Unvaccinated workers who lose jobs ineligible for unemployment benefits (Canada)
edmontonjournal.com
edmontonjournal.com
EI benefits are generally only given if you lose your employment through no fault of your own (didn't quit or get fired). What this policy does is clarify that losing work hours or your job due to vaccine refusal after a workplace vaccination mandate (outside of medical exemptions) does NOT count as "through no fault of your own", and instructs employers to indicate as such.
So: For the duration of the pandemic, if your workplace mandates COVID vaccination and you refuse and then get fired over it, you're not eligible for EI any more than you would be if you got fired for cause.
“They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist....This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?"
I have taken both shots, and will take the third but these declarations are appropriate for a mad man, not a country leader.
It’s alarming because “they don’t believe in science” has become a divisive weapon that hand waves away all scientific nuance.
The vast majority of young healthy people are completely asymptomatic, they don’t need a vaccine, nor would it be a wise investment of limited doses.
Also, previous infection confers protection that is at least as effective as vaccination. This has been consistently observed since the beginning of the pandemic.
Vaccines can save the lives of many vulnerable people though; it’s an amazing tool and its use is certainly justified by science.
But using economic and financial engineering to force everyone to get vaccinated? There is no scientific evidence supporting that decision, and the second and third order consequences are completely unstudied. (evolution of viral resistance is one example; many experts are aware of the phenomenon but commenters here have been misled to believe that an airborne virus circulating the planet can be eradicated ‘if only everyone got vaccinated’)
Of course they need a vaccine. Just because you don't have symptoms does not mean (a) that you're not carrying it, and (b) can't infect someone who may not be as healthy as you.
Further it's difficult to predict ahead of time how an individual will react to being infected. A 20-year-old takes up an ICU bed just as effectively as a 40- or 60-year-old: they're less likely, but it can still happen. Which is why people in higher risk profiles get priority. But just because certain folks may get things first doesn't mean other shouldn't later.
COVID can also mutate just as well in a young person as an older person.
> But using economic and financial engineering to force everyone to get vaccinated? There is no scientific evidence supporting that decision, and the second and third order consequences are completely unstudied.
The unvaccinated make up the vast majority of hospital and ICU admissions. And by "majority" we're talking about 90-100% in many places. "Unvaccinated 60 times more likely to end up in ICU with COVID-19, Ontario data shows":
* https://globalnews.ca/news/8230051/covid-vaccine-hospitaliza...
And then if someone who is vaccinated perhaps has a serious (car) accident or heart attack and there are no ICU beds for them.
According to the CBC, the lack of available hospital beds pre-dates Covid and exists even when Covid case counts are low. From Why Ontario hospitals are full to bursting, despite few COVID-19 patients:
"The data suggests many hospitals have returned to the overcrowding levels seen before the pandemic, when CBC News revealed hospitals filled beyond capacity nearly every single day, with patients housed in hallways, conference rooms and cafeterias not as exceptional cases, but as a matter of routine.[1]"
It's unfair to scapegoat the unvaccinated for systemic failures that aren't really due to Covid at all.
1: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-hospital-occu...
But many people contribute to the problem with a variety of unhealthy life choices, and blaming one particular group for the problem, and writing policies to punish that group (many of whom also happen to be the PM's political opponents), is the worst kind of politics.
And suggesting that the lack of healthcare in Canada is caused by the unvaccinated is simply dishonest.
Most other unhealthy life choices are low-moving train wrecks and can be accommodated for: it's not like the obesity and diabetes rates go from 15% to 40% in the span of six months. A good portion people's choices can be accommodated for 'simply' by looking at trend lines and planning accordingly.
> And suggesting that the lack of healthcare in Canada is caused by the unvaccinated is simply dishonest.
Any problems that any healthcare system in the world had were (and are being) exacerbated by the sudden surge of COVID patients. The unvaccinated-by-choice are needlessly making things worse for a whole lot of people who need a hospital/ICU bed through no fault of their won.
The same can happen with COVID-19 if the percentage of the population that's vaccinated is high enough. Of course, if that percentage drops below the herd immunity threshold, then outbreaks may occur. In fact, that happened several years ago with the measles virus because asubset of the population refused vaccination.
Looking at the natural immunity scenario, one can consider the history of varicella. Prior to widespread vaccination, there were yearly outbreaks amongst children, despite the fact that more than 99% of the adult population had immunity due to prior infection. That is, despite the fact that the adult population was largely immune, there were still outbreaks among children.
Once the varicella vaccine became part of the standard vaccine schedule, those outbreaks essentially ceased. That doesn't mean that the virus isn't still being transmitted. It does mean that if enough people refuse getting the vaccine for their children, then there is a risk of another outbreak precisely because the percentage of people immune to the infection dipped below the herd immunity level.
Similarly, with COVID-19, if we can get the vaccination percentage up to more than 90 to 95% (or whatever percentage the data supports), then outbreaks will cease, but the virus will still be out there.
So that leaves the personal risk, where I think people should be able to decide by themselves if they want a vaccine or not. It's also fair that they don't get an ICU spot, but instead get whatever other treatment is available. However, most governments seem to shy away from this decision and instead bet everything on vaccination with predictable results.
These people have killed plenty of others. On the count of people killed and economic costs - it would be anti vaxxers that are the "mad men".
"These people" haven't killed anyone and there is no court of law that would condemn them. The economic costs are to blame on a bumbling government that failed to prepare for pandemic scenarios and doesn't have any ideas on how to deal with the virus except through vaccines. Unfortunately for them, Omicron's not too fazed about said vaccines, making the whole exercise more and more absurd.
>Canada's Justin Trudeau on the unvaccinated:
>“They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist....This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?"
https://twitter.com/KevinBardosh/status/1476838517007257600
My patience with COVID cultists is starting to run quite thin.
The only way you can actually ask this is by trying maliciously move the conversation to a nonsensical point. Neither myself nor anyone else has ever made the point that vaccines protect you completely, which is the entire point why even with vaccination there is still an objective to reduce case counts.
