The building I work in was designed and built by others. Regulations mean they can't cut corners in their impact of me.
A vaccine that protects me from getting the virus or getting a serious case.
It's a difference between others work impacting my safety and my own choices impacting my safety.
This is an area worth pondering.
As another comment said, if the unvaccinated were willing to stick to their "ideals" and die at home instead of an ICU bed, I would be a lot more amenable to arguments against mandates.
But as-is, normal people who took precautions to get vaccinated are being hurt by anti-vaxxers when they get an unrelated illness or injury (car wreck, infection, etc) and then suffer worse outcomes (including death) just because the ICU beds are full of people who could have literally just decided not to be in them (given how effective the vaccine is at preventing hospitalization).
Our society is far too interconnected for almost anything to not at least indirectly affect someone else, even if the first-order effects are well-limited to "just you".
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
Can you extend this logic to other groups beyond "unvaccinated"? For example, imagine the ICU beds that would be unoccupied if people who smoke tobacco and drink alcohol chose to "die at home". As a society, we know both of these behaviors are detrimental to health, and yet there are people occupying ICU beds because of their decision to use those 2 substances. Slippery slope and whatnot.... health insurance premiums would also be a lot cheaper if my group health insurance plan wasn't subsidizing treatment for all my coworkers with lung cancer, emphysema, and liver failure.
This depends on where you're at. Where I live we currently are not near capacity in hospitals or ICUs. There isn't an issue and we are not near one.
Should so many be mandated or highly pushed to get vaccinated because of a few hot spots that affect a small part of the population? This is a question I've heard.
Note, there is a difference between believing (or knowing) the positive effects of vaccines, being a proponent, and getting one yourself.
This is about forcing others against their will do to something. I fear this will come back to bite our nation in the future. Both in terms of the willingness to force people and the repercussions that will come from it.
This argument falls flat when we do not require mandatory weight loss from other citizens. The point of the vaccine is not to protect oneself from taking up an icu bed, but to protect other people.
But if the vaccine protects you, and you have it, why do you care if I get it or not? By definition, the only people I could hurt are myself or other unvaccinated people.
Because every infection is a chance to evolve a new variant that my (and my family's) vaccination does not protect against.
Communicable disease and taking reasonable precaution isn't that different. This one is interesting because its virality and fatality rates are apparently on the cusp of what society as a whole agrees are worth doing something about.
Helmet laws for motorcycles? I'm generally against them for the reason that it doesn't affect others (except in really weird edge cases) and I don't think we should mandate people risking their own lives (Except in situations where people don't realize the danger they are in)
In the same way, driving while drunk is tremendously dangerous to yourself but is also a danger to others.
When you skip the flu vaccine you put others at risk. In a normal year 40k people die of the flu in the US.
At what point do we draw what lines?
I'm not suggesting what that point is. Just that we slow down, think about it, and understand the tradeoff. There is no perfect answer.
There is also the element of the co-founding factors. Things like heart disease. Many of the co-founding factors, though not all, are repercussions of lifestyle (e.g., most heart disease is the result of many years of unhealthy eating).
We don't force people to eat healthy which would avoid a significant amount of disease and related factors in COVID deaths.
I realize this is not all cases... and I'm attempting to push thoughts forward rather than state my own ideas. Thinking this stuff through in depth is important. Seeing folks on the other side is important.
Somewhere. One one side, we don't allow you to shoot anyone you see to protect yourself against COVID. On the other we don't allow people with COVID to intentionally infect people (even sneezing on them in an obviously purposeful way implying you have COVID is getting punished.) So we draw it somewhere.
> Just that we slow down, think about it, and understand the tradeoff.
No. I have no desire to slow down. It's killing people now. It's delaying cancer treatments now. It's causing people to die of burst appendixes because they cannot get treatment now. If we need to revisit, fine. But it has to be after taking action.
Which itself is an epidemic. There are multiple levels of cellular automata at work here, riding on each other like layers of foam.
