All: please don't take HN threads into tedious flamewar on eternal flamewar topics. "Vax versus antivax" is one of the most tedious of them all. If you're tempted to post angrily about how wrong and bad the other side is, please inhibit that impulse. If your comment was going to repeat something we've all heard many times before, please don't post it.
Obviously the vax theme is topical in this case—that makes this a good chance to apply discernment and distinguish between thoughtful, substantive comments and shallow, dismissive ones. As that is what we all should be doing on HN anyway, practice is good.
I’ve typed out 3 comments to 3 separate people before deleting them. I didn’t see the point.
Folks, it’s a good idea to heed dang’s warning at the top of the thread. I’ve read all the comments and can confidently say there’s nothing worth reading here. Just people absolutely convinced of their ideas and principles, shouting past each other. Nothing we haven’t seen on this topic 50 times before.
> I’ve read all the comments and can confidently say there’s nothing worth reading here
I particularly dislike this type of comments, which tell people what to feel and think about a thread, however well meaning it might be. You're in a performative contradiction when you shallowly dismiss the entire thread with an overgeneralization and with that make it definitely less useful.
Yes, this thread is more divided than your usual one, but I personally found useful nuggets of information in the comments, so it is definitely not "nothing worth reading".
The interesting discussions are not one-dimensional back-and-forth such as this one. It is when participants weigh multiple arguments against eachother and try to reach new insights.
Discussion of value-systems are just hopeless, as there's no common ground.
“Interesting” is not a property of the discussion in itself but created between the reader and the discussion. Maybe the reader is also culpable for the perceived dimensionality reduction?
To me heavy disagreement usually makes more interesting of a discussion than mere conformity, and HN is one of the few places where it can take place without bans, kicks, brigades.
I can stand all but the arrogance of projecting one’s perspective as a conclusive “quality” to the entire discussion. It is an insult to the efforts of the well meaning commentators, it is an insult to the intelligence of the readers and their capability on deciding what is relevant or interesting to them on their own.
At the risk of being repetitive, “finding common ground” cannot be a one sided action, else it is seeking mere conformity. And the reader is a side to this; if the reader is stuck at a perspectival narrowing, they will feel like the argument is not working towards common understanding with them while it might as well be their narrowness preventing them from being receptive.
Also common ground is not a geometric mean; eg in an imaged conversation for and against capital punishment, common ground is not killing the convict just a little. It is about showing the work that lead to people to their own conclusions, which usually tend to have more in common than people expect.
Not being conclusive is OK for such discussions, and people have a right to defend their positions, as long as it doesn’t degrade to name calling and other conversation killers.
The most dominant name calling in this thread right now is from people that condemn all participants for not being sophisticated or conciliatory enough. That is the performative contradiction I’ve been talking about.
That’s a really solid rule for productive discussions. The great difficulty would lie in actually enforcing it on HN.
Maybe some sort of cool-down timer for posters, who are otherwise polite, getting too agitated? Some kind of rate limiting for new comments on a controversial submission?
Hacker News actually already has that to a first approximation (though if I understand correctly, rather than being applied to heated or controversial threads, it's applied to users who have difficulty consistently adhering to the site guidelines. Their accounts are flagged as not allowing more than a certain number of posts per hour).
Much better: bots insert fake responses that are calming and neutral. If you want to tailor/manage discussions (manipulate might be a better word), it seems like adding to the discussion is far better than censorship (or rate limiting as you call it). People being shadowbaned or rate limited or whatever just aggravates the problem because it makes people more hostile in general. Don’t censor bad speech, promote what you believe to be better speech.
> Discussion of value-systems are just hopeless, as there's no common ground.
It boils down to freedom vs. safety, period. It's just that simple.
In a free society, you have to sacrifice safety. The safety people are fine to feel they way they want to feel, but they need to understand that argument is antithetical to American values. America is founded on the ideals of freedom; it was not founded on the ideals of safety.
Neither safety nor freedom are absolute, or are intended to be. It's treating them like they are that makes the discussion unhelpful.
We have structures to keep you safe from murder, or from breathing cigarette smoke in your workplace. Where your freedom can hurt others, we value finding a middle ground. That's not new.
Vaccines are already mandated in some situations and we don't fight about it. This topic is only controversial because some have found they can profit by turning it into a culture war.
But we're talking about nudging the freedom/safety line a slight bit one way or the other. It's already in the middle. Losing one right doesn't mean that we're not qualitatively as free as we were yesterday.
As someone who also started reading the comments in this thread, I can wholeheartedly second this.
Remember, nobody is going to change their mind on this issue because of a perfectly worded response in an internet discussion. If you want to change anyone's mind, focus on the people you can speak to in the real world—and have a conversation filled with love and respect. Fear of vaccination is a powerful meme which cannot be countered by deriding the people who are sincerely captured by it. Instead, I suggest you walk them through the statistics and place them into human terms and human context. Show them how to calculate risk of death. Show them how to calculate risk of long term injury.
My advice was meant to be interpreted in a more holistic sense. It is true that occasionally, people have had their minds changed by reading an internet discussion. But most people are more likely to change someone's mind by speaking to people they know in the real world, than they are by contributing to the noise on the Internet.
No, really, better not. The people who are "captured" by this meme, as you rather condescendingly put it, generally don't trust the vaccine safety statistics, have many valid reasons not to do so, and are also well aware of the statistics around how dangerous COVID is or isn't for themselves. It would take great faith to believe that the institutions are providing reliable data right now in an atmosphere of mass hysteria.
How about, rather than assuming people you disagree with are "captured" by "memes", you sit down, treat them like intelligent adults, listen to them and only then consider what to do?
Remember, nobody is going to change their mind on this issue because of a perfectly worded response in an internet discussion. If you want to change anyone's mind, focus on the people you can speak to in the real world—and have a conversation filled with love and respect. Trust in vaccination is a powerful meme which cannot be countered by deriding the people who are sincerely captured by it. Instead, I suggest you walk them through the statistics and place them into human terms and human context. Show them how to calculate risk of death. Show them how to calculate risk of long term injury.
We know what the long term consequences of vaccination are: reduction of risk of the long term consequences of COVID. These include breathing difficulties, fatigue and cognitive impairment. The objectively proven benefits of vaccination are so starkly and concretely conclusive that it is functionally impossible for anyone's imagined fantastical, hypothetical concerns to outweigh them.
A vaccine isn't even really medicine, it's science. It is a method of giving your immune system a heads up about a pathogen without exposing you to the actual pathogen. The vaccine doesn't hang around in your body for the "long term". The vaccine material is quickly disposed of by your body. After a few weeks, the only things left inside you is your own immune system, better educated.
There is no single "vaccine material" and pretending there is this single magic completely disappearing thing in all vaccines is disingenuous at best.
Also, just because something disappear from the body does not mean that it will have long lasting impacts (of course that is the point, where the gained immunity is a positive impact, but there could also be negative)
I never said that vaccine material was singular; my intent was for "material" to represent the totality of all material content in the vaccine dose, save perhaps for the water molecules it is suspended in.
If you want to go down that rabbit hole of "long lasting impacts" then you must equally accept that everything you eat is a risk. Everything you wear against your skin is a risk. Every breath you take. Every move you make. Every bond you break. Risk is everywhere.
Running away from a Komodo dragon carries the risk present in any form of physical activity. It's possible that you might trip, fall, and hit your head in a particularly nasty way. But the fact that running isn't entirely free of risk doesn't mean running away from a Komodo dragon is a bad idea.
I don't know of anyone who's "dictating" that you get the vaccine and I would oppose anyone who wants to make vaccinations literally compulsory.
But given how extremely well tested it is, given its utterly astonishing and indisputable efficacy, given that the upsides greatly outweigh the risks[0], I have no problem with society applying a bit of societal pressure on people to get vaccinated voluntarily.
[0] Obviously this is the case when talking about known risks, likely but unproven risks, or even unlikely but plausible risks. But it's still true EVEN IF you accepted all of the wacky paranoid nonsense about vaccine safety and their beliefs about "long term risks". I haven't heard any anti-vax argument that makes the vaccine out to be even one tenth as bad as the disease it protects you from.
>I have no problem with society applying a bit of societal pressure on people to get vaccinated voluntarily.
The problem is that you are essentially imposing your trust in the institutions, onto others.
Trust in "science" is fundamentally different from trust in "scientists". Even though it might make sense to apply societal pressure to mandate trust in "science", it makes no sort of sense to mandate trust in "scientists".
I think it is hard for a lot of people to see or acknowledge the distinction between "Science" and "Scientists" which is causing these debates..
This has nothing to do with trust any more. I no longer have to trust a single thing said by any individual scientist, any individual medical doctor, any institution of science or any institution of medicine. Why? Because sufficient evidence is now available in hard numerical statistics.
Adverse events? Don't make me laugh. Sorry, but even the most doomsday anti-vax postulations about vaccine "adverse events" don't even come close to competing with the proven "adverse events" of COVID infection. A whole bunch of mumbling imaginings don't amount to a hill of beans when compared to four million deaths.
If you want my attention, you'll have to show me evidence that vaccines have caused millions of people to die within weeks and millions more are currently suffering serious long term illness. But you can't show anything like that. You're playing an infantile game of "I demand exact numbers" in order to hide the fact you're asserting phantom dangers while unable to offer any numbers of your own.
I believe this goes way beyond the fear of vaccination. There is rampant distrust in many of our institutions and I would argue this isn't unfounded. We are witnessing profound and fundamental issues that go beyond what some perceive as antiscience and/or racist sentiments.
All this is being compounded by technology in many different ways. Everyone has the ability to create their own version of Malleus Maleficarum and publish it to the world in an instant. Social media, especially with the lockdowns, has demonstrated the limits of our evolutionary biology. Twitter often reminds me of a very crude form of the Babel fish from THHGTG[0]. It's going to take more than love and respect to overcome the effects of the virus and the response to it.
I had discussions about vaccines with relatives and there I've tried to make a case where I think it would be beneficial for them. I've dropped the topic for those that don't want it, perhaps only jokingly bringing it up every now and then, but they do have to test before if they come by.
What I don't understand is this obsession about the vaccination status of strangers. The only time that I felt upset about somebody else's vaccination status was with (our) teachers that said they won't get it. Because kids can't be protected by the vaccine, I think it's justified that the teachers are asked to vaccinate and the manufacturer/gov must compensate them for any side-effects.
Other than that everyone has a right to decide what they put in their body. The state of the pandemic does not justify violating this right.
> What I don't understand is this obsession about the vaccination status of strangers.
Herd immunity. It's an important part of the efficacy of the vaccination of highly contagious pathogens. It's why smallpox is now just a page on Wikipedia, rather than an existential risk to your life.
I get what you and dang are saying, but I'm not so sure it's that simple. If I follow this idea to its logical conclusion, I'm left with simply nihilism. You can use this same reasoning about anything. Why go out and march or protest or do anything for ____ (insert any cause here)? Any single action you do is unlikely to solve a big problem. But everyone can't just give up on everything and go for a walk when things seem hopeless or unlikely to change.
Social pressure is an important phenomenon and public opinion can really end up changing a lot over time, and I'm not so sure it's useless to add numbers to your side of an issue and contribute to a sense of societal consensus. It seems very difficult to pick out exactly what kinds of actions move societal opinion over time. E.g. what were the singular actions between the years 2000 and 2015 that were able to shift opinions on gay marriage so dramatically and make it so widely accepted now in America? If everyone that was fighting for this cause over that time had assumed it was hopeless and just given up and gone for a walk instead, it's possible this shift would not have happened.
It's true that if you zoom in, it's hard to believe that some comment arguing on the internet will have any impact. But in aggregate, probably it does make a difference. Hell, a lot of the conspiracy stuff spread over the internet in the first place.
You are right, people who has contrarian views are only more entranced upon hearing counter arguments.
Though the delta variant clearly shows vaccine works but if you get infected you don't die. Even with infection spikes in France or Spain for example you don't see deaths spike.
In the low vaccination countries you see spike in the infections and in deaths.
Your information is not current as of yesterday evening. Of course the most current information is less reliable as is always the case with emerging information. The vaccines efficacy may be waning for protection from severe covid. Of course all of this is down to definitions and denominators. Are we testing all newly identified cases for variants?
People should absolutely get vaccinated. After Eric Topol's appearance on Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast, the argument has been made and it's airtight... for you, yourself going and getting vaccinated of your own volition.
What should not happen - what cannot happen - is the government or private entities forcing you to be vaccinated, or you lose your means of supporting yourself. It's as un-American as it gets.
Part of being a free society - a truly free society - is that people must be free to make their own choices, even if they're poor choices.
Nobody lives in a "truly free society". This is one of these stupid American inventions that I wish would die because it's so obviously wrong—and so obviously incomplete as an intellectual concept. Everyone's fate is ultimately and inextricably intertwined with the actions of their neighbours. You can either be "truly free," or you can be a member of society. You can't be both.
Here in my home country of Australia, a society which arguably has more freedom than in America[0][1][2][3] we require children to be vaccinated in order for them to attend childcare and primary education. This is because most of us recognise that sending our children into an environment which has strong herd immunity to serious disease like measles is itself a form of freedom. We've traded one freedom (which we didn't want anyway) for a much better freedom.
In America, you have the freedom to have your access to quality healthcare determined by your bank balance. And you have the freedom to live in a community where everyone around you has their access to healthcare determined by their bank balance. If that's freedom, I don't want it.
[0] No civil asset forfeiture. No gerrymandering. No capital punishment. Fewer citizens incarcerated. Less student debt. Near-zero medical debt. No PATRIOT Act. Freedom from gun violence. Paid parental leave. Elections held on weekends.
> You can either be "truly free," or you can be a member of society. You can't be both.
Says who?
I am one of the, according to you, stupid Americans who loves and demands freedom. I am forced to live in society and I am forced to participate by paying taxes. I don’t want your shot or your schools or your healthcare. I want to be left alone. You may think I am stupid but I think you are too.
I never said "stupid Americans." You have the freedom to misrepresent my words, but you don't have the freedom to actually change what I wrote, which remains published above.
> I am forced to live in society
No, you want to live in society. Society is where the hamburgers are; it's where the Internet is; it's where the houses with pipes delivering an endless bounty of water and electricity are; it's where the Hacker News comments section is. Being part of a society means, to some extent, accepting that many things which affect you every day are outside of your control and will be decided by someone else.
Someone decided that you have to be licensed in order to drive a car. You didn't decide that. Your freedom to drive a car (cars being a product of collective society) along roads (also a product of collective society) is determined by the collective will of society—and enforced by the collective will of society.
> I want to be left alone.
No, you want the benefits of society without being a contributor to it. You're just cherry picking the bits you like without care for long term stability of the whole. Society is fragile. And without it we have far less of the things which—if you're honest with yourself—matter to you far more than your affluent, plushy concept of "freedom."
Your post implies that "ideal" is well defined. I disagree. For what it's worth, I vehemently disagree that libertarian freedom is an ideal in theory or would be tolerated by the vast majority of people if applied in practice.
I would assert that most everything that most people actually enjoy in life is directly or indirectly scaffolded by a combination of socialism, capitalism and authoritarianism—and would be made worse by the actual reality of libertarian freedom.
> Being part of a society means, to some extent, accepting that many things which affect you every day are outside of your control and will be decided by someone else.
No it doesn't. You have shown zero proof to back up this statement. It is 100% completely possible to have a completely voluntary society. There is no reason force needs to be used to have a society. It even has a name: anarchy.
This is just the way your world view has been shaped by the status quo and where you grew up. Your mind is closed friend. Society doesn't require government.
> No, you want the benefits of society without being a contributor to it.
You have the freedom to misrepresent my words, but you don't have the freedom to actually change what I wrote, which remains published above.
> Society doesn't require government.
I never said society requires government. Only that it requires collective decision-making. You could require all collective decisions to require 100% agreement among all members, but then you'd achieve little to nothing.
I want the freedom to evaluate a product from what I see around me, and decide if I should use it. It is quite simple.
If it is beyond me to evaluate the product, I would look at people who are capable that I trust, to evaluate it for me.
So this is the basic principle in this context. I should be free to choose who I trust. Just because I trust someone, shouldn't mean you must trust them as well.
But with these mandates, the implication is that every one should trust a certain bunch of people. And that is the freedom of choice that is really being taken away from the people.
It's typical. Entire pro-vax threads are allowed, but as soon as someone presents a different point of view the thread is locked and 'problematic' posts removed.
I think this is result of tribalism. People chose to divide into two groups on important matter, you can chose to belong to the group by sharing their belief system or not.
Why belief system? We read leaflets listing what are painkillers made from and what side effects might come out from taking them and yet we don't read leaflets when we take vaccinations. I personally don't know a single person who would read the documentation before taking vaccination. Acting like this is basically committing statement of faith.
Yes it's tribalism, and yes everyone is acting on faith, but only one side has been tricked by the Pied Piper into avoiding a vaccine that could save their lives. I wonder why that is. (You know Trump himself got vaccinated, right?)
It's a war that has to be fought. It's like...hmm, it's like "racism is great" vs "racism is awful". These two opinions can't really exist in society in large numbers simultaneously without explosive results. Eventually, one side has to win. That's the only way you get peace.
That's the way I see it, anyway.
edit: an example, and a counter-example. Gay marriage is the example: there was never going to be a steady equilibrium reached of roughly half the US opposed and half the US in favor. One side had to win the fight and settle the issue.
On the other hand, abortion seems kind of similar and has in fact been in a fairly steady equilibrium in terms of public support. I think that may be because it's less one issue than two: the right to life of a fetus + bodily autonomy.
Maybe? Anyway, the main point is that there has to be a resolution, and that will only come about through conflict of some kind, which is what we're seeing playing out.
People don't want to hear this, but does anyone have a plausible alternative that might actually happen? Where a debate like this was resolved sans conflict?
What do you propose to do with `anti-vax nutjobs`? They won't listen to you after reading the comment, which you try to completely dismiss and dehumanize them.
Agreed. Let’s not ignore that: different people will have different risk/benefit profiles; that these vaccines are still in fact experimental; that there is no reproductive toxicity report for these vaccines; that there is data showing that the lipid nanoparticles from this vaccine accumulate in the ovaries; the rushed COVID vaccines are responsible for more all-cause deaths than the last 30 years of vaccines combined; that people with natural immunity have no evidence based reason to take these vaccines; that mass vaccination during pandemics create evolutionary pressure for immune escape variants; that there is now data showing that antibody-dependent enhancement is a real possibility due to these vaccines.
This all needs to be followed up on and both these worrying signs and any follow ups need to be accurately and loudly reported to the public. Instead it all gets brushed under the rug and drowned out with “safe and effective. Safe and effective. Safe and effective”.
The antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) is what scares me the most.
While our vaccines were in development, Dr. Fauci described causing ADE as "the worst possible thing you could do" [1] and that you could get a feel for it with animal models, which would be interspersed with human trials. Interspersing the animal models seems incredibly risky to me, and to my knowledge we haven't seen those studies with the vaccines currently in production.
So far, the data does not seem to indicate that we're in big trouble yet -- the vaccines are still effectively preventing death -- but seeing the breakthrough cases gives me pause. I would appreciate if the "establishment" would circle back and address the risk of ADE. Even if it is very unlikely, what is the game plan if new breakthrough strains do start causing this type of response?
Because right now, it seems to me that if humanity puts all its eggs in the vaccine basket, and then ADE occurs with a breakthrough strain, then there is potential for an enormous catastrophe.
different people will have different risk/benefit profiles: should be self evident
that these vaccines are still in fact experimental: all current COVID vaccines are still being distributed under a EUA.
that there is no reproductive toxicity report for these vaccines: I checked on the status of this again, so far this study [1] that will be published next month seems to be all we have. Note that the study is on only 44 subjects, all of them rats. Additionally, please try going to the VAERS database [2] and do a query for “Spontaneous abortion” grouped by year, notice that out of the last 22 years, 48% of such events occurred in 2021 (which we are only about half through). Surely this needs some sort of follow up.
there is data showing that the lipid nanoparticles from this vaccine accumulate in the ovaries: [3], this is in rats, this should be followed up, especially when taken with the context VAERS data above, but the only follow ups I can find are hot takes from non-experts.
the rushed COVID vaccines are responsible for more all-cause deaths than the last 30 years of vaccines combined: [2] again, you can build the appropriate query yourself. I can’t draw a definitive conclusion here, but it’s rather scary that this is being mostly ignored except by right-wing media who are quick to draw their own possibly wrong from-the-hip conclusions.
that people with natural immunity have no evidence based reason to take these vaccines: here’s what The WHO has to say about it [4]. In general it seems when we are about X months past feb 2020, there is evidence that natural immunity works for about X minus 2 months. Which is to be expected as we are collecting data in real time. However the public is being constantly misdirected about this. The party line is that “long term immunity from natural infections is uncertain, but from vaccinations is certain” which cannot be a possible real conclusion because this virus has only been around for less than 2 years, and the vaccines for about half that time. If anything, we obviously know more about the long term immunity from natural infection, than the vaccine. And that WHO report sheepishly admits as much.
that mass vaccination during pandemics create evolutionary pressure for immune escape variants: feel like this should be a no-brainer, but here’s one random article that goes in depth about it [4]
there is now data showing that antibody-dependent enhancement is a real possibility due to these vaccines: there was an NBC report 2 days ago that showed signs that this might be the case, but it got memory-holed [5]. Here’s another symptom of ADE [6]. This (and all the other points) should be talked about, addressed, followed up on. Not condescendingly swept under the rug as conspiracy theories.
A sincere thank you for all of those links, very educational.
It seems to me that the "condescending sweep under the rug" you identify is motivated by the same reasoning that caused Fauci to declare early on that masks don't work - people need to be manipulated into doing the "right thing", and exposing them to information that might make them not do the right thing is bad, therefore that information must be suppressed.
