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Given that the currently available vaccines are all non-sterilising (do not prevent infection and transmission), it is difficult to see this as a measure aimed

Given that the currently available vaccines are all non-sterilising (do not prevent infection and transmission), it is difficult to see this as a measure aimed at controlling transmission. It is terrifying to me that a government is confining healthy people to their homes for refusing a treatment that they (rightly or wrongly) believe is not in their best interests. Of course, recorded cases are likely to fall naturally at some point. If the fall is coincident with the introduction of this rule, we can expect the same across the West.

arkitaip 5y ago
Society forcing people to behave in a certain way is a fundamental aspect of any and all civilizations. At certain points, you rights have to give way for the collective good, especially when people's lives are at stake.
- MonkeyClub 5y ago
  "Social bullying has happened before, so accept it now, as it's for a good cause" is not the best of arguments. Fundamental rights and liberties are fundamental for a reason.
- fy20 5y ago
  I was pro-lockdown when they first started, but the mandates coming out now don't really make any sense. It seems like politicians are just imposing new restrictions because they need to be seen doing something. In my (EU) country you need to be vaccinated to go into most shops, restaurants, bars, and beauty services. However you can freely go to your office and not wear a mask. Even the people working in places where as a customer you need to be vaccinated, do not themselves need to be vaccinated. I'm fully vaccinated, but I have friends who are not. The people who do not want to be vaccinated have their reasons, and I doubt these restrictions which cause mild inconveniences at best (compared to lockdowns like last winter, where some stores were closed for 3 month and you couldn't leave your city) are really going to make them change their mind. If they really want everyone to be vaccinated, they should just come out and say that, then work to get it passed into law.
- twofornone 5y ago
  >you rights have to give way for the collective good, especially when people's lives are at stake But when discussions over the degree to which measures actually benefit the collective good are suppressed, both top down (tech censorship) and bottom up (downvotes and social shaming), you are moving into the territory of tyranny/oppression.
- proc0 5y ago
  > people to behave in a certain way This isn't about behavior, unless you mean blindly following authority (in which case those civilizations had huge downsides). This is about a medical treatment for a disease that is objectively not a civilization-ending threat, by any measure. The problem is forcing people to take a specific medical treatment (it's not about immunity from the virus, it's about the specific treatment ONLY), and using fear as a justification to control society. What you're calling "collective good" is exactly how past atrocities have happened. Anytime there has been genocide or millions of people getting slaughtered, it's because one side decided it was for the collective good. It's a cliche argument that can go both ways and says nothing about the actual reasons for implementing force across a society.
fifteenforty 5y ago
Please stop spreading misinformation. Vaccines prevent infection, as evidenced by the drastically lower COVID case numbers in the vaccinated. You can’t spread it if you don’t have it. If you do contract it, you are less infectious. This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  I'll believe that the vaccine prevents spreading COVID as soon as mask mandates stop applying to vaccinated people.
  - MonkeyClub 5y ago
    Perhaps the vaccinated won't be required to wear a second mask?
  - Arnt 5y ago
    They did here a month or two ago. They now apply only in areas where vaccinated and unvaccinated people mingle and enforcement would be too much bother.
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      That's not the case here. I've gone to places where everyone has had to show their vaccine card at the door, but we still had to wear masks inside.
- fwn 5y ago
  I don't think the "Please stop spreading misinformation." boilerplate is necessarily always hostile and provocative. In situations where the comment is only aimed at correcting a factual mistake, for example, it can be okay, if still bad style. It always feels as if it prematurely implies evil intention, which is a move that does not belong in any intellectually honest conversation, neither casual nor scientific. I don't think the boilerplate should be used in comments that then continue with highly questionable, very radical statements. Especially if heterodox opinions are stated as if they were well established positions. For example: "This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available." The idea that conditional lockdowns are identical to non-conditional lockdowns from legal, medical or political perspective is not just wrong, but also unnecessarily radical. The radicalism just makes the wrongness trivial to spot. The position that actually justifies conditional lock-downs (like the new Austrian policy) is one where the discriminatory treatment is acknowledged and justified, not simply denied. ...which should not surprise anyone who somewhat followed the discourse on the issue. I know that's not as attractive as just denying the existence of differences between two obviously different policies.
Mikeb85 5y ago
Well no one cares about spread to vaccinated people. No one truly cares about spread except as it affects the health care system. If everyone was vaccinated, all cases would be mild and life could go on as normal. But unvaccinated people are filling hospitals causing disruption to the healthcare system and that effect snowballs.
- MonkeyClub 5y ago
  Then covid medicine would certainly be a more liberal way to go towards; have a remedy available if need be, without being pushed to require vaccines from citizens.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    And that'll be great when it's widely available.
- drukenemo 5y ago
  How do you know that? If you are reading that from MS news, and if you are just repeating a statement without actual numbers, you are spreading propaganda of those who are interested in promoting the vaccines (aka Big Pharma and the sponsored media). As shown in this thread , IC hospital occupancy was low in France, and I know it was the same in the Netherlands. The current occupancy numbers of vaccinated vs unvaccinated are conveniently undisclosed by the Dutch government.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    Dunno, recent stats from my country (Canada) shows that during our last wave, about 90% of our hospital occupancy was unvaccinated people despite them being about 20% of the population.
    - angelzen 5y ago
