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To reply as the devils advocate to this comment, what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society ha

by ixacto 5y ago

To reply as the devils advocate to this comment, what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society have to do something that it doesn't want e.g. not bear risk if they want to? Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight and obesity are going to cost much more in increased healthcare costs than COVID will in the coming decades (pls prove me wrong..). What about drinking and smoking? Maybe we should also ban these because these people will probably go on government health insurance when they come down with chronic health issues from too much alcohol or tobacco. I guess I don't see where your argument about societal costs doesn't become a slippery slope. Also full disclosure I'm 100% vaccinated and will get the booster in Dec.

refulgentis 5y ago
The line seems to be drawn at socializing the risks of full hospital ICUs in a region Edit: why the downvote to near-dead? I thought that's what the author emphasized :\
- wrycoder 5y ago
  ICUs normally run at 80%. This is gaslighting.
  - refulgentis 5y ago
    How so? Latest reports have most of the south from south carolina to Texas at 100% capacity. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/14/us/covid-hospital-icu-south.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/14/us/covid-hosp... Please avoid this style of interaction on HN — it's been my favorite place for 13 years because of what dang often refers to as the right attitude for discussion, "coming with curiosity." We try to avoid accusatory language, especially accusing others of lying, not by omission, but by commission for the sole purpose of psychological abuse.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      ICU capacity is generally bottlenecked by staffing and not by beds within suitable facilities. Basically there are required minimum ratios both legally and from a "we have to follow our on policy lest we create slam dunk lawsuits" point of view. ICU staffing is less elastic than it's ever been because hospitals have cut staffing in response to people postponing elective care (where all the $$ is). So ICU capacity as a percentage of full is as much a reflection of hospitals being tightwads as it is about Covid.
      - Izkata 5y ago
        > have cut staffing in response to people postponing elective care Also more recently from firing nurses who don't want to get vaccinated, who had worked for all of last year without a vaccine.
        refulgentis 5y ago
        So the hospitals _are_ full but they're actually not full, their capacity is lower than last year? Do you have any sources that can back that claim? It seems like a first order, simple, cause and effect thought, but it's unclear if this is anecdotal or there was a mass firing of nurses that's got under the radar. Let's signal boost it, if so.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Gaslighting? wtf?
  - coffeecat 5y ago
    I hear the term "gaslighting" used a lot nowadays. Its textbook definition is a specific form of interpersonal manipulation that occurred in a movie. But I've never been able to connect the dots between the term's textbook definition, and the way that people actually use it. The effective definition seems to be: "expressing a different perspective."
    - prawn 5y ago
      I find this interesting too, wondering what we called it 5+ years ago when I never heard anyone use the term. My wife is a few years younger and uses it. I think the only time I've used it in 40+ years is asking my wife what it means. If an argument involves differing opinions, and participating in an argument is an attempt to persuade, is that manipulation?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - Izkata 5y ago
      The more general meaning is "making a person question their own sense of reality", without any specification on who is causing it. It may or may not apply here, it depends on if the person being argued against already knows the larger context of 80% being normal. Everyone around them pretending that was never the case would be gaslighting. If they didn't know the larger context, it wouldn't be gaslighting, they're just ignorant of the context.
- colpabar 5y ago
  I downvoted you because you complained about being downvoted :)
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    I downvoted you because you came across as smug :)
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
It's not a binary. Sure, you should be able to take the risk (if an adult and mentally competent, and maybe also fully informed). It's a free country (or so they claim). But when your choices rack up huge medical bills that the rest of us have to pay, then your freedom to do what you want collides with our freedom to not have to pay for it. If you're free to spend my money, then I'm less free. But that isn't absolute, either. We let people drive, and emit carbon dioxide, and play loud music, all of which impose negative externalities on others. We even let people be obese and smoke, which impose financial costs on the rest of us. (And yet, there's been a massive anti-smoking campaign over the last 10 or so years...) Societal costs is a slippery slope, or something like it. As a society, we're trying to find a place to stand on it that isn't "no healthcare for you because you make stupid choices", and also isn't "here's the public's checkbook for you to make full use of to try to undo the consequences of your bad choices". There are no simple answers. (And it's not just Covid.)
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  There are societal costs for obesity as well, but they aren’t socialized early enough in the USA, and their increased cost burden on Medicare is paired with a decrease cost burden on social security. Not that it’s an excuse (we should mandate vaccines and also deal with obesity on a societal level, both are good, one is more urgent than the other).
glangdale 5y ago
Aside from DUI risk and passive smoking, most of these risks are specific to the person. I can't catch obesity from being in the same room as a obese person, and while public health costs go up from drinkers/smokers/heavy people, I haven't heard of ambulances being gridlocked outside a hospital due to a spike of lifestyle diseases.
- rolobio 5y ago
  Children can “catch” obesity from their parents. Once you’re sufficiently overweight, it’s hard to turn back, even when you leave your parents house.
- djKianoosh 5y ago
  But doesn't a population's overall poor health contribute to the potential gridlock of the healthcare system? I mean, what is the percentage of non-accident emergencies in the system and has it increased with the overall decline in society's fitness? (assuming it has declined I suppose, I don't have any numbers as I am not in that field)
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    It probably adds some load, but it's a predictable amount spread out across decades, not a giant clump right now. It will consume more healthcare resources, but it's not going to overload the healthcare system and prevent other people from using it.
- carom 5y ago
  This pandemic would be a blip if everyone was in shape. >CFR (case fatality ratio) in the large cohort in China was elevated for patients with comorbidities, with 10.5% of those with underlying cardiovascular disease, 7.3% of those with diabetes, 6.3% of those with chronic respiratory disease, and 5.6% of those with cancer dying of COVID-related illness. [1] That looks like a clean 17% reduction for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. So yes, hospitals are getting gridlocked during this pandemic because of lifestyle diseases. >The NCHS statement broke down the death certificates mentioning COVID-19. For 94% of people who had COVID-19 also had other conditions listed. COVID-19 alone was cause of death for 6%. >Dr. Maja Artandi ( here ), medical director of the Stanford CROWN Clinic for COVID-19 patients ( here ), told Reuters via email that the CDC’s numbers “are really not a big surprise,” as “patients who have a comorbidity such as diabetes, hypertension or obesity have a higher risk of getting seriously ill and dying from COVID-19.” [2] Without COVID they would still be alive, but no doubt lifestyle disease has been a serious contributing factor to deaths during this pandemic. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida... 2.https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-94-percent-covid-among-caus-idUSKBN25U2IO https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-94-percent-covi...
micromacrofoot 5y ago
If hospital beds become filled to >50% capacity because of the obese then maybe we can start making this comparison. Because of unvaccinated people many of us face significantly worse hospital care right now.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  Many of the COVID severe cases are the obese