Then, it was "we don't want people hoarding masks that are more urgently needed by healthcare workers, so tell them masks don't work". Now, it's "we need as many people getting vaccinated as possible, so suppress and cast doubt on all information that might make people hesitate". A few decades ago, this likely would have been effective (although arguably morally reprehensible) public health policy. With the internet, not only does that not work anymore but it actually backfires spectacularly, and our government elites haven't come to terms with that.
I find it at least somewhat reassuring that the biggest unknown potential side effect of the vaccine seems to be around female reproductive health, but the demographic by far most at risk from covid is past their reproductive years anyway. The ADE discussion I know nothing about, but look forward to reading; thanks again for the links.
With regards to reproductive toxicity report, I’m not really sure how to prove the absence of something, but the best study I found is on 44 rats. Let me know if you can do better. Aside from that, the VAERS miscarriage data directly supports the hypothesis that the COVID vaccines do indeed have some sort of effect on reproductive health. Can you provide some other explanation for that data?
The VAERS data also directly supports my statement about there being more deaths due to this vaccine than all the rest of the previous 20 years put together.
I am finding many articles that support the fact that natural immunity is at least as good as the vaccines. Here’s another study if the WHO isn’t good enough for you. https://www.precisionvaccinations.com/natural-immunity-after... please let me know if you find anything to the contrary.
Recent evidence supports ADE, but I agree it’s not something to be concluded just yet. The ADE hypothesis directly explains higher titer rates in vaccinated cases unvaccinated and also the fact that more vaccinated counties in California have higher case rates currently. This needs to be looked into further, but if the deleted NBC article is anything to go by, ADE will instead be memory-holed.
Anything else that you specifically have a problem with?
With regards to the VAERS data, it’s simply a matter of numbers. 140m people vaccinated, almost all of them older than 18, and all of them in a short time period. A disproportionate percentage of whom are elderly, by the way. Some of them are going to die after getting a shot for no particular reason.
As far as the miscarriage bit - somewhere between 15-25% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage. 4.4m pregnancies a year, 366k pregnancies a month, 33m women in the us of peak childbearing age, that means that in any given month ~1% of women discover they are pregnant. Most miscarriages happen in the first 12 weeks so we can roughly assume 3% of peak childbearing age women are within their first 12 weeks at any given moment. About 40% of that original group of women has had at least 1 shot, which works out to 2.2m/mo and 73k/day. 3% of 73k means that 2200 first trimester women every day got a shot. Every day, ~400-500 of those women will go on to miscarry at some point within their first trimester. Surely some reasonable percentage of those people will have that happen within a few days - if we say they’re all at the median of 6 weeks along, they have a 17% chance of miscarrying within a week, which means every day you have 7-8 women who get a vaccine shot and miscarry within a week.
This is all obviously an estimation, but the math works. In reality the odds of miscarrying drop as you approach 12 weeks, so if anything, the odds of miscarrying within a week at six weeks is HIGHER than within the following two week.
EDIT:I didn’t even think about the fact that unless you’re getting thr j&j you need two shots, so that’s two chances for a miscarriage within a week, so adjust appropriately .
Yes I agree that math seems to work. I also agree that it is safe to assume that the COVID vaccine is somewhat unique in that it is being administered to women of childbearing age more than almost all other vaccines, which typically get administered to children.
So for a more like-to-like comparison, let’s look at flu vaccine numbers, which gets administered to about 40% of American adults every year (including women of childbearing age). That would mean over the 20 years before 2021, about 250 million flu shots were administered to women of childbearing age, which is at least 5x more than the ~50 million doses of COVID vaccines given to women of child bearing age (my upper estimate based on your quoted vaccination rate for women of childbearing age times 6 months times 2 doses). However, anywhere between 40%-48% of spontaneous abortions over the last 20 years (depending on your exact query) are from this year. Which to me implies that the COVID vaccines are many times more harmful for reproduction than the flu vaccines, and the harm multiplier only gets bigger considering that there are other vaccines that women of childbearing might get that aren’t just the flu vaccine that I’m not counting.
In any case, there is
clearly some debate to be had here, that probably neither of us are really qualified to have. However it is worrying to me that attention doesn’t really get drawn to this and we don’t have many real experts weighing in on what this data means.
Or, when a woman gets a flu shot and then has a miscarriage, she doesn’t assume it was because of the flu shot, because she’s had a flu shot many times before. It seems like you’re being deliberately obtuse here.
I think I’m being very transparent and open minded. I’ll admit your hypothesis about the mundaneness of flu shots is very possible. My only point is that that hypothesis or some other hypothesis needs to be confirmed by experts. Instead the only people we have commenting on this are right wing pundits that have their own axe to grind.
This is exactly what these people can tell to you too, that you `ignore substantial and overwhelming evidence` - making statements like this does not help to solve the issue.
And what is "the issue"? Is it people saying they are being "dehumanized" because the propaganda they watch makes them feel uncomfortable with something that has already had four billion doses given out?
I believe the real issue is the state of mind, where two sides of dispute cannot find a consensus and tension keeps growing over time. Situation like this is leading to physical extermination of one of the sides. We have seen this in the history of humanity.
I work at google and am vaxxed but this pisses me off. I decided that the vaccine was worth the risk and for the best overall but if someone makes a different calculus I can understand and respect that.
IMHO they gone way outside the reasonable scope of an employer - this is a cultural decision at the society level - why the fuck does my employer give a shit about this. Unless the employees are only commuting back and forth to work this does fuck all. It's feel good virtue signalling and I can't stomach any more counter productive SJW bullshit. The risk from COVID is not even that high for vaccinated individuals. What low risk bullshit are they going to make rules about next? Don't expect me to smile when you ask me to trade freedom for a bit of false security.
Want to change something? Then change societies perspective on the vaccine on your own fucking time.
Personally this ranks with their worst decisions and they made some fucking awful decisions over the years. I probably will act as if I don't have the vaccine and let them fire me for it when push comes to shove.
There is a counter point to yours, just as valid, where folks don’t want to be around unvaccinated folks. Maybe they have an immunocompromised relative or child at home. Maybe they don’t feel safe with unvaccinated folks around.
This is a game of odds. People keep acting like this is binary. You’re statistically more likely to have and spread covid without the vaccine.
I would be delighted if my employer enforced this policy but in Finland it’s never going to happen.
Honestly, anyone who's genuinely at risk enough that they can't risk being exposed despite being vaccinated - as opposed to the people who were convinced they are because of stupid media culture war bullshit - probably shouldn't be working in an office, because at that point they're going to be at reasonably comparable risk from the common cold. Seriously. The other four endemic human coronaviruses, for example, are very far from a walk in the park for at-risk people that manage to catch them; it's just that most people with working immune systems have some level of immunity that protects them from the worst effects.
As I mentioned in my comment, many folks have families. We are not dealing with individuals when it comes to a pandemic. We are dealing with contagion amongst bubbles of people. Many people have vulnerable people in their bubbles at home and need to make a living.
But how is this different from previously? Flu, common cold, various other viruses... all present a similar threat to that from covid and spread as easily. What has changed with covid to create so much additional fear and the subsequent authoritarian responses? Any decent person would just keep away from the office if they were ill. What's changed that now a particular course of action has to be mandated with the threat of job-loss as the alternative?
Seems to me that those who are concerned about unfairness for one group are simply transferring that unfairness to another group.
> But how is this different from previously? Flu, common cold, various other viruses... all present a similar threat to that from covid and spread as easily.
Because covid is more transmissible [1], more dangerous, has far longer lasting effects (long-covid), and because vaccines for non-covid viruses are generally more effective to _immunocompromised people_ as we've had longer to deal with them.
Furthermore, flu has been around for generations. We've all probably had some variant of it in our lives, and have some level of immunity. Covid is entirely new. It's far easier to rip through the population and get into the proximity of vulnerable people than flu.
> Any decent person would just keep away from the office if they were ill.
Sure. Except you don't know you're ill. A majority of people will be asymptomatic and spreading it without knowing. This is what is happening in the UK right now.
I'm personally feeling pretty uncomfortable with comparisons to flu and the cold today.
One of the guys on my team has just got out of hospital, he is in his mid-20s with no underlying conditions. Yet when be caught Covid he ended up in hospital on oxygen, was admitted to ICU, there was talk of him having to be intubated before he started to recover. That doesn't sound like a sniffly nose or a bad case of the runs to me.
I know it's only an anecdote, a single data point, but it means a lot more to me.
So... someone with a autoimmune disorder who is on a drug that suppresses their immune system shouldn't be in the office - even if they feel decent daily and definitely wouldn't qualify for disability?
(These sorts of medicines keep folks as healthy and mobile as possible, which is why diseases like MS aren't the sentence they used to be, even if they are still serious).
Diabetes can make you much more likely to have issues with infection too. Should it cause you to stay home? How are you going to eat and pay utilities?
Just FYI, infected vaccinated people have same levels of virus as unvaccinated people, and transmit the virus at the same rate. Best way to “stay away from unvaccinated people” is to just get yourself vaccinated and call it a day. If someone is immunocompromised they are not safe near vaccinated people either.
Assuming this is correct, that would be vaccinated people who get infected, and they are 10 times less likely to get infected in the first place. Antivax arguments are so terrible.
So people who don't want to take the vaccine until it has been fully approved by the FDA should be penalized to accommodate people who neglect their health?
This is not the case. Many people who are double vaccinated are testing positive for COVID and therefore capable of spreading it:
https://archive.is/sYyMf
Look at the data from the UK. The pandemic is far from over there, although hospitalisations are far far lower than previous peaks. There is a non-significant amount of immunocompromised people in the UK (1million+). Maybe the data we are seeing is because the immunocompromised people who take risks all ended up in hospital and died.
Maybe, what you are left with is a huge number of people scared shitless at home, hiding, lonely, scared in a country where everyone is being told everything is fine. My father is in this position, double vaccinated and tested negative for antibodies. Current data shows extremely low efficacy and antibody production in immunocompromised people.
> Many people who are double vaccinated are testing positive for COVID and therefore capable of spreading it
Yes, but the fact that symptoms tend to be much weaker in the vaccinated likely means it's less likely to spread from them. Currently, the problem is that we have those breakthrough cases, plus also the unvaccinated still spreading the disease.
That said, it's true that the new delta variant may mean we need further boosters.
As mentioned in the parent comment I made, it's a game of odds. It's one thing wearing a mask at the supermarket and passing someone with covid. But if I go to the office, pick up COVID, and I live in the same home as someone who is immunocompromised, they don't stand a chance. This is the reality for many millions of families around the world.
It’s funny though how you say this phrase for a vaccine and not for the hundreds of other riskier situations you face daily. “I drove a car…risk was worth it I decided”. It sounds a bit self-important. Vaccines are just something you do. For me it was not a decision. It’s an interesting exploration in psychology where people oppose something mostly because they are told to do it. Like a teenage rebellion attitude. I get this feeling when I feel like I am being taken advantage of or have been recently.
I can imagine it’s tough being a Google employee in the SJW era. There are a thousands ways they tell you you need to change. New language, etc. Constant unrelenting bullshit that you cannot oppose.
I think this is a way for people to take back control of something because they feel a loss of control in other areas.
Just like brexit, people want to go against things because of the people telling them to do something.
Google shouldn’t tell me. The government shouldn’t tell me. SJWs shouldn’t tell me.
But sadly I don’t think there is a way around this. But I do think the SJWs and vaccine/mask crusaders make things much worse.
> It’s funny though how you say this phrase for a vaccine and not for the hundreds of other riskier situations you face daily. “I drove a car…risk was worth it I decided”.
epistemic risk is fundamentally different from empirical risk
you started off strong with the max level condescendence and ignorance
but I do agree with the rest of the message, roughly at least
Of course you made a decision, unless you are an automaton? (ignoring the question of free will here). If the vaccine killed 90% of those who took it, you would of course take it, because "vaccines are just something you do"? No, you evaluated the risk.
And yes, driving a car absolutely is a risk, as is just about everything.
Yes I would take it. Because if there is a vaccine available and recommended to the general population that has 90% kill rate, the thing it’s protecting against would undoubtedly have a higher kill rate then this.
End of days scenarios we would be talking about nonetheless.
No the implication is a vaccine mandate in itself implies a calculated risk assessment that is sufficiently obvious it doesn’t make sense to use it as a basis for discussion.
That's true, but they are the foot soldiers for the technocrats. Like Mao's Red Guard, they are the ones enforcing it on the ground, ousting dissidents and running the struggle sessions. They humiliate, bully, ostracize, get people fired, destroy reputations. Without them the technocrats would have far less power.
No, I don't think so. The radical extremes give energy to each other. They're a problem for centrists.
It's been interesting to watch the center attempt to embrace enough of the (further) left to address the legitimate concerns (and remove fuel from the fire), without swallowing the poison.
It's also been interesting to watch Trump et al conflate the radicals with the center. They say nonsense like "Nancy Pelosi's far-left agenda", and people believe them. What absurdity.
I'm also at Google. Every single one of my reports who are intending to return to office have expressed concern and stress over unvaccinated peers in the office. Every single one.
Google has 130,000 employees. I've got ~10 reports and not all of them are coming back to in-person work. If 10% of the company doesn't want to get vaccinated, there is a reasonable chance that none of those people end up on my team.
The point is that the presence of unvaccinated people is going to cause stress and problems for other people who are less productive and happy at home and want to return to the office but feel unsafe doing so knowing that they would be sharing space with unvaccinated people.
> this is a cultural decision at the society level - why the fuck does my employer give a shit about this.
I don't think they should care if it is work from home (except that it potentially raises insurance premiums for everyone if they come down with some kind of chronic stuff from getting covid or being intubated or have to pay out company life insurance policies), but in the office there is is an obvious interest in having people vaccinated, just like college dorm rooms required even before covid.
Yeah I totally get that there is an interest - I disagree with whether it's a big enough interest at the employer level to justify a requirement. It feels more like pandering/posturing to me. The trade off isn't something that's easily weighed and I doubt we could ever reach consensus (it's pretty much a classic divisive political issue) but in those cases I err on the side of freedom and am sort of fed up with Americans giving up their freedoms.
If you need to meet customers in person, in their offices, they'll most likely require visitors to be vaccinated against Covid too. So you'd have to meet remotely only, which is a different market (it seems to put you in competition with a jillion people from low cost countries).
I don't want to be forced to be around potentially infectious people. The vaccine, like all others, is not 100% effective. Unvaccinated people pose an avoidable risk to my health. I don't want them around me. I don't want to be forced to be around them. Unvaccinated people have made a choice to risk their lives, they don't get the choice to risk mine.
Then you’ll be opting to stay home? If everyone in the office is vaccinated you’ll be around only potentially infectious people.
>Unvaccinated people have made a choice to risk their lives, they don’t get the choice to risk mine.
Doesn’t the vaccine cover for this? You get the vaccine and it reduces your symptoms, making you less likely to end up hospitalized or die. Even vaccinated you can still get infected, get sick from and spread the virus.
I said *avoidable* risk. Avoidable is the key. Driving a car has risks, that doesn't excuse idiots driving drunk or racing into my vehicle. Unvaccinated people are literally like drunks. They can be drunk at home, they don't get to be drunk while on the road, and I shouldn't have to stay home so that they can drive dangerously.
> Doesn’t the vaccine cover for this? You get the vaccine and it reduces your symptom
I don't want reduced symptoms, I just don't want your germs. And I wear seat belt or helmet but that doesn't give you a pass to booze up your commute, even though it would reduce the symptoms of rear ending me.
What you said was you don’t want to be forced to be around potentially infectious people. So anyone who’s been fully vaccinated and unvaccinated people who are currently infected. The only people to my knowledge who don’t spread are unvaccinated who have been previously infected. Robust natural immunity can be had from previous infection or cross reactive immunity from a previous coronavirus strain.
Back to your last point. If you don’t want germs, I’m not sure an office environment is for you. A 100% vaccinated office will still be susceptible to spreading COVID, especially if the Delta variant takes off like it did in the UK and Israel.
There are a number of assumptions underlying this perception. And under each of these assumptions, there is some information that you base on trust on some entities.
And if you vary this trust, the perception changes drastically. So you cannot change things like this objectively.
But with these kinds of mandates, it effectively impose your trust, onto others.
I don't think that is ethical.
Also, going by your reason, every other human being on this planet is a potential source of risk for you. Does that mean everyone should drop dead to make you feel safe. Sure I know you mention this "avoidable" thing.
But don't you see that for a person who is concerned about the vaccines, vaccines are this "avoidable" thing?
what i think people forget is that this isn't (IMO) about what the company wants or whatever, it's about the fact that offices are a nasty space where everybody breathes everybody's air - and diseases simply don't give a crap about where that happens. I'm pretty sure if google were an outdoor office complex where everybody sat 10 meters apart from each other they wouldn't give a crap about your vaccination status.
If anything, i think it has highlighted things like how cramped public transport, bars, clubs, etc really are and we just never paid it attention.
At the end of the day, this is one of the mitigations of a disease's spread and an office is somewhere it can happen. Let me flip it: Remote work ends and you now have to go back in, you're not vaccinated because [whatever reason you want] and you inevitably end up contracting the virus (along with it's risks). (My pessimistic guess is: people then sue the company for unsafe working conditions.)
Being personally educated on the risks to to people in my demographic, I would gladly sign an ironclad “I won’t sue the company if I get covid” contract to work in an office. If that’s the company’s concern, I suspect most people who hasn’t received a vaccine would sign such a contract.
Will you compensate financially the co-workers you happen to infect and who are vaccinated but for whom the vaccine didn't work (10% or so risk)?
It's not about you, nobody's stopping you from playing Russian roulette with your own skull. I personally do not want to be around unvaccinated people any more than I want to be on the same road as a drunk or street racer.
I would agree to that, provided there is evidence to prove that the other person was infected from me and not anyone else and that this specific infection caused them harm.
Restitution on dubious causes is not something that would hold in a court, I think.
I don't think you'd need anything other than pointing out that the person refused to take minimal precautions, even though it was available to them. I'm pretty sure employers have been sued for this one - not doing the basic minimum to keep others safe.
Civil courts, at least in the US, don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt, after all - which is why you can get found not guilty for felony charges but still have to pay a wrongful death settlement for the same incident.
I'm with you except for the sentence about virtue signalling and SJW's; no need to bring the entire culture war into it. (In fact I'm usually on the side of those you call SJW's.)
Vaccination is not a "this is a cultural decision at the society level". It has saved millions and millions of lives. Maybe change your employer if you are so pissed at them?
Is there a coherent thought here? I don't disagree the vaccine has saved lives or even that you shouldn't get it. I can enjoy my job and what I do and disapprove of decisions made by leadership at the same time. It's easily the best place and people I've ever worked with.
It's a very basic responsibility of an employer to try and make their workplace a safe place to work. I'm not sure why that's so difficult to understand.
It's honestly fascinating to me that this is going to be the way we meet Privacy vs Security face to face more broadly. Intrapersonally, they might go hand in hand, but in the group setting, they seem almost at direct odds.
Security (or safety) requires some social contracts to be fulfilled. When these social contracts aren't enough we start to see polices and law take up the slack. Our existing privacy laws and regulations (e.g. HIPPA compliance) could be argued to be too strict, whereas at the same time, we're in an age of spyware / ad-tracking which is in dire need of curtailment.
HIPPA is absolutely not too strict, it has many fundamental holes which need to be plugged.
I am vaccinated but the only place I am willing to prove it is at an airport or a medical facility. There is a developing liberty/security divide which is going very much in the direction of far too far. Going along with the irrational ways so many people talk about vaccination I am not willing to give up an inch of liberty to the hivemind. No “papers please” to allow me to participate in normal society where the group in power gets to decide if I’m acceptable.
A club I attend is now proposing proof of vaccination for continued membership. I tried to inform them of a KISS one time paper proof of vaccination to registry that other businesses I visit practice instead of on prem or 3rd party service scanning of our vaccination cards which contains PII of Real Name, DOB and for some, Medical Record Number, MRN
They were too spooked by the need for health safety ("We must have a safe place!") to grasp the implications of building a honeypot ready for exploit or sell off. So now they have name, address, DOB, MRN, CC, what else is missing? I think the other data brokers will fill the gaps. This a business relationship, not an employer. I fear more businesses will go unchallenged with this convenience route.
> HIPPA is absolutely not too strict, it has many fundamental holes which need to be plugged.
Citation needed? It’s HIPAA, by the way; one P and two As.
> There is a developing liberty/security divide which is going very much in the direction of far too far.
Total drivel. I’m sick of lockdowns and mask mandates. If you’re legally and medically eligible for a vaccine and you haven’t gotten one, I’m happy for private businesses to refuse you service.
There is an example. There has been a proliferation of for-profit companies offering health-related services which aren't counted as healthcare providers which a freely selling and distributing personal data for profit, to law enforcement, and accidentally because they are "not medicine" but in reality they are indeed collecting data about your health and giving you tools, information, and advice as a result of that data.
Companies covered by HIPAA are also sharing your health data extensively either through authorizations which don't very well describe the sharing which is actually happening, or freely without notification or approval as "deidentified" data which has been shown time and again to be rather trivial to unmask deidentified records to figure out the person in question.
it has been repeatedly shown that deanonymized healthcare data is not hard to reconstruct. HIPAA defines a series of identifiers that have to be scrubbed, but it's not enough to prevent reidentification by a motivated adversary.
> No “papers please” to allow me to participate in normal society where the group in power gets to decide if I’m acceptable.
What are your thoughts on individuals contracting and spreading a disease that has killed millions already due to their refusal to comply with the most basic health and safety precautions?
Do you believe that someone's refusal to comply with basic sanitary precautions should take precedence over my and my family and loved one's desire to not die of a preventable disease?
And where do you draw the line in that refusal to comply with basic health and safety precautions? Do you also extend it to other viral diseases that are preventable by vaccination such as measles, or do you single out covid?
One has to believe at some point that liberty is worth a certain amount of risk.
>Do you believe that someone's refusal to comply with basic sanitary precautions should take precedence over my and my family and loved one's desire to not die of a preventable disease?
