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Comment by throwaway316943 | Hacker News Reader

Those who are downvoting this are being blatantly disingenuous. Tobacco alone kills over 480,000 people per year in the US. There is a very strong case for banning it if your fundamental concern is the health of others and the upkeep of the health system.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

Alcohol kills another 95,000 per year in the US

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...

Obesity related deaths are around 300,000 per year.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/192032

No one can honestly look at these figures and come away with with the opinion that we need to protect the unvaccinated from themselves through mandates while turning a blind eye to these other self inflicted diseases. Argue for or against limiting personal choice to preserve health but be prepared to defend your position on all of these fronts.

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Let's start with the simplest: tobacco. There is no way to make it disappear, you can only make it illegal. Our experiments with making other addictive drugs illegal had been a complete failure, I doubt you could even find convincing research that shows that making them illegal has led to less deaths due to them. Whereas vaccine passports appear to actually work. That is a major difference.

I take issue with this comparison: just because the prior 'experiments' have been failures does not mean that future efforts which utilize entirely different methods will be. The war on drugs was already highly criticized for its ineffectiveness on several accounts: there is definitely a way to eradicate the problem, but those were not it and even people at the time knew it.

What methods would you suggest? My parent said "ban tobacco".

To be clear I was not advocating banning all of those things, I was saying that mandating vaccines is as counterproductive as trying to revive prohibition or enforce weight loss.

I think it’s still too early to draw conclusions about how effective vaccine passports are. There is still a significant proportion of people not accepting them, there is also another group who have been vaccinated but are now protesting the use of vaccine passports, and with the requirement of a third shot and the potential requirement for a fourth or continuing boosters we cannot know how the sizes of those groups will change. If vaccine passports become permanent my money is on it following a similar progression as prohibition or the war on drugs, it will eventually become a law that everyone flaunts. The human cost will depend on how much violence the state is willing to pursue enforcing laws that no one wants. If history is a reliable measure it will be horrific, biased, and long lasting.

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