  - grioghar 5y ago
    I challenge you to provide proof of this statement outside a politically slanted source.
    - danielheath 5y ago
      I'd challenge you to provide a source - for any statement - that is unambiguously free from political slant.
    - collegeburner 5y ago
      According to the NIH, 64% of hospitalizations might have been prevented if not for obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and heart failure. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/most-covid-19-hospitalizations-due-four-conditions https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/most-co...
      - jeromegv 5y ago
        --- In the U.S. Almost 3 in 4 U.S. adults is overweight or obese. Nearly half of people have prediabetes or diabetes. --- So basically, it's easy to say that COVID would be prevented IF those people didn't have those conditions... but those people are there, they are actually majority of your adult population. So we have to deal with that.
        5y ago
jackson1442 5y ago
Generally medical gridlock hasn’t been a problem, but this is a unique case in that ICU beds are filling up in some regions leading to _entirely preventable_ illness and death that is unrelated to covid. Once that stops happening, I will care significantly less. But if I have the risk of not having an ICU bed if I get into a car crash because people aren’t getting vaccinated, that’s an unacceptable social outcome to me. My personal take is that insurance should progressively cover less of covid treatment of unvaccinated (by choice- minors and immunocompromised being excluded from this policy) patients until it is having a minimal impact on our healthcare system. If people don’t want to get the vax, that’s fine, but I’m not pooling for your medical bills. Sure, it could be played into a “forever war” by reducing hospital/ICU capacity, but I don’t really see a benefit to doing that.
- 015a 5y ago
  One of the issues with that argument is: If Biden's workplace vaccine mandate goes through, many of the remaining people who decide not to get vaccinated simply won't have insurance, given they'll also be out of a job. Instead of paying more into the system, they'll be paying less. They'll still end up in the hospital. Defaulting on the hospital bill doesn't seem unlikely for many in this situation. This is the biggest reason why this move by Biden is an idiotic gambit, relying on the hope that most of the holdouts are simply on the fence and need a manipulative push. He may be right, but the cost of being wrong could quite literally be large swaths of the US Healthcare System. What's more, we're seeing concerning numbers of healthcare workers leave the industry. ICUs are not, generally, overfilled because they're out of physical beds; they're overfilled because they're out of people. No one in power is talking about this. Hospitals lose nurses making $70k, then turn around and pay $8000/week for travel nurses. Those nurses that left? You guessed it: many are trying out travel nursing. The rest are burnt-out. The crisis really is not in the unvaccinated; its in our healthcare system, and it was growing long before the pandemic. A fractionally small part of me actually believes what some in the really, really fringe-right are saying right now: the administration wants the healthcare system to fail, because its another crisis which can be pivoted into single-payer or even nationalized healthcare. Well, its their fear, but its conversely my hope, because at least that would mean the people in charge have a medium term strategy for what seems to be inevitable at this point.
MSM 5y ago
>Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? >What about drinking and smoking? There's a lot of investment in trying to fix these problems already, or at least offset the costs. For example, there are "sin taxes" for things like cigarettes and alcohol, which means smokers and drinkers are paying disproportionately more taxes than those that don't. You could argue that overweight folks are also paying disproportionately more simply by buying more food than someone who weighs 20% less. All that aside though- forcing fat people to get skinny isn't a valid comparison to forcing people to take a vaccine. One takes a couple minutes and the other is something requiring an hour or more of dedicated time per day for potentially years (or a whole lifetime!). Let's say, hypothetically, there existed a free shot which would immediately make its recipient a perfectly lean 20 BMI and grants all the benefits of health and exercise without the work. How many people would choose not to take it, and how would society view those that decided to walk around weighing 400lbs? That's really the apples to apples comparison here, and I think you'd find there would be very few folks walking around at 400lbs in that scenario.
- collegeburner 5y ago
  Except the food you eat to get fat is often much cheaper than the food to stay healthy. Produce is expensive per calorie, lean meat is expensive per calorie, cooking takes time and effort, and a gym membership is expensive. This is one of the reasons why obesity is so prevalent, it's much easier than staying healthy. It's not just 20% more of what healthy people eat.
  - tayo42 5y ago
    > Produce is expensive per calorie, Thats kind of the point of eating fresh food, your filled with less calories. you eat less, your at a healthy weight. That not the stuff getting people fat. Look how many calories are in mcdonals burgers. People are getting fat becasue they're uneducated. They drink sodas, sweet teas, eat candy and excessive alcohol
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      The point is that it's much cheaper to fill your belly with a McDonald's burger than artisanal bread, fresh tomato, minced lean meat. Much, much cheaper. If you are aiming to eat 2000 calories per day, you will do eat much more cheaply with a pizza and a burger than with good food.
iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
> What about drinking and smoking? Literally Whataboutism. Don’t take the irrelevant bait.
- collegeburner 5y ago
  No it's not. It's saying that we tolerate huge social costs elsewhere, so why is this one too large to bear?
  - iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
    There is no way to have a good faith argument with someone who is advocating not saving lives because we aren’t saving other lives.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      Saving lives cannot be the only consideration. There has to be limits on the power of the state to restrict and compel human behavior. We shouldn't live under medical tyranny.
      - aaron-santos 5y ago
        What about economic tyranny? Shouldn't we be fixing that first?
        CryptoPunk 5y ago
        What economic tyranny are you referring to?
        quantumBerry 5y ago
        How about the tyranny of being forced to pay taxes to blow up little kids in Afghanistan at $40k+ a bomb, or the tyranny of being forced under penalty of prison to pay for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons for the Taliban? You don't think it's a little tyrannical that the tax man can say give us the money to blow up innocent little kids or I'm going to put you in a cage and take your own kids?
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Wasn’t that the whole point of Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch drive? And the conservatives who are largely against mandated vaccines today also declared that initiative as government going too far. People living in conservative states are also far more obese than liberal ones (California vs Texas, for example). Conservatives, at least, are being consistent.
TulliusCicero 5y ago
> Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight people can't transmit their overweightness to me through a virus or bacterium that they breathe into the air. If they could, then yeah, we'd probably have some kind of legal mandate on it. Just like we have a bunch of restrictions on smoking now, because indeed, that's something that you push into the air. The general rule is that your rights stop where others begin. Most issues of health are purely personal, but infectious diseases are not. Because they're infectious.
- hammock 5y ago
  >Overweight people can't transmit their overweightness to me through a virus or bacterium that they breathe into the air. They can fill up hospital beds though, that might not be available for you when you need one!
  - thebraxton 5y ago
