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>"because you refuse to follow sane and frankly manageable guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19."

As a point of order we can't treat "manageable guidelines" as a monolith as there have been a ton of "guidelines" and rules imposed over the last three years that were dubious, farcical, or overly intrusive. Like supermarkets cordoning off the greeting card aisle because social gatherings like parties were prohibited. Or gyms being told not to play music above a certain BPM because more intense exercise could enable Covid to spread more easily [1]. Going to the beach alone can get you arrested, but standing in a crowded Costco is acceptable. And so on. There's a lot more to the resentment and outrage than people simply being upset at the inconvenience of wearing a mask.

Plenty of small business owners and restaurateurs had their livelihoods destroyed because the government went back and forth on restrictions and enforcement.

[1] South Korea to ban music over 120bpm in gyms, in response to Covid spike : www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210712000804

I often hear criticisms like this (and it's perfectly sound criticisms).

My counter-argument is that, at the time, given our resources and our understanding we had to take wide scale measures and a lot of compromises were made and negotiations happened between people, institutions, governments, etc. so that we wouldn't just shut down everything. I believe most of the time these oddities and weirdness are consequences of those compromises and it's still the case.

Sometimes it's easy to frame things like that and sometimes it's not (especially when the measures is only put in place for 3 days or a week. Eg when they asked people to sit alone next to train windows, rather than all next to each other or when they cordoned off books in supermarkets so bookstores that just reopened could have clients). I don't know how far off the mark I am.

You're probably overestimating covid risk (there are other polls similar to this one - this is the most recent): https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...

The media's addiction to "scare articles" as well as the government's willingness to promote noble lies puts a lot of weight towards covid risk being heavily propagandized. On top of that, complying with government orders simply because you're afraid is a dangerous way to live.

The scariest thing is how quickly propaganda can convince people others are not worth of life. The cheering of unvaccinated covid deaths is abhorrent.

Begads! A Selfawarewolf in the flesh!!

>The scariest thing is how quickly propaganda can convince people others are not worth of life. The cheering of unvaccinated covid deaths is abhorrent.

I like to study history and I recall an interview with a German who lived during the holocaust. He was asked if he thought the holocaust could ever happen in the US and replied that it could happen anywhere, it's just it wouldn't necessarily happen the same way as it did in Germany. If it ever happened in the US, it would be its own unique flavor of holocaust. It was pretty chilling. People don't even realize the moral road they are traveling when they praise deaths for political "gotchas"; I guess that's what makes going down that road so easy.

Ironically that comes up with wildly inaccurate estimates itself.

> we take the average population totals over the relevant periods for each population (March 1, 2020-Aug. 9, 2021 for the unvaccinated population and Dec. 15, 2020,-Aug. 9, 2021, for the vaccinated population). The adjusted population of vaccinated people comes to 83 million and 295 million for the [un]vaccinated population

330 million Americans, less 83 million vaccinated Americans equals 247 million unvaccinated people, not 295 million.

They are also deliberately ignoring CDC estimates.

> CDC epidemiologists estimate that the actual number of hospitalizations may be 1.8 times higher than the reported number.

It doesn't have to be rational. Vaccines mandates are already common for school children, nurses, (and maybe teachers, but I'm not sure about that one)

The rage over masks (and things like "CRT") is being intentionally stoked to win elections. The plan is to make it an us vs them issue. Again, it's intentional and cynical.

If you stoke rage about mask wearing (and vaccines) you can position yourself as also being a valiant anti-mask/anti-vax candidate and win elections on this issue.

> The plan is to make it an us vs them issue. Again, it's intentional and cynical.

Why doesn't everyone see things clearly for what they are. If its obviously 'the plan' .

Because they started labelling such arguments as right/left wing propaganda. Labelling any criticism against you as enemy propaganda is a common strategy in authoritarian regimes, and it works really well as long as you have sowed enough hate against the enemy in people.

So even though the plan might not be obvious to those who live in the authoritarian regime, it is often very obvious for outsiders that for example the democratic peoples republic of Korea isn't really a democratic republic.

I'd argue it's because propaganda works.

Government-imposed vaccine mandates were never common for access to private establishments, as is now the case in NYC and LA

Philosophically speaking, It's one thing for the government to say you must be vaccinated to attend public school. It's quite another thing for them to say you must be vaccinated to enter a privately-owned gym.

Or to work remotely.

I have a child attending private school and vaccinations are required by the state. (CA) So that’s at least one exception to that.

> I have a child attending private school and vaccinations are required by the state. (CA)

No, they aren't.

