NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay(iapps.courts.state.ny.us) |
NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay(iapps.courts.state.ny.us) |
Petitioners sued, saying that the mandate with the exemptions was essentially arbitrary, and the courts agreed. So what happened here is that Eric Adams sabotaged NYC's vaccine mandate.
The whole thing was a farce anyway so it doesn't matter.
And I imagine someone could also make a pretty good argument in the other direction. A firefighter is probably going to be wearing a mask. Performers by their nature are yelling into a crowded indoor space.
https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/153-22/transcr...
> Mayor Eric Adams plans to announce on Thursday that professional athletes and performers working in New York City will no longer be required to show proof of vaccination against Covid-19, according to a person familiar with his plans.
> This means that Kyrie Irving, the Nets’ star point guard who has refused to get vaccinated, will be able to take the floor at Barclays Center in Brooklyn for the first time this season.
Adams is awful. NYC mayors exist to further the interests of property developers, corporations and the police unions. If that means that a public health measure needs to be sabotaged so some anti-vaxxer can play for the Nets, so be it.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/sports/kyrie-irving-nyc-v...
For example: if you sold an ATV to a town police department, you were deemed an essential business and thus got to ignore the closure orders and keep your entire business, both offices and showrooms/repair centers, open.
...but then his administration also went around shutting down bicycle shops in the city. Guess what a lot of medical staff and "essential" blue-collar workers depend upon for transportation, particularly since the public transit system was largely shut down, dangerous to be on public-health-wise, and doesn't operate at hours useful for some shift workers?
Eventually he got the message, but not after a lot of very cringe comments to the press about the pandemic being "real" and implying that bike shops were just frivolous luxury stores.
The poor blue collar working man has a truck for every family member, and a heavy duty truck for the old man.
It's like saying "On-call developer fixes problem caused by program written in Java" – correct, but doesn't point out, for example, that it was caused due to a commit pushed to production on Friday evening after overriding the failing CI tests.
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[1] Which, as they say, is the worst kind.
The state of New York famously responded to the outcome of NYSRPA v. Bruen, which overturned the defacto ban on concealed carry, by declaring nearly all public spaces "sensitive areas" in which licensed individuals may not carry for their protection. Regardless of one's opinion of said rights, how do courts blatantly ignore rulings and orders from higher courts with no repercussions?
How do courts declare certain executive orders unconstitutional, and yet the perpetrators, who took an oath to uphold and defend said rights and values, face no consequences?
This forum was not exempt from that hate.
I hope this court opinion is enough to sway the opinion of those who held such extreme beliefs in this vaccine mandate that there are different opinions, and it doesnt have to be so extreme when deciding how to move forward with things that affect peoples livelihoods. Sometimes you do what is best for you and I do what is best for me is a perfectly logical and sane reasoning.
Da fuq?
People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels.
People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all.
Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Supreme_Court
So this will likely be challenged
Also note: the NY Supreme Court is actually the lowest court level in NY. Articles like this are being misleading on purpose.
The court decided the executive branch didn't have the right to fire the workers. Because of that, the workers lost their jobs, insurance, and pay.
How else would you suggest the court make them whole again?
Maybe your complaint should be with the State of New York for having such a misleading name for their lowest-level trial court, and not the OP for literally referring to it by its name ;-)
Even if you don't state the reason (which they did), it would be illegal to fire all black people from a company, because it's trivial to prove for a large enough company.
"at will" doesn't supercede civil rights act and other laws.
It would hopefully make the judiciary overall less partisan, less of a high-stakes affair to nominate an appeals judge, and less swinging back and forth between 5-4 Democratic or Republican votes
If you don’t like what judges decide, get people elected who will write things clearly into law. If they can’t do that, it sucks, go fix the political situation and stop trying to fix that dysfunction by making major systematic changes.
(and googling it just now to give you details, I arrived at Ballotpedia which said Maryland and New York are the only two states that don't call their top court "supreme". Maryland for not much longer probably, as ammendments on the ballot always seem to pass here. But even Maryland doesn't call a different court supreme!).
> Question 1 would rename the Maryland Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court of Maryland and the Maryland Court of Special Appeals to the Appellate Court of Maryland. It would change the name of a Judge of the Court of Appeals to be a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland and the name of the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland. It would also change the gendered language to gender-neutral in the articles of the Maryland Constitution that would be amended.[2]
> Maryland and New York are the only states that do not refer to their state's top court as the supreme court
—https://ballotpedia.org/Maryland_Question_1,_Renaming_of_the...
(OK, so currently in Maryland you start your appeal at the "court of special appeals", and if you don't like the finding you can appeal further to the "court of appeals"? The Court of Appeals is a higher court than the Court of Special Appeals? I'd say that's almost as confusing as New York, although maybe not quite).
Almost every other state the State Supreme Court, is the top court of the state, just like the federal court
And the Court of Appeals is lower than the State Supreme Court.
Why NY needs to needless complicate everything is beyond me
> The New York Supreme Court is the oldest Supreme Court with general original jurisdiction. It was established as the Supreme Court of Judicature by the Province of New York on May 6, 1691. That court was continued by the State of New York after independence was declared in 1776. It became the New York Supreme Court under the New York Constitutional Convention of 1846.
The name predates the US Supreme Court (in fact, predates the US itself), and many other state courts. Basically, someone changed the naming convention out from under them.
You've hit the core problem of society/government that countless generations have tried to obfuscate via an academic body that implies that social interactions can be studied/understood like natural sciences.
At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence - Commit non-violent white collar crime? Show up to court, because if you don't you'll get arrested. Run from the police when they try to arrest you? You'll get taken by force.
Reject Capitalism? Starve to death on the streets.
Sure, there's political theory and economics can act like "utility" drives all things, but at the end of the day, it's the threat of some sort of violently bad outcome that keeps society in check.
The recent rub is that we have (probably correctly) decided that violence is bad and we should all just be chill and work together because it's good for all of us. We've also created hyper complex systems that couldn't even theoretically be kept in check with violence (Who am I going to punch when I was duped by a crypto scam?).
