The number of comments here that fall back on some sort of a slippery slope argument, based in a worry about government overreach, is really disheartening. If COVID has proven anything in the US, it's how little control the federal government actually has. They've barely been able to enforce mask mandates.
The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water here. I think we can look at the facts - 700,000 people dead, hospitals overwhelmed, countless people injured or disabled from COVID, and no end in sight - and decide that a strong mandate makes sense here, and that a mandate won't make sense in future cases.
The "government is always bad, personal choice should always win" mindset runs deep in this country unfortunately, and from what I can see, it's often based in nothing other than veiled conservatism and a preference for division and anti-cooperativeness.
Above all else, this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.
> The number of comments here that fall back on some sort of a slippery slope argument, based in a worry about government overreach, is really disheartening. If COVID has proven anything in the US, it's how little control the federal government actually has. They've barely been able to enforce mask mandates.
This is by design. We don't want a strong federal government.
> The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water here. I think we can look at the facts - 700,000 people dead, hospitals overwhelmed, countless people injured or disabled from COVID, and no end in sight - and decide that a strong mandate makes sense here, and that a mandate won't make sense in future cases.
here's some more facts that change the landscape significantly. 5% of COVID deaths were without co-morbidities. On average, a person who died of COVID had 4.0 co-morbidities. (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Co...)
The vast majority of those dying are 65+.
We don't have a COVID problem, we have a health problem. Has the government been encouraging people to take vitamin D, get fresh air, exercise, and get to a healthy weight? The rhetoric has been sit down and get the jab.
> The "government is always bad, personal choice should always win" mindset runs deep in this country unfortunately, and from what I can see, it's often based in nothing other than veiled conservatism and a preference for division and anti-cooperativeness.
The government polices are extreme overreactions by any measure of the data, and government doesn't give power back once it has it.
> Above all else, this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.
I can almost agree here, except the pro-choice people seem to overlap heavily with the pro-mandate people. I don't think you can logically hold both of those positions
> We don't have a COVID problem, we have a health problem. Has the government been encouraging people to take vitamin D, get fresh air, exercise, and get to a healthy weight? The rhetoric has been sit down and get the jab.
I'm disabled and it's not my fault. I'm a healthy weight, I have a vegetarian diet high in vegetables, I do my rehab exercises every day and see the doctor frequently. And yet my condition is progressing, because that's the nature of it.
>Has the government been encouraging people to take vitamin D, get fresh air, exercise, and get to a healthy weight?
The government has been advocating for exercise and general health for decades. Despite this, we remain one of the least fit countries in the world. If the government cannot convince someone to take a safe, free shot that might save their lives, how can you reasonably expect them to convince someone to exercise?
>
> the pro-choice people seem to overlap heavily with the pro-mandate people. I don't think you can logically hold both of those positions
Well, not from the "governments are either allowed or not allowed to tell people to do things" angle.
From the "what do medical experts suggest we do to minimize unnecessary death and suffering" point of view it's possible to be consistently on the same side though.
I believe you are misinterpreting that data. 5% of COVID deaths listed COVID as the only cause. The other 95% list additional causes. In some cases, those are pre-existing conditions like "hypertensive diseases" or "diabetes", but not all of them are. Some of the most common causes are things like "influenza and pneumonia", "respiratory failure" and "cardiac arrest".
Pneumonia, respiratory failure and cardiac arrest are symptoms of COVID. They aren't pre-existing conditions that make COVID worse. They are just more specific explanations about the exact mechanism by which COVID killed the person.
> except the pro-choice people seem to overlap heavily with the pro-mandate people. I don't think you can logically hold both of those positions
It’s about how your personal choices impact other people. To be deliberately shocking to help show why these are different:
You can’t cough on me and give me an abortion. I can’t choose to have an abortion and that creates a super spreader event that gives everyone around me an abortion.
You can choose not to get vaccinated, be an asymptomatic spreader, and pass Covid on to other people. Your choice of taking the vaccine or not taking the vaccine can impact lots of people, and even hasten their death.
Societies have various laws that prohibit certain choices you make that can have a negative impact on others. For example see drunk driving, or someones choice to use speech to inflame a riot. Where those lines are drawn, or should be drawn, can certainly be up for debate. Reasonable people can disgree
There seems to be consensus that the delta wave won't end until the US reaches at least 85% herd immunity (either through vaccination or infection). It's clear from polling that there is a large enough minority of American adults who won't take the vaccine voluntarily (under any circumstances) to achieve this level of immunity, so that leaves infection. Letting covid 'rip' through the remaining unvaccinated population will bring tens or hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths, even with wide availability of current therapeutics.