    I don't think it's whether the beds are filled up, I sure many injuries are carelessness, it's how easy is it to avoid it. Losing weight is insanely hard getting a shot or two is easy. In fact if you had some kid who was speeding, got into a crash, and is now taking up a bed I'd argue that self control for young adults in related to reckless behavior is much more difficult to stop than not getting a vaccine.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    That's true, and certainly I'm in favor of national policies to encourage people to be healthy and fit. That said, getting vaccinated is about a thousand times easier than staying in shape. It's free and quick to get over with, whereas fitness requires sustained effort indefinitely. It's reasonable to treat people's choice to refuse something easy different from people either refusing or struggling with something difficult. The other important distinction is that we're not gonna suddenly have a shock of people coming down with obesity and flash flooding the hospitals. The country getting bigger is not a good thing, but as a gradual thing it can be managed much more easily.
  - cko 5y ago
boplicity 5y ago
You are assuming that getting vaccinated is a burden, and then comparing it to challenges that many people take years, or longer, to overcome. That makes absolutely no sense. Getting vaccinated takes just a few minutes, and has no long term consequences for virtually everyone, and does not require ongoing effort of any kind. In no way is getting vaccinated comparable to struggling with obesity, quitting cigarettes, or alcoholism. Sorry, but your comparisons are, frankly, bizarre.
- johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
  We could choose to not sell pure sugar as food in grocery stores, cigarettes, alcohol, or firearms for that matter in the first place... Funny enough, during the initial/strictest lockdowns in Ontario Canada, the liquor stores were one of the only stores allowed to be open to the public.
- spaginal 5y ago
  They haven’t studied these genetic therapies long term to know if what you assert is the case. We already know there are health issues associated now with the mrna shots. We could see a rash of issues show up in the next couple of years.
  - jumpkick 5y ago
    “We already know there are health issues associated now with the mrna shots.” What issues? This is the first I’m hearing of this. Details and sources please.
    - quantumBerry 5y ago
      Of course not in all cases can we prove that the health issues are 100% the shot, but it looks extremely likely the shot causes health issues in rare cases [1]: -Anaphalaxysis in 2-5 per million peoples -Thrombosis (2 reported cases from J&J) -Myocarditis / Pericarditis : 854 confirmed The benefits appear to far exceed the risk at the population level. But that's not much consolation at the individual level if you are someone predisposed to anaphylaxis or thrombosis, which are potentially life threatening, in which case at the individual level the vaccine may look to not be worth the risks. Better screening tools could help identify individuals with these risks. I'm also not sure there are any mRNA vaccines for which we have to compare in humans that have been out few years and FDA approved. It is my understanding the COVID vaccine was the first widely distributed mRNA vaccine in humans. I have no reason to believe they are dangerous, but they are lacking any long term studies in humans on any large scale. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
js2 5y ago
When I drink or smoke or I’m overweight, that doesn’t affect the health of my neighbor. It also doesn’t overcrowd hospitals causing innocent people to die because they can’t find treatment[1]. There also isn’t a vaccine for being overweight. (We should probably mandate seasonal flu vaccines too.) 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/12/alabama-ray-demonia-hospitals-icu/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/12/alabama-ray...
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  It does because you place disproportionate strain on the healthcare system, which limits its accessibility to others. There also is a 100% successful method for losing weight, it's just that people can't or choose not to follow it, but we could mandate it and force them to. For their own good and the good of the healthcare system. (We probably should not mandate that or any other drug or medical treatment)
  - lukebitts 5y ago
    No it doesn’t. People have been smoking, drinking and being fat for decades now and we haven’t had a crisis or a lack of beds for the rest of the public.
    - sparrish 5y ago
      That's ridiculous. Hospitals fill up on a regular basis, now and before Covid. They like to keep as close to capacity as they can - $$. If we have more need for beds, we build more beds. We don't take away personal freedom.
      - lukebitts 5y ago
        It’s a fact that before Covid we didn’t have a crisis for lack of beds (where I live) and after Covid we do. What hospitals like to do is irrelevant, I’m talking about reality
        5y ago
gnopgnip 5y ago
>what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society have to do something that it doesn't want e.g. not bear risk if they want to? Vaccines are already required to attend schools, daycare, college, to immigrate to the US, for many existing federal jobs, to join the military, most jobs in the medical field. These requirements have existed for 20+ years, society has tolerated these costs and benefited greatly. I could see OSHA having a vaccine mandate that covers TDAP, MMR, polio and Hep B similar to the proposed covid mandate for large employers. But all of these are required to attend school and in other situations, so it isn't needed. >What about drinking and smoking? Drunk driving is a crime. Society doesn't tolerate it. We generally limit second hand smoke, banning smoking in restaurants and many other indoor buildings. Requiring vaccination to prevent the spread of infectious disease is analogous.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > Requiring vaccination to prevent the spread of infectious disease is analogous. No, it isn't. Requiring someone to submit to a medical procedure that injects something into their body is very different from restricting the circumstances in which they can do things like smoke or drink. Also, past vaccination campaigns (such as smallpox, polio, measles) have all been based on the expectation that mass vaccination would eradicate the disease (and that expectation has been realized with several of those diseases). There is no such expectation with the COVID vaccines we currently have; they are not going to eradicate COVID.
- quantumBerry 5y ago
  >Drunk driving is a crime In someplace like Texas drunk driving is only a crime in limited circumstances, like driving in public. You could go to somewhere private, like an employer's private gated parking lot that is accessible to 100 employees but not the public, and you could not get a DUI. By the same token that it would be tyrannical for drunk driving to be a crime on private area of private property, it is quite tyrannical to enforce covid vaccines on facilities with 100 employees voluntarily engaging in employment on private property.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Obesity tends to kill people before they get old enough to incur real costs in medical care. It's like cigarette smoking, it actually saves the healthcare system money and resources because smoking tends to kill people before they get very old. Also, I can't catch obesity by simply sharing the same room with someone who is obese like I can with COVID.
- cfn 5y ago
  And your chance of catching COVID from an unvaccinated person is, apparently (no real studies to prove or disprove yet that I know of) not very different from a vaccinated person.
Johnny555 5y ago
Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight and obesity are going to cost much more in increased healthcare costs than COVID will in the coming decades (pls prove me wrong..). No matter how obese someone is, I'm not going to catch their obesity by breathing the same air as them.
XorNot 5y ago
Overweight people already have their costs internalized: that's what your insurance rates are. This is also actually tremendously fair, because if you're fat but don't suffer any lifestyle illnesses, then your insurance rates are low - you are actually able to support your mass. But once those conditions start ticking up, so do your insurance rates. The US basically leads the way on addressing the social externalities of obesity as they relate to the healthcare system.
solmag 5y ago
He isn't serious about this. Guarantee he has a tweet or liked a tweet from 2020 raging about Cheeto Mussolini's White Supremacy Vax. It's just politics, and has been, since early 2020. Let us put the gays to the camps, they impose external costs to the healthcare system too (but we won't, because they are a holy symbol for these people).
jollybean 5y ago