CA has announced that it will have a school student vaccine mandate, once vaccines for children are fully approved, and not earlier than next school year in any case.

Or: you must be vaccinated to go to school, AND you must go to school (until you turn into an adult). This means that you have no choice. Not getting vaccinated means you cannot go to school, and not going to school means you may be taken away from your family, or your parents getting into legal trouble. That, and of course not being able to go to school has its own repercussions.

>It doesn't have to be rational. Vaccines mandates are already common for school children, nurses, (and maybe teachers, but I'm not sure about that one)

Even this argument ignores nuance.

The vaccines in these schedules are mandated for 2 reasons

1. The diseases they treat directly impact their population in a major way in large numbers

2. Immunization not only prevents the negatives impacts of 1, but also prevent the spread.

As an exmaple for #2. Take Pertussis and TDAP. Even adults that have children will often get a booster. The reasoning is sound there, you reduce the chance of transmitting pertussis to an infant. This is especially true for premature babies that may not have had the chance to get the anitbodies from the mother, assuming she got a booster during pregnancy.

As of right now. COVID-19 has a pretty small impact on children directly ( hospitalization rates at their peak were like 1.9 per 100k for under 18 [2]) . And even nationally its much smaller than any of the diseases used to compare it to (like Measles which has pretty severe complications in like 30% of those that contracted it, regardless of age [1])

AND the vaccine isnt particularly proven to reduce spread [3]. To add insult to injury, CDC specifically stopped even recording breakthrough infection rates unless they were severe as of May 1, 2021.

So it would make sense to question a vaccination mandate for those under 18...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/meas.html [2] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html [3] https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do....

There's something horribly wrong with your link [3].

"The first study saw a drop of 78%, and the second 41%, in infectiousness — with the large difference in numbers perhaps explained by the fact that the estimates are based on a very small number of vaccinated people who were infected and then infected others. ... The results correspond well with studies conducted elsewhere. One analysis3 of some 365,000 households in the United Kingdom, published on 23 June, estimated that individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 were 40–50% less likely to spread the infection if they had received at least one dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that developed by the University of Oxford, UK, and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, based in Cambridge, UK, at least three weeks previously. A study4 from Finland, posted as a preprint on 10 July, found that spouses of infected health-care workers who had received a single dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that produced by Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were 43% less likely to get infected than were spouses of unvaccinated health workers." (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z)

"The study shows that people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a COVID-19 vaccine than if they haven’t1. But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot. ... Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus." (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y)

Maybe this. There seems to be an issue with formatting

https://bit.ly/3auVBjh

Is your argument that COVID-19 does not impact the population directly in large numbers?

Yes basically. Major complication rates for those under 18 are very low, especially when compared to other diseases in these vaccine schedules (in my example I used measles which was closer to 30%) [1][1.1][1.2] .

By far most of the major complications as a result of COVID are in populations over 45 OR with those with pre existing conditions. This qualifications are almost nonexistent in the under 18 population. At best, the hospitalization rate for those under 18 was about 1.9 per 100k. There have been, according to CDC data, 499 deaths as of 10/6/21 for those 0-17 yo [2][3].

Add to that there is evidence that vaccination doesn’t necessarily prevent transmission, and there have been breakouts where up to 70% of those involved were vaccinated it’s not entirely unreasonable to question a vaccine mandate for that population [4]. Additionally as of May 1, 2021 the CDC stopped really tracking breakthrough rates and only tracks them if they result in hospitalization, which makes it hard, if not impossible to really gather data on how effective the vaccinations used in the US are at preventing transmission.

So theres plenty of arguments to be had about being skeptical of even this argument "vaccines are mandated for kids" as it applies to THIS specific vaccine.

[1] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html

[1.1] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_5.html#virusTypeD...

[1.2] https://imgur.com/a/8oENuRn

[2] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

[3] https://imgur.com/a/0W1oqlH

[4] https://bit.ly/3auVBjh

But what about the 499 deaths? Wouldn't those have been prevented?

That’s a pretty silly assumption. Those numbers are low enough it could just as easily be exigent reasons (autoimmune diseases, compromised immune systems). 2x more kids die from congenital anomalies. About the same number for heart heart defects per year. [1]

Those numbers can easily be intermixed. Not to mention kids with severe asthma or other respiratory diseases.

There’s no data that would say vaccinations would have done anything for those 499 people.

Not to mention the way many did a lot of these stats is if someone had covid and died from any cause, they were often included in the numbers.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754

> If you stoke rage about mask wearing (and vaccines) you can position yourself as also being a valiant anti-mask/anti-vax candidate and win elections on this issue.

