8 ms·

One of the reasons we find ourselves even in such a predicament is so odd: while governments the world over were (and are) quite willing to put very strong curb

One of the reasons we find ourselves even in such a predicament is so odd: while governments the world over were (and are) quite willing to put very strong curbs, shut-downs etc. in place, they are hesitant to generally mandate vaccination. So now we are in these proxy campaigns on vaccinations. Of course, one could argue that governments should not/cannot mandate vaccination, but then we also generally accept that governments can send you off to die in wars. Generally speaking, this whole mess actually brings some much deeper issues on state vs the individual to the surface. Those are the ones that will eventually need proper debate much more than finer points on immunology.

eecc 5y ago
Indeed. I rationalized it so: COVID is a wild enemy that will do whatever to survive at our own expense. We need to fight and wage all-out war, conscript, treat the wounded and comfort the widowed.
- ioslipstream 5y ago
  So is every illness, potentially, and yet the world never cared before.
  - eecc 5y ago
    Yes, like every infectious disease with a high mortality rate and capable of overwhelming our healthcare infrastructure. And no, the world of professionals do care, as always. You’re talking about yourself
- swader999 5y ago
  The problem is unchecked propaganda could push you to make these same conclusions about anything and anyone.
  - eecc 5y ago
    Yes, the slippery slope argument. Anything can be “unchecked propaganda”, you need to prove it is 1. Propaganda and 2. that it is unchecked
- effie 5y ago
  That is not rational at all. It's a manageable disease class with limited health impact on population, in death numbers comparable to strokes. It is not appropriate to compare it to war at all; in most places people are not afraid of COVID much.
  - eecc 5y ago
    It’s only manageable with heavy handed medical care and heavy handed containment to preserve care capacity. Have you been living under a rock or are you just trotting out talking points? Let me ask: how many deaths in the USA alone? How does it compare to KIAs in one of the many US wars? Please stop pretending you know what you’re talking about
    - effie 5y ago
      Let's get some perspective on U.S. deaths in 2020 [1]: [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 For the whole year 2020, heart disease was 2x bigger killer (700 thousand) than COVID (350 thousand). Cancer was bigger killer still than COVID. Stroke was smaller than COVID - I was wrong about that. COVID gets scary in the few months when it gets out of control, like in January [2]. Those trips are a reason to use some extraordinary measures to prevent next ones. [2] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-continues-to-be-a-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s-in-june-2021/ https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-continues... Long term, COVID is a smaller killer than the other killers in the U.S.
bondarchuk 5y ago
It would look like this: people get dragged out of their houses by armed men, and are forcibly injected while screaming and being held down. "We also send people off to war" is not a sufficient argument for removing the right to bodily autonomy. Edit: oh, and probably you wouldn't get to see any videos of it online, because it's anti-vaccination content. Haha.
- RandomLensman 5y ago
  May point was: you already have only a limited right to bodily autonomy. But that aside: I think pushing people in some (oblique) ways towards vaccination while at the other hand not mandating it sends a somewhat confused message.
- unsui 5y ago
  yet we force our children to be vaccinated in school in order to be part of society. we also force other things that impinge on personal liberty, such as wearing seatbelts, getting car (and medical) insurance, etc. I can see the argument that this is a slippery slope, such as "well, the common good dictates that I get this neuro implant to ward off the 2157 neurovirus", and unfortunately, the short answer is "it depends on the context". Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality. as with war measures or other emergency measures, personal liberty has historically been set aside for the common good. I don't see this going away, nor should it. The conversation should be how to draw the right balance, so that, when the emergency is over, we return to some modicum of personal liberty, while still preserving the common good. In some cases, it means that the mandate becomes the accepted practice (e.g., child vaccinations). In others, we would hope, personal liberty returns (e.g., habeas corpus). TL;DR: it is contextual, rather than dogmatic and a-priori
  - hackinthebochs 5y ago
    >Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality. Is this even true anymore? Delta is highly contagious and the vaccines are leaky, thus it is not obvious that the effective R0 of Delta will be less than one assuming a fully vaccinated population. We already know that vaccinated people can still be infected, and not at minuscule rates, and once infected they are similarly contagious as an unvaccinated person. If Delta is endemic now, blaming the unvaccinated for the ongoing pandemic is just false.
qwytw 5y ago
I'm not sure if there is really any widespread acceptance in any democratic country that the government can just decide to send anyone to a foreign war. Every western soldier who died in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. volunteered. I think that if the US government just decided to reintroduce conscription back in 2003 it would had went down much worse than when they were sending conscripts to Vietnam and there'd probably be even much more resistance to that these days.
- yaur 5y ago
  I’m not sure if you are familiar with Stop-loss [1] but it’s been used to some extent in pretty much every conflict over the last 30 years to keep people serving involuntarily. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-loss_policy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-loss_policy
  - qwytw 5y ago
    I'd assume that at this point anyone signing up is (or should be) aware that the military can arbitrarily extend their service time?
- RandomLensman 5y ago
  Which country has given up its ability to conscript? Not just chosen not to exercise it. I would call that general acceptance of that policy. In a specific case, whether to exercise on that policy is a more complex choice.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    There are many things governments in theory could legally do that would not be generally accepted by the public. I can hardly imagine a realistic scenario under which any western country could deploy conscripts in an overseas war without extreme opposition.
megous 5y ago
Governments already mandate vaccinations [of kids] in many places. Just not for covid-19.