The thing that makes COVID dangerous is it's contagion not so much it's direct effects. If COVID were not highly transmissible, then the relatively low risk of death would make it spooky, but it's not likely we'd even see it on the news. It spreads to others quickly, and many people get very sick even if they don't die, hospitals fill up and it makes it very difficult to operate a healthcare facility. Consider the 'no policy' effect: if we did nothing in response to COVID, it would spread like a fire, and without 'flattening the curve' - which we mostly have done, it would badly degrade our ability to function. People not able to tend for the older population because they themselves are sick, hospital staff going down, people in hospitals with other ailments going down etc.. So because of that it's a community problem. If you want to think about it from an 'individual choice' perspective, consider what it would mean if you didn't take proper precautions while doing an activity, and ended up killing someone even by accident, that's manslaughter. Given a rational population with some reasonable, conscientious objectors, we should be at about 95% vaccination, which is plenty. There's room for the serious objectors, the problem is there's way too much arbitrary and misinformed skepticism. So it's not like wearing a seatbelt or eating too much carbs, which is mostly a personal issue. COVID is inherently a systematic problem.
worker767424 5y ago
> Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? That policy hurts farmers, so it's not viable for a different reason.
scoopertrooper 5y ago
> To reply as the devils advocate to this comment, what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society have to do something that it doesn't want e.g. not bear risk if they want to? * The risk isn't just on that segment. The vaccine is not 100% effective without herd immunity to back it up. * The unvaccinated will be the source of new variants, so a substantial of social resources will need to be continually invested in developing and trialing new vaccines. > Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight and obesity are going to cost much more in increased healthcare costs than COVID will in the coming decades (pls prove me wrong..). I believe the jury is still out on whether or not obesity is contagious. > What about drinking and smoking? Maybe we should also ban these because these people will probably go on government health insurance when they come down with chronic health issues from too much alcohol or tobacco. Most countries ban smoking in confined spaces where it can impact the health of non-smokers. I suppose you'd support repealing such laws. > I guess I don't see where your argument about societal costs doesn't become a slippery slope. Slippery slope to what exactly?
ggggtez 5y ago
Your drinking is regulated. When you step into a car drunk, you are putting others at risk and it stops being your problem and starts being society's problem. The same is true here. You are stepping into society on a state of health that presents risks to everyone around you.
tayo42 5y ago
> I guess I don't see where your argument about societal costs doesn't become a slippery slope. Your admitting this, why even bring up your points if you know they dont matter? There's no reason to argue this point
sjg007 5y ago
> Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight and obesity are going to cost much more in increased healthcare costs than COVID will in the coming decades (pls prove me wrong..). You are the one making this claim. Back it up with some evidence.
enaaem 5y ago
From risk management perspective obesity and pandemics have completely different risk characteristics. Pandemics are contagious and deaths can grow exponentially, leading to catastrophic outcomes. Obesity is constraint to individuals. On the other hand. A vaccine that is not as rigorously tested as normal and is used on 80% of the population can also lead to catastrophic results. No one really knows the long term effects for sure. So I understand the paranoia on two sides. You actually want to use as many different vaccines as possible so no single vaccine can exterminate your population. That’s why I belief natural immunity should be counted as a valid ‘vaccine’, if the science shows it offers similar protection.
- LudvigVanHassen 5y ago
  I agree with this.
johnchristopher 5y ago
> To reply as the devils advocate to this comment, what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society have to do something that it doesn't want e.g. not bear risk if they want to? It has been debated to death and one of the thing we can't negotiate with is time so at some points some actions have to been taken, some things conceded. We can keep on debating the benefits of smoking and individual freedom but we as a society (our institutions) have decided that smoking or not wearing shoes inside restaurants is not allowed. At some points our society decided that it wants everyone (let's put aside the special immunodeficient, babies, etc. cases) to be vaccinated. Now why should I be obliged to risk my health by going to restaurants, social events or work where I am taking the risk to get covid because other people are fine with the risk (or are not fine but refuse to get the vaccines on the ground that it's not a health matter but a compliance to law matter for them. I know one) ? It's like smoking, don't blow it in my direction. Vaccines/pass/etc. are a necessity for the vast majority to enjoy life as it was, to get some freedom back. People willing to participate in society without following the rules that society put in place to participate safely should not be allowed to join in without restrictions. It's my opinion, not a logical conclusion to any reasoning about our laws and how we behave as as specie/culture. It's fine if they don't get the vaccines but it's not fine to put others at risk. We can debate the fairness aspect of this decision or the framework in which freedom and liberties are defined and understood but at some points reality force us to take a stance. There'll never be a perfect solution that reconcile everyone's visions of freedom. With all that being said I strongly believe that keeping on debating publicly these aspects of the situation 24/7 is harming our recovery or transition to a better situation. These `debates` are just maintaining the illusion that options are still on the table, that we have the luxury to debate them, that somehow the longer we beat the same old dead horse maybe covid problems will magically disappear, that debating and coming to the same set of possible conclusions is somehow useful.
dorfsmay 5y ago
It's a resource vs demand at this point. Socialized healthcare systems already deal with this. For example being obese or a smoker will put you at the bottom of the list for organ transplant. Given how unvaccinated covid cases are filling up some ICUs, why shouldn't we prioritize ICU access against eligible unvaccinated people?
leetcrew 5y ago
it's not clear that people who smoke, eat, and/or overeat actually consume more healthcare over a lifetime. most people incur the majority of their healthcare expenses as they slowly die over the last several years of their life. the last few years just come sooner for unhealthy people.
kristjansson 5y ago
The social costs of forgoing the vaccine are unique in that they arrive all at once. Smoking, drinking, obesity, etc. increase lifetime healthcare costs, but realize those costs over a long period of time. Hospitals are sized appropriately, more can be built if projections indicate more need, doctors can be trained, etc. A policy that accepts infection-recovery as equivalent to vaccination unconditionally and removes most/all other restrictions could result in lots of those social costs over a very short period of time, much shorter than the timescale on which resources can adjust. So much so that resources become exhausted, and the costs compound from merely high to truly awful. Personal choice resulting in an impaired standard of care for unrelated people in need for unrelated reasons should probably be discouraged or proscribed. Once the risk of resource exhaustion is eliminated, a policy that's less than a full-court press for vaccination might be reasonable. But that risk is primarily determined by the size of the covid-naive population, which can only be reduced by vaccination or infection...
stjohnswarts 5y ago
It is a slippery slope fallacy. You only have to look back through the history of vaccines and see. We have had vaccine mandates before and guess what? No dictatorship installed. It's easy to point at democracies all over the world. Mandated vaccinations never led to "okay now do this ______ to improve your health or else" . Also no one says bring in the police, just make it so that if you want a job then get the vax or bring in a reason from your doctor that says you can't take it because of some medical condition. Simple.
kgin 5y ago
> Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Japan does this and has a 3.6% obesity rate compared to our 42%. Doesn’t seem that terrible of a slope to slip down. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/world/asia/13fat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/world/asia/13fat.html

