7 ms·

Vaccine mandates: A new form of 'institutional segregation'

15 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

smt88 5y ago
I'm incredibly sick of bad-faith, flamebait nonsense that equates racial segregation to policies that restrict unvaccinated people's ability to spread disease to others. Racial segregation wasn't a choice Black people could make. Vaccines are. Vaccine mandates are broadly popular, they work, and they keep conspiract-minded people from harming the rest of us. Opinion pieces like this are intellectually dishonest and unlikely to drive any substantive discussion on HN, so I've flagged it.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  > they keep conspiract-minded people from harming the rest of us Do you have a link to a study with adequate controls demonstrating that the Covid vaccines substantially reduce transmission? Race isn't the only dimension on which segregation can exist. For instance, it could be decided that Muslims should be excluded from public accommodations. They could always just choose to renounce their faith!
  - moistly 5y ago
    “Transmission” is not what is important at this time. Keeping people out of the ICU is the primary objective. Healthcare systems are failing. The unvaccinated are destroying our ability to provide healthcare to anyone else. It is not viable to continue on this path.
    - peteradio 5y ago
      Healthcare systems are not so voluntarily letting staff leave. Did you get confused about which people we were supposed to keep out of the ICU?
      - moistly 5y ago
        It’s not so much letting staff leave as it is burned-out nurses and doctors have no more to give. The unvaccinated are destroying healthcare systems. Oh, and for a few percent of staff, it’s not letting them leave: it is booting them out the door because they have rejected vaccination. They’re far too likely to become patients, they are a liability.
        peteradio 5y ago
        Sure would be interesting to see some statistics on the matter. What percent of attrition due to covid compassion fatigue?
        smt88 5y ago
        It's not "compassion fatigue," it's every kind of fatigue, physical and emotional. People are working 80-120 hours a week just to treat existing patients. They're losing time with family, seeing conspiracy theorists/idiots say that the virus isn't that bad, and watching a lot of people suffer. Where I live in the South, none of my nearby hospitals are accepting anyone to the ER, so if I get into a car accident, I'm likely to have to go 45-60 min away to be seen by a doctor. You can easily see statistics yourself by looking for them, but I'm guessing it's an issue of not wanting to. > "Of the 22 percent of nurses who indicated they may leave their current positions, 60 percent said they were more likely to leave since the pandemic began, driven by a variety of factors, with insufficient staffing, workload, and emotional toll topping the list."[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/nursing-in-2021-retaining-the-healthcare-workforce-when-we-need-it-most https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-s...
        peteradio 5y ago
        Thanks I really appreciate it. In fact I just haven't seen it nor did it come up in any conversation (until now). I guess I still don't see what that has to do with covid, wouldn't it be prudent to increase staffing to alleviate the most common concerns (insufficient staffing, workload, and emotional toll)? Firing staff which has a high probability of possessing immunity would seem to aggravate the existing situation.
  - smt88 5y ago
    > Do you have a link to a study with adequate controls demonstrating that the Covid vaccines substantially reduce transmission? It's not our job to educate you. Search for yourself. There are literally dozens of studies from around the world that show that the vaccines reduce transmission[1]. Why should we bother to dig up research when people like you have proved that they don't want to change their mind on the issue? Why don't you provide studies that prove your conclusion? Also, no one cares primarily about transmission. If an infection were harmless, we wouldn't mind if it spread to 100% of all humans. The vaccine is intended to reduce illness and death, which it does dramatically. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z
    - AndrewBissell 5y ago
      "but Delta is an unknown" right in the title of your link! Are you unaware that there was a sea change in thinking around transmission and the Delta variant within a week after this Nature article was published? Also, household studies do not have adequate controls as there may be a significant number of confounding variables at play. Here's a CDC study of a prison outbreak which found a 93% attack rate for unvaccinated and 89% for prisoners vaccinated more than 4 months prior: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7038e3.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7038e3.htm "No one cares about transmission" until the point they want to make the case for mandates, because it collapses if one acknowledges that the vaccines are not very effective in reducing it.
retrac 5y ago
In America, we see vaccine hesitancy is highest among marginalized groups. Insular religious sects/cults, black Americans with little education, the white rural South. Some of these people will double down when mandated to get vaccinated. Some are in positions where vaccination would be social death to them (which is usually a bigger motivator than real death in humans). It's unavoidable most of the impact of such policies will fall on some of society's more marginalized groups. A woman whose husband won't allow her to be vaccinated now loses her part-time job and social contacts. Some kid whose parents won't allow them to be vaccinated in a religious sect now loses contact with some of the few non-brainwashy social outlets they had. The job losses for non-vaccination will disproportionately affect the poor, uneducated, and racial minorities. Maybe this is a necessary cost. But I hope people have really thought it through.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  Your perception that vaccine hesitancy is limited to insular and uneducated groups of people is off the mark. 25% of eligible Americans still haven't taken the vaccine despite months of unending propaganda across all forms of media, intense social pressure, and even threats of job loss.
  - pbaka 5y ago
    There was a study at Carnegie Mellon University with 500K respondents which would seem to corroborate what you write. The most hesitant in the US were the least educated (basic formal education) and the most educated (PhD's). Journalistic summary : https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9893465/Americans-PhDs-reluctant-vaccinated-against-COVID-study-finds.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9893465/Americans-P... The original publication : https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2021/july/covid-hesitancy.html https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2021/july/cov...
  - retrac 5y ago
    I have a similar hard time intuitively believing 30% of rural Albertans refuse to be vaccinated when 92% have been here in Toronto. But there are pockets where people aren't getting the same media diet and uniform messaging you or I were. Like tends to cluster with like.

