignoring covid's long term risks.
Then there are the people who want to make vaccination mandatory - for the same reasons and with the same logical flaws.
Then there's also the government, first saying that masks are useless, then making them mandatory. Also, caring a lot about lives, but at the same time ignoring how many people die from other reasons and not considering the long term damage of lockdowns for many people (especially children).
And I'm pretty sure that when or if this pandemic is over, people will forget about all of it and go back to normal without having learned anything from it. And I'm in the middle, feeling that almost everything has gone crazy and no rational reasoning can help - no matter which of the groups I'm talking to.
No one is forcing them to risk infection. If you don't want to risk infection, stay home!
And now you hit the crux of the issue. Who gets to decide who stays home?
It's a false comparison to say that an unvaccinated person is "forcing" someone to take a risk.
If you don't want to get shot, stay home or wear body armor! The body armor is 90% effective at reducing severe bodily harm from my bullets.
One person's freedom to do what they want with their body conflicts with another person's freedom to live in a drug free society.
This leads to a semantic argument over the word and what freedoms are right or wrong, which is just trying to construct your own axiomatic system, but you can't ever prove the correctness of the axioms that you adopt. Its a pointless endless argument and you can't ever come to any agreement.
The thing to look at is outcomes and unintended consequences.
And really this about the fact that our hospitals and ICUs are going to fill up and we only have a limited supply of people to run them, even if we could have Elon Musk pump out a million ventilators or something. Getting coercive about vaccinations is something that apparently has to happen because not enough people are doing it. And the vast majority of people do actually want an ICU to go to if they get into a bad car accident. That's why freedoms don't actually matter. Our hospitals are turning into fucking warzones and we should be dealing with this like we're on a war footing.
And in this case the enemy is a virus, not human, we should be able to agree as a species that we'd like to defeat its efforts. Instead we have humans with brainworms simping for the virus.
In the immediate circumstances, I don't disagree with you - but that's a result of the circumstances. We happen to have an extraordinarily safe and effective vaccine available, and COVID-19 is debilitating, deadly, and causing havoc in our healthcare system. It's less obvious that anti-disease measures governments took in the past, or may take in the future, should be seen as uncontroversial.
Taken to an extreme, your argument could be used to prevent the propagation of certain combinations of genes. Similar arguments were also used to justify mass-spraying DDT to eliminate malaria.
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
probably so does preventing the propagation of certain genes.
when i mentioned unintended consequences i very specifically meant that no policy can be considered in a vacuum without considering externalities, blow back and the response to of human society to those policies.
for example, a world where aborton is illegal and clotheshanger abortions didn't happen isn't one of the possible options. it all needs to get tested against actual reality and not wishful thinking.
Sad to see smart people talking about "consent" when public health is in danger.
It's really not difficult at all to see how "public health" taking precedence over anything can very easily lead to government overreach that is unwarranted.
I get frustrated with antivaxxers not necessarily because they are against mandates, but because their arguments for not getting vaccinated are complete and utter nonsense.
I am vaccinated, advocate others getting vaccinated, have immunocompromised family, but am uncomfortable with mandated medical treatments.
What if you've already had Covid and recovered? The data seems a lot less certain about whether the vaccine is a clear advantage over the natural antibodies that you have from a natural recovery.
What if you genuinely have allergies or other issues that might cause serious complications with receiving a vaccine? People like this definitely do exist.
Those issues are both real. Alas, it's also tough to prove for certain that somebody is in one of those buckets and not making something up because they're afraid of the vaccine.
The antivaxx community is filled with people willing to take some vaccines but not others.
Random article on the subject: You can essentially break anti-vaxxers into two groups, says Tim Caulfield, the Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta. The first consists of full-on disbelievers who make up somewhere between two and five per cent of the population, depending on which study you look at. Their minds won’t be changed. The second group — somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent of Canadians — is for what some now call the vaccine-hesitant. They may get some of the required vaccinations for their children, but not all of them. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/who-are-the-anti-vaxxer...
Philosophically, yes. Practically, no. If you are voluntarily unvaccinated because you’re a nutter or are lazy, you’re the same risk to the public.
