To address the seeming contradiction. Vaccination was never imposed by the healthcare system on patients during COVID, it was required by cruse ships, schools, and yes hospitals for staff etc.
That’s “imposing” and it speaks to the lack of ethics in the healthcare system they joined in coercing medical treatments rather than refusing to perform treatments people were only accepting under duress.
The ethics around vaccination is it saved well over 1 million US lives without direct force, that’s a clear win by any reasonable ethical system. Being unable to be an unvaccinated healthcare worker is little different than requiring people wash hands, or preventing them from walking around shooting patients.
PS: Actual estimates for lives saved is around 3 million with a fair bit of uncertainty and some wiggle room in terms of definitions. Over 1 million is basically incontrovertible, but in a wider context you need to look at the spike in cancer deaths due to an overworked healthcare system and extrapolate not just consider the individuals who get infected.
There was, in fact, many alternatives beyond “isolation”. But thanks to society’s hysterical myopic focus and constant propaganda and suppression of information most people were not allowed to discuss them out loud.
How anybody could continue to believe what society did in response to Covid was not only okay but was the only option is absolutely wild to me. It’s a testament to the massive amount of propaganda cranked out by various governments. Their belief is not just wrong it’s insulting to the people who watched the nonsense unfold.
The vaccines hospitalized at a rate higher than they prevented hospitalizations and the mandates applied to groups who were at virtually no risk.
> The ethics around vaccination is it saved well over 1 million US lives without direct force, that’s a clear win by any reasonable ethical system.
Except that force was used, to restrict the rights of those who didn’t comply with mandates. And numerous atrocities have been conducted by exactly that utilitarian mindset.
You can claim you needed to violate Nuremberg, but the data doesn’t support that and I’ll continue to think you’re morally defective.
The vaccines emptied the hospitals. Literally.
Two weeks after the vaccination (with any of the western trio, or the one China exported), the odds of people being hospitalized felt more than 90% every time somebody measured, everywhere.
The Chinese one was the "bad" one, with the odds falling by not much more than 90%. The other ones were much better.
False.
> Except that force was used.
Nobody was forcefully vaccinated, and in fact 10’s of millions of Americans never got vaccinated and a vastly larger percentage of them died. The numbers aren’t even vaguely comparable.
We had a great natural case study in Australia of COVID through a vaccinated population. Everyone caught it over the course of a month, the vaccines did basically nothing to stop the spread. They were pretty much only useful on an individual level which means there was never a requirement for any coercive measures.
When you look at killing thousands of people as a minor consequence you may want to rethink your priorities.
2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now. Factor in that there'd probably be between 40 and 60% uptake of the vaccine just by people being prudent and the authoritarianism was not only a betrayal of the principles our civilisation is supposed to be defending but also ineffective.
And, as the current article showcases, extremely ill-advised.
3) That logic is silly. We don't mandate people do anything special about flus and that'd save far more lives than thousands. Do you consider people who advocate normal life even though influenza exists to be some sort of malign force in society? Even COVID is still killing people. 100s of thousands are still going to die from this thing. But you want to support an abandonment of basic human rights over a few thousand maybe-deaths that can't even be detected? In the extreme, more people have been purposefully murdered to secure basic liberties than that - these aren't the sort of rights that should be casually taken away.
Many hospitalizations and deaths from COVID occurred on subsequent infections.
> 2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now.
False, that’s simply not how infection works.
Part of the difference here is viral load on exposure. Vaccines and masks reduced viral loads in the air, which then gave people’s immune system longer to react. The immune system takes time to ramp up, but so do infections. A larger initial exposure can snowball even in reasonably healthy individuals.
This is because of Delta. The original strain was substantially reduced but an order-of-magnitude efficacy jump made that moot. You’re right, however, that we should have focused on masking and air filtration since that was actually effective at preventing spread in close quarters like a school or workplace.
I am from Australia and this is all nonsense.
a) Vaccines are not designed to prevent transmission. They are designed to stop people from getting seriously ill and dying.
b) Vaccines and lockdowns were vital in high-density areas like Victoria and NSW which saw health care systems almost instantly overwhelmed. This was then causing mass deaths for both COVID and non-COVID cases. It was a public health emergency by every definition.
c) COVID was only allowed to spread once enough of the population was vaccinated. And that was because instead of needing to go into hospital people could stay at home for a few days. And even then it has taken years for the system to recover.
> Vaccines are not designed to prevent transmission. They are designed to stop people from getting seriously ill and dying.
Vaccines are commonly designed to prevent transmission. For example it is a critical aspect of the measles vaccine [1]. If a magic wand could've been waved the covid vaccines would've worked that way too, and that is why they were sold to the public as reducing transmission.
> Vaccines and lockdowns were vital in high-density areas like Victoria and NSW...
There are enough counterexamples of people and places where different trade-offs were chosen. e.g. Brisbane. To say they were vital is injecting your own opinion.
c) COVID was only allowed to spread once enough of the population was vaccinated... instead of needing to go into hospital people could stay at home... it has taken years for the system to recover.
The overwhelming majority of people were always just going to need to stay at home for a few days, even pre vaccine. The reason the system has taken so long to recover is due to the suboptimal approach we took where we elongated the period of reduced throughput through the hospital system. The effect here was threefold:
1) The backlog of surgeries needed to be cleared.
2) Many patients had worsened over covid and now required more intense treatment.
3) Preventable disease was not being caught in routine checkups etc.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...