I'm trying to stoke awareness of how oxygen is known to be toxic, how ventilation is known to be harmful, and how patients' oxygen levels can be improved by using the antidote to oxygen toxicity that has been mostly forgotten by Science™ [0]. Sometimes patients benefit from a little extra oxygen, but it's a very fine line between helpful and too much.

Would I win an election? Maybe an anti-mask/anti-vax candidate will just adopt my term, and point out the harm being done: Medical Hyperventilation causes the deterioration supposedly being treated.

[0] https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat...

I agree with you pretty much 100%. My anger is that, by not being truthful, I feel like health authorities played right into the hands of the conspiracy theorists and everyone trying to sow doubt that this is some big power grab.

Well, it's also a big power grab so that doesn't help.

Everyone is grabbing for their own power, for their own reasons; they feel this tailwind but they assume that it means they're right, not that they're temporarily useful to other parties with their own agendas.

Never waste a crisis.

A power grab by who? Mask manufacturers? People who don't like to look at lips? I am baffled by the belief that asking people to wear masks, in the middle of a pandemic, is a power grab by anyone.

If anything, an intervention that would make it safer to open up more businesses and public spaces should be seen as a great thing for reducing the power needed to shut these spaces in the first place.

I wasn't specifically referring to masks, but now see that the thread had gone that way. I would say, however, that doing good and grabbing power are not mutually exclusive.

I, too, am baffled by beliefs (in general) and would suggest any new powers given to authority be viewed with extreme suspicion and of limited duration before enacted.

To be fair, with policies like mandating masking outside, or banning outdoor activities long after it was known there virtually no outdoor transmission, or forcing vaccinations on people who had covid already, or deafening silence on any health improving measures people can take (did we really need studies showing exercise improves covid outcomes? well we have them now, after 2 years passed), or no mitigation of aerosol transmission (we have dentists installing HEPA filters, and nothing in hospitals), it is really easy to play right into the hands of conspiracy theorists...

> I just cannot wrap my head around being so upset that a public official lied you're willing to sever friendships, familial ties, and sacrifice your career because you refuse to follow sane and frankly manageable guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It's not even that the messaging is currently or has been conflicting now. It's like carrying a grudge for years over the smallest of infractions. Are people so bored, they have nothing going on other than to get in a big tizzy about having to wear a mask?

It's rare, but some of us developed actual health issues from the mask itself, be it the reduced airflow or excess humidity from trapped exhalation. I didn't make the connection for myself until this spring when the mandate was lifted and my problems completely went away.

So, I have no intention of wearing masks ever again, regardless of mandates.

It's not just a grudge or being stubborn when people are asking you to actively hurt yourself.

Emotions can, and often do guide people to do stupidest decisions of their lives that will effectively ruin it, or even kill them. You can't reason with such a person. And getting through the firewall of those emotions, for somebody often on the opposite side of the argument is practically impossible. I suspect IQ level plays a role too (critical thinking not only towards the world but also oneself).

The more you push, the more resistance there is. Doesn't matter how right you are and how wrong they are.

What covid highlighted like thermonuclear blast is how many people in general population are weird, naive, paranoid and basically... dumb, for the lack of better words. Also how internet amplifies the good and the bad equally.

200 years ago it would be just some random quiet weird dude that you don't have desire to talk to, today its a self-proclaimed patriot who thinks got the ultimate truth in contrary to general population. In their own echo chambers, this spirals into some pretty weird crowd mechanics.

There is no win of argument. There is no going back. In this regard we moved a bit back to the middle ages. And yes, politicians fucked up pretty big time, almost every single one.

The wonderful thing about your statement is it is unclear just what “side” is correct.

You say “ The more you push, the more resistance there is. Doesn't matter how right you are and how wrong they are.”

That applies a ton to a bunch of ”pro mitigation” people out there who absolutely refuse to look at the data and science. Both strongly show that covid “badness” is very strongly correlated with age to the extent that the median age of death is higher than the average human life expectancy. Kids are almost completely unaffected by covid.

One only need look at Sweden and their results. They took minimal action, allowed the youngest to remain in school w/o masks, and only canceled large events. We are now starting to see the all-cause mortality stats and they are proving Sweden's approach minimized the most harm.

Do you have a source that Sweden minimized the most harm (and the definition of harm in this case)? I’m not saying this is wrong I just haven’t heard of this fact before and I’m interested in reading the study for myself. Thanks!

E.g. their COVID deaths per capita stats place them at, I think, about position 50. The UK with much harsher restrictions sits at position 25.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...