We both know that vaccine , in general, is intended to “greatly minimize risk”.
Every mainstream medium is telling it loud and clear: 20-fold reduction in ICU admissions and deaths. There is nothing to debate here.
There is no science if reasonable doubts aren't allowed.
The thing with this pandemic is, that the time where you could have a reasonable doubt in the vaccines are over for a while now. We vaccinated half of earths population. If there would have been horrible side effects they would have shown. The more data we gather the clearer the picture becomes and the less reasonable certain doubts become.
The thing about doubt is that one can always doubt anything. You can doubt that a stone in your hand falls to the ground if you let it go, but no amount of doubt will change the outcome if you actually do it. Physical reality for the most part doesn't care for our feelings. If you are a brilliant physicist you could doubt is the explainations why the stone falls to the ground, but you cannot reasonably doubt the fact that it does accelerate towards the ground, because this is what is observed.
You could have the feeling the universe is holographic and all this falling does not occur, however if you cannot create an experiment that would falsify existing, simpler explainations it remains just a interesting feeling and not a reasonable doubt.
Every piece of available evidence points to the same conclusions, over and over again: the general safety of vaccines, the risks of long COVID, the contagiousness of the Omicron variant, and so on and so forth.
Those things are clearly not up for the discussion given the absolute garbage quality of the proposed counterevidence offered by these "skeptics".
Another example is the recommendation for AstraZeneca which was first not offered to older people because of unclear efficiency data, and then not offered to younger people because of the risk of blood clots.
Yet another example is the recommendation for boosters against Omicron. Israel's backing off from recommending a fourth to the general population because among other things the faster loss of protection.
"authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy"
This is coming from someone who was deeply concerned by the erosion of precedents under President Trump. I didn't turn off my skepticism when the man I voted for actually got to office. It feels like I'm on the receiving end of my own political retribution and its really made me pause.
I know several mothers squeamish on risking their children to continual rolling of the dice w.r.t the mRNA vector vaccines. Also, I can unequivocally state that no other vaccine have I ever seen that has to be continually boosted to maintain it's efficacy, which sounds to me like a deficiency in memory cell formation. The bigger issue there, is that in spite of that being an interesting quirk of these vaccines to do research on, no one will, because having "this year's model" of vaccine is a jackpot to Pharmaceutical companies. Dat Annual Recurring Revenue producing nothing but upsides for them.
-New repeatably, and reliably recurring business -Relaxed or increasingly streamlined approval processes to be lobbied for the next time they want to sneak something through
And the downsides being safely (to them) externalizable
-increased attrition of horseshoe crab populations and concomitant environmental knock-on effects -accumulating social costs in the damage done by implementing the infrastructure for implementing things like vaccine passports, which can be adapted to non-public health use cases.
I mean, I get where you're coming from. However, I've researched the supply chains, and the stuff that is relied upon for QC'ing this stuff (horseshoe crab blood) is not inexhaustible, and the incentives we're manufacturing are not at all ideal. Just because you've stopped analyzing the problem at the physiological effects on the patient does not mean there isn't reason for concern. Everything is interconnected.
The mRNA vaccines don't produce IgA-mediated sterilizing mucosal immunity and they would not have been expected to, and they should never have really been expected to or promoted as providing sterilizing immunity.
The point, though, is to prevent severe disease and death which is mediated through memory cells, which are doing just fine and not waning, and mostly likely responsible for the bulk of the headlines that Omicron is less virulent -- because the vaccines are actually working for their intended purpose (turning severe COVID into a bad cold).
The vaccine misinformation on HN is really crazy. Conflating lack of protection against infection to failure to form memory cells is not a remotely well informed take.
The DYOR crowd does the absolute worst research. I don't have a problem with the policy in the title article because you all don't know what you're talking about.
And a multiple shot series of a vaccine is common, most of them are. The initial interval with the mRNA vaccines was probably too short for hypermutation/maturation to happen (but was necessary to get people protected as fast as possible, and to keep the trials as short as possible) so the "boosters" are the really the second shot of a two shot series.
You still haven't addressed the anti-pattern of cranking out "vaccines of the month", the environmental impact of utilizing a protein from a natural source in a QC process intended to track pharma batches for multiple doses for every human on earth, the incentive problem that emerges from vaccinations not designed for long lasting, sterilizing immunity in that it's already been acknowledged by Goldman Sachs analysts that cures are not a good business model and that this approach to vaccine making seems eerily in that vein of taking this advice to heart.
Condescend on the DYOR folks all you want. If someone didn't, none would ever get done. I, for one, will continue to learn as much as I can, and will encourage people to do as much thinking for themselves as I can. Funny thing I noticed is half the people who say "leave it to the experts" tend to own stock in said experts.
We're still using the same OG strain vaccine that we started with and we're not doing this.
The ancestral mRNA vaccines still protect against death and hospitalization even with Omicron.
If you're doing your own research, then watch a course on virology and try to learn something:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3MhWWi6n4&list=PLGhmZX2NKi...
I probably do way more research than you do, but it all reinforces what the experts actually say because I don't spend all my time trolling blogs for counter intuitive takes so I can feel intellectually special.
There’s a new flu vaccine every year.
If they actually protected you against the virus that would have shown too, though.
Anti-vaxer's love to play up that meme.
A better analogy would be the body armor that Marines wear in combat zones. No Marine is stupid enough to believe that wearing body armor will make him completely immune to bullets. And certainly no Marine is stupid enough to say "I won't wear it, because it doesn't make me completely immune to bullets".
Definition before late-2020:
"a product that stimulates a person's immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, thereby protecting against that disease",
To
"a preparation used to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific disease".
Now, we are realising that the Covid vaccines are helpless against the new variants, so I guess the definition will be changed even further.
Compared to something like the Smallpox vaccine (lifelong/multi-decade immunity), the Covid vaccine is mostly useless.
