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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is a confusing headline. The judgement here is in NY state court, and pertains to employees of and in the City of New York, which enacted a vaccine requirement for employees of the city and later private employers in the city. Months later, Eric Adams was elected mayor of NYC, and he issued an executive order exempting athletes, performers, and artists from the mandate.

Petitioners sued, saying that the mandate with the exemptions was essentially arbitrary, and the courts agreed. So what happened here is that Eric Adams sabotaged NYC's vaccine mandate.

View on HN

Eric Adams' "performers and sports players" exemption was specifically to allow Broadway to re-open and to allow Kyrie Irving to play in Brooklyn.

The whole thing was a farce anyway so it doesn't matter.

It wasn't Kyrie, it was the Yankees. The opening came just before the start of the MLB season but well into the NBA season.

Rumor was Aaron Judge, the Yankee's biggest star, was unvaccinated. He personally sidestepped question about vaccine status and the team had publicly said a few (two?) players on a Yankees hadn't had their shots. Before opening day there were questions about if Judge would be able to play in New York.

The whole thing ended up being a mute point, because everyone on the starting roster[1] eventually got their shots so they could travel to Canada to play the Blue Jays.

[1] they later traded for an unvaccinated player

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/sports/baseball/aaron-jud...

moot

Yeah, I also meant opening day roster, not starting roster. Can you tell I couldn't sleep last night?

DeBlasio was known as the "Dope from Park Slope", but this one is pretty inept thinking as well.

Not merely arbitrary. From the decision: "This Court aggress that the Commissioner cannot enact a term of employment on City employees and has exceeded his scope of authority..."

That part of the ruling, too, was based on the arbitrariness of the order (in particular the fact that the rule was indefinite rather than temporary, and applies only to city employees and not private employees once the private rule was rescinded).

That definitely plays into the sabotage thread. Any competent corp counsel would have been able to navigate around this issue.

Regardless of if they were the right thing to do, many of the various covid mandates being enacted through whatever form of decree really didn’t seem like they fit inside the authority of the government executives trying to enact them. Many were also made to be unenforceable so they’d never be tested in court while still influencing people.

The rule of law is important and limiting the power of “rulers” to make large sweeping regulations by themselves is important. Agreeing with what they’re trying to do doesn’t make it right. People have been cheering for authoritarianism more and more and it’s disturbing.

Us Americans are so obsessed with government overreach that you'd think our corporate overloads are actually treating us well and that the government is the bad guy.

When the government wants to fuck us over, think what the NSA has been doing, they won't look for precedents so there's no point in treating every decision they make as a potential sliperry slope.

Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

People like government overreach when they agree with it completely forgetting that they won’t always.

Rights aren’t just for your side.

Absolutely. This is why I laugh when republicans who support all republican actions try to consider themselves libertarians. I guess it's the trendy term to be now.

If you're a libertarian, you vouch for liberties across the board. Not seesawing utter power against the other side every election cycle.

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

This last sentence is such a massive slippery slope that an answer isn’t even necessary.

Forgive me, but what is it a slippery slope of? I immediately thought this logic was already applied to things like child toy regulation or lead paint warning regulation or food recall regulation or workplace safety regulation… it’s really common for the government to enforce people to do things (or ban people from doing other things) in certain contexts because of the danger otherwise.

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

There's a pretty significant difference between "you may not sell dangerous products" and "you must use X medicine".

Next up, government mandated pedometers with minimum step counts, broccoli consumption, teeth brushing (prevents heart disease that kills people!), flossing, and minimum hours of sleep per night.

Once we've kept the fat, foul-breathed insomniacs out of society, government bans you from going into the wilderness (bears! bee allergies!), driving a car, riding a bike, running with scissors, and using a computer for more than a few hours a day.

Some of these things obviously kill more than others, but heart disease, cancer and "accident" are all leading causes of death in the US, with heart disease and cancer beating out COVID in 2020 and probably 2022.

I actually think the government can and should regulate food consumption. We already did it with cigarettes and trans fats. Omega-6 fatty acids should be next. A more fair but less politically viable alternative is to tax the healthcare of people with >%30 body fat. But these should probably have 10 year limits with the ultimate goal of changing people's habits.

Ok, you want a big brother to tell you what to do. But why would you bring me into this?

>Ok, you want a big brother to tell you what to do.

More like I want to solve an increasingly unsusatinable cost to society:

>People with obesity experienced a statistically significant twofold increase in average direct healthcare costs per year (EUR 5,934), compared with controls (EUR 2,788) and had statistically significantly higher indirect costs compared to controls. Total healthcare costs for people with obesity and one or more of the 11 comorbidities were 91.7%–342.8% higher than total healthcare costs of the population with obesity but none of the 11 comorbidities.

>Obesity was associated with an increase in both direct and indirect costs. The presence of comorbidities was associated with additional healthcare costs.[0]

[0]https://doi.org/10.1080/14737167.2022.2053676

So you want to solve a problem created by authoritarian enforcement of healthcare costs distribution by introducing authoritarian enforcement of lifestyle?

Sounds like the more reasonable solution is to remove taxpayer funding for healthcare. That way, people who make bad choices wouldn't be subsidized by the public.

Yeah, except that's even less politically viable.

These are still negative regulations (don't do this), which are fundamentally different than the COVID vaccine regulations.

A comparable analogy would be mandating, under penalty of legally enforced isolation, that you eat a certain amount of vegetables per unit of body weight.

> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

They don't though.

None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.

And only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID. If you're not in either of those camps, or have natural immunity the risk is negligible.

> only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID

We should not make policy decisions as long as only the elderly and otherwise vulnerable are at risk?

Yes, exactly. We shouldn't upend everyone's lives for the sake of the elderly and the feeble. The median age of a Covid-associated death in the US is near the average life expectancy[0]. There's a case to be made that the lockdown-related life loss, including the great increase in deaths of despair, as well as future poverty in children who more or less lost two years of schooling, will exceed the Covid death toll. Our policy response has been madness.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

Not all policy decisions would necessarily result in "upend[ing] everyone's lives".

Many person years were lost: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I sat in the ICU as my father died and listened to the many ventilators as a result of policy failures. I had lots of time to contemplate possible policy decisions. Pretending that the only possible choices were "do nothing" and "do something stupid" is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.

Yes, many person years were lost, mostly among the elderly and infirm. I am truly sorry for your loss, whether your father was in that group or not. But the fact on the ground is that "do nothing" and "do something stupid" were the only two choices that actually happened around the world, and regrettably mostly the latter. Pretending otherwise is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.

There is really no example of a country that successfully "did something well" as a matter of policy; the countries that fared better in terms of death rates did so on the basis of their demographics or their cultural habits. Countries with younger or fitter (less obese) populations did much better. Countries with more group-minded cultures, like the East Asian countries, did better, but those countries are also much less obese so it's unclear how much the habitual masking in those places helped. If you have counterexamples, I would love to hear about them.

