32 ms·

Mandate is hereby stayed pending further action by this court [pdf]

104 points by SQL2219 5y ago

thoughtstheseus 5y ago
OSHA estimates 6,500 lives will be saved by the mandate over six months or ~0.02% of the U.S. population. While there is uncertainty in these estimates, they are confident hundreds of lives will be saved. At first glance there seems to be many less politically fraught avenues of improving public health.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > OSHA estimates 6,500 lives will be saved by the mandate over six months So that's a justification for lawlessness? If it's so important, then pass a law, don't rule by executive order.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    OSHA was created through the law, and they have the authority to change what they deem necessary whenever they want. Their decisions can be challenged in court (as this rule has been), but it’s not “executive order” per se. Congress gave the President the power to do this. A vaccine mandate by OSHA, however, is unprecedented, and I can’t speak on how successful it’ll be and whatever unintended consequences it may have
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      > they have the authority to change what they deems necessary whenever they want. I think the courts have a history of disagreeing on that point. Not enough, mind you, we've seen an unprecedented expansion of federal powers, but they have been ruling some of the more extreme executive orders unconstitutional.
falcolas 5y ago
TL;DR: 5th Court (based out of Texas) issued a stay against the OSHA vaccine mandate.
- pindab0ter 5y ago
  This should have been the title.
redis_mlc 5y ago
The CDC head just testified that the CDC has not studied if previous corona infections confer immunity. She refused to say if CDC staff were returning to work or what their vaccination rate was. Not sure what they do all day. (My understanding is they have 3,000 staff.)
- throwoutway 5y ago
  If the CDC said that, it is just carefully worded ignorance. The US’ NIH supported a research that confirmed it: https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-generated-from-covid-19-vaccines-differs-from-an-infection/ https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera... Just because “we the CDC” didn’t fund it doesn’t make it any less true.
  - kronin 5y ago
    The study states: "We studied sera from adults (ages 18 to 55 years) who received two doses of the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine in phase 1 clinical trials (12). The majority of our study focused on 14 individuals who received the 250-μg dose, although we validated key conclusions with a smaller subset of eight trial participants who received the 100-μg dose. The sera were collected at 36 and 119 days after the first vaccine dose, corresponding to 7 and 90 days after the second dose." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8369496/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8369496/ Strange that the study would focus on individuals who received a 250-μg dose. The adult dose is 100-μg (https://reference.medscape.com/drug/mrna-1273-moderna-covid-19-vaccine-mRNA-moderna-4000149 https://reference.medscape.com/drug/mrna-1273-moderna-covid-...). Yes, the study states that key findings were validated with 8 participants who received the regular dosage, but still seems odd to me. The comparison dataset is explained as: "The convalescent plasma samples were characterized in earlier studies (13–16) and grouped into an early time point of 15 to 60 days after symptom onset and a late time point of 100 to 150 days after symptom onset." So the comparison was between vaccinated individuals, most of whom received a higher dose than is being given out, to infected individuals, and the time periods don't exactly line up. For the vaccinated dataset, the time periods were 7 and 90 days after the second dose. For the other dataset, the time periods were 15-60 days, and 100-150 days after symptom offset. Deeper into the study, there is also this: "The escape maps of the 100-μg cohort resembled those of the 250-μg cohort and fell into the 456/484-targeting, core-targeting, or flat categories (fig. S6). Although the sample sizes are small, and a higher fraction of the 100-μg dose escape maps were flat than for the 250-μg cohort (4 of 8 versus 5 of 14, respectively), this suggests that 100- and 250-μg doses elicit antibody responses similar in the breadth of their RBD-binding specificity."
rbobby 5y ago
If the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that the strangest thing about a zombie outbreak will be the zombie supporters.
- molbioguy 5y ago
  The pandemic has taught me that rational relative risk assessment crumbles in the face of personal fear.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    people rather fail than change <a conclusion from the british doctors study 1951-2001> - chris wilson https://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of-evidence-2338367 https://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of-evidence-2338367 This will be taught in every US highschool one day.
- jengler 5y ago
  If the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that the strangest thing about a zombie outbreak will be the Umbrella Corporation supporters. ;)
  - rbobby 5y ago
    HODL Umbrella?
- dfilppi 5y ago
  Its taught me how people freely lay down their freedom.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  Here’s what I’ve learned (thanks Zuby) Most people would rather be in the majority, than be right. At least 20% of the population has strong authoritarian tendencies, which will emerge under the right conditions. Fear of death is only rivalled by the fear of social disapproval. The latter could be stronger. Propaganda is just as effective in the modern day as it was 100 years ago. Access to limitless information has not made the average person any wiser. Source: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1412012561164390403.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1412012561164390403.html
smarx007 5y ago
Side note: this looks like a very well typeset document. Also, seems like the first use of Butterick's fonts [1] by the courts? [1]: https://practicaltypography.com/mb-fonts.html https://practicaltypography.com/mb-fonts.html