So instead of angry mobs tarring and feathering bad politicians/business people (probably bad) we just grouse on the Internet (bad but not as bad).
And stuff like this keeps happening, because an increasingly large number of people (especially the wealthy and politicians) are realizing the threat of violence isn't that great anymore. Like look at Elon Musk - his whole deal is proving that there are no bad consequences to doing whatever he wants and he's revered for it because people who still have a risk of violence in their lives are jealous but believe they one day could get to a similar place.
There's not really a solution other than figuring out how to may people be chill and cooperative on their own (good luck).
What's "rejecting capitalism?" You can't blow up the NYSE, but most everything else is fair game. Your employer isn't going to care if you reject capitalism so long as you get your work done. If you don't want to work under a capitalist, you can join join or start your own cooperative. If you can't do that, you can be an independent contractor. If you don't have the motivation to do that, you can fall back on the charity of others.
>Like look at Elon Musk - his whole deal is proving that there are no bad consequences to doing whatever he wants
Musk got ousted as board chair at at Tesla, and was forced to buy Twitter at a very overpriced valuation.
Cripes. Nope.
If this was true, how do you explain backyard cookouts, pool parties, trick-or-treating, or Christmas present exchanges?
How do you explain folk dance festivals, buskers, and non-royal weddings?
How on earth do you explain hugs?
Is this true for all social structures, or just our current one?
The social structures that emerge are time dependent. The people living in the middle ages had no way of predicting the social structures of today. Since we can't predict the social structures that the future will bring, how could we know for sure that there isn't X social structure that doesn't need violence to propagate itself?
We can talk about the likelihood of X social structure emerging, sure. But to make the universal claim about all social structures, viz "human nature", is flawed reasoning
Being incarcerated or dead is very low utility for most people ;)
This is completely wrong. Our current social structure in the United States is build on the threat of violence. Sense of duty, sense of shame, fear of ostracism, respect for tradition and family are all forms of social structure that have existed since we were crafting tools from stone. Of course all of these non-violent forms of social structure require a somewhat homogeneous population that shares the same values and culture. Many native American tribes had social structures like this where there was no police force, no threat of violence to enforce social norms. However, when a hodgepodge of people with different beliefs, different cultures, different educational levels, different educational values, different religions and different histories are jammed together in overcrowded cities the result is always going to be the same. Perhaps we should write "Our diversity is our strength!" On the side of all the prisons and police cars to make people feel better.
Put another way, people with nuclear weapons don’t need to pay parking tickets.
He wanted to weasel out of his M&A agreement with Twitter. No luck, contract law is well established.
He is also wanted to just do automatic assembly for Tesla, no luck there. You might remember when they had to set up tents connected to the factory building to extend the assembly line, etc. all because the markets demanded results. (Many people were shorting Tesla.)
...
Sure, he built a nice cult of personality for himself, it allows him a few degrees of freedom in the eyes of those people. But the vast majority of the people don't know much about him, and don't care. Not everyone is glued to Twitter, HN, Forbes billionaires toplists, etc.
Similarly Trump built a bigger one. And a lot of authoritarian assholes too. It was the norm for a long time after all, pharaohs, divine kings, etc.
This is what group violence is historically used for. When responsibility was so diffused among so many people that you couldn't fix things by picking one of the most responsible and making an example out of them the king or whoever would have everyone in the group subjected to violence or some other punishment under credible threat of violence.
Executing consequences into popular Presidents or other members of Congress would also be politicized and have political consequences for Congress, so it doesn’t happen. That said, leaving impeachment or expulsion of legislative members to the Courts would also give them too much power.
So the real consequences are at election time. If you ran to retain your seat, and lost, that’s your comeuppance. It’s not granular, but it gets the job done eventually. This is also why control of the White House flips back and forth so much: nothing any President does is particularly popular most of the time, they just have the votes to do it. Incumbents do get massive advantages in staying power but in the present day, two terms looks like about the maximum we would be able to tolerate a President’s political party in the Oval Office and typically after midterms they no longer have the votes in Congress either.
Most of this is generally applicable to the States, but I don’t know New York politics specifically but would note that the previous Governor was put into a position where he was pretty much forced to resign both for scandals and for the actions he took while in office; and that was a slow slow build up.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/longer-elected-terms-lead-t...
First of all it's not at all clear in advance that the laws are unconstitutional, and that the lawmakers are "perpetrators". Plenty of times the laws are challenged and the courts uphold them. The whole point is that laws often push boundaries or address areas not previously addressed by the courts, and of course courts are political too. Lawmakers are trying to do what they believe is right for the people, and courts are too, and sometimes they disagree, and all of this is legitimate.
And second, what would it even mean for a court to "penalize" lawmakers? For the government to penalize itself? The lawmakers are elected and often passing laws their constituents voted them into office precisely in order to pass. Do you want to fine the lawmakers and take away their salary? Do you want to fine the people who voted for them? No, of course not. That's ludicrous. Just as ludicrous as legislatures (or governors) fining judges when they think judges decide cases wrongly.
This isn't criminal, it's legitimate disagreement over what policy and law ought to be. Penalizing lawmakers doesn't make any sense. In the end the court overturns something, and if a change is dangerous/disruptive enough the courts place an immediate injunction until the final decision is made. This is how democracies work.
(On the other hand, if a legislator breaks a law personally, e.g. murders somebody, they are tried personally and go to jail just like anybody else.)
Our rights would remain more intact if lawmakers actually faced personal financial penalties when they try to deny us the already very few rights afforded to us by the constitution.
Most legal scholars don’t believe it’s legal and will be overturned. But everyone also agrees any money given out will not be returned, so they’re rushing to get as much debt forgiven before it’s overturned.
Also worth considering: ostracism [2].
No, if someone broke the law in the process of exercising the executive authority, that's a different issue. But we don't generally have laws of the form "the executive is not allowed to infringe on non-fundamental liberties during an emergency," because history shows that emergencies happen and sometimes people just have to be told what to do (arguably, that's one of the reasons we bother to have an executive at various levels of government).
