6 ms·

If this was a sterilizing vaccine, such that you couldn't spread the virus or be infected after taking it I'd say neither are okay, religious or otherwise, beca

by Grimm1 5y ago

If this was a sterilizing vaccine, such that you couldn't spread the virus or be infected after taking it I'd say neither are okay, religious or otherwise, because your personal choice has the potential to affect a wide range of people by getting them sick, making your personal choice not so personal. Your rights end where mine begin and all of that. You shouldn't be able to spread a virus to others without consequences if there is a low risk way to completely eliminate that chance. Bodily autonomy is not an excuse to prolong a deadly pandemic especially because in this instance, this type of bodily autonomy doesn't come without large measurable consequences to society at large.

andi999 5y ago
Even non sterilizing could be argued, it effects other people if you cannot find an ICU after your car accident because they are full with unvaccinated (and some vaccinated) covid patients.
- xondono 5y ago
  The problem with this argument is that you can use it to also ban tobacco, and alcohol, and sugar, and red meat, and then you can move to things like sports, and start banning bungee jumping and rock climbing,… There’s no obvious way to draw a line, but you definitely need one.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wtallis 5y ago
    > There’s no obvious way to draw a line, but you definitely need one. That's why you look at the magnitude of the effect, not just the direction of the effect. Not all slopes are slippery. Our legal system does not collapse as soon as it is tasked with determining which harm is more important to prevent.
    - xondono 5y ago
      > Our legal system does not collapse as soon as it is tasked with determining which harm is more important to prevent. No, it just sucks at drawing lines and harms thousands if not millions of innocent bystanders.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    > is that you can use it to also ban tobacco, and alcohol, and sugar, and red meat, and then you can move to things like sports To be honest, IMHO both smoking tobacco and sports that cause a lot of concussions (eg. Rugby, American Football) are not going to last in the long term, or become marginal not mainstream activities. This might involve legislative pressures on them, as well as a decline in social acceptance. In the case of Tobacco, we see this drop well advanced already. This is no bad thing, considering the outcomes from these activities.
    - bradknowles 5y ago
      If eating red meat was causing the ICUs to fill up, then I think the public health concerns should take precedence. And then we should be talking about a nationwide ban of the practice. Likewise with smoking. But neither of those activities has that level of impact on public health. So, the measures to be taken to curtail that kind of activity likewise should not be as strong. But COVID is that bad. So, yes — vaccinations should be mandatory. Masking in public should be mandatory. At least, until the pandemic is over and we have sterilizing vaccines as well as medications that are proven to help cure the disease. And yes, this period could last years. And if you don’t want to be vaccinated and you don’t want to wear a mask in public, then you don’t have to go out into public. You can stay home. And if you want to violate that rule too, then we should be able to lock you up in a COVID hotspot jail.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
        Smoking _does_ cause hospital wards to fill up. But it happens on average a few decades later. So, the measures taken to curtail it have also come in over decades. But in the end, they will be strong. I'm in agreement with you on COVID and the necessary public health measures during an active pandemic.
- woofie11 5y ago
  It can, but it's a lousy argument. If my body doesn't affect your body, it should be my choice. Freedom is an American value. It's not a world value, and I wouldn't impose it on other countries, but it is an American one. I'm 100% for vaccine mandates iff vaccines significantly reduce R0. I'm 100% against them if they do not. Once my vaccination stops affecting the public health, it's my choice. Banning unsafe things IS a mistake. Yes, I ought to be able to sword fight on a tightrope with sharp swords and no protection over a pit of alligators, if I decide that's what I want to do. If that's the concern, then triage the unvaccinated COVID19 patients last. But in the long term, capacity expands to meet demand, and it's perfectly okay to change insurance premiums for anti-vaxers, smokers, or otherwise (or sword fighting over a pit of crocodiles, for that matter).
  - smorgusofborg 5y ago
    > If that's the concern, then triage the unvaccinated COVID19 patients last. This is an ethics violation. I don't really get your argument on risk. Non-vaccinated people with natural acquired immunity each got their special card rights by having caused a definite risk to everyone because they computed potential mutations perpetuating the pandemic and most likely perpetuated them. We have too high a population compared to 1918 to even have a that rough equivalent of what happens with a new virus in a pool of any more than 2 billion who aren't vaccinated. All I hear when I hear anti-vax arguments is a freeloader who refers to natural things that are completely unrelated to the life science is letting them live. If you don't like artificial vaccination, you need to propose how you want to lower the population to pre-science era levels.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