- maxerickson 5y ago
  I'm not sure if it was 2013 or 2016, but the type engine in Word got a big update. (It may also be that it works better with PDFMaker, doing paragraphs instead of individual words, I've only noticed the difference, not figured out the specifics)
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  A lot of larger courts have a proprietary document management system that typesets the final documents. And a lot of smaller courts use the modern-day WordPerfect suite (with Paradox and Perfect Authority) as a sort of home-grown one. It depends a lot on the individual court and government. In this case the metadata just tells us the PDF was generated by iText, so it's probably from a Java or .NET DMS the court uses. The use of Butterick's Equity suggests it's pretty new but I wasn't able to figure out what product they're using.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    I used the HN site link ( https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=uscourts.gov https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=uscourts.gov ) to quickly grab an older filing from the 5th circuit, which shows a similar Adobe PDF Library; modified by iText as the Producer, and PDFMaker for Word as the Creator. https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/17/17-41251-CR0.pdf https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/17/17-41251-CR0.pd... Of course they may have upgraded to something else that shows the same producers, but the pattern is still there.
Animats 5y ago
Until next Tuesday. This is just a normal pretrial motion.
- Meekro 5y ago
  Is it ordinary for Federal Judges to speak of "grave statutory and constitutional issues"?
throwawaysea 5y ago
Reminder that before their hard left turn away from civil liberties and towards partisanship, the ACLU was against vaccine mandates: https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/aclu-flip-flops-on-vaccine-mandates https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/aclu-flip-flops-... Another interesting piece of the public conversation around mandates is the redefinition of the term vaccine (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...). The CDC claims they redefined it away from the word “immunity” towards the word “protection” because no vaccine grants perfect immunity. Personally I find that to be a bad answer. By taking a weighty word like “vaccine” and redefining it, the expectations of risks and benefits the public holds were exploited. For the majority of the public, those who are under 50 and healthy, COVID poses little risk - it’s not much different from a typical seasonal flu. Personally I think getting an mRNA vaccine is a reasonable low-risk action but the risk of undergoing any medical intervention is nonzero, and it is higher for a novel technology. I bet that if the COVID vaccines were not called a vaccine, people would evaluate the risk reward trade off differently.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  People under 50 and healthy probably aren't a majority of the population. You can probably get away with 'mostly healthy', but there's enough people under 50 that are overweight to make it so that more than half the country is either over 50 or has a co-morbidity. And then there's lots of other things that are impacting people's health. If you called the mRNA vaccines something else, the risk reward trade off wouldn't change, and there is nice clear evidence that they reduce overall risk for adults, even relatively health adults. The trade off is tighter for younger males, but it also slightly favors vaccination (the number of serious adverse events due to vaccination is smaller than the number of infections requiring hospitalization).
- nerdponx 5y ago
  > I bet that if the COVID vaccines were not called a vaccine, people would evaluate the risk reward trade off differently Interestingly, one of the entry-level Covid denialist talking points is that the vaccine is "classified as experimental gene therapy, and not a vaccine". It's probably not worth spending too much energy seeking logic in illogic. I just thought it was interesting and kind of ironic in this context.
015a 5y ago
The saddest part of all this is really the destruction of centrism. There's a strong amount of nuance lost on both extremes in the common centrist opinion that 'the vaccine is good, everyone should get the vaccine, public vaccine mandates may be premature." Primarily: 1. It doesn't close the door on private vaccine mandates, which while certainly concerning to some on the fringe, aren't as much of a hot topic. 2. It specifically calls out "premature"; one of the strongest pro-public vaccine mandate arguments is in their precedence. We absolutely do require vaccination in many situations, such as at grade schools or going to university. A critical, nuanced centrist opinion is simply the sense that these vaccines are extremely new; while they have scientifically demonstrated safety for the duration of the studies, and more generally perceived safety for the duration of their availability, both of these timelines pale in comparison to the timeframe many other commonly available vaccines have been available for. 3. Additionally, on the premature angle: We did have three highly effective vaccines in the US. This has been more-or-less reduced to two (as the J&J's efficacy is in such broad question, combined with their production issues, many vaccine sites aren't offering it anymore). Public vaccine mandates would in-effect be a public backing of a private corporation's revenue; the same people who rightly despise America's military-industrial complex aren't seeing the incredibly apt correlates to the increasing power of the public health-industrial complex. 