Same way no one suffered any consequences for deciding to support the opposition in the Syrian civil war to piss off Assad long after it was obvious they weren’t going to get him out and the only consequence was going to be lots of dead Stands mom Syrians. Same way there were no consequences for bombing Libya into civil war and open air slave markets. Same way there were no consequences for no WMDs in Iraq.
There needs to be a coalition to make them pay. It needs to be not just powerful enough, but committed.
Unfortunately the penalty falls only on the taxpayer, and not at all on the lawmakers who pass unconstitutional laws or declare executive actions that they do not have the legal authority to declare as law. Indeed, lawmakers routinely flaunt their ability to enact laws that they know are unconstitutional across the political spectrum, to abortion laws (pre Dobbs) in "red states" to gun laws in "blue states". The recent NY legislation in the wake of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decision is the perfect example. It contained all sorts of blatantly unconstitutional measures, like requiring those applying for gun permits to turn over all their social media accounts for scrutiny. But since there is no potential penalty suffered by lawmakers who willfully and knowingly violate the Constitution, this sort of unlawful, blatant political pandering is going to continue.
You have to consider not only the effects of nominal usage, but also the effects of abuse. In this case, they're extreme.
Isn't this like saying developers should suffer consequences if they allow bugs to get into their code? Because we are perpetrators of flawed code, like law makers are perpetrators of flawed laws?
> Regardless of one's opinion of said rights, how do courts blatantly ignore rulings and orders from higher courts with no repercussions?
Because to do otherwise is to abandon civil process (where people get to argue about laws, and they have the right to be wrong without further consequence than being wrong) and enters into what would effectively devolve into mob rule.
Not agreeing or disagreeing. Merely adjusting the analogy
If your code kills someone in a foreceeable and predictable manner, then you should.
Other branches of engineering have to do their work properly
If you can't warranty something, it's worth less than if you can.
And if you do warranty it, but don't back it up, that's fraud.
People are tired of false promise and baiting into hazard.
really grinds my gears cuz they KNOW these laws will get killed in court but it will take 3-4 years so in the mean time stfu and deal with it.
Just to name a few: Book bans, anti-LGBTQ bills (bathroom bills and more), edicts on what doctor can or cannot say to patients (or must say to patients), ag-gag, voting restrictions, and anti-abortion-choice laws.
All passed with the full knowledge they'll be struck down almost immediately, with the express purpose of tying up funds of progressive non-profits and getting to brag to their base about how they're trying to further 'The Cause' (you know how conservatives are always going on about "liberal virtue-signaling? As always, they're great at projection.)
Nothing about this is partisan to me. People who knowingly and intentionally violate their oaths should see consequences for their actions.
Lawyers are totally baffled at what is going on.
Later I got voted up from people who got back from (actual) work, who read HN
Btw. "the science" hasn't changed. The vaccine never stopped the spread. There were no studies indicating that it did (medical trials were about hospitalisations / death, not infections / spreading). You fell for the fake science propagated by fake news media.
And anyone talking about vaccine problems, they also need to go.
We could make a special disinfo re-education summer camp, where we will send all the plague rats and political dissidents. We'll let them out when they're good people again, and tow the party line!
The mandate should have never existed.
The idea that you can order someone to perform a medical procedure because they work for you is disguisting.
Where does this end?
What are talking about? What piles of bodies?
You can pass whatever law you'd like now- the existing judiciary can simply decide that it doesn't apply or isn't 'constitutional', and their decisions aren't reviewable. It's awarding ultimate power in society to a very small group The vast majority of developed countries don't work this way, at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty
At a minimum, calling a law 'unconstitutional' should require a supermajority out of a fairly large body
> Da fuq?
> People were being called plague rats, scum, degenerates, etc. At societal, national, international, levels, unvaccinated people were 'other'ed to an extremely disturbing degree - fired from work, separated from loved ones, locked indoors, bashed on national media at all levels.
> People were talking, and still talk of denying them medical treatment, ending the Geneva convention, altering the Declaration of Human Rights, etc, to force people into taking "perfectly safe and 100% effective" vaccines. Which weren't that at all.
> Anyone who spoke out for them was the target of immediate white-hot anger. Don't know where you live to have missed all this, but claiming there wasn't broad levels of hate is just gaslighting, and I don't like it.
Right, that sounds like what I said earlier, mandmandam:
"There was anger, sure, but not hate" - and you affirmed it; white-hot anger. And it was deserved. But broad hate, no. We just wanted people to be responsible.
When you violate the social contract (protecting others by doing what's due), you attract anger.
I'm not really here to debate it; anyone saying otherwise is spinning our anger for others' irresponsibility and others' putting the immunocompromised in danger.
I think you have a loose definition of violence.
“Go live in the forest” is very violent, in practice.
The duty and and family stuff are arguably window dressing on the ostracism violence.
The whole thing ended up being a mute point, because everyone on the starting roster[1] eventually got their shots so they could travel to Canada to play the Blue Jays.
[1] they later traded for an unvaccinated player
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/sports/baseball/aaron-jud...
I imagine that the entire New York Legislature are hanging their heads in shame for confusing a few dozen folks on HN who don't even live in the state.
I further imagine that it will immediately become important for the governor to call an emergency session of the Legislature (which normally meets from January to June) to change the name of the court after they read your comment.
Sounds like they blew their chance to name it properly. Oh well.
> “”Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19. As of the day of this Decision, CDC guidelines regarding quarantine and isolation are the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves. We have learned through the course of the pandemic that the vaccine against Covid-19 is not absolute. Breakthrough cases occur, even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted. President Joseph Biden has said that the pandemic is over.& The State of New York ended the Covid-19 state of emergency over a month ago.? As this Court stated in its decision in the Rivicci matter, this is not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders, the ones who worked day-to-day through the height of the pandemic. See Rivicci v. NYC Fire Dept., Index No. 85131/2022. They worked without protective gear. They were infected with Covid-19, creating natural immunity. They continued working full duty while their exemption requests were pending. They were terminated and are willing to come back to work for the City that cast them aside. The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health: it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for vaccination for all residents. In a City with a nearly 80% vaccination rate, we shouldn't be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down. If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt. It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just.”