The same principle works in medicine. Instead of one institute doing 10 trials over 5 years you can also have 10 institutes doing 10 trials in a year (Note: these are not actual numbers, just a show of peinciple).
The trials for the corona vaccines have not been done at a worse quality, as far as I can tell the opposite is actually the case. No vaccine ever had this many critical eyes on it.
Granted, RNA vaccines are quite new (although a lot older than the pandemic), but the mechanisms behind RNA are older still. Out cells produce RNA all the time. What you propose is, that RNA produced by our cells today, will somehow miraculously show an effect a decade after it is gone. What is true for the RNA triggered by the vaccine must be true for our own RNA as well. That means our body would have to remember every piece of RNA produced in every cell for a decade.
I am not a medical expert, but I think this is highly unlikely. That would be like drinking a bottle of Schnaps today and being drunk 10 years after it left your body.
I don't know enough to judge by myself and agree that it's highly unlikely, but I've noticed that we've been surprised before by these new vaccines: the AZ blood clots came out of the blue and it took about a year for the cause to be discovered - I remember reading that the culprit was accidental injection in the bloodstream after all. Myocarditis is still a mystery.
I call this the "vaccines will turn us into zombies" theory. Quite laughable, but we'll have to wait and see. :-)
> The world was able to develop COVID-19 vaccines so quickly because of years of previous research on related viruses and faster ways to manufacture vaccines, enormous funding that allowed firms to run multiple trials in parallel, and regulators moving more quickly than normal.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
Anti-vaxxers must also be climate change deniers and racists and anti-abortion, etc...
It makes it easier to hate people you disagree with if they're fundamentally evil in all the same ways. It saves you from having to have discussions with them, from having to think for yourself, and from any ethical dilemma when you mistreat them.
It’s not about thinking for yourself more than it’s a consequence of people being good at mounting a defense for their own ideas whatever they are or wherever they originate. The more “research” you do on an issue the more likely you’ll come away with nothing more than better arguments for your existing stance.
And I’m not claiming to be above it, you can play this game with me too. I am exactly the bleeding heart snowflake liberal.
It still surprises me how efficiently all our worlds leaders shifted blame from them for our shitty covid health response to the unvaccinated as though the vaccine was available from the beginning.
Whew, hyperbole of the year.
It's just another modern flavor of intolerance and authoritarianism.
OK, so he said that we all know people who are hesitant to get the vaccine and we'll be considerate of them, but there is also a small group that is unequivocally opposed to the vaccine (who don't believe in science, who are often racist, mysoginist etc). About them we have to make a choice: Do we tolerate them, or do we say look, most people are vaccinated, we want to go back to the things we like doing, and these people are blocking us.
So yeah, throwing in the racist and mysoginist thing was in poor taste. Hardly Watergate material, though.
Edit 2: Whoops, deleted the video link, but it's already in another comment. https://westernstandardonline.com/2021/12/trudeau-calls-the-...
Edit 3: I had originally said there was no video to look at. Please don't downvote the respondent.
I'm inclined to give him more leeway than the rest of the commenters here, as I think the unvaccinated do need to be censured, and in developed countries where information is abundant suggesting that it is safe and everyone should take it, it is increasingly unforgivable and intolerable for folks to be unvaccinated. As someone below quite aptly said: "If they want to ‘protect’ themselves from the vaccine they have that right, absolutely, but the rest of us also have the right to protect ourselves from them."
Previously Covid-infected, two Pfizers in me, scheduled for the booster on Wednesday, but I definitely feel that forcing people into vaccination by economic and political pressure is going to backfire. If the root problem is lack of trust, use of force will likely make it worse.
In the US/Canada for most people to keep your house you have to work for a corporation. Having your employer as the vaccine enforcer means they have no real free choice. It’s comply or become homeless.
Not working for most is far more damaging than contracting Covid. To deny them government benefits they paid for via taxes because they don’t want to take the vaccine is absurd.
The whole “I don’t want the unvaccinated to put me at risk” crowd can just go seal themselves up in a bubble.
You can’t avoid contracting Covid forever at this point. There is 3x vaccine shots to protect you and now antiviral cocktails.
E.g. here in Germany there's been a hospital management problem on the gov's side since late 00's early 10's. Relatively, in the past two years there has been no difference to the hospital problems compared to 2010 - 2012.
It is an enormously, totally different thing. How the hell are people still denying it at this point?
If you've vaccinated yourself and ensured that your loved ones are in the same boat, its absurd to want to strong arm those who decide not to repeatedly vaccinate for their own personal choice. For one thing, they won't directly affect you. Secondly, at this early stage, how can you be sure that the vaccines themselves won't cause their own long-term consequences that cause you as a vaccine proponent to be in the wrong about good public health?
Live your own life, paranoid or not, but let others make their own choices, especially if they're young. Virtually nobody is lacking for a vaccination option if they're really worried about contact with the unvaxxed.
So hospitals getting full of unvaccinated patients "doesn't affect me"?
Service industries losing staff all over doesn't affect me? Increased insurance costs and cancelled flights don't concern me? A huge number of people having long COVID symptoms, record number of people applying for disabilities, doesn't affect me?
There's not enough medical staff to go around treating these idiots.
Your arguements are just one brtual demonstration of ignorance after another.
The same goes for many other industries such as those you refer to, as well as cancelled flights. These are problems caused by irresponsible structural management, not people exercising the basic right of bodily autonomy. As for long COVID, it's still hotly debated how prevalent it is but the numbers are nowhere near enough to justify your own hysterical claim about its importance on a global scale.
Your very dismissal of any nuance and of people who for numerous reasons disagree with mass forced vaccinations and social punishments for those who harbour reasonable doubts about these particular vaccines is also grotesque and childish. Simply referring to those of us who consider this whole range of factors as "idiots" is foolish and arrogant in an absurd way.
Ignorance is blindly, fearfully swallowing a fixed narrative and reducing anything that disagrees with it into simplistic reductions
You seriously want to claim your arguement is nuanced but you haven't heard the most important point about this? You can just wave a magic wand and you suddenly get thousands more doctors in a year?