by ixacto 5y ago

refulgentis 5y ago

The line seems to be drawn at socializing the risks of full hospital ICUs in a region Edit: why the downvote to near-dead? I thought that's what the author emphasized :\

wrycoder 5y ago
ICUs normally run at 80%. This is gaslighting.
- refulgentis 5y ago
  How so? Latest reports have most of the south from south carolina to Texas at 100% capacity. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/14/us/covid-hospital-icu-south.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/14/us/covid-hosp... Please avoid this style of interaction on HN — it's been my favorite place for 13 years because of what dang often refers to as the right attitude for discussion, "coming with curiosity." We try to avoid accusatory language, especially accusing others of lying, not by omission, but by commission for the sole purpose of psychological abuse.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    ICU capacity is generally bottlenecked by staffing and not by beds within suitable facilities. Basically there are required minimum ratios both legally and from a "we have to follow our on policy lest we create slam dunk lawsuits" point of view. ICU staffing is less elastic than it's ever been because hospitals have cut staffing in response to people postponing elective care (where all the $$ is). So ICU capacity as a percentage of full is as much a reflection of hospitals being tightwads as it is about Covid.
    - Izkata 5y ago
      > have cut staffing in response to people postponing elective care Also more recently from firing nurses who don't want to get vaccinated, who had worked for all of last year without a vaccine.
      - refulgentis 5y ago
        So the hospitals _are_ full but they're actually not full, their capacity is lower than last year? Do you have any sources that can back that claim? It seems like a first order, simple, cause and effect thought, but it's unclear if this is anecdotal or there was a mass firing of nurses that's got under the radar. Let's signal boost it, if so.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Gaslighting? wtf?
- coffeecat 5y ago
  I hear the term "gaslighting" used a lot nowadays. Its textbook definition is a specific form of interpersonal manipulation that occurred in a movie. But I've never been able to connect the dots between the term's textbook definition, and the way that people actually use it. The effective definition seems to be: "expressing a different perspective."
  - prawn 5y ago
    I find this interesting too, wondering what we called it 5+ years ago when I never heard anyone use the term. My wife is a few years younger and uses it. I think the only time I've used it in 40+ years is asking my wife what it means. If an argument involves differing opinions, and participating in an argument is an attempt to persuade, is that manipulation?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Izkata 5y ago
    The more general meaning is "making a person question their own sense of reality", without any specification on who is causing it. It may or may not apply here, it depends on if the person being argued against already knows the larger context of 80% being normal. Everyone around them pretending that was never the case would be gaslighting. If they didn't know the larger context, it wouldn't be gaslighting, they're just ignorant of the context.
colpabar 5y ago
I downvoted you because you complained about being downvoted :)
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  I downvoted you because you came across as smug :)

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

It's not a binary. Sure, you should be able to take the risk (if an adult and mentally competent, and maybe also fully informed). It's a free country (or so they claim). But when your choices rack up huge medical bills that the rest of us have to pay, then your freedom to do what you want collides with our freedom to not have to pay for it. If you're free to spend my money, then I'm less free. But that isn't absolute, either. We let people drive, and emit carbon dioxide, and play loud music, all of which impose negative externalities on others. We even let people be obese and smoke, which impose financial costs on the rest of us. (And yet, there's been a massive anti-smoking campaign over the last 10 or so years...) Societal costs is a slippery slope, or something like it. As a society, we're trying to find a place to stand on it that isn't "no healthcare for you because you make stupid choices", and also isn't "here's the public's checkbook for you to make full use of to try to undo the consequences of your bad choices". There are no simple answers. (And it's not just Covid.)

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
There are societal costs for obesity as well, but they aren’t socialized early enough in the USA, and their increased cost burden on Medicare is paired with a decrease cost burden on social security. Not that it’s an excuse (we should mandate vaccines and also deal with obesity on a societal level, both are good, one is more urgent than the other).

glangdale 5y ago

Aside from DUI risk and passive smoking, most of these risks are specific to the person. I can't catch obesity from being in the same room as a obese person, and while public health costs go up from drinkers/smokers/heavy people, I haven't heard of ambulances being gridlocked outside a hospital due to a spike of lifestyle diseases.

rolobio 5y ago
Children can “catch” obesity from their parents. Once you’re sufficiently overweight, it’s hard to turn back, even when you leave your parents house.
djKianoosh 5y ago
But doesn't a population's overall poor health contribute to the potential gridlock of the healthcare system? I mean, what is the percentage of non-accident emergencies in the system and has it increased with the overall decline in society's fitness? (assuming it has declined I suppose, I don't have any numbers as I am not in that field)
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  It probably adds some load, but it's a predictable amount spread out across decades, not a giant clump right now. It will consume more healthcare resources, but it's not going to overload the healthcare system and prevent other people from using it.
carom 5y ago
This pandemic would be a blip if everyone was in shape. >CFR (case fatality ratio) in the large cohort in China was elevated for patients with comorbidities, with 10.5% of those with underlying cardiovascular disease, 7.3% of those with diabetes, 6.3% of those with chronic respiratory disease, and 5.6% of those with cancer dying of COVID-related illness. [1] That looks like a clean 17% reduction for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. So yes, hospitals are getting gridlocked during this pandemic because of lifestyle diseases. >The NCHS statement broke down the death certificates mentioning COVID-19. For 94% of people who had COVID-19 also had other conditions listed. COVID-19 alone was cause of death for 6%. >Dr. Maja Artandi ( here ), medical director of the Stanford CROWN Clinic for COVID-19 patients ( here ), told Reuters via email that the CDC’s numbers “are really not a big surprise,” as “patients who have a comorbidity such as diabetes, hypertension or obesity have a higher risk of getting seriously ill and dying from COVID-19.” [2] Without COVID they would still be alive, but no doubt lifestyle disease has been a serious contributing factor to deaths during this pandemic. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida... 2.https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-94-percent-covid-among-caus-idUSKBN25U2IO https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-94-percent-covi...

micromacrofoot 5y ago

If hospital beds become filled to >50% capacity because of the obese then maybe we can start making this comparison. Because of unvaccinated people many of us face significantly worse hospital care right now.