4. Finally, on the premature angle: I strongly, in all walks of life, take the stance "if a choice isn't obvious, its because you don't have enough data". The choice on public vaccine mandates, democratically, is undeniably Not Obvious; its obvious to many individuals, in both direction, and thus it is not obvious to the voting public in aggregate. Thus, doing nothing except gathering more data, which our public health institutions are quite great at, is the right course. This always crystalizes the correct choice. In short, the issue has become too politicized; I feel the best course of action right now is for politicians to step back and let our doctors and scientists take the lead. With the increasing existence and availability of effective treatment options, combined with the increasing pro-vaccine population driving down infections, hospitalizations, and death; a public vaccine mandate may end up inflaming one side of the political spectrum, and hurting our economy by causing significantly increased turnover and vacancies in an already difficult climate for businesses, unnecessarily.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > the common centrist opinion that 'the vaccine is good, everyone should get the vaccine, public vaccine mandates may be premature." I think you've misstated the centrist opinion here. If it were really obvious that "the vaccine is good, everyone should get the vaccine", then public vaccine mandates would be the obvious choice. The reason public vaccine mandates are premature is that it is not obvious that everyone should get the vaccine. People's risk profiles vary widely, for both vaccines and for COVID. That's why it should be left to individual people and individual workplaces to strike the best balance for them, instead of a one-size-fits-all mandate for everybody.
TheDesolate0 5y ago
Fucking traitorous maga judges.
TheDesolate0 5y ago
Fucking traitorous maga judges!
AnnoyedComment 5y ago
Just because you think this thing is deadly doesn't mean I have to have an injection. Go. Fuck. Yourself.
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive comments and breaking the site guidelines. That's not what HN is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
rp1 5y ago
I'm so sick of hearing about COVID-19... The virus completely endemic at this point, it will never be eradicated. We have a vaccine that is effective and free to all who want it. Breakthrough infections happen, but not often and those who get them usually recover. Will I need to wear a mask for the rest of my life? Will I need to worry about my children staying home from school forever? I want to forget about the virus and get on with my life.
- reureu 5y ago
  I think everyone is sick of hearing about COVID-19, but hitting your information saturation point is not the same as a disease becoming endemic. The virus is objectively not endemic yet, as demonstrated by the overwhelmed hospital systems. This may not be the case where you live, but there are many places in the US where crisis standards of care are either currently implemented, on the verge of being implemented, or have just been ceased. While you're totally right about breakthrough infections etc, it's a bit premature to say we're back to normal when people are at risk of dying of treatable conditions solely because hospitals are full of mostly unvaccinated covid patients.
  - rp1 5y ago
    The virus is objectively endemic. It's regularly found in people and cannot be eradicated. Even if you could somehow eradicate it among humans, it has animal reservoirs so re-contamination would always be a threat. If hospital capacity is an issue, then we should expand capacity to reflect the current state of the world, instead of hoping that the world will somehow return to how it was prior to the pandemic.
    - reureu 5y ago
      The question wasn't if we're trying to eradicate it or not, or if we're going to ever return to a pre-pandemic normal, it's whether we're in an epidemic/pandemic or endemic phase. My point is just that, as tired of hearing about it as everyone is, covid is still killing many people both directly (through infection) and indirectly (through tying up healthcare resources). We're still not at a place where covid is like the flu or colds because, as one example measure, it's overwhelming hospitals. We should definitely be talking about expanding healthcare capacity, if not for covid than for the burgeoning obesity, diabetes, and hypertension epidemic. Those are discussions that have been happening for years, and ultimately work on a decade timescale.
qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
If I am vaccinated for chicken pox why do I have to worry if my friend is not vaccinated for it and gets it ? If Covid vaccination is a vaccination i true sense the above assumption should apply to it no ? Also using a government agency intended for construction / mining hard hat and fall safety for vaccinating people who don’t want to get vaccinated for personal medical reasons is outrageous. This is the kind of stuff that happens in a communist country like North Korea
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  > If I am vaccinated for chicken pox why do I have to worry if my friend is not vaccinated for it and gets it ? Vaccines don't work like that. They give you a better chance of not getting something (chicken pox vaccine is 90% effective), and the rest of the vaccine's effectiveness is made up in scale (if everyone has 90% resistance, the virus has nowhere to "catch hold" and just disappears). Many people don't get that, and think vaccines should either be 100% effective or they shouldn't be used at all, or they don't understand that they only work well when they are applied at scale (which is why schools mandate many vaccines with few exceptions). > his is the kind of stuff that happens in a communist country like North Korea Or America in the 1950s and 1960s when they wanted to get rid of polio, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis, etc... It is crazy: America back then didn't care about these nut case concerns, they were just focused on getting the job done. What happened to this country?
  - mindslight 5y ago
    Postmodern (post-truth) politics, affluenza-induced solipsism, and mass media selling domestic influence on the international market.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    By all reasonable metrics, the covid vaccine makes the risk of covid negligible for all interested groups. If you're worried get the vaccine (I have) and carry on. Sticking your nose in everyone else's business is just unhealthy. If others don't want to get it. That is their decision