I also, having taken the full course of an mRNA vaccine and booster, am not willing to participate in the "vaccination card ID to enter businesses" that is recently popular in some places.
I don't think any anti-vaxxer expects to end up hospitalized, just as nobody driving drunk expects to go and kill somebody with their car.
I was born and lived under one rule of tyranny (communist Czechoslovakia), and the legal & judicial professions suffered tremendously there. In fact, they were among the first to go, replaced by something truly heinous.
Like, what do these judges and lawyers who keep silent expect will happen, once basic civil liberties & human rights are disbanded? (no matter whether disbanded directly or through some bullshit round-about "we didn't kill you, we just hired mercenaries / didn't let you live / work / travel; if you don't like it why didn't you emigrate?")
Past injustices cast long shadows.
These vaccines have risks that are not being opening discussed. There is an unprecedented systematic campaign of censorship, deception and propaganda aimed at people who question anything about these vaccines. Vaccine injuries are real. The performance of these vaccines are not meeting expectations. They should not be mandated, full stop. We need a system based on informed consent, not coercion.
The regulators on several counties including the US have even publicly registered concerns about several of the vaccines, particularly the J&J single dose vaccine. None of these studies have been suppressed or censored, and they are ongoing and I see debate about them going on in the press and on forums like this all the time.
Some social media platforms ban provably false statements on this and other topics, and sometimes those restrictions go too far. That is not the same thing as banning all public debate.
It is throwing water on discussion at critical times simultaneous to strong government intervention which resets the discussion to the new overton window. You don't need to ban public debate you just play talk to the hand and call anyone who disagrees with you probably racist and or russian dissonance.
There are plenty of examples of people who have disagreed with current vaccine policy and them being censored or destroyed- and have the bills to show for it! We even have emails from leaders of the federal government that show they engage in these tactics routinely. Honestly I don't know how people don't see these tactics being played every day.
Your "side" is led by a man who claims "he is science" and anyone who disagrees with him is "disagreeing with science." Give me a break.
There are extensive, long-term trials, with results being published every day, on vaccine effectiveness for every vaccine and every variant from all sorts of public and private institutions all over the world.
Do you even "do your own research"? There's new papers coming out that you can read on /r/covid19, easily summarized and explained, and they all points towards similar conclusions over and over again.
This idea that "there are huge issues" seems to be a repeated meme without any epidemiological basis.
How and when? This time last year (when trump said a vaccine was less than a year away) these same medical professionals were warning us that vaccine testing takes years in the best case.
Very odd.
Vaccines reduce spread. Even if it doesn’t stop spread completely it’s still a significant factor.
In this case, they don't.
You're right that there's no definite answer to this, but the general consensus among doctors is that it doesn't prevent the virus from spreading.
OTOH, the measures that are being implemented for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated are out of proportion based on the evidence we have.
“ In a November press conference, Tedros Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO, said that the vaccines were 60 percent protective against spreading the virus prior to the arrival of the delta variant. That number has dropped to 40 percent post-Delta. Omicron may worsen the problem, if, as suspected, it is more transmissible and leads to many more breakthrough infections.”
There are a number of studies both identifying a mechanism for covid to have reduced spread due to vaccine and verifying that this occurs empirically. The difference is decreased with newer variants but:
1. Hybrid immunity is even stronger at reducing spread and only possible with prior vaccination
2. There is still non-negligible reduced spread which can be impactful.
At some point, there is no realistic difference between R=10 and R=7. Everyone is getting this. Some of us have known that since March 2020.
If your theory includes "avoid being infected with coronavirus" and you live in a democratic country it is a flawed theory. Only full home isolation or hazmat suit rituals will suffice.
If you attempt to spread it out and succeed, you're at 100% capacity basically all of the time, plus 99% of people get to deal with the fact that coronavirus restrictions are utterly miserable.
Omicron has probably made all of this irrelevant anyway, it's so contagious that effectively everyone who goes outside is getting it this month. 1 in 15 in London right now and that's only the confirmed cases I believe.
"Everyone" is a significant stretch. Yeah its seriously contagious but you, an engineer, should know better than deal with such absolutes. Viruses burn out long before they infect everyone, even without vaccines and even if they're extremely contagious.
We're not far off 1 in 5 _confirmed_ in the UK and most of that was pre Omicron.
Based on the experience of my friendship group I believe that huge numbers of people have probably had it and not even noticed. I finally had a positive test and it was indistinguishable from the other 30 times I've woken up a bit tired in the morning over the past two years.
You have to remember that a lot of people aren't tuned in to the "omg test every time you move" stuff.
Also you can take the seatbelt off when you get out of the car.
It's still nonsense (click it or ticket laws), but you gotta pick your battles. Though I'm ready to murder the people who invented/mandated "beep incessantly if the seatbelt is not clicked, even if the car is stationary".
A better example would be driving drunk, given that you are at an increased risk of injuring others.
Remember that a seatbelt also prevents your body from being a projectile that would be launched against other people in an accident, you're not just a danger to yourself when you don't wear one.
While I do agree that wearing a seatbelt is in most cases a good idea, there still do exist people who are opposed to the mandatory seatbelt laws (even decades after they were introduced).
I personally don't because I know about autoimmune diseases, but hey, you seem to be of that "crowd" who only talks in quotes because they don't understand much.
Let's not be willfully disingenuous here. Obviously, the types of "vaccine" injuries or potential long-term problems that many people are fearful about don't dissipate into the ether.
Interestingly, your comparison is relevant, but you are responding to an argument which I don't think is being made. The OP is _not_ arguing that vaccines shouldn't be mandatory because they aren't 100% effective.
On the contrary, the OP's argument is that since vaccines are relatively effective, one person's choice to not get vaccinated will not effect the others, and it should be up to them.
Your seatbelt example is relevant, in that the same "no-harm-to-others" argument can be made in that case too.