OrvalWintermute 5y ago
Many of the COVID severe cases are the obese
- grioghar 5y ago
  I challenge you to provide proof of this statement outside a politically slanted source.
  - danielheath 5y ago
    I'd challenge you to provide a source - for any statement - that is unambiguously free from political slant.
  - collegeburner 5y ago
    According to the NIH, 64% of hospitalizations might have been prevented if not for obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and heart failure. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/most-covid-19-hospitalizations-due-four-conditions https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/most-co...
    - jeromegv 5y ago
      --- In the U.S. Almost 3 in 4 U.S. adults is overweight or obese. Nearly half of people have prediabetes or diabetes. --- So basically, it's easy to say that COVID would be prevented IF those people didn't have those conditions... but those people are there, they are actually majority of your adult population. So we have to deal with that.
      - 5y ago

jackson1442 5y ago

Generally medical gridlock hasn’t been a problem, but this is a unique case in that ICU beds are filling up in some regions leading to _entirely preventable_ illness and death that is unrelated to covid. Once that stops happening, I will care significantly less. But if I have the risk of not having an ICU bed if I get into a car crash because people aren’t getting vaccinated, that’s an unacceptable social outcome to me. My personal take is that insurance should progressively cover less of covid treatment of unvaccinated (by choice- minors and immunocompromised being excluded from this policy) patients until it is having a minimal impact on our healthcare system. If people don’t want to get the vax, that’s fine, but I’m not pooling for your medical bills. Sure, it could be played into a “forever war” by reducing hospital/ICU capacity, but I don’t really see a benefit to doing that.

015a 5y ago
One of the issues with that argument is: If Biden's workplace vaccine mandate goes through, many of the remaining people who decide not to get vaccinated simply won't have insurance, given they'll also be out of a job. Instead of paying more into the system, they'll be paying less. They'll still end up in the hospital. Defaulting on the hospital bill doesn't seem unlikely for many in this situation. This is the biggest reason why this move by Biden is an idiotic gambit, relying on the hope that most of the holdouts are simply on the fence and need a manipulative push. He may be right, but the cost of being wrong could quite literally be large swaths of the US Healthcare System. What's more, we're seeing concerning numbers of healthcare workers leave the industry. ICUs are not, generally, overfilled because they're out of physical beds; they're overfilled because they're out of people. No one in power is talking about this. Hospitals lose nurses making $70k, then turn around and pay $8000/week for travel nurses. Those nurses that left? You guessed it: many are trying out travel nursing. The rest are burnt-out. The crisis really is not in the unvaccinated; its in our healthcare system, and it was growing long before the pandemic. A fractionally small part of me actually believes what some in the really, really fringe-right are saying right now: the administration wants the healthcare system to fail, because its another crisis which can be pivoted into single-payer or even nationalized healthcare. Well, its their fear, but its conversely my hope, because at least that would mean the people in charge have a medium term strategy for what seems to be inevitable at this point.

MSM 5y ago

>Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? >What about drinking and smoking? There's a lot of investment in trying to fix these problems already, or at least offset the costs. For example, there are "sin taxes" for things like cigarettes and alcohol, which means smokers and drinkers are paying disproportionately more taxes than those that don't. You could argue that overweight folks are also paying disproportionately more simply by buying more food than someone who weighs 20% less. All that aside though- forcing fat people to get skinny isn't a valid comparison to forcing people to take a vaccine. One takes a couple minutes and the other is something requiring an hour or more of dedicated time per day for potentially years (or a whole lifetime!). Let's say, hypothetically, there existed a free shot which would immediately make its recipient a perfectly lean 20 BMI and grants all the benefits of health and exercise without the work. How many people would choose not to take it, and how would society view those that decided to walk around weighing 400lbs? That's really the apples to apples comparison here, and I think you'd find there would be very few folks walking around at 400lbs in that scenario.

collegeburner 5y ago
Except the food you eat to get fat is often much cheaper than the food to stay healthy. Produce is expensive per calorie, lean meat is expensive per calorie, cooking takes time and effort, and a gym membership is expensive. This is one of the reasons why obesity is so prevalent, it's much easier than staying healthy. It's not just 20% more of what healthy people eat.
- tayo42 5y ago
  > Produce is expensive per calorie, Thats kind of the point of eating fresh food, your filled with less calories. you eat less, your at a healthy weight. That not the stuff getting people fat. Look how many calories are in mcdonals burgers. People are getting fat becasue they're uneducated. They drink sodas, sweet teas, eat candy and excessive alcohol
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    The point is that it's much cheaper to fill your belly with a McDonald's burger than artisanal bread, fresh tomato, minced lean meat. Much, much cheaper. If you are aiming to eat 2000 calories per day, you will do eat much more cheaply with a pizza and a burger than with good food.

iamnotwhoiam 5y ago

> What about drinking and smoking? Literally Whataboutism. Don’t take the irrelevant bait.

collegeburner 5y ago
No it's not. It's saying that we tolerate huge social costs elsewhere, so why is this one too large to bear?
- iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
  There is no way to have a good faith argument with someone who is advocating not saving lives because we aren’t saving other lives.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Saving lives cannot be the only consideration. There has to be limits on the power of the state to restrict and compel human behavior. We shouldn't live under medical tyranny.
    - aaron-santos 5y ago
      What about economic tyranny? Shouldn't we be fixing that first?
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        What economic tyranny are you referring to?
        quantumBerry 5y ago
        How about the tyranny of being forced to pay taxes to blow up little kids in Afghanistan at $40k+ a bomb, or the tyranny of being forced under penalty of prison to pay for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons for the Taliban? You don't think it's a little tyrannical that the tax man can say give us the money to blow up innocent little kids or I'm going to put you in a cage and take your own kids?

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

Wasn’t that the whole point of Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch drive? And the conservatives who are largely against mandated vaccines today also declared that initiative as government going too far. People living in conservative states are also far more obese than liberal ones (California vs Texas, for example). Conservatives, at least, are being consistent.

TulliusCicero 5y ago

> Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight people can't transmit their overweightness to me through a virus or bacterium that they breathe into the air. If they could, then yeah, we'd probably have some kind of legal mandate on it. Just like we have a bunch of restrictions on smoking now, because indeed, that's something that you push into the air. The general rule is that your rights stop where others begin. Most issues of health are purely personal, but infectious diseases are not. Because they're infectious.

hammock 5y ago
>Overweight people can't transmit their overweightness to me through a virus or bacterium that they breathe into the air. They can fill up hospital beds though, that might not be available for you when you need one!
- thebraxton 5y ago
  I don't think it's whether the beds are filled up, I sure many injuries are carelessness, it's how easy is it to avoid it. Losing weight is insanely hard getting a shot or two is easy. In fact if you had some kid who was speeding, got into a crash, and is now taking up a bed I'd argue that self control for young adults in related to reckless behavior is much more difficult to stop than not getting a vaccine.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  That's true, and certainly I'm in favor of national policies to encourage people to be healthy and fit. That said, getting vaccinated is about a thousand times easier than staying in shape. It's free and quick to get over with, whereas fitness requires sustained effort indefinitely. It's reasonable to treat people's choice to refuse something easy different from people either refusing or struggling with something difficult. The other important distinction is that we're not gonna suddenly have a shock of people coming down with obesity and flash flooding the hospitals. The country getting bigger is not a good thing, but as a gradual thing it can be managed much more easily.
- cko 5y ago

boplicity 5y ago

You are assuming that getting vaccinated is a burden, and then comparing it to challenges that many people take years, or longer, to overcome. That makes absolutely no sense. Getting vaccinated takes just a few minutes, and has no long term consequences for virtually everyone, and does not require ongoing effort of any kind. In no way is getting vaccinated comparable to struggling with obesity, quitting cigarettes, or alcoholism. Sorry, but your comparisons are, frankly, bizarre.

