Why would it make sense to exempt those people but not, say, firefighters?
> “”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...
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…
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.
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.
Being anti-vax-mandate for an ineffective vaccine is not anti-vax in any way.
Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 would then be quite ignorant of the history of how vaccines are rolled out. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211029-why-mandatory-va...
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.)
That really isn't what normal people infer from the term.
“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).
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
No, because they will just refuse. That’s the whole problem.
So apparently getting vaccinated is critically important, but not more important than money.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
They care about their finances and those of their friends and lobbyists and donors, so corruption is the simplest and most obvious explanation.
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.
https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/153-22/transcr...
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Its an amazingly corrupting kind of power, the ability to dictate the way others can have fun.
Of course, there's the huge complicating factor that the official figures for "covid deaths" conflate "died with" and "died from".
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.
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.
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?
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.