In an incident, an un-seat-belted occupant can turn into a projectile and harm or kill others in the vehicle that might be wearing seatbelts.
I actually think the analogy is a relatively good one. Parallels also also run for the question of how much "paternalism" do we want (the limits of "for-your-own-good" argument). Interests of insurance providers (whether social or private) is also involved in both cases.
In the case of vaccines, immunocompromised people's health is also a consideration. And there is the issue of side-effects, especially for young people. And there is "bodily autonomy". And the stress on healthcare system, etc.
I think there could reasonable discussion about these issues. However, the sad reality is that things quickly get reduced to repeating trite "rallying cries".
If you're not seriously doing your part, then you are actively supporting the virus and working against all the rest of the population that is either unable to get critical care or just tirelessly working in the healthcare sector treating all those avoidable critical patients.
But it will effect others:
> But here’s the thing. A crankish libertarian – I count myself as one – might understand that seatbelts save lives, and still object to being required to wear one, on personal freedom grounds. That’s perhaps tenable when it comes to seatbelt laws, since the only life in peril from not wearing one is your own.
> But vaccines not only make it less likely that you will be infected, suffer or die: They also make it less likely that you will infect others, to suffer and die – and infect still more people – in their turn. (And yes, despite what you might have heard, the evidence[1] is also clear[2] that vaccines reduce transmission rates.) This is hardly a theoretical concern, in the midst of a pandemic that has already claimed nearly 30,000 Canadian lives.
> So if anything the case for vaccine mandates is even stronger than it is for seatbelt laws. The cost to personal freedom – a jab in the arm – is slight. The risk of adverse side-effects is negligible. The savings in human lives is provably enormous. How on earth could so many otherwise sensible[3] people have persuaded themselves otherwise?
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-is-the-case-...
There is a "pragmatic libertarian" argument too, which goes like this: The mandatory jab is much less costly to civil liberties than lockdowns, and if the virus is not quelled, the political support for lockdowns will only increase.
There is a whole bunch of issues and trade-offs involved. [1] People have strong feelings on this [2], and discussion is often reduced to partisan "rallying cries".
[1]: e.g. see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29759089
[2]: Which is somewhat understandable, some of us have lost loved ones, lost jobs, been down the dumps, felt like being in "house arrest", couldn't even hit the gym, witnessed all the paltering by the media etc.
That's the difference.
https://www.hrreporter.com/labour/news/fort-mcmurray-alta-tr...
>> No store would deny you entrance for that
You can’t really wear a seatbelt into a store but i can cite examples of being denied service for refusing to wear one (taxi, airplane, fun fair ride, etc.)
>> No government will deny basic services to you for that
You get fined by the government if you don’t wear a seatbelt.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/worl...
If you have more robust information though I’d like to know of it.
Edit: please note this was published in dec 29 2021, with data up to that point, and therefore also incorporates omicron.
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...
Why?
Actual studies that look at evidence and test hypotheses seem to suggest that mRNA vaccines are effective.
The vaccine efficacy (how well it teaches the body) and the body's own anti-body efficacy (how effective the anti-bodies are against the virus) also have a role to play.
Thus, a vaccinated person can still be infected, and can even spread the virus around. The sooner the virus is dealt with within their body, the sooner they no longer have a virus to spread. Isolation helps sooner, too. It is therefore possible for a triple vaccinated person to still get infected and to test positive for the infection.
Among various benefits of being vaccinated are the lowered load on hospital staff. The number of hospital beds and even oxygen cylinders does not matter as much as the availability of hospital staff. This pandemic helped highlight that around the world, there are already only a limited number of doctors and nurses, and that both of them are already over-worked. For e.g., I did not know that 30-hour shifts are considered normal. It got me thinking that I wouldn't want to risk receiving care from an over-worked and tired medical care giver whose judgement might have been impaired from sheer exhaustion.
Many of us vaccinated people are now able to safely isolate at home when we are infected with the Covid virus. We rush to hospitals only when the anti-bodies that we create are unable to deal with the Covid 19 virus. Over-worked hospital staff thus focus on a far lesser number of patients. There are now more beds available for those who need them. These included those vaccinated but ill enough to require external medical care, not-yet vaccinated, vaccine-hesitant, those who can't be vaccinated, those who won't be vaccinated.
Really, this pandemic won't truly end until we isolate and end the spread of the virus. Being vaccinated planet-wide and reducing the load on the hospital is our next best bet to ensure that those who need the medical care have less-overworked staff and beds and oxygen cylinders.
The various successful track record of anti-vaxx conspiracies, the true stories of the greed of medical companies/hospitals, the CIA messing with the polio vaccine in Pakistan + Afghanistan, the might-is-right approach by which some countries grab vaccines and waste them while other countries do not receive even a single dose, the hiding of data to save "face" and reputation, the political attacks based on data, politicians speaking up instead of scientists, scientists not knowing how to speak to media, media irresponsibly reporting news - all of these contribute to a general decline in the acceptance of vaccines.
In my lifetime, polio was almost-eradicated. Smallpox was eradicated even earlier. I am hopeful that in time, we'll all pull up our socks and eradicate Covid-19 as well.
Antivaxxers can be execrated for all I care - dumbest way to enforce your freedom
Or maybe it saved yours and your girlfriend’s life.
It’s hard to say on a case-by-case basis which is why we depend on population-level data.
And yet, case counts have never been higher than now, a year into vaccines and infections.
Ah, but Omicron you may say. Well doesn’t that imply that the vaccine isn’t terribly effective against that strain? Yet the answer seem to be “just keep getting more injections of the same vaccine formulation.”
Perhaps one or more of our fundamental assumptions are wrong. Maybe the vaccines aren’t actually that effective (Israel is on dose number 4 within a calendar year…). Or maybe PCR tests cranked to an absurd number of cycles aren’t actually detecting what we think they are (an actual infection versus some dead cells in the nasal passage).
c'mon, you're at least a year behind the conspiracy theory state of the art, we're on vaccine infertility now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...?