In the end, there's not much policy-wise you can do in the face of a highly transmissible airborne disease that's not actually deadly enough to scare people into staying away from each other. Governments can issue as many policy decisions as they would like in the moment, but in the end everyone is going to get it, and some will die.

Long-term policies that encourage people to actually be healthy would help a lot more; but instead many countries, and especially the developed Western ones, did the opposite and encouraged or forced people to stay home, next to their refrigerators, in fear, away from laughter and joy from their social groups, all the while demonizing those who broke the arbitrary and capricious rules at the same time that political leaders were visibly flouting their own rules. I suppose we can agree that we learned a lot about what not to do for the next pandemic.

Excess deaths per capita show us where cultures are better than others at policy. Yes, some of those cultures have healthier people.

e.g., Those countries that paid only the sick to stay home were smarter than those who locked down everyone.

We should have invested in the infrastructure that will be of use in the next pandemic.

There are many obvious good policy decisions other than "do nothing".

I do realize that in the country run by Democrats, Republicans, and Trumpers that nothing useful will happen.

What are some of those "obvious good policy decisions"? Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.

Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.

And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers.

Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making. Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.

Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar. Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.

But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.

> What are some of those "obvious good policy decisions"?

I stated the biggest example in my previous reply: Paying the sick to stay home would have been smarter than the lockdowns.

Spending on infrastructure for health testing at airports and air monitoring in public spaces would have been smart and we will need this for future pandemics.

The country with the most nuclear aircraft carriers could have invested in getting PCR machines installed everywhere. Instead, it propped up the cruise ship industry.

> Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.

Yes, all government policy decisions are about allocation of capital. I never wrote otherwise.

> Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.

Yes, spending money training doctors and nurses would have been smarter than corporate welfare in the form of PPP and Fed bond purchases. Our demographic collapse will have us needing more doctors and nurses even without accounting for future pandemics. Imagine if elected representatives were able to make decisions that made sense in the long term.

> And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers. Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making.

According to that table, there is a difference of over 1,000 excess deaths per 100K people. Clearly, some cultures will survive pandemics better than others.

> Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.

Sweden did not “do nothing” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to...).

> Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar.

I see no mystery here. There are no ways for states to protect themselves from the citizens of other states. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution enables effective virus distribution. Where there are differences, the simplest explanation I see is difference in elderly population versus seasonal cold, dry air.

> Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.

The excess death curves for California and Florida are very different. I live in Florida. I have been tracking the CDC data since early 2020 and built tooling around it to better understand the failures: https://mcculley.github.io/VisualizingObservedDeaths/

> But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.

This is a false dilemma. Of course we expect government to do smart things which result in fewer excess deaths, especially when we can see other governments doing smarter things.

The decision of St. James's parish to remove a handle from a well pump is the canonical example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...) Should they have done nothing instead?

I enjoy civilization. I choose to live in a city. This requires compromises due to density. Should we have no regulation for how sewage is treated?

Those are the exact people who should get the vaccine. It's great that it exists. Forcing people who are not at risk, to inject something into their bodies which will not help them is authoritarian overreach, even if the vaccine DID protect from infection. Now that everyone admits it does not prevent infection, or "spread", there is not even a bad reason to mandate vaccination.

I did not ask about vaccine mandates.

What's the best source on this? I know it's true, it's just sad and tragic that the Atlantic is still saying they prevent infection.

>None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.

The popular narrative being told to people from all sources was that vaccines were to prevent transmission which was quietly toned down when it turned out not to be true and then people now say things like "we never said that" when nobody mentioned it at all in the beginning that vaccines quite possibly weren't going to prevent disease or transmission.

People just move goal posts, fail to outline risks that don't align with their advice before those risks are undeniable, and generally always pretend they were right all along.

<insert item here> is a threat to our <choose one of: lives, democracy>, and so these regulations and encroachments must be enacted!

Speaking for myself, I'm obsessed with corporate overreach in general. It just so happens that government is the largest and the most well-armed corporation around, so it gets considerable attention as such.

Why would it make sense to exempt those people but not, say, firefighters?

It doesn't, that's the point. The mandate presumably would have been legal if Adams hadn't added those arbitrary exemptions.

Doubt it. The court also said the following (court towards the end indicates that the mandate didn’t make sense even when the order was issued):

> “”Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19. As of the day of this Decision, CDC guidelines regarding quarantine and isolation are the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves. We have learned through the course of the pandemic that the vaccine against Covid-19 is not absolute. Breakthrough cases occur, even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted. President Joseph Biden has said that the pandemic is over.& The State of New York ended the Covid-19 state of emergency over a month ago.? As this Court stated in its decision in the Rivicci matter, this is not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders, the ones who worked day-to-day through the height of the pandemic. See Rivicci v. NYC Fire Dept., Index No. 85131/2022. They worked without protective gear. They were infected with Covid-19, creating natural immunity. They continued working full duty while their exemption requests were pending. They were terminated and are willing to come back to work for the City that cast them aside. The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health: it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for vaccination for all residents. In a City with a nearly 80% vaccination rate, we shouldn't be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down. If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt. It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just.”

Source:

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

Yikes. This reads like a gish-gallop of anti-vax talking points. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the decision to reinstate the employees, but this legal reasoning is embarrassing.

Edit: I’m happy to learn that the New York Supreme Court is not the highest court in New York, this entire thread is misleading (I think people are assuming New York’s highest court slapped down vaccine mandates). I don’t know why New York has to name their courts in such weird ways…

I think it is important to understand that not all people who against vax mandates are anti-vaxers.

I thought about this for several moments, and I disagree.

Vaccines offer some personal protection but predominantly become effective by achieving herd immunity. Vaccine hesitancy undermines this goal and weakens the system. Being pro-vaccine is senseless without being in favor of enough people being vaccinated to provide strong immunity, including for those who cannot be vaccinated due to medical complications.

Even if you were to argue on behalf of one who is indifferent to vaccines but is against mandates, so long as those mandates encourage vaccination, they effectively are discouraging vaccination and are thus anti-vax.

It can be hard to recognize all of this without the right perspective. In isolation, it is easy to claim that one is not anti-vax; however actions speak infinitely louder than words.

This argument is useless in the face of the COVID shots because they do not prevent transmission, an important factor in herd immunity being effective.

Being anti-vax-mandate for an ineffective vaccine is not anti-vax in any way.

Your lack of understanding how vaccines work belies your argument. No vaccine prevents transmission. That makes no sense. In order to prevent transmission, your immune system must prevent any infection, regardless of how minor. No vaccine guarantees absolute prevention from infection. Depending on mode of transmission, any infection can be transmissible. Thus any vaccine may not prevent transmission, for anything.

Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.

> No vaccine prevents transmission.

Wrong. Some viruses don't get transmitted if the person is not symptomatic, even if there's an infection. Your lack of understanding belies your argument.

> Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.