"Oh I'm totally for vaccine, but not the one that went through full trials and helps stopping the actual pandemic going on right now, nope, that one is a no go better people keep dying when we could stop it"
At this point we have more data on COVID vaccinations than most prescription medications as their so widespread.
Which? Next to medical reasons there are none.
It's just selfishness and not caring about the greater good and health of society, your neighbours, colleagues, friends or family.
I'm not prejudging how an individual's assessment of risks and benefits might shake out and I personally feel it's not a huge deal either way. That said, I very greatly disagree with the sense of entitlement baked into the comment I'm responding to, e.g., that I and all others should collectively drop everything and abandon all personal preferences and goals to focus single-mindedly on defeating the virus. The flaws with the majoritiarian premise are at least three-fold. 1. We most certainly will not defeat the virus in any way-- history teaches that we will at best coexist with it. 2. The viral risks are not infinite and easily may be overshadowed in many cases by life circumstances-- I am not required to quit my life and livelihood to serve majority sensibilites or lack thereof. 3. Before this pandemic I had some sense that my choices are personal, sometimes private, and always mine-- the pandemic has made me realize those sentiments are not universal, but have not persuaded me I'm wrong.
This is SO dramatic! It's just a vaccine! It's done in less than an hour! Wearing a mask is not fucking hard! What happened to American tenacity and strength in the face of adversity? How do these things even make your life harder?
The risk of getting this due to an acute Covid infection is eight times higher than after getting the vaccination.
This is an emotional appeal that has been used to justify countless atrocities in countless civilizations. A rational society shouldn't be thinking in such blanket and qualitative ways
That is to say, judging an action solely by its reason is intellectually lazy; Especially because you can just interrogate the action and its effects themselves.
To make it clear: Saying getting vaccinated is dangerous because the 'greater good' is also used to justify atrocities seems like something profound, but it actually lacks any insight whatsoever.
Then say that, don't say "the greater good". The "greater good" means very different things to Nazis or Islamist terrorists. We should encourage people to say what they mean, not vague and meaningless phrases like "greater good".
If nobody got the covid vaccine, would things be better or worse across our society than they are now? Simple question, simple answer, but something you are ignoring and thus you aren't rational.
Unbounded utilitarian arguments can be used to justify any number of atrocities, and therefore must be bounded by human rights and other factors.
Ultimately, it comes down to what you are and aren't measuring when you are assessing "impact over the collective".
Anything complicated like this requires nuance.
Spock wants to have a word with you.
anything less is just selfishness and not caring about the greater good and health of society, your neighbours, colleagues, friends or family.
Not according to a recent Oxford study. Quite the contrary, actually.
https://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/covid-19/covid-19-infection-survey/...
>Two doses of either vaccine still provided at least the same level of protection as having had COVID-19 before through natural infection; people who had been vaccinated after already being infected with COVID-19 had even more protection than vaccinated individuals who had not had COVID-19 before. [my emphasis added]
COVID vaccines aren't eligible for the VICP and have a laundry list of horrific side-effects, that's plenty of reason for any reasonable person.
> It's just selfishness and not caring about the greater good and health of society, your neighbours, colleagues, friends or family.
You can say the same about fat people, smokers, drinkers, and all other people who take unnecessary risks of any kind. They're all burdens on the healthcare system that reduce access and affordability for everyone else.
They cannot kill someone by walking by them in a grocery store.
This kind of hyperbole really damages the debate.
A “laundry list of horrific side-effects” sounds like there are known long-term problems that result from getting the vaccine.
This is simply not the case. There is a list of side effects, but it’s not long, and no reasonable person should consider them to be ‘horrific’.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/expect/af...
2. Guillain-Barre syndrome
Yes, the chance of risks from Covid is orders of magnitude higher than the vaccine. People are still bad at it.
Politics didn't help the situation.
In recent years huge swath's of the united states have been suffering from another epidemic: the opioid crisis. It is well established that a major part of this epidemic was caused by many of the same major pharmaceutical companies that are now claiming to have developed a vaccine in record time.
What's sad is that this legitimate concern has been whipped up by one side into a completely irrational frenzy that no longer makes coherent sense. I don't trust big pharma companies as a general rule, but I also don't believe that micro chips are being implanted (or even could be) into a vaccine. So, imho, legitimate vaccine skepticism is transformed into insane conspiracy thinking.
