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Comment by asquabventured | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to comply with this over reach and I’m fully vaccinated

> I’m fully vaccinated

Temporarily. I am assuming you had your second shot more than two weeks ago. Soon, the definition of "fully vaccinated" will change to require the third shot and you will be counted among the unvaccinated as it is currently done for people with a single shot or less than two weeks past their second shot when it comes to death/hospitalization stats.

We are close to living in Arcadia[1].

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4377942/

Yeah, there are so many layers to this. I mean, a mandate for employers oversteps what government is allowed to do anyway. But that aside, if it was polio or something and there was one shot that basically ended it, you could see a rational path to a single mandate that got everyone vaccinated (btw I'd be curious to know polio, measles, etc vaccine rates, I think they are very high). But when "vaccinated" is essentially some political flavor of the week, how is it going to get enforced? Will a third shot get rolled in? And if there are more, or if we switch from mrna to another variety, do they get rolled in too? Will you need to have the original 2021 shots, even once they've been subsumed into something else, or can you just get the latest thing.

For all the pretend deference to science, we're in the middle of a rapidly unfolding situation. It seems preposterous, even with clear evidence that the vaccines do work (and ignoring government overreach which is itself absurd and illegal imo) to start mandating something that is not likely to hold 6 months from now, and what, just require that everyone tracks whatever current orthodoxy says? I have my two pfizer shots, and if there is a vaccine later that actually cures covid, maybe I'll go back and get it. But I'm giving up on trying to track the flavor of the week and trying to match whatever the new York times wants me to do, I'll wait until there is actually a reasonable consensus

Good god, after sifting through endless amounts of senseless blabber on this topic, I want to frame the exert above.

Yep, that's how it is in Israel. Get the boosters or no 'pass' for you.

I agree and support this. People want to conflate the issues of not believing in vaccines (or whatever words they like to put in peoples mouths) and believing in having to provide proof of a personal health situation all over the place. It's convenient to pretend that anyone who is against government and corporate overreach is an "anti-vaxxer" instead of actually engage with the issue.

They have literally redefined "anti-vaxxer" in a similar way to how "racism" was redefined. Its being used as a tool for control.

How and when was racism redefinied?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/merriam-webster-redefines-racis...

They're getting conflated because the people who are against vaccines are referencing freedom to choose as their primary argument, as if the ability to make bad decisions implies some duty to make bad decisions.

I'm against vaccine mandates in principle, but the ultimate cause of the authoritarianism is mass media. Covid has been a fantastic setup for dog and pony shows - political hucksters rail all day about government overreach while inciting their followers to make bad choices. The large scale effects of those bad choices practically demand government intervention. And after the utilitarian system steps in to mitigate the problem, the hucksters take credit for being right about government overreach all along. It's the perfect con for the post-reality media environment - when reality asserts itself and some low level preacher dies of their own kool aid, they just go silent and are replaced by another ignorant voice on the same channel.

If we had a level of societal trust such that you could expect that most everyone would be taking measures to prevent spreading Covid, then coming together in large groups (eg employment) would be less of an issue. But as it stands, why would anybody want to go back into the office when it's likely that at least a third of your coworkers will blithely get you sick? And hence OSHA et al step in, using the same rationale as when preventing operating heavy equipment while drunk - it creates an unsafe work environment.

I just hate that there seems to be zero nuance now on the topic. According to the media you're in one of two camps.

Camp 1: Pro vaccine, pro mask, pro lockdown, pro doing anything and everything the government says.

Camp 2: Anti vaxx, anti mask, anti lockdown, trump supporter, Jan 7th attendee, etc.

And it seems that now more than ever, if you're not 10000% in Camp 1, you're automatically assumed to be in Camp 2

What happened on January 7th?

Sorry I meant the 6th. Capitol riot in DC.

Can that "zero-tolerance" mindset be productively applied to any problem? We see it in a lot of places, and it never seems to achieve the goals it aims to serve.

I vaccinated within days of becoming eligible and I'm 100% against this mandate. To such an extent that I'll become a single-issue voter over it.

I would be with you if it weren’t for the “or test” part. “You must get vaccinated” would be problematic, but “you must do a COVID test once a week if you’re not vaccinated” is totally reasonable IMO.

Give it a few months. First they will pass the costs onto the employee, then they will take away the option altogether. Mark my words.

With a $14k fine per violation, I doubt most employers will give employees the option to test weekly. That's too much of a liability.

Especially considering the load this will put on laboratories.

The people that need the test to determine proper course of treatment will get results days after it matters. It will be just like 2020.