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
We could choose to not sell pure sugar as food in grocery stores, cigarettes, alcohol, or firearms for that matter in the first place... Funny enough, during the initial/strictest lockdowns in Ontario Canada, the liquor stores were one of the only stores allowed to be open to the public.
spaginal 5y ago
They haven’t studied these genetic therapies long term to know if what you assert is the case. We already know there are health issues associated now with the mrna shots. We could see a rash of issues show up in the next couple of years.
- jumpkick 5y ago
  “We already know there are health issues associated now with the mrna shots.” What issues? This is the first I’m hearing of this. Details and sources please.
  - quantumBerry 5y ago
    Of course not in all cases can we prove that the health issues are 100% the shot, but it looks extremely likely the shot causes health issues in rare cases [1]: -Anaphalaxysis in 2-5 per million peoples -Thrombosis (2 reported cases from J&J) -Myocarditis / Pericarditis : 854 confirmed The benefits appear to far exceed the risk at the population level. But that's not much consolation at the individual level if you are someone predisposed to anaphylaxis or thrombosis, which are potentially life threatening, in which case at the individual level the vaccine may look to not be worth the risks. Better screening tools could help identify individuals with these risks. I'm also not sure there are any mRNA vaccines for which we have to compare in humans that have been out few years and FDA approved. It is my understanding the COVID vaccine was the first widely distributed mRNA vaccine in humans. I have no reason to believe they are dangerous, but they are lacking any long term studies in humans on any large scale. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...

js2 5y ago

When I drink or smoke or I’m overweight, that doesn’t affect the health of my neighbor. It also doesn’t overcrowd hospitals causing innocent people to die because they can’t find treatment[1]. There also isn’t a vaccine for being overweight. (We should probably mandate seasonal flu vaccines too.) 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/12/alabama-ray-demonia-hospitals-icu/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/12/alabama-ray...

throwawaylinux 5y ago
It does because you place disproportionate strain on the healthcare system, which limits its accessibility to others. There also is a 100% successful method for losing weight, it's just that people can't or choose not to follow it, but we could mandate it and force them to. For their own good and the good of the healthcare system. (We probably should not mandate that or any other drug or medical treatment)
- lukebitts 5y ago
  No it doesn’t. People have been smoking, drinking and being fat for decades now and we haven’t had a crisis or a lack of beds for the rest of the public.
  - sparrish 5y ago
    That's ridiculous. Hospitals fill up on a regular basis, now and before Covid. They like to keep as close to capacity as they can - $$. If we have more need for beds, we build more beds. We don't take away personal freedom.
    - lukebitts 5y ago
      It’s a fact that before Covid we didn’t have a crisis for lack of beds (where I live) and after Covid we do. What hospitals like to do is irrelevant, I’m talking about reality
      - 5y ago

gnopgnip 5y ago

>what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society have to do something that it doesn't want e.g. not bear risk if they want to? Vaccines are already required to attend schools, daycare, college, to immigrate to the US, for many existing federal jobs, to join the military, most jobs in the medical field. These requirements have existed for 20+ years, society has tolerated these costs and benefited greatly. I could see OSHA having a vaccine mandate that covers TDAP, MMR, polio and Hep B similar to the proposed covid mandate for large employers. But all of these are required to attend school and in other situations, so it isn't needed. >What about drinking and smoking? Drunk driving is a crime. Society doesn't tolerate it. We generally limit second hand smoke, banning smoking in restaurants and many other indoor buildings. Requiring vaccination to prevent the spread of infectious disease is analogous.

pdonis 5y ago
> Requiring vaccination to prevent the spread of infectious disease is analogous. No, it isn't. Requiring someone to submit to a medical procedure that injects something into their body is very different from restricting the circumstances in which they can do things like smoke or drink. Also, past vaccination campaigns (such as smallpox, polio, measles) have all been based on the expectation that mass vaccination would eradicate the disease (and that expectation has been realized with several of those diseases). There is no such expectation with the COVID vaccines we currently have; they are not going to eradicate COVID.
quantumBerry 5y ago
>Drunk driving is a crime In someplace like Texas drunk driving is only a crime in limited circumstances, like driving in public. You could go to somewhere private, like an employer's private gated parking lot that is accessible to 100 employees but not the public, and you could not get a DUI. By the same token that it would be tyrannical for drunk driving to be a crime on private area of private property, it is quite tyrannical to enforce covid vaccines on facilities with 100 employees voluntarily engaging in employment on private property.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Obesity tends to kill people before they get old enough to incur real costs in medical care. It's like cigarette smoking, it actually saves the healthcare system money and resources because smoking tends to kill people before they get very old. Also, I can't catch obesity by simply sharing the same room with someone who is obese like I can with COVID.

cfn 5y ago
And your chance of catching COVID from an unvaccinated person is, apparently (no real studies to prove or disprove yet that I know of) not very different from a vaccinated person.

Johnny555 5y ago

Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight and obesity are going to cost much more in increased healthcare costs than COVID will in the coming decades (pls prove me wrong..). No matter how obese someone is, I'm not going to catch their obesity by breathing the same air as them.

