9 ms·

Why I’m for Covid vaccines, but against vaccine mandates

25 points by primroot 5y ago

mandmandam 5y ago
Adding to the purely scientific argument against mandates (well covered in this article), there are also civil rights concerns which remain deeply important and under-appreciated. Most civil liberties experts have been very consistently against vaccine mandates, on the basis that they are divisive, dangerous, and quite likely to be counter-productive. Exceptions, such as the ACLU's recent pro-mandate stance, are based entirely on the scientism which this article takes down so well.
- nojokes 5y ago
  I do not think that bringing out (again!!!) absolute risk reduction argument has anything to do with science really but propaganda. ARR requires that background risk is taken into account. Please note that small remark "Data collected from the Veterans Affairs system between December 2020 and March 2021." under the table. Has prevalence of the disease changed after this period? Sure, greatly, there was delta wave and there is now omicron wave that has made the virus a lot more prevalent than it was during the winter/spring 2021. This means that to address the risk, you should take into account future prevalence because it will affect your risk assessment. Does he do this? No, of course not. He just tries to look smart and is quite good at it by fooling great amount of people. Is he really smart? I do not think so. But I get it. People do not like to be told what to do. Especially when people who tell it are not really smart. Vaccine mandates are an useful tool to reduce burden on health care system and reduce total amount of deaths. It has population level effect. But it is being sold as solution for personal level problems. It just does not make sense and every claim about its benefits feels like total bullshit because it mostly is. Of course vaccines have great personal benefits too. You will reduce your changes of severe illness and death. If there was a vaccine against death in car accidents, I would take it. The others in the accident who die? Well, bad luck for them - should have taken the vaccine too. The vaccine will also reduce prevalence of the disease but so far the effect on personal level has stayed on coin flip level. Definitely better than nothing but still not great. But this on the population level is a huge difference. If you can reduce the amount of people being infected by half, it would be tens of millions (in US). But lets get back to the ARR "theory". What if I told you that your child has 0.01% to die when infected. If I have the remedy that will reduce it to 0.009% and it is free but there is 0.001% risk that your child will develop heart condition that has 20% change being long lasting then will you take it? What if your child also has 0.1% of change to develop the same condition when infected but it has 50% change of being long lasting? Now of course you will ask what is the change that your child will get infected, because you are a smart person. Why take the risk of the remedy when there is no real threat. What this person is doing, is to confuse you to not ask this question. He claims that because the risk of infection was low in the past, you should not vaccinate your child. He decorates this claim in cleaver terms but the essence of it is exactly this. Is he stupid or evil, I do not know. What was the reality with delta wave? In some countries I checked, change of getting infected was about 10% in first weeks in unvaccinated children population. Omicron has been even faster. I would claim that there is near 100% change that your child will get it in coming years. ARR does not tell us anything about this. This is just a tool used by anti-vaxxers to confuse people. Is this doctor an anti-vaxxer? Maybe not, but he for sure sound like one.
jfmatth 5y ago
Finally, an article I can get behind. In a nutshell: - Vaccines help - Natural Immunity is best - Mandates don't need to be here now. Thanks for posting this, very helpful
- nojokes 5y ago
  Saying natural immunity is best is really not smart. This means that you must get sick to acquire it and possibly really sick. This is exactly what vaccines are trying to avoid. In principle it is smart to prime your immune system with a vaccine. Then if you get still sick, you will mostly gain benefits from natural immunity. There are still risks involved because instead of single protein in fixed configuration you will get 29 of them in bioactive forms but at least you have greatly reduced your risk.
  - ls15 5y ago
    True, but to me it makes no sense to force people who already have built immunity to a recent strain to get vaccinated against an ancient strain. Why is existing natural immunity treated like an inferior sibling of being vaccinated (or even ignored completely), even when it provides the most up-to-date protection?
- bediger4000 5y ago
  Oddly this article does say Natural Immunity is best. But do we really know? I mean, we've had only 2 years of experience with COVID, and there's some evidence that natural immunity isn't all that great: suffering through the Delta variant didn't give immunity to the Omicron variant.
  - nojokes 5y ago
    Actually against omicron 3 doses of vaccine is superior but you will still get infected very likely. More likely than with 2 doses and delta because omicron is just so much more prevalent at the moment.
  - ls15 5y ago
tomjonesey 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mattzito 5y ago
It's hard to take some of these arguments seriously when one of the core arguments: > In people who are previously infected vaccines offer zero additional benefit with respect to hospitalization is so fatally flawed. The reason that previously infected people have lower hospitalization rates is that some percentage of people who were previously infected and at risk of hospitalization _died_. You're literally clearing out the population that is most likely to skew these numbers. Second, this argument: > vaccinated and unvaccinated persons with detectable infection have the same viral loads, despite the reduction in disease severity for the former group. is similarly flawed, in that it goes right to transmission after successful infection, without touching on infection rates themselves. Sure, yes, when you have a breakthrough case, and are infected, you're probably similarly likely to infect household members. It's common sense. But the raw infection rates for fully vaccinated people are much lower, even with omicron. The data from NYC is very clear: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/fQBNe/16/ https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/fQBNe/16/ So vaccination is important because it reduces spread, and reduces infections. The medications he cites as justification for reduced need for vaccination are not widely available, and in the case of fluvoxamine, not widely prescribed. Over and over the author simply manipulates data to support their argument.
