I’ve been waiting on the, “Anti- vaccination is un-American. And the conspiracy theories are all a (Russian/Chinese/Iranian) plot to undermine our way of life,” rhetoric. But it never came along.
Consider the way that Biden keeps blaming lockdowns and government measures on the unvaccinated. He keeps saying, everything can go back to normal, if only those annoying unvaccinated people get the jab. Literally "the unvaccinated are undermining our way of life", as you put it. But that's illogical because if the vaccines worked, there'd be no need for any more measures. People could decide to take it or not and deal with the consequences themselves. Health insurers could take it into account in their premium calculations, if necessary.
Instead they are keeping the measures and using them as an excuse to pit Americans against each other. In reality the measures will never end until people collectively insist they are removed. Israel is a good demonstration of what happens in a country with high levels of compliance: over a million people who thought they were vaccinated, are now having their passes revoked, because they didn't get a booster shot. How many "boosters" are necessary for this particular vaccine? Probably an infinite number. They certainly are not any way to restore life to normal given government attitudes so far.
Your logic seems short there. People are still falling ill and filling up hospitals, and these are primarily the unvaccinated. If the vaccine workee and everyone took it then we can reduce the restrictions, oh hey this is a comment thread about a country that's doing exactly that... does that mean the vaccine is working? Zomg!
Imagine a row of houses, and the ones at the left side are on fire. Firefighters are spraying the houses from the right with retardant so they will only be slightly charred if the fire reached them. In my mind whar you're proposing is analogous to wanting the firefighters to stop spraying the stuff after 60% of the houses got the spray.
Most of the stats claiming this are heavily manipulated, for example by using "everyone since the start of the epidemic" as the denominator for unvaccinated people. The US agencies have been especially bad at this, with their 99% claims (not at all true, as their own leaked documents show). Stats that don't play this kind of game show a much less convincing effectiveness.
But even if your point were completely true, it has nothing to do with logic. It's just the latest talking point that will be gone in five minutes. Hospital demand has always been built out to meet demand. If unvaccinated people end up in hospital more often, they could just be charged more via insurers to pay for the additional capacity, same as the obese or those who smoke and get lung cancer or those who do extreme sports. There is no actual reason to force everyone to take a vaccine to manage hospital capacity, and in fact places with relatively low vaccination rates are not experiencing a hospital crisis of any kind (see: Switzerland).
And even if you don't agree with that last paragraph, it's irrelevant because the topic we're discussing in this sub-thread is whether there's been government propaganda! And there certainly has been, vast amounts of it, it's just effective enough that some people can't see it for what it is. The unvaccinated are systematically demonized by governments and painted as dangerous including to the vaccinated, which is upside-down world thinking. It's no different to how people were described as "un-American" when they opposed the war in Iraq.
> Most of the stats claiming this are heavily manipulated
Are you saying the states taking the extraordinary steps of rationing hospital care because of capacity problems don't really have full hospitals but are letting patients die based on manipulated stats? That...is an extraordinary claim that needs some support more than vague handwaving.
1. The hospitals that are busy firing health workers due to vaccine mandates are having capacity problems? Of course they are. That's an inevitable consequence of reducing staffing at a time when you need more. It's the result of bad government policy.
2. Statistical claims being manipulated. Consider the claim that 99% of hospitalizations are in the unvaccinated, made quite recently by US authorities. This stat didn't match stats from any other country, because it was a lie. The CDC's own internal presentations show this, clear as day. See for yourself:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/cdc-breakthrough-infe...
Slide 4. The graph shows that already in May 15% of people hospitalized for COVID were vaccinated. Not 1% at all, although this claim was being made far more recently than May. And, it was climbing quickly, as would be expected from the stats released by other countries.
https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/22/joe-biden/...
So Biden says in July a number which was valid 6 weeks beforehand, before Delta became much more prevalent (feel free to fact-check me there), the PDF in the WaPo URL is from late July. In your conspiracy theorist mind this talking point (he's an old geezer politician using an almost 100% number to shock...) means the government is manipulating statistics across the board.
Yeah ok mate, believe what you want.
Yes, I do think that the President of the USA should - when citing statistics about health to justify forcing people to take medical interventions - actually use accurate statistics. And that such stats should not have to come to light through press leaks. Do you disagree?
You're also mixing things. Sure in your mind these 2 things might be interchangeable, but staff doesn't equal bed. Got any detailed information that links the two? Who knows if the fired staff are even the Covid nurses, or if they're e.g. people who work in the hospital kitchen.
Bed capacity is mostly a synonym for worker capacity. When people talk about hospitals being "full" they don't mean literally physically full - that's why the emergency hospitals that were built never got used even though the press keep telling you that hospitals are overflowing. Here's a random recent example of such an article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/covid-vaccine-mandate-h...
"Across the country, health-care systems that have instituted mandates have seen some workers leave or be terminated over their refusal to get the shot, exacerbating a shortage in skilled nursing and bedside care."
Another: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-hospitals-face-sta...
"NEW YORK, Sept 27 (Reuters) - New York hospitals on Monday began firing or suspending healthcare workers for defying a state order to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and resulting staff shortages prompted some hospitals to postpone elective surgeries or curtail services ... Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo suspended elective inpatient surgeries and had stopped accepting intensive-care patients from other hospitals as it prepares to fire hundreds of unvaccinated employees, a spokesman Peter Cutler said."
Note: before they were OK, accepting ICU patients and doing elective surgeries. After: they can't handle electives or ICU intake anymore. That isn't being caused by unvaccinated people getting so sick they're flooding out all the other operations, it's caused by hospitals being forced to shed staff.
At any rate, isolated hospitals can easily run out of staffed beds for many reasons and this is a phenomenon that predates COVID. That's why there are stories about overflowing hospitals from the flu in pre-COVID years. As the article notes there were already problems but this is now making it worse.
So staffing levels are not genuinely a COVID problem, let alone an unvaccinated COVID problem. If it were true that unvaccinated COVID = overflow then it'd be the case everywhere. Look at the Swiss dashboard:
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total
COVID utilization is low during the entire pandemic, with ~25% at its peak (but still lots of spare beds, i.e. a lot of these cases are infections of people already there for something else). There has never been a time throughout the whole two years when there wasn't plenty of spare capacity - in fact they've been reducing the number of beds allocated to ICU during 2021 because the level of nursing care required for them is expensive.
Now look at vaccination rate on the same dashboard. Only 64% of the population has even taken one dose. Yet, the hospitals are fine and there are thousands of free beds. There is nothing magical about the Swiss people or hospitals. You can find similar graphs for US regions, I think (I am just less familiar with them). Rather, looking at the raw data tells a very different story to what the press and governments are telling.
So, are you pro restrictions for the unvaccinated, and pro control of public events with such certificates, then?
Also, to clarify, those thousands of free beds in Switzerland are not ICU beds, they don't even have 1000 ICU beds in total: https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/icu . So, don't confuse those 2 either.
Obviously I know the graphs are total capacity and not ICU. I even mentioned that. The point is identical if considering ICU beds.
I guess the answer is no, you won't answer point (2).