If you want the pandemic, masking, lockdowns etc to end for good, it seems a vaccine mandate is the only way forward (absent some as-yet-to-be-invented technology). What am I missing here? Is there some other way to 'convince' anti-vaxxers to take it? Is 100k+ Americans dead an 'acceptable loss' to maintain some perception of 'medical freedom?'
> Letting covid 'rip' through the remaining unvaccinated population
Aren't unvaccinated individuals the ones who made this decision? You may disagree with the conclusion of their dubious risk analyses, but if you choose not to get vaccinated then all bets are off.
Or is it that the risk that the unvaccinated pose to the vaccinated are so high that they warrant strong arm solutions?
I'm curious - of the folks that have not gotten vaccinated, do we have an idea of how many haven't gotten it because they strongly do not want to get it, and how many haven't gotten it for other less strong reasons (inability to get time off work, mixed signals from social media, etc)?
> Letting covid 'rip' through the remaining unvaccinated population will bring tens or hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths, even with wide availability of current therapeutics.
The more cases, the more the variants. Getting everyone infected might bring about herd immunity to one strain, and create a dozen more.
> this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.
Arguments around hypocrisy cut both ways! Consider how weak pro-choice arguments sound right now to people who don't want to be forced to take a vaccine. I'm assuming we will never ever hear "My body, my choice" as a pro-choice argument ever again, it would be absurd at this point.
Also, I wonder how much of this is a left vs right political debate. Most of the conservatives I personally know are vaccinated. It's possible that there are silent dissenters among the progressives that can't really speak up because they will be ostracized.
There is no legal penalty for refusing the vaccine. You still have the choice to undergo testing instead. Mandating either testing or vaccination is a perfectly reasonable workplace safety requirement during a pandemic. No one's bodily autonomy is being violated by this rule.
> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
Side effects from vaccines are rare, but do occasionally happen. Because of the small risk, there’s a government program to pay money to anybody who suffers a serious side effect from taking a vaccine in exchange for granting legal immunity to vaccine producers ( https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html ). So, to answer your question, schools don’t literally require legal immunity themselves, but they do benefit from legal immunity that that the government gives vaccine manufacturers: there’s no need to sue a school for requiring vaccines when there’s a special program to pay out benefits.
Last I knew, COVID-19 vaccines weren’t covered, but apparently I missed some news, since it’s the first thing listed on https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp .
The MMR vaccine required by school is sterilizing, once and done. Intramuscular Covid vaccines provide blood/serum antibodies that can reduce the risk of severe disease or death, but they are non-sterilizing. They never promised to prevent infection and the CDC has updated their definitions to make that clear.
Why would employers need legal immunity? Their lawyers may want to look closely at the legal immunity protections of the PREP act, which extend to healthcare professionals who recommend "countermeasures".
Unless you mean a very literal "at our expense" as in dollars paid for a highly effective vaccine, are you implying that the vaccine has been a net negative?
It always surprises me when conservatives use the economic argument wrt vaccine deployment because doing so means they assume an intrinsic value of $0 on human lives.
> Is the federal government going to provide employers with the same legal immunity granted to pharmaceutical vendors via the PREP act
They already did for COVID countermeasures in general. In the first declaration that did that for pharmaceutical companies, public entities managing countermeasure planning and distribution, and others in March of last year.
mRNA vaccines do not directly stimulate the immune system. They cause the immune system itself to create protein structures that stimulate the immune system.
The definition change is simply to more accurately include this vaccine method.
My concern is why OSHA has not issued emergency mandatory ventilation and air circulation orders, since that's actually within their wheelhouse vs this extension into medical demands which until now had been limited strongly to vague recommendations and couched in informed consent language (e.g. Hepatitis awareness)
Because that requires tremendous capital and labor costs, overhauling HVAC in every private and public building would take years, there aren’t enough electricians and tinners/pipefitters. HVAC equipment is also very expensive and most public institutions have already budgeted for capital costs. Who will pay for it all?
Most of the Patriot act was to expire after 4 years. It was renewed by Congress multiple times. Parts of it were renewed in separate bills after it eventually expired.