Did you and your family get vaccinated? What unvaccinated people do does not affect your risk profile in any meaningful way. Are your kids too young to get vaccinated? The last flu season pre covid killed more under 18s than COVID-19 has.
Do we need government mandated vaccinations and mask mandates for every flu season now?
>And where do you draw the line in that refusal to comply with basic health and safety precautions? Do you also extend it to other viral diseases that are preventable by vaccination such as measles, or do you single out covid?
Do you get asked if you've had a measles vaccine before you get seated at a restaurant? Are you suggesting this is a reasonable action?
You draw the line where there is a real serious threat which passes a certain threshold.
But with COVID-19 like so many things, the people speaking loudly about promoting their cause in protecting us from it (not the professionals) have absolutely no conditions for victory and will endlessly move goalposts forward and endlessly try to do more regardless if risks change by orders of magnitude.
If you're vaccinated or too young to be vaccinated, COVID-19 is over for you. The risk went from 1 in 1000 people dying to no worse than the risk in any flu season, unless that very mild risk makes you think that we should reinvent what personal freedoms in society means, stop turning and ending pandemic into a catastrophe.
> If you're vaccinated or too young to be vaccinated, COVID-19 is over for you. The risk went from 1 in 1000 people dying to no worse than the risk in any flu season, unless that very mild risk makes you think that we should reinvent what personal freedoms in society means, stop turning and ending pandemic into a catastrophe.
I'm not sure this is settled fact at the moment. There are known variants which have shown to reduce the efficacy of at least some of the available vaccines.
The danger isn't from the individual unvaccinated person, it's from pockets of them creating a reservoir of the virus from which new variants can develop. Strong arming people into being vaccinated is the stick with which to try to limit these reservoirs.
Personally, I'm comfortable with limiting peoples ability to attend mass events (which are elective and for entertainment value only) in the tail end of a pandemic without proof of vaccination, I'm less conformable about allowing employers (outside of perhaps those who work with people who are at risk) to do the same.
> Strong arming people into being vaccinated is the stick with which to try to limit these reservoirs.
I suppose then that after every single person in more developed countries is vaccinated, we should start readying the troops for invasion into the less developed countries that, inevitably, will not be fully vaccinated? Otherwise, pockets > variants > travel > reinfection.
Or is too inhumane to invade a country to force them to vaccinate fully? Maybe we should just isolate them economically and close borders with them until they do it themselves.
How far should we go?
I understood your personal thresholds, and thank you for sharing. For me only the government should make and enforce a decision on public health at scale, not any employer, that's my threshold.
I have seen other thresholds being crossed in the last 2 years, but now mine has been crossed, and I don't see this slowing down. What's the next threshold to be crossed?
Something like five billion people have yet to have a single dose, I wouldn’t be too worried about “pockets” of holdouts yet.
Yes, variants have shown to be less inhibited by vaccines… but that’s just it, less. Ever had a cold? Influenza? Variants make some vaccinated people sick, but almost none of them end up in the ICU, they’re full of unvaccinated people.
>If a small but militant group insists in putting everyone at risk by intentionally and systematically violating basic health and safety precautions then the only hope society has is to mitigate this risk.
Who is militant? And they aren't putting "everyone" at risk. They are putting themselves at risk surely, but the risk doesn't really spread to people who have been vaccinated.
>You need to prove you are vaccinated when you travel internationally
I also need permission from the government of the country I'm visiting to come at all. They can add conditions if they want and I can choose accordingly.
>So why yes, obviously yes. Don't you agree? Or do you actually believe that an individual's whims and irresponsiblr and reckless behavior should simply put everyone else's life at risk just because?
I don't agree. I think people have lost perspective and have very little idea what the risks of various situations are and can't tell the difference between a risk that could kill millions and a risk that could kill hundreds and are happy to charge forwards to try to prevent any risk regardless of how small because "doing something" has become as a religious mandate.
>I mean, if you really valued freedom then wouldn't you be doing your hardest to ensure that everyone around you should, say, not risk death by an easily preventable disease in spite of everyone except you taking basic precautions?
Freedom is not trying to force everyone around me to do what I determine is best for them.
>do you feel the measles or tetanus shots violate your freedom?
Tetanus basically only spreads through deep puncture wounds with soiled implements. I guess if I didn't seem like I was out of my mind I would want my doctor to accept refusing treatment for a painful and life threatening disease that could only ever effect myself... The question "do you think shot violates your freedom?" really shows that you don't understand my point at all and will continue arguing past and around whatever I have to say.
I am opposed to de facto licensing of public activities based on a choice that should be mine to make. (I did indeed get vaccinated) When there was significant risk and incomplete vaccine access, different rules were acceptable, but only because of the large and temporary risk. Now that that risk is avoidable by anyone in the US who wants to avoid it, continuing to enable and enforce restrictions on everyday activities has gone too far, and normalizing the "papers please" activity does serious harm to our future freedoms.
> They are putting themselves at risk surely, but the risk doesn't really spread to people who have been vaccinated.
They _are_ putting those who have been vaccinated at risk since vaccinated people can still get sick. Also this ignores all of those who wish to, but can't be vaccinated for one reason or another.
Then may be you should complain to people who gave you the vaccine, instead of pushing others to take this thing that apparently does not work as advertised.
> Then may be you should complain to people who gave you the vaccine, instead of pushing others to take this thing that apparently does not work as advertised.
You clearly don't understand how vaccines work. No vaccine in history has ever kept all vaccinated people from getting sick.
An 80% efficacy may be good enough for you to take the vaccine. But for someone they might be looking for 95% efficacy to make it worthwhile for them.
But in no circumstance, I should be able to dictate that my threshold of efficacy should be good enough for you, and thus you should take it as well, so that my riskier choice will provide better ROI for me...
Honestly, what are you talking about? I was responding to this original quote:
> They are putting themselves at risk surely, but the risk doesn't really spread to people who have been vaccinated.
This is false because no vaccine provides 100% protection. You even here have agreed we me. Your point that people should complain to vaccine manufacturers about efficacy is both irrelevant and misguided.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious here but arent those that don't want the vaccine a risk just for themselves? If they want to risk it it's their problem/choice.
One thing everyone seems to ignore is those people that have immunity/antibodies and don't actually need a vaccine. Why is that?
As far as I managed to read here and there not even the shot I had protects me from catching or spreading the virus. It only reduces(at least I hope) the damage done when infected even though my age group should be ok-ish even without.
Whichever vaccine you had, it has a high chance (90ish percent) of preventing any detectable infection, and as a corollary being contagious.
If you do lose the odds and develop an infection, the rates of various outcomes are all better. i.e. very low chance of death or ICU visit, very high chance of no or extremely mild symptoms
People don’t have a good understanding of statistics, of how to treat risk, or of basic disease dynamics.
There is less signal to noise when it comes to reinfections because the data is just harder to come by, but the preliminary evidence shows that reinfections do happen, but quite rarely (some numbers from a few waves of infections showed only 1 out of 150 positive results were from people who had tested positive previously). There has also been evidence that intensity of infection is correlated to post-infection immunity (i.e. if you were asymptomatic you have less immunity than if you were hospitalized)
It is reasonable to believe that having had an existing infection will boost your immunity against future infections and that both vaccines and previous infections will protect you on a diminishing basis, say, for a year or two. (based on existing covid evidence and the behavior of immunity to other coronaviruses which are common in humans which are usually very mild and referred to as a "cold")
How about some citations? At least a few of these claims are wrong. 2,3 I’ve definitely seen at least one study demonstrating the effectiveness of cloth masks in limiting the projectile spread of the disease. Like, recorded video exploring different masks (not all were effective).
5. China’s lockdown was effective, what are you talking about?
To your last point, Brazil is a good example of a complete failure of individual level solutions.
> My mask protects you, your mask protects me". There is no physics behind this, masks aren't one way barriers, were never studied or sold as such, nor are they capable of stopping the sort of explosive air pressure caused by a cough.
The proposed mechanism is that during exhalation (or more importantly speaking and coughing) there are relatively large droplets of saliva/mucus containing viral particles, and these droplets can be catched by masks (they are big and move more balistically, so masks need not be airtight).
But once these droplets are in air, they dry to (much smaller) aerosol that cannot be catched by masks, you would need properly fitted FFP2/3 respirator.
If that were the way the virus spread, pre/asymptomatic transmission wouldn't be noticeable.
There's lots of debate about whether that's really how respiratory viruses spread, but more importantly, we know it can't be that simple because we can see the effect mask mandates had on case curves (there wasn't any). So however they're theorized to work, real world data disagrees. There can be lots of reasons for this that aren't even related to mask material, e.g. most transmission occurs in homes, care homes and hospitals, all places where you'd expect most transmission to take place because people have to be confined in a small space with other sick people for long periods, and also places where you can't make people wear masks all the time.
If they don't vaccine and don't venture out it is fine.
But if they don't take the vaccine and do go to work etc, the risk of them catching corona is higher. They in turn can spread to others.
We have seen the kind of snowballing effect 1 or 2 infected can cause.
Of course vaccines do not have 100% efficacy rate, but the risk of getting corona and its effects is at least a bit reduced if you get vaccinated.
Reporting is that almost no intensive care patients in the US these days have been vaccinated.
We're not scared of covid-19 because it'll make us feel shitty for a few days, we're scared of it putting people on ventilators or killing them. There is a very strong signal that vaccination makes the rates of severe negative outcomes of infection very very small - down to the levels of many other rarely severe diseases which don't justify significant action.
>>> "Liberty" isn't the freedom to put yourself at risk with no consequences to anyone or anything else.
>>> It is recognizing that there must be, at some point, a prioritization of giving people choices that might impact others.
There will always be a set of people who prioritize themselves over others and in the case of corona as we have seen it just takes 1 selfish person to start the snowballing effectt.
We are seeing actual Zombie movie tropes playing out in real life coz of this corona pandemic. even if 98% of people get vaccinated, the holdout population maybe enough to incubate and spread new variants.
Last I checked, I didn't need a license to go outside or buy a coffee.
That's the future I want to avoid, you want the screaming majority to dictate if you're allowed to do anything outside your home, go ahead and continue to advocate social control with this metaphor.
Standard expected response. Which is why I said unreasonable risk. Not zero risk. To test this hypothesis, take a car and drive it around for an hour. If someone doesn't ram into you, congratulations licensing works. Otoh drive around with a bunch of 13 year olds at the wheel. Experience is going to be very different.
I had to pass a background check to start work at Google, my employer before Google, and my employer after. If anything that was much more intrusive than "prove you're vaccinated".
This goes back to the generally weak worker protections in the US. Background checks are a pretty hostile approach for most jobs, since after all it is assumed that the person which was convicted paid their debt to society. Sure, for certain kinds of positions like working as a lawyer or in a bank, or working with kids perhaps it makes sense, but for programmers working on consumer and B2B software it's a stretch.
In many countries there has to be a justified reason to request a criminal record certificate.
As for the vaccine, the employer has no business knowing or demanding anything related to the health of an employee, unless that thing is directly affecting their performance. Lack of vaccination does no such thing.
To be fair: Background checks, in the US, aren't limited to criminal records.
First and foremost, sometimes checks include arrests (without conviction, or a not guilty verdict) if the company chooses the wrong background check company. The government doesn't regulate them very well.
But it can be things like a google search for you (Which means that a protest you went to could mean you "aren't a good fit for the company.").
It can be a credit check: I had to pass a credit check to work at a gas station once. The district manager was convinced that bad credit meant you were more likely to steal.
Very, very often - and more often than a criminal background check - is a drug test. I didn't take a job that did pre-employment hair follicle tests, mostly because the person in the room with me explained she had a drug problem in the past. She had been clean for 2-3 years clean and was willing to take regular drug tests. But they said the tests went back further than that, and no job if the hair follicle test wasn't passed (I think there are now laws that would have protected her).
Urine tests are more common, though. And a slew of employers do random drug tests - some call centers, for example, might do random hair follicle or urine tests (Student loan collections do this in some places). It doesn't matter if it would affect your job or not.
This is all mostly because there is no law protecting it: The behavior would be illegal where I live now.
Now, with vaccinations: Employers do have a little bit of business knowing health concerns if it can affect workplace safety in ways that can make other employees or customers fall sick. They already do this to some degree in, say, foodservice. For example, I know a food factory here (That I worked at temporarily) that requires stool sample tests and time off work if you have any sort of vomiting or diarrhea - you know, because it can make others sick.
These sort of unofficial background checks are unethical IMO, because there's often zero trace of them occurring. That person is essentially blacklisted without any hope of remedy. Unfortunately even where they're illegal they still happen sometimes and the candidates are none the wiser.
I agree with you on workplace safety, but in this case it seems like posturing, since the SARS-2 vaccines don't protect from sickness and transmission (any more). Several countries are experimenting with "vaccinated, cured or tested" to enable reasonably fair and safe access to social life. Since tests will no longer be free, this seems to be a very strong incentive to get vaccinated.
In countries like the UK, Germany, France, etc they're also pondering making it mandatory for health care professionals to get vaccinated. That probably makes sense, together with e.g. teachers, especially since kids can't get the vaccine. But the government must guarantee that any vaccine side-effects will be made up for. The nasty thing about AZ for example was that you would of course get treated if you got the brain thrombosis, but no compensation was awarded. I indirectly know of someone that had this critical side-effect and they survived but last time I heard they were still half paralysed.
The Google background check (along with other employers) verify your claimed credentials (sadly people like about phds). The folks doing it aren't particularly capable, though, I've had to correct errors they made in my check (basic stuff like working at a company for two distinct time periods).
Is this really pushing the envelope though? Routine drug testing by employers, for example, has been considered totally acceptable by society for decades now. I'd consider a one-time proof of vaccination against a deadly pandemic to be far less intrusive than that.
Is routine drug testing universally considered acceptable? If I'm going to be a pilot, maybe. For a developer job, I would never consider one that asked for a drug test (I don't use drugs just to be clear, my objection is to a company having any say in what people do on their own time). People complain about having to do a coding test during the interview process, but somehow it's ok to verify that you don't smoke pot on the weekends?
I've been drug tested for corporate programming jobs before. I wouldn't say it's the norm in our industry though and this may be even less common now, IDK.
But I do feel like there's a distinction between a urine test and a vaccine, since it's impossible to have a negative reaction to a piss test.
As a fully vaccinated individual, I still dislike the idea of having to disclose this fact. Not for any logical reason I can personally attribute, but just because I'm used to not wanting to discuss my personal medical history in a professional setting. Perhaps this is actually worth changing, given how fucked up our medical system is here (USA). Just because something is new doesn't make it bad. What worries me though is backlash for the tiny fraction of population that actually can't take the vaccine for whatever reason.
This line of reasoning falls apart pretty quickly after this point, since if you look for it, you can come up with whatever reasons you want for fearing the vaccine and therefor not taking it. At the end of the day you just need to trust that some things work as designed and that you are probably stronger than you think you are.
I have never done a drug test but had to disclose very invasive information for security clearances in the past. But in those cases I made a voluntary choice to work in a particularly interesting area.
I also have both my vaccine shots and got them as soon as I possibly could.
What I worry about is the idea of being compelled to do it, and of being compelled like you say to provide sensitive information for employment. It's better to push against something that you agree with the goal but are uncomfortable with the methods than wait until you have to fight against something you disagree with entirely. I would have to think very hard before taking a job where I had to prove to anyone I was vaccinated.
My view is that focusing on increasing voluntary vaccinations to the point that it doesnt matter is the answer. Giving up to authoritarianism just this once is not a useful precedent to set.
“ Giving up to authoritarianism just this once is not a useful precedent to set.”
The precedent is already set for things of far less value. Vaccine disclosure actually seems like one of the few things companies require I provide that is valuable for the workplace.
If they can ask for your COVID vaccine status, they can ask for your other vaccines, your HIV status, they can ask for the results of your latest colonoscopy, your blood pressure, your blood sugar, all in the name of a "healthy workplace."
That sounds like the slippery slope fallacy. COVID is a wide- and fast-spreading, current risk to public health. You don't need to ask for more, because nothing else is in the same ballpark.
I never understood this "fallacy", it's really common for laws and policies to build upon themselves. You call it the slippery slope fallacy, I call it slowly boiling the frog. People adapt and suddenly it's the new normal.
> But I do feel like there's a distinction between a urine test and a vaccine, since it's impossible to have a negative reaction to a piss test.
I feel this jab is disingenuous.
The goal of a drug test is to test whether you took recreational drugs. The goal of vaccination is to ensure the odds you contract and spread a disease is low to none.
What I find mind boggling is that the concept of a drug test is extremely intrusive, as it tracks whether you took a recreational drug sometime in the recent past, like in your personal time very far away from the company's offices and while not on the job. Why is that encroachment deemed acceptable and normal by antivaxers but the simple and extremely safe act of taking a vaccine is somehow a major problem?
> Is routine drug testing universally considered acceptable? If I'm going to be a pilot, maybe. For a developer job, I would never consider one that asked for a drug test
Not to mention it would strike many positives thanks to prescription amphetamines being prevalent among developers. Then one would have to disclose psychiatric diagnosis (ADHD) to prove not being a druggie.
After testing at the lab, the lab reports a potential positive, employer contacts you and says that you need to talk to the lab, and the lab gives a pass upon proof of prescription.
Medical Review Officers actually have access to prescription histories. I'm not entirely clear on how it works as I haven't personally seen that end, but they can verify non-negative results without speaking to the donor and report the result as negative (clean) to the company. They only need to speak to the donor if there's a non-negative result and they have no prescriptions that could cause a false positive for that. Also the MRO contacts the donor directly using the information on the chain of custody; the employer is never made aware that there's something abnormal about the sample.
"Is routine drug testing universally considered acceptable?"
In the US, yes. There is a very, very, very good chance that your cashiers, call center workers, and a slew of other low-level (and store management) positions have had to take a pre-employment drug test. A lot of government jobs require it as well (IIRC, the government has some issues getting tech folks because of drug test requirements): Some have to take random drug tests during their employment.
It doesn't matter if it will affect your job at all. In some states, they can reject or fire you for nicotine.
I don't think this is as acceptable outside of the US: I'm in Norway now, and it would probably be illegal without reason (pilots, for example... perhaps). And a real reason, not just wanting sober employees or to sort potential employees.
if taking drugs would cause bleed-over effects into the job time, then it's not really only affecting their own time, and thus, the employer has the right to control it partially.
It's not the 'proof' part of "proof of vaccination" that's the problem. It's compelling an employee to put a foreign substance into their body. This is also much different than requiring an employee NOT ingest a substance. The situation you've created here is akin to restricted speech vs compelled speech (drug test the former, vaccine the latter).
Before this year I think most would have agreed that requiring an injection of a novel pharmaceutical is more intrusive than a non-medically invasive test of urine or hair follicle.
But what makes you think the vaccination will be one-time? There's plenty of indicators the Covid-19 vaccine is only effective for a limited number of months, so -if it turns out to be more like a flu vaccine than a measles vaccine- should we then continuously be able to prove that we got a booster shot in the last 6 months?
> Is this really pushing the envelope though? Routine drug testing by employers, for example, has been considered totally acceptable by society for decades now.
I don't know what's the experience in the US, but in my home country everyone has a little booklet they carry with them since pretty much birth where we register not only when we took vaccines, such as measles or tetanus or hepatitis, but also when we should take the booster shots.
Oddly enough, the booklet looks a bit like a passport. Well, a passport is also a log, right?
So I'm kind of baffled why some people claim this is a radical turn of events.
The radical change is that previous generations took, at scale, vaccines against Polio and Small Pox. To the point these diseases don't matter really anymore. Today we tend to prioritize personal inconvenience over a truely greater good.
Unsure about anyone else, but I have been very much taken by surprise by the level of anti-vax and anti-lockdown sentiment during the pandemic. I'd have expected _some_ of the behaviour we're seeing, but not on this scale. In the UK we've seen huge "freedom marches", which are literally mass acts of disobedience against public health policies designed to save the lives of the elderly and vulnerable.
It makes me wonder what other public reactions I might be wrong about. For example, will people react to climate change getting worse by actively adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? Might they drive (then outlawed) combustion engine vehicles in long processions through capital cities?
I've recently been reading Obama's memoirs and he talks about how he came to realise people are moved by emotions rather than rational argument, how he was disappointed by that but forced to embrace it.
I wonder, therefore, if the poor leadership of some world leaders during the first year of the pandemic is a key factor in the strength of backlash against public health policy we're seeing. Perhaps this situation is an exception caused by a void of decisive emotional argument in the other direction. I don't know, but I do know that I'm surprised.
It's pretty bizarre. At least in the US, there's been mandatory vaccinations for decades for schooling, and only fringe anti-vaxxers have opposed it. It's largely been considered settled and non-controversial (except to anti-vaxxers in recent years); a basic, common sense public health requirement, not really any different from, say, health codes.
Now, apply the same principle to an active pandemic and half the country is losing its mind about it.
The 'freedom marches' as far as I'm aware were mainly focusing on lockdown and vaccine passports. The former is a general liberty issue, but the latter is actually a really sensitive subject in Britain.
Since basically forever, it's been a point of principle that British Citizens Do Not and Will Not carry identification around. Even if you're pulled over by the police when driving, you are only required to submit documentation via post within 7 days of being pulled over.
Dozens of governments have floated identity cards for nearly the last 50 years, and it was a surefire way to quickly tarnish a party's reputation.
> will people react to climate change getting worse by actively adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere?
Rolling Coal is/was a thing and it was exactly that: emitting pollution as a form of anti-environmentalism. See a Toyota Prius behind you? Hit them with a cloud of smog.
Current research shows that the previously infected’s antibodies are equal-to or better than the vaccine. So previously infected should be sufficient, yet I expect these companies not to care about that
Oh that is interesting. Most Data have shown previous infection tends to have much better Anti-Bodies than all vaccines. And I was under the impression that previous infection automatically equaled to have vaccinated, at least in the few countries I know of.