What is also sad though is that the reaction against vaccine skepticism has been equally turned into an insane "what are you anti-science!?!" Pharmaceutical companies are complicit in the death of hundreds of thousands of individual over the last decade. Being skeptical of the claims of these companies is common sense, not anti-science. We're also seeing consist contradictions about safety and efficacy of the vaccine. There are already complex side effects and the break through rate among full vaccinated is much higher than initial claims.
For me personally the vaccine still makes sense, and it certainly seems like our best path forward as far as policy efforts to end the pandemic. However the current language and public discourse on the topic is ridiculous.
As an aside, according to random internet site, 1.7% of Americans have a phd.
When it comes to "consent", it's the same as the whole Apple CSAM ordeal. Why talk about consent when it's for the good of children?
As an analogy:
mRNA technology is NOT like sending a saboteur into a factory to change the blue prints / designs / masters records (=genes) of the factory.
Rather it is like dropping a bunch work instructions (RNA snippets) over the factory and have some workers (cells) pick them up and build the things described there-in.
mRNA tech isn't the same as CRISPR.
The worst that could happen is that a work instruction that we inject becomes self-replicating (a virus), but because it can't replicate to begin with it there is no way that it mutates to gain such an ability.
It's important to have that clear-headed discussion, not this elite arrogance that discussion and arguing the points is somehow bad for discourse or society.
People are rightfully skeptical of new pharmaceuticals based on new technology with zero long-term studies being not just approved and being sold, but also being required for basic activities in society like earning a living.
There is definitely an argument to be made about not being locked down forever, and finding a way forward despite endemic COVID. But vaccine passports, and accusations that anyone with a hint of hesitation is "anti-vaxx", is a terrible way to engage and broaden the tent so all concerns are heard and addressed.
This is lip service to make it seem like vaccine hesitant individuals have a legitimate argument when they actually don’t. It’s impossible to have a clear-headed discussion when the other side’s argument pretty much comes down to gut feel at best and government conspiracy at worst. If you are (oddly) skeptical of MRNA technology, then the J&J vaccine exists and is also free.
There are well over 100MM shots administered since April and the worst side effect as been a dozen blood clots in women who had a pre-existing condition that caused them. Anyone who tells you they aren’t safe is trying to sell you a bridge. If you want to argue against hard data, then you must have an actual data-backed argument or we can just assume you aren’t a serious person.
Thalidomide was perfectly safe, too, until kids started being born without arms and legs. Oops.
What are _you_ talking about?
2. No regulatory body in America ever claimed it was safe to use before the side effects were discovered.
I don’t see how the comparison is apt. The FDA doesn’t have a track record being too cavalier when it comes to public health so I don’t understand why you would bring up an example of the FDA doing their job to imply they aren’t doing their job
US regulatory bodies said that the COVID vaccines were safe before blood clotting and myocarditis were discovered.
> The FDA doesn’t have a track record being too cavalier when it comes to public health so I don’t understand why you would bring up an example of the FDA doing their job to imply they aren’t doing their job
You're a little too hung up on "The FDA". "The FDA" isn't a person. "The FDA" of 50 years ago isn't "The FDA" of today.
The CDC paused the rollout of J&J after fewer than 50 cases to do further research and understand what factors cause blood clots. Once understood they resumed the vaccine rollout.
By that same logic - Tylenol/acetaminophen is also known to cause liver problems in a small number of otherwise healthy individuals. Is your logic here that Tylenol should also be declared unsafe?
> "The FDA" of 50 years ago isn't "The FDA" of today.
By that very same logic then what does the distribution of Thalomide 50 years ago have to do with the FDA of today then?
I would suggest not taking what you see on TV and the internet as gospel and engage with a few folks in real life.
There are certainly people who you won't be able to have a discussion with, but you're not being that open-minded either by shutting down everything by declaring "they don't have a legitimate argument".
*Edit: The myocarditis issue is real. Please don't handwave away legitimate concerns because of lack of understanding and compassion.