Well, first of all, the vaccine has to be:

* effective,

* free of major side effects,

* for a virus that kills a large portion of the infected and that kills more than just the elderly and obese,

* and not mandated for people to actually live.

The COVID shots and mandates did not meet any of those requirements.

And if you complain that my last requirement is too much, remember that in the United States, the Federal Government has severe limits on its power on purpose. Sure, the government should be able to prevent unvaccinated people from accessing government facilities, but only temporarily (while the pandemic is going on) because the government has jurisdiction over those things.

But it does not have jurisdiction over telling businesses who they can and cannot do business with.

Not just the federal government! All levels of government have limits on their powers. Important in the context of a New York state court ruling.

Yes, exactly! Thank you for saying that when I forgot to.

Ok I have more vaccines then the law requires because I went places where it made sense to get more shots for more disease.

I have not touched the COVID shot because I did not trust it for these reasons:

- vaccines take years to test not months - there were new untested biotech involved - in short order I was being told that it does not work for this flavor of COVID.

And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.

How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.

I am not debating the efficacy of a particular vaccine and I care not for your rationale -- save your breath.

Your arguments, however you feel may be justified, are not in favor of vaccination, and by definition are anti-vax. Ask yourself what would need to be different for you to be in favor.

This kind of binary thinking where you want to put everyone not fully toeing the party line into the evil group is exactly what makes issues like this so politicized. All it does in the end is divide and thereby push people further into opposition of what you are trying to force on them. In other words if you want more people to actually become anti-vaxers rather than people questioning or just being hesitant about a specific novel vaccine, keep doing what you are doing.

> vaccines take years to test not months

This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.

This time, there was a financial backer (the government) that was willing to fund development of a whole bunch of vaccine candidates, without any preconditions. That's never happened before.

Normally, if you want to develop a vaccine, you have to go to investors, and convince them that your vaccine has a high probability of succeeding, not only technologically but financially. If you're lucky, you find someone to fund phase-1 trials. After those trials are done, you analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-2 trials. You have to finish those trials, analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-3 trials, which are extremely expensive.

If there's someone who guarantees funding for all three phases up-front, you can go a lot faster, without sacrificing scientific integrity at all. You can begin recruiting people for the phase-3 trials before phase-1 trials even begin. You can immediately begin the next phase of the trials once you know the vaccine passes the requisite safety threshold, even if the previous trials are still returning data.

Normally, these things are done strictly in order in order to minimize financial risk. If there is no financial risk, you can do a lot of things in parallel.

> And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.

The vaccines reduce your risk of serious disease or death by orders of magnitude. That's extremely strong protection. They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.

> How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.

The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.

> > vaccines take years to test not months

> This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.

This is not at all true. There is only so much you can parallelize things, as every software dev should know. It will always take 9+ months to figure out what the effects are for a mother that was vaccinated before conception, for instance. (Does this trigger autoimmune issues? Birth defects, like thalidomide did? And some birth defects - mental ones in particular - might not become apparent for years!)

> They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.

There's a decent bit of data now saying that having been vaccinated in the past increases your chance of infection after 12+ months.

> The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.

One problem is that the lives saved and the side effects happen in different and only slightly overlapping populations, and long-term side effects (for both covid and the vaccines) are not yet known or knowable.

> It will always take 9+ months to figure out what the effects are for a mother that was vaccinated before conception, for instance.

A couple of things. First, pregnant women are generally excluded from vaccine trials - this isn't something specific to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

Second, what is the scientific basis for thinking that vaccination before pregnancy will affect women at the end of their pregnancy (that is, 9+ months later)? When you propose a possible harm, there should be a scientifically plausible basis for it. Is there one in this case?

> There's a decent bit of data now saying that having been vaccinated in the past increases your chance of infection after 12+ months.

I haven't seen anything to suggest this.

> One problem is that the lives saved and the side effects happen in different and only slightly overlapping populations

CoVID-19 was one of the leading causes of death across a wide range of ages. The idea that only the elderly suffered from it is not true.

> long-term side effects (for both covid and the vaccines) are not yet known or knowable.

Long-term side-effects of vaccination are very much knowable. There is no known mechanism that could lead to these vaccines causing long-term side-effects, and there are very good biological reasons for believing that they do not cause any long-term side-effects. Vaccine side-effects occur within months of vaccination, for reasons that are understood. They do not arise years afterwards (also for reasons that are understood). Saying that there may be side-effects years from now is simply FUD.

> First, pregnant women are generally excluded from vaccine trials - this isn't something specific to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

This is perhaps not an argument in favor of the proven safety of vaccines for pregnant women.

> Second, what is the scientific basis for thinking that vaccination before pregnancy will affect women at the end of their pregnancy (that is, 9+ months later)? When you propose a possible harm, there should be a scientifically plausible basis for it. Is there one in this case?

We fundamentally do not understand the human body. We do not know why many common medications work, and many of the reasons we think others work are likely wrong. And we know that many chemicals carry future risks of birth defects.

> CoVID-19 was one of the leading causes of death across a wide range of ages. The idea that only the elderly suffered from it is not true.

This is because people in their 20s and 30s are so unlikely to die outside of accidents and malice, not because covid was a large absolute risk. The risk of death for someone over 65 was iirc 100x that of someone under 55.

When you limit the group to "otherwise healthy people under 40" the risk ratio skews even further. This is normal. But it means that those people receive a much lower benefit from vaccination.

> There is no known mechanism that could lead to these vaccines causing long-term side-effects

Spike protein accumulating in cardiac tissue leading to myocarditis. Antigen fixation, leading to reduced protection against future variants. The immune system identifying the mRNA delivery vector as a threat, preventing the use of future mRNA treatments.

"But those aren't proved" is really not convincing to me. For an EUA for at-risk populations, ok. For mandates? Heeeelll no, go cross those Ts first.

> and there are very good biological reasons for believing that they do not cause any long-term side-effects.

The whole point of a vaccine is to cause long term effects. That intended effect is immunity to disease.

"Nothing else could possibly persist" smacks of hubris to me.

> Vaccine side-effects occur within months of vaccination, for reasons that are understood. They do not arise years afterwards (also for reasons that are understood). Saying that there may be side-effects years from now is simply FUD.

This is medicine we're talking about, a bit of uncertainty and doubt is very much justified - especially when the process has been politicized.

> We fundamentally do not understand the human body.

This is not true. We understand a great deal about the human body. What's relevant here is that we understand the mechanisms that cause serious vaccine side-effects, and we understand why those side-effects appear within a few months.

> Spike protein accumulating in cardiac tissue leading to myocarditis.

Myocarditis occurs soon after vaccination, not long afterwards. It's also a very rare side-effect (it actually occurs more often from the virus itself).

> The whole point of a vaccine is to cause long term effects. That intended effect is immunity to disease.

