Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

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From the perspective of the person who's been OK since the beginning, those numbers don't really matter. What matters is that they are fine now, they've been fine for a while, and now they are being coerced into taking an action which they don't think will benefit them and might hurt them worse than whatever their experience has been.

Do not expect resistance to coercion to melt away when you dial up coercion.

Add to that the fact that very incompletely counted known deaths from Covid19 among those fully vaccinated against Covid19 just jumped 11% since Monday[1], one might ask why one is being coerced to take a discreet step to assume a new risk.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre...

[2]: https://archive.is/https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hea...

So the death rate is now less than 0.0006% / shot? This is why I started this thread off by specifying "rational individual".

Nobody's being coerced to do anything. They have the completely free choice to take the shot, or not. Either way, they must accept the consequences of their choice. This is not coercion; nobody's holding any guns to anyone's heads or holding people down and forcing the shot on them. What's being dialed up is the severity of consequences of not taking the shot.

Let's say that an American municipality instituted a rule that people who profess Muslim beliefs are to be excluded from gathering in public establishments. No one would be physically forced to abandon their faith, and they would have the completely free choice to remain Islamic and accept the consequences.

Would you not perceive any coercion here?

Correct. It's not coercion. The fact that it's wrong to discriminate against someone due to their religious faith and to violate peoples' right to free assembly is orthogonal to the question of whether it's coercive or not. In other words, this is a false equivalence.

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