104 points by SQL2219 5y ago

OSHA estimates 6,500 lives will be saved by the mandate over six months or ~0.02% of the U.S. population. While there is uncertainty in these estimates, they are confident hundreds of lives will be saved. At first glance there seems to be many less politically fraught avenues of improving public health.

rsj_hn 5y ago
> OSHA estimates 6,500 lives will be saved by the mandate over six months So that's a justification for lawlessness? If it's so important, then pass a law, don't rule by executive order.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  OSHA was created through the law, and they have the authority to change what they deem necessary whenever they want. Their decisions can be challenged in court (as this rule has been), but it’s not “executive order” per se. Congress gave the President the power to do this. A vaccine mandate by OSHA, however, is unprecedented, and I can’t speak on how successful it’ll be and whatever unintended consequences it may have
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > they have the authority to change what they deems necessary whenever they want. I think the courts have a history of disagreeing on that point. Not enough, mind you, we've seen an unprecedented expansion of federal powers, but they have been ruling some of the more extreme executive orders unconstitutional.

falcolas 5y ago

TL;DR: 5th Court (based out of Texas) issued a stay against the OSHA vaccine mandate.

pindab0ter 5y ago
This should have been the title.

redis_mlc 5y ago

The CDC head just testified that the CDC has not studied if previous corona infections confer immunity. She refused to say if CDC staff were returning to work or what their vaccination rate was. Not sure what they do all day. (My understanding is they have 3,000 staff.)