What does this have to do with long-term adverse side-effects? The types of changes that a vaccine causes in the immune system are understood, and the reasons why those changes sometimes cause adverse side-effects are also understood. The mechanisms do not spring into action years later. The side-effects begin within months, at the latest.

> "Nothing else could possibly persist" smacks of hubris to me.

You're just dismissing immunology out-of-hand, based on vague statements about science not knowing how the body works.

> especially when the process has been politicized.

The politicization was on the side of the vaccine "skeptics." One of the most infuriating aspects of the pandemic has been how the most effective single tool for saving lives, a tool that has minuscule risks, has been subject to so much FUD. This tool is safe enough and beneficial enough that I would have absolutely no problem with mandating it for participation in society, the same way that seat belts and airbags are mandated.

The etymology of vaccine comes from vacca, which is Latin for cow. Vaccines were originally discovered after finding that milkmaids seemed somehow immune to smallpox, which otherwise not only made people gravely ill but had a mortality rate upwards of 30%. The reason, it was discovered, is that they were regularly exposed to cowpox which sufficiently strengthened their immune systems to provide effective immunity to smallpox. And thus the field was born.

Herd immunity does not make vaccines work better, but is a tertiary effect whereby unvaccinated individuals can receive effective protection simply by living in an area with a high vaccination rate. In extreme cases (such as with smallpox) diseases can even be completely eliminated, but this requires extremely effective vaccines that prevent infection and spread, vaccines that are robust against mutations, and diseases that are unlikely to be able to exist without humans. None of these factors apply to COVID or the vaccines developed for it.

The etymological tidbit is but a distraction from the meat of the issue, which is that you are wrong.

Namely, herd immunity absolutely does make vaccines work better, and is the basis of all vaccine policy in the modern world. I'm not even sure how you can state it's a tertiary effect when it is the primary reason vaccine policies exist.

You're simply spreading misinformation. Herd immunity due to vaccination has resulted in the eradication or near eradication of multiple deadly infectious diseases over the last few centuries. And if not for humans, then look only to farm medicine. Ignoring the power of vaccine policies and mandatory vaccination walks humanity back hundreds of years. Eradicating small pox took hundreds of years. We've been combating COVID-19 for close to three years.

Ask yourself: what qualities of a COVID-19 vaccine would satisfy you?

The entire point is that a smallpox vaccine does provide genuine immunity from smallpox to the point that was so apparent that we could casually observe even the tiniest micro-population (milkmaids) were somehow just completely immune. They didn't get it, they didn't spread it, and their immunity didn't just disappear in a few months or because of a slight genetic variation.

And, also critically, there is no non-human transmission vector for smallpox. It travels exclusively between humans, contrasted against COVID which thrives in both human and animal populations. So if you were unvaccinated and spent all your time around milkmaids - you would not become infected, because there was no vector for the disease to get to you. If 90% of your company were milkmaids, you may get it if one of the other unvaccinated was infected, but the odds would be reduced. This is what herd immunity refers to.

You can observe the effects of 'herd immunity' with the current COVID vaccines in places such as Gibraltar. They achieved greater than 100% vaccination rates, and early on, by vaccinating not only their entire population, but even a large number of migrant workers. They ended up with a death rate of 3,204 per million contrasted against 3,266 for the US. And their infection rate was one of the highest in the world at nearly 60%, but that was probably more so due to extensive testing than greater susceptibility.

The problem is that this is a very first mandate for vaccination we ever imposed on ordinary people.

The US has very complex society and diverse population, so mandates do not work and might create backclash.

I think mass vaccination can be easily achieved by mass marketing. Mandates just made this way too political: and as we can see did not achieve a thing.

> The problem is that this is a very first mandate for vaccination we ever imposed on ordinary people.

That's not true! It used to be you had to show your smallpox vaccine scar (the vaccine left a distinctive mark) in order to enter many businesses.

That is true. I forgot about that.

And why did they check for scars? Because people were forging their vaccination certificate (like now with COVID). So this mandate thing did not really worked well.

I imagine the scar would be relatively easy to fake with makeup. I always assumed it was just the most obvious way to verify smallpox vaccine status. Did we even have consistent medical records back then?

It's okay if some unvaccinated people manage to cheat the system, as long as the vast majority cannot. Similar to how laws against thievery are useful even though thieves still exist.

We knew the odds the Covid vaccine would substantially reduce transmission were very low. Covid first impacts your mucosal immune compartment, which means an infection first gives you all the symptoms exhibited by a mild case of Covid. It also mostly spreads from there as you exhale.

The vaccine does not target your mucosal immune system. It's injected. Thus, the vaccine will help you if you develop a severe case of Covid that spreads beyond your throat/sinuses/lungs. Immune system compartments work largely independently. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27169/

> The first is that immune responses induced within one compartment are largely confined in expression to that particular compartment. The second is that lymphocytes are restricted to particular compartments by expression of homing receptors that are bound by ligands, known as addressins, that are specifically expressed within the tissues of the compartment. (Immunobiology: The Immune System in Health and Disease. 5th edition.)

One can be absolutely pro-vaccine, want to drive down vaccine hesitancy rates and still think that mandating vaccinations is not the way to go.

For example they could argue that people will rebel against "you must do X" reflectively, but a well designed and sensitive information campaign might win them over.

> One can be absolutely pro-vaccine, want to drive down vaccine hesitancy rates and still think that mandating vaccinations is not the way to go.

One would then be quite ignorant of the history of how vaccines are rolled out. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211029-why-mandatory-va...

This is a crazy level of absolutism that seems only to exist to force a "with us or against us" reaction.

I think everyone where I live should probably be supplementing vitamin D in the winter months because it is damn near impossible for even people working outdoors all day to get enough vitamin D through natural sunlight at this parallel. Never would I dream of mandating a vitamin D regimen to people. My lack of wanting a vitamin D mandate, by your very argument, would make me anti vitamin D.

I take vitamin D daily, and have convinced others they probably should too, which I think makes me an advocate on some level. If even your top percentile advocates are "anti" from your operating definition, because they don't go far enough, you may be an extremist.

Funny how millions of people who had all the common vaccines except the covid "vaccine" suddenly became anti-vaxer. That like saying someone who smokes cigarettes, pipes and shisha but not cigars must be anti-smoking.

The common western covid "vaccines" do not have the properties of other common vaccines. They are at best comparable to flu shots which I know no one under the age of 50 who has ever took them. Are these all anti-vaxers now too? Have you ever head anyone talk about herd immunity related to flu shots pre-covid? Almost everyone alive today apparently prevented herd immunity for flu most of his life by not taking the flu shot. So we're all anit-vaxers.

>I thought about this for several moments, and I disagree.

You need some more moments I guess, you clearly didn't think this trough.

This definition of "anti-vax" is broad enough to include those who happily received the vaccine, but oppose mandates.

That really isn't what normal people infer from the term.

