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> oppose vax mandates why? could you explain your stande on other mandates/requirements and what's this vax mandate does that makes it so different? (eg. you n

• x3n0ph3n3 5y ago
  All government mandates are enforced at the barrel of a gun.
  • lalaland1125 5y ago
    Are you opposed to all vaccine mandates? Including for diseases like measles?
    • refurb 5y ago
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3216452/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3216452/ This is a nice article about immunization requirements in Canada a decade before Covid hit. In 2011, only 3 provinces had mandates for students and also had plenty of exceptions. And this is for vaccines with decades of use and highly effective at preventing transmission and disease.
  • jleyank 5y ago
    I’ll get shot if I drive without a license and insurance? Damn….
    • mwint 5y ago
      For sure. You may get a ticket the first couple times, then they'll take you to jail (where you cannot drive). If you insist on continuing to drive, that means you have to resist going to jail. Resisting going to jail is an excellent way to have force used on you, up to and including guns. Heck, if the right country wants you in jail for the right reasons, you could flee somewhere else and have the _Air Force_ used against you.
    • feanaro 5y ago
      No, but you'll get detained and then you'll like your freedom back so you'll try to walk away, but they won't let you. If you insist, you'll eventually get shot.
      • mortenlarsen 5y ago
        Really? Where I live, cops only shoot if necessary, and someone getting away is not a valid reason. Maybe in some very extreme case they would, but it is better that someone escapes custody than someone (including the suspect dying). Then again, just a cop drawing a weapon or firing a weapon usually makes the news.
        • mwint 5y ago
          So you're saying that, in your region, it's possible to have a warrant (say, for failure to appear at your unpaid-ticket trial) and avoid jail by... running away? Indefinitely? They won't arrest you the next chance they get (say, when your plate shows up on a scanner)? I'd propose that avoiding jail indefinitely will eventually lead to violence in any halfway-organized jurisdiction. And if you start shooting, eventually the government will shoot back. All over a driving misdemeanor. We just assume that reasonable people won't let these things escalate that far, but yes: Every law written is ultimately enforced by a man (or woman) with a gun.
          • lovecg 5y ago
            If we’re arguing technicalities, a gun is not strictly speaking required. If it’s you against 20 cops they can just physically subdue you and throw you in jail. At no point they even need to threaten to shoot you. So a threat of physical force - yes. Actual guns and deadly force - not in every situation.
          • mortenlarsen 5y ago
            They will shoot you to defend themselves and others if necessary. But not to prevent you from escaping. They will overpower you if they get the chance. Bottom line: If you are not a danger to anyone, they will let you escape rather than kill anyone (including you), even if it means you are never brought to justice. It makes a lot of sense, if you don't have a revenge based justice system.
    • aksss 5y ago
      Do it enough, and ignore the authority of the government to require these things of you, and eventually violence will come of it (forcibly ensure your appearance or imprison you, and that force knows no upper limit if you keep resisting).
  • CogitoCogito 5y ago
    > All government mandates are enforced at the barrel of a gun. So is enforcement of contracts between private parties. Are you against private property as well?
    • amscanne 5y ago
      No they aren’t. You must go to the government via the legal system, since they are the only one authorized to use force.
      • wk_end 5y ago
        Are we talking about "first order enforcement" or not? If we are, neither private contracts nor vaccine mandates are directly enforced at the barrel of a gun - the RCMP aren't busting down people's doors to shoot them for failing to get vaccinated, just as people aren't immediately killed by the feds for violating legal contracts. If we're talking about how they're ultimately enforced, if all else fails...well, they're both enforced the same way.
        • amscanne 5y ago
          The police (who carry guns) have shut down events for mandate violations in Canada, and arrested people. (There was a particularly stubborn anti-vax pastor in Alberta IIRC.) For private disputes, it’s also not uncommon to have an armed officer help enforcement. Consider an extremely common private contract dispute - an eviction - where the police may come to remove the tenant. The “barrel of a gun” is of course a metaphor, but first order enforcement can be closer than you think.
          • wk_end 5y ago
            All you're doing here is arguing with yourself: you agree that the barrel of a gun is, in the final analysis, ultimately used to enforce both vaccine mandates and private contracts. Therefore an opposition to things being enforced at the barrel of a gun alone is an incoherent reason to oppose vaccine mandates and not private property.