Again you are playing lip service. If there are legitimate arguments you would list them. Either you don’t know them and you are carrying water for charlatans or they don’t exist. This kind of argument would not be tolerated in any other field of science. Can you imagine Einstein saying “The speed of light is constant for all observers but you need to talk to these people, who I won’t tell you who they are, to figure out why?”
I’ve had these discussions before and it almost always turns out the “blessed” arguments are just wordier statements of constantly debunked talking points
1) Concern over long term effects which we have no data on (legitimate but low probability in my estimation)
2) Natural immunity is slightly less effective than the vaccine against alpha variants, but still very robust. These people should therefore be exempt from the vaccine.
---
On the policy side, the legitimate arguments/discussions I see are:
3) We should strive for a society where consent is obtained by changing minds, not force, even if this is extremely difficult.
4) Slippery slope concern- There is no hard limit or consensus on when public health outweighs bodily autonomy and other considerations.
5) Who owns the responsibility to ensure personal safety. (should the obligation fall on people who don't want to catch covid to avoid public spaces and take defensive action, or fall on people who could be spreaders in the public spaces)
---
If it helps to have a productive discussion, I declare my tribe as vaccinated and encouraging others to get the vaccine.
2) This is a public policy problem. Let's say you allow this; then everyone, in lieu of getting an actual vaccine will just claim they had COVID already.
3) No one is getting forced to take the vaccine. Vaccine mandates just mean you can be prevented from entering certain federal buildings until you are vaccinated. This is not a new power - children have been mandated to get vaccines to enter public schooling. If you don't want to get a vaccine, then society has kindly asked you to not step on a plane.
4.) This is only a slippery slope to people born after the time where vaccines have pretty much eradicated most contagious diseases. Previous vaccine mandates for polio and chickpox did not lead the USG into forcibly inoculating children with super soldier serum. It's a slippery slope to you because you weren't around that last time this power was enforced.
5.) Following this logic - should the government be banned for giving you a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt? Should the government allow the sale of cars without airbags? After all if I drive safe why should I pay extra for seatbelts and airbags? The short answer is - we do these things because, you living in a society, can cause negative externalities. If you drive a car without seatbelts and airbags you cause not only danger to your passengers, but also to the emergency services system that has to pry you from your car. You are only "free" from your responsibility as long as you pledge to not visit a hospital and operate on yourself. Otherwise it's simply unfair that someone who could have gotten vaccinated should occupy an ICU bed from someone who cancer. The second you are in the ICU, your "responsible" decision now must fall on nurses, doctors and other patients.
Again, I want to stress, I do not think these are very strong or well-researched arguments against the vaccines at all. I hope I have answered your arguments non-combatively, but I want to point out I do not think these are strong or even well intentioned arguments now that we are more than a year into this pandemic. Only one of your arguments had to do with actual safety and public policy, and the rest I believe came down to your personal opinion of how things should be done. I'm sure you are a smart individual, and again I don't mean this in combative manner but I'm going to trust the people who have been studying this for years. Going back to my original comment, most arguments against the vaccine are "gut-feel" at best and not backed by any actual data.
2) I split the topics into scientific 1 & 2 vs political 3-5, and think this is more a question of science. If natural immunity is reasonably close to vaccination immunity, I think they should be treated the same (whatever that may be). This is the question that science can answer. For your implementation concern, positive covid test or antibody test would be a simple way to administer an equivalent immunity pass.
Questions 3-5 are political because they can not be answered by science or data. Science can inform the decision, but they come down to questions of values, morality, ect.
3) I agree nobody is being tied down and given a shot, and only wackos are advocating this. There is a scale for how hard society can incentivize or punish people until they get a vaccine. I personally think society has done a terrible job of informing people to change their mind, and skipped straight to the punishments, and am deeply uncomfortable with this.
4) I agree that past vaccinations were largely a success via eradication. I have not seen a success criteria stated for the covid pandemic, as eradication is unlikely. At what point will we stop ratcheting up control mechanisms? X deaths per year, sustainable hospital capacity of Y? Is any sacrifice warranted to prevent 1 death?