      Perhaps you mean "90% of covid hospitalizations", which is different than "90% of hospitalizations". I've been checking the jhu pages for various US states, never seen covid hospitalization rates above 10-20% and covid ICU utilization rate above 30%. Right now, using the Rt map from https://covidestim.org https://covidestim.org, looks like Indiana & Ohio are in the middle of a wave. Covid hospital bed utilization: IN 10%, OH 15%. Covid ICU utilization: IN 20%, OH 20%. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/indiana https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/indiana https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/ohio https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/ohio
simion314 5y ago
I think in a few months we experts can look at this winter cases around the globe and compare the differences between the vaccination rates and other measures and find some conclusions.
HarryHirsch 5y ago
No, the goal is to reduce load on the healthcare system. It's well known that the Covid vaccines keep people out of hospital. There's no reason that people should interfere with other people receiving urgently needed medical treatment.
- ssivark 5y ago
  How about simply turning away the unvaccinated from hospitals for Covid care? Is that less or more humane than holding them under house arrest? PS: I think arguments justifying such mandates for avoiding overwhelming of hospitals will further enrage anyone who was already against universal healthcare because it becomes yet another avenue for govt/bureaucratic manipulation of people's lives.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    That's a political impossibility. Besides - whom to reprioritize? Pick the sickest person, the latest arrival, or what? There was a case not too long ago in Alabama where a person suffered a heart attack and died because in three dozen hospitals no intensive care bed could be found, so the concern isn't even theoretical.
  - caeril 5y ago
    In the US, that would result in severe disparate impact on non-Asian minorities, because Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are currently the least-vaccinated groups. Not really politically viable until these numbers equalize.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    It isn't universal healthcare if you exclude anyone for any reason. It still can be public healthcare with alternatives for private insurance schemes. It would be most unwise to kill universal healthcare because of the threat or costs Covid poses.
    - angelzen 5y ago
      Like many things in life, absolute universal healthcare is impossible. At limit it implies life without death and youth without aging. The utopian ideal must contend with the reality that resources are finite and accept tradeoffs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anramon 5y ago
> not been double-jabbed will only be allowed to leave their homes for work, school, exercise and buying essential supplies This makes absolutely no sense. The most terrifying is people actually defending and promoting this kind of orwellian and irrational measures.
_djo_ 5y ago
It’s a false dichotomy to claim that they’re non-sterilising. They’re partially sterilising, at to at least 50% effectiveness even after waning. With boosters, it seems that returns to 90%+.
- glogla 5y ago
  Yeah, the other thing is, sterilising vaccines are possible, they are just harder to research so the initial target for pretty much every vaccine was to reduce hospotalizations and deaths. I don't know if sterilising vaccins are being researched now though. I heard something about possible nose-spray vaccine that would both improve this and make applications easier. Maybe well see that in near future.
  - pbaka 5y ago
    AFAIK at least a couple Chinese companies as well as French Sanofi are. Will take years though.
- caeril 5y ago
  This is not true, at all. The current crop of vaccines are roughly 95% non-sterilizing. It IS true that they reduce net transmission, but the literature is clear that the reason is almost exclusively due to how they shorten the duration of carrying. The nasal viral load is virtually identical. The primary factor is how long you're carrying that load for (approximately 11 days vs 8 days from what I can tell from pubmed et al). Does vaccination help the herd? Sure, but it's pretty limited. The reality is that vaccination mostly protects YOU - it keeps the infection in the top layer of the respiratory epithelium, ensures to a great degree that you won't be hospitalized for deeper tissue damage.
  - _djo_ 5y ago
    Bearing in mind that transmission effectiveness data is only just becoming available from multiple countries, it certainly isn't showing that duration of carrying is the only factor. Dutch data, for instance, has recently shown substantial reductions in transmission within households, locations where a three day difference in the duration of symptoms is unlikely to have had a major impact. [0] [0]https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v...
raxxorrax 5y ago
If the vaccine would protect against transmission in any way, shouldn't I see a less steep flank when a new wave hits and cases are increasing? I have compared graphs with the same axis configuration and it looks like there is no difference at all. The amplitude of that latest wave is even higher in my country than when people were unvaccinated. Cannot control for factors like behavior. Lockdown rules were almost the same, although I think people take current rules far less serious. If you constantly are having an emergency, it isn't an emergency anymore...
rsynnott 5y ago
So, it's apparently to protect the hospitals. While I've no idea of the situation in Austria, in most Western European countries ICU occupancy is largely unvaccinated people and severely immunosuppressed people. So once you're close to ICU capacity you have three options: - Ignore it, likely leading to a lot of deaths. - Full lockdown - Targeted lockdown of the most vulnerable population (similar to 'cocooning' of elderly in the early stages) Obviously, none of these are great options, but they're the choices a number of places are now facing.
- angelzen 5y ago
  ICUs are a scarce bonus, not an entitlement. We are talking denying basic human rights to a large segment of healthy people on the off chance that a tiny percent of them will end up populating the tiny number of ICUs available in the country at some point in the future. What's next: obese people, people engaging in sexual promiscuity, smokers, babies with congenital malformations or simply old people? All of these populations have a higher statistical chance to occupy an ICU bed, so we should just ban them from society? WTaF?
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    > or simply old people? So, in the early stages of the pandemic, a number of countries did exactly that. Which was, arguably, a lot more unfair; over 80s can't take a de-oldening vaccine. Ultimately, _if_, and only if, the ICU numbers dictate either locking down the whole population or locking down that fraction of the population who have voluntarily decided to be the main contributors to ICU load... well, it's not a _great_ choice to have to make, certainly, but there's something to be said for locking down fewer people, if that is the choice.
    - angelzen 5y ago
      Sorry, does not compute. Feel free to do whatever triage you want for the scarce ICU resource. Banning large numbers healthy people form society, of which the vast majority (>99%) will never need an ICU, is something else entirely.