Source:
https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...
Edit: I’m happy to learn that the New York Supreme Court is not the highest court in New York, this entire thread is misleading (I think people are assuming New York’s highest court slapped down vaccine mandates). I don’t know why New York has to name their courts in such weird ways…
“Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19.”
This was not true before Omicron. Vaccination was never a 100% protection against contracting or transmitting SARS-CoV-2, but it did significantly reduce the rate of both. People who refused to vaccinate themselves were, in fact, putting people around them at greater risk.
That protection has decreased with Omicron, though it is still not zero (and with boosters, it increases again for a few months).
This sort of thing is unintuitive but has happened before. In fact Fauci cited the possibility of this effect as one of the reasons not to rush the trials. Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics (the way they classify people as unvaccinated for weeks after having actually been given the shot can warp the stats).
Would you be allowed to build a monastery on top of a random mountain in America today? Clearly not. Force will be used to remove you.
So you portrailyal of 'anything short of terrorism is fair game' is totally inaccurate - the only way you are allowed to reject capitalism by selling tickets to a concert where you just talk shit.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sibling
> share (v.) To have or use in common
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/share
> another (det.) Not the same; different
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/another
Being one’s own sibling is incompatible with the accepted definitions, so no.
Law is never settled and courts disagree and reverse frequently... So I don't think you've really thought this through... :)
Including who is going to pay for all those damages, which is going to be the taxpayers, so hello much higher taxes! ;)
What is not fair about this?
And while we're at it, are we also creating a three strikes law for lower courts that get overruled by the SC three times?
And what about the courts below them? What if they get overruled by a higher court... which in turn gets overruled by the SC?
I can't wait to keep track of all this ;)
I've even seen it used to good effect to strong-arm otherwise unreachable organizations when they choose to be anti-social. During the housing crash, one of the major non-profit universities a city panicked about its investments going shaky and abruptly decided to stop paying into some multi-decades-long standing donations that back-stopped some city services. The non-profit was paying into that donation pool because state law that had made sense in the 1900s and a lot less sense in 2000 made those non-profits non-taxable (but they had eaten up a significant percent of available real estate in the city center, none of which could generate tax revenue to pay for city services).
The city responded by preparing an ordnance that would tax out-of-town students directly.
The uni responded that this would be obviously illegal on its face as per state law.
The city responded that they believed the uni was presenting a reasonable legal theory that they were happy to debate back-and-forth in county, circuit, state, and appeals court for the next five years.
The university returned to the negotiating table and hammered out a new plan to pay a percentage of their former amount into the donation pool, preventing what would have otherwise been a heavy disruption in city services at a time when everyone was hurting from the housing crash.
Messy, but this kind of creation of leverage is what makes political systems operate at all at multiple scales of governance.
If face significant consequences, there would be no developers left.
> Too many and you might get shown the door.
You are much more likely to get shown the door for being hard to work with, being crass, not showing up to work, not following process (that doesn't eliminate bugs but mitigates consequences), etc...
Complete ass pull, many proffesions face consequences
> You are much more likely to get shown the door for being hard to work with
Because the entire industry is full of chancers, startibg with folks who hold the purse strings.
Responsibility for safety only ever came through government regulation. Before that, construction industry made fire escape ladders out of wood.
The comparison will not be favourable to you. [2]
[1] Your camp spent the past two years both telling everyone, and doing your best to ensure that everyone is going to catch it anyways, so this seems like a reasonable comparison to require.
[2] The risk of treatable myocarditis from catching COVID is vastly higher than from the vaccines. The risk of injury and death from less-treatable complications is incomparably higher. If we're all going to get it anyways, you're choosing to both hurt yourself, and others by not getting vaccinated. You can't even freeload off herd immunity...
I'm not going to argue with you on vaccine effectiveness, because that's actually not my point. I'm not afraid of people discussing the effectiveness of vaccines - I'm certain the correct opinion will win out.
What I am afraid of is the cruelty of political radicals - which this issue has created in excess.
During the pandemic, people in my corporate slack channels were GLEEFULLY fantasizing about all the vaccine deniers that were going to be fired due to Bidens executive order. This behaviour is terrifying, and anyone who carries this out is reprehensible. Even a moron is a person and has rights.
And the fact that you don't see this as the actual issue is evidence you're still possessed by this nonsense. I posted a snarky sarcastic comment about government suppression and you're talking about vaccines.
Sure, but what, you're going to send the mayor to Jail (violence) over a political decision he made?
That would not be trivial.
Positive reinforcement is not antithetical to the threat of violence and can go hand-in-hand. If you're good to me I'll treat you like family. But violate that peace and me and my clan will come down on you with furious anger. That's how people have lived for time immemorial.
Our aversion to violence is not new. In ancient Rome, it was sacrilegious to bring weapons inside the pomerium.
How do you explain why you get to determine the guest list?
Speaking as a lawyer, reading this, it feels like it will be overturned almost immediately, and possibly reassigned to a different judge.
There is very little legal analysis, and a large amount of unnecessary, biased, diatribe.
Appeals courts rarely look kindly on that.
I think people of a particular viewpoint have allowed their bias to drown out reason.
To top it all off, it will be very difficult to argue in good faith the mandate was not arbitrary. It quite literally came down to a single dude deciding who he liked better.
Just in this very thread we have people admonishing Adams for "ruining" the mandate, and if he had just been more careful then all these anti-vaxxers would be out of luck... as-if the mandate was a weapon to use against those we don't agree with. That's wrong.
So, while you may assert there isn't much substance to the case, I assert you are very wrong. There is no reality where what happened is legal and there should not be a reality where what happened is legal.
This was the first step in undoing some very great injustices.