I'm a bit confused by this article. AFAIK PCR tests are only reporting a positive at 35 cycles. The author of the article is correct that it is run for 40 cycles often, but this is only because a positive between 36-40 cycles indicates "unclear result" and the test is repeated with a different assay targeting a different component of the virus. Positive is only reported at 35 cycles max.
This should not pick up any "dead cells", it will pick up viral mRNA. There is a concern over picking up low loads, but the mRNA is still there.
The unvaccinated are banned as means to put social and financial pressure on individuals to get the vaccine. It is an unfortunate misconception that any of the currently-approved intramuscular vaccines reduce transmission to a meaningful degree.
This social and financial pressure is placed on individuals because urban hospitals do not have the money or resources to deal with the rate at which they're admitting patients for severe Covid-19, and most of the patients they're admitting are unvaccinated.
Vaccination reduces the infection rate. [0] You can't transmit the virus if you aren't infected in the first place. Other studies have shown that people with breakthrough infections have a shorter period in which they can transmit.
[0] BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Mass Vaccination Setting https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2101765
Vaccines absolutely do reduce transmission from the vaccinated outward.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newscientist.com/article/22...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-l...
This is another misconception. Our best evidence is that they're extremely effective. The problem is they're not quite effective enough to just go back to life as before since newer variants are extremely virulent.
Even given the typical bias of the media it’s still astonishing that Biden got a complete and utter free pass from the media for propagating this idea by basically giving everyone - vaccinated or not - a “mandate” that they no longer needed to wear a mask this past spring / late summer, all for PR points to make it look like the virus had been defeated.
Yes, intramuscular vaccines for sars-cov-2 work, for about 6 months, to significantly reduce the likelyhood of serious disease in the internal organs. They do this by getting your body to produce serum igG antibodies against the shape of the spike protein produced, or delivered, by whatever mechanism. They also train your T cells to recognize more broad coronavirus epitopes that hold up longer against changes in spike coding.
But the igG antibodies in the body serum produced by intramuscular vaccination do not appear in any useful quantity in the upper respiratory mucosa (a different immune compartment). And the T cells definitely do not get there. The upper respiratory mucosa is where respiratory viral diseases infect. Intramuscular vaccination does not protect against sars-cov-2 infection of the upper respiratory mucosa. It just means that your lungs, which have some serum igG antibodies seep in, are protected and your body organs are protected. You can and do still get infected and transmit the virus to others at the same rate as the un-intramuscularly vaccinated.
The intramuscularly vaccinated should not be exempted from any mask requirements and people really, really have to become aware of this if we're going to stop the pandemic. It's either that or intranasal vaccination, the smart move, like India is pushing towards. Enough of the intramuscular boosters. We need intranasal to stop the spread.
Pretending intramuscular vaccination is some be all end all that stops spread is stupid and deadly. It is only the first partial step.
1. It’s harder for the virus to enter your body 2. If it gets in, you will get less sick (lower chance of symptoms) 3. Your body will fight it off faster 4. The virus has a harder time replicating in your body
Due to 2, 3 and 4, the ability to transmit virus to others goes down.
Enforcing everyone to take the jabs increases those subsidies (this enforcement is persistent in all countries submissive to USA). That's what makes sense.
However, don't assert altruism because there isn't any. The 'save lives' campaign is just a coating to make things easy for the general public to swallow.
Vaccines work the same way car seat belts and airbags do: they improve the/your odds. They make you much less likely to be infected, and because less likely to be infected, less likely to pass it on.
> If seatbelt-wearers outnumber non-wearers by four to one, but account for roughly the same number of deaths, it suggests seatbelt-wearers are about one-fourth as likely to die in an accident as non-wearers. That shocking statistic turns out to be not so shocking as all that.
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-is-the-case-...
* https://archive.fo/ayjkf (for paywall)
"Unvaccinated 60 times more likely to end up in ICU with COVID-19, Ontario data shows"
* https://globalnews.ca/news/8230051/covid-vaccine-hospitaliza...
It still surprises me how efficiently all our worlds leaders shifted blame from them for our shitty covid health response to the unvaccinated as though the vaccine was available from the beginning.
That said, if the government takes away benefits, then it should give back all the taxes withheld on one's salary before it does that.
On another note, personally I don't see any other solution to the pandemic, other than everybody/most people gaining some kind of natural immunity. Places requiring some form of green pass are none other than VIP superspreader events, where the Green Pass is the VIP ticket. People holding the Green Pass, will then go to meet others who may or may not be vaccinated, but who will eventually catch Covid.
Not true, they do reduce infection and spread.
> That said, if the government takes away benefits, then it should give back all the taxes withheld on one's salary before it does that.
That’s not how government, taxes or being part of civil society works at all.
> personally I don't see any other solution to the pandemic, other than everybody/most people gaining some kind of natural immunity
This is scientifically illiterate as Omicron bypasses all “natural” immunity whereas a vaccine gives stronger protection. What’s to stop future variants doing exactly the same?
Maybe if youre boosted and its been 14 days but not greater than 45 days. But citation needed anyway. Natural immunity was not totally bypassed. South Africa kicked Omicron's ass with regard to case fatality rate.
It really really makes you wonder if western governments are trying to prove conspiracy theoricians right.
Soooo…
Initially started with the medicine standard herd immunity of 65%, which includes vaccinated and recovered
And now even 90% vaccinated is supposedly unacceptable
Are you ignorant of that?
The vaccine isn't experimental, stop with that stupid trope. How many billions more patients do you want before you'll consider the known data definitive?
So will they revise and lower the vaccination targets?
Omicron up to 70% less likely to need hospital care https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59769969
Omicron Has 80% Lower Risk of Hospitalization in South Africa https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-22/omicron-h...