  • jbay808 5y ago
    This sounds scary, but is it a bad thing? It depends on the mandate but the gun barrel is generally at the end of a long chain of escalating non-cooperation that starts with a sternly worded letter. Some governments are more trigger-happy than others, but at least in gentler societies, to get to the point where you're looking at a gun barrel, you'd probably have to respond somewhere along that chain with significant violence yourself. In societies where you are allowed to carry a gun, the government having an even bigger gun is rather implied by the word enforced, because a mandate couldn't be called enforced if the police could only hand sternly-worded letters to you while you ignore it and shot at them.
  • brianpan 5y ago
    I don't understand what this argument means. Aren't all rules enforced by whatever incentive or deterrent attached to the rule? Is "No parking from 9pm to 6am" enforced at the barrel of a gun?
    • iqanq 5y ago
      Certainly yes. You are fined. If you accumulate several fines, you will eventually be arrested. If you resist the arrest, you will find where the barrel of the gun is ;)
• chrissnell 5y ago
  Because we are free individuals and can make medical decisions for ourselves and our abilities to feed our families should not depend on upon our willingness to take a medication that does not appear to stop the spread of Omicron COVID. The mandates also make no exception for natural immunity which DOES appear to at least slow the spread of Omicron COVID.
  • jbay808 5y ago
    This answer seems to be a mix of principles and practicals. I'm curious which matter more to you. Hypothetically, in an alternate reality where the vaccine is super effective at reducing transmission of Omicron, and where Omicron is super deadly, would you support a vaccine mandate? Or is it the principle that matters more, where regardless of the vaccine's effectiveness or the dangerousness of the virus, you believe you should be free to decide for yourself whether to get a vaccine, without it impacting your employability?
    • throwawaythekey 5y ago
      I'm not the parent but you have posed a funny question. > in an alternate reality where the vaccine is super effective at reducing transmission of Omicron, and where Omicron is super deadly If either of these were true then mandates would be far less required because people would be far more willing to take them voluntarily. Instinctively though I do want to answer yes, I would support mandates more under higher risk scenarios. In an ideal world though I would probably prefer if communities could self select by risk tolerance i.e it's possible to live/work/party somewhere nearby with like minded people.
      • u801e 5y ago
        >> in an alternate reality where the vaccine is super effective at reducing transmission of Omicron, and where Omicron is super deadly > If either of these were true then mandates would be far less required because people would be far more willing to take them voluntarily. I don't know whether that would necessarily be the case. We have seen how easily people are manipulated via misinformation campaigns.
• buscoquadnary 5y ago
  If you really want to know why I oppose them honest to God? Because whenever the government does something, or is given the ability to do something, whether de jure, or de facto, I ask myself "Would I feel comfortable with my worst political enemy having the power to do this?" EDIT: The answer I was responding to edited his answer before I finished posting, so the original question was just. "Why do you opposse vax mandates?" My answer still stands.
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    I'm personally not sending my kid to any school that doesn't require the standard vaccines: here it is Hepatitis B, DTaP, IPV, MMR and Varicella. It is weird that vaccines mandates didn't gather as much resistance for the last century, but I guess things are just way more political now.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • SamReidHughes 5y ago
      Those vaccines were for diseases that were highly lethal, and also highly lethal to children (well, not varicella), and they had years of research behind their safety. Mass vaccination also effectively stopped transmission. Schools also allowed medical and religious exemptions, with California's recent removal of that option being very controversial.
      • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        The polio vaccine was mandated five years after it was invented, and that was in the early days of the field. Mass vaccination is the only way to stop transmission, of course, you just can’t have some people vaccinated and others not, vaccines don’t work like that. The exemptions have never been very deep (very few takers each year), but if they exceed something like 5%, then an adjustment must be made. Washington state for example, revoked personal and philosophical exemptions for MMR vaccines after an outbreak. Religious exemptions are still allowed, but those have a much higher bar than a philosophical exemption. Medical exemptions are always allowed, they are one major reason why most everyone else needs to get vaccinated in the first place (because people who can’t get the vaccine are at risk from transmission). I guess one could argue that everyone that wants to should get vaccinated to better protect those who don’t want to be vaccinated. That makes sense, but hardly seems fair.
• brandonmenc 5y ago
  None of your examples are "inject this medication to keep your job." Very, very different, and unprecedented for the general public.
  • Filligree 5y ago
    Unprecedented? What? How do you think we eradicated Smallpox?
    • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure we did not eradicate smallpox by firing people for not getting the vaccine...
      • mmastrac 5y ago
        Montreal did in fact have a mandate for the Smallpox vaccine in the past.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • whoisburbansky 5y ago
        It's hilarious you say that, since that's exactly how we eradicated smallpox: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/
    • selcuka 5y ago
      > I'm pretty sure we did not eradicate smallpox by firing people for not getting the vaccine... Yes we did: > In 1901 a deadly smallpox epidemic tore through the Northeast, prompting the Boston and Cambridge boards of health to order the vaccination of all residents. But some refused to get the shot, claiming the vaccine order violated their personal liberties under the Constitution. > One of those holdouts, a Swedish-born pastor named Henning Jacobson, took his anti-vaccine crusade all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation's top justices issued a landmark 1905 ruling that legitimized the authority of states to “reasonably” infringe upon personal freedoms during a public health crisis by issuing a fine to those who refused vaccination.
• 015a 5y ago
  I am not the OP, but hold a similar stance, primarily for the reason that the mandates represent a "the last 20% takes 80% of the time" inefficiency in what should be a global effort to dampen the pandemic, and the massive resources invested in first world countries to claw every last hundredth of a percent of the population to get vaccinated could be invested to see much greater effect in second & third world countries.
  • throwaway48292 5y ago
    (UK) At some point it started to feel like stirring division for its own sake, since everyone will be exposed to the virus regardless of whether we get another 0.1% vaccinated. Luckily it seems to be calming down now.
  • fishidns 5y ago
    True, but the problem, at least in Canada, isn't the spread from/to the remaining 20%, but the strain and cost to the public healthcare system. The spread from them is a small part of it too, but not the primary factor. Canada is kind of in a difficult place, because refusing medical treatment is an even bigger taboo then forcing vaccination. But the publicly funded medical system is having to pay a high price both in cost and in capacity due to that remaining 20%. This is why people are looking for ways to reduce that. Refusing medical care is not currently seen as a viable option, thus vaccine incentives are being explored, like restricting what someone can do if unvaccinated.
    • ROTMetro 5y ago
      Those restrictions being earning a living or shopping.
      • Ensorceled 5y ago
        There are no vaccine mandates for shopping, it's masks only. "Earning a living" is only an issue in certain occupations such as healthcare.
• daenz 5y ago
  >You need clothes This kind of lunacy, where nothing has meaning, since everything is "just like everything else" has got to stop. There's a big difference between the accepted norm of wearing clothing and being forced to inject your body with drugs. Expecting people to explain it to you is a bad faith attempt to let them say enough words so that you can argue semantics endlessly with them.
  • walterbell 5y ago
    Speaking of semantics, CDC definition of "vaccine" was changed in 2021 and WHO definition of "pandemic" was changed in the late 2000s.
• rkk3 5y ago
  Because at this point it's not a particularly effective solution & is just political theater. It's also not just needing a vaccine you also need a non expired government-ID and a smart-phone to partake in society. And in 20 years these things will still be around, just like TSA and the Patriot act.
• karmakaze 5y ago
  They shouldn't be necessary if enough of the relevant population is vaccinated and given the risk profiles of current variants. Or if they are necessary, show me the data that supports it. Reaching for a mandate 'just because', is poor government.
  • oceanplexian 5y ago
    > Reaching for a mandate 'just because', is poor government. This is exactly what happened with the TSA. If people don’t stand up against mandates, like people failed to do after the War on Terror, we’ll still be wearing masks at airports and proving our vaccine status decades from now.
• oceanplexian 5y ago
  Pretty simple to answer this. Passports work. Car safety regulations work. Seatbelts protect you. COVID vaccines, however, are not effective at preventing the transmission of COVID, this is well established science at this point. So, that said, why the mandate?
  • Tiktaalik 5y ago
    The vaccine mandates prevent unvaccinated people from accessing areas of higher risk transmission. Unvaccinated people (particularly the elderly) are more likely to end up dead or with a serious hospital visit if they catch the disease. At the moment hospitals are overwhelmed and so at this point the vaccine mandates are about keeping hospital admissions from exploding.
• postingawayonhn 5y ago
  I'm vaccinated but I have no particular interest in forcing anyone else to be. And at this stage I'm not convinced that having a small percentage of the population unvaccinated will have a noticeable impact on transmission (or even that we should be worrying about transmission anymore).