5) Again, this is political question, and reasonable can and do have different opinions on how much personal risk you can take on, and when the government should protect you from yourself. You brought up seatbelts, going on somewhat of a tangent, the things you described are not true negative externalities in the technical sense. They are cost society chooses to pay, and could simply choose not to. I could give a beggar $5 but that isn't an externality. If I make a rule that I will give every beggar I see $5, it still isn't an externality. If the beggar on the corner lowers my property value, that IS a negative externality because it is imposed on me and I have no control or choice. You can say that seatbelts and vaccines both reduce the cost to the social safety net. Lots of things would reduce costs, and we can choose to to pay them, or not, opposed to controlling people. I personally love seatbelts, but think that tickets for adults are unreasonable (different story for minors in their care, ect).
>I don't mean this in combative manner but I'm going to trust the people who have been studying this for years. Going back to my original comment, most arguments against the vaccine are "gut-feel" at best and not backed by any actual data.
With the exception of the first two, these arguments aren't backed by data because they aren't questions that can be answered by data. They are simply matters of opinion, and I think we would all be best served if we acknowledge this. At the end of the day, science can conclude that universal vaccination would reduce deaths, or save $X, but it cant answer question on what public policy should be. This will be different based a multitude of values in addition to deaths and money.
Opinions you disagree with (assuming they are not based on incorrect data) are not wrong, just different.
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrou...
2.) I'll have to do more research, but I can only assume that natural immunity is not reasonably close to vaccination immunity which is why it's not an appropriate replacement. I saw a Fox News segment last night that said essentially natural immunity is a perfect solution, but I don't accept things from Fox at face value.
3.) States are literally paying people money to get vaccinated - no one "skipped straight to punishments". The vaccine is completely free with very few barriers, in a country with no socialized medicine. This kind of framing feels deliberately misleading. I don't know what more you expect the state to do at this point - even Trump is telling people to get vaccinated to boo-ing crowds.
4.) The success criteria has been ICU bed capacity. That is the key criteria that seperates the regular old flu from COVID. That is why efficacy rate stress hospitalization rates, and not breakthrough rates. When you have mass ICU usage, that is when a pandemic becomes a public policy problem.
5.) I don't feel your response has addressed my point. I brought up seat belts because it's something the government does today to enforce personal responsibility. You framed forced mandates as some government overreach on personal responsibility and I'm saying that isn't the case and the government has always had that power. Secondly if you refuse to get the vaccine and end up in the hospital - why aren't you framing this decision as someone selfishly controlling doctors, nursers and other patients to deal with their selfish decision? The doctor has "no control or choice" in being forced to treat you to a respirator. When the public health officials tell you get a vaccine that's being "imposed on you and I have no control or choice", but when you catch or infect someone else with COVID, it's 100% ok in imposing your choice on nurses? I hope I've highlighted the hypocritical selfishness of your argument.
>They are simply matters of opinion, and I think we would all be best served if we acknowledge this.
Again, they are not. They are poorly researched opinions and that is why I continue to reject them. You said the state "skipped straight to punishments". That's not true. You said "there's no success criteria". That's not true, it has always been ICU capacity. These two "opinions" are demonstrably false statements that are masquerading as "harmless opinions". To me that's misinformation. Your fifth point just exposes your selfishness. I'll give you that you have your own personal freedom to be selfish, but I wouldn't be shocked if you are called an asshole for acting selfishly.
2) I'm OK to defer this until the science is in.
---
3) Vaccination rates are climbing, and we have no idea where they will end. In many demographics they are already quite high. Uptake is 91% in 65+ and 73% for 18+. Breakthrough cases are extremely low at <0.1% of cases, so 99.9% of cases are self imposed by choice of not to get vaccinated. One easy thing that states could do is wait, let the numbers continue to climb, let people change their mind as all their vaccinated neighbors walk around fine, or their unvaccinated neighbors die, or they get sick and get a decent level of personal immunity. As of today, the death rate is 0.3/100k per day. That is 359,160 deaths per year, of which 360 will be people who chose to get vaccinated but died of a breakthrough case. This is pretty close to the CDC numbers, which puts the the breakthrough deaths for the first 4 months of 2021 at 160 people, who had a mean age of 82 [1]. For context, lawn mower accidents kill >1000 people a year in the US.