Although, just like Afghanistan, there's no clear end to COVID afaik ... although I disagree with the implication that there's some great benefit the government / other interests are getting out of this ETS, of the same scale that the military-industrial complex/the executive branch got out of the PATRIOT act/Afghanistan.
> there's some great benefit the government / other interests are getting out of this ETS
Pharma is gonna be making some good money out of COVID, no? The amount of tests that have been produced, plus the amount of vaccines being used are certainly not free.
> of the same scale that the military-industrial complex/the executive branch got out of the PATRIOT act/Afghanistan.
Given that covid and the subsequent reaction realized one of the largest wealth transfers from poor to rich in modern history and led to great market returns for those in power, how can you honestly say this?
Look.. like most people on hacker news I am in the top 1% of earners and due to my industry benefitted greatly from covid lockdowns. But just because we benefited, we cannot be blind to the mass robbery that has taken place. We've literally robbed the poor to pay the wealthy.
There is going to be a massive enforcement bureaucracy set up. Unwinding that will be nontrivial. Once people's budgets and fiefdoms at work depend on it, they will fight to keep or grow their power. This will be around in some form for a very long time.
Due to a president that the media declared absolute war against. If Biden or Clinton were in office, they'd have renewed it quietly.
Just because they can't sneak it back in now doesn't mean they don't want to. The new administration has already made bogeyman out of 'domestic terrorism' that it's own fbi cannot find evidence for.
There's a bit in Ron Paul's "Revolution" where he points out that gov programs get added and grow but few are reduced or ended. His politics aside (i..e., regardless of party, he does have plenty of first hand experience), there's plenty of evidence to support this.
Oddly enough, a couple of weeks ago at the local thrift store I picked up "The Secret History of the American Empire" by John Perkins. Even if only half of it is accurate, there's also plenty of reason to believe there are less than noble forces at work given the current changes and the opportunities they create.
Our largest healthcare provider has already mandated vaccines for their staff and insurance companies are now following suit because they got hammered with life insurance payouts for 2020 and first half of 2021.
Waiting for retailers to announce this as well at some point.
Maybe slightly off topic, but it’s always been odd to me how life insurance tests with vigor for tobacco use but lack that enthusiasm for metabolic health / diet.
It depends on the amount of life insurance you get. Mine is of an amount that blood work was required and it definitely affects the rate. One of the things I learned is I have a "fatty liver" - which is indicative of poor metabolic health. I started taking care of that, brought the levels down to normal, and my rate was lowered.
They certainly test for basic health, or did with me. I had to give blood and urine, and a nurse came to check other vitals. They also get your basic measurements which gives them BMI. They can then categorize you into "preferred" or other groups.
To get my life insurance 5ish years ago, I had to have a blood test that included tobacco, drug use and cholesterol. My understanding is that is pretty common.
One you qualify though, I don't think they can re-test you.
You often do get tested and rated based on health factors. Maybe not exact diet, but they can surely infer some of that from blood/urine/size/weight/etc. It depends on the insurance company but more likely the size of the policy. I think a lot of $20-$100k policies don't require any tests - they may also be more expensive. I got a decent term 15 years ago, and I had to have an in-home exam from a nurse.
>>insurance companies are now following suit because they got hammered with life insurance payouts for 2020 and first half of 2021.
Do you have a source for this comment? One thing is certain, more people are purchasing life insurance so if anything Covid has been a windfall for the carriers, for various reasons not just increased sales.
> Our largest healthcare provider has already mandated vaccines for their staff
Seems reasonable to expect people working with many sick and vulnerable patients in a healthcare setting to be vaccinated. That’s one of the highest risk scenarios I can think of for exposure and transmission as well as the most likely place to concentrate vulnerable patients.
Temporarily. I am assuming you had your second shot more than two weeks ago. Soon, the definition of "fully vaccinated" will change to require the third shot and you will be counted among the unvaccinated as it is currently done for people with a single shot or less than two weeks past their second shot when it comes to death/hospitalization stats.
Yeah, there are so many layers to this. I mean, a mandate for employers oversteps what government is allowed to do anyway. But that aside, if it was polio or something and there was one shot that basically ended it, you could see a rational path to a single mandate that got everyone vaccinated (btw I'd be curious to know polio, measles, etc vaccine rates, I think they are very high). But when "vaccinated" is essentially some political flavor of the week, how is it going to get enforced? Will a third shot get rolled in? And if there are more, or if we switch from mrna to another variety, do they get rolled in too? Will you need to have the original 2021 shots, even once they've been subsumed into something else, or can you just get the latest thing.