throwoutway 5y ago
If the CDC said that, it is just carefully worded ignorance. The US’ NIH supported a research that confirmed it: https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-generated-from-covid-19-vaccines-differs-from-an-infection/ https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera... Just because “we the CDC” didn’t fund it doesn’t make it any less true.
- kronin 5y ago
  The study states: "We studied sera from adults (ages 18 to 55 years) who received two doses of the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine in phase 1 clinical trials (12). The majority of our study focused on 14 individuals who received the 250-μg dose, although we validated key conclusions with a smaller subset of eight trial participants who received the 100-μg dose. The sera were collected at 36 and 119 days after the first vaccine dose, corresponding to 7 and 90 days after the second dose." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8369496/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8369496/ Strange that the study would focus on individuals who received a 250-μg dose. The adult dose is 100-μg (https://reference.medscape.com/drug/mrna-1273-moderna-covid-19-vaccine-mRNA-moderna-4000149 https://reference.medscape.com/drug/mrna-1273-moderna-covid-...). Yes, the study states that key findings were validated with 8 participants who received the regular dosage, but still seems odd to me. The comparison dataset is explained as: "The convalescent plasma samples were characterized in earlier studies (13–16) and grouped into an early time point of 15 to 60 days after symptom onset and a late time point of 100 to 150 days after symptom onset." So the comparison was between vaccinated individuals, most of whom received a higher dose than is being given out, to infected individuals, and the time periods don't exactly line up. For the vaccinated dataset, the time periods were 7 and 90 days after the second dose. For the other dataset, the time periods were 15-60 days, and 100-150 days after symptom offset. Deeper into the study, there is also this: "The escape maps of the 100-μg cohort resembled those of the 250-μg cohort and fell into the 456/484-targeting, core-targeting, or flat categories (fig. S6). Although the sample sizes are small, and a higher fraction of the 100-μg dose escape maps were flat than for the 250-μg cohort (4 of 8 versus 5 of 14, respectively), this suggests that 100- and 250-μg doses elicit antibody responses similar in the breadth of their RBD-binding specificity."

rbobby 5y ago

If the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that the strangest thing about a zombie outbreak will be the zombie supporters.

molbioguy 5y ago
The pandemic has taught me that rational relative risk assessment crumbles in the face of personal fear.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  people rather fail than change <a conclusion from the british doctors study 1951-2001> - chris wilson https://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of-evidence-2338367 https://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of-evidence-2338367 This will be taught in every US highschool one day.
jengler 5y ago
If the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that the strangest thing about a zombie outbreak will be the Umbrella Corporation supporters. ;)
- rbobby 5y ago
  HODL Umbrella?
dfilppi 5y ago
Its taught me how people freely lay down their freedom.
mrfusion 5y ago
Here’s what I’ve learned (thanks Zuby) Most people would rather be in the majority, than be right. At least 20% of the population has strong authoritarian tendencies, which will emerge under the right conditions. Fear of death is only rivalled by the fear of social disapproval. The latter could be stronger. Propaganda is just as effective in the modern day as it was 100 years ago. Access to limitless information has not made the average person any wiser. Source: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1412012561164390403.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1412012561164390403.html

smarx007 5y ago

Side note: this looks like a very well typeset document. Also, seems like the first use of Butterick's fonts [1] by the courts? [1]: https://practicaltypography.com/mb-fonts.html https://practicaltypography.com/mb-fonts.html

maxerickson 5y ago
I'm not sure if it was 2013 or 2016, but the type engine in Word got a big update. (It may also be that it works better with PDFMaker, doing paragraphs instead of individual words, I've only noticed the difference, not figured out the specifics)
jcrawfordor 5y ago
A lot of larger courts have a proprietary document management system that typesets the final documents. And a lot of smaller courts use the modern-day WordPerfect suite (with Paradox and Perfect Authority) as a sort of home-grown one. It depends a lot on the individual court and government. In this case the metadata just tells us the PDF was generated by iText, so it's probably from a Java or .NET DMS the court uses. The use of Butterick's Equity suggests it's pretty new but I wasn't able to figure out what product they're using.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  I used the HN site link ( https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=uscourts.gov https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=uscourts.gov ) to quickly grab an older filing from the 5th circuit, which shows a similar Adobe PDF Library; modified by iText as the Producer, and PDFMaker for Word as the Creator. https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/17/17-41251-CR0.pdf https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/17/17-41251-CR0.pd... Of course they may have upgraded to something else that shows the same producers, but the pattern is still there.

Animats 5y ago

Until next Tuesday. This is just a normal pretrial motion.