arkitaip 5y ago

Society forcing people to behave in a certain way is a fundamental aspect of any and all civilizations. At certain points, you rights have to give way for the collective good, especially when people's lives are at stake.

MonkeyClub 5y ago
"Social bullying has happened before, so accept it now, as it's for a good cause" is not the best of arguments. Fundamental rights and liberties are fundamental for a reason.
fy20 5y ago
I was pro-lockdown when they first started, but the mandates coming out now don't really make any sense. It seems like politicians are just imposing new restrictions because they need to be seen doing something. In my (EU) country you need to be vaccinated to go into most shops, restaurants, bars, and beauty services. However you can freely go to your office and not wear a mask. Even the people working in places where as a customer you need to be vaccinated, do not themselves need to be vaccinated. I'm fully vaccinated, but I have friends who are not. The people who do not want to be vaccinated have their reasons, and I doubt these restrictions which cause mild inconveniences at best (compared to lockdowns like last winter, where some stores were closed for 3 month and you couldn't leave your city) are really going to make them change their mind. If they really want everyone to be vaccinated, they should just come out and say that, then work to get it passed into law.
twofornone 5y ago
>you rights have to give way for the collective good, especially when people's lives are at stake But when discussions over the degree to which measures actually benefit the collective good are suppressed, both top down (tech censorship) and bottom up (downvotes and social shaming), you are moving into the territory of tyranny/oppression.
proc0 5y ago
> people to behave in a certain way This isn't about behavior, unless you mean blindly following authority (in which case those civilizations had huge downsides). This is about a medical treatment for a disease that is objectively not a civilization-ending threat, by any measure. The problem is forcing people to take a specific medical treatment (it's not about immunity from the virus, it's about the specific treatment ONLY), and using fear as a justification to control society. What you're calling "collective good" is exactly how past atrocities have happened. Anytime there has been genocide or millions of people getting slaughtered, it's because one side decided it was for the collective good. It's a cliche argument that can go both ways and says nothing about the actual reasons for implementing force across a society.