So that is not the case in US and you still have to get a vaccine? Or is it simply because there is no "proof" that you have been previously infected?
The EU limits “recovery certificate” to 6 months (after infection, as proven by PCR teat) vs possibly longer validity of vaccination. So the US is not the only “science denying” country.
Most EU countries (that I checked - Austria is an exception) don’t even recognise the presence of antibodies as proof of past infection.
In other words, there's strong evidence that you get a stronger immune response, for longer, that is more effective against variants with the vaccine than with a natural infection. The paper I think you're referring to (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...) states "It is not known how well these results will hold if or
when some of the newer variants of concern become prominent. However, if prior infection does not
afford protection against some of the newer variants of concern, there is little reason to suppose that the
currently available vaccines would either. Vaccine breakthrough infections with variants have indeed
been reported [17]", but this is directly contradicted by some of the other studies I cited, that to show better protection against variant re-infection.
You are correct, but that doesn't mean it's anecdotal. At this point we don't know whether natural immunity is 'better' than vaccine induced immunity, and it could go either way. There are many disease (including viral ones!) for which the vaccines are orders of magnitude more effective [1].
The simple reason being that the vaccines have the spike protein as a marker - the part of the virus that we expect is least likely to change significantly.
What we do know is that the current Delta variant, which is a fitness escape but also partly an immune escape, has infected a number of people that had the vanilla variant.
> You are correct, but that doesn't mean it's anecdotal. At this point we don't know whether natural immunity is 'better' than vaccine induced immunity, and it could go either way.
There is this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01377-8 saying that natural immunity seems to be slightly worse than Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, but better than AstraZeneca or Johnson vaccine.
If you're exposed to a pathogen, you'll get infected. Immunity makes it so that your body recognizes the attacker and fights it.
Vaccines and prior infection train the adaptive immune system to recognize pathogens so that the body can begin fighting the infection sooner. Some people's immune systems work less well than others, or due to situational factors, a person is more susceptible to infection and they become sick. People with immunity generally do far better at fighting the infection, being less ill and recovering faster.
Nothing is perfect. Vaccines are better than getting sick or doing nothing.
For a big chunk of the population vaccinating is very safe because the virus is very dangerous. A vaccine doesn’t have to be very safe for a disease that kills on the order of one in a thousand off otherwise healthy adults.
Being very young or already having contracted the virus significantly alters it’s risk profile. With a virus several orders of magnitude less deadly you have to start being much more careful that the vaccine is provably considerably safer than doing nothing. That’s not hard when you’re trying to beat 1 in 1000. It is very hard when you’re trying to beat a one in millions risk.
There have been concerns and side effects. Much less amplitude in signal compared to the virus, but still big enough to halt briefly a few of the vaccines, still enough that small children don’t get emergency authorization, still enough for a few warnings about immune reactions.
It is very rational to take a one in a million risk to prevent a one in a thousand risk. It is very rational to pause before taking a one in a million risk that could very well prevent nothing.
From my experience, the immune reaction to the vaccine after having had the infection is an order magnitude worse than what the brochures and previously uninfected people say.
One angle that isn't being discussed – having vaccinated employees greatly reduces healthcare costs for the company and its insurance provider. I'm sure they would love to enforce vaccinations, annual checkups, healthy diet, exercise, no smoking etc. among employees as a condition for providing insurance or employment if there wasn't a social pushback for doing so.
that's a pretty bold assertion, and i dont think it's true. Flu virus will infect someone unfit just as well as someone fit. The fit person may likely not get ill from it, but it doesn't mean they don't spread it.
> The infectious period varies a bit from person to person but it is considered that an adult with flu starts being able to pass on the infection from during the day before their symptoms appear and then they remain potentially infectious for three to five days. The start is probably the same for children but it is often stated that it runs on for up to seven days after onset.
> However, the risk to others is not constant throughout. Infectiousness rises steeply when the person starts feeling unwell and that is when he or she is most dangerous to others. The risk of catching influenza from someone even just before they become ill and after the end of the first three days is quite low.
Exactly because companies are typically not allowed to force employees to undergo certain procedures and treatments - and for very good reasons - no exception should be done in this case either.
> some unvaccinated idiot won himself a trip to the ICU
Don't know what it's like over in the US, but here in the UK 'the vaccinated' aren't some tiny percentage of hospitalisations. Actually, they're currently sitting around 40%, which means there's almost as much chance of your VACCINATED colleague "winning himself a trip to the ICU" as the unvaccinated. You might want to use the word 'idiot' more cautiously.
A vaccinated person is doing the bare minimum to avoid serious complications and the vaccine is extraordinarily good at that. S/he is not an idiot. An unvaccinated person is practically inviting illness. They're idiots, through and through.
No matter which end of the vaccine debate spectrum you fall on, this is free market at work. These are private corporations that can do business with customers and employees as they see fit within the laws. If people strongly disagree, they need to vote with their wallets and either change jobs or need to start a new company.
Yes you can try to lobby although the chance is virtually non existent in this case. I still think very few countries cherish individual rights and privacy as the US
In this particular case the US cherish corporate rights above individual rights. In EU it is >>currently<< otherwise: companies can not (yet?) mandate employees to get vaccinated...
It can be done by law. E.g. France, where 76% of the population support a law making vaccination mandatory for certain jobs, mostly health care, along with requiring proof of being negatively tested, vaccinated or recovered. The same law stopped tests from being free. And all of a sudden people registered for vaccine appointments.
A large part of the vaccine hesitancy is just convenience.
But Google is also planning on requiring people to go back to the office starting September. You can apply for a transfer to a remote position, but that requires that there be a remote position available for you to take and then finding it and matching into it. So yeah, sounds like unless you are already remote, they are requiring you take the vaccine in order to keep your job.
At which point you will be dismissed if you have not found and secured a remote position within the company. That part of the policy has not changed. Until they announce it has we should assume they are intending to follow though.
"just get vaccinated and not worry about getting fired"
The word 'just' must be one of the most heavily used words of the last 18 months. The problem is that 'just' is the start of a slippery slope. Governments and organisations rarely withdraw authoritarian diktats, once we've allowed them in.
The vaccine has an overwhelming amount of data showing it's effective, and very little showing side effects. At some point it's a national responsibility to get it. If you don't, then there's nothing that says you should have a job at faang.
>The vaccine has an overwhelming amount of data showing it's effective, and very little showing side effects.
I see studies exploring long term/subtle effects of COVID, along with controls that were not infected. I don't see a lot of "vaccinated but not infected" and "vaccinated and infected" groups in these studies. I'd be far more convinced if those studies were done.
So effective that we're going back to mask mandates, talking feverishly about boosters, etc. And this is for already vaccinated individuals. Can't blame the boogeyman "anti-vaxxers" for increases in cases and hospitalizations in countries where Pfizer is readily admitting that the "immunity" granted by their product is "waning":
Are we ready to have an adult conversation about mRNA gene therapy and how it differs from traditional vaccines? We're up to 3 shots a year already. Typical vaccines protect the individual for the rest of their life.
Of course. I've seen that headline in plenty of places. But as soon as you scroll past the headline you see:
"However, the two-dose vaccine still works very well in preventing people from getting seriously sick, demonstrating 88% effectiveness against hospitalization and 91% effectiveness against severe illness, according to the Israeli data published Thursday."
Exactly -- people are still free to not get vaccinated, but they're not free to go to aggregate settings where they might infect everyone there, which seems like a reasonable compromise.
It's the same approach as with antivax parents -- don't want your kids vaccinated? Then you'll need to homeschool them.
Vaccination doesn’t mean you cannot be infected, and cannot spread it once infected. It lowers the chances of infection and presentation of symptoms.
So when your unvaccinated coworker exercises his selfish right to be stupid, you’re putting others at risk. The difference here is that your exposing your coworkers children and others who cannot be vaccinated to infection.
We socially tolerate people like this who choose to infect an entire office or daycare with rhinovirus, flu or the cold, because the impact is generally lower. COVID is different, and frankly, people don’t want to be around unvaccinated people just as they avoid people who display bad judgement in other ways.
But we were told to get vaccinated to protect others. Get vaccinated so you can visit your grandparents. Now we are getting a different message. This is why people develop doubts that the authorities have any real idea what they are talking about.
"Being vaccinated isn't a perfect defense, but it reduces the risk to you of getting the disease, it drastically reduces the risk to you of dying from the disease or suffering long term life altering consequences from it, and it lowers the risk of you spreading it to others."
The general guidance hasn't changed. The risk to each other has gone up as Delta spreads, because it's more dangerous. There will probably be other dangerous variants given the huge breeding ground for the virus among the unvaccinated and immune compromised.
Get vaccinated, lower your risk, lower the risk to everyone around you and to the general population of the earth. (And it's incredibly harmless).
I know it’s comforting to imagine that anyone who says something that you don’t like is just a troll, but I’m not here to lie, distort reality, or say things without proof. Both cases were clearly proven, but what does that matter when you obviously know the situation of my friends better than me…
Ofcourse these may be a small number of cases. But you can't see these people, and say that the vaccine is "incredibly harmless"...
How these people are being neglected is absolutely disgusting. I have submitted this link here and it was promptly flagged, where have written why I think that these people deserve to be thanked
The vaccine does protect yourself and others, a lot. It is very much worth it. The reported numbers make this very clear.
It's not absolute protection however. But it greatly reduces the probabilities of propagating the virus.
In a population the effect is multiplied more than the effect on an individual, because of the reduced propagation. If enough are vaccinated that multiplier does make it near-absolute protection.
Thus, it protects you, and it also protects each other through the multiplier effect.
It also greatly reduces the chances of hospitalisation and death from infection if you are one of the unlucky ones who gets Covid-19 anyway in spite of vaccination.
> Now we are getting a different message
No, we aren't.
The message from the authorities has been consistent on why people should be vaccinated, including acknowleging that it isn't absolute protection (with reported probabilities), that people should still take care to protect each other in other ways, and that collective multiplier effects mean it's important for nearly everyone to be vaccinated - people protect each other, not just themselves.
Despite not providing absolute protection to an individual who takes it without others taking it, it is believed to be able to provide nearly absolute protection if vaccine takeup is sufficiently widespread and social behaviour stays careful enough - because R < 1 means the virus dies out instead of continuing to spread, and R depends on collective vaccine takeup and people's behaviour.
Measured likelihoods of infection with the vaccine are reported from time to time, as is the effect of different virus variants. Due to the complex nature of social interactions in different environments, and the fact that data is continuously being produced and analysed, and nothing is static, those reported values are not the same everywhere, and new values keep emerging.
> This is why people develop doubts that the authorities have any real idea what they are talking about.
Different people explain the message in different ways, and emphasise different aspects. It does not mean the authorities are changing their mind on the major points.
But public health messaging is a difficult field of its own: If you spell out all the details and nuances, that some people would like to hear, most people tune out and don't follow the advice no matter how important. They also forget details, then when they hear the same thing put a different way with different emphasis, it sounds different and perhaps contradictory, but isn't really.
It has to be simplified and memorable, for people to follow it, unfortunately.
You're right that when people hear different versions of the same message, it leads people to wonder if what they are hearing is consistent.
I'll try to provide my simplified version:
When you get vaccinated and your grandparents vaccinated and everyone you interact with vaccinated, then wait a while, eventually you will be pretty safe visiting them.
If you only get yourself vaccinated but your grandparents don't, nor any of the people you interact with daily, you will be better protected than them, but they can still give you the virus (with lower probability), and you can still pass the virus on to your grandparents. You'll probably not be too ill because the vaccine protects against severe illness as well, but you might still carry it and pass it on to someone who does gets severely ill. This is why it's so important to have almost everyone vaccinated around you, not just yourself.
For example, the right to freedom of association, and choosing not to employ people who are making reckless choices that impact the safety of their coworkers?
Employees at Google are mostly at-will. Google can fire them any time, although typically, they produce a 6+ month performance record with failure to do job before terminating (mostly to protect against lawsuits). However, Google has terminated people on the spot, with cause. The government will back Google firing people for not being vaccinated.
The takeaway is that the general left now is for firing employees for political or medical reasons, when historically they were against. Why that is, at least in Europe, is because the left is no longer majority working class, it is majority middle class.
That's how you know it's not just a public health measure. For other vaccines, we rely on the majority being vaccinated so that any isolated outbreaks are naturally contained. I assume google doesn't ask you to prove you're vaccinated against measles for example. If one person is not vaccinated, it's to their detriment and irrelevant to everyone else. There are weak arguments about vaccine efficacy etc that some people could still get infected, but the point is that majority voluntary vaccination contains disease to the point that there is no justification of invasive personal measures (in this case disclosing personal health information to an information predator, but its unacceptable regardless of the employer). It seems to me this is much more about signaling to their various stakeholders about their politics rather than an actual public health campaign.
FWIW I think (I think) they should be allowed to enforce this if they want, even if i dont like it. Although I might support measures to make this kind of discrimination illegal, I'd have to think more about that. Despite having my vaccine, I would not work for a company that asked me to prove it, however. I've got no beef with the vaccine, only with giving state or corporate actors power over my health choices.
> I assume google doesn't ask you to prove you're vaccinated against measles for example.
Is there a massive measles outbreak currently infecting millions of people? I don’t see how the fact that they don’t require proof of measles vaccine is in anyway proof that COVID vaccination isn’t in the interest of public health.
Think of yourself at the center of a circle with a series of concentric rings. If you are vaccinated with a 90% effective vaccine, your chance of catching the bug is 10% from anyone in the first ring. However, if everyone in the first ring is vaccinated, the chance of catching the bug from anyone in the second ring is only 1% (i.e 0.1*0.1). Thus with enough people vaccinated even a crappy vaccine works pretty well.
Perhaps a rather simplistic model, but somewhat illustrative.
The same way that my friend who is vaccinated was infected by his unvaccinated wife. Close quarters with an infected person is going to increase risk for some one who is vaccinated. The Pfizer vaccine is 38% effective [1] at preventing infection on average. It’s obvious that spending 8 hours next to someone who is actively infectious will reduce that efficacy rate.
[1] for the Delta variant, which at this point is what matters
"The CDC has found, however, that in rare breakthrough infections — instances where a fully vaccinated person tests positive for the virus — the amount of virus in that vaccinated person's system is similar to the viral load in an infected individual who is unvaccinated."
One could be forgiven though for not being up to date on the latest oscillation.
And a second unvaccinated coworker is also someone that has chosen not to be vaccinated, right? (Obviously there may be some individuals who can't get the vaccine, but that should be a relatively rare circumstance, and could have policies around dealing with it.)
With the delta variant becoming more common, it's seeming like vaccinated people might still be able to transmit the disease, even if they don't become infected themselves. There's also the matter of asymptomatic infection: remember that the 95% efficacy numbers reported by Pfizer and Moderna (for example) are about symptomatic infection; during their clinical trials, they only tested people if they showed symptoms.
And if a vaccinated person is infected but asymptomatic, they may never even know about it. Technically we may or may not call that a "breakthrough infection", but that person could still presumably infect an unvaccinated person, and that's the thing that matters.
> Obviously there may be some individuals who can't get the vaccine, but that should be a relatively rare circumstance, and could have policies around dealing with it.
Right, and having people around them who are unvaccinated by choice is an unnecessary risk to those who can't be vaccinated.
Not that rare in the scheme of things. Odds are strong that if you're vaccinated a breakthrough infection will be much less serious though. However in either case, you've now inconvenienced the breakthrough infectee who has to be concerned with how they go on to infect others, e.g. unvaccinated children.
The vaccination rate for vericella (Chickenpox) is over 90%, so our society has herd immunity and cases are rare. Same with measles, mumps, diphtheria and polio. I don't know the vaccination for meningitis, but cases are rare and mostly in children not old enough to be vaccinated.
If an officemate wanted to be a free rider on one of those they could, and it would be very unlikely any harm would come from it.
If we had a 90% vaccination rate for this coronavirus we would not be having this conversation (and several hundred Americans would not be dying daily from a preventable illness).
As for the flu, its not especially dangerous, not prone to exponential spread, pre-symptomatic transmission is rare and the vaccines are not especially effective. So the flu shot is in a different class than the others.
I don't buy it, even if there was 90% vaccination, which I think we can get to, people want to see obedience. This is as much about calling out heretics as it is about health, especially at companies like google. If broad vaccination was the goal like for other apolitical diseases, there are lots of measures google could support to get us there that don't involve invasive tracking of health information. Let's try to increase vaccine uptake if that's really the goal.
"This is as much about calling out heretics as it is about health"
No, you're wrong, this is about saving lives. Around 300 people died today from a disease that we can stop. 300 more will die tomorrow. Are there perhaps others sub-agendas that some people are pushing under the cover of the pandemic? Yes, obviously, just like with literally every other catastrophe. But the primary agenda is stopping a preventable disease form killing another 20,000 or 30,000 Americans.
Full stop.
Also, I find it baffling you think we can get to a 90% vaccination rate given the politicization of this vaccine.
> A unanimous public opinion tends to eliminate bodily those who differ, for mass unanimity is not the result of agreement, but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria.
-- Hannah Arendt
Thousands die worldwide each die from hunger and thirst. And just earlier, these two stories were flagged off the front page after shooting to the top very quickly:
You don't just get to say "this as about saving lives" and not have any real argument.
Encouraging vaccination, and getting it to levels consistent with other vaccines, does not automatically mean accepting new powers for employers or anyone else to enquire about people's medical status.
Google's move is consistent with wanting to give the appearance of being a progressive company that shares the values of many people here, that think individual privacy and freedom take a back seat to showing that we are taking the disease seriously. This is the same theater we see with airlines and security at other venues. There are real ways of addressing it, and then there are token gestures that are mostly about appeasing stakeholders. This is effectively populism. It's comforting to provide rituals and easy answers, but it is discriminatory and divisive, and not consistent with liberal democratic values, even if you agree with it.
What kind of hyper-politicized, conspiracy-minded sociopath doesn't count "saving human lives from an easily preventable illness" as a reasonable argument? Get out there in the world and talk to some people who have lost loved ones in this pandemic and maybe they can reason with you.
Several of those are essentially required to get a university degree already... so for many people I'm not sure an additional requirement would significantly help things, but it also couldn't hurt.
Less transmission of disease in the office would be a good thing as we return.
They are required if you want to immigrate to the US [1], so I sure hope citizens-by-birth also have to follow similar rules. Maybe you don't need to prove anything because by default people would already either be vaccinated, or had to obtain an exemption?
There are vaccines required to attend public school, but if your parents just say "I refuse" they are not going to kick you out. These hard-core antivaxxers are pretty small in number though.
It's one of those cases where it's required by law, but the law is never enforced.
I have applied for visa in multiple countries, attended public schools as well as university, and even had employment contracts specifying current vaccination.
I have never had to actually present any of that information. I'm not even sure how I could find it.
Interesting! So I guess the enforcement will only start when it's needed to get rid of some troublemaker. "-The person is causing us grief, what can we do to expel them? -Check their vaccination status, and look for other normally unenforced rules, there's gotta be something!"
It's not exactly the same, since the only mandatory vaccine I'm aware of is the one against measles, a very infectious disease which can kill kids and batter adults. It has sequelae which can appear years later. The vaccine has been in use for a long time and is well understood.
So as long as it can be ensured that the unvaccinated won't infect others (e.g. through testing), they should not be forbidden from participating in society. This is not justified by the current course of the pandemic. Maybe if we discover in a few months that the vaccines don't work any more because of the low vaccination rates this becomes more critical.
This would be fair if the equivalent public school spending for that student were instead given back to parents as a voucher to spend on homeschooling or on a different education provider of their choice with different vaccination requirements. But otherwise there is a financial coercion into divulging health choices or giving up bodily autonomy that doesn’t feel right to me.
I don't understand the concept of fairness when we're talking about something that has killed more Americans than every war since the Civil War combined. I would consider every death caused by the asymptomatic much more unfair than someone having to pay for a charter school for the luxury of being a liability to the general public every time they step outside their home.
Every one of us will end up having to pay for the problems caused by 1/3rd the population feeling they have the right to risk my life because of unfounded fears. If said people were so worried about their life, they would do the same risk analysis lots of us did. It's very clear that COVID is more likely to fuck me up than the vaccine.
And if it turns out the data was a result of every first world country in the world coordinating amongst themselves to spread an insanely damaging lie telling us exactly the opposite of the truth, we have much much worse problems.
I'm not sure why a lot of disagreements surrounding this issue devolve in to pointing the finger at some issue that has nothing to do with COVID. I assume it's an attempt to diminish the severity of COVID, by comparing a transmittable disease to one that's not?
To but it simply, I don't risk dying from obesity simply by being in proximity with someone morbidly obese. I risk contracting COVID, and potentially dying by sitting next to someone who has COVID.
There have been studies that show group social dynamics can spread (like behavioral viruses), e.g. the behavior traits that lead to obesity do in fact spread due to the conforming nature of humans.
Timescales are, of course, orders of magnitude different, and maybe that is the only difference that “matters”. E.g. we would still rearrange chairs on a slowly sinking titanic because that’s what humans do.
Remember when employer-sponsered healthcare plans tried to mandate how birth control could be used by women? I couldn't help but notice a lot of people arguing against their own rights.. and now here we are
Birth control and, for that matter, abortion is only affecting one, max. two, people. Vaccinations against a pandemic is affecting everyone. Big difference.
> To be perfectly clear, they are mandating employees be vaccinated if they want to physically go in to an office, not to do (or keep) their jobs
That is not perfectly clear actually. From what I’ve heard refusal requires a “talk” with the HR. Sounds like termination is on the menu if company doesn’t want to grant remote privileges to that person.
What happens to people with health problems preventing vaccination? I assume they would ask for proof, at which point you have to reveal your private health condition.
EDIT: I suppose a doctor's note could say you can't be vaccinated without revealing why.
Given that the CDC just admitted that vaccinated people can also spread COVID (by reissuing mask guidance), what is the point of requiring vaccinations?