That's because being anti-mandate is effectively being anti-vax from a public health policy perspective. By construction, effective public health can't be about individual choice, and the astonishing efficacy of vaccines in history has relied on this principle.

The legal reasoning doesn’t need to go beyond the first line, which I believe is now scientific and popular consensus?

“Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19.”

“A talking point” is a very sleazy turn of phrase. You don’t say it is wrong, incorrect, harmful; you just apply guilt by association even though the statement in question may have merit by itself.

> Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19.

This was not true before Omicron. Vaccination was never a 100% protection against contracting or transmitting SARS-CoV-2, but it did significantly reduce the rate of both. People who refused to vaccinate themselves were, in fact, putting people around them at greater risk.

That protection has decreased with Omicron, though it is still not zero (and with boosters, it increases again for a few months).

That's not the case. Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative. The UK is one of the few countries that kept regularly publishing case stats even after this happened and it showed that once the initial vaccine 'high' wore off, vaccinated people were getting infected more frequently than the unvaccinated. Omicron didn't change this.

This sort of thing is unintuitive but has happened before. In fact Fauci cited the possibility of this effect as one of the reasons not to rush the trials. Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics (the way they classify people as unvaccinated for weeks after having actually been given the shot can warp the stats).

> Even against Delta effectiveness dropped very rapidly and then actually went negative.

Effectiveness against Delta did not go negative. Protection against infection decreased, but was still quite significant. A single booster also greatly increased protection against Delta, which is why many countries initiated booster campaigns in the Fall of 2021.

> Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics

The trials were always designed to test protection against symptomatic disease, severe cases and death. They were not designed to test protection against infection. Everyone who read the trial registrations and the studies knew this from the beginning. The fact that this has recently been presented as a big revelation in the media just shows how uninformed the public (and much of the media) is. It's also a reflection of the revisionist narrative (i.e., we shouldn't have done anything about CoVID) taking hold.

Protection was falling steadily at the time delta disappeared completely, and continued falling on the same trend far below zero.

Your description of the trials is perfectly inverted! I wonder how that happens. The trials weren't designed to detect anything except reduced PCR test positivity i.e. infections. They didn't attempt to determine what a "severe case" was because that distinction was invented only after the falling effectiveness made it necessary to do so, and as for death, more people died in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm! They definitely didn't make claims about reducing the death rate because it was so tiny to begin with that they couldn't get a big enough sample of COVID deaths to make any conclusions, not even with 64,000 odd people.

> The trials weren't designed to detect anything except reduced PCR test positivity i.e. infections.

> They didn't attempt to determine what a "severe case" was because that distinction was invented only after the falling effectiveness made it necessary to do so

I'm sorry, but you're wrong on both of these points. From the Moderna phase-3 trial description [0] on clinicaltrials.gov:

> Primary Outcome Measures:

> 1. Efficacy: Number of Participants with a First Occurrence of COVID-19 Starting 14 Days after Second Dose of mRNA-1273

If you look at the trial protocol, there is no regular PCR testing (except for at the start of the trial and at administration of the 2nd dose). Only people who have two or more symptoms are tested. This means that the trial is only meant to test efficacy against symptomatic infection (also known as "CoVID-19," the disease, as opposed to the virus, "SARS-CoV-2"). From the scientific paper[1] on Moderna's phase-3 results:

> Covid-19 cases were defined as occurring in participants who had at least two of the following symptoms: fever (temperature ≥38°C), chills, myalgia, headache, sore throat, or new olfactory or taste disorder, or as occurring in those who had at least one respiratory sign or symptom (including cough, shortness of breath, or clinical or radiographic evidence of pneumonia) and at least one nasopharyngeal swab, nasal swab, or saliva sample (or respiratory sample, if the participant was hospitalized) that was positive for SARS-CoV-2 by reverse-transcriptase–polymerase-chain-reaction (RT-PCR) test.

Then, later on from clinicaltrials.gov:

> Secondary Outcome Measures:

> 1. Number of Participants with a First Occurrence of Severe COVID-19 Starting 14 Days after Second Dose of mRNA-1273 or Placebo

So you see that the idea of preventing "severe CoVID-19" goes back all the way to the formulation of the trials in early 2020.

And more detail from the scientific paper:

> A secondary end point was the efficacy of mRNA-1273 in the prevention of severe Covid-19 as defined by one of the following criteria: respiratory rate of 30 or more breaths per minute; heart rate at or exceeding 125 beats per minute; oxygen saturation at 93% or less while the participant was breathing ambient air at sea level or a ratio of the partial pressure of oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen below 300 mm Hg; respiratory failure; acute respiratory distress syndrome; evidence of shock (systolic blood pressure <90 mm Hg, diastolic blood pressure <60 mm Hg, or a need for vasopressors); clinically significant acute renal, hepatic, or neurologic dysfunction; admission to an intensive care unit; or death.

0. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427

1. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2035389

Kyrie Irving isn't a firefighter.

No, he a chimney since he gets swept

In Cleveland we still call him the bus driver

The argument at the time was that it was "creating a double standard that disadvantaged local artists and athletes" compared to performers that were not residents of NYC (but commuted in for work).

https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/153-22/transcr...

Stuff like this and allowing certain events while vilifying others as "superspreader events" killed a lot of people's belief in mitigation strategies IMO. A virus is a virus and doesn't recognize human needs or wants. Either there are no exceptions for anyone or we shouldn't bother.

The same happened in CA with some stores being open and others closed. Why was Home Depot open? It made no sense in terms of spreading the disease . It was just arbitrary BS.

Closing the beaches was stupid too. If there ever was a safe place then it was the beach or state park wheee uou are in the open and the window blows.

People were rabidly cheering it on too. Police going around shutting playgrounds and arresting parents for playing outdoors with their children, while at the same time the politicians they voted for were constantly and egregiously shown to be flouting the rules on frivolities, parties, travel, fun. And there were excuses for the politicians and bloodlust for the commoner trying to exercise or raise their child. Absolutely flabbergasting.

I used to wonder how on earth nazis and communists and the like were able to seize power and control of a population, and now I've seen it. Covid has been a really amazing learning experience for me.

“I used to wonder how on earth nazis and communists and the like were able to seize power and control of a population, and now I've seen it”

That’s how the US has worked for a long time. See the war on drugs and mass incarceration, laws against black people and extreme political polarization. There was always a group of “others” that people wanted to get punished.

I bet if Trump had been a little smarter he would have got away with a lot more while people cheering him on. But it seems a lot of political institutions are eroding so maybe the next strongman will be able to go way further.

Yes that seems to be how it goes. Drum up irrational fear, lay the blame at the others, create hatred against them, then it becomes almost a self-sustaining mass psychosis. Intellectually I understood that's basically how it works, I guess I just didn't want to believe it.

People didn't care that vaccines didn't stop the virus spreading, they didn't care that insignificant transmission occurred due to individuals or small family groups enjoying the outdoors, they didn't care that some people were as irrationally scared of the vaccines as they were of covid. It wasn't about any kind of measured response designed for the real greater good. They wanted to see those hated others suffer and be punished for their heresy and audacity.

