That's not really the problem though. See, no matter how many ICU beds you have, the people going to the ICU are about 40% or so likely to die from COVID and the remainder will recover but will take a very long time to do so and have a significant chance of having long term residual effects and/or complications.
You don't really wish that kind of thing on anybody. So you try to avoid people going to the ICU in the first place (assuming you have a humane government, which unfortunately isn't always the case).
That said, the pandemic has definitely taught a lot of countries that stripping your health care system is probably a bad idea.
The reason people are even mentioning ICU beds are because they're trying to shift the vaccination argument from "do it for yourself, if you want to" to "you have to do it for others".
If we had enough ICU beds, there would be NO argument to force people to get vaccinated, just like there is no argument to force people to not smoke or not be fat.
If we had enough ICU beds there would still be an argument because it will cause a bunch of people to die. If you don't care about that then that's your problem, but personally I'd like those old people to stick around for a bit longer, and keep in mind that one day you too will be old.
The arguments for vaccination go a lot further than just a lack of ICU beds.
Right, maybe we should stick them on an island somewhere so they don't have contact with the rest of society then. Really, the degree of selfishness here is incredible. Don't you have parents or grandparents? Would you want them to be isolated from you and the rest of your family, their friends and neighbors for the foreseeable future just so you can pretend that there is no problem?
So, we have a climate crisis, uncontrolled health care and college costs, decades of pointless war, mass incarceration, and a variety of other crises that cause a lot of death and suffering.
Yet isn't it strange that the one crisis we have chosen to pull out all the societal stops for, to radically reorient all of society and put it in stasis for, is COVID-19. Odd coincidence that most of the first list affects young people, COVID-19 primarily affects old people, and the political leadership of the developed world happens to be comprised of old people.
And the subset of old people responsible for handling the pandemic hasn't even managed to do that properly. This is the same category of people who hollowed out unions, induced globalization, and generally kicked out the ladder beneath them in a variety of ways.
I do care about my parents/grandparents, I've been vaccinated, and I'd wear a mask around an old person. That's the absolute maximum I'm willing to do voluntarily and feel fine about that. I'd even venture to suggest that if someone has a problem and demands that all of society radically realign itself to fix/prevent it in a way that's disproportionate to society's other needs, it's not society that's being selfish.
> To be frank, I'm in favour of mass cryogenics. Build mausoleums under mountains and fill them with the frozen heads of the dead, to be revived later.
Science fiction has no place in policy determination.
Yeah, but then the unvaccinated would only be risking their own lives. The most prominent argument for compulsory vaccination right now is that they're taking away scarce ICU beds.
It's a factor, but not the whole story. A lot of people are immunocompromised and for them just getting infected immediately raises the risks to unacceptable levels. We all owe the weaker people in our societies (from a health perspective) to take care of them, and if that requires us to get vaccinated to create a cordon of safety then so be it.
That there are a bunch of egoists that would rather have us all fend for ourselves doesn't change that, and usually those are exactly the people demanding we take on their burdens when the situation is reversed. It's called a social contract for a reason: taxes, vaccination against communicable diseases where possible, compulsory education and so on, it's the flipside of the coin, you get a lot of rights, but you also have some (sometimes moral) obligations.
The dead comment is unfortunately correct, there will probably be no herd immunity with these vaccines. That's what I hear from every virologist/epidemiologist lately anyways, and the real world data with highly vaccinated countries having record surges appears to confirm it.
I agree that it would be a much stronger argument. However, I also find it cruel to force people into an injection that they do not want, and would probably still oppose a universal vaccine mandate for that reason. I'd be okay with a mandate that allows people who really don't want the vaccine to opt out. I'd even be okay with that for the COVID vaccines if it wasn't for the 2G stuff and the awful rhetoric against unvaccinated people that preceded it. Enacting the mandate now makes the whole thing feel too much like "we'll get you somehow". Like I said, I find it cruel. It's not my idea of a humane society.
Vaccines by themselves won't do miracles. But vaccines combined with some reasonable level of restrictions can get us through this to the point where we've caught up with the virus to a degree that we have other means to reduce the number of serious cases.
Keep in mind that there is plenty of precedent for mandatory vaccinations, in almost every developed country and in plenty that are not young children are vaccinated against a whole raft of diseases that would otherwise cause serious problems. The only people that are exempt are those that do not want any vaccinations for religious reasons because it apparently interferes with 'gods plan'. If you want to deal with this at the same level of ignorance then that's fine with me but I personally have absolutely no problem with a mandate and I also would not have a problem with rescinding the exemption for religious purposes.
I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, however in the long run that won't protect the immunocompromised. The virus is so contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect. Everyone will be exposed eventually.
That's true. We missed our chance to contain it early on, thanks to those that tried to spare the economy at the cost of 'a few lives' which has now harmed our economy for a much longer period than an initial effort at containment would have caused, not to mention that at that time we didn't know exactly how bad it would get (it could have been a lot worse than it was).
But reducing the amount of active infections does have a beneficial effect because even though everyone will likely be exposed that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody will also get the disease (even the the worst diseases viral do not necessarily spread to 100% of the population), and there some chance that later strains may become milder. And if fewer people are ill at the same time that should increase the level of care available.
> We missed our chance to contain it early on, thanks to those that tried to spare the economy at the cost of 'a few lives'
Illusion of control. The chance was never there. Even countries who are way more suitable for isolation like australia didn't manage to keep the virus out. Attributing that to "those that tried to spare the economy" is just another toxic blame game.
They didn't manage because the rest of us fucked up.