It affects the balance of propabilities, and that is everything in the current situation.
Shifts in probabilities make the difference between large scale disease (a wave growing exponentially) or not (decaying to zero).
They CDC have always acknowledged that vaccinated people can spread COVID-19 with some probability. There is no "admission" because that's not new. What's changing the advice is new measurements, modeling, social behaviours, vaccination levels (or hesitancy), and the delta variant all update the balance of probabilities.
"They can still take the bus but they must sit in the back"
I'm getting downvoted but people who refuse to get vaccinated tend to be poor and minorities. And who can blame them for not wanting the government injecting a needle inside their body given the US history?
PS: I'm not antivax by any means, I got my two shots.
I know many who are literally just waiting for it to be approved the regular way rather than an EUA.
This nation has done some horrific human experimentation on marginalized groups and always claimed they were “helping people and saving lives.”
I don’t begrudge folks who have a good reason to distrust the system and demand that we at least do the usual baseline caution in investigating brand new tech
Funny how most people have zero idea what the difference between EUA and the "normal way" means. Buying FDA registered non-drugs and medical devices doesn't seem to bother as much so.
Not the GP, but I'm imagining that they meant that in the same way the 'War on Drugs' was not discrimination based on skin color, it had a disproportinate impact on African-American communities (which for all accounts was by design).
Lower socioeconomic communities have poorer access to vaccinations and lower rates of vaccination.
Just because something does not claim to discriminate by race, does not make it true. Measures to segregate the unvaccinated WILL impact lower socioeconomic communities more than middle class communities.
Lower socioeconomic communities have poorer access to vaccinations
Early on, maybe. Not now.
Find the poorest zip code in Alabama, 35203, which is in Birmingham. Look it up in Vaccines.gov. Nearest vaccination locations:
Publix Supermarket, 0.79 miles, in stock.
UAB Hospital, 1.03 miles, in stock.
Walgreens, 1.62 miles. CVS, 1.65 and 1.74 miles.
Legion Field vaccination clinic, 1.99 miles.
There are a dozen more within 5 miles.
That's a populated area. If you look for Cotopia, AL, a small remote town in the poorest county in Alabama, where the post office closed in 1986, it's not quite as easy. You have to go 9 miles, to the nearest WalMart (#10-0731).
If you can make it to a WalMart, a CVS, or a Walgreens, you can get vaccinated.
The US government has historically conducted quite a bit of experimentation on broad swaths of the population [1], not just your favored marginalized groups. So it sounds like "Karen" is perfectly justified in her skepticism.
Religious convictions, lack of trust, fear of getting an experimental vaccine (which it is under the laws they were authorized and developed). To answer to your question, those things are very hard to change although not at hard as race.
Intellectuals focusing on how the unwashed masses are the reason we can't have nice things would do well to take a long, hard look at themselves and those they serve.
I’m going to call out some BS in this thread. If you work at Google or Facebook you can get a job elsewhere which likely pays similar if not more than your current position. I know lots who have done it and are happier.
We are talking as if Google and Facebook doing something will cause everyone else to do something. Some companies will, others won’t. Reality is, a lot of us are sick of COVID and quarantine and masks and not seeing friends and family and just want it to stop dominating our lives.
I was sick with COVID in April and it was a bad few days. I was then re-infected approximately 10 months later and it was even worse. I have severe medical anxiety and the best decision I made for myself was to get the vaccine.
You can make your own personal choice but other people don’t need to cater to you. Many of us have been personally affected by COVID and our freedom means we don’t need to put up with BS anymore.
I won’t support government mandated vaccines, but I will support individual companies making this decision.
If you, a tech worker at FAANG, truly can’t find another job in this hot market.. then we can start talking about welfare in this country and how most don’t make 500K at FAANG and get totally fucked over by the lack of support from their government. Never mind the complete wreck of an economy the last year was.
Incidentally I was working on some US immigration paperwork this morning, which requires documenting that you got some vaccines before they will give you a green card. COVID is not among them yet.
The required vaccines overlap with ones required to go to school in the US. So between school vaccines and immigration vaccines, perhaps this is why companies have not had to require any vaccines before now?
I’m neutral on the vaccine itself, and I don’t believe Google and FB are doing this for any valid health reason. It’s more political signaling.
Since it’s really one “side” of the culture divide who’s pushing this, I just want to ensure we’re all on the new rules:
1. I don’t ever want to hear the “my body, my choice” slogan again. Not when abortion laws are debated, not when you’re demanding legalization of drugs, not when the dangerous bath houses are being shut down, etc. Your bodily autonomy apparently stops when any vague connection to the “common good” can be made.
2. Don’t even try to continue to play the “IDs for voting are racist” card. Not while you’re demanding to see my vaccine card to buy groceries. It’s just too absurd to even debate it with a straight face at this point, so don’t try.
3. Don’t cry when this same precedent is used by private businesses in ways the “science” will inevitably enable. In 20 years, they’ll have enough knowledge to correlate everything from intelligence to aggression to specific genetic markers that can be tweaked. “Sorry, for the safety of our fellow employees, we won’t hire <racial group> until they’ve been vaccinated against hyper-aggression.”
4. When the right comes back to power, no more pseudo tears when they literally place land mines along the southern border to keep out dangerous, unvaccinated immigrants. Likewise, all your H1Bs were denied cause two people got Polio or some other mostly eradicated virus in India.
I'm in complete favour of vaccination, but I'm amazed that it's even legal for an employer in the US to ask such specific details about one's medical history.
My employer doesn't need to know what vaccines I've taken, or anything else from my medical record, unless I decide to share it.
Mind you, I'll still tell my team "I'll be about this morning for vaccination". But there's a difference between me willing to share information and the company demanding it.
It's weird to pretend this is about "one's medical history" when it's clearly about minimizing risk of harm to others.
People need to accept the reality that spreading a disease is causing harm, and that preventing people from causing harm is a core function of the rules of society.
Spreading disease is unique- unlike assault or robbery or rape or murder it doesn't require the harmer to intend to cause harm, so many people resist accepting that they are hurting other people.
We need to update our societal understanding of causing harm to understand it includes harm which was unintentional, unknown, or done passively.
Your wrong. That's like saying a taxi cab driver who drove a criminal to a place where he committed a murder is partly responsible for the crime.
The virus is the thing that's causing harm. You can't blame an individual for being skeptical about a vaccine (that has more voluntarily reports of causing harm than any other vaccine in recent history, btw) that's experimental, and unapproved.
Also, the science is in on there being an effective treatment, therefore emergency use isn't even warranted. Seems cut and dry to me .
Hilarious comparison, because it's actually like holding a getaway driver responsible... which is exactly how the law does work.
The taxi cab driver would be relevant in February of 2020 when it was new and unknown. If you're going out in public today unvaccinated, you're knowingly complicit in spreading covid.
Wrong again, bc you're leaving out intent. People aren't taking the vaccine bc they don't want to inadvertantly put themselves in harm's way, not bc they want to infect other people.
Or maybe they're like me, and have already been infected with mild symptoms. Have you noticed that no one talks about natural immunity anymore, btw?
Again, anyone who has seen the VAERS data, and doesn't think twice about getting the vaccine, is just plain reckless.
Yet, if you look at the VAERS data, 2021 had more all-cause deaths after vaccinations than the previous 20 years combined. Also had more miscarriages after vaccination than the previous 20 years combined.
Keep in mind also we are only a little over half way through 2021.
Be sure to ignore the big disclaimer on that page, though, right?
> The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted or used to reach conclusions about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines.
My main paint, which I mention in many of my posts about this topic, but sometimes forget to include, is that there are peculiar signs in the data, and that these signs have to be acknowledged, followed up on and investigated, and some conclusions have to be drawn by people with the expertise to do so, and they have to be transparent about how those conclusions were drawn.
Instead everyone is sticking their head in the sand, except right wing pundits, who I think are all idiots and drawing their own incorrect conclusions because they aren’t experts.
> People need to accept the reality that spreading a disease is causing harm, and that preventing people from causing harm is a core function of the rules of society.
Mandating vaccines is going a step further - it's forcing people to do an action, which might reduce their chances of causing harm in the future.
If the sole goal was to prevent people to cause harm to others, we should prevent people from driving (they hit others with their cars) or we should stop people from being drunk (they end up fighting others, and also driving drunk).
So clearly actually, the more nuanced answer is that society is, amongst other things, a balance between protecting others and personal liberty (and these things often fight against each other).
(I'm personally vaccinated, and think as a society everyone should be encouraged to vaccinate, but that it has to be an individual decision and that we shouldn't force people to put things in their body that they don't want to put into it).
I was in the same boat as to thinking vaccination should be an individual decision but I have come around to the idea of mandates in the last month.
As far as I can tell there is no reasonable justification for an individual not to get vaccinated unless they are immunocompromised. It is a purely selfish thing to do. Choosing not to get vaccinated is essentially saying that you want everyone else to get the vaccine but not you because there is some infinitesimal risk involved. If you have to choose between the vaccine or covid you would be very irrational to choose covid, so you are essentially saying you want there to be herd immunity without personally taking any actions. It is pure selfishness.
The longer this goes on the clearer the damage and risk have become. If we don't reach herd immunity the economy will shut down again, hundreds of thousands of people will die in our country alone, unknown thousands more will have disabilities, and all of the problems that come along with social distancing will continue. It is a huge waste of life and resources and happiness in return for what?
Meanwhile the vaccine that has already been administered to hundreds of millions of people with virtually no long term negative effects. With a mandate everyone will be much better off, especially those who wouldn't get vaccinated as they are avoiding the much greater risk of the potential damage covid can cause.
My guess is that more companies will follow suit and I applaud it. The VA hospitals were the first and there will be many many more to come. The government wont ever do it so it is left to private businesses. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is the right call.
Your post seems to ignore natural immunity completely. As in people who have had covid already and are immune, or already have cross reactive immunity from a coronavirus strain in a previous cold season.
This Doctor in the Wall Street Journal last month brings attention to herd immunity gained through previous infection.
You are right it does ignore it. I would be fine to make an exception for someone who has natural immunity. It might make it needlessly complicated which explains why businesses are making it simple and mandating vaccinations.
>As far as I can tell there is no reasonable justification for an individual not to get vaccinated
How about, I don't trust the vaccine research?
You can expect rational people to trust science (which is essentially trusting nature to behave in a regular manner), but you cannot expect people to trust "scientists" just on the basis of rationality, simply because they are human, and is coerciable as the next guy..
That's a fair assessment, my initial comment only focused on one half of the balance you're highlighting.
The problem is, you know what I don't want to have put in my body even more than the vaccine? The coronavirus. The fact that it's some anti-vax luddite coughing on my kid and putting the virus in their body that way instead of a nurse administering a shot is just a minor implementation detail.
We've banned leaded gasoline and smoking indoors because we recognize the harm caused to others, even if it's hard to directly pin-point a specific cigarette to a cancer case. We need to pull society into the 21st century and acknowledge that spreading viruses has the same dynamic.
Since we can't effectively hold people liable for the damage they cause (eg, suing or imprisoning the person who negligently spread the disease when someone gets hospitalized or dies) I don't see any practical option other than requiring the vaccine. Maybe the liability model could work- if you went out in public unvaccinated, you're held liable for the medical expenses, missed work or wrongful death of the people you exhaled the virus onto.
In any free society you need consent of the governed. And especially on the topic of security, there are a lot of diverging opinions.
Does abortion cause harm to human life? Not wanting to enflame anything, but I don't think there are easy answers here. Especially in this case and the danger Covid poses, I believe mandatory vaccination isn't justified by a security argument.
> that preventing people from causing harm is a core function of the rules of socie
Many would disagree with such statement. The core function of society is IMHO preventing people from infriging on rights and freedoms of other people. That is much more complex and multivariadic issue than just 'preventing harm'.
People generally cause harm to others in many interactions that are acceptable and resticting it would be oppresive. Situations where person A causes harm to person B can be classified to four cases:
1) No one is within their rights
2) Person B is within their rights, while person A is not. Examples are classical right violations like assault or robbery.
3) Person A is within their rights, while person B is not. In this case person B has to tolerate the harm, as requiring person A to abstain from that action would be infriction of their rights.
4) Both sides are within their rights, in this case society has to find compromise solution and weight both rights against other.
This vaccination issue seems to me like the fourth case.
One one side, there is the right of bodily autonomy, which is important and fundamental human right.
On the other side, there is the right to protection of health. That is also important right but it is relative based on threat level.
Before the society concludes that the second right is more important than the first, and vaccinations of adults may be mandated, there are several questions that should be answered:
Did we used enough non-forcible approaches to improve vaccinations rates (say financial stimulus)?
What is the quantified marginal risk of a small part of population not being vaccinated to others and how does this compare to other health risks that we accept as inevitable part of living in society?
There's a further complication; in most countries hospitals are required to treat (emergency) patients. This directly puts medical workers in conflict with people who ignore their advice and then require an ICU bed. There is no autonomy for hospital workers; they must quit the field or take the additional risk. This isn't a sustainable situation nationally because the government is not likely to either force them to work or rescind the laws requiring all hospitals to treat all emergency cases. Arguably something else in the rights tradeoff should give way before the medical system is dismantled from the inside or mandatory emergency care is abandoned.
> it's even legal for an employer in the US to ask such specific details about one's medical history.
I would presume it's legal in many European countries as well, and I would expect some would go even farther. Note that they're requiring vaccinations for returning to offices that the company manages, not asking arbitrary questions about medical histories. It certainly would be legal in the country where I live, from everything I've read. Just as private businesses are free to require a vaccination certificate for entry to an establishment (e.g. clubs, or in certain European countries more essential services as well), employers are free to terminate an employee if their presence in the workplace poses an excessive risk.
There is also the difference with me having been patient for some pay off this population to come to terms with their stupidity and pfft. Vax or go to space
Can someone explain the “I won’t get it until it’s fully approved by the FDA” logic to me?
Unlike usual vaccine trials, these vaccines have been deployed worldwide with hundreds of millions of people across many different conditions. Europe stopped using some due to an extremely rare blood clotting episode that was tens of people out millions. That suggests that rare, acute side effects have been (mostly?) discovered.
AFAICT, the FDA rules for full licenses seem to require a six month trial, as well as more information on process / manufacturing / quality control.
That just doesn’t seem that important compared to the massive, real-world “trial” data. What am I missing?
I'm not sure I can explain anything related to the FDA (I'm European) but maybe I can shed some light on the insight what people are worried about.
These vaccines have been applied hundreds of million times in the past year, true. Therefore, we have a very good understanding of their adverse effects in the first 6-12 months. What we cannot know, however, are possible adverse effects that are longer term. Susceptibility to other diseases maybe due to a weakened immune system. Possibly a higher prevalence of autoimmune diseases.
If these vaccines were regular, inactivated virus vaccines, we could extrapolate long term effects from other similar vaccines. But this is brand new technology which affects our immune system, which is far from completely understood.
Agreed on concerns about long-term effects! But I don’t believe FDA approval includes that. If anything, I suspect long covid, mRNA surprises, and similar issues will only be truly apparent in the multi-year timeframe. Again though, FDA approval doesn’t seem to address that. So I understand, “I want to understand the long-term side effects”, but not FDA approval versus emergency authorization.
I had originally hoped that Europe’s use of AZ might have avoided the concern over new methodology. But ultimately the various problems during production, testing, and rollout, “seem” worse than the newness of mRNA (in my circles).
> If these vaccines were regular, inactivated virus vaccines
There are also inactivated viral vector vaccines for COVID. I got J&J because it was what was available to me. I would have gotten an mRNA vaccine if I could. I agree that the mRNA vaccines should be studied for long term effects, but with what we know about them so far, my prediction is that we will find them to be much safer in the long term than viral vector vaccines. Only time will tell.
Viral vector vaccines are not the same as traditional inactivated virus vaccines, and are in fact similar to mRNA vaccines in some important ways:
1. mRNA vaccines and viral vector vaccines deliver genetic instructions so your own cells produce the targeted proteins
2. Like mRNA vaccines, there has never been widespread use of a viral vector vaccine prior to this year.
I challenge you to try again without assumptions! Unless you are saying, for those who are unsure of long term health risks, to just follow your expectations?
Please take a pause before replying to understand why people are hesitant to blindly follow the blind
There actually have been mRNA vaccine trials for more than a decade[0]. The thing about mRNA vaccines is that they have far fewer moving parts, so to speak, than conventional vaccines. So the mRNA vaccine for two different diseases will differ far less than two conventional vaccines for different diseases.
As I understand it, a reasonable comparison is between two mRNA vaccines and two flu vaccines from different years. So if you trust the 10 years of studies that don't show any long term negative effects, and you trust that the particular protein won't have long term ill effects (and, well, if it does, you'd also get them from the virus and probably worse), then the set of assumptions you need to make are relatively small, and essentially the same as the ones you'd make in getting any given flu vaccine.
So please also take the time to educate yourself before calling others "blind"!
Thank you for making a good point. I'm saying we should use the limited data we have to make the best predictions we can until all of the data comes in. Of course, predictions don't always end up being right, weather forecasts being the obvious example, but there is still value in making them and trusting them (with a grain of salt).
Yes! And do not forget, the limited data includes the botched 1970s flu vaccine as well. Don't forget the infamous Tuskgee experiment. These are all valid data points that people can use to say "well i'm not going to be a guinea pig until the long term data comes out". There is also data that most people don't find out they are allergic until the first shot. That's anxiety inducing!
When you start becoming empathetic to the other side, you realize that there are gaps where simply hand waving doesn't make the problem go away. And this is a problem everyone with an opinion, on this topic, seems to forget
There are several adenovirus based vaccines, including vaccines for tuberculosis and influenza, among others. The first adenovirus vaccine I'm aware of was developed in the 1970s.
According to [1] there are only Covid and Ebola approved vaccines based on an Adenovirus vector. Only for the latter we have a couple of years of data and I am not sure whether it has been administered to large populations.
For tuberculosis there is no approved vector based vaccine [2]. Neither for influenza [3].
The effects of covid are far from completely understood. We do know that it kills a decent percent of the people infected with it and gives long term symptoms to another relatively large percent. The long term effects are unclear but they are almost certainly much worse than the long term effects of the vaccines.
My question is whether or not it is a rational position that the risk of the vaccine is higher than the risk of getting covid? Is this a conclusion that someone could reasonably come to - that they would rather have covid than be vaccinated?
If the answer to the question is no, I believe mandates from private companies are something that needs to happen as the government will not be able to act.
I expect for the most part it’s a fig leaf, and when it is approved the goal posts will move. Then it will be, “the FDA rushed approval” with no evidence presented or required.
That’s certainly going to be true for some people. But my express goal in this thread is to hear a good faith “full authorization argument” from someone who honestly argues for it. I believe arguments exist that I haven’t considered.
I set myself a smart goal. 2024. clinical trials for all will be finished by the end of 2023 at the latest and then, give it a couple months to wrap up and draft or bury and reports.
I think waiting for long-term effects to be clear is a defensible position.
What I don’t follow is that, AFAICT, full authorization is likely ~6 months from the date of filing (so November to January depending on manufacturer). So we won’t have long-term data.
Is full FDA approval meaningful to you? If so, how?
> I think waiting for long-term effects to be clear is a defensible position.
Unless you get infected, in which case you made a pretty big mistake.
So then your basically saying you don't want to get vaccinated or get covid. I'm guessing you probably also want to stop social distancing. in which case you would eventually certainly get covid if it weren't for the existence of the vaccines.
So the choices are:
- Don't get vaccinated and everyone continues social distancing for several years, or until you get Covid.
- Don't get vaccinated and stop social distancing once everyone else gets the vaccine
- Get vaccinated
Only the third option is remotely defensible. The second option is borderline sociopathic and there are enough people taking it that it is far more dangerous than option 3.
I haven't looked at it much but it doesn't seem like a reliable enough treatment that one wouldn't want to be vaccinated. It seems like there are a bunch of different drugs that have shown to be effective but none are in the ballpark of two doses of Pfizer or Moderna
I don't disagree with you. In fact, I don't know what the correct policy should be. But we have focused heavily on preventing infection, and the vaccines have been amazing at this so far. Because now of variants and decreasing immunity, we know boosters will be needed, and for how long? Also some people are having bad side effects, like blood clots, heart problems, exhaustion, and even death, making others skeptical. No doubt it is safer than covid though. But this makes me wonder if we should have more comprehensive policy. Ivermectin seems great at treatment at various stages of covid once infected without those side effects, and also seems to hold up better against the variants. But it also looks less effective overall.
The right answer is for everyone to get vaccinated as soon as it is available to them, preferably with the mrna vaccines. Then we don't have to worry much about treatment because the disease will no longer be a part of our daily lives.
The terrible side effects you speak of effect an absolutely miniscule number of people relative to the hundreds of millions who have had the vaccine with no such effects.
Previous to this summer I wasn't so certain that the vaccine should be effectively mandated but after seeing the effect that vaccine hesitancy has on people I know longer think there is any reason businesses shouldn't mandate their employees and customers be vaccinated.
Appreciate the response. Regarding side effects, I picked those 3 because at least in my own family ~25% had those shortly after the 2nd dose, and are still ongoing. Their doctors think it’s coincidence, but it makes me skeptical how rare the side effects actually are. Open to any hard data though. If we could treat covid and stop it via natural immunity as well as vaccination, I think it could work better than ongoing boosters and mandates.
I upvoted both you and the parent, as both positions are valid. The difficulty of the issue is that a personal decision to vaccinate or not influences also the health of other people. This result could be weaker if Google didn't insist on forcing people back to the office - but they already made the decision so you either comply or lose your job, there is not much to discuss.