eecc 5y ago

Indeed. I rationalized it so: COVID is a wild enemy that will do whatever to survive at our own expense. We need to fight and wage all-out war, conscript, treat the wounded and comfort the widowed.

ioslipstream 5y ago
So is every illness, potentially, and yet the world never cared before.
- eecc 5y ago
  Yes, like every infectious disease with a high mortality rate and capable of overwhelming our healthcare infrastructure. And no, the world of professionals do care, as always. You’re talking about yourself
swader999 5y ago
The problem is unchecked propaganda could push you to make these same conclusions about anything and anyone.
- eecc 5y ago
  Yes, the slippery slope argument. Anything can be “unchecked propaganda”, you need to prove it is 1. Propaganda and 2. that it is unchecked
effie 5y ago
That is not rational at all. It's a manageable disease class with limited health impact on population, in death numbers comparable to strokes. It is not appropriate to compare it to war at all; in most places people are not afraid of COVID much.
- eecc 5y ago
  It’s only manageable with heavy handed medical care and heavy handed containment to preserve care capacity. Have you been living under a rock or are you just trotting out talking points? Let me ask: how many deaths in the USA alone? How does it compare to KIAs in one of the many US wars? Please stop pretending you know what you’re talking about
  - effie 5y ago
    Let's get some perspective on U.S. deaths in 2020 [1]: [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 For the whole year 2020, heart disease was 2x bigger killer (700 thousand) than COVID (350 thousand). Cancer was bigger killer still than COVID. Stroke was smaller than COVID - I was wrong about that. COVID gets scary in the few months when it gets out of control, like in January [2]. Those trips are a reason to use some extraordinary measures to prevent next ones. [2] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-continues-to-be-a-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s-in-june-2021/ https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-continues... Long term, COVID is a smaller killer than the other killers in the U.S.

bondarchuk 5y ago

It would look like this: people get dragged out of their houses by armed men, and are forcibly injected while screaming and being held down. "We also send people off to war" is not a sufficient argument for removing the right to bodily autonomy. Edit: oh, and probably you wouldn't get to see any videos of it online, because it's anti-vaccination content. Haha.

RandomLensman 5y ago
May point was: you already have only a limited right to bodily autonomy. But that aside: I think pushing people in some (oblique) ways towards vaccination while at the other hand not mandating it sends a somewhat confused message.
unsui 5y ago
yet we force our children to be vaccinated in school in order to be part of society. we also force other things that impinge on personal liberty, such as wearing seatbelts, getting car (and medical) insurance, etc. I can see the argument that this is a slippery slope, such as "well, the common good dictates that I get this neuro implant to ward off the 2157 neurovirus", and unfortunately, the short answer is "it depends on the context". Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality. as with war measures or other emergency measures, personal liberty has historically been set aside for the common good. I don't see this going away, nor should it. The conversation should be how to draw the right balance, so that, when the emergency is over, we return to some modicum of personal liberty, while still preserving the common good. In some cases, it means that the mandate becomes the accepted practice (e.g., child vaccinations). In others, we would hope, personal liberty returns (e.g., habeas corpus). TL;DR: it is contextual, rather than dogmatic and a-priori
- hackinthebochs 5y ago
  >Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality. Is this even true anymore? Delta is highly contagious and the vaccines are leaky, thus it is not obvious that the effective R0 of Delta will be less than one assuming a fully vaccinated population. We already know that vaccinated people can still be infected, and not at minuscule rates, and once infected they are similarly contagious as an unvaccinated person. If Delta is endemic now, blaming the unvaccinated for the ongoing pandemic is just false.

qwytw 5y ago

I'm not sure if there is really any widespread acceptance in any democratic country that the government can just decide to send anyone to a foreign war. Every western soldier who died in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. volunteered. I think that if the US government just decided to reintroduce conscription back in 2003 it would had went down much worse than when they were sending conscripts to Vietnam and there'd probably be even much more resistance to that these days.

yaur 5y ago
I’m not sure if you are familiar with Stop-loss [1] but it’s been used to some extent in pretty much every conflict over the last 30 years to keep people serving involuntarily. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-loss_policy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-loss_policy
- qwytw 5y ago
  I'd assume that at this point anyone signing up is (or should be) aware that the military can arbitrarily extend their service time?
RandomLensman 5y ago
Which country has given up its ability to conscript? Not just chosen not to exercise it. I would call that general acceptance of that policy. In a specific case, whether to exercise on that policy is a more complex choice.
- qwytw 5y ago
  There are many things governments in theory could legally do that would not be generally accepted by the public. I can hardly imagine a realistic scenario under which any western country could deploy conscripts in an overseas war without extreme opposition.

megous 5y ago

Governments already mandate vaccinations [of kids] in many places. Just not for covid-19.