Meekro 5y ago
Is it ordinary for Federal Judges to speak of "grave statutory and constitutional issues"?

throwawaysea 5y ago

Reminder that before their hard left turn away from civil liberties and towards partisanship, the ACLU was against vaccine mandates: https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/aclu-flip-flops-on-vaccine-mandates https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/aclu-flip-flops-... Another interesting piece of the public conversation around mandates is the redefinition of the term vaccine (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...). The CDC claims they redefined it away from the word “immunity” towards the word “protection” because no vaccine grants perfect immunity. Personally I find that to be a bad answer. By taking a weighty word like “vaccine” and redefining it, the expectations of risks and benefits the public holds were exploited. For the majority of the public, those who are under 50 and healthy, COVID poses little risk - it’s not much different from a typical seasonal flu. Personally I think getting an mRNA vaccine is a reasonable low-risk action but the risk of undergoing any medical intervention is nonzero, and it is higher for a novel technology. I bet that if the COVID vaccines were not called a vaccine, people would evaluate the risk reward trade off differently.

maxerickson 5y ago
People under 50 and healthy probably aren't a majority of the population. You can probably get away with 'mostly healthy', but there's enough people under 50 that are overweight to make it so that more than half the country is either over 50 or has a co-morbidity. And then there's lots of other things that are impacting people's health. If you called the mRNA vaccines something else, the risk reward trade off wouldn't change, and there is nice clear evidence that they reduce overall risk for adults, even relatively health adults. The trade off is tighter for younger males, but it also slightly favors vaccination (the number of serious adverse events due to vaccination is smaller than the number of infections requiring hospitalization).
nerdponx 5y ago
> I bet that if the COVID vaccines were not called a vaccine, people would evaluate the risk reward trade off differently Interestingly, one of the entry-level Covid denialist talking points is that the vaccine is "classified as experimental gene therapy, and not a vaccine". It's probably not worth spending too much energy seeking logic in illogic. I just thought it was interesting and kind of ironic in this context.

015a 5y ago

The saddest part of all this is really the destruction of centrism. There's a strong amount of nuance lost on both extremes in the common centrist opinion that 'the vaccine is good, everyone should get the vaccine, public vaccine mandates may be premature." Primarily: 1. It doesn't close the door on private vaccine mandates, which while certainly concerning to some on the fringe, aren't as much of a hot topic. 2. It specifically calls out "premature"; one of the strongest pro-public vaccine mandate arguments is in their precedence. We absolutely do require vaccination in many situations, such as at grade schools or going to university. A critical, nuanced centrist opinion is simply the sense that these vaccines are extremely new; while they have scientifically demonstrated safety for the duration of the studies, and more generally perceived safety for the duration of their availability, both of these timelines pale in comparison to the timeframe many other commonly available vaccines have been available for. 3. Additionally, on the premature angle: We did have three highly effective vaccines in the US. This has been more-or-less reduced to two (as the J&J's efficacy is in such broad question, combined with their production issues, many vaccine sites aren't offering it anymore). Public vaccine mandates would in-effect be a public backing of a private corporation's revenue; the same people who rightly despise America's military-industrial complex aren't seeing the incredibly apt correlates to the increasing power of the public health-industrial complex. 4. Finally, on the premature angle: I strongly, in all walks of life, take the stance "if a choice isn't obvious, its because you don't have enough data". The choice on public vaccine mandates, democratically, is undeniably Not Obvious; its obvious to many individuals, in both direction, and thus it is not obvious to the voting public in aggregate. Thus, doing nothing except gathering more data, which our public health institutions are quite great at, is the right course. This always crystalizes the correct choice. In short, the issue has become too politicized; I feel the best course of action right now is for politicians to step back and let our doctors and scientists take the lead. With the increasing existence and availability of effective treatment options, combined with the increasing pro-vaccine population driving down infections, hospitalizations, and death; a public vaccine mandate may end up inflaming one side of the political spectrum, and hurting our economy by causing significantly increased turnover and vacancies in an already difficult climate for businesses, unnecessarily.

pdonis 5y ago
> the common centrist opinion that 'the vaccine is good, everyone should get the vaccine, public vaccine mandates may be premature." I think you've misstated the centrist opinion here. If it were really obvious that "the vaccine is good, everyone should get the vaccine", then public vaccine mandates would be the obvious choice. The reason public vaccine mandates are premature is that it is not obvious that everyone should get the vaccine. People's risk profiles vary widely, for both vaccines and for COVID. That's why it should be left to individual people and individual workplaces to strike the best balance for them, instead of a one-size-fits-all mandate for everybody.

