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> Mandating vaccines (and now boosters) in young, healthy people who were already at small risk, including those who have already had the virus, is so absurd that I can't even characterize it as science. It is simply punitive behavior.

The idea that a vaccine is a punishment is disturbing. I'm glad to have been able to get it.

I said the mandate is punitive, not the vaccine.

If you feel more comfortable getting an unnecessary vaccination, nobody is stopping you. Other people should not be coerced into doing the same against their will.

College kids are currently being expelled for refusing boosters. Children are being refused classroom education. Prior infection is not taken into account, and risk/benefit is not a factor. There's no other way to frame this than as coercive behavior.

College kids were already required to get multiple vaccines to attend and I remember being lined up to take the swine flu nasal spray with no say in the matter if I was going to continue education.

> There's no other way to frame this than as coercive behavior

We coerce people constantly when they have bad behavior that affects society and others. I don’t know why people keep trotting out mandates as having aspects of coercion/authoritarianism is a mic drop moment explaining why they are bad. How is this worse than all the other health based coercion we’ve had?

I think their point is that the data shows that previous infection provides good protection. If the goal is protection, then this should count for something, and should be factored in to the risk-benefit ratio. The risk-benefit ratio is not negligible for young, which is why the vaccine still hasn't been approved for the very young (and there's certainly not a step function in the risk-benefit ratio, by age). But, the risk-benefit ratio calculations being used don't seem to be including previous infection. This is not necessarily scientific.

For the other-than-COVID vaccines that are required for enrollment, there isn't existing protection in the majority of the population. Nobody has natural, effective, protection against measles.

I think the practical problem/reason is that there's infrastructure set up to track and share vaccination/booster status. There's no infrastructure set up to track, or even test, immunity status, which is the real metric of risk. So, for practical reasons, proof of vaccination status will always be favored and, almost certainly, held above the true, yet difficult to measure, immunity status, to drive policies. This is an easy out, that might cause harm, relative to an "ideal" policies that were based on immunity.

> College kids were already required to get multiple vaccines to attend and I remember being lined up to take the swine flu nasal spray with no say in the matter if I was going to continue education.

Saying it's happened in the past isn't an argument that it should continue in the future. I doubt your swine flu nasal spray had as intense of negative side effects as the COVID second shot and booster tend to in the young and healthy. Now that we're in booster territory and Delta is being phased out the shots are almost certainly more painful than the disease for some portion of the population.

> How is this worse than all the other health based coercion we’ve had?

I can't recall any other health based requirement for attending an event or restaurant. I also don't understand why people continue to harp on how a personal COVID vaccination decision "affects society and others" at this point. The vaccine only marginally prevents infection at this stage, and the primary benefit of reduced severity should stop everyone who's vaccinated from worrying about what others around them may be doing. I get the flu shot so I don't get the flu, and I'm not sitting around telling others who haven't that they're putting me in danger.

Marginal reduction in transmission can mean the difference in ending a pandemic or dragging it out for another year or two. There is a big difference in an R value of R1 and R0.9

And you probably don't remember ever being required to show vaccination status to get into a stadium or restaurant in your lifetime because you hadn't previously lived through a pandemic.

> Marginal reduction in transmission can mean the difference in ending a pandemic or dragging it out for another year or two.

Sure, it’s great that we have the vaccines to do so. We should be focusing on making them available to everyone on earth rather than forcing them down the throats of those who don’t want them to get to the fastest “end.”

> And you probably don't remember ever being required to show vaccination status to get into a stadium or restaurant in your lifetime because you hadn't previously lived through a pandemic.

Fair enough. My reply was in response to a status quo argument, but indeed this pandemic hasn’t been just that. In which case I think you have to assess the dangers to those who have been vaccinated, which is not much. Indeed with omicron the risk isn’t very high for a large portion of the population vaccinated or not. And the vaccines are available to anyone who wants to reduce their risk, thus the mandates make little sense.

When I worked in DoD intel in the past, I had to travel to multiple nations with extremely high rates of dangerous tropical disease. I took multiple vaccines for this purpose. At no point do I ever recall worrying about whether the local populations I was dealing with were vaccinated at all. Because that's how vaccines work. They make it so you don't have to worry about others not being vaccinated or giving you the disease. With diseases that are highly dangerous to children, this is a different case, because you can't vaccinate children when they're extremely young and therefore a person not being vaccinated can transmit the virus to them. With COVID it is the absolute opposite. Small children are at minuscule risk and are actually far more at risk from influenza due to the dynamics of the virus. This risk age gradient is actually unprecedented and a unique feature of COVID.

What's really happening here is people who have considered themselves progressive and tolerant their entire lives have decided that they want to impose policies that are tyrannical, but they have to desperately backfill this logic to make it feel okay. They aren't willing to let any form of data disrupt this because if they did, they would have to admit to themselves that they had a tyrannical impulse in the first place.

Notice how when he got the swine flu nasal spray he wasn't demanding that everyone else in every public place he went to also get it. Nothing about this makes sense unless you view it as people trying to psychologically justify tyrannical impulses.

> When I worked in DoD intel in the past, I had to travel to multiple nations with extremely high rates of dangerous tropical disease. I took multiple vaccines for this purpose. At no point do I ever recall worrying about whether the local populations I was dealing with were vaccinated at all.

Yeah the tropical diseases are an interesting parallel for me too. In a place where malaria or dengue are prevalent I don’t blame others for being vectors of the disease, I assess my own risk and behave accordingly. And the mere fact that they’re spread via mosquitoes instead of air/surfaces doesn’t change the necessity of congregating people to spread. But these diseases are not universally dangerous, so people should not be universally pressured to take any measure to avoid them.

I’m not sure I fully agree with the tyrannical impulse premise, but I’d subscribe more readily to a tribal “badge of honor” premise, which in this (and indeed most cases) happens to be tyrannical. I think generally the masses don’t intend tyranny, rather they virtue signal to coerce and thus become tyrannical as a result.

There is a pre—existing vaccination mandate for enrollment at colleges in the US.

All the vaccines mandated by colleges have been around for decades. It’s not “just another vaccine” to add to the list; there is a difference.

Which brings it all back to a lack of trust in the vaccine/science. The current science is that the vaccines are safe and provide a greater degree of protection than prior infection alone. Outside of some very rare conditions that would make someone unfit for a vaccine, there's no reason not to get vaccinated. Refusing to get one only increases your chances of ending up in a hospital and for what? There's no advantage to giving yourself a disadvantage no matter how small you think the benefit a free vaccine would give you over the protection a natural infection has already given you.

Your logic here is flawed. Even if you've already had covid, the vaccine will give you more protection. That's good. We can't do the reverse (give deliberate natural immunity to those who are already infected), but that's no reason to say that natural immunity is "good enough." That goes for the individual as well as society. Would you decline airbags because seatbelts as effective?

I think you're hitting a strawman here.

Are any number of vaccine shots "good enough"? Or, should we be getting one every month to get as much protection as possible?

There's a line to be drawn somewhere, and I think what's argued here is that natural immunity should count for something, instead of being lumped into the same group as those "unvaccinated and no prior infection".

> Even if you've already had covid, the vaccine will give you more protection.

And more risk. Which is greater?

Your ~half estimate is more like 70-80% these days. See https://covidestim.org/us

(This makes your case stronger, of course.)

Absolutely. I'm being intentionally conservative here.