fifteenforty 5y ago

Please stop spreading misinformation. Vaccines prevent infection, as evidenced by the drastically lower COVID case numbers in the vaccinated. You can’t spread it if you don’t have it. If you do contract it, you are less infectious. This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available.

josephcsible 5y ago
I'll believe that the vaccine prevents spreading COVID as soon as mask mandates stop applying to vaccinated people.
- MonkeyClub 5y ago
  Perhaps the vaccinated won't be required to wear a second mask?
- Arnt 5y ago
  They did here a month or two ago. They now apply only in areas where vaccinated and unvaccinated people mingle and enforcement would be too much bother.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    That's not the case here. I've gone to places where everyone has had to show their vaccine card at the door, but we still had to wear masks inside.
fwn 5y ago
I don't think the "Please stop spreading misinformation." boilerplate is necessarily always hostile and provocative. In situations where the comment is only aimed at correcting a factual mistake, for example, it can be okay, if still bad style. It always feels as if it prematurely implies evil intention, which is a move that does not belong in any intellectually honest conversation, neither casual nor scientific. I don't think the boilerplate should be used in comments that then continue with highly questionable, very radical statements. Especially if heterodox opinions are stated as if they were well established positions. For example: "This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available." The idea that conditional lockdowns are identical to non-conditional lockdowns from legal, medical or political perspective is not just wrong, but also unnecessarily radical. The radicalism just makes the wrongness trivial to spot. The position that actually justifies conditional lock-downs (like the new Austrian policy) is one where the discriminatory treatment is acknowledged and justified, not simply denied. ...which should not surprise anyone who somewhat followed the discourse on the issue. I know that's not as attractive as just denying the existence of differences between two obviously different policies.

Mikeb85 5y ago

Well no one cares about spread to vaccinated people. No one truly cares about spread except as it affects the health care system. If everyone was vaccinated, all cases would be mild and life could go on as normal. But unvaccinated people are filling hospitals causing disruption to the healthcare system and that effect snowballs.

MonkeyClub 5y ago
Then covid medicine would certainly be a more liberal way to go towards; have a remedy available if need be, without being pushed to require vaccines from citizens.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  And that'll be great when it's widely available.
drukenemo 5y ago
How do you know that? If you are reading that from MS news, and if you are just repeating a statement without actual numbers, you are spreading propaganda of those who are interested in promoting the vaccines (aka Big Pharma and the sponsored media). As shown in this thread , IC hospital occupancy was low in France, and I know it was the same in the Netherlands. The current occupancy numbers of vaccinated vs unvaccinated are conveniently undisclosed by the Dutch government.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  Dunno, recent stats from my country (Canada) shows that during our last wave, about 90% of our hospital occupancy was unvaccinated people despite them being about 20% of the population.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Perhaps you mean "90% of covid hospitalizations", which is different than "90% of hospitalizations". I've been checking the jhu pages for various US states, never seen covid hospitalization rates above 10-20% and covid ICU utilization rate above 30%. Right now, using the Rt map from https://covidestim.org https://covidestim.org, looks like Indiana & Ohio are in the middle of a wave. Covid hospital bed utilization: IN 10%, OH 15%. Covid ICU utilization: IN 20%, OH 20%. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/indiana https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/indiana https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/ohio https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/ohio

simion314 5y ago

I think in a few months we experts can look at this winter cases around the globe and compare the differences between the vaccination rates and other measures and find some conclusions.

HarryHirsch 5y ago

No, the goal is to reduce load on the healthcare system. It's well known that the Covid vaccines keep people out of hospital. There's no reason that people should interfere with other people receiving urgently needed medical treatment.