Is fear of dying irrational? I mean, it's going to happen to us all anyway, so does it matter if it's via airborne virus or whatever it is that conservatives fear is going to kill them?

Fear of dying of covid because someone is taking their child to play in a park certainly is.

And was the contagiousness of covid perfectly understood as soon as it was discovered?

Certainly by the time vaccine mandates came around, we had a pretty good idea of the contagiousness and lethality of the disease.

At that point, they had also taken the caution tape off the playground by me. I'm unaware who mandated that. As far as I can tell, many aspects of the disease and vaccines are still quite controversial, though it seems to me that vaccines are helpful.

> fun.

Its an amazingly corrupting kind of power, the ability to dictate the way others can have fun.

You've got cause and effect backwards. Societies have to overreact to pandemics, because those that didn't got wiped out - eventually. Enforcement of quarantine and similar measures through extreme social norms is a necessary adaptation to the threat of plague; civilization wouldn't be able to exist without it.

No I don't think I do have it backward.

What was the point of writing that?

It was commensurate with your reply. What exactly is the cause and what is the effect that you think I have backwards?

You think that the authorities are creating an internal enemy to sow division. I am saying that the visceral reaction to plague is an instinctive human universal, not something that has to be cultivated.

> You think that the authorities are creating an internal enemy to sow division.

They do and have done so many times throughout history.

> I am saying that the visceral reaction to plague is an instinctive human universal, not something that has to be cultivated.

Fear is an instinctive response to many things, and that can be and is manipulated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cYPm__73XI I still remember this video that was widely circulated. The bans were never more than politicians wanting to look like they were doing something.

Home Depot was open because people need to fix shit around their house if you want them to stay home. What's arbitrary about that?

I agree with you about the beaches. But in the early days, we didn't really know what worked and what didn't. People said 6 feet apart was safe enough indoors because "droplets containing the virus fall to the ground".

It was arbitrary because small hardware stores had to close, while big ones could stay open. Also, because in most states someone in the governor’s office just went down a random list of professions or business types and decided on the spot whether to shut them down or not. That’s the very definition of arbitrary and capricious. It also fails the rational basis test, since the government hadn’t even come up with a rationale for why certain businesses have to close while others can stay open. Or why a Walmart could have a 500 people in it, while churches were limited to 10 people at a time (regardless of the size of the church’s building, even), etc.

Then why?

Then why what? Can you elaborate a bit?

Sorry, why would he do this? If he wasn't doing it thinking it would help then what?

I’m not sure which person you are referring to, but it doesn’t matter if someone thought it would help. That’s not sufficient.

The rules vary somewhat from state to state, but in general a government order must be narrowly tailored to serve a legitimate government interest, there must be a rational basis for how the order will actually serve that interest, and it must not be arbitrary or capricious. It has to have all three or it’s out. Notably, “I thought it would help” isn’t quite on the list.

If you can explain why something might help, then that could form your argument for the rational basis test (although it would be better if you could explain how it _will_ help, rather than how it _might_ help). But the order had better meet all the other requirements as well.

There are often other requirements as well. The agency writing the order must have the explicit authority to do so. Some types of orders are limited ahead of time by legislation. For example, many states have a written maximum amount of time that any order based on a state of emergency can last. Etc, etc.

I didn't know about small hardware stores being forced to close. That's the arbitrary part then. If it was a question of space, they should've been allowed to continue business with curbside pickups.

Religion and community are important. But congregating inside a church building is not something that needs to be prioritized during a pandemic. Schools and daycares first.

> But congregating inside a church building is not something that needs to be prioritized during a pandemic. Schools and daycares first.

Not everyone puts priorities in that order. For many people, religion is much, much more important than daycare.

Plus, any order which treats businesses differently is going to be arbitrary. If you can go to a school but not a bar, then that is arbitrary.

> If you can go to a school but not a bar, then that is arbitrary.

It literally is not. I don't think you understand what "arbitrary" means. It's not "I don't see the difference".

> For many people, religion is much, much more important than daycare.

So have the service in the parking lot of the church. Or on an open field, the way JC used to preach. Not having daycare is far more disruptive to far more people objectively. Way more people go to school and daycare every day, than go to church. Way more people depend on having a school or daycare to send their kids to, than go to church.

> I don't think you understand what "arbitrary" means. It's not "I don't see the difference".

Arbitrary here means that the rule wasn’t decided rationally. The government must typically establish a “rational basis” for any rule that they want to impose on people.

It is commonly understood that being indoors with a lot of people increases the risk of transmitting a virus between those people. The risk is understood to go up when more people are present, but it is also higher when the building is smaller than when it is larger.

Thus, a rational basis for the maximum occupancy of a building during a pandemic would be based on the number of people per square foot. A rule such as “1 person per 100 square feet” treats both large and small groups fairly, as well as treating large and small buildings fairly.

When we look at specific rules that were actually in place during the pandemic, we often find that there was no such rational basis. The rules were instead arbitrary. In NYC, churches were limited to a flat 10 people in the building at any one time, regardless of the size of the church building. This limits a large church more than a small one, and thus the rule is arbitrary. It would have been no more arbitrary if they had rolled dice to pick the number.

Similarly, the same rule in NYC did not apply to big–box hardware stores. A Home Depot could have hundreds of people in it all the time! No matter how important hardware stores are, this is an arbitrary distinction. There is no rational basis under which the virus is dangerous to a group of 11 people who are in a church, but not to a group of 11 people who are in a Home Depot. The relative importance of churches and Home Depots is not important. What is important is that the difference in how the rule applied to them was arbitrary.

> The relative importance of churches and Home Depots is not important.

It absolutely is. The risk between churchgoing and Home Depot shopping, or going to school vs a bar may be equivalent, if we accept your analysis. But when taking risks, we also consider benefit. Risk for little to no benefit is best not taken. Risk for benefit may be worth taking, depending on how much benefit. If you can't accept this basic principle, there's no point in continuing this discussion further.

Education/childcare and having a habitable home are more important, objectively, than getting drinks or worshipping in-person inside of a building. Safe alternatives for the latter existed - drinking beers on your porch, or having church services in a field.

Not everyone judges the importance of things the same way. If it is ok to force churches to meet outside (and many churches did), why not force Home Depot to move their goods outside to sell?

> Risk for benefit may be worth taking, depending on how much benefit.

This is true. We each judge both the level of risk of each action we take, and the amount of benefit we gain from it. It is an _individual_ decision whether or not to go into a building, based on our _individual_ level of risk tolerance and our _individual_ benefit from whatever is in the building.

As a result, we long ago decided that if the government wants to step in and ban something that is risky, it must always have a rational basis on which that level of risk is determined. This prevents the government’s decisions from being arbitrary, and from favoring one party or group over others. (There are other requirements as well.)