Omicron has passed peak in South Africa, causing relatively few deaths and hospitalizations, authorities say https://www.yahoo.com/news/omicron-passed-peak-south-africa-...
and not sure who you're hanging with, but as a sexually active gay man I've never heard of no condom usage for anyone being seen as acceptable unless there is consent between all parties
There are cases where people are injured while accidentally not having a seatbelt on, and there are cases where people dogmatically refuse to wear seatbelts and refuse to accept the safety statistics. Maybe it makes sense to differentiate between those kinds of cases somehow? Maybe people who consciously choose to refuse safety measures should still be treated but should be prioritized lower than people who are accepting safety measures?
One of the problems with people who refuse to accept safety policies is they make emergency treatment more expensive for everyone, and they reduce the probability that someone who’s been safe can get emergency treatment in a timely manner. Part of the question is why it’s fair for people who’ve accepted the safety measures to have a non-zero chance not being able to get emergency treatment because someone who refused to be safe got hurt and is already in the only ER/bed left in the hospital.
- fellow canadian
I desperately urge others who are also capable to take such a hit to follow suit.
Edit: Note, I'm also vaccinated. J&J March 2020.
The devil is in the details. The EUA designation was pushed through because there was no other, "obvious" treatment (despite proven efficacy of a combination of prophylactic treatments).
They are testing this thing on us. Even if it works I do not consent to be tested on.
"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment."
First, you would have to find a jurisdiction that officially accepted the Nuremberg code and move there, second you would have to prove that the Covid vaccination program was a medical experiment and third you would have to explain why you accepted prior vaccinations that were part of a public health program (such as polio vaccinations)
I reject your call to take a stand because I don't think there's anything to stand on or any right that I'm losing.
Trotting out the nuremberg code for a vaccine intended to help reduce world suffering (that is being used in a moral ways) is in poor taste, in my opinion. It was written because Nazis were using Jewish and other people in scientific experiments that make vaccine trials look pleasant.
Also, all the necessary information for you to make a decision according to the code has already been provided to you, and the US government (not sure about others) has a constitutionally supported right to mandate that you take a vaccine.
You got a jab hundreds of millions of people got. I got a jab a few thousand of people got.
I got to install an app and log all sorts of things on it every couple days. You didn’t have to do that.
You received a QR code to allow you to participate in a variety of things. I didn’t, and had to even-more-experimentally mix and match my untested vaccine with an EMA approved one so I could get a Covid safe ticket.
I’m fine by the way.
All I got was, “sit here for 15 minutes”.
I don't remember that for any other vaccine I’ve ever taken.
The 15 min wait is because some known side effects manifest within those 15 minutes. Everything else is either minor, or extremely rare, or both. The US has the VAERS system if you want more on side effect reporting, but your doctor is supposed to do the work.
Either way, the vaccine was tested. That it didn't go through a 10 year trial period is because we didn't have the time. Will you suddenly explode or combust in 11 years? I can't prove you won't. I would happily put money on the negative though, care to wager?
And you're being deliberately obtuse. Like most medicines, vaccine injections have other ingredients like preservatives, the carrier fluid, etc. People can be allergic to the other ingredients but not the mRNA/TDAP/Influenza/whatever vaccine.
and also does there exist a sufficient amount of medical professionals to agree to service an all-anti-vaxxer school without complaint?
They all live in very remote areas with few people so the risk is low to begin with. They aren't entirely "unintelligent", and I respect their decisions.
1. infectious disease that can kill others. it's great that they are remote, but they still interact with others sometimes. no one requires them to wear warning signs. as numerous others have pointed out, it's like drunk driving. drinking while driving is not just personal choice, even if it seems like just you minding your own alcohol.
1a. even if the disease itself is not sufficient to kill people but causes them to seek medical attention, beyond the capacity of the healthcare system, this means worse outcomes for those who could not have avoided ending up in the hospital.
2. ask what doctors think about treating them when they get polio or things we havent seen in many generations.
even intelligent people are terrible at assessing risk in areas where they are not professionals. see how many doctors are antivaxxers, how many security professionals click on https://chase.myaccount.com links, etc.
When administered to the at risk population. When required for young, hospitalization system impact would be marginal.
https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2...
Please cite your sources.
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...
Which groups are not "at-risk" here? What age? Because it seems like there is a significant % of the population in groups other than 80+ that are in the hospital.
So maybe find the source and share it here since you are the one who made the argument? Burden of proof is on you, not me.
In my case I was looking for covid case data in children broken down by age. The only data I found was over 18 and under 18. It wasn't until recently when 0-4, 5-12 and 12-18 age group data was shared. So while I understand your point, it's doing a disservice to the actual problem at hand and thats enabling others to make advised choices.
If you’re looking for a response to your numbers that you pulled out, we still have many worse diseases and our leaders economic policies during covid impacted and hurt more people than the “5 million dead”
I also didn’t see you or anyone complaining about the obesity; diabetes, car crashes; depression and other far worse epidemics that we’ve had induced by our same shitty health agencies that sell us the covid cure today.
I can’t spread obesity diabetes and depression to others. Cars are regulated immensely (though I do think it’s better to design cities that don’t need them… and hey people that walk more are less obese, which reduces diabetes risk).
For someone quick to point out a supposed fallacy, you’re heavily leaning on whataboutism. Not that you care, but I am also active in my city for improving pedestrian infrastructure at the expensive of space for cars, and I live in one of the most walkable cities in the country.
But if it comes down to it, I’m actually completely ok with such an approach.
How is this any different than mandating the small pox vaccine, or the polio vaccine?
The vaccine dramatically lowers the probability of a severe infection; reduces the burden on healthcare systems - which in, in many countries apart from the US (for instance, Canada) is a public good. And therefore enables hospitals to provide care for patients with other diseases; patients who need urgent surgical procedures.
Even where there is private healthcare, it still is a public resource.
One possible symmetric response to people who refuse to get vaccinated is to deny them access to healthcare if they get a covid infection and need medical care - But I think that is far more draconian and inhumane, and is arguably more akin to medical apartheid, than denying those who chose to remain unvaccinated (without broadly accepted medical reasons) access to public goods when they do not accept their responsibility towards public welfare.
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2021/12/23/us-paus...)