In June of 2020, I waited over 2 weeks for the results of my test. A delay that long makes the test more than worthless for preventing transmission and determining best course of action.

I think more reasonable stance would be to require employers offer sufficient protective gear for unvaccinated employees. Gas masks aren't that expensive. And any private person can at their own cost also buy such device to fully protect themselves.

That's pretty unreasonable unless you can't medically receive the shot and there are active infections.

We require vaccinations for schooling and for healthcare already (e.g TB). This is no huge stretch.

Actually having had to wear a gas mask in the military for hours... I would LOVE to see this. If you think an N-95 grade mask is hard to breathe though, try wearing an NBC mask for 8 hours a day. :-)

It's "reasonable" in the sense of being slightly less draconian but completely unreasonable from a health perspective.

Think about it: two people enter a workplace. One is unvaccinated but recently tested, so it can be said with good confidence they are not infected. The other is vaccinated but may well be sick and spreading it, especially as effectiveness wanes quickly. The other is waved through, the first is penalized with constant charges. Who is making other people the safest here? It's not the vaccinated guy.

"Recently tested" doesn't mean you definitely don't have the Covid. It could that you weren't far enough along in your sickness at the time you were tested.

It's all about risk. Someone who has been vaccinated has a very low likelihood of being sick with Covid. Someone who has recently been tested also has a low likelihood.

IMO, though, if the tests are a week apart, that's a lot of opportunity for Covid to slip through. There's a reason that 72 hours (and sometimes 48 hours, I think) is the time limit for tests for traveling. Even that isn't a guarantee, though.

I can't find the chart now, but Covid progresses pretty rapidly, so if someone gets tested on Friday and was exposed 1-2 days before that, they can pretty much spread it for an entire week before they get tested on the next Friday.

And even if they were tested on Mondays, they could still be spreading it before the weekend.

Tests prevent someone from spreading it for weeks, but not days.

Vaccines are much more likely to prevent the spread at all.

Preventing the spread of an infectious respiratory virus is a fools errand and we’ve known this forever. No amount of authoritarianism is enough to stop the spread. The mitigation efforts were always to avoid overrunning the hospitals, which we have managed easily.

Take a look around right now, multiple states are at ICU capacity. You don’t need to overrun the hospital system but under sustained stress, you quickly degrade service. Not to mention all the burnout and people leaving the field on top of it all.

Icu beds are a function of staffing long before equipment is a limitation. We've fired nurses and not rebuilt over the last 18 months. If nothing has been done to address staffing for seasonal diseases in that time, it's either incompetence or by design. This is why hospitals run at or near capacity all year round and have capacity issues every flu season. It's a business decision. It also happens to be easily exploited by the narrative.

You can go back and look at 10+ years of UK NHS "hospitals desperately overwhelmed" annual articles. Just because you hadn't heard of it before doesn't mean it isn't normal.

The fact that it happens a lot doesn't make it any less true now and the fact we've had sustained stress on the system for a year and a half isn't typical.

In the US, they've relaxed many guidelines and allowed student nurses without gaining licensure yet to practice because of the need [1].

[1] https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200327.71403...

This all pales in comparison to the mandate Biden announced last night for all healthcare staff at facilities which take Medicare/Medicaid to be required to take the vaccine. Probably a good 20% of our nursing staff is at direct risk of being lost because of that new measure.

I'm not sure why this is down-voted (but I have my suspicions). ICUs are f-ed because hospital's business models are f-ed. Without people voluntarily electing to get minor surgery and other elective services their balance sheets get turned inside out and they cut staffing. The fact that we had a massive uptick in people who need laborious ICU care (because covid) at the same time that people more or less stopped voluntarily going to hospitals was a double whammy.

Measles

Mumps

Smallpox

SARS1

MERS

Chickenpox

Tuberculosis

To name a few.

Not a fools errand. Important to get vaccinated to prevent worse variants.

I’ll cancel out your vote then because I’m 100% for this.

Just FYI, no amount of coercive mandates and force applied against your fellow human beings to make them take these shots, which are marginally protective against transmission at best, will actually do anything to make you safer from Covid or reduce your paralyzing fear of it. TPTB will continue to menace you with the specter of The Virus as long as it is making you behave in ways useful to them -- namely, by handing them more power.

Oh ok, thanks for the heads up. Can't believe I let all these doctors, medical professionals and scientists cloud my judgement and make me believe them. I should definitely trust a stranger online, believe their conspiratorial drivel on a shadow cabal consolidating power and redpill myself out of this fever dream of a life I've been living.

