I can't believe people still think after 2 years we're at a point technologically and logistically that we can control nature and just make this "go away".
Delta came out of India. Omicron came out of South Africa. How do mandates in the West stop variants elsewhere?
And variants aside, the vaccinated are still getting sick and dying at significant rates [1]. This vaccine is not the slam-dunk our "experts" promised. Until some miracle cure comes along, R < 1 is simply not possible.
If you think full vaccination is a necessary goal despite all this, OK fine. You know what might go a long way in terms of achieving mass vaccination? Open sourcing the vaccine recipe. Not just the RNA sequence. The whole recipe.
This should be a no-brainer.
Governments have no qualms with mandating lockdowns, masks, and vaccines for the masses.. but for some reason they hit the brakes when it comes to mandates for pharma. Not only is this a good idea in terms of improving supply side logistics, but also for the sake of re-building trust.
But no, common sense is too hard and "blame and shame" is too easy.
Being unvaccinated does not harm the vaccinated.
Hospital collapse has been liminal for 2 years now, it's a manufactured crisis. Instead of bolstering our healthcare staff and paying our front line workers more, we have done.. the exact opposite. We funnel tons of money to pharma, while frontline workers have effectively had their pay cut in half.
We're quite literally being force fed lies. But I guess that doesn't matter because at the end of the day the Milgram experiment prevails and all these attempts to question the narrative and hold authority accountable is pointless.
> Being unvaccinated does not harm the vaccinated.
This is, on average over large numbers, not correct. Higher rates of disease spread harms everyone, the vaccinated included.
> This vaccine is not the slam-dunk our "experts" promised.
Which expert promised you that?
> it's a manufactured crisis ... We're quite literally being force fed lies ... Milgram experiment ... question the narrative
Cranks write like this. That is a shame as some of your other points are very correct, particularly around the need for Intellectual property waiver, which some have been calling for for some time, to no avail (1). BTW, they don't generally call it "open sourcing" in that field.
Hospitals genuinely are in crisis and doing difficult triaging, anyone working in them can tell you that.
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
> Cranks write like this.
Apologies I'm new to being a social pariah, being under pseudo house arrest, and psychosis in general.
I don't want hospitals to collapse. I'm afraid if we give up this freedom now, we'll never get it back. I'm afraid of the unknown and putting my life in the hands of people (our dear leaders) that really have never cared about my health before.
Even now its not about care for my own health, but for "the greater good".
I can only speak about where I am (UK) but the health care crisis is a complex topic, but there's no mystery at all to why it came about: decades of under-investment are 100% predictable given the party that has been power for a while now. It's what they always do. People should not be surprised that their votes have this obvious consequence.
But there's no easy fix to help us now, because it takes a long time to train doctors, nurses and other staff, or actually build hospitals. Yes, the crisis is entirely predictable but also entirely real. It is possible, even likely for a "liminal" crisis to persist at that level, as the safety valve that keeps it there is that patients without sufficient care just die off. These are the "excess deaths". Yes, I am appalled.
This is BTW one way how "Being unvaccinated could harm the vaccinated": If I (very much vaccinated) need urgent treatment for any reason, and can't get it because all the beds are full of unvaccinated COVID patients, then I am harmed thereby.
If your main concern right now is the "freedom" implications and the "we've been lied to narrative" not the actual deadly pandemic then you have been misdirected, and should reconsider your media diet away from conspiracy-mongers.
Yes, we need to take the good of others into account. Like it or not we live in a society and our actions impact others. This pandemic is making it clear to those who can see, that stubborn selfish refusal, and paranoid anti-mask and anti-vax "freedom" rhetoric harms not just yourself, but also those around you. Rugged individualism is a complete bust in this context. Collective action is what works.
Sure, this is a general problem with finite limited resources that are collectively owned. The more you have, the less I get. When demand exceeds the supply, harm is unavoidable. And yes we should do what we can to drive down the demand, but I don't see what that has to do with forcing restrictions on people that are not at risk?
This deadly pandemic is not deadly for everyone.
People over 50 make up 1/3 of the population but 93% of covid deaths. I imagine this number is roughly proportional for hospitalizations by the same age groups. We can do some handwavy math and say if everyone under 50 was unvaccinated, they would only ever take up 7% of ICU beds.
Is 7% the difference between collapse or not? "One size fits all" doesn't make sense.
Further, I'm so confident I will never get sick and be hospitalized with covid that I'm happy to forgo my right to an ICU bed. Thus I'm decoupled from the dilemma. Or at least in an ideal world I would be able to make that choice. This was my assessment the first time I got covid, and now I likely have some level of immunity, so I'm even more confident now.
And as far as your hospital scenarios go, my point is we haven't seen the things you describe materialize. I'm sure there are a handful of cases, which is a tragedy, but if it's marginal then we shouldn't hold it up as a liminal crisis like we have been.
> Yes, we need to take the good of others into account. Like it or not we live in a society and our actions impact others.