4) I still don't think that an objective goal has been communicated. Less covid cases, or more ICU capacity is not an objective or achievable goal. What is the criteria for ICU beds, what is the metric, and what is it now? Is it a national average, or until every hospital in the country meets it, ect? The CDC has stopped tracking ICU capacity as of July 2021 with an average of 60% of beds full and doesn't even report the number of those which are covid related. All bed occupid with covid patients was 8-9% (including the asymptomatic admitted for other reasons), but I admit this could be higher in the ICU. If this is the primary goal for our pandemic response, we should at least track where we are relative to the goal. If there is a measurable goal you can share, I would be ecstatic, and it might change my opinion that we are in a foreverwar against covid with no success criteria (not unlike Afghanistan & the war on terror).
My guess is that we will continue aimlessly focus time and resources into it without any idea of what completion looks like until everyone is burnt out and comes to the realization that covid is endemic. We will check vaccination cards when traveling, for employment, and potentially events out of fear of triggering one of the 360 breakthrough deaths. My mental model for the war on Covid is largely based on the war on terror, and I think there are several parallels.
5) I would rather live in a world where doctors, hospitals, and insurers were free to refuse services to the unvaccinated, than one where people were both compelled to get medical treatment, and provide health services.
>[these] are poorly researched opinions and that is why I continue to reject them. You said the state "skipped straight to punishments". That's not true. You said "there's no success criteria". That's not true, it has always been ICU capacity. These two "opinions" are demonstrably false statements that are masquerading as "harmless opinions". To me that's misinformation. Your fifth point just exposes your selfishness. I'll give you that you have your own personal freedom to be selfish, but I wouldn't be shocked if you are called an asshole for acting selfishly.
"Skipped straight to punishments" was vague and exaggerated language. Replace that with implemented punishments faster than I would like. Is that sufficiently an opinion now? I stand my by statement that there is no success criteria. I never said opinions are harmless. For example, I said that it would be tolerable to have 50k vaccinated covid deaths. That is a real opinion, that if enacted, would let people die.
As mentioned before, I am fully vaccinated, and will probably get a booster when available. I just have a very high tolerance for other people being assholes or selfish. More so when we have what looks to be a very effective vaccine available for "free" and boosters on the way to provide a huge degree of protection to those who want them.
The manufacturers are telling the FDA that their vaccines are safe enough to mandate while at the same time they tell Congress that their vaccines are too dangerous to make unless they get legal immunity. Safe enough to make billions in profits; too dangerous to have to defend themselves in court against people they injure.
Lawsuits are easy to file and costly to defend against. We commonly concentrate prosecution in the hands of specialists when the public stakes are high, e.g. crime and medicine. (Also, the liability protection is only until 2024.)
If you get a faulty medicine or medical device, you can absolutely sue the manufacturer.
If you are unreasonably imprisoned or shot by the police, you can sue them.
This is how nearly all of these issues come to light and are adjudicated.
Do you think it's possible for us to construct good faith for and against debate in a forum like this or do we need a better tool to demonstrate nuance?
I think it's fair to say forums like this are falling flat on their face in terms of productive debate.
Maybe something that DRYs the topics, and can recognize where your current thought falls into the levels of abstraction, and from there provides contextual paths to both broader and more nuanced arguments.
Do you have a source for this? I have looked it up a few times and all the information I saw indicated that natural immunity should transfer to variants favorably, because natural immunity targets several parts of the virus whereas the current vaccine only targets a single region.
>natural immunity is weaker
This is true on the margin, but it is still quite good. Vaccination breakthrough cases are very rare at <0.1% of cases[1]. The CDC reports that natural immunity breakthrough risk is 2.34 times higher than vaccination[2], but you have to remember that the base multiplier is still incredibly low. By this logic, cases from natural immunity are at worst 0.23% of all cases!
I think it is very misleading to be grouping those with natural immunity with the unvaccinated when it is so close to vaccination in efficacy, and drastically different than those with no immunity.
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrou...
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...
Thus 100% vaccine mandates may be excessive but their not useless and would actually save lives.
There's no scientific evidence anyone has a "natural immunity" to SARS-CoV-2, and even the immunity granted to those who are vaccinated is largely contested by the mutations known as the delta and lambda variants.