For all the pretend deference to science, we're in the middle of a rapidly unfolding situation. It seems preposterous, even with clear evidence that the vaccines do work (and ignoring government overreach which is itself absurd and illegal imo) to start mandating something that is not likely to hold 6 months from now, and what, just require that everyone tracks whatever current orthodoxy says? I have my two pfizer shots, and if there is a vaccine later that actually cures covid, maybe I'll go back and get it. But I'm giving up on trying to track the flavor of the week and trying to match whatever the new York times wants me to do, I'll wait until there is actually a reasonable consensus
I agree and support this. People want to conflate the issues of not believing in vaccines (or whatever words they like to put in peoples mouths) and believing in having to provide proof of a personal health situation all over the place. It's convenient to pretend that anyone who is against government and corporate overreach is an "anti-vaxxer" instead of actually engage with the issue.
They're getting conflated because the people who are against vaccines are referencing freedom to choose as their primary argument, as if the ability to make bad decisions implies some duty to make bad decisions.
I'm against vaccine mandates in principle, but the ultimate cause of the authoritarianism is mass media. Covid has been a fantastic setup for dog and pony shows - political hucksters rail all day about government overreach while inciting their followers to make bad choices. The large scale effects of those bad choices practically demand government intervention. And after the utilitarian system steps in to mitigate the problem, the hucksters take credit for being right about government overreach all along. It's the perfect con for the post-reality media environment - when reality asserts itself and some low level preacher dies of their own kool aid, they just go silent and are replaced by another ignorant voice on the same channel.
If we had a level of societal trust such that you could expect that most everyone would be taking measures to prevent spreading Covid, then coming together in large groups (eg employment) would be less of an issue. But as it stands, why would anybody want to go back into the office when it's likely that at least a third of your coworkers will blithely get you sick? And hence OSHA et al step in, using the same rationale as when preventing operating heavy equipment while drunk - it creates an unsafe work environment.
I would be with you if it weren’t for the “or test” part. “You must get vaccinated” would be problematic, but “you must do a COVID test once a week if you’re not vaccinated” is totally reasonable IMO.
Created this throwaway to say that there are at least some others who agree but are too scared of the current cultural tone to speak openly about this. I feel thoroughly alienated from my peer-group and family over their fervor for this response and against any who disagree.
Trucking, food production, Oil & Gas, powerplant workers, linemen, water treatment, etc.
In those essential industries, a small percentage of people walking out may wreck havoc on the whole nation. Those are also the same people that I expect are more anti covid vaccine.
Inevitable outcome in a society that is terrified of everything. And to think that our ancestors sailed across the oceans into the unknown and faced diseases, war, famine, and worse. Now we are instituting a surveillance state in the name of a fairly bad flu virus with a 99% survival rate.
We really need a new frontier. Hopefully space travel happens before human beings become completely domesticated.
I never understand this whole "99% survival rate" being presented as if that's low. I don't know about you, but if I'm around something that has a 1 in 100 chance of killing me, I'm going to do everything I can to not let it, because those are NOT low odds.
It also conveniently ignores the known and unknown long-haul effects from Covid, which impacts a significant percentage (20%?). I, for one, like staying in relatively good health.
I'll take a stab at that survival number, which is inaccurate information. Your risk is way less than 1 in 100.
First off, the baseline survival rate is much better than 99%, between 99.8% and 99.9%. That's already an order of magnitude lower, closer to 1/1000 than 1/100. 1% lethality was a bad estimate from early on, before we realized we were undercounting mild cases by a huge multiple.
Second, lethality is highly correlated to comorbidities, including obesity and vitamin D deficiency. 94% of Covid deaths had another condition. If you don't, then your own risk reduces by another factor of 15.
Third, lethality is highly stratified by age. Under age 50 incurs at least 10x fewer deaths than higher age brackets.
Fourth, the vaccines. That also reduces risk by a factor somewhere in the ballpark of 10x again.
Fifth, Delta variant is also less lethal, as seen by the low death rates in India and the UK, although we don't seem to have reliable numbers on that yet.