ssivark 5y ago
How about simply turning away the unvaccinated from hospitals for Covid care? Is that less or more humane than holding them under house arrest? PS: I think arguments justifying such mandates for avoiding overwhelming of hospitals will further enrage anyone who was already against universal healthcare because it becomes yet another avenue for govt/bureaucratic manipulation of people's lives.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  That's a political impossibility. Besides - whom to reprioritize? Pick the sickest person, the latest arrival, or what? There was a case not too long ago in Alabama where a person suffered a heart attack and died because in three dozen hospitals no intensive care bed could be found, so the concern isn't even theoretical.
- caeril 5y ago
  In the US, that would result in severe disparate impact on non-Asian minorities, because Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are currently the least-vaccinated groups. Not really politically viable until these numbers equalize.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  It isn't universal healthcare if you exclude anyone for any reason. It still can be public healthcare with alternatives for private insurance schemes. It would be most unwise to kill universal healthcare because of the threat or costs Covid poses.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Like many things in life, absolute universal healthcare is impossible. At limit it implies life without death and youth without aging. The utopian ideal must contend with the reality that resources are finite and accept tradeoffs.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

anramon 5y ago

> not been double-jabbed will only be allowed to leave their homes for work, school, exercise and buying essential supplies This makes absolutely no sense. The most terrifying is people actually defending and promoting this kind of orwellian and irrational measures.

_djo_ 5y ago

It’s a false dichotomy to claim that they’re non-sterilising. They’re partially sterilising, at to at least 50% effectiveness even after waning. With boosters, it seems that returns to 90%+.

glogla 5y ago
Yeah, the other thing is, sterilising vaccines are possible, they are just harder to research so the initial target for pretty much every vaccine was to reduce hospotalizations and deaths. I don't know if sterilising vaccins are being researched now though. I heard something about possible nose-spray vaccine that would both improve this and make applications easier. Maybe well see that in near future.
- pbaka 5y ago
  AFAIK at least a couple Chinese companies as well as French Sanofi are. Will take years though.
caeril 5y ago
This is not true, at all. The current crop of vaccines are roughly 95% non-sterilizing. It IS true that they reduce net transmission, but the literature is clear that the reason is almost exclusively due to how they shorten the duration of carrying. The nasal viral load is virtually identical. The primary factor is how long you're carrying that load for (approximately 11 days vs 8 days from what I can tell from pubmed et al). Does vaccination help the herd? Sure, but it's pretty limited. The reality is that vaccination mostly protects YOU - it keeps the infection in the top layer of the respiratory epithelium, ensures to a great degree that you won't be hospitalized for deeper tissue damage.
- _djo_ 5y ago
  Bearing in mind that transmission effectiveness data is only just becoming available from multiple countries, it certainly isn't showing that duration of carrying is the only factor. Dutch data, for instance, has recently shown substantial reductions in transmission within households, locations where a three day difference in the duration of symptoms is unlikely to have had a major impact. [0] [0]https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v...

raxxorrax 5y ago

If the vaccine would protect against transmission in any way, shouldn't I see a less steep flank when a new wave hits and cases are increasing? I have compared graphs with the same axis configuration and it looks like there is no difference at all. The amplitude of that latest wave is even higher in my country than when people were unvaccinated. Cannot control for factors like behavior. Lockdown rules were almost the same, although I think people take current rules far less serious. If you constantly are having an emergency, it isn't an emergency anymore...

rsynnott 5y ago

So, it's apparently to protect the hospitals. While I've no idea of the situation in Austria, in most Western European countries ICU occupancy is largely unvaccinated people and severely immunosuppressed people. So once you're close to ICU capacity you have three options: - Ignore it, likely leading to a lot of deaths. - Full lockdown - Targeted lockdown of the most vulnerable population (similar to 'cocooning' of elderly in the early stages) Obviously, none of these are great options, but they're the choices a number of places are now facing.

angelzen 5y ago
ICUs are a scarce bonus, not an entitlement. We are talking denying basic human rights to a large segment of healthy people on the off chance that a tiny percent of them will end up populating the tiny number of ICUs available in the country at some point in the future. What's next: obese people, people engaging in sexual promiscuity, smokers, babies with congenital malformations or simply old people? All of these populations have a higher statistical chance to occupy an ICU bed, so we should just ban them from society? WTaF?
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > or simply old people? So, in the early stages of the pandemic, a number of countries did exactly that. Which was, arguably, a lot more unfair; over 80s can't take a de-oldening vaccine. Ultimately, _if_, and only if, the ICU numbers dictate either locking down the whole population or locking down that fraction of the population who have voluntarily decided to be the main contributors to ICU load... well, it's not a _great_ choice to have to make, certainly, but there's something to be said for locking down fewer people, if that is the choice.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Sorry, does not compute. Feel free to do whatever triage you want for the scarce ICU resource. Banning large numbers healthy people form society, of which the vast majority (>99%) will never need an ICU, is something else entirely.