For example, at some point we decided that crowded buildings were too large a fire risk. The government decided to allow the fire department to regulate the maximum number of people that could occupy every room of every building. In order to prevent this from being arbitrary, the fire department must base their determination on the actual fire risk: the materials the building is made from, the rate at which fire can spread in those materials, the number and size of the exits from the building, etc. The purpose of the building doesn’t matter: a church with 10,000 square feet and fire doors gets exactly the same maximum occupancy as a store with 10,000 square feet and fire doors (all else being equal; a real store would probably get dinged for having a bunch of additional flammable material in it).

It doesn’t matter that some buildings are used for frivolous purposes like entertainment while other are used for serious business. The fire doesn’t care about that, so neither can the fire department. This protects everybody against corruption and abuse of authority. Suppose the Fire Marshall was a crazy Fundamentalist, and arbitrarily decided that your bar should have a maximum occupancy of 2? You’d be out of business, and quite angry. By the same token, suppose the Fire Marshall was anti–religion, and arbitrarily decided that your church should have a maximum occupancy of 2? Same result. The rational basis rule is intended to protect us all from oppression at the hands of our neighbors, even when we have differing ideologies.

A virus doesn’t take into account the importance of the building when it infects people, and therefore pandemic restrictions on occupancy cannot take that into account either.

> why not force Home Depot to move their goods outside to sell?

Because a lot of products can't stay outside. It would be incredibly disruptive to operations. Not to mention that many stores, including Home Depot, did start offering curbside pickup to reduce risk.

Fire danger is omnipresent and essentially forever. Pandemics are not. So your analogy doesn't apply. I don't even know why I'm bothering. F it. Have a good weekend. Pretend you won the argument.

A small hardware store in town went out of business because they were forced to close. Same for a lot of other small stores. I could understand reducing number of people in the store but closing totally while keeping others open simply didn’t make sense. I think the exceptions had more to do with successful lobbying than with health reasons.

You could probably make a pretty good argument. A firefighter deals closely with the population in non-voluntary situations. An athlete or performer is likely quite a bit separated from the crowd watching them, and they're choosing to be there anyway. I don't know if there was actually an attempt to justify the decision, though.

And I imagine someone could also make a pretty good argument in the other direction. A firefighter is probably going to be wearing a mask. Performers by their nature are yelling into a crowded indoor space.

Because it doesn’t matter who has Covid in a fire.

Dunno how it is in NY, but in my city, the fire department spends way more time on paramedic duties than on actually fighting fires (around 40 EMS calls for every fire call). IMO if you're getting a ride to the hospital from someone it matters if they have COVID. And even though the vaccines don't guarantee that you won't get infected, the government does have an interest in preventing severe infections. COVID was the #1 killer of first responders

> the fire department spends way more time on paramedic duties than on actually fighting fires

Why does the fire department do medical stuff in the US? Why isn’t it medical people providing paramedics? Seems like something that should be left to professionals?

Most common example is probably motor vehicle accidents where firefighters (in concert with police officers) will secure the scene, gain access to the vehicle(s) if necessary, etc.

A lot of firefighters are also EMTs and paramedics. Both because in places with volunteer firefighters they can just work as EMS, and also because there's quite a bit of overlap in that if you need a firefighter there's a decent chance having EMS around would be beneficial as well.

Firefighters who aren't trained in EMS are not providing medical care, so saying "leave it to the professionals" is pretty dismissive in this context.

Because professionals will charge you second house mortgage.

What makes you think the fire department's medical staff aren't professionals? My city FD has 148 EMTs and 88 paramedics and are assigned to every station and unit in the city.

My county is kind of weird, but only firefighters are allowed to be paramedics here. They are considered professionals, they have to take the same classes and get the same certs as paramedics in other areas

I am perfectly happy to have a COVID spewing firefighter get me to the hospital after a car accident and let me take my chances there, than to be left without a first responder. 100% of the time.

>I am perfectly happy to have a COVID spewing firefighter get me to the hospital after a car accident and let me take my chances there, than to be left without a first responder. 100% of the time.

Except that doesn't apply to this situation. IIRC, ~95-97% of cops, EMTs and firefighters in NYC were already vaccinated and those that weren't were given ample time (extended several times) to get vaccinated.

As such, that was never an issue.

That said, there certainly was an arbitrary and capricious standard applied in this case.

I would rather have a live and vaccinated firefighter take me to the hospital than have to wait at home because an unvaccinated firefighter died of COVID or is hooked up to a vent

Someone healthy enough to be a firefighter has a near-zero chance of being hospitalized because of Covid.

Can't be that near zero if COVID deaths were about the same as all other causes of firefighter deaths combined in 2021.

Didn't know that. Thank you.

Of course, there's the huge complicating factor that the official figures for "covid deaths" conflate "died with" and "died from".

I found https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... which says “there were 70 non-COVID-19 on-duty firefighter deaths and 78 firefighter deaths resulted from COVID-19 in 2021”.

Also “In 2021, 1,353,500 fires resulted in 3,800 civilian deaths and 14,700 injuries”. By comparison, Wikipedia says there were 42,915 deaths due to motor vehicles in 2021, more than 10x. So it makes sense that even if fire department only dealt with road crashes they would spend more time on that than on fires.

By that logic, firefighters should have been exempt.

Because athletes and performers are irreplaceable and bring in tourist revenue which the city wants. Firefighters are more easily replaceable and have no effect on tourism. Having competing priorities is common enough, I don't see what doesn't make sense here. The city wants everyone to be vaccinated but it also wants broadway and basketball to be happening more, so they came up with this policy.

Why do firefighters have no effect on tourism? Without them you can not run a city. Same for many other jobs like garbage collection.

Well clearly there is an elite class to whom body autonomy is granted, and an underclass who must follow arbitrary and capricious rules. OP appreciates that celebrities and entertainers are our betters and should not be held to the same standard.

An attitude which I've found to be curiously pervasive amongst self-proclaimed egalitarians and socialists.

FWIW, there was a vocal contingent of Marxists on Twitter who saw the mandates for the erosion of worker power and rights that they were, and vigorously opposed them. Richard Wolff even came around eventually, as well as Jimmy Dore after having his own personal run-in with the nasty side effects which are all too common with these vaccines.

Sadly, though, some of the most awful scapegoaters of the unvaccinated were indeed on the "left." Noam Chomsky even said they should be excluded from society completely, and if that meant they couldn't even obtain food, well, that would be their problem.

I don't think this mandate had much to do with body autonomy, but job autonomy, which yes, rich people have quite a bit more of.

Reality is that not letting Kyrie play basketball cost New York millions, and firing a firefighter doesn’t. Tons of people lose their jobs when entertainment acts close because the performers aren’t vaccinated. Money talks, does that mean celebrities should not be held to the same standard? Not really, it just means that holding them to the same standard would cost more than adams was willing to pay, whether it was the right thing to do or not.