I have some sympathy to this argument, even though I agree with you in overall that based on what we know from the millions of vaccines being administered, they appear to be very safe. But points in favor of the FDA argument, which is mostly around emergency authorization requiring a lower standard of evidence:
- The pharmaceutical industry is notorious for manipulation of trial data to make their treatments looks as beneficial as possible, as they are incentivized to do so. In the current case Pfizer and others have still not made the trial data public, and probably never will [0][1]
- The main study on the Pfizer vaccine contained safety data for an average of about two months - on this basis the vaccine was declared to be extremely safe. Obviously longer term effects cannot be captured in this timeframe [2]
- Due to the requirements to generate a clear public health message, almost anything that may suggest a risk with vaccines is downplayed. See for example how VAERS data is routinely dismissed (with some reason)[3], whereas data on COVID hospitalization and death rates is largely unquestioned, despite containing some room for interpretation [4].
Again, the the totality of evidence suggests that the vaccine are safe and effective. But it is not crazy or evil, as some would suggest here, to question some of what we are being told and how the data is being presented to us.
Does full FDA approval make a meaningful difference, though?
If anything, it seems like if someone doesn’t want to rely on the current EUA (because of limited data, incentives, etc.) then they shouldn’t suddenly be okay with the FDA’s full authorization.
Over the past couple years we’ve witnessed and discussed at length the level of regulatory capture that has affected the FAA (via Boeing).
That makes me wonder if the FDA has also succumbed to the same issues (via Pfizer).
The agencies have a similar role and similar potentiality for capture. Revolving doors, lots of $ at stake, huge multinational corporations.
I’ve brought this up before and was downvoted to hell. But I’m just putting it out there without bias. It’s based on a logical thought process. I don’t understand why we can’t even discuss if there are issues with the FDA’s process being corrupted by corporations with billions of dollars.
Your explanation is completely correct as far as I can tell, but you can see how someone who's unfamiliar with the details might be skeptical. "You're telling me the FDA already knows the vaccine is safe and effective, and they're just keeping it a secret for 6 months because the rules say so?"
Absolutely. But I honestly was (am) hoping to hear it from someone who personally holds the opinion, because I think we’re all missing something (replies so far don’t include anyone saying that’s what they’re waiting for).
I have plenty of my own speculation, assumptions, and anecdotes, but my hope is that someone pops up with an interesting nugget of “actually, EUA < something I haven’t considered >”.
Fingers crossed for you, but I think it's one of those things where the people who think that way are overwhelmingly unlikely to be interested in arguing about it on the Internet. I know I would have bounced right out of this comments section if I were even slightly less extreme in my pro-vaccine views.
Fwiw, multiple companies mentioned they would also move to require vaccination once it’s no longer EUA. I should have included that in my original framing.
To me, that sounds more like “once the government gives us more cover, we’ll do it”. But that doesn’t tell me “who would be convinced after this milestone, but not with the current data? What changes?”.
Google and Facebook are the most important companies for controlling information flow in the modern world. As a side effect this rule will increase conformity in their ranks, with predictable consequences.
I didn’t even think of that angle, but you are completely correct. Each decision to constrain their ranks in some way makes them less representative of other populations of people, whose information these companies still will control.
I can absolutely feel a kind of religious zeal and moral superiority from the pro-vax side. It will be hilariously stupid if long-term side effects turn out to be real.
“I am vaccinated. Look at this unvaccinated person. I am not like them. They are not like us. Lets go find more of them. Let’s throw stones at them. We’re not usually allowed to throw stones, but we can because they are bad. And I am now doing good, and it brings me satisfaction and purpose.”
Vaccinations, like masks, may have taken on a political identity. Therefore a persons decision to be vaccinated may be seen as others as a political statement.
Like many others here, I am concerned about the influence that large corporations have on public health policy and personal health decisions.
Is it fair to legally require these corporations to disclose conflicts of interest (eg investment in vaccines, or manufacturers thereof) given decisions of this magnitude?
Can they be held accountable if scientific consensus changes, such that it in hindsight it becomes obvious that forcing vaccinated people to return to densely populated indoor buildings further jeopardized public health in general? To be more concrete with respect to how such a situation may unfold, please see this peer reviewed paper published in April 2021 "Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein"[1].
Some key highlights from [1]:
- "Evidence from multiple experimental studies showing that single RBD point mutations can lead to resistance to neutralizing convalescent plasma from multiple donors suggests that specific single mutants may be able to evade spike-targeting vaccinal immunity in many individuals and rapidly lead to spread of vaccine-resistant SARS-CoV-2."
- "Our work suggests that it is likely that standing genetic variation alone has already produced a substantial population of viruses with single and double nucleotide changes that confer nAb resistance. These variants will establish quickly in the population under selection pressure. In fact, there is already a precedent for this behavior, as one such selective sweep occurred early on in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic when the D614G mutation rose to nearly 80% frequency in under 6 months [33]."
- "The speed at which nAb resistance develops in the population increases substantially as the number of infected individuals increases, suggesting that complementary strategies to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission that exert specific pressure on other proteins (e.g., antiviral prophylactics) or that do not exert a specific selective pressure on the virus (e.g., high-efficiency air filtration, masking, ultraviolet air purification) are key to reducing the risk of immune escape. In this context, vaccines that do not provide sterilizing immunity (and therefore continue to permit transmission) will lead to the buildup of large standing populations of virus, greatly increasing the risk of immune escape."
- "The juxtaposition of a relatively constrained immune response against the high degree of evolutionary plasticity of the spike RBD (visible even under neutral drift conditions) suggests that SARS-CoV-2 has extensive capacity to evolve to evade nAbs targeting a small number of antigenic regions. This capacity will negatively impact SARS-CoV-2 immunity in humans, whether active (vaccinal or natural) or passive (nAb prophylactics)."
I wonder if this will help the fully remote working cause, with such a polarizing policy some (a lot?) people might as well advocate more strongly to not coming back to the office
I am surprised at the push for return to work. We've known about Delta since December. It took out India and the UK followed. We have at least another year of the pandemic left and more likely probably 2 more years before things settle down. Google and FB really need to figure out how to be remote first.
The Spanish flu took 2+ years. Learning to live with covid is a 5 year thing I think just because of how interconnected we are. Hopefully vaccines will dent it.
I'm really upset with this decision. I have not gotten the vaccine as I prefer the known, extremely low risk of contacting COVID over the unknown longitudinal risk of the vaccine. My right to make these personal decisions regarding my bodily autonomy is extremely important to me. Under no circumstances will I yield that decision to my employer! Their demand only further reinforces my desire not to take the vaccine.
Given dang's comment on guideline, I really don't want to comment back . However, I am just feeling so angry. So many people have unnecessarily died because someone has the wrong idea of risk calculation or political bias in disguise despite all the scientific data. I am sorry. You have a right to not be vaccinated. You have a right to whine about it. But government and organizations also have the right from preventing you to harm others. Still find it difficult to understand why are there so many selfish people in the world. I know it is wrong, but secretly I am not sorry about people like you getting infected or hospitalized. The world might be a better place. Sorry Dang, I deserve the downvotes for not following the guideline as this is an emotional response.
There's nothing selfish about not wanting to undergo a medical procedure to help strangers. A vaccine is first and foremost a method for protecting oneself and one's family from disease.
The only critical aspect of this situation is that there are kids and people who can't get the vaccine. It would be great if we could protect them and people who work with kids/medical personnel should be obligated to get the vaccine with full reimbursement in case of side-effects.
We should absolutely work to have healthier indoors climate through filtering, venting, etc. And I think we should all wear masks when e.g. going to the doctor or in public transport. But none of that will happen, we'll probably continue to spit on each-other and breathe stale air.
My replies were throttled and someone beat me to the punch... :-)
It's not that simple and a very important factor is what that something is. To give an extreme example, we don't call people that don't donate a kidney to help others selfish, even if the others may die without the kidney. We don't even call those that don't want to donate organs after death selfish.
The more accurate statement is therefore that those who get vaccinated (primarily) to help others are selfless. It's good for the rest of us that they exist, but we can't and should not make those that don't want to do this feel guilty, because there's like I mentioned nothing to be guilty of, given the current state of the pandemic.
It's probably a good idea to make it mandatory for medical professionals and people working with kids, as long as the government (or even better the vaccine manufacturer) takes responsibility for any and all side-effects. And if the pandemic changes course and vaccines stop working, putting us in an endless cycle of flare-ups and vaccinations - then it would be worth it to consider vaccination a duty for all people.
It is dishonest to frame the argument in this way.
A better way to see vaccine mandates is that it will remove one of the fundamental checks and measures from capitalism that ensures the consumer get a quality product.
If a product become mandated, then the producer have a vastly less incentive to maintain the quality of the product. And this is the real danger.
The ability of a consumer to reject a product based on what they see, is the crux of our system of economy, and it cannot be removed or written off, no matter what.
But the companies would love to write it off, and point to authorities like CDC, and say, "Hey, look, you are still protected by these agencies", and the proceed to buy them off (or have them already on the pay roll), and in the end, consumer gets fucked.
>I am not sorry about people like you getting infected or hospitalized.
I was one of those people this time last year. No one was feeling sorry then either.
Don't worry I'll get a booster shot when it is due, but I've done my part. Please don't lump me in with the unvaxxed.
EDIT: to be clear, i was just an innocent bystander who caught covid-19 early on while no one could possibly believe i was having the symptoms that we are all so deathly afraid of now. i survived, i have this persistent feeling of weirdness and random twinges of pains, but i survived it without a vaccine. i don't know what a vaccine is going to do for me (at this junction in time, maybe T+12 months will be different lets see what the science says)
I’m talking about viral vector as a delivery method. And you’re talking about testing a COVID-19 vaccine, right? Of course there’s none. But there’s no way to do a long-term testing of a particular COVID-19 vaccine. By the time you finish the study it’s going to be too late. So if someone says “But a vaccine hasn’t been studied long enough!” they just propose to not vaccinate at all and rely on lockdowns/post-illness immunity. However, we’ve got sufficient knowledge about the mechanism of the used vaccines to say they’re sufficiently safe.
> I prefer the known, extremely low risk of contacting COVID
I'm a little confused by this. I live in King County, WA (and I work at Google). According to data reported by the county (as tabulated by the NY Times), one in 19 residents have contracted COVID[0]. That's >5% -- with a 1.8% case fatality rate in the US[1]. That's a bit below a one in 1000 chance of having died of COVID if you live in my county, including the infection fraction. If you look a the risk of just contracting it, based on the county, the risk is higher than any other disease I'm aware of.
That looks like a scary number until you look at it by age, then it looks very different. If you were at risk of dying from flu before COVID then your odds got worse, everybody else's risk level is largely unchanged. Should employers mandate that healthy employees get experimental vaccines in order to improve the mortality rate among non-employees who were already at risk of being taken out by a cold? Seems pretty obvious to me, but this thing went well beyond reason a long time ago. Unless Google and Facebook have a bunch of 65+ stalking their halls, it is really hard pretending that this isn't either a political move or some weird power trip.
This reasoning works only if you believe the society isn’t supposed to help the vulnerable.
It’s clear that the older you get, the worse your immunity works. A vaccine isn’t 100% efficient in the first place and will work worse on a 70 yo than on a 30 yo. This means that in order to protect the vulnerable, the society has to achieve herd immunity.
In breakthrough cases in the vaccinated population, their viral load has been found to be just as high as the unvaccinated population. According to Dr. Fauci, this is actually why the CDC changed their masking guidelines for vaccinated people.
...aaand one day later the CDC says the direct opposite in order to justify a new mask mandate, citing unreleased but super scary and definitely trustworthy data.
That’s just grasping at straws. If you try to get a holistic overview, no single measure is 100% effective. But you can combine masks, vaccinations, social distancing, etc. till pandemic stops to be a problem.
> This reasoning works only if you believe the society isn’t supposed to help the vulnerable.
This reasoning is used to justify horrific acts. Is there no limit? Obviously your line in the sand is beyond compelled experimental vaccinations... what about throwing virgins into volcanos? That might actually be more productive, as it could be no less effective in combatting the virus - and it might actually sate the power mad doom cult and show the elderly how devoted young people are to them.
What exactly seems to be experimental, considering the published clinical trials? You’ve got to have a hypothesis, like “In 5 years mRNA-vaccinated subjects develop chronic explosive diarrhea because of X, Y, and Z.” Then you can go ahead and test the hypothesis, that’s how science works.
Yes, you missed stratifying by age and preexisting conditions and BMI. This data was missing in the beginning, but we have more than the overall mortality rate now. This is indeed relevant for young people, which tech largely consists of.
Unknown factors for the unvaccinated are the severity of new strains (against which the vaccines may not work well though, see the CureVac trials) and long covid (which does exist but is not well studied yet). Unknown factors for the vaccinated are the potential of the spike protein to create havoc in your vascular system (yet a real infection gives you an uncontrollable large dose of it), and the related anecdata about rare severe vascular side effects.
Such unknowns have to be respected when making personal, political and employer decisions. Overconfidence easily slips into failure. People have issues with the related cognitive dissonances and prefer to take and rage defending sides.
Around 1 in 1000 may have died in King County, however the risk to an individual varies with age and comorbidities. If GP is young, isn't overweight, and doesn't work in close proximity to others, their risk of death is about an order of magnitude lower just by basic social distancing and exposure reduction. [0] shows COVID involved in about 3% of all deaths in the 18-29 group and about 13% in 85+.
Personally, I can't imagine the guilt if I knew I caused a close family member or friend to contract COVID, and have remained pretty cautious even after we have all been vaccinated.
Man, I work in bioinformatics and study some aspects of the immunity. Like, on a low level, down to specific molecules. Am I qualified to make a decision whether I should get vaccinated? Hell no!
We’re talking about public health here, not just yours or mine. Something tells me we should have a bit of trust in people who studied epidemiology and vaccines all their lives. And the consensus in the scientific community is that herd immunity by vaccination is a way to go.
To be fair, it actually is different. The mechanism of action and the EUA timelines are different and unlike most other widely available vaccines. It is ok to disagree on the crux of the argument which is whether taking the vaccine is a net good, but non-factual arguments do not help.
Obviously some of the details are different, they're different for every contagion, but the principle is the same: the interest in public health overrides the normal interest in preserving individual bodily autonomy, just like with vaccinations and schooling.
The details are the important part here. If you understand why people are against the vaccine, it is because they are not convinced that the vaccine results in the greatest public health. Whether this is right or wrong, trying to gloss over the differences in the details doesn't work here since the conflict is at the level of details.
And no I don't agree with your point about vaccines being "different for every contagion". That is patently untrue, most vaccines developed in the recent past have either been recombinant, attenuated/inactivated viruses or adenovirus vectored vaccines that have undergone extensive FDA approval by now.
This is especially true for the vaccines required for schooling.
> most vaccines developed in the recent past have either been recombinant, attenuated/inactivated viruses or adenovirus vectored vaccines
If you list every other type of vaccine other than mRNA, then yes the majority of vaccines are one of those. I mean, you even listed adenovirus which is extremely new and only used in covid & ebola vaccines, which makes me suspect you don't actually care about the underlying technology or know much about it.
> This is especially true for the vaccines required for schooling.
The start of that movement was with the smallpox vaccine, which was quite a dangerous vaccine as far as vaccines go. Seems a weird comparison to make.
> "adenovirus which is extremely new and only used in covid & ebola vaccines"
So you are agreeing with me that there is prior evidence that adenovirus vector vaccines are safe and efficacious? Because that is exactly what I am trying to say. If you feel that there isn't enough evidence, feel free to omit that from the list and the point still stands. Perhaps even more so for OP's point about school-mandated vaccines.
> The start of that movement was with the smallpox vaccine, which was quite a dangerous vaccine as far as vaccines go. Seems a weird comparison to make.
You completely lost me here. No one is making the claim that the covid vaccines are net bad nor that it will always be so. From what I understand the vaccine hesitant population includes medical professionals and many well informed people who are simply waiting for more evidence about its safety. The smallpox vaccine today is understood to be both safe and efficacious and has been approved by many advisory administrations including the FDA. So if you are trying to make the point that vaccines can initially start off being unsafe and further developments can make them safer over time, you are basically voicing the perspective of those who would rather wait it out than rush to take the vaccine.
> So you are agreeing with me that there is prior evidence that adenovirus vector vaccines are safe and efficacious
I mean, the evidence isn't as strong as it is with mRNA vaccines, but nonetheless they are effective and reasonably safe.
I just think your division of categories is totally arbitrary and not grounded in any evidence.
> From what I understand the vaccine hesitant population includes medical professionals and many well informed people who are simply waiting for more evidence about its safety
You could describe the flat earth movement the same way. The world has a lot of people in it, the set of beliefs contained within run the gamuet. Some people think X is true for all X. I don't think that says much about the answer to the question one way or another.
> I just think your division of categories is totally arbitrary and not grounded in any evidence.
You just agreed that adenoviruses are proven to be safe and effective at scale. I don't think anyone can argue conclusively that mRNA vaccines are, though there is mounting evidence that the incidence of short-time side effects is low. If you follow that rule, it should be obvious what rule the division of categories take and why they are grounded in evidence.
> You could describe the flat earth movement the same way.
Now that is a strawman if I've ever heard one, not sure if you actually intend to be taken seriously with that. There are provable ways to show that the earth is round based on physical laws. There is not enough evidence that the covid mRNA vaccine is safe and effective. One could argue about what would constitute evidence for safe and effective, but pick any reasonable metric (e.g. full FDA approval, long term studies). In fact, I would argue that to think that the COVID vaccines are completely safe without enough evidence to conclusively prove that falls under the kind of beliefs that you describe.
There are always going to be people who are non-rigorous and choose to believe what they want to but I hazard a guess that a large portion of the vaccine hesitant crowd falls under the category of people who want to see a rigorous analysis of the long term side effects of the vaccine before taking it.
Before you strawman this argument again by saying that you can apply this logic to anything, do some research about the history of mRNA vaccines and its associated risks (autoimmune disorders, myocardial inflammation, all the anecdotal reports of persistent side effects, etc.).
The point is not that mRNA vaccines produce these side effects with high probability but that there is high uncertainty as to whether they do or not because of the lack of long term studies.
> You just agreed that adenoviruses are proven to be safe and effective at scale. I don't think anyone can argue conclusively that mRNA vaccines are, though there is mounting evidence that the incidence of short-time side effects is low. If you follow that rule, it should be obvious what rule the division of categories take and why they are grounded in evidence.
I have trouble following your line of argument.
You think that adenovirus based vaccines are proven to be safe and effective at scale. You don't think that mRNA has. But covid was the first time adenovirus vaccines have been used at scale. They're probably a reasonable risk tradeoff for people during a pandemic, but they have rare side effect causing blood clots that are fatal if not immediately treated, so i wouldn't say they have the ideal safety profile.
I think it would be logically consistent (even if i disagreed) to say neither mRNA nor adenovirus had enough testing. It would also be consistent to say both are ok or even mrna is ok but adeno isn't. However it makes no sense to me to say, of two vaccine types that have had the same amount of testing, the one that has worse safety & efficacy is great, the one with the better safety results needs more testing.
Like, is their something i'm missing about your argument? What basis are you making this judgement on?
> Now that is a strawman if I've ever heard one,
How so? I'm pretty sure its not. A straw man is a specific type of invalid argument.
To recap, you said
> From what I understand the vaccine hesitant population includes medical professionals and many well informed people who are simply waiting for more evidence about its safety.
And i said (ad absurdum) that the same could be said of flat earth. Flat earth is nuts, so if your argument applies equally to them, it must be incorrect. Therefore that line of reasoning should be discarded.
> There are provable ways to show that the earth is round based on physical laws
Indeed that was my point: flat earth is nuts. If your argument could be used to support a patently false position than there is almost certainly a mistake in your logic
> Before you strawman this argument again by saying that you can apply this logic to anything
Again that's very literally the opposite of what a straw man argument is. Wikipedia has an article on the topic if you are curious.
> The smallpox vaccine today is understood to be both safe and efficacious
This is kind of besides the point. But no that's not true. The smallpox vaccine is understood to be high risk and is not reccomended for most people. Risk is cost vs reward, so it was a very different story in the 1800s.
My main argument here is not that its safe or not safe (even though i believe it is). I'm claiming that you're evaluating its safety irrationally and inconsistently (or perhaps without researching the underlying topic), and i guess more generally if you're not going to be consistent in your own evaluation you should just listen to experts.
Either you don't understand what a strawman argument is or just lack the understanding of it and I need to spell it out for you. A strawman argument is when you misrepresent someone's argument and attack it in a misguided attempt to refute the original one.
In this case, you are misrepresenting the argument I'm trying to convey by comparing it to something that is proven without a shadow of a doubt (the earth is round). You misrepresented the initial claim as being a statement on the "proven safety (or lack thereof) of covid mRNA vaccines" whereas it was merely about the "uncertainty of the safety of covid mRNA vaccines".
Also to address your other leaky arguments.
> However it makes no sense to me to say, of two vaccine types that have had the same amount of testing
One of the vaccine types (hint: adenovirus vectored) has an instance that has approval for use by EMA. Now if you want to raise questions about the rigor of the EMA compared to that of the FDA and as a result their relative safety compared to the other vaccine types, you are free to do so. Like I mentioned, even if you want to omit that specific type of vaccine, my point still stands. It makes 0 difference to the argument I'm making. If you don't understand this basic point and are unable to progress beyond a single technicality, there is no use having a discussion because you don't get the point that is being made.
> Indeed that was my point: flat earth is nuts. If your argument could be used to support a patently false position than there is almost certainly a mistake in your logic
What is this patently false position you speak of? The only patently false argument I can think of is your insistence that there is enough evidence to conclude that the covid vaccines are conclusively safe over the long term.
You do not need any additional evidence to prove that the earth is not flat. You absolutely do need more evidence to conclude with high probability that the covid vaccines are safe long-term for the obvious fact that there has not been sufficient time since a large group has been vaccinated to know. Not to mention the various variants which the vaccines don't seem to be effective against.
> Again that's very literally the opposite of what a straw man argument is. Wikipedia has an article on the topic if you are curious.