So if you are young, healthy, not overweight, and vaccinated, multiply all that out and your risk factor really comes to less than one in a million. You take bigger risks every time you drive in your car. You're losing more life-value worrying about Covid than you actually stand to lose from it.
That all said, there is the point to be worried about Covid not for yourself, but for the possibility of spreading it. That's a valid point, but that is a question of politics, of individualism versus collectivism, not of science and statistics.
> “…but if I'm around something that has a 1 in 100 chance of killing me, I'm going to do everything I can to not let it, because those are NOT low odds.”
then you should avoid any and all cars as you have a 1 in 100 lifetime chance of dying in a car accident. or birth, as babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth.
covid suffers severely from availability and recency bias because our lives are so exceedingly safe already. it’s hard to die on accident, even via covid.
Like I said, your ancestors had 99% more courage and confidence in the face of danger you can’t even begin to imagine. But, we are a terrified people and so we continue to build a safety space cocoon around ourselves.
> Inevitable outcome in a society that is terrified of everything.
I agree. Lots of folks afraid to take a shot that's been well-studied and given to millions and is, in all probability, quite safe. ;)
I chalk it up to the youth, who are selfish and only able to think about themselves and their Friendster ranks and how many YouTubes they have on the FaceSpace.
No, it isn’t comparable, because those diseases wiped out 3/4 of the population. That obviously isn’t the case with COVID, even if our terrified-of-everything populace thinks it is.
The average lifespan for the period you are describing (say, 1492-ish since we're talking about sailing) was their mid-thirties (and probably lower for the people that actually got on those boats). So I think I like our strategy better. And it's not even about "but at least they truly lived!", their lives were miserable. It's a lot easier to "face the unknown" when the "known" is itself often religious persecution, famine, or worse. I might have gotten on those boats too if where I currently was kept switching between Protestantism and Catholicism depending on who rose to the crown.
Consider that perhaps the best way to honor those "fearless" risks is to not waste the world they made possible for us by unnecessarily cutting our own lives short. I certainly hope my descendants have even longer lives than I do! But perhaps that's just my selfish genes talking.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to be afraid of a virus that has killed 700,000 people in the United States and leaves ~30% with long term side effects and sometimes serious, permanent disability.
Yeah, so many people see boogeymen around every corner, living in fear of deep conspiracies like chemtrails and nanobots and others. It’s amazing how much they’ve let fear overtake their brains.
The ICUs are filling up and people who just need a kidney transplant are dying. That is with just a small fraction of the population actually getting infected. The hospitalizations are also resource intensive and require an ICU bed for 2 or 3 weeks. This isn't just a "bad flu virus". Once around ~10,000 people get infected in a week that's enough to knock over a metropolitan hospital system sending hundreds of people into the hospital.
Our new frontier is trying not to overload our medical system to capacity by trusting science and being proactive and not selfish. We’re failing miserably.
The terrified of everything portion of you comment still applies if we change "fairly bad flu virus with a 99% survival rate" to "extremely safe vaccine with 0.007 risk of adverse effects".
Prior to mandating anything, the US government should step up and ensure that every household has a free weekly delivery of rapid at-home tests. There is no reason for us to be individually flying blind whenever we get a sniffle or headache or other minor symptom.
Additionally, there is evidence that a prior covid infection grants stronger immunity than at least the J&J vaccine, and 40%+ percent of the US population has had COVID. Unless an exemption is made for that 40%, this is unscientific.
Just had a conversation about the J&J vaccine with someone who works at that company in another area and their throwaway comment was, "well, it's not really for our market because the single dose was aimed at non-western countries with weaker governments where the governments couldn't really get after people to do multiple doses."
I agree, easy, free access to rapid tests would be fantastic. They're pretty prone to false results, though, and are no substitute for vaccination.
As for giving exemptions for prior infection, there's no real reason to. Prior infection gives decent immunity, but a vaccination on top of it gives great immunity. It's a small net positive, but anything helps.
Aren't both of these titles editorialised and against guidelines?
The original title of the page is: "Path out of the Pandemic, President Biden's COVID-19 Action Plan", shouldn't that, or a derivative have been used instead?
The subtleties of the title domain are a hell of a rabbit hole, but in the case of the current page, I'd argue that the original title would be misleading at the top of an HN thread. Corporate press releases are often that way- see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Readit News
The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water here. I think we can look at the facts - 700,000 people dead, hospitals overwhelmed, countless people injured or disabled from COVID, and no end in sight - and decide that a strong mandate makes sense here, and that a mandate won't make sense in future cases.