What if there was a medical treatment prbabisticly reduced aggression, violence, or other antisocial behavior?
- Grimm1 5y ago
  Well today if you were to punch me you'd likely be on trial for assault, and if you killed me, murder. Antisocial behaviors generally aren't legally punishable until they're taken out on someone else. In this case, if you choose not to get the vaccine and then through contact tracing or some other mechanism an outbreak is traced to you when you could have gotten a vaccine? Assault sounds correct to me and if you killed someone through inaction, then something equivalent to negligent homicide sounds correct to me. You're not necessarily malicious but I'd say fairly negligent. Not that that's what is currently the case, but it seems fair to me and in that world, rolling the dice on criminal charges instead of just getting a vaccine that 169million people in US alone currently have taken with no issue seems like a dumb dice roll to me, but most people have steadily proven to me over the last few years that they're not great at risk calculation over and under.
  - mlac 5y ago
    I am vaccinated and pro-vaccine, but it is not “zero issues”. There are side effects with the vaccines, and some of them are significant (partial paralysis). The numbers still work that we should get vaccinated, but it’s unclear if people who have the worst side effects from the vaccine would be the same ones who would have suffered the worst effects of COVID (death). So I get it - if you’re young, healthy, and unlikely to die from COVID, it is a non-zero (very, very small) risk from talking the vaccine. But I still think people should get the shot.
  - hallihax 5y ago
    I'm not aware of any actual data on this, but it seems to me that those who choose not to be vaccinated are probably also very unlikely to be tested on any regular basis (if at all), and also (at least in the UK, where I am) not engage in any kind of voluntary contact tracing. There seems to me to be a gap between what people think is happening, and what is actually happening. How exactly are people who haven't tested positive for Covid (either through a negative result, or simply avoiding testing altogether) going to be identified as the source of an outbreak if they're also not engaging in contact tracing in the first place? As it stands, it seems to me like the most likely people to be contact traced are those who are also testing regularly, and are also the most likely to be vaccinated. I would be surprised if non-vaccinated people are anything but rarely identified as the source of an outbreak, precisely because they're also much less likely to ever get tested (unless seriously ill) or engage in contact tracing.
criticaltinker 5y ago
For the sake of discussion, here are some counter-arguments: > If this was a sterilizing vaccine There's no question that if we had a vaccine that provided sterilizing immunity, the calculus for public health policy would be affected. However, we have to account for the inevitability of viral mutation and evolution. This idea goes hand in hand with the fact that immunity is a spectrum, and just because a vaccine provides sterilizing immunity now, doesn't guarantee it will continue to do so indefinitely and for everyone. > bodily autonomy doesn't come without large measurable consequences to society at large Similarly, compulsory mass vaccination does not come without significant risks to public health. There is a very real and non-trivial risk that compulsory mass vaccination would create selective pressure that further enhances the fitness of the virus, leading to immune escape which manifests as decreased protection for individuals who have acquired immunity through vaccination or natural infection [1][2][3][4][5]. Analogous to antibiotic resistance, the threat of vaccine resistance is a strong argument for diversifying viral elimination strategies across multiple molecular targets and therapeutic modalities. Finally, the argument for compulsory mass vaccination does not account for the fact that individuals who acquire immunity through natural infection are at least equally well protected as vaccinated individuals [6][7][8]. And this point leads us back to the crux of OP - it violates medical ethics to order unnecessary procedures. [1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/ [2] Can we predict the limits of SARS-CoV-2 variants and their phenotypic consequences? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evolution-of-sars-cov-2-26-july-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti... [3] Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016.2562 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016... [4] The adaptive evolution of virulence: a review of theoretical predictions and empirical tests https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/ [5] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1002198 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj... [6] SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4.pdf [7] Longitudinal analysis shows durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection with persisting antibody responses and memory B and T cells https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(21)00203-2 https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37... [8] Necessity of COVID-19 vaccination in previously infected individuals https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v3.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...