Tell me the magic number for risk tolerance. If everyone self-quarantined from driving, and we switched to a delivery only economy, we could drastically reduce the number of motor vehicle fatalities. Do we not owe that to the greater good? What about for climate change? We should continue living like we did in 2020 forever.
> Collective action is what works.
It always works when your leaders are competent and have your best interests in mind. My country doesn't even recognize natural immunity, which I envy the UK for.
But free choice works too. Look at Florida, Sweden, people will still choose the vaccine. You don't need a mandate.
> If your main concern right now is the "freedom" ...
I can't believe the "vaccinated" are completely unconcerned by the trends regarding freedom right now.
You know its not an either/or situation, you can be concerned about both, right?
Look at Howard Springs Australia. Look at the vaccine passports. Look at the thread you're posting in. You probably think you're exempt. But immunity wanes, and variants will continue to emerge.
Governments never relinquish their emergency powers once they're enacted. This is just the latest "WMDs in Iraq". I can't speak for the UK, but in the US we still have the patriot act, and we just recently pulled out of Afghanistan.
20 years later we still live under the boogeyman of terrorism. Imagine if all the money we put into the war on terror went into better healthcare and other social goods?
All of this is to say, I don't have absolute trust in the vaccine or the plan or the people in charge, I don't trust them to make good decision nor to be honest.
If you want me to be onboard with "the plan", governments need to tell me
- What's in the vaccine.
- Exactly when they'll declare this over.
- That they'll undo all of their emergency powers afterwards.
Otherwise, just like the war on terror, this will never be over no matter how much we comply.
There are so many questionable things in this rambling waffle that it's hard to know where to start.
The idea that most people "not at risk" is wrong.
The idea that collective action is all about trusting government is wrong, it's primarily abut supporting the other people in your community. it's a very USA'ian line of thinking to jump to "Imma screw over my fellow citizens because the government can't be trusted. Freedom!".
The idea that Florida and Sweden are good examples is wrong.
And as above, the idea that the "freedom" implications and the "we've been lied to narrative" not the actual deadly pandemic is wrong. Do not confuse the one crisis (of democratic ideas) with the other (of infectious molecules) or your responses will not be appropriate. They operate at completely different levels of abstraction.
The idea that "we haven't seen the hospital scenarios you describe materialize" is, in my local area, wrong.
> Look at Howard Springs Australia. Look at the vaccine passports. Look at the thread you're posting in. You probably think you're exempt
I have no idea of the point you're trying to make, and please to make no assumptions at all about me.
I googled "Howard Springs" but I have no idea what crazy talking point I am supposed to be nodding along with now.
> governments need to tell me - Exactly when they'll declare this over
You can't vote on the virus's timeline. The only politicians who have tried to declare "it's over" are charlatans.
> governments need to tell me - What's in the vaccine.
Do I need to go into the reasons why this is paranoid delusional, confused idiocy? Governments don't design or manufacture the vaccines. Without a bio-medical background that you and I both lack it's just not comprehensible. And lastly, can you not google the layman's explainers and research papers? I understand why you didn't post this line alone in a comment - it would be flagged and deleted.
All in all, I feel like someone at a party who has engaged a stranger in conversation, and now regrets it, as they speak a lot but say absolutely nothing worth hearing.
Most people are "not at risk" in a sense that their risk is clearly much less than for others. There is no zero risk of anything, so we should not aim for that.
It would help if you explained what is wrong.
As it looks now, you just don't like what the stranger said and declare him not worth listening.
To me it is clear that vaccine passports is clearly not working and all this has become a big failure for politicians who don't know how to exit this failed strategy therefore double down on their plans.
Delta came out of India. Omicron came out of South Africa. How do mandates in the West stop variants elsewhere?
And variants aside, the vaccinated are still getting sick and dying at significant rates [1]. This vaccine is not the slam-dunk our "experts" promised. Until some miracle cure comes along, R < 1 is simply not possible.
If you think full vaccination is a necessary goal despite all this, OK fine. You know what might go a long way in terms of achieving mass vaccination? Open sourcing the vaccine recipe. Not just the RNA sequence. The whole recipe.
This should be a no-brainer.
Governments have no qualms with mandating lockdowns, masks, and vaccines for the masses.. but for some reason they hit the brakes when it comes to mandates for pharma. Not only is this a good idea in terms of improving supply side logistics, but also for the sake of re-building trust.
But no, common sense is too hard and "blame and shame" is too easy.
Being unvaccinated does not harm the vaccinated.
Hospital collapse has been liminal for 2 years now, it's a manufactured crisis. Instead of bolstering our healthcare staff and paying our front line workers more, we have done.. the exact opposite. We funnel tons of money to pharma, while frontline workers have effectively had their pay cut in half.
We're quite literally being force fed lies. But I guess that doesn't matter because at the end of the day the Milgram experiment prevails and all these attempts to question the narrative and hold authority accountable is pointless.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
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