- Jtype 5y ago
  Even the CDC admits that vaccination has not reduced spread and infections. You're spreading misinformation now. Your graph includes no sources, no raw data, and is open to interpretation. For example, fully vaccinated people are much more fearful of covid and are more likely to self isolate. Fully vaccinated people are more likely to have minimal or no symptoms, so are less likely to be tested, while still being contagious. I watched in December a community that is over 99% vaccinated have an omicron spike which led to 10% of the population test positive in a week. This started a spike which then spread to the outlying areas, and was likely only even discovered because of surveillance testing. If 10% of a fully vaccinated population could become infected within a week, then clearly the vaccines were not reducing spread or infections.
  - empthought 5y ago
    > If 10% of a fully vaccinated population could become infected within a week, then clearly the vaccines were not reducing spread or infections. This is just a fallacy. Even measles vaccines have a breakthrough rate—cases are so low because there is not widespread community transmission. Just because it's not reducing transmission to your taste doesn't mean it's not reducing transmission.
scottiebarnes 5y ago
> There are many reasons I have heard put forth for why vaccines should be mandated, but one dominant argument stands out: Mandating vaccines will protect vaccinated people from unvaccinated people. That ones new to me. It almost sounds like a strawman. But I think its just the phrasing. Obviously, vaccinated people are already "protected" from the virus, especially against severe illness and hospitalization, but less so for transmission. So vaccinated people can't really be protected any further, other than by lowering the probability that the person next to them has the virus (which I suppose would be the definition of "protecting vaccinated people" above, or protection from transmission).
- empthought 5y ago
  > So vaccinated people can't really be protected any further, other than by lowering the probability that the person next to them has the virus This protects everyone, not just vaccinated people. It's what people called "herd immunity," before that started to mean a stealth uncontrolled eugenics project.
thawaya3113 5y ago
1) The article consistently minimizes vaccine benefits. The study it points to shows that vaccination reduces spread by 40%. It’s a small study with n’s of <40 people, but 40% is a significant reduction in transmission. Beyond that it tries to somehow ignore the massive benefits in reducing the risk of hospitalization (therefore ignores the fact that even when the vaccinated spread the virus, they are likely to in lower intensity), by claiming that a bad flu year has 50-70k hospitalized Americans. Which is true, and just goes to show how much worse the impact of COVID is on hospitalization when the hospitalization winter peaks have been 140k and 160k, more than double the worst flu season in the US. And no, 12% of the staff not being available (largely because they are burnt out because of COVID) is not even a part of the reason that hospitalization is so much of a problem when hospitalization is 100% greater than the worst flu year. 2) The article does not provide strong studies showing the benefits of reinfections. Other than a letter to the editor, the data ends pre-Omicron, but more importantly, covers a period which is well within the 6-9 month period of the last 2 surges where immunity from both vaccines and infection is considered strong. There is research showing that immunity due to infection does, in fact, reduce dramatically after 6-9 months. It may take some time for the effects of Omicron to be isolated, but either way, at best it shows that variants are able to evade immunity by infection. 3) Finally, they don’t actually provide any downsides to the vaccine mandates. And there are no novel civil liberty based defenses one can hide behind because vaccine mandates already exist for many vaccines. At least in the US, courts have ruled in favor of mandatory vaccinations even over religious objections. Arguably the likes of Jenny McCarthy, who have been anti vaxxers well before COVID-19 existed can take a principled stance against vaccine mandates, but it’s very difficult for others to do so considering they’ve been accepting them for so long with nary a word against them. Consequently, an argument against a strong vaccine mandate must test on a cost benefit analysis, and it’s hard to argue against the mandate on a cost benefit analysis, and I don’t see how pointing out a bunch of benefits, without showing any costs (to those who don’t have medical exemptions, who presumably would be exempt from any version of a vaccine mandate) leads to a conclusion against mandates.
- dekhn 5y ago
  Why are you saying such reasonable and intelligent things using a throwaway account? I've concluded mandates are useless because they got weaponized- the harder you try to push for vaccines, the harder the people who associated with antivax will push. I'm curious what outcomes would have been different if we'd reached, say, 99.99% vax in the US.
Out_of_Characte 5y ago
I find vaccine mandates to be a solution to a problem that will never exist. in most countries, 80% was willing to get vaccinated before any kind of restrictions happened. This shows the trust and faith most people have in the benefit of the vaccine to their daily lives. If no one trusted the vaccine, then using political force would be the most destructive influence you can have on a democratic society where the majority is supposed to agree with the rules set forth. Trying to force the last diverse 20% to take something they chose not to is also a clear violation of the Nuremberg code. There's two rules in the code which I believe is relevant for denying participation in vaccinations and their imposed restrictions. "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion" "The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment." The second point is mostly related to vaccinating younger people "for the benefit of the populace" If you claim something benefits the group, you still have the responsibility of proving that it benefits the group. which for very young people, natural infection might similarly benefit the group just as much as taking the vaccination. Whether or not the Nuremberg code has any standing in todays courts is debatable but as this experiment has no defined solution it is clear that someone should be able to deny participation.
- empthought 5y ago
  These vaccines are not experimental. Stop reading antivax trash.
  - peteradio 5y ago
    How will these vaccines continue to fare in 2 years? Don't know? Sounds like we are testing some sort of hypothesis with observation.
    - empthought 5y ago