The "government is always bad, personal choice should always win" mindset runs deep in this country unfortunately, and from what I can see, it's often based in nothing other than veiled conservatism and a preference for division and anti-cooperativeness.
Above all else, this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.
This is by design. We don't want a strong federal government.
> The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water here. I think we can look at the facts - 700,000 people dead, hospitals overwhelmed, countless people injured or disabled from COVID, and no end in sight - and decide that a strong mandate makes sense here, and that a mandate won't make sense in future cases.
here's some more facts that change the landscape significantly. 5% of COVID deaths were without co-morbidities. On average, a person who died of COVID had 4.0 co-morbidities. (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Co...) The vast majority of those dying are 65+. We don't have a COVID problem, we have a health problem. Has the government been encouraging people to take vitamin D, get fresh air, exercise, and get to a healthy weight? The rhetoric has been sit down and get the jab.
> The "government is always bad, personal choice should always win" mindset runs deep in this country unfortunately, and from what I can see, it's often based in nothing other than veiled conservatism and a preference for division and anti-cooperativeness.
The government polices are extreme overreactions by any measure of the data, and government doesn't give power back once it has it.
> Above all else, this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.
I can almost agree here, except the pro-choice people seem to overlap heavily with the pro-mandate people. I don't think you can logically hold both of those positions
I'm disabled and it's not my fault. I'm a healthy weight, I have a vegetarian diet high in vegetables, I do my rehab exercises every day and see the doctor frequently. And yet my condition is progressing, because that's the nature of it.
My comorbidities aren't a moral failing.
The government has been advocating for exercise and general health for decades. Despite this, we remain one of the least fit countries in the world. If the government cannot convince someone to take a safe, free shot that might save their lives, how can you reasonably expect them to convince someone to exercise?
Well, not from the "governments are either allowed or not allowed to tell people to do things" angle.
From the "what do medical experts suggest we do to minimize unnecessary death and suffering" point of view it's possible to be consistently on the same side though.
Pneumonia, respiratory failure and cardiac arrest are symptoms of COVID. They aren't pre-existing conditions that make COVID worse. They are just more specific explanations about the exact mechanism by which COVID killed the person.
At any given time, someone the population is weak in some way.
Had there not been covid, most of those people would be alive.
Cause of death is covid. That covid killed them more easily is a different matter.
Today, those same people can get a vaccine and are extremely likely to avoid the hospital and death.
I am consistently shocked at just how willing so many of us are to blame others. And that is all.
Dead Comment
It’s about how your personal choices impact other people. To be deliberately shocking to help show why these are different:
You can’t cough on me and give me an abortion. I can’t choose to have an abortion and that creates a super spreader event that gives everyone around me an abortion.
You can choose not to get vaccinated, be an asymptomatic spreader, and pass Covid on to other people. Your choice of taking the vaccine or not taking the vaccine can impact lots of people, and even hasten their death.
Societies have various laws that prohibit certain choices you make that can have a negative impact on others. For example see drunk driving, or someones choice to use speech to inflame a riot. Where those lines are drawn, or should be drawn, can certainly be up for debate. Reasonable people can disgree
If you want the pandemic, masking, lockdowns etc to end for good, it seems a vaccine mandate is the only way forward (absent some as-yet-to-be-invented technology). What am I missing here? Is there some other way to 'convince' anti-vaxxers to take it? Is 100k+ Americans dead an 'acceptable loss' to maintain some perception of 'medical freedom?'
Aren't unvaccinated individuals the ones who made this decision? You may disagree with the conclusion of their dubious risk analyses, but if you choose not to get vaccinated then all bets are off.
Or is it that the risk that the unvaccinated pose to the vaccinated are so high that they warrant strong arm solutions?
The more cases, the more the variants. Getting everyone infected might bring about herd immunity to one strain, and create a dozen more.
"Think of the Children!" type arguments aside.
Arguments around hypocrisy cut both ways! Consider how weak pro-choice arguments sound right now to people who don't want to be forced to take a vaccine. I'm assuming we will never ever hear "My body, my choice" as a pro-choice argument ever again, it would be absurd at this point.