The Meme of COVID being all of the AJ talking points. The antivaxxers are a surrogate host, they act in symbiosis. The mind virus and the cellular virus reinforce each other.
So we draw the line somewhere between 40k and the number of deaths from covid? Note, it's not 650K in the US, those are deaths after all the social distancing, mask wearing, etc and more recently vaccinations. The true number would have been in the millions just in the US if these precautions weren't taken. Actually the IFR/CFR would be at a higher rate than now because hospitals would have been completely pummeled so people who now survive due to hospital care would die at home or in an ambulance waiting for a bed. Not to mention long covid, organ damage etc. The economy would suffer even with everything open.
Are you saying that you would draw the line at more than millions dead in a year in the US for covid because we draw the line higher than 40k per year for the flu?
If anything can be learnt from this, I think the argument can be that we can do more to combat flu every year, make it socially necessary for sick people to stay at home or mask up in subways etc.(like in Japan), increase testing, increase uptake of vaccines, new better MRNA vaccines etc.
Why do we need to draw the line there? Why not at 10k or 1m? It seems like you are advocating we arbitrarily pick the number to not include the flu but to include covid without providing a good reason.
Also, society has not really drawn the line. Politicians and unelected bureaucrats have chosen for us.
The vaccine does not in fact guarantee person X will not be infected or hospitalized. Widespread vaccination does result in systemic reduction in community spread.
Ponder that.
We aren't going to wipe out COVID. It's here to stay. From people to animals. At some point most of us will likely get it. There has been a fair amount written on this.
If we look at past times we had pandemics (e.g., pandemic of 1889-90) we can see patterns. There the virus hit people and was bad the first year and gradually was less and less until they stopped tracking it. When we get hit the first time we get some immunity. For the virus from that pandemic it happens today as kids. Antibodies fade over time (while T cells remain). That means our nose and throat can easily get reinfected but after the first time we usually just get a simple cold (and first time is usually a simple cold, too).
That situation moved from pandemic to endemic. The same will happen here.
Yet, every year ~40k people in the US die from cold/flu.
We can't stop it. How we treat people along the way will say a lot about us and impact our relationships once we hit the endemic stage.
We'll get to endemic without or without the vaccine. The vaccine will help. Forcing people is going to create enemies and the side effect will live beyond the pandemic.
Just a thought to ponder.
Associating public health mandates with (EDIT correcting typo) "forcing people is going to create enemies" is the opposite of being respectful of people.
Best wishes to you.
The idea that enemies are made by enforcement of a public health mandate, and that that enemy creation is evidence of poor example of how to treat people and will redound....elides the rather obvious point that those who refuse to volunteer for vaccination in this context are exhibiting...poor treatment of others. In any kind of social context it is grotesque sociopathy. To accede to this notion of "enemy creation" is irrational and cowardly.
Cheers.
What we are witnessing in a distrust of non-demogogic power that has been instilled into the Republican base over the last 40 years. The multigrade attack on intellectualism, science, logic. That is like your opinion man. The same qualities of Fascism, the hero worship, the sacrifice of the individual, emotionally charged thinking, all of that is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tools of the enlightenment.
If folks had better understanding of how vaccines work from a mathematical/statistical level their internal framing of "should I get it or not" would be altered. It isn't whether this is a benefit to me directly, but is it good for the heard. For society as a whole.
Thinking of the heard is socialist. Self-centered, me vs the world is another Republican strategy. All of them actually weaken the individual vs the state and the corporation.
Choice, responsibility, individualism are great concepts, but they have been perverted into a form of control that divides and distracts.
Ironically, because COVID vaccinated individuals still transmit the virus, the individualistic argument now favors the vaccine. Since anyone vaccinated is going to reduce social distancing and try to “return to normal,” they will spread the virus. So now the individualistic argument is that you should get the vaccine because the virus will become endemic and on a long enough timeline you will become infected.
Sometimes?
Where we draw that line is very important, for sure.
Obesity is not highly contagious. Obesity can't mutate easily.