25 points by primroot 5y ago

Adding to the purely scientific argument against mandates (well covered in this article), there are also civil rights concerns which remain deeply important and under-appreciated. Most civil liberties experts have been very consistently against vaccine mandates, on the basis that they are divisive, dangerous, and quite likely to be counter-productive. Exceptions, such as the ACLU's recent pro-mandate stance, are based entirely on the scientism which this article takes down so well.

nojokes 5y ago
I do not think that bringing out (again!!!) absolute risk reduction argument has anything to do with science really but propaganda. ARR requires that background risk is taken into account. Please note that small remark "Data collected from the Veterans Affairs system between December 2020 and March 2021." under the table. Has prevalence of the disease changed after this period? Sure, greatly, there was delta wave and there is now omicron wave that has made the virus a lot more prevalent than it was during the winter/spring 2021. This means that to address the risk, you should take into account future prevalence because it will affect your risk assessment. Does he do this? No, of course not. He just tries to look smart and is quite good at it by fooling great amount of people. Is he really smart? I do not think so. But I get it. People do not like to be told what to do. Especially when people who tell it are not really smart. Vaccine mandates are an useful tool to reduce burden on health care system and reduce total amount of deaths. It has population level effect. But it is being sold as solution for personal level problems. It just does not make sense and every claim about its benefits feels like total bullshit because it mostly is. Of course vaccines have great personal benefits too. You will reduce your changes of severe illness and death. If there was a vaccine against death in car accidents, I would take it. The others in the accident who die? Well, bad luck for them - should have taken the vaccine too. The vaccine will also reduce prevalence of the disease but so far the effect on personal level has stayed on coin flip level. Definitely better than nothing but still not great. But this on the population level is a huge difference. If you can reduce the amount of people being infected by half, it would be tens of millions (in US). But lets get back to the ARR "theory". What if I told you that your child has 0.01% to die when infected. If I have the remedy that will reduce it to 0.009% and it is free but there is 0.001% risk that your child will develop heart condition that has 20% change being long lasting then will you take it? What if your child also has 0.1% of change to develop the same condition when infected but it has 50% change of being long lasting? Now of course you will ask what is the change that your child will get infected, because you are a smart person. Why take the risk of the remedy when there is no real threat. What this person is doing, is to confuse you to not ask this question. He claims that because the risk of infection was low in the past, you should not vaccinate your child. He decorates this claim in cleaver terms but the essence of it is exactly this. Is he stupid or evil, I do not know. What was the reality with delta wave? In some countries I checked, change of getting infected was about 10% in first weeks in unvaccinated children population. Omicron has been even faster. I would claim that there is near 100% change that your child will get it in coming years. ARR does not tell us anything about this. This is just a tool used by anti-vaxxers to confuse people. Is this doctor an anti-vaxxer? Maybe not, but he for sure sound like one.