Sadly, there won't be nearly enough who feel as you do. But I wholeheartedly applaud your statement!

It only has to be enough in certain industries.

Trucking, food production, Oil & Gas, powerplant workers, linemen, water treatment, etc.

In those essential industries, a small percentage of people walking out may wreck havoc on the whole nation. Those are also the same people that I expect are more anti covid vaccine.

I have heard that truckers in Australia and Brazil are already boycotting their respective governments due to COVID responses.

There was a trucker strike in Australia. I got the impression that it was limited to TWU (the equivalent of Teamsters) demanding more money and better working conditions. I never saw what better working conditions actually meant.

I'm more concerned about 20% of the truckers being fired for not taking the vaccine. Logistics is already stretched thin and it would make it much worse.

Created this throwaway to say that there are at least some others who agree but are too scared of the current cultural tone to speak openly about this. I feel thoroughly alienated from my peer-group and family over their fervor for this response and against any who disagree.

I'm right there with you. Had an old friend of over 25 years say to me that it was a "blunt cudgel to enforce a social instinct that is shockingly atrophied in people."

Hang in there, you are not alone and we are still in the very early days of this whole operation. Also, you might be able to find a local anti-mask or anti-mandate group on Facebook, I've found having that social support network is really helpful.

Is Facebook allowing those? The censorship (authoritarian as well as consensual) is pretty heavy on facebook, twitter, reddit.

Isolating dissenters. Make them feel like lone crazies.

There is still one that is active in my local area, at least.

Trust me, you are most definitely not alone. Most are like you - quietly going about your business, keeping a low profile.

I'm sorry, but I think this is time to speak up. We're losing rights month by month, slowly following in Australia's authoritarian footsteps. So many who oppose this are too afraid to say anything, and the result is the appearance of overwhelming support for such measures, mainly because those who do support are much more aggressive, louder, willing to directly attack others personally and even physically.

We shouldn't resort to those tactics, but we do need to make our voices heard, support each other, reassure everyone that we're just as numerous if not more so. It's important, this is our freedom and that of our children on the line.

I'd suggest following Rand Paul on twitter, and as he suggests, refusing to comply with these unscientific and unreasonable orders.

(truly, any mandate that fails to take in to account naturally acquired immunity or vaccine risks to individuals as noted in cdc and fda documents is completely lacking in scientific rigor.)

You say it's time to speak up, but you're using a throwaway account. You could very well be a Russian mis-information agent.

> I feel thoroughly alienated from my peer-group and family over their fervor for this response and against any who disagree.

Join the club. You really do need to start speaking out though. This shit has gone on long enough. The idea that it is impossible well intentioned, well reasoned person to object to any part of our current situation is complete rubbish. We are being gaslit and bullied and quite honestly I'm tired of it.

Same. My vaccination status is my own damn business. I am prepared to be fired over this, if needed.

except it's not really since you can kill other people if you're not vaccinated.

On the contrary it's the vaccinated people who are sick but don't know that they're sick who are spreading the virus.

Mostly to people that are unvaccinated... If 90% of people were vaccinated r would be less than 1 and there would be no spread.

"no spread" is R=0. Vaccinated people are spreading it to vaccinated people as well as unvaccinated. Assuming that vaccinated people don't know that they get it we have essentially created a big cesspool for the virus to spread undetected.

Luckily that's a bad assumption because the vaccines are so bad that they aren't even protecting people from getting very ill.

> "no spread" is R=0.

If R<1 the number of infected people continually decreases until there are no cases. This is also why it's important for the US to provide other countries with vaccines.

Okay, but you claimed that "there would be no spread". But that is not true for 0 < R < 1. Can you just admit you misspoke instead of arguing a pointless point?

I didn't say there would immediately be no spread. It is true that if there are no cases there is no spread. It's not like it would take very long...

The FDA application for boosters claims that efficacy against transmission for delta for persons vaccinated when the vaccine became generally available is now 42%. That isn't enough to drop Reff below 1 even with 100% vaccination-- in fact, it leaves delta with an Reff higher than the original L strain had absent vaccination.

> except it's not really since you can kill other people if you're not vaccinated.

Not if they are vaccinated. I don't understand why vaccinated people give a hoot about the vaccination status of others. Vaccinations protect them from severe covid issues.

Everybody is gonna get covid. We knew this all the way back in march of 2020.

Yup. And as a sane person I understand that and long since took appropriate actions. And that is my own damn business and I owe you no explanations or medical records!

Enjoy getting fined while making the COVID pandemic worse!

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