This is definitely in that category. It reads like an internet argument on Reddit, not a judicial decision
Closing the beaches was stupid too. If there ever was a safe place then it was the beach or state park wheee uou are in the open and the window blows.
I agree with you about the beaches. But in the early days, we didn't really know what worked and what didn't. People said 6 feet apart was safe enough indoors because "droplets containing the virus fall to the ground".
I used to wonder how on earth nazis and communists and the like were able to seize power and control of a population, and now I've seen it. Covid has been a really amazing learning experience for me.
The rule of law is important and limiting the power of “rulers” to make large sweeping regulations by themselves is important. Agreeing with what they’re trying to do doesn’t make it right. People have been cheering for authoritarianism more and more and it’s disturbing.
When the government wants to fuck us over, think what the NSA has been doing, they won't look for precedents so there's no point in treating every decision they make as a potential sliperry slope.
Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.
This last sentence is such a massive slippery slope that an answer isn’t even necessary.
They don't though.
None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.
And only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID. If you're not in either of those camps, or have natural immunity the risk is negligible.
Rights aren’t just for your side.
Effectiveness against Delta did not go negative. Protection against infection decreased, but was still quite significant. A single booster also greatly increased protection against Delta, which is why many countries initiated booster campaigns in the Fall of 2021.
> Unfortunately the trials did not detect this, probably due to bad use of statistics
The trials were always designed to test protection against symptomatic disease, severe cases and death. They were not designed to test protection against infection. Everyone who read the trial registrations and the studies knew this from the beginning. The fact that this has recently been presented as a big revelation in the media just shows how uninformed the public (and much of the media) is. It's also a reflection of the revisionist narrative (i.e., we shouldn't have done anything about CoVID) taking hold.
Your description of the trials is perfectly inverted! I wonder how that happens. The trials weren't designed to detect anything except reduced PCR test positivity i.e. infections. They didn't attempt to determine what a "severe case" was because that distinction was invented only after the falling effectiveness made it necessary to do so, and as for death, more people died in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm! They definitely didn't make claims about reducing the death rate because it was so tiny to begin with that they couldn't get a big enough sample of COVID deaths to make any conclusions, not even with 64,000 odd people.
> They didn't attempt to determine what a "severe case" was because that distinction was invented only after the falling effectiveness made it necessary to do so
I'm sorry, but you're wrong on both of these points. From the Moderna phase-3 trial description [0] on clinicaltrials.gov:
> Primary Outcome Measures:
> 1. Efficacy: Number of Participants with a First Occurrence of COVID-19 Starting 14 Days after Second Dose of mRNA-1273
If you look at the trial protocol, there is no regular PCR testing (except for at the start of the trial and at administration of the 2nd dose). Only people who have two or more symptoms are tested. This means that the trial is only meant to test efficacy against symptomatic infection (also known as "CoVID-19," the disease, as opposed to the virus, "SARS-CoV-2"). From the scientific paper[1] on Moderna's phase-3 results:
> Covid-19 cases were defined as occurring in participants who had at least two of the following symptoms: fever (temperature ≥38°C), chills, myalgia, headache, sore throat, or new olfactory or taste disorder, or as occurring in those who had at least one respiratory sign or symptom (including cough, shortness of breath, or clinical or radiographic evidence of pneumonia) and at least one nasopharyngeal swab, nasal swab, or saliva sample (or respiratory sample, if the participant was hospitalized) that was positive for SARS-CoV-2 by reverse-transcriptase–polymerase-chain-reaction (RT-PCR) test.
Then, later on from clinicaltrials.gov:
> Secondary Outcome Measures:
> 1. Number of Participants with a First Occurrence of Severe COVID-19 Starting 14 Days after Second Dose of mRNA-1273 or Placebo
So you see that the idea of preventing "severe CoVID-19" goes back all the way to the formulation of the trials in early 2020.
And more detail from the scientific paper:
> A secondary end point was the efficacy of mRNA-1273 in the prevention of severe Covid-19 as defined by one of the following criteria: respiratory rate of 30 or more breaths per minute; heart rate at or exceeding 125 beats per minute; oxygen saturation at 93% or less while the participant was breathing ambient air at sea level or a ratio of the partial pressure of oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen below 300 mm Hg; respiratory failure; acute respiratory distress syndrome; evidence of shock (systolic blood pressure <90 mm Hg, diastolic blood pressure <60 mm Hg, or a need for vasopressors); clinically significant acute renal, hepatic, or neurologic dysfunction; admission to an intensive care unit; or death.
If we had a sterilizing vaccine, and you refused to take it, and got me sick, could I hold you responsible?
I'm just trying to understand exactly to what extent other people's selfish choices should be allowed to endanger my life and livelihood.
You probably live in some developed country. If it's the US or Canada, I can say for sure that you live in a country that was founded on the exploitation of others. We continue to knowingly benefit off of such exploitation by importing and purchasing products produced by cheap and often abusive labour. We use electronic devices whose manufacture is mostly in China and other such countries where there is recorded abuses and in some cases downright modern day slavery. We continue to use these devices despite knowing that many of their essential metals are mined by exploited children in Africa.
I'm trying to understand exactly to what extent our selfish choices should be allowed to endanger others' lives and livelihoods
It isn't a binary yes or no, but it has been a gradient. And every policy decision is made on a gradient of harm/benefit. So yes, it is entirely relevant about what the ethics of the hypothetical would be.
Not getting vaccinated is an action that directly harms other people, for what turns out to be no net gain. Requiring vaccination... Is an action that directly harms a few holdouts for some net gain for the rest. None of this is an absolute ethical question, and the degrees of harm and gain are this completely relevant to it.
“Finally, states of emergency are meant to be _temporary_. The question presented is whether the Health Commissioner has the authority to enact a permanent condition of employment during a state of emergency. This Court finds that the Commissioner does not have that authority and has acted beyond the scope of his authority under the Public Health Law and in violation of separation of powers. The Petitioners herein should not have been terminated for their failure to comply with the Commissioner’s Order during a _temporary_ state of emergency.”
and then later in the conclusion:
“It is clear that the Health Commissioner has the authority to issue public health mandates. No one is refuting that authority. However, the Health Commissioner cannot create a new condition of employment for City employees. The Health Commissioner cannot prohibit an employee from reporting to work. The Health Commissioner cannot terminate employees. The Mayor cannot except certain employees from these orders.”
https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...
