Comment by chronofar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chronofar | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

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.

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