15 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

I'm incredibly sick of bad-faith, flamebait nonsense that equates racial segregation to policies that restrict unvaccinated people's ability to spread disease to others. Racial segregation wasn't a choice Black people could make. Vaccines are. Vaccine mandates are broadly popular, they work, and they keep conspiract-minded people from harming the rest of us. Opinion pieces like this are intellectually dishonest and unlikely to drive any substantive discussion on HN, so I've flagged it.

AndrewBissell 5y ago
> they keep conspiract-minded people from harming the rest of us Do you have a link to a study with adequate controls demonstrating that the Covid vaccines substantially reduce transmission? Race isn't the only dimension on which segregation can exist. For instance, it could be decided that Muslims should be excluded from public accommodations. They could always just choose to renounce their faith!
- moistly 5y ago
  “Transmission” is not what is important at this time. Keeping people out of the ICU is the primary objective. Healthcare systems are failing. The unvaccinated are destroying our ability to provide healthcare to anyone else. It is not viable to continue on this path.
  - peteradio 5y ago
    Healthcare systems are not so voluntarily letting staff leave. Did you get confused about which people we were supposed to keep out of the ICU?
    - moistly 5y ago
      It’s not so much letting staff leave as it is burned-out nurses and doctors have no more to give. The unvaccinated are destroying healthcare systems. Oh, and for a few percent of staff, it’s not letting them leave: it is booting them out the door because they have rejected vaccination. They’re far too likely to become patients, they are a liability.
      - peteradio 5y ago
        Sure would be interesting to see some statistics on the matter. What percent of attrition due to covid compassion fatigue?
        smt88 5y ago
        It's not "compassion fatigue," it's every kind of fatigue, physical and emotional. People are working 80-120 hours a week just to treat existing patients. They're losing time with family, seeing conspiracy theorists/idiots say that the virus isn't that bad, and watching a lot of people suffer. Where I live in the South, none of my nearby hospitals are accepting anyone to the ER, so if I get into a car accident, I'm likely to have to go 45-60 min away to be seen by a doctor. You can easily see statistics yourself by looking for them, but I'm guessing it's an issue of not wanting to. > "Of the 22 percent of nurses who indicated they may leave their current positions, 60 percent said they were more likely to leave since the pandemic began, driven by a variety of factors, with insufficient staffing, workload, and emotional toll topping the list."[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/nursing-in-2021-retaining-the-healthcare-workforce-when-we-need-it-most https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-s...
        peteradio 5y ago
        Thanks I really appreciate it. In fact I just haven't seen it nor did it come up in any conversation (until now). I guess I still don't see what that has to do with covid, wouldn't it be prudent to increase staffing to alleviate the most common concerns (insufficient staffing, workload, and emotional toll)? Firing staff which has a high probability of possessing immunity would seem to aggravate the existing situation.
- smt88 5y ago
  > Do you have a link to a study with adequate controls demonstrating that the Covid vaccines substantially reduce transmission? It's not our job to educate you. Search for yourself. There are literally dozens of studies from around the world that show that the vaccines reduce transmission[1]. Why should we bother to dig up research when people like you have proved that they don't want to change their mind on the issue? Why don't you provide studies that prove your conclusion? Also, no one cares primarily about transmission. If an infection were harmless, we wouldn't mind if it spread to 100% of all humans. The vaccine is intended to reduce illness and death, which it does dramatically. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z
  - AndrewBissell 5y ago
    "but Delta is an unknown" right in the title of your link! Are you unaware that there was a sea change in thinking around transmission and the Delta variant within a week after this Nature article was published? Also, household studies do not have adequate controls as there may be a significant number of confounding variables at play. Here's a CDC study of a prison outbreak which found a 93% attack rate for unvaccinated and 89% for prisoners vaccinated more than 4 months prior: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7038e3.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7038e3.htm "No one cares about transmission" until the point they want to make the case for mandates, because it collapses if one acknowledges that the vaccines are not very effective in reducing it.

retrac 5y ago

In America, we see vaccine hesitancy is highest among marginalized groups. Insular religious sects/cults, black Americans with little education, the white rural South. Some of these people will double down when mandated to get vaccinated. Some are in positions where vaccination would be social death to them (which is usually a bigger motivator than real death in humans). It's unavoidable most of the impact of such policies will fall on some of society's more marginalized groups. A woman whose husband won't allow her to be vaccinated now loses her part-time job and social contacts. Some kid whose parents won't allow them to be vaccinated in a religious sect now loses contact with some of the few non-brainwashy social outlets they had. The job losses for non-vaccination will disproportionately affect the poor, uneducated, and racial minorities. Maybe this is a necessary cost. But I hope people have really thought it through.

AndrewBissell 5y ago
Your perception that vaccine hesitancy is limited to insular and uneducated groups of people is off the mark. 25% of eligible Americans still haven't taken the vaccine despite months of unending propaganda across all forms of media, intense social pressure, and even threats of job loss.
- pbaka 5y ago
  There was a study at Carnegie Mellon University with 500K respondents which would seem to corroborate what you write. The most hesitant in the US were the least educated (basic formal education) and the most educated (PhD's). Journalistic summary : https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9893465/Americans-PhDs-reluctant-vaccinated-against-COVID-study-finds.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9893465/Americans-P... The original publication : https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2021/july/covid-hesitancy.html https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2021/july/cov...
- retrac 5y ago
  I have a similar hard time intuitively believing 30% of rural Albertans refuse to be vaccinated when 92% have been here in Toronto. But there are pockets where people aren't getting the same media diet and uniform messaging you or I were. Like tends to cluster with like.