Doing so would add additional work to the _already overworked_ health agencies, labs, etc. You'd need to test people to ensure that they have an adequate immune response (at least on par with what the vaccines provides). With unlimited resources and total information, then sure, doing either vaccines or natural immunity would work, assuming that the natural immunity is at least on par with the vaccines. However, given that we don't have unlimited resources nor total information, it's much simpler for the health agencies to ask for everyone that doesn't have a medical exemption to get vaccinated.
IMO everything else related to covid is less important, but it's still seldom discussed besides like in the article (barely mentioned).
Article 6 – Consent
1. Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.
Article 11 – Nondiscrimination and nonstigmatization No individual or group should be discriminated against or stigmatized on any grounds, in violation of human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedom
Public health supercedes individual rights. It has been like this since we started forming large groups of civilizations. If you don't like this, you should leave civilization.
Also, all these mandates have medical exemptions. They should also permit equal access with a mask and recent negative COVID test. (I do not think we should subsidise those tests out of the insurance pool or public purse.)
Those are chronic behaviours. There is evidence that quitting addictions is medically challenging. There is no similar barrier to vaccination for most people. (For those for whom there is, we have medical exemptions. Including for extreme cases of anxiety.)
The move may encourage some unvaccinated Americans to get the shots as well as give more private businesses across the nation greater confidence to implement vaccine mandates.I would be OK with prioritizing those who were proactively vaccinated if we get there. Latest data shows 8-9% of hospital beds are occupied by those with Covid, including those with a positive test but no symptoms
Triage doesn’t violate the Hippocratic oath. Allocating limited medical resources is sometimes a necessity.
That said, yes, they shouldn’t be refused. We don’t refuse the mentally ill or others who self harm. But unless it can be shown to be a product of mental illness, the voluntarily unvaccinated should be on the hook for the cost of their treatment.
If hospitals are full the voluntarily unvaccinated should be de-prioritised. (If they recover, they’re going to be right back in with the next variant.) But if the hospitals aren’t full, there is no reason to refuse care.
Hospitals cannot roll the gurneys out into the street and dump non vaccinated people when they need to make room. Once admitted, they can occupy lots of resources for lots of days, so I say just make it easy and tell them to hit the road for the time being.
I do not even see a reason why elective procedures should be affected by the selfishness of non vaccinated people.
As for stigma, I have no problem stigmatizing people for their choices when those choices are harmful to others. I feel comfortable stigmatizing neo-Nazis.
But, the key thing is to acknowledge the ethical commitments you've made, and explain your actions. Positions can change, but I would not want my leadership to simply ignore them because they are momentarily inconvenient. If they set that precedent, what's to stop them from ignoring other commitments — binding or otherwise — to defending our allies, protecting our environment, or upholding basic principles of justice?
To attend kindergarten in California, you need to be vaccinated for polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatisis B, chickenpox.
To attend 7th grade in California, you need to be vaccinated again for tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis and chickenpox.
Did you attend college in the US?
Many states (not California) require you to be vaccinated against meningitis before attending freshman year.
The specific requirements depend on where you live and attend school [1].
The "normal lives" that we have been able to lead (pre-covid) are in part because of these requirements -- we don't have outbreaks of 50,000 polio cases a year like we did in 1952.
That's why.
"These are private businesses!"
"You can just stay home/quit your job/order groceries online/do curbside pickup/etc"
"We need to focus on SAFETY".
Interesting that the "my body, my choice" crowd has gotten super quiet on this particular issue.
Not really interesting, since abortion does not affect others whereas a transmissible virus does.
This is a bad faith argument that makes no effort to understand anti-abortion viewpoints. At least for some subset of their population, the whole basis for their stance is that they assign humanity at conception, not at birth. Hence to say abortion "does not affect others" is an opinion only valid in some viewpoints.
(unfortunately, I feel disclaimers are necessary around topics that people tend to not be objective and unemotional about) - I'm not anti-abortion myself; if anything I'm quite pro-abortion and think it should be encouraged in many cases. However I still try to understand the viewpoint of anti-abortion proponents
forgingahead’s comment implied that people with the opinion of pro abortion choice are being inconsistent in their belief if “my body, my choice” when it comes to mandating vaccines, to which I intended to clarify how it is not inconsistent because it is actually “my body, my choice [assuming it does not affect others]”.