You should definitely go read up on what a strawman argument is. I am not surprised that you use such arguments given that your understanding of them is incomplete. To clarify, I'm referring to the fact that based on your previous responses, I can guess that you are prone to misunderstanding what I am saying as "covid vaccines are especially prone to having horrendous side effects" as opposed to "there is uncertainty about its long-term safety, for good reason".
> I'm claiming that you're evaluating its safety irrationally and inconsistently (or perhaps without researching the underlying topic)
I clearly just outlined several reasons to be skeptical of mRNA vaccines. I have many friends who are immunologists and pharmaceutical scientists who know about the history of mRNA vaccines and their associated risks. If you have no clue about this, you're the pot calling the kettle black and you should do more reading instead of wasting my time. Your deference to "experts" in the public eye clearly supersedes your ability for critical thinking, making sound logical arguments and reading primary literature.
> In this case, you are misrepresenting the argument I'm trying to convey by comparing it to something
Ah, i see where the confusion came in. You don't know what misrepresent means.
Misrepresent means to say someone said X when they really said Y.
To compare something is to say, someone said X (when they really truly did), and I think that X is similar or equivalent to Y due to reason Z.
The key difference is I'm not saying the other person said Y, I'm saying that i think its equivalent. I'm not making claims about the other person's beliefs, i'm making claims about my own beliefs about what they said. An on looker can clearly distinguish what are my beliefs and what the original person's beliefs are, and judge for themselves. In a misrepresentation they can't honestly tell where the original person's belief end and the new person's beliefs start. See the difference?
> by comparing it to something that is proven without a shadow of a doubt
That is generally how argument ad absurdum works (well usually the negation of something proven beyond a shadow of a doubt). Which is very different from a strawman.
If the conclusion wasn't proven false beyond a shadow of a doubt, it would hardly be fitting to call it absurd
> You absolutely do need more evidence to conclude with high probability that the covid vaccines are safe long-term
Yes, i was dismissing your evidence as stupid (i.e. the existence of some unnamed person somewhere believing a proposition having any bearing on the truth of the proposition), not the need for evidence in general.
> What is this patently false position you speak of?
The absurd concludion that the earth is flat. (Its more clear in context)
> You should definitely go read up on what a strawman argument is
You just quoted it at me. I stand by my statement. A priori, "saying that you can apply this logic to anything" cannot be a strawman since there is no misrepresentation involved which is a neccesary condition for it to be a strawman, according to the definition you just quoted.
> I have many friends who are immunologists and pharmaceutical scientists who know about the history of mRNA vaccines...
Really now? Its basically a meme at this point to use a line like this when talking about race relations (e.g. "i'm not racist, i have black friends!"). I'm not sure why you think this would be anymore compelling in a different context.
> One of the vaccine types (hint: adenovirus vectored) has an instance that has approval for use by EMA
Which one? The covid adenovirus ones are emergency approval, which to be clear, is still an approval, but i thought the bar you had was approval without caveats. The ebola one also has caveats - "Zabdeno has been authorised under ‘exceptional circumstances’. This is because it has not been possible to obtain complete information about Zabdeno for scientific and ethical reasons." - https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/EPAR/zabdeno
Is there an adenovirus based vaccine i don't know about that has full approval?
Re: the strawman argument, I already clearly stated where you misrepresented my argument so if you're still unclear about it read it several times. Your point about ad absurdum is wrong because you're not making a statement on my initial argument about the amount of evidence required to make a high confidence decision on long term safety.
Re: "existence of some unnamed person somewhere believing a proposition having any bearing on the truth of the proposition"
You seem to be making things up now, if you make absurd claims, back it up with evidence. Where did I say such a thing? My point has always been about the amount of evidence, if you understood otherwise you misinterpreted what I said. At least now, you are starting to agree with my point about the need for evidence, so we are making some progress here.
> Really now? Its basically a meme at this point to use a line like this when talking about race relations
This is such a dumb thing to say with no relevance to the point at all. If you feel the need to resort to such analogies to strawman (yes, read what it means if you don't get the use of the term here and keep re-reading till you understand) my argument, it is clear you have nothing of substance to say. The reason I brought this up is not to virtue-signal as you seem to have misrepresented but rather to inform you about the sources I'm getting my information from. All of my friends who work in these fields agree with these risks and advise against getting the vaccine until there is more data unless its unavoidable.
Re: Zabdeno - The fact that it is an exceptional use authorization is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that it is approved and has been in use for over a year. That reduces the uncertainty about long-term effects. If you don't trust the rigor of the EMA and doubt that it is safe despite being in use for over a year, it is up to you to discount the evidence. Irrelevant to the point.
In any case, I have not heard anything convincing from your end as to why the people who are holding off of getting the vaccine because of the lack of long term safety data are wrong. And instead, it is increasingly clear that you have not done your research or thought about this matter deeply enough. I know it is not representative of all the people who are pro-vaccine so I would like to allocate my time hearing from those who have actually thought about this and have substantial things to say. Good day.
> Re: the strawman argument, I already clearly stated where you misrepresented my argument
And i disagreed that making a comparison from one thing to another is a misrepresentation provided that one accurately describes the initial thing. As far as i can tell you haven't disputed my counterargument as to what the words misrepresent and comparison mean, as of yet. My evidence is the dictionary.
> Re: "existence of some unnamed person somewhere believing a proposition having any bearing on the truth of the proposition"
> You seem to be making things up now, if you make absurd claims, back it up with evidence. Where did I say such a thing?
I'm responding to "From what I understand the vaccine hesitant population includes medical professionals and many well informed people who are simply waiting for more evidence about its safety"
To be fair, you did qualify that with weasel words about medical professional & well informed people. They were unnamed though. I should have used the same qualification. I don't think changing it to be "existence of some unnamed medical professional or person somebody deems to be well informed somewhere believing a proposition having any bearing on the truth of the proposition" has any material impact on my argument.
> The fact that it is an exceptional use authorization is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that it is approved and has been in use for over a year. That reduces the uncertainty about long-term effects.
Look at those goal posts shift.
> I brought this up is not to virtue-signal as you seem to have misrepresented but rather to inform you about the sources I'm getting my information from.
Yes, indeed, that's why i compared it to the racism context, since that's how that argument is used in that context too - as an appeal to authority that cannot be assailed because the authority is hidden (or potentially made up) making it very difficult to criticize the authority. Maybe its a bit of an obnoxious comparison since its borderline ad hominem to compare to that subject matter. Nonetheless all the reasons that's an unreasonable argument in that context apply here too.
> In any case, I have not heard anything convincing from your end as to why the people who are holding off of getting the vaccine because of the lack of long term safety data are wrong.
Indeed, the primary point i was arguing is that your position is irrational and inconsistent. This has nothing to do with vaccines. I can't actually tell if you are pro or against it, since you seem to be pro adenovirus vaccines, and most covid vaccines other than moderna or pfizer are adenovirus based. Regardless, you'd be wrong if you were pro, you'd be wrong if you were anti, you'd be wrong if we were talking about what type of shoes to wear. The reasons you're wrong for the most part have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Both Google and Facebook are very powerful in delivering any information. Why they cannot convince people with simply pure data that vaccines are:
1) necessary, because here is the data: ...
2) safe, because here is the data: ...
They create all kinds of funny web sites on any topic but not on this very important thing today. Just make a good web site and convince all the remaining skeptics with scientific arguments and data! Put it in one place, make it clear and fair.
Google and Facebook are primarily platforms for user generated conent.
When content is something that's monetizable, people of all kinds are going to use this chaotic opportunity to make a quick buck. The more attention grabbing the title the greater the likelihood people will click on the link.
So its entirely unsurprising that a corp marketing team within google or facebook would be entirely powerless in creating a repo that cuts through the noise. Certainly they could censor all information except their official statement, however people would be highly mistrustful of that and will take any change in narrative as a signal of incompetence.
In the healthcare field, getting an annual flu shot is typically mandated as a condition for employment. The principle is the same - risk to others is deemed too high. I bet you’d not enjoy being a patient at a hospital where a bunch of staff are carrying diseases while you’re vulnerable … because, let’s face it, it’s bad for patients and therefore bad for business.
The same principle is now being extended to other companies and sectors now. I personally wouldn’t want to return to office if colleagues were unvaccinated (I also have a newborn at home). Many of my colleagues wouldn’t either. That would be bad for individuals and therefore bad for business.
At least FB and Google have remote employment for the anti-vax crowd.
Yes, of course I think about others. I would never go in with symptoms of any infectious disease. Were I asked to work in a building away from people that are high-risk or are regularly in contact with high-risk people I would easily oblige. There are multiple possible solutions that do not violate my bodily autonomy.
I agree with your assessment that major adverse effects are unlikely, but ultimately unknowns are impossible to quantify. I know the risk of COVID, I do not if I am being prescribed thalidomide.
You do not know the u-u risk of covid for precisely the same reasons you do not know the u-u risk of the vaccine: they are both on the same timeline.
You also do not know the aggregate u-u risk to others: asymptomatic spread, modalities of spreading, etc.
The aggregate u-u compound the individual u-u of covid. Eg., suppose long-covid occurs at a higher rate than supposed, has a longer lasting impact, has a more severe neurological impact.... then this compounds the u-u risk on spreading (eg., suppose that asymptomatic spread is more severe...).
All you're saying by declining the vaccine is that you care more about the u-u risk to yourself.
> All you're saying by declining the vaccine is that you care more about the u-u risk to yourself.
which is fine, i think this is a valid position to take.
The invalid position is to prevent others from isolating you (who have this position) - for example, by mandating a vaccine passport for certain types of services or activities. You cannot take the position of wanting to protect yourself from u-u risk of vaccines, _and yet_ also continue consequence free life.
Pretty much every position has its own sort of moral defence.
My issue is the conceptual mistake of ignoring the "unknown unknown" risks you impart on others when you accept one set of "unknown unknowns" yourself. It is a sort of hypocrisy that allows you to dodge the shame of a private decision.
In the end, when rejecting this vaccine, you have to fully own the "shameful aspect":
Taking the vaccine is an act many are taking on behalf of others, and in doing so, accept a private risk for a public good. We ought rightly praise this.
Rejecting the vaccine is a rejection of the priority of this public good which many ought regard as shameful.
Personally, were I so inclined to reject it, I'd simply say: "I do not care about society so much" -- and it would be true -- "shame me all you like, who cares". But the latent hypocrisy here and doublethink makes me believe many are unwilling to say this -- because they dont believe it -- and hence my issue.
> Yes, of course I think about others. I would never go in with symptoms of any infectious disease.
Its not as simple as that. Most covid transmission occurs when the infecting person is asymptomatic. And approximately 30% of people who get covid have no significant symptoms at all.
You have a right to make decisions about your body and medical treatment. And, taken on its own, the decisions you make are very unlikely to make a significant difference to the outcomes for the society that you live in. But when large numbers of people decide, like you, to prioritise their own autonomy over the safety of their community, we end-up with a situation that is exploitable by the disease. The way to beat it is to act together. Sincerely, I'd urge you to consider this.
How are you so sure you know the risk of Covid, that has both an immediate and longitudinal risk, that will likely increase due to fitness escapes? Let's not forget there are still unknown unknowns regarding the longitudinal risk of Covid.
Evolutionary pressure selects for less deadly viruses over time. You're right though, there is still longitudinal risk as this does not preclude a vastly more deadly strain--but at that point the effectiveness of a vaccine is similarly unknown.
COVID spreads most in the few days before and after the appearance of symptoms. Organ failure, lethality, are largely due to the immune response to the virus.
The virus has little evolutionary pressure to be less lethal. COVID has already spread before the symptoms appear.
> Evolutionary pressure selects for less deadly viruses over time.
I'm hearing that for the first time, do you have a source?
> longitudinal risk
With longitudinal I meant the risk of what we have labelled 'long Covid' but really seems to be a conglomerate of different, sometimes chronic diseases in different people, that we still don't really know how to treat effectively (not very frequent in absolute terms, but orders of magnitude more frequent than any serious side effects we have observed due to the vaccines).
So if I understand you correctly, what you are fearing is that there is some unknown risk about the mRNA vaccine, that will only reveal itself over time, but that we have no idea about the mechanism of action nor any actual cases. Is that right?
>> Evolutionary pressure selects for less deadly viruses over time.
> I'm hearing that for the first time, do you have a source?
A virus that kills its host before it has a chance to infect others cannot reproduce.
I cannot remember which virus it was (might have been ebola) but it wiped whole communities so fast it died off because there were no new hosts to infect.
Not sure if that's what parent meant - these are extreme cases. In general (e.g. in the case of SARS-Cov2) evolutionary pressure will increase transmissibility but is indifferent to lethality (again up to the extreme point where lethality precludes transmission).
In general no, as was remarked in a sibling comment in this thread: SARS-Cov-2 on average spreads within the first 1-4 days after infection (viral titers peak on day 2 I believe), so the virus is indifferent to what happens after.
I also want to remark that there is the opposite effect that transmissibility correlates strongly with viral load (amount of viral particles) and viral load correlates weakly with lethality.
The issue is that young people can die of covid, even if it's rare, also they can have some comorbidity that they do not want their employer to know about.
Also, you can transmit covid and be asymptomatic.
Finally, death is not the only "bad" outcome of covid. About 1/10 people have "long covid", ie symptoms that persist over time (lack of smell or taste, fatigue..). And this affects young people too.
So, as others have said many times, this vaccine is not a matter of individual choice. This is an infectious disease, so by being infectious, you may harm others, even young people. This is why governments or companies are making it mandatory.
> I have not gotten the vaccine as I prefer the known, extremely low risk of contacting COVID
Your risk of getting Covid if not vaccinated (and leading a remotely normal lifestyle) is close to 100%. With an R0 of 6 you can't just free-ride of people who take the "unknown longitudinal risk", because even if a lot of people take the jab it's extremely unlikely we will achieve herd immunity any time soon -- even if the jabs (or prior infection) granted perfect and permanent immunity which they don't. I'm suprised you think otherwise, and would like to hear your reasoning, in quantitative terms if possible.
Not OP but if he has not gotten it so far with his lifestyle in 16+ months then it could be easy to think you won't get it for another 16+.
Other's just don't care, me for example. I lived in a heavily lockdown country and then said fuck it, travelled to somewhere with (near) 0 covid rules and went nightclubbing almost daily till I got it. Wasn't that bad for me. And my preference is to have it again than being coerced into putting something I don't want into my body.
If my employer makes that decision for me, then that is fucked up and I am quitting, or better yet, questioning the legality of it.
The thing missing from this perspective is the additional people you come in contact with while contagious (potentially while asymptomatic). Saying, “I don’t care if I get sick” ignores the others you may spread the virus to.
This is why folks are pointing out the public health aspect as opposed to a focus on individual health.
> it could be easy to think you won't get it for another
16+.
And the relevance of 16 months would be? At this point it's pretty much a given that covid will become endemic. Due to general idiocy we've missed our chance of eradication.
In the 16 months you cited Covid has become both more virulent and almost twice as infectious. We'd now need around 85% population immunity to stop it from spreading, and the best vaccines only have below 90% effectiveness against symptomatic infection, and less against asymptomatic it seems. And evolution likely still has more low hanging fruit to find to make a virus that only made the jump to humans very recently better adapted to its new host.
So even if OP only has a 20% chance of contracting Covid in any one year interval (and it's likely higher), over 10 years that's a 90% chance (and 99.5% over 25). I have no idea what OP's belief that they have a extremely low chance of contracting covid is based on (that's why I asked, but unsurprisingly received no answer).
If an employer mandates it, then the employer is liable for anything bad that happens, the employers don't have immunity like the vaccine manufacturers. This of course assumes that there is rule of law.
Imagine if we had the echochambers of today around when polio was still running rampant. We would never have gotten it as close to extinction as we have now.
Honest question: why do you say the risk of COVID is known, while the risks of the vaccines are not? Both have been around and exceptionally well studied for more than a year. We have pretty thorough data on the risks of both, don't we?
Not OP, but I guess some anti-vaxxers are wary that what if the vaccination has some "time-bomb" where bad things happen say 5 years after you take it.
But if they're worried about that, they should also be worried about stuff the virus might do in the long term.
I have to disagree here. I have diabetes and have the two shots already. My wife is pregnant and we decided not to risk it with the shots. Impact on pregnant women and babies is still not known. Some trials have started, but you can't just say it's been exceptionally well studied.
Astrazeneca did cause blood clot in some people who ended up dead. Yes, it's a very tiny fraction but this goes against what people are claiming to be the perfect cure.
I personally believe people should have the choice to take the shot.
My wife got the vaccine while pregnant at the advice of her doctors due to the comorbidities associated with contracting COVID while pregnant. Added bonus is that our baby (recently gave birth) has antibodies as well.
I do understand that it ought to be a choice, and it still is, even with these companies. It looks like they are carving out polices for exceptions because there are folks that are unable to get vaccinated. I would hope that being in a class of people who haven’t been rigorously tested (pregnant women) would qualify.
Beyond that, they aren’t requiring all employees to be vaccinated, but anyone who will be working from an office where they may put other employees at risk. The choice still belongs with the individual.
To be fair, infections after the vaccine are so mild that few people notice them, thus will not isolate.
And the effectiveness at preventing transmission drops by something like 10% every month after the vaccination. Maybe this is due to delta-variant increasing?
And after delta, there will be epsilon ... and so on. Whatever strains escape the immunity created by the vaccines will be what spread.
De facto, vaccinations will not stop the spread and will not stop mutations. But they do prevent serious disease and death.
> I have not gotten the vaccine as I prefer the known, extremely low risk of contacting COVID over the unknown longitudinal risk of the vaccine.
There's also a longitudinal risk of covid as well. Given that the future is unknown, why would you count that as a reason not to get vaccinated instead as opposed to a reason to get vaccinated? You should really basically be considering the longitudinal risk as neutral since you don't really have any information saying it's issue.
I wouldn't bet on it. Which is a good thing if you ask me. Because without mandatory vaccinations we will prolong this shitty thing for another year, this time at the cost of children and people under 16, while we had the elderly taking the brunt of the cost so far. And all that because as a society we came to a point where we refuse to take one for the team. Not to mention we ignore our own personal health.
In countries that had lockdowns, children and young adults arguably suffered worse than any other group. For a ten year-old, that's 10% of their life "gone". Children, teens and young adults have foregone life milestones, missed opportunities and friendships. Instead they have been charged with a ridiculous anxiety about something that is harmless to them.
It is comparatively inconsequential for the elderly to isolate.
And which took the biggest losses of life? Funny how children, up to 13 which my oldest age, not really complained that much.
Opening everything up now, without a adequate vaccination rate, would just put them at a huge health risk. Right after the social impact they already had.
Young children are at greater risk from influenza. Why do you think they have been barely affected by COVID this whole time, but somehow in the future, they will suddenly be the ones dying?
Delta is already worse among younger people. That means younger people, not just children, will be infected and affected more. Having unvaccinated children at school also makes future school closures more likely.
We have to reach a point where Covid becomes endemic and we, people, society, are good to love with it. We will reach this point quicker the faster we vaccinate everyone. I guess we can agree school closures are not so good thing, right?
I understand and respect your comments about the relative risk for you personally. That's a personal judgement and your position on that does not seem unreasonable.
Vaccination also protects other people by reducing the spread in the population. By not being vaccinated, you will increase the chances of other people being infected.
How do you factor the risk to others into your decision?
Once the vaccines have Full FDA Approval then of course they can be mandated. Until then, medics decisions should be between a person and their doctor. Just like abortion.
But genetically-modified food could be. By living in the US I'm not sure how OP can avoid it, as it is not labeled. So there you go with a long term exposure with unknown effect.
People having control over their own bodily functions is one of the main arguments of pro-abortion, right?
The counter argument being that when conception happens it's not just one person anymore, this has lots of levels of restriction over a person's body depending on when you consider this "conception" of a conscious being happens
Not necessarily. Many people may generally not want the government mandating or forbidding any kind of procedures, yet still find a compelling argument in public health with a vaccine. That argument doesn’t exist with something like abortion, euthanasia, psychedelics, or even something as benign as wisdom teeth removal.
The argument used to be quite frequent that sterilizing prostitutes, “mental defectives”, and criminals was in fact a public health and safety measure, as was aborting the unborn of said individuals against their will - that is the reasoning the US and many European countries used to engage in mandatory sterilization for decades in the twentieth century.
Look up the quote “Three Generations of Imbeciles is enough”, if you want to see where public health over individual autonomy lands us.
And if the risk was only to yourself, by all means that would be reasonable. But it isn't.
When we work, we give all sorts of autonomy up. That what work literally is, exchanging some autonomy for some money. Most obviously that means doing parts of the job you don't like (docs aint going to write themselves). Some places it means wearing a tie (eww). My last job made me sign a document saying i agree never to bring a firearm to work.
All these things hinder my autonomy. Some may be more aceptable than others (eww dress code. Not interested in wearing a tie. But also wouldn't want to work at a nudist workplace either). In any case, almost every workplace has policies that prevent you from doing things that threaten the safety of other employees or their families. This is hardly much different.
All such bad examples. It's not nearly as intrusive to say you can't bring your firearm or wear a tie. It's literally a momentary thing, now I a wear a tie now I don't. To compare that to forcing somebody into taking a novel vaccine with questionable long- or even short-term health effects is absolutely disingenious and quite cynical to be frank.
How about comparing it to requiring people to get vaccines? This already happens in schools. When I went to work in a local school district it was required to have a TDAP vaccine.
It's really shaky to say "religions" don't oppose vaccines because religious interpretation (and personal interactions with their god(s)) is up to the individual.
But it's all irrelevant in this case because Google is almost entirely an at-will employer. They can change the terms of the agreement at any time - take it or leave it.
I respect more the position of an individual saying he doesn't want to get the vaccine because of his personal convictions than because his religions tells him so (although, to be clear, I think both are stupid positions).
Hopefully Google will only allow exemptions based on health issues.