Also, I wonder how much of this is a left vs right political debate. Most of the conservatives I personally know are vaccinated. It's possible that there are silent dissenters among the progressives that can't really speak up because they will be ostracized.
Does this mandate incorporate the Sept 2021 CDC definition of vaccine, https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article25...
> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
Last I knew, COVID-19 vaccines weren’t covered, but apparently I missed some news, since it’s the first thing listed on https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp .
Why would employers need legal immunity? Their lawyers may want to look closely at the legal immunity protections of the PREP act, which extend to healthcare professionals who recommend "countermeasures".
Penny wise, pound foolish.
They already did for COVID countermeasures in general. In the first declaration that did that for pharmaceutical companies, public entities managing countermeasure planning and distribution, and others in March of last year.
The definition change is simply to more accurately include this vaccine method.
Well, I guess one should never let a good crisis go to waste...
Low hanging fruit.
One is easy to order, cheap to implement, and cheap to verify, the other would be expensive to implement and even more expensive to verify.
For the COVID ETS from this June, OSHA has been coordinating with the CDC monthly to determine if it is still necessary. See https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/ets#:~:text=to%20assess%20t...
Although, just like Afghanistan, there's no clear end to COVID afaik ... although I disagree with the implication that there's some great benefit the government / other interests are getting out of this ETS, of the same scale that the military-industrial complex/the executive branch got out of the PATRIOT act/Afghanistan.
Pharma is gonna be making some good money out of COVID, no? The amount of tests that have been produced, plus the amount of vaccines being used are certainly not free.
Given that covid and the subsequent reaction realized one of the largest wealth transfers from poor to rich in modern history and led to great market returns for those in power, how can you honestly say this?
Look.. like most people on hacker news I am in the top 1% of earners and due to my industry benefitted greatly from covid lockdowns. But just because we benefited, we cannot be blind to the mass robbery that has taken place. We've literally robbed the poor to pay the wealthy.
Not sure if you're aware, but it expired in 2020
To call 20 years 'temporary' is a big stretch.
Just because they can't sneak it back in now doesn't mean they don't want to. The new administration has already made bogeyman out of 'domestic terrorism' that it's own fbi cannot find evidence for.
So it'll only be around for 20 years?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution:_A_Manifesto
Oddly enough, a couple of weeks ago at the local thrift store I picked up "The Secret History of the American Empire" by John Perkins. Even if only half of it is accurate, there's also plenty of reason to believe there are less than noble forces at work given the current changes and the opportunities they create.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-secret-history-of-the-amer...
Waiting for retailers to announce this as well at some point.
One you qualify though, I don't think they can re-test you.
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Edit: oh life insurance, thanks.
The effects of smoking OTOH are extremely clear.
Do you have a source for this comment? One thing is certain, more people are purchasing life insurance so if anything Covid has been a windfall for the carriers, for various reasons not just increased sales.
Life insurance companies - maybe?
But for most demographics, statistics that would concern an actuary have not changed.
So life insurance companies are requiring COVID vaccines? Or health insurance companies, or both?
Seems reasonable to expect people working with many sick and vulnerable patients in a healthcare setting to be vaccinated. That’s one of the highest risk scenarios I can think of for exposure and transmission as well as the most likely place to concentrate vulnerable patients.
Temporarily. I am assuming you had your second shot more than two weeks ago. Soon, the definition of "fully vaccinated" will change to require the third shot and you will be counted among the unvaccinated as it is currently done for people with a single shot or less than two weeks past their second shot when it comes to death/hospitalization stats.
We are close to living in Arcadia[1].
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4377942/
For all the pretend deference to science, we're in the middle of a rapidly unfolding situation. It seems preposterous, even with clear evidence that the vaccines do work (and ignoring government overreach which is itself absurd and illegal imo) to start mandating something that is not likely to hold 6 months from now, and what, just require that everyone tracks whatever current orthodoxy says? I have my two pfizer shots, and if there is a vaccine later that actually cures covid, maybe I'll go back and get it. But I'm giving up on trying to track the flavor of the week and trying to match whatever the new York times wants me to do, I'll wait until there is actually a reasonable consensus
Camp 1: Pro vaccine, pro mask, pro lockdown, pro doing anything and everything the government says.
Camp 2: Anti vaxx, anti mask, anti lockdown, trump supporter, Jan 7th attendee, etc.