Odd thought: Even if ineffective against omicron, why would the government pause distribution of any, safe medicine? Doctor's should still be allowed to use it as they see fit, no?
Quite the hyperbole: not all government services, just employment insurance and that too if you were only fired for not receiving the vaccine. A reminder that in many of these jobs, there was already a requirement for getting a set of vaccines so this is not new. Though for some people, this vaccine is "different" but once you ask them to explain why they can't. So no new rules. You needed vaccines for most of the jobs and this just an additional one.
You will still receive employment insurance for other stuff, irrespective of your vaccination status.
> prevented from patronizing various businesses
You are not prevented from accessing essential businesses and no one checks your vaccination status or even asks for one.
> even restricted from traveling and the ability to work
You are still free to drive to work or take local public transit.
The difference between ICU rates of unvaccinated and vaccinated people in Ontario for example tells us that the vaccination is working:
https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2...
^ Please see the above graph.
If you cannot participate in society moving forward, then you should not expect society to cater to your needs.
Then the whole point of this thing is pointless. We're selectively punishing people. We don't prevent or punish positive cases from going around to work, public transport, etc and infecting others, yet we punish people that choose to simply not vaccinate.
> "If you cannot participate in society moving forward, then you should not expect society to cater to your needs."
Just like to point out that you can use the same line of reasoning for a host of other things, even unrelated to medical themes. Like say allowing facial recognition cameras in all homes to prevent domestic violence and child abuse. Yet most people supposedly stand on principle against it, despite the "pragmatism" of it. Likewise we should be standing here on plain old and impractical "body autonomy" and protecting people's personal medical choices.
It just depends on how far you want to take the hyperbole and how far you want to extrapolate the doomsday predictions that flow from this. E.g. How about state-mandated abortions for down-syndrome? Or preventing pro-creation of known carriers of genetic disorders? Look at how we tip-toed around aids after we eventually acknowledged it.
As a side note, we should all be worried about how this entire world-incident is allowing laws and understandings that we've had and worked on attaining for decades if not centuries to be simply and casually bypassed under some banner of "safety", "science" and pragmatism. There has to be a better way to deal with this and as you say, move society forward instead of backward.
It's not pointless. Unvaccinated people are far far more likely to occupy the hospital and the ICU -- see above. How is that pointless? I am not talking about positivity as that is not relevant. See the official numbers above.
Your hyperbole is not valid as these jobs already required vaccinations so I am not sure what the new outrage is.
Simply not true. Defying a public health order is illegal.
The company has had petty CEOs that did shady things with users posts and data.
To be clear vaccination is good, people should be vaccinated, I have been vaccinated three times, etc, etc but does vaccination still offer a public health benefit vs just being a good idea for your own personal health?
Why isn't this fraud?
IE is there to protect you from loss of employment through no fault of your own. Always has been.
My son broke his arm and he has to wait 3 weeks for a cast. I've been waiting for a general doctors appointment for 6 months yet, been waiting 4 years to have a compressed disc looked at. It's sad.
To make it worse it's almost impossible to find the vaccine and when you do it's a several hour wait and often it runs out.
I think there is more to it than everyone is a racist homophobe trump supporter. Most people who say things like that are often an abortion that failed.
Canadians don't have to worry that if they get sick that they are 'screwed'.
If you haven't had a compressed disc looked at in 4 years, you're not trying. Even if you don't have a family doctor, it's not difficult to get referred to a specialist.
As for the vaccine, everyone is in a mad rush for it right now because of Omicron, so there is a delay. I live in the poorest province and made an appointment Thursday to get my booster this Tuesday. This is what I did last summer and they weren't run out when I got there.
Do fat people, smokers, and drinkers next.
Healthy people with long, drawn-out illnesses use the greatest healthcare and pension resources.
https://taxfoundation.org/new-study-shows-smokers-and-obese-...
Vitamin D and air quality is the major underlying factor behind COVID severity - its why the virus exhibits such seasonality. Pushing vaccines doesn't address underlying public health problems.
My understanding is that the field of medicine is heavily against this because they have historical cases where moral judgement to deprive care have resulted in human rights abuses and medical neglect due to bigotry. It might end up disproportionately affecting the homeless, those afflicted with addiction, single mothers, and the poor.
> (To be clear: I’m a fully vaccinated and boosted person that masks consistently.)
Dear COVID scientogists, if you engage in a public discourse where your opponents have to write a disclaimer like this to prevent getting downvoted, you have failed at civic discourses and even if all vaccines were 100% effective and had 0 side effects, your behaviour would still be abhorrent.
Being able, but unwilling, to get vaccinated substantially shifts my priors of where your comment is coming from. It is useful information, and I appreciate when people disclose it.
If you replace vaccination with an analogous, more politically one-sided limit case (say [not being a Nazi]:[supporting a policy of Hitler] - in typical Godwinian fashion), you can see why this sort of information would be useful.
Ad hom is only fallacious if the information really is irrelevant to the argument [0][1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/e01b9z/is_ad...
Draconian measures such as what you suggest just make people more suspicious of authority not less.
I am not in favor of sentencing people to death just because their stupidity happened to lie on the vaccination axis, while other stupid people get to live.
There is a reason why the Hippocratic oath does not have exceptions for currently unpopular groups. Even captured Nazi war criminals weren't denied medical care in prison.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: actually, you've been breaking the site guidelines so egregiously that I've banned the account. It's not ok to post like this here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29674183
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29674176
We're trying for a different sort of website, one in which people have thoughtful, curious conversation across differences. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the intended spirit in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
This goes against the spirit of HN. We value open discussion here.
Your actions should be brought to PGs attention. It seems you are abusing your power as moderator. This is not in HN’s best interest.
Just because you disagree with someone doesnt mean you should ban or silence them.
It always feels like the mods are against you (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but you can't take that as evidence that we disagree with you. The people with opposite views to yours are just as sure that we're secretly agreeing with you and moderating the site to privilege your views. That's just how it goes.