That's a lot of ask of an internet commenter.
In all seriousness, I did see that part while skimming through it, but I don't find it very convincing in regards to public employees. The order came from the Mayor, not the health commissioner. Requiring city employees be vaccinated is an administrative decision. It's within the best interests of the city that city employees not get sick, that the city's health insurance premiums don't go up, etc.
Yes, but that’s not the sole requirement. In addition to serving a legitimate government purpose, a government order must also avoid being arbitrary or capricious. Every order has to meet both requirements, and this one only meets one of them. From the ruling:
“This Court finds that based on the analysis above, the Commissioner’s Order of October 20, 2021, violated the Petitioners’ equal protection rights as the mandate is arbitrary and capricious. The City employees were treated entirely differently from private sector employees, and both City employees and private sector employees were treated entirely differently from athletes, artists, and performers. All unvaccinated people, living or working in the City of New York are similarly situated. Granting exemptions for certain classes and selectively lifting of vaccination orders, while maintaining others, is simply the definition of disparate treatment. Furthermore, selected enforcement of these orders is also disparate treatment.”
The health commissioner's order didn't say fire the employees [1]. It said that you can't have unvaccinated people on the premise which is clearly within their powers to "control of communicable and chronic diseases ... " [2]. The commissioner never said you needed to fire anybody. It we start taking this to the extreme, I think we can agree if somebody has Ebola its ok for the commissioner to say that person should not show up to work. Such a claim is in direct contradiction with the Judge's statements though: "The Health Commissioner cannot prohibit an employee from reporting to work.".
[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/covid/covid-19...
[2]: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...
Besides, you cannot go by the overall mission of some government agency to decide what they are allowed or not allowed to do. The legislature has delegated specific authority to each agency to take specific actions. An agency, no matter how well–meaning they are, is not allowed to take any action not on their list.
At best you could claim “reducing the spread” (but marginally) and in now way “preventing”.
>protection waned to around 10% after only 4–6 months
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00775-3
It would only be a measure of postponing some of the rising transmission rates if people don't get boosted every few months. Also it would have to be compared against the effects of natural immunity.
The vast majority of doctors and scientists strongly recommend taking the vaccine. It is not about stopping 100% of illnesses and infections, but it is 100% about significantly reducing the chance of hospitalisation and death.
What are you talking about? Sounds like the time to reflect is all yours.
It mentioned nothing about decreasing hospitalisation or death (which is true and I agree with!).
It mentioned “saving coworkers” which implies that the vaccine prevents infection or transmitted, which is not true.
Despite a lot of people (Biden, Fauci, CDC) explicitly saying it does, and invoking “science”.
If you're a libertarian, you vouch for liberties across the board. Not seesawing utter power against the other side every election cycle.
That statistic alone has me questioning if democracy is a good system
That’s how incumbents can maintain their edge whilst Congress as a body is untrusted.
I’m convinced that capping the House of Representatives at 435 was a mistake, and Federalizing most laws even more of a mistake. The question isn’t whether democracy can scale, but whether ours can within its present constraints. The reforms I would want to see are mechanical; not social, economic or judicial. A Continental-sized nation with hundreds of millions and growing probably needs thousands—not a few hundred!—of legislators if representation is to be meaningful. Short of that, my Representative has 700K+ constituents, so any one individual holding her accountable without other connections is a pipe dream at best.
I mean, that has certainly been true for me, and many other people. I sent someone to Congress I liked. Congress then has a wide spectrum of people who end up doing whatever a small group decides (this term, whatever Manchin and Sinema want). It's pretty easy to like your guy but not the end results of the process or the body as a whole that produced it.
1. Wyoming Rule. No district should be larger than the least populist state.
2. Make DC a Museum. With modern technology there is no need to "send" legislatures to Washington DC, they can vote, meet, etc all remotely. This will make lobbying more expensive, and put the representatives back in their actual communities, because lets face it most of them represent Washington DC not Local Communities.
3. Expand the Term to 4 Years, with a 2 year offset to the president Election. So every 4 years the entire house is elected as a Mid Presidential term Election
But one huge benefit of freedom is that if we embrace freedom, the vast majority of decisions can be made individually, or by mutual agreement of consenting individuals, and not collectively. So the negative consequences of democracy aren't as impactful.
Then approval rating would mean something.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-a-system-of-voting-a...
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empowe...
And in States where “big issue” lawmaking is deferred to the public via referendum on a regular basis there’s almost no incentive at all to mind what the legislature or governor is doing; especially if tax increases also have to be voter approved. Who do you hold accountable when it’s the voters who make a bad decision about a law?
People emotionally trick other people into voting for them and then do whatever is on their agenda during their mandate.
Except that doesn't apply to this situation. IIRC, ~95-97% of cops, EMTs and firefighters in NYC were already vaccinated and those that weren't were given ample time (extended several times) to get vaccinated.
As such, that was never an issue.
That said, there certainly was an arbitrary and capricious standard applied in this case.
Also “In 2021, 1,353,500 fires resulted in 3,800 civilian deaths and 14,700 injuries”. By comparison, Wikipedia says there were 42,915 deaths due to motor vehicles in 2021, more than 10x. So it makes sense that even if fire department only dealt with road crashes they would spend more time on that than on fires.
Why does the fire department do medical stuff in the US? Why isn’t it medical people providing paramedics? Seems like something that should be left to professionals?
A lot of firefighters are also EMTs and paramedics. Both because in places with volunteer firefighters they can just work as EMS, and also because there's quite a bit of overlap in that if you need a firefighter there's a decent chance having EMS around would be beneficial as well.