And it seems that now more than ever, if you're not 10000% in Camp 1, you're automatically assumed to be in Camp 2
I'm against vaccine mandates in principle, but the ultimate cause of the authoritarianism is mass media. Covid has been a fantastic setup for dog and pony shows - political hucksters rail all day about government overreach while inciting their followers to make bad choices. The large scale effects of those bad choices practically demand government intervention. And after the utilitarian system steps in to mitigate the problem, the hucksters take credit for being right about government overreach all along. It's the perfect con for the post-reality media environment - when reality asserts itself and some low level preacher dies of their own kool aid, they just go silent and are replaced by another ignorant voice on the same channel.
If we had a level of societal trust such that you could expect that most everyone would be taking measures to prevent spreading Covid, then coming together in large groups (eg employment) would be less of an issue. But as it stands, why would anybody want to go back into the office when it's likely that at least a third of your coworkers will blithely get you sick? And hence OSHA et al step in, using the same rationale as when preventing operating heavy equipment while drunk - it creates an unsafe work environment.
Trucking, food production, Oil & Gas, powerplant workers, linemen, water treatment, etc.
In those essential industries, a small percentage of people walking out may wreck havoc on the whole nation. Those are also the same people that I expect are more anti covid vaccine.
We really need a new frontier. Hopefully space travel happens before human beings become completely domesticated.
It also conveniently ignores the known and unknown long-haul effects from Covid, which impacts a significant percentage (20%?). I, for one, like staying in relatively good health.
First off, the baseline survival rate is much better than 99%, between 99.8% and 99.9%. That's already an order of magnitude lower, closer to 1/1000 than 1/100. 1% lethality was a bad estimate from early on, before we realized we were undercounting mild cases by a huge multiple.
Second, lethality is highly correlated to comorbidities, including obesity and vitamin D deficiency. 94% of Covid deaths had another condition. If you don't, then your own risk reduces by another factor of 15.
Third, lethality is highly stratified by age. Under age 50 incurs at least 10x fewer deaths than higher age brackets.
Fourth, the vaccines. That also reduces risk by a factor somewhere in the ballpark of 10x again.
Fifth, Delta variant is also less lethal, as seen by the low death rates in India and the UK, although we don't seem to have reliable numbers on that yet.
So if you are young, healthy, not overweight, and vaccinated, multiply all that out and your risk factor really comes to less than one in a million. You take bigger risks every time you drive in your car. You're losing more life-value worrying about Covid than you actually stand to lose from it.
That all said, there is the point to be worried about Covid not for yourself, but for the possibility of spreading it. That's a valid point, but that is a question of politics, of individualism versus collectivism, not of science and statistics.
And until yesterday, that was entirely your choice! Unfortunately, as of today, it isn't any more.
Plus then COMPARE that to other probabilities of death such as car accidents, medical mistakes, etc. which are FAR HIGHER.
then you should avoid any and all cars as you have a 1 in 100 lifetime chance of dying in a car accident. or birth, as babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth.
covid suffers severely from availability and recency bias because our lives are so exceedingly safe already. it’s hard to die on accident, even via covid.
I agree. Lots of folks afraid to take a shot that's been well-studied and given to millions and is, in all probability, quite safe. ;)
I chalk it up to the youth, who are selfish and only able to think about themselves and their Friendster ranks and how many YouTubes they have on the FaceSpace.
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Some of our ancestors were almost completely wiped out from novel disease brought by those that crossed the oceans. They were probably also terrified.
Consider that perhaps the best way to honor those "fearless" risks is to not waste the world they made possible for us by unnecessarily cutting our own lives short. I certainly hope my descendants have even longer lives than I do! But perhaps that's just my selfish genes talking.
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Additionally, there is evidence that a prior covid infection grants stronger immunity than at least the J&J vaccine, and 40%+ percent of the US population has had COVID. Unless an exemption is made for that 40%, this is unscientific.
It would have been chilling a year ago, now? Meh.
As for giving exemptions for prior infection, there's no real reason to. Prior infection gives decent immunity, but a vaccination on top of it gives great immunity. It's a small net positive, but anything helps.
Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472856 - Sept 2021 (262 comments)
The titles are emphasizing two different things, but it's the same announcement.
The original title of the page is: "Path out of the Pandemic, President Biden's COVID-19 Action Plan", shouldn't that, or a derivative have been used instead?