jfmatth 5y ago

Finally, an article I can get behind. In a nutshell: - Vaccines help - Natural Immunity is best - Mandates don't need to be here now. Thanks for posting this, very helpful

nojokes 5y ago
Saying natural immunity is best is really not smart. This means that you must get sick to acquire it and possibly really sick. This is exactly what vaccines are trying to avoid. In principle it is smart to prime your immune system with a vaccine. Then if you get still sick, you will mostly gain benefits from natural immunity. There are still risks involved because instead of single protein in fixed configuration you will get 29 of them in bioactive forms but at least you have greatly reduced your risk.
- ls15 5y ago
  True, but to me it makes no sense to force people who already have built immunity to a recent strain to get vaccinated against an ancient strain. Why is existing natural immunity treated like an inferior sibling of being vaccinated (or even ignored completely), even when it provides the most up-to-date protection?
bediger4000 5y ago
Oddly this article does say Natural Immunity is best. But do we really know? I mean, we've had only 2 years of experience with COVID, and there's some evidence that natural immunity isn't all that great: suffering through the Delta variant didn't give immunity to the Omicron variant.
- nojokes 5y ago
  Actually against omicron 3 doses of vaccine is superior but you will still get infected very likely. More likely than with 2 doses and delta because omicron is just so much more prevalent at the moment.
- ls15 5y ago

tomjonesey 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mattzito 5y ago

It's hard to take some of these arguments seriously when one of the core arguments: > In people who are previously infected vaccines offer zero additional benefit with respect to hospitalization is so fatally flawed. The reason that previously infected people have lower hospitalization rates is that some percentage of people who were previously infected and at risk of hospitalization _died_. You're literally clearing out the population that is most likely to skew these numbers. Second, this argument: > vaccinated and unvaccinated persons with detectable infection have the same viral loads, despite the reduction in disease severity for the former group. is similarly flawed, in that it goes right to transmission after successful infection, without touching on infection rates themselves. Sure, yes, when you have a breakthrough case, and are infected, you're probably similarly likely to infect household members. It's common sense. But the raw infection rates for fully vaccinated people are much lower, even with omicron. The data from NYC is very clear: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/fQBNe/16/ https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/fQBNe/16/ So vaccination is important because it reduces spread, and reduces infections. The medications he cites as justification for reduced need for vaccination are not widely available, and in the case of fluvoxamine, not widely prescribed. Over and over the author simply manipulates data to support their argument.

Jtype 5y ago
Even the CDC admits that vaccination has not reduced spread and infections. You're spreading misinformation now. Your graph includes no sources, no raw data, and is open to interpretation. For example, fully vaccinated people are much more fearful of covid and are more likely to self isolate. Fully vaccinated people are more likely to have minimal or no symptoms, so are less likely to be tested, while still being contagious. I watched in December a community that is over 99% vaccinated have an omicron spike which led to 10% of the population test positive in a week. This started a spike which then spread to the outlying areas, and was likely only even discovered because of surveillance testing. If 10% of a fully vaccinated population could become infected within a week, then clearly the vaccines were not reducing spread or infections.
- empthought 5y ago
  > If 10% of a fully vaccinated population could become infected within a week, then clearly the vaccines were not reducing spread or infections. This is just a fallacy. Even measles vaccines have a breakthrough rate—cases are so low because there is not widespread community transmission. Just because it's not reducing transmission to your taste doesn't mean it's not reducing transmission.