TheDesolate0 5y ago

Fucking traitorous maga judges.

TheDesolate0 5y ago

Fucking traitorous maga judges!

AnnoyedComment 5y ago

Just because you think this thing is deadly doesn't mean I have to have an injection. Go. Fuck. Yourself.

dang 5y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive comments and breaking the site guidelines. That's not what HN is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

rp1 5y ago

I'm so sick of hearing about COVID-19... The virus completely endemic at this point, it will never be eradicated. We have a vaccine that is effective and free to all who want it. Breakthrough infections happen, but not often and those who get them usually recover. Will I need to wear a mask for the rest of my life? Will I need to worry about my children staying home from school forever? I want to forget about the virus and get on with my life.

reureu 5y ago
I think everyone is sick of hearing about COVID-19, but hitting your information saturation point is not the same as a disease becoming endemic. The virus is objectively not endemic yet, as demonstrated by the overwhelmed hospital systems. This may not be the case where you live, but there are many places in the US where crisis standards of care are either currently implemented, on the verge of being implemented, or have just been ceased. While you're totally right about breakthrough infections etc, it's a bit premature to say we're back to normal when people are at risk of dying of treatable conditions solely because hospitals are full of mostly unvaccinated covid patients.
- rp1 5y ago
  The virus is objectively endemic. It's regularly found in people and cannot be eradicated. Even if you could somehow eradicate it among humans, it has animal reservoirs so re-contamination would always be a threat. If hospital capacity is an issue, then we should expand capacity to reflect the current state of the world, instead of hoping that the world will somehow return to how it was prior to the pandemic.
  - reureu 5y ago
    The question wasn't if we're trying to eradicate it or not, or if we're going to ever return to a pre-pandemic normal, it's whether we're in an epidemic/pandemic or endemic phase. My point is just that, as tired of hearing about it as everyone is, covid is still killing many people both directly (through infection) and indirectly (through tying up healthcare resources). We're still not at a place where covid is like the flu or colds because, as one example measure, it's overwhelming hospitals. We should definitely be talking about expanding healthcare capacity, if not for covid than for the burgeoning obesity, diabetes, and hypertension epidemic. Those are discussions that have been happening for years, and ultimately work on a decade timescale.

qwertyuiop_ 5y ago

If I am vaccinated for chicken pox why do I have to worry if my friend is not vaccinated for it and gets it ? If Covid vaccination is a vaccination i true sense the above assumption should apply to it no ? Also using a government agency intended for construction / mining hard hat and fall safety for vaccinating people who don’t want to get vaccinated for personal medical reasons is outrageous. This is the kind of stuff that happens in a communist country like North Korea

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
> If I am vaccinated for chicken pox why do I have to worry if my friend is not vaccinated for it and gets it ? Vaccines don't work like that. They give you a better chance of not getting something (chicken pox vaccine is 90% effective), and the rest of the vaccine's effectiveness is made up in scale (if everyone has 90% resistance, the virus has nowhere to "catch hold" and just disappears). Many people don't get that, and think vaccines should either be 100% effective or they shouldn't be used at all, or they don't understand that they only work well when they are applied at scale (which is why schools mandate many vaccines with few exceptions). > his is the kind of stuff that happens in a communist country like North Korea Or America in the 1950s and 1960s when they wanted to get rid of polio, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis, etc... It is crazy: America back then didn't care about these nut case concerns, they were just focused on getting the job done. What happened to this country?
- mindslight 5y ago
  Postmodern (post-truth) politics, affluenza-induced solipsism, and mass media selling domestic influence on the international market.
- iammisc 5y ago
  By all reasonable metrics, the covid vaccine makes the risk of covid negligible for all interested groups. If you're worried get the vaccine (I have) and carry on. Sticking your nose in everyone else's business is just unhealthy. If others don't want to get it. That is their decision