by Grimm1 5y ago

andi999 5y ago

Even non sterilizing could be argued, it effects other people if you cannot find an ICU after your car accident because they are full with unvaccinated (and some vaccinated) covid patients.

xondono 5y ago
The problem with this argument is that you can use it to also ban tobacco, and alcohol, and sugar, and red meat, and then you can move to things like sports, and start banning bungee jumping and rock climbing,… There’s no obvious way to draw a line, but you definitely need one.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wtallis 5y ago
  > There’s no obvious way to draw a line, but you definitely need one. That's why you look at the magnitude of the effect, not just the direction of the effect. Not all slopes are slippery. Our legal system does not collapse as soon as it is tasked with determining which harm is more important to prevent.
  - xondono 5y ago
    > Our legal system does not collapse as soon as it is tasked with determining which harm is more important to prevent. No, it just sucks at drawing lines and harms thousands if not millions of innocent bystanders.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > is that you can use it to also ban tobacco, and alcohol, and sugar, and red meat, and then you can move to things like sports To be honest, IMHO both smoking tobacco and sports that cause a lot of concussions (eg. Rugby, American Football) are not going to last in the long term, or become marginal not mainstream activities. This might involve legislative pressures on them, as well as a decline in social acceptance. In the case of Tobacco, we see this drop well advanced already. This is no bad thing, considering the outcomes from these activities.
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    If eating red meat was causing the ICUs to fill up, then I think the public health concerns should take precedence. And then we should be talking about a nationwide ban of the practice. Likewise with smoking. But neither of those activities has that level of impact on public health. So, the measures to be taken to curtail that kind of activity likewise should not be as strong. But COVID is that bad. So, yes — vaccinations should be mandatory. Masking in public should be mandatory. At least, until the pandemic is over and we have sterilizing vaccines as well as medications that are proven to help cure the disease. And yes, this period could last years. And if you don’t want to be vaccinated and you don’t want to wear a mask in public, then you don’t have to go out into public. You can stay home. And if you want to violate that rule too, then we should be able to lock you up in a COVID hotspot jail.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      Smoking _does_ cause hospital wards to fill up. But it happens on average a few decades later. So, the measures taken to curtail it have also come in over decades. But in the end, they will be strong. I'm in agreement with you on COVID and the necessary public health measures during an active pandemic.
woofie11 5y ago
It can, but it's a lousy argument. If my body doesn't affect your body, it should be my choice. Freedom is an American value. It's not a world value, and I wouldn't impose it on other countries, but it is an American one. I'm 100% for vaccine mandates iff vaccines significantly reduce R0. I'm 100% against them if they do not. Once my vaccination stops affecting the public health, it's my choice. Banning unsafe things IS a mistake. Yes, I ought to be able to sword fight on a tightrope with sharp swords and no protection over a pit of alligators, if I decide that's what I want to do. If that's the concern, then triage the unvaccinated COVID19 patients last. But in the long term, capacity expands to meet demand, and it's perfectly okay to change insurance premiums for anti-vaxers, smokers, or otherwise (or sword fighting over a pit of crocodiles, for that matter).
- smorgusofborg 5y ago
  > If that's the concern, then triage the unvaccinated COVID19 patients last. This is an ethics violation. I don't really get your argument on risk. Non-vaccinated people with natural acquired immunity each got their special card rights by having caused a definite risk to everyone because they computed potential mutations perpetuating the pandemic and most likely perpetuated them. We have too high a population compared to 1918 to even have a that rough equivalent of what happens with a new virus in a pool of any more than 2 billion who aren't vaccinated. All I hear when I hear anti-vax arguments is a freeloader who refers to natural things that are completely unrelated to the life science is letting them live. If you don't like artificial vaccination, you need to propose how you want to lower the population to pre-science era levels.

s1artibartfast 5y ago

What if there was a medical treatment prbabisticly reduced aggression, violence, or other antisocial behavior?