scottiebarnes 5y ago

> There are many reasons I have heard put forth for why vaccines should be mandated, but one dominant argument stands out: Mandating vaccines will protect vaccinated people from unvaccinated people. That ones new to me. It almost sounds like a strawman. But I think its just the phrasing. Obviously, vaccinated people are already "protected" from the virus, especially against severe illness and hospitalization, but less so for transmission. So vaccinated people can't really be protected any further, other than by lowering the probability that the person next to them has the virus (which I suppose would be the definition of "protecting vaccinated people" above, or protection from transmission).

empthought 5y ago
> So vaccinated people can't really be protected any further, other than by lowering the probability that the person next to them has the virus This protects everyone, not just vaccinated people. It's what people called "herd immunity," before that started to mean a stealth uncontrolled eugenics project.

thawaya3113 5y ago

1) The article consistently minimizes vaccine benefits. The study it points to shows that vaccination reduces spread by 40%. It’s a small study with n’s of <40 people, but 40% is a significant reduction in transmission. Beyond that it tries to somehow ignore the massive benefits in reducing the risk of hospitalization (therefore ignores the fact that even when the vaccinated spread the virus, they are likely to in lower intensity), by claiming that a bad flu year has 50-70k hospitalized Americans. Which is true, and just goes to show how much worse the impact of COVID is on hospitalization when the hospitalization winter peaks have been 140k and 160k, more than double the worst flu season in the US. And no, 12% of the staff not being available (largely because they are burnt out because of COVID) is not even a part of the reason that hospitalization is so much of a problem when hospitalization is 100% greater than the worst flu year. 2) The article does not provide strong studies showing the benefits of reinfections. Other than a letter to the editor, the data ends pre-Omicron, but more importantly, covers a period which is well within the 6-9 month period of the last 2 surges where immunity from both vaccines and infection is considered strong. There is research showing that immunity due to infection does, in fact, reduce dramatically after 6-9 months. It may take some time for the effects of Omicron to be isolated, but either way, at best it shows that variants are able to evade immunity by infection. 3) Finally, they don’t actually provide any downsides to the vaccine mandates. And there are no novel civil liberty based defenses one can hide behind because vaccine mandates already exist for many vaccines. At least in the US, courts have ruled in favor of mandatory vaccinations even over religious objections. Arguably the likes of Jenny McCarthy, who have been anti vaxxers well before COVID-19 existed can take a principled stance against vaccine mandates, but it’s very difficult for others to do so considering they’ve been accepting them for so long with nary a word against them. Consequently, an argument against a strong vaccine mandate must test on a cost benefit analysis, and it’s hard to argue against the mandate on a cost benefit analysis, and I don’t see how pointing out a bunch of benefits, without showing any costs (to those who don’t have medical exemptions, who presumably would be exempt from any version of a vaccine mandate) leads to a conclusion against mandates.

dekhn 5y ago
Why are you saying such reasonable and intelligent things using a throwaway account? I've concluded mandates are useless because they got weaponized- the harder you try to push for vaccines, the harder the people who associated with antivax will push. I'm curious what outcomes would have been different if we'd reached, say, 99.99% vax in the US.

Out_of_Characte 5y ago

I find vaccine mandates to be a solution to a problem that will never exist. in most countries, 80% was willing to get vaccinated before any kind of restrictions happened. This shows the trust and faith most people have in the benefit of the vaccine to their daily lives. If no one trusted the vaccine, then using political force would be the most destructive influence you can have on a democratic society where the majority is supposed to agree with the rules set forth. Trying to force the last diverse 20% to take something they chose not to is also a clear violation of the Nuremberg code. There's two rules in the code which I believe is relevant for denying participation in vaccinations and their imposed restrictions. "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion" "The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment." The second point is mostly related to vaccinating younger people "for the benefit of the populace" If you claim something benefits the group, you still have the responsibility of proving that it benefits the group. which for very young people, natural infection might similarly benefit the group just as much as taking the vaccination. Whether or not the Nuremberg code has any standing in todays courts is debatable but as this experiment has no defined solution it is clear that someone should be able to deny participation.

empthought 5y ago
These vaccines are not experimental. Stop reading antivax trash.
- peteradio 5y ago
  How will these vaccines continue to fare in 2 years? Don't know? Sounds like we are testing some sort of hypothesis with observation.
  - empthought 5y ago