Firefighters who aren't trained in EMS are not providing medical care, so saying "leave it to the professionals" is pretty dismissive in this context.
There's a pretty significant difference between "you may not sell dangerous products" and "you must use X medicine".
Next up, government mandated pedometers with minimum step counts, broccoli consumption, teeth brushing (prevents heart disease that kills people!), flossing, and minimum hours of sleep per night.
Once we've kept the fat, foul-breathed insomniacs out of society, government bans you from going into the wilderness (bears! bee allergies!), driving a car, riding a bike, running with scissors, and using a computer for more than a few hours a day.
Some of these things obviously kill more than others, but heart disease, cancer and "accident" are all leading causes of death in the US, with heart disease and cancer beating out COVID in 2020 and probably 2022.
In practice, all the claims that were made about representative democracy being superior to direct on the basis that it's "less erratic" have been proven false by experience - just look at who we keep electing to Congress etc. At best, it gives the whole circus some veneer of respectability - as in, our representatives still make an erratic mess, but they do so with gravitas. But even that doesn't last for long - at some point, if enough voters really feel like it, you get someone like Donald Trump.
The worst thing about representative democracy is the sham scalability. In theory, a parliament can "represent" as many people as you want - there's an upper limit on the number of MPs who can still hold a coherent discussion, but there's no limit on how many people each MP "represents". However, the higher that number is, the more said "representation" is removed from the voters, and the more of a sham it is. With direct democracy, because of how poorly it scales, you have to keep the scope of the government small for it to function at all procedurally, and then come up with some federation arrangements above that - and that's a good thing.
There were two separate orders. The first was for public employees, and the second was for private employees. I agree that the second was capricious, but the first was consistent. The city is allowed to fire city employees. Maybe something about it is unconstitutional, but the ruling completely handwaves this, as well as the justification for backpay.
The city union disagrees rather strongly with that :) In particular, the city’s contract with these workers does not require them to be vaccinated. If your boss sprung a new rule on you and then fired you for not following it, you would be pretty upset too. Especially if it required you to take actions that you thought were potentially risky to your own personal health and safety. I’ll let you read the ruling yourself though, since it was more nuanced than that and I am tired of transcribing from a scan of a printout of a digital document.
Having multiple separate orders that result in an unconstitutional outcome is not really different from having a single unconstitutional order. I don’t know why you keep bringing that up; it’s not very interesting.
Also, awarding back pay is super common in wrongful–termination suits. Any time the harm resulting from a tort is monetary, it is quite ordinary to redress that harm through monetary means. In fact, in most cases it’s one of the easiest forms of harm to redress. The court cannot undo the harm to someone’s reputation nearly as easily, for example.
Do they? From what I understand these employees aren't being represented by the union. Also, the ruling acknowledges that they did bargain with the union and are therefore not finding a breach of contract.
>Having multiple separate orders that result in an unconstitutional outcome is not really different from having a single unconstitutional order. I don’t know why you keep bringing that up; it’s not very interesting.
My point is that it's not unconstitutional for the city to fire a city employee.
Demonstrably false. The commissioner's order (which I linked above) never required them to be fired. The order solely required they be kept off the premise which is not the same as fired. Sure somebody could fire them and then claim the health order told them to but that wouldn't make it truthful; the health code is very clear on violations being a fines / misdemeanors.
> But they could still go to grocery stores and baseball games, because those places aren’t important.
Sure. Perhaps the agency has the power to stop people from doing that. It's not explicitly listed though.
> An agency, no matter how well–meaning they are, is not allowed to take any action not on their list.
The legislature has delegated a vague do everything to the agency. So, everything is on their list ...
"Except as otherwise provided by law, the department shall have jurisdiction to regulate all matters affecting health in the city of New York and to perform all those functions and operations performed by the city that relate to the health of the people of the city, including but not limited to the mental health, intellectual and developmental disability, alcoholism and substance abuse-related needs of the people of the city. The jurisdiction of the department shall include but not be limited to the following:"
However, the Health Department does have explicit control over "(5) ... operation of facilities by other agencies of the city;". Which is exactly what they were doing. They were telling other agencies that they can't operate their facilities with unvaccinated individuals. They also tailored the order to be as narrow as it needed to be. The unvaccinated individuals are still allowed to work, just not on premise which is how a disease would get transmitted at those facilities.
[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/covid/covid-19...
I should have been clearer here. I made a general statement about determining what an agency may or may not do based on a mission statement. This is always a mistake that you want to avoid.
But it’s not really relevant to this case!
The judge didn’t find that the agency overstepped its authority. Instead, the judge found that the agency had created an order that was arbitrary and capricious, because it treated certain groups of people differently, even though they were in the same situation.
The judge can find whatever they want but to pretend that a sportsball player is the same as a city employee is obviously bogus.
EO 62 [1] very clearly layed out the difference in their situation as concert performers and sportsball players will increase the economic activity of NYC. A city employee just doesn't have the same economic impact as the exempted classes.
Look, the judge is just again vaccination requirements and will find whatever reason they want to justify their position against them. This is pretty much layed out when the judge goes on how the city could've kept its testing strategy despite the fact that the judge doesn't at all justify what effect a testing strategy would have or what effect a vaccination strategy would have or how the two would achieve similar goals or what those goals were (i.e. the judge has no problem making an arbitrary and conspicuous claim about how the state should've ran itself).
[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/062-003/emerge...
It ends with your survival. Vaccination isn't surgery, it's an extremely minor medical procedure that reduces or eliminates the risk of contracting a disease. During a deadly global pandemic, refusing vaccination is nothing short of suicidal. 97M Americans were infected and more than a million died. There were over 630M cases globally, and over 6.5M died due to COVID. The People have the stronger right to not be infected with COVID by you than your right to be infected. No one ever has any right to spread infection, not even libertarians.
Way to dodge the question. Also, I think you're missing the point. I don't think OP or most other anti vax mandate people think that the covid vaccine is a risky procedure, or that the public is better off on net for it. They're against it because it sets a precedent for government to mandate medical procedures.