My employer mandated vaccines. Exceptions for sincere religious belief or documented medical reasons. I didn't want the vaccine but I wasn't going to lie about having a legitimate religious reason for it. Some people will, but most people wont.
So I got the shot, but if I have any serious side effects I will certainly be contacting a personal injury attorney.
If I recall correctly, there are ways to ask for religious exemption to some of the requirements (e.g. vaccination when immigrating, answering "no" to an immigration question about willing to bear arms for the US), but they require establishing proof that you have been a member of a religious community that has rules conflicting with the mandate - it's not as easy as saying "it is so because I say so". Depending on how enforcement will happen, it may be possible to at least reduce the loophole.
It will be abused, but hopefully at least some people might feel ashamed at such abuse and not go through with it when they have to do so on an individual basis.
Vaccination isn't an all or nothing game. Every single bit helps. Some people will always opt out one way or another, but that doesn't make the entire policy useless.
Make no mistake, this is because they're trying to get people back into the office as soon as possible. It may be the case that remote work is superior and companies that embrace remote work will ultimate do better, but I believe that FB and Goog believe the opposite.
I can’t find the previous link which discuss this, but does anyone know the repercussions of someone who refuses to get the vaccine? Is that an automatic work from home, or does the company say no, you are returning to the office and you must get vaccinated?
I have been reading comments here and I'm honestly terrified how easily people are throwing judgmental or plain rude comments calling names on other people who exercise their right to make a choice - whatever the choice is.
How easily are many falling into the trap of "common good" - please think about it, almost a century ago there was a time in one country in Europe where one nation was called to spread plague, only a few years later this nation was put to gas chambers. We are going to face the same situation very soon.
If you won't have respect to the other side you will see terror, and you will always find nice and round argument to justify that terror. Seeing how much of hatred is spread in this "technical" forum I must say, the time of terror is very near.
> I'm honestly terrified how easily people are throwing judgmental or plain rude comments calling names on other people who exercise their right to make a choice - whatever the choice is.
Aren't they just exercising their right to free speech?
I have zero tolerance for people refusing to accept a little bit of personal inconvenience, one to two injections and maybe three days of not feeling to good, in order to end this pandemic sooner. And to protect those that cannot be vaccinated. It was the same crowd that refused to follow guidelines, indirectly prolonging everything. It was members of this crowd that attacked people for wearing masks. It was this crowd that pushed for early opening.
Now we could approach the point of being to open up again, and it is about time. Because, with some luck and pressure, we can get enough people vaccinated. Only that we can't yet, because of the se crowd. And once we are at that point, this crowd basically wants a free ride. Talking about egoism, that's kind of the text book example.
I’m all for getting everyone vaccinated as well, but I’d be really concerned about the precedent this sets.
The reasons governments are reluctant to do this is they it sets a precedent for them to dictate what a person can do with their bodies.
Saying someone must have an injection, regardless of how well intentioned it is, requires you to be able to dictate what goes into their body. Pretty much the same set of powers that would dictate the old pro-life vs pro-choice debate.
I’m greatly conflicted. I want people vaccinated, but I personally do not like the idea of giving up bodily autonomy to do so.
What do you think of abortion? I agree about body autonomy but it frustrates me to no end to see woman asking for this basic right, even when their lives depend on it and it being denied, sterilization is also not easy to obtain for a woman.
But then comes someone who is scared about potential side effects to a vaccine in the middle of a pandemic crisis, so much so that they're willing to risk their peers and they cover themselves with "body autonomy" arguments, we already live in a country where people don't have body autonomy, it just does not affect you, until now.
I have the right not to get the shot. I control my own body. But there are others involved, not just me.
In the same way, with abortion, there's another involved, the fetus. It's not part of the mother's body (it's genetically different).
The "it's my body" argument breaks down in the same way for both issues. Unfortunately, both sides want to pick and choose when they apply which logic.
Is a fetus "someone" else or do we need more than 8 weeks to form a consciousness, how long is that period? I think there's debate to be had there.
while in the vaccine situation we're talking about actual already born humans who are walking around the unvaccinated person every day and there's no debate there, the risk is real, and the other people can actually be verbally vocal about not wanting to be involved with unvaccinated people.
Your first paragraph: Sure. There's debate to be had. My point is that the "it's my body" argument seems deliberately designed to hide the fact that the fetus isn't just a part of the woman's body. It's not like her tonsils or her appendix or her toenails. [Edit: That is, it's designed to hide the need for the debate.]
As to your second paragraph, it looks about even to me. If I walk around unvaccinated, I might infect someone. I might infect several people. Somewhere between zero and several people could die because of that. Whereas with abortion, the fetus is going to die with 100% probability.
But yes, people can be vocal about not wanting to be around unvaccinated people. The fetus? It never got a chance to voice an opinion.
I'd wager that "it's my body" argument does not try to hide that part of the debate, but instead declares a clear conviction that the fetus up to certain point is not a person, so it's a statement and it's picking a side in said debate, you can argue about that, in fact that's what most pro-life people do, it's even stated in the name _pro-life_ as in, for the life of the fetus, for that you have to conclude that the fetus is indeed a person.
What differentiates a embryo from a toumor? That it has another person's genetic code?
A mistakenly forgotten medical prop is not a part of anyone's body for example, wouldn't it be fucked up for someone not to be able to remove it from their body if the doctors left it inside just because it's not like their tonsils or her appendix? If there's something I don't want inside my body I should be able to decide, if your argument is that it is not "my body" because it is not explicitly "me" like my appendix, then many medical procedures would also be controversial
I absolutely agree, which is my primary concern with enforcing vaccination uptake. I have trouble picturing a world where we can have those rights remain strong while also forcing folks to be vaccinated.
Unclear how different is this from getting vaccinated as a child, giving blood sample for lab test as a child, and having your tooth removed as a child.
The parents consent for the child, because a child cannot give consent. As adults, only we can give consent for our bodies. As children, consent is delegated to the parents.
The draft - get sent to war against your will, potentially die, get maimed or get tortured.
This - get the vaccine tens of millions of people around the world have already got, or work remotely (or very worst case give up your cushy tech job and find another cushy tech job).
You can't opt out of the draft. If you work at FB/Google tell your manager the two magic words "I QUIT" and don't get the vaccine and go work somewhere that makes you happier.
AFAIK these companies are still at-will private employers and vaccination status is not a protected class. So they can fire anyone they want including all the anti-vaxxers, at any time they want, for whatever reason they want including vaccination status.
i think the draft is way worse in that you are separated from your family and there is a real possibility you’re going to die.
also, remember that this is not the government. your employer can ask you to do anything (within limits) and invoke at-will employment when you don’t want to do it. I love capitalism!
You raise an excellent point. When you sign up for the US military you give up a lot of your rights. This is definitely bad from a perspective of individual rights, though I can see arguments for a draft being a matter of addressing an existential threat.
Do we as a country feel like COVID is an existential threat? I’m definitely concerned about how we handle future, potentially worse pandemics before we figure out where we draw these lines and what appropriate trade offs are for public health.
Half the country thinks it is an existential threat. Half the country thinks it's a bad flu. About 612,000 people have died from it, that's more than WW2 which lead to the modern international political and economic systems. So yeah, change is happening IMO.
What we're doing now is proving the efficacy of using a mRNA vaccine platform to rapidly deal with a pandemic at a speed that has never been done before. So far the vaccine has worked great. Now we need to establish global distribution chains and make sure that in the event of an even worse pandemic we have options to vaccinate against it.
Society has progressed from such times. There are many things that were acceptable back then that would not be now. If the draft was re-enacted, we would hopefully see strong pushback.
“Condemn us all to death”? COVID has like a 1% fatality rate concentrated entirely in the elderly and the unhealthy (damaged immune system, obese, …) you are overreacting.
Sounds a lot like the obesity epidemic to me. One that kills 1,794 people in the United States DAILY, year… over… fucking… year. Also completely preventable.
Prevention of obesity is a bit harder than getting vaccinated.
Also the data you link to is about heart disease. Many people will have some sort of heart disease as they age even without being obese. The #1 risk factor of heart disease is age. Age is not preventable.
There are many ways you can force your population or employees to be less fat.
Google could ban fatties from coming into the office incentivising fat loss, you could force fat people to self isolate or not allow them to travel, also to incentivise healthy loving and make it shameful to contribute to the obesity epidemic.
This is all ridiculous, but the moral logic would be similar. The same is true for driving and weapons, which are dangerous.
But Google is not trying to make people live healthier, it doesn't care about that. Google is trying to prevent hazardous working conditions for their employees. All vaccination mandates are about that: they don't care about the vaccinated or unvaccinated person, they care about the risk that person presents for its environment. In that sense the obesity analogy completely fails.
Obesity is culturally infectious. If you have fat friends/family/SO you will get fatter in most cases (more than 1%). It is also acutely deadly as most of thr top10 death causes are directly related to diet and lifestyle.
Important to note that obesity is excess of fat related to general bodyweight, not only total weight.
> About 33% of COVID-19 patients who were never sick enough to require hospitalization continue to complain months later of symptoms like fatigue, loss of smell or taste and "brain fog," University of Washington (UW) researchers found.
How much of the vaccinated people will get this same reaction? That's the important question. Would you like to get your "long covid" jab now or in 2 years? I decided to wait.
i’m with you there. what really concerns me is that people that vaccinated themselves and people who don’t want the vaccine seem to live in completely different worlds.
we are a post truth society. logic and reason have been dismissed and sent to the basement. I laughed hard when I saw Idiocracy first - now I no longer find it funny. I wonder why.
by your first comment, it seems you already believe the real truth is the one you bought, only. the rest is post-true. Funny thing is that your reasoning is exactly what post truth means.
I have nearly died twice in my life as a physical reaction to a vaccination and am being advised by my physician not to take these yet.
I am now in the position of choosing between a Google-sized salary and whatever risks are associated with these vaccines. This isn't a decision being made lightly.
I'm not anti-vax, I'm just pro-me. That 20 per 100K could be you.
Not my company. At my company, I have to be back in an office and vaccinated.
At my company it's 100% a political signaling move.
Also New York State stopped recognizing religious & medical exemptions for vaccinations for school attendance over a decade ago. Companies based out of here are basing their decisions around this policy.
nah. you’ll be fine and get an exemption. Taking the vaccine usually goes like this: risk if you take it <<< risk if you don’t take it. I’m gonna bet you real money that if you actually tried getting it you would get screened out based on the questionnaire you fill our before the vaccine.
Today the entire state of New York had ZERO covid related deaths. Yet this week we saw NYC and State employees and now major private corporations mandate the vaccine.
For the record I will never disclosure my health status so don’t assume one way or another.
The “wait 2 weeks” argument did not work for Florida when they took the lead, nor Texas when they had the first full capacity sporting event, and not India when they were on the “brink of collapse”.
Delta is confirmed to be more contagious and less deadly.
In a few weeks the numbers will be low regardless of what measures are taken. But the forced vaccination of federal, municipal, and private employees will be given credit.
I am not against the vaccine. I am however against governments determining what freedoms their citizens are allowed to have based on what medicines they chose to take.
We’ve all seen the disaster with our personal privacy across social media and the internet as a whole.
>I am not against the vaccine. I am however against governments determining what freedoms their citizens are allowed to have based on what medicines they chose to take.
This is a private company deciding that they don't want to employ you. There are no governments involved here.
>CA will have the strongest state vaccine verification system in the US and will require state employees & healthcare workers to provide proof of vaccination—or get tested regularly.
This is clearly different, as it allows testing your way out of getting vaccinated.
> Delta is confirmed to be more contagious and less deadly.
Sort of, delta is confirmed to be less contagious and less deadly among a (significantly) vaccinated population. It is probably more contagious than the initial variant among an unvaccinated population, yes. But whether or not its more or less deadly, or whether vaccines + improved treatments have reduced the severity/survivability isn't clear. So delta is less deadly in practice at a population level, but it might be more deadly in only the unvaccinated population, or the same, or less. We don't really know.
Agreed and it’s the “we don’t really know” but we’re forcing the vaccine on everyone that’s the problem. What we do know is that vaccinated can still catch and spread covid. The stats of breakthrough cases are skewed due to the CDCs methodology of tracking covid infections among the vaccinated.
> The stats of breakthrough cases are skewed due to the CDCs methodology of tracking covid infections among the vaccinated.
I guess, but the CDC isn't the only reliable source of information, and from everything else we see (international studies and natural experiments from things like hospitals testing all arrivals for all causes), the vaccine still has something like a 50-90% reduction in infection rate, depending on the particular variant and study. And beyond that, a 90%+ reduction in sever cases.
> There have been cases of covid infections among enclosed vaccinated groups
Yes, as the CDC website says, in bold "Vaccine breakthrough cases are expected". What we know is that the vaccines appear to be highly effective at preventing severe cases, and slightly less effective (though still pretty darn good) at preventing infection whatsoever.
Bayes rule would suggest that as the majority of people become vaccinated, we'll begin to see a larger and larger share of infections coming from vaccinated individuals. But, we'll also see fewer infections (and fewer deaths!) overall.
While we don't know precisely how delta compares to the initial variant, we do know its more infectious, and still quite deadly (from its impact in India). So we do know enough to draw the conclusion that Delta is dangerous, almost certainly more dangerous than the older variants, and we also have data to support the claim that vaccines are more effective immunity against delta than natural infection. That's enough information, or if it isn't, what else would convince you?
Should they wait until after people start dying again to implement preventative measures or something?
This is exactly the kind of bizarrely short-sighted reasoning that results in pandemics exploding in the first place: "Things aren't bad yet, so why do we need to do anything??"
Where do we end this then? Do we continue implementing lockdowns, mask mandates, forced vaccinations with every ebbs and flow…
Or do we realize our urgent care infrastructure has enough capacity, deaths are down- zero on some days, vaccines are available for free for anyone that wants one, masks can be worn by anyone anywhere when they feel uncomfortable, and actually start promoting a healthy lifestyle.
Or do you want to be in a perpetual state of a government controlled health crisis
If you want to take a political tangent, it is your choice. Again, this is a decision by a private company. If you are against big government, you should be in favor of the freedom of private companies and individuals implementing their own policy. In your single mindedness you have failed to realize that private companies being allowed to make their own decisions is actually not an example of big government. Also, you cannot have personal health Privacy without bug government. But that is a debate for another time.
It’s very much political and not science based when you have most states going one way versus a handful working with private companies for a health based system
> Today the entire state of New York had ZERO covid related deaths. Yet this week we saw NYC and State employees and now major private corporations mandate the vaccine.
It seems NYC has been registering a daily average of new 700 confirmed cases of covid, which is growing fast. This is a lower limit of the true rate of transmission as they reflect confirmed cases through molecular tests.
In this page, if you check the graph, you'll notice that NYC is registering a new wave of covid infections that is as the highest level in about two months.
Even though covid infections in NYC are spiking, death rates are not. This is expectedly the result of the vaccination campaign.
No wonder they are mandating the vaccine. That's the only way to prevent another death wave.
Source for which part? The numbers of NYC's infections and death rates, or that practically all covid-related deaths right now happen in patients who are not vaccinated?
they are not same because vaccinated are less likely to be infected and hence less likely to spread disease.
every vaccinated person is 40% less likely of getting infected compared to unvaccinated. so if a person goes to office with vaccine mandate, they are 64% less likely of getting infected compared to no vaccine mandate.
That very well could be balanced out somewhat by vaccinated people being less careful than non-vaccinated, and possibly by them being more likely to be asymptomatic (but still spreaders).
I’m not sure why you’re downvoted, this is an accurate depiction. The vaccine does not prevent infection/transmission, despite lay people commonly believing it does.
Well in some places like California, and now Illinois, they are advocating in legislation to decriminalize a person who knowingly transmits HIV to a partner. It’s possible we could see a criminalization of someone who knowingly transmit Covid to someone else.
Spock logic "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" as an individual it will feel wrong but from the point of view for the many it seem selfish.
I do think people with no vaccine now are becoming more and more at risk as the vaccinated population grows with more social interaction without much consequence to the vaccinated. This has increased the risks to the unvaccinated. Being a holdout is not a great position to be in now.
Makes no rational sense. The unvaccinated choose to be unvaccinated. You can walk into any Walgreens and get vaccinated for free. The vaccines have over 99% efficacy. Over 99% of new infections are unvaccinated people. Vast majority of vaccinated people getting infected with delta are having mild illness.
If I had to bet, these sorts of policies actually disincentivize people to get vaccinated. Let everyone suffer so you can keep living unvaccinated.
Irrational exuberance for the vaccine drives some people to doubt.
The vaccine is a very reasonable thing to get but that doesn’t mean everyone in favor of it is behaving or thinking rationally.
When you have people turning something reasonable into a quasi religious moral obligation it is going to attract opposition, behaving irrationally is harmful even for something which is a good idea.
'The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.'
Being stuck working at Google or Facebook is a bit different than being stuck in a concentration camp from the perspective of consent don't you think?
I'm not belittling the discussion that our society must have about what can or can't be mandated by an employer. However, I doubt the above quote was created in the context of high paying tech jobs, they were focused on the forced experimentation that occurred in WW2.
If you have a mortgage and a child, do you really have the freedom to say “no” when something becomes a condition of your continued employment?
Corporations, very much including google, are becoming defacto governments having a huge control in the flow of information and have threads weaved in to all of our lives. You can’t just give them a pass to do anything they want just because they’re technically not government.
The quote should apply to any entity with power over people trying to take away their ability to consent.
This is the evolution of oppression and control. Just add money to make it seem like everyone has freedom.
No longer are people going to stab you with something pointy and drive you out of your home if you don't accept control, they'll drive you out of your home by giving you the "choice" of accepting control or losing your salary. Feudalism is back but disguised as real estate investment and trillion dollar corporate overlords giving you a salary.
I'd classify 'get an experimental vaccine with known possibility of side effects or we fire you from your job' as 'element of force', 'duress', and 'coercion'.
I think the problem with your argument is equating the covid vaccine to medical experimentation as considered in the Nuremberg Code. That code was written as the result of the Nazi experimentation of human subjects.
The covid vaccine is technically experimental under the FDA definition only because it hasn't received full approval yet, but it has already gone through trials that (to some extent) have proved its safety. I don't think "medical experiment" has used in the code is the same as in the case of the covid vaccine as of today.
Absolutely all human medicine is experimental in the same way the person is using "experimental vaccine". Anything else would not be science.
The only question is usually how many experiments have been run and on who and what do we extrapolate from them.
But make no mistake - nothing could possibly be proven safe to a given person without having been tested on that person. You are unique. This is precisely why this is not the standard used for safety, and can't be.
Maybe some century we will have that capability, but it does not exist right now.
If you go buy an orange from the grocery store, that's experimental in the same way - i guarantee you it's mutated at least a little from the other oranges you've eaten. How can you be sure the mutations will not have a harmful effect?
(This isn't even a joke - mutation is quite common in citrus, and thing like the cara cara came from natural orange tree mutations)
As far as testing goes - in the history of vaccines that were deployed quickly (polio, smallpox, etc), the covid vaccines are very well tested.
The space of things we don't continuously test and track for safety is basically infinite, and the likelihood of harm coming from that infinite space of untested things is much greater (overall) than "a thing we've given to hundreds of millions of people and explicitly kept track of the side effects"
This is proven to be true again and again - eventually we notice the effect of things we weren't looking at, take some of them, test them, and say "well crap, actually, this is really harmful".
Meanwhile, outside of intentional fraud/malice, it's much more rare that the things we are testing and tracking continuously on large groups of people turn out that way. When they do, it's often because of long term effects you couldn't discover without time anyway.
How is this functionally different from mandatory vaccinations currently required for schooling?
Companies have a responsibility to provide a safe workplace. If some people are disinterested in avoiding harm to their coworkers, employers are under no obligation to indulge them in that.
There are several reasons for this being in the Nuremberg Code.
- Nazis conducted horrific medical experiments on Jewish prisoners (who were mostly German citizens as well!). In fact, pretty much everything we know about hypothermia came from the Nazis freezing and attempting to revive prisoners.
- Nazis often used promises of medical treatment to ensure compliance. The famous "showers" were one such example. Prisoners were then sent into a room -- complete with showerheads, soap, and even puddles! -- to be gassed.
- Nazi propagandists created documentaries showing Jewish, Romani, and other "undesirable" communities as "disease-ridden". It is easier to convince normal people to betray "undesirables" when "normal people" believe they are protecting both their own health, as well as the health of their communities.
Regarding forced experiments freezing and thawing people, can you link me some primary sources, preferably records and photos rather than just accounts? I speak German if that’s a prerequisite.
A lot of talk here about the getting the vaccination is a moral imperative for the greater public safety. One parable I can think of is mandatory abortions. At a time where the planets resources are diminishing surely another human is a risk to us all. And who’s to say someone’s child doesn’t end being a deranged, homicidal maniac. Women have an imperative, no are required by law, to abort at the earliest possible moment. And compared to the Varus, there is a 100% chance a child will use up resources, opposed to whatever new kill rate the virus has. There are a lot of our-there defences for anti-vax, the ones that make the most sense are: (1) COVID is not as deadly as the news cycle makes it out, (2) the vaccine is still in trial, (3) there are no repercussions for vaccine producers. Of course, the implications of these points is what turns off the other side. The loudest theory in the room gets noticed, and that happens to be 5G microchips or whatever. When really, it’s just a new tax on everyday people. Politicians have an interest in the companies producing the vaccine so they’ll enforce laws to make them mandatory. The surveillance state loves any excuse to track us more than they are already. Splintering the population along ideological lines further benefits the system in place. So, yes, regarding the implications of points (1), (2) and (3), I believe the system in place would willingly manipulate this non-issue for its own benefit. And, if your argument is vaccination is better for society as a whole see parable above.
Obviously the vax theme is topical in this case—that makes this a good chance to apply discernment and distinguish between thoughtful, substantive comments and shallow, dismissive ones. As that is what we all should be doing on HN anyway, practice is good.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html