XorNot 5y ago

Overweight people already have their costs internalized: that's what your insurance rates are. This is also actually tremendously fair, because if you're fat but don't suffer any lifestyle illnesses, then your insurance rates are low - you are actually able to support your mass. But once those conditions start ticking up, so do your insurance rates. The US basically leads the way on addressing the social externalities of obesity as they relate to the healthcare system.

solmag 5y ago

He isn't serious about this. Guarantee he has a tweet or liked a tweet from 2020 raging about Cheeto Mussolini's White Supremacy Vax. It's just politics, and has been, since early 2020. Let us put the gays to the camps, they impose external costs to the healthcare system too (but we won't, because they are a holy symbol for these people).

jollybean 5y ago

The thing that makes COVID dangerous is it's contagion not so much it's direct effects. If COVID were not highly transmissible, then the relatively low risk of death would make it spooky, but it's not likely we'd even see it on the news. It spreads to others quickly, and many people get very sick even if they don't die, hospitals fill up and it makes it very difficult to operate a healthcare facility. Consider the 'no policy' effect: if we did nothing in response to COVID, it would spread like a fire, and without 'flattening the curve' - which we mostly have done, it would badly degrade our ability to function. People not able to tend for the older population because they themselves are sick, hospital staff going down, people in hospitals with other ailments going down etc.. So because of that it's a community problem. If you want to think about it from an 'individual choice' perspective, consider what it would mean if you didn't take proper precautions while doing an activity, and ended up killing someone even by accident, that's manslaughter. Given a rational population with some reasonable, conscientious objectors, we should be at about 95% vaccination, which is plenty. There's room for the serious objectors, the problem is there's way too much arbitrary and misinformed skepticism. So it's not like wearing a seatbelt or eating too much carbs, which is mostly a personal issue. COVID is inherently a systematic problem.

worker767424 5y ago

> Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? That policy hurts farmers, so it's not viable for a different reason.

scoopertrooper 5y ago

> To reply as the devils advocate to this comment, what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society have to do something that it doesn't want e.g. not bear risk if they want to? * The risk isn't just on that segment. The vaccine is not 100% effective without herd immunity to back it up. * The unvaccinated will be the source of new variants, so a substantial of social resources will need to be continually invested in developing and trialing new vaccines. > Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight and obesity are going to cost much more in increased healthcare costs than COVID will in the coming decades (pls prove me wrong..). I believe the jury is still out on whether or not obesity is contagious. > What about drinking and smoking? Maybe we should also ban these because these people will probably go on government health insurance when they come down with chronic health issues from too much alcohol or tobacco. Most countries ban smoking in confined spaces where it can impact the health of non-smokers. I suppose you'd support repealing such laws. > I guess I don't see where your argument about societal costs doesn't become a slippery slope. Slippery slope to what exactly?

ggggtez 5y ago

Your drinking is regulated. When you step into a car drunk, you are putting others at risk and it stops being your problem and starts being society's problem. The same is true here. You are stepping into society on a state of health that presents risks to everyone around you.

tayo42 5y ago

> I guess I don't see where your argument about societal costs doesn't become a slippery slope. Your admitting this, why even bring up your points if you know they dont matter? There's no reason to argue this point

sjg007 5y ago

> Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight and obesity are going to cost much more in increased healthcare costs than COVID will in the coming decades (pls prove me wrong..). You are the one making this claim. Back it up with some evidence.

enaaem 5y ago

From risk management perspective obesity and pandemics have completely different risk characteristics. Pandemics are contagious and deaths can grow exponentially, leading to catastrophic outcomes. Obesity is constraint to individuals. On the other hand. A vaccine that is not as rigorously tested as normal and is used on 80% of the population can also lead to catastrophic results. No one really knows the long term effects for sure. So I understand the paranoia on two sides. You actually want to use as many different vaccines as possible so no single vaccine can exterminate your population. That’s why I belief natural immunity should be counted as a valid ‘vaccine’, if the science shows it offers similar protection.

LudvigVanHassen 5y ago
I agree with this.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> To reply as the devils advocate to this comment, what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society have to do something that it doesn't want e.g. not bear risk if they want to? It has been debated to death and one of the thing we can't negotiate with is time so at some points some actions have to been taken, some things conceded. We can keep on debating the benefits of smoking and individual freedom but we as a society (our institutions) have decided that smoking or not wearing shoes inside restaurants is not allowed. At some points our society decided that it wants everyone (let's put aside the special immunodeficient, babies, etc. cases) to be vaccinated. Now why should I be obliged to risk my health by going to restaurants, social events or work where I am taking the risk to get covid because other people are fine with the risk (or are not fine but refuse to get the vaccines on the ground that it's not a health matter but a compliance to law matter for them. I know one) ? It's like smoking, don't blow it in my direction. Vaccines/pass/etc. are a necessity for the vast majority to enjoy life as it was, to get some freedom back. People willing to participate in society without following the rules that society put in place to participate safely should not be allowed to join in without restrictions. It's my opinion, not a logical conclusion to any reasoning about our laws and how we behave as as specie/culture. It's fine if they don't get the vaccines but it's not fine to put others at risk. We can debate the fairness aspect of this decision or the framework in which freedom and liberties are defined and understood but at some points reality force us to take a stance. There'll never be a perfect solution that reconcile everyone's visions of freedom. With all that being said I strongly believe that keeping on debating publicly these aspects of the situation 24/7 is harming our recovery or transition to a better situation. These `debates` are just maintaining the illusion that options are still on the table, that we have the luxury to debate them, that somehow the longer we beat the same old dead horse maybe covid problems will magically disappear, that debating and coming to the same set of possible conclusions is somehow useful.

dorfsmay 5y ago

It's a resource vs demand at this point. Socialized healthcare systems already deal with this. For example being obese or a smoker will put you at the bottom of the list for organ transplant. Given how unvaccinated covid cases are filling up some ICUs, why shouldn't we prioritize ICU access against eligible unvaccinated people?

leetcrew 5y ago

it's not clear that people who smoke, eat, and/or overeat actually consume more healthcare over a lifetime. most people incur the majority of their healthcare expenses as they slowly die over the last several years of their life. the last few years just come sooner for unhealthy people.

kristjansson 5y ago

The social costs of forgoing the vaccine are unique in that they arrive all at once. Smoking, drinking, obesity, etc. increase lifetime healthcare costs, but realize those costs over a long period of time. Hospitals are sized appropriately, more can be built if projections indicate more need, doctors can be trained, etc. A policy that accepts infection-recovery as equivalent to vaccination unconditionally and removes most/all other restrictions could result in lots of those social costs over a very short period of time, much shorter than the timescale on which resources can adjust. So much so that resources become exhausted, and the costs compound from merely high to truly awful. Personal choice resulting in an impaired standard of care for unrelated people in need for unrelated reasons should probably be discouraged or proscribed. Once the risk of resource exhaustion is eliminated, a policy that's less than a full-court press for vaccination might be reasonable. But that risk is primarily determined by the size of the covid-naive population, which can only be reduced by vaccination or infection...

stjohnswarts 5y ago

It is a slippery slope fallacy. You only have to look back through the history of vaccines and see. We have had vaccine mandates before and guess what? No dictatorship installed. It's easy to point at democracies all over the world. Mandated vaccinations never led to "okay now do this ______ to improve your health or else" . Also no one says bring in the police, just make it so that if you want a job then get the vax or bring in a reason from your doctor that says you can't take it because of some medical condition. Simple.

kgin 5y ago

> Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Japan does this and has a 3.6% obesity rate compared to our 42%. Doesn’t seem that terrible of a slope to slip down. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/world/asia/13fat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/world/asia/13fat.html