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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

A vaccinated person can still spread the disease. Perhaps at a lower rate, but a lot of lifestyle choices affect that rate. The singular focus on that one choice is irrational and the obsession with what other people inject into their bodies is unethical, since the free choice of a person to inject or not inject a substance into their body is more fundamental than many of the other choices that affect the rate of spread.

I have personally been vaccinated but I feel a pang of guilt whenever I use the government mandated vaccine passport to make use of restaurants and so on. So I stop using those facilities that require a vaccine passport, with the exception of the gym.

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The rate is what matters. Vaccination is one of the easiest things we can do to affect that rate.

In terms of ethics, yeah I care what other people do. I also care that they stop at red lights so they don’t murder me with their car. We set rules as a society when individual decisions can affect group outcomes.

The rate only becomes highly relevant if it makes the difference between R>1 and R<1. Otherwise the disease will still exponentially expand, just over a more spread out period of time. Even countries with very high vaccination rates now have R much above 1, so the idea that COVID can be stopped by vaccines is unfortunately not tenable any more.

We have traditionally not violated bodily autonomy for very low probability of benefit to other people, and I think the precedent that some countries have set is a grave mistake. I understand that you are upset and afraid of death, but I would encourage you to look at the statistics. If you are vaccinated then COVID is a very survivable disease. Without vaccination, the average person's risk of dying of COVID is approximately 0.5%. The vaccine trial showed that it is 98% effective, so it cuts your risk by another factor of 50. As a point of comparison, if you are unvaccinated then COVID is ~10x more dangerous than the flu. Vaccination changes that picture. Consider whether your reaction is proportionate, when compared to what your reaction to "people murdering you from across the room with the flu" would have been. Ethical violations have historically happened quite often when people are irrationally afraid. It is true that the vaccines are less effective against Omicron, but on the other hand Omicron is a milder disease than Delta. Current data is looking like we are net very lucky to have Omicron displace Delta.

> Without vaccination, the average person's risk of dying of COVID is approximately 0.5%. The vaccine trial showed that it is 98% effective, so it cuts your risk by another factor of 50. As a point of comparison, if you are unvaccinated then COVID is ~10x more dangerous than the flu.

Also covid is heavily weighted towards the elderly, the flu is not (or at least not as much). IIRC ages 30-50 have around the same risk as the flu, and under 30 have more risk from the flu.

I guess for me “bodily autonomy” is not some bright line. We mandate other vaccines for school. We have loads of regulations around what goes in our food and water and air. Why is this suddenly different?

I think I’m as guilty as anyone at binarizing the issue though. You’re right that I have a low risk of death. We don’t have enough data around long-COVID to really talk about other risks. I’m not talking out of fear. I’m talking out of frustration that I’ve made lifestyle changes to help others who clearly don’t feel the need to reciprocate.

Food, water, and air regulations are completely different. To be analogous, they would have to be regulations about food and drinks you must consume, or gasses that you must breathe in. Even if that were the case, it would still be less invasive than an injection with RNA, which enters your cells, which causes your cell to produce spike protein, which causes your immune system to attack those cells. Note again: I personally did take the vaccines, the point is that this is not comparable to food regulations. When I did take the vaccine I already knew that medically there was no necessity: due to my age and no comorbidities the risk of complications from COVID was known to be extremely low, and I knew that it wouldn't help other people either because it would not get R<1, but I simply made the decision because I did not want to lose my sense of smell for a couple of months. I was under no illusion that I was saving the world with that decision. If one was under such illusion, I can certainly understand the frustration with other people not saving the world. But this is not reality.

Your point about schools mandating vaccines is good. I'm not categorically against vaccine mandates. For a sufficiently transmissible disease, which is also deadly, and where spread can be stopped by vaccination, it can be justified. Measles may be a candidate: very transmissible (more so than COVID) and deadly for children (2.6 million deaths in 1980), and a vaccine which is extremely effective (99% immunity against infection) and has a long term safety record (complications <1 per million). COVID is not such a disease, and the COVID vaccines are not such vaccines.

Even so, in my country it is not compulsory to get vaccinated against the measles, not even in schools. Certainly one does not have to show a measles vaccination proof when entering a non-essential business like a restaurant, which one does have to show for COVID. Nor does one have to get a booster every 9 months, which one does, by law, for COVID.

> I’m talking out of frustration that I’ve made lifestyle changes to help others who clearly don’t feel the need to reciprocate.

Ok but this is not a good reason to compel other people to vaccinate. These people likely did not ask you to make the changes that you did. Nor are the changes that you made likely to have made much difference in the lives of these people, and whether or not these people do get vaccinated has a very minimal impact on your life, other than your frustration.

The fact that you feel like it would be a nice gesture from them if they "reciprocated" by getting vaccinated does not weigh against the negatives. Many of these people are probably genuinely afraid to take the vaccine. They may be very misinformed, but the fear is real. If you put sufficient pressure on these people via the government, for instance by threatening to take away their job and their ability to provide for their children, then they may well take the vaccine. But these people may resent those who forced them into it for the rest of their lives, and feel alienated from a society that made them do it. And some of them will feel ill for a day or two (as many do after getting the vaccine), which may cause them to think that any future pain or health problems were caused by the vaccine. It this worth it to you in order to act out your frustration that they "don't feel the need to reciprocate"?

not only can, but there is evidence that current covid vaccines can only higher you chances of milder disease. The probability of you getting infection and being a spreader is the same whether you are or not vaccinated.

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