Grimm1 5y ago
Well today if you were to punch me you'd likely be on trial for assault, and if you killed me, murder. Antisocial behaviors generally aren't legally punishable until they're taken out on someone else. In this case, if you choose not to get the vaccine and then through contact tracing or some other mechanism an outbreak is traced to you when you could have gotten a vaccine? Assault sounds correct to me and if you killed someone through inaction, then something equivalent to negligent homicide sounds correct to me. You're not necessarily malicious but I'd say fairly negligent. Not that that's what is currently the case, but it seems fair to me and in that world, rolling the dice on criminal charges instead of just getting a vaccine that 169million people in US alone currently have taken with no issue seems like a dumb dice roll to me, but most people have steadily proven to me over the last few years that they're not great at risk calculation over and under.
- mlac 5y ago
  I am vaccinated and pro-vaccine, but it is not “zero issues”. There are side effects with the vaccines, and some of them are significant (partial paralysis). The numbers still work that we should get vaccinated, but it’s unclear if people who have the worst side effects from the vaccine would be the same ones who would have suffered the worst effects of COVID (death). So I get it - if you’re young, healthy, and unlikely to die from COVID, it is a non-zero (very, very small) risk from talking the vaccine. But I still think people should get the shot.
- hallihax 5y ago
  I'm not aware of any actual data on this, but it seems to me that those who choose not to be vaccinated are probably also very unlikely to be tested on any regular basis (if at all), and also (at least in the UK, where I am) not engage in any kind of voluntary contact tracing. There seems to me to be a gap between what people think is happening, and what is actually happening. How exactly are people who haven't tested positive for Covid (either through a negative result, or simply avoiding testing altogether) going to be identified as the source of an outbreak if they're also not engaging in contact tracing in the first place? As it stands, it seems to me like the most likely people to be contact traced are those who are also testing regularly, and are also the most likely to be vaccinated. I would be surprised if non-vaccinated people are anything but rarely identified as the source of an outbreak, precisely because they're also much less likely to ever get tested (unless seriously ill) or engage in contact tracing.

criticaltinker 5y ago

For the sake of discussion, here are some counter-arguments: > If this was a sterilizing vaccine There's no question that if we had a vaccine that provided sterilizing immunity, the calculus for public health policy would be affected. However, we have to account for the inevitability of viral mutation and evolution. This idea goes hand in hand with the fact that immunity is a spectrum, and just because a vaccine provides sterilizing immunity now, doesn't guarantee it will continue to do so indefinitely and for everyone. > bodily autonomy doesn't come without large measurable consequences to society at large Similarly, compulsory mass vaccination does not come without significant risks to public health. There is a very real and non-trivial risk that compulsory mass vaccination would create selective pressure that further enhances the fitness of the virus, leading to immune escape which manifests as decreased protection for individuals who have acquired immunity through vaccination or natural infection [1][2][3][4][5]. Analogous to antibiotic resistance, the threat of vaccine resistance is a strong argument for diversifying viral elimination strategies across multiple molecular targets and therapeutic modalities. Finally, the argument for compulsory mass vaccination does not account for the fact that individuals who acquire immunity through natural infection are at least equally well protected as vaccinated individuals [6][7][8]. And this point leads us back to the crux of OP - it violates medical ethics to order unnecessary procedures. [1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/ [2] Can we predict the limits of SARS-CoV-2 variants and their phenotypic consequences? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evolution-of-sars-cov-2-26-july-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti... [3] Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016.2562 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016... [4] The adaptive evolution of virulence: a review of theoretical predictions and empirical tests https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/ [5] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1002198 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj... [6] SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4.pdf [7] Longitudinal analysis shows durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection with persisting antibody responses and memory B and T cells https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(21)00203-2 https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37... [8] Necessity of COVID-19 vaccination in previously infected individuals https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v3.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...