It's like a fire. If your house is the only house in a row of houses that is well prepared against fire then you're going to go down, in spite of all of your preparations.
The fatalism that many people exhibit is a self fulfilling prophesy: we won't be able to do it so we're not even going to try. But you know what? Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and China showed that it is possible.
While I don't disagree with what you are saying in the abstract, there are limits and the demands really should be rational.
I don't see that with this series of vaccines. They do not stop transmission. The ICU issue cannot be addressed fairly without addressing the other causes that put large numbers of people in ICUs.
We pay every year as a society in deaths for the assumption of some risk. We manage it, make laws, or just leave it alone and some people die (for example, we don't ban cars or eating too many calories or swimming pools).
In my estimation we are going a bit overboard demanding everyone take a novel injection, most especially when it appears the health authorities either didn't understand or didn't communicate the effectiveness over time of the injections.
There's a point were everything can't be all about what someone at the top proclaims is for the social good. Otherwise we wind up in corruption and dictatorship.
> In my estimation we are going a bit overboard demanding everyone take a novel injection
This was the same with every vaccine in the past, very few vaccines have received as much scrutiny as these, the biggest risk is the long term one and even there we have a fairly good idea of what the possibilities of materializing are.
None of these weigh up against the damage that a COVID-19 infection does.
If you think mandatory vaccination equates corruption and dictatorship then I am not sure we are on the same wavelength regarding the meaning of those terms.
I don't understand why this batch of vaccines is being compared to vaccines for other diseases as if they are the same thing. Other vaccines are generally mandated for children with extremely high efficacy, have an extremely low chance of adverse events, prevent community spread perfectly or almost perfectly, have an exactly known quantity of doses required and are deployed as prevention (not in the midst of a pandemic). Importantly, they treat diseases that cause extremely bad outcomes in children at very high rates. This current generation of covid vaccines is more like a drug that works well for some and not so for others, doesn't prevent transmission, aims at moving target, requires an unknown amount of doses, only modestly discourages continued spread and represents one of many ways for society to treat, tackle and prevent the disease. This is a disease that is trending downwards in its mortality rate, while being of fairly low risk for the majority of the population, with the lowest risk found for young people. The diseases we mandate children to get vaccinated for are not declining in their disastrous health effects as far as I know. The risk of adverse events from the current set of covid vaccines is lowish but not particularly low. All that doesn't make the vaccines we have for covid any less important, but the comparison really does not wash and is a highly dubious way of engaging around the topic of body sovereignty.
There are a small group of people out there who are scared to death to take this vaccine because they genuinely think it will do harm to them. They are being asked to override their own alarms by people who do not share the fear because they don't have the same alarm bells going off. I know only a few of these people and they all have a ton of prior negative experiences with the medical system that would have left me feeling much the same way if I had shared their experiences personally. There are people that have been put in a 'do as you are told' situations and have received medical interventions that have done them great harm. Now they are being hounded and once again are being told to do as they are told, while fearing for their own health. A lot of people are willing to sweep aside their concerns as if they are asocial, ignorant, stupid, irresponsible and part to blame for the scale of the epidemic. People who feel out of control want to blame others so very badly, concentrating culpability in the hands of a group of bad actors, and it results in completely warped thinking with a tendency to dehumanise. And people can pick this up in others and it only increases their skepticism. They fear people operating in a blinkered, blame-seeking authoritarian way, and they see that as danger.
Though I encourage vaccination and have repeatedly tried to talk people who fear it off the ledge, I totally understand where the dictatorship and corruption logic is coming from. It doesn't take a hard-core cynic to raise an eye-brow when a drug company CEO proclaims that we'll all be needing many repeated doses of their product for years to come, while a leading political figure with immediate ties to the biotech industry wants to encourage countries to mandate the use of their products. If you had told me 2 years ago that society would control, monitor, demonise and divide people on the basis of having or having not received a recent government sanctioned medical treatment, I would have probably called you a hysterical conspiracy nut.
Thank you! Every crazy axe murderer receives more empathy then the people who simply stopped trusting the system after being lied to one time too often.
Two things drive me crazy:
1. How easy it is to dehumanize a significant percentage of the population.
2. How willingly politicians embrace that in order to find a scapegoat for their own failures.
I think, (or hope rather) that the mandates are well meaning, no I don't think this is dictatorship, rather I'm addressing your more "meta" point about social responsibility and the perils of one group being able to dictate to others without input.
As in, we can't just say "We have some social responsibilities so you must XX per the authorities" when XX is self serving, counterproductive, useless or harmful. We have an individual right, and responsibility, to weigh the dictates we are given at some point, perhaps not on all issues, but on some.
Other vaccines were not taken in to market in this manner. It is a novel vaccine.
> the perils of one group being able to dictate to others without input
This is pretty much the norm in any country that is a democracy but that does not have coalition governments. You get a kind of see-sawing effect where one group will enact a bunch of stuff and then when the tables are turned it all gets undone. It's stupendously inefficient.
Democracy is quite flawed but it still is the best mechanism for government that we have that is sustainable over a longer period of time.
Democracy in itself is nothing more then the dictatorship of the majority. It certainly doesn't constitute a just society, alone. In addition, you need at least fundamental, untouchable civil rights, protection of minorities and the rule of the law.
You don't really wish that kind of thing on anybody. So you try to avoid people going to the ICU in the first place (assuming you have a humane government, which unfortunately isn't always the case).
That said, the pandemic has definitely taught a lot of countries that stripping your health care system is probably a bad idea.