Yes exactly. You are allowed to infect people with a deadly pandemic if you're rich, but if you're poor you have to risk personal medical consequences or lose your remote job.

This is the issue. Politicians claim it about health and saving "grandma", but when the number of dollars get big enough, all that goes out the window.

So apparently getting vaccinated is critically important, but not more important than money.

Because they can be replaced by vaccinated people I guess and if one or two can’t that’s ok because they’ve still got all the other ones. Kyrie and the Yankees can’t be replaced.

I’d be willing to bet I could more easily find a team full of people to swing a bat or throw a ball than a couple thousand people willing and able to rush into a burning building.

Can you get people to pay to watch them?

> Same for many other jobs like garbage collection.

Spoken like someone who hasn't been to New York. I love the city, its a fun and vibrant place. But they have some unusual trash policies (primarily they don't have alleys so trash has to be dumped on the main sidewalk) and wherever you go its not uncommon for the sidewalks to be lined with trash waiting for pickup.

I have been to New York and I have also seen Paris during a strike of garbage collectors. It gets ugly very quickly once collection stops.

The number one thing I have noticed in New York was they seem to make trash collection as loud as possible ideally at 3 in the morning :)

How would they collect trash efficiently during the day when many streets are packed. Not to mention the extra traffic a slow moving often stopping garbage truck would cause

Aren't NYC's financials a basket case though? Surely its politicians don't care much about bringing revenue to the city, rather bringing profit to their friends and families and lobbyists. That is what makes more sense here.

My understanding is that a significant number of Yankees were unvaccinated and would not have been able to play home games. There are a significant number of New Yorkers that would’ve been very upset had that come to pass, so politicians acted according to public will and gave them an exception. Does that mean this wasn’t also corruption? No, but it is a reasonable thing to do even without corruption imo.

You just said it was for revenue to the city though.

I'm not really convinced about this new explanation either. I've seen little to no evidence that upsetting significant numbers of people factored into any other decisions around covid response, including the significant number who were upset by the creation of these double standards.

I'm going to have to stick with pure and simple corruption as the simplest and most likely explanation, unless there is some extraordinary evidence supporting some other less likely one.

I meant revenue that went to businesses/people in the city, like the general ecosystem not just the government. And a large part of the backlash was from people whose jobs were eliminated until full scale entertainment came back. It was a big deal to tons of people.

And I meant it's just simple corruption because there is little to no evidence that can be produced which supports the fringe theory that politicians care about the city's finances or what is and is not a big deal to the common people.

They care about their finances and those of their friends and lobbyists and donors, so corruption is the simplest and most obvious explanation.

So you say there's no evidence for one theory then offer your own with no evidence?

There is lots of evidence that politicians are corrupt.

This is the reason they did it. It's also the reason that most firefighters and others like them do not vote for politicians like Eric Adams. Despite the fact that he's a former police officer.

> Because athletes and performers are irreplaceable and bring in tourist revenue which the city wants. Firefighters are more easily replaceable and have no effect on tourism.

I believe this is the most cynical thing I've read yet today.

> I don't see what doesn't make sense here

If the Athletes and Performers are so irreplaceable, then wouldn't you demand they be the most protected by the vaccine, and thus require them to have it before you would require the firefighters? They are so replaceable, afterall...

> so they came up with this policy.

They wanted to force compliance, but then realized there are some people who see themselves as above compliance, so they carved out their own policy in a telling way to kowtow to them.

Dollars are replaceable. People aren't. You can't actually be happy to wrap this cynicism around this, can you?

> you demand they be the most protected by the vaccine, and thus require them to have it

No, because they will just refuse. That’s the whole problem.

People are replaceable, resources aren't.

Are there athletes or performers older than 55 so covid vaccination would have positive effect?

There are certainly some stage performers over 55, but it's a small minority. Patti LaPone is 73 and is still on the stage.

because they travel into the state from elsewhere to work.

This is 100% correct [1]:

> Mayor Eric Adams plans to announce on Thursday that professional athletes and performers working in New York City will no longer be required to show proof of vaccination against Covid-19, according to a person familiar with his plans.

> This means that Kyrie Irving, the Nets’ star point guard who has refused to get vaccinated, will be able to take the floor at Barclays Center in Brooklyn for the first time this season.

Adams is awful. NYC mayors exist to further the interests of property developers, corporations and the police unions. If that means that a public health measure needs to be sabotaged so some anti-vaxxer can play for the Nets, so be it.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/sports/kyrie-irving-nyc-v...

Sabotaged is a politically biased way of describing the events here. The reality is different as my sibling comment pointed out

Confusing: you haven't written a sibling comment? What are you talking about? Did you use a second account?

Are you your own sibling?

> sibling (n.) (computing theory) A node in a data structure that shares its parent with another node.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sibling

> share (v.) To have or use in common

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/share

> another (det.) Not the same; different

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/another

Being one’s own sibling is incompatible with the accepted definitions, so no.

Did I use the term incorrectly? A sibling comment is someone else’s comment that shares a parent comment, is it not? I’ve seen others use this term

I think that the confusion is with the word my. If you had said a sibling comment, it would likely have been immediately clear. Linking or quoting the sibling comment would avoid linguistic ambiguity altogether.

I see. I will try that next time

Vaccine mandate is unlawful to begin with so there is nothing to sabotage.

I think that the headline describes the ruling better

My state's republican governor sued mayors closing down construction sites during the peak of the pandemic, and also exempted a dizzying number of industries and sectors.

For example: if you sold an ATV to a town police department, you were deemed an essential business and thus got to ignore the closure orders and keep your entire business, both offices and showrooms/repair centers, open.

...but then his administration also went around shutting down bicycle shops in the city. Guess what a lot of medical staff and "essential" blue-collar workers depend upon for transportation, particularly since the public transit system was largely shut down, dangerous to be on public-health-wise, and doesn't operate at hours useful for some shift workers?

Eventually he got the message, but not after a lot of very cringe comments to the press about the pandemic being "real" and implying that bike shops were just frivolous luxury stores.

Nothing says luxury like riding a few hundred dollar used bike through the pissing rain.

The poor blue collar working man has a truck for every family member, and a heavy duty truck for the old man.

Can you explain what's confusing about it? Seems perfectly crystal clear to me.

It's confusing because it makes it's technically correct [1], but doesn't really get at the heart of the matter. If 'tptacek hadn't pointed out the subtlety that it was the arbitrary nature of exceptions added later that was the reason for this judgement, I would not have understood or noticed it.

It's like saying "On-call developer fixes problem caused by program written in Java" – correct, but doesn't point out, for example, that it was caused due to a commit pushed to production on Friday evening after overriding the failing CI tests.

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[1] Which, as they say, is the worst kind.

This whole thread sprawled! I just meant that it wasn't clear who the ruling applied to, because New York City is easy to confuse with New York State.

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