>No one ever has any right to spread infection, not even libertarians.
You literally do, though. It's not against the law to get on a packed subway while you're sick as a dog, for instance.
This is just a part of what is so ridiculous about their objections and reveals ignorance and a misunderstanding of law. The government isn't required to establish precedent here because it is already the law of the land.[1][2][3] That said, precedent has been very well established for a very long time.[4]
[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title50/cha...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Emergencies_Act#Emerg...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Service_Act
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
Does it, though? Just because the government can mandate employees be vaccinated as a condition of continued employment, doesn't mean they can mandate employees be sterilized (for instance). No reasonable person would say the second follows from the first. Law isn't code.
The proper branch of government to decide this is Congress passing a law, not each major making it up as they go along.
It is definately distopian for employers to decide anything on this matter -they are not sibject to dempcratic scruitiny.
And there are many methods of reducing covid infection avaliable - installing air purifiers, improving ventillation in schools, Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI).
If situation is so serious, whu are none of those being mandated? Now we know current vaccines give you immunity for like 6 months and new variants appear very rapidly.
Congress did decide this already by passing legislation a century ago granting temporary increased powers to the executive in event of national emergency and its declaration.
> It is definately distopian for employers to decide anything on this matter -they are not sibject to dempcratic scruitiny.
Government employment is already dystopian and private employers can have any requirements they like short of discriminating against religion, race, disability, etc. There are no federal protections for political disposition.
> And there are many methods of reducing covid infection avaliable - installing air purifiers, improving ventillation in schools, Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI).
The virus was already circulating due to unpreparedness and slow reaction by the administration in office. Had we seen a two week stay home order in February, the crisis would likely have been averted, but the executive was overly concerned about the economy, which tanked anyway regardless of putting 300M+ Americans at risk of infection, illness and/or death.
> If situation is so serious, whu are none of those being mandated? Now we know current vaccines give you immunity for like 6 months and new variants appear very rapidly.
Again, COVID was already circulating by late February 2020, and if two vaccinations a year are required from now until the end of time, it is still a very small price to pay, a minor inconvenience at worst with the benefit of increased resistance to infection, severe illness, hospitalization, and/or death.
I think it is. Governments aren't that trustworthy if you ask me.
Given a safe and effective vaccine, you and your vaccinated coworkers would either not become infected at all or would experience very mild symptoms and be left with supercharged immunity (immunity from your vaccine + immunity from infection). Your dumb, science-hating coworker would suffer much worse symptoms and maybe die (a little over 1 in 3 chance given the 35% fatality you postulate).
Your vaccine, first and foremost, is supposed to protect you.
But with covid that is not at all what we are seeing.
This was especially painfully clear in places with strongly-enforced "vaccine passport" regimes during the period they were in force before being abandoned. The vaccinated spent time with other vaccinated and were infecting and being infected by one another and birthing new, more transmissible vaccine-evading variants of the virus. Vaccine efficacy actual goes negative (i.e. vaccine recipients more susceptible than unvaccinated persons after a few months: "Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron or Delta variants following a two-dose or booster BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccination series: A Danish cohort study" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...) and vaccine recipients are infected and infectious for at least as long as unvaccinated persons (e.g. "Duration of Shedding of Culturable Virus in SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (BA.1) Infection" in NEJM https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35767428/).
The popular narrative being told to people from all sources was that vaccines were to prevent transmission which was quietly toned down when it turned out not to be true and then people now say things like "we never said that" when nobody mentioned it at all in the beginning that vaccines quite possibly weren't going to prevent disease or transmission.
People just move goal posts, fail to outline risks that don't align with their advice before those risks are undeniable, and generally always pretend they were right all along.
We should not make policy decisions as long as only the elderly and otherwise vulnerable are at risk?
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Many person years were lost: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
I sat in the ICU as my father died and listened to the many ventilators as a result of policy failures. I had lots of time to contemplate possible policy decisions. Pretending that the only possible choices were "do nothing" and "do something stupid" is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.
If you're assuming that every voter is intelligent enough to make their own voting decisions, then no one is being "tricked". And assuming to the contrary puts you on a slippery slope of who gets to decide if someone was "tricked" vs not.
> If the politicians don't follow up, you vote them out.
That's what I think where it lacks options. You cannot really vote politicians out. You can only vote politicians in. In some cases you can even only vote for parties, not for people. The ancient Greeks used to vote people out. I would at least want to be able to vote for party X, but not this guy, not this other guy and definitely not that guy who was the worst liar over the last 20 years, but somehow managed to stay afloat every time.
Religion and community are important. But congregating inside a church building is not something that needs to be prioritized during a pandemic. Schools and daycares first.
Not everyone puts priorities in that order. For many people, religion is much, much more important than daycare.
Plus, any order which treats businesses differently is going to be arbitrary. If you can go to a school but not a bar, then that is arbitrary.
That’s how the US has worked for a long time. See the war on drugs and mass incarceration, laws against black people and extreme political polarization. There was always a group of “others” that people wanted to get punished.
I bet if Trump had been a little smarter he would have got away with a lot more while people cheering him on. But it seems a lot of political institutions are eroding so maybe the next strongman will be able to go way further.
People didn't care that vaccines didn't stop the virus spreading, they didn't care that insignificant transmission occurred due to individuals or small family groups enjoying the outdoors, they didn't care that some people were as irrationally scared of the vaccines as they were of covid. It wasn't about any kind of measured response designed for the real greater good. They wanted to see those hated others suffer and be punished for their heresy and audacity.
Its an amazingly corrupting kind of power, the ability to dictate the way others can have fun.
This is the biggest argument against my ideas of reform: this is compromise actually working even with all the flaws I think are there. In the absence of consensus the consensus is to do nothing at all, which drives the people who want to do a lot and quickly crazy.
That said, Federated States in a Union with a weaker Federal government than we presently have would have fewer compromises they would have to make at the cost of also having to live with the fact that others who are ostensibly as much a part of the nation as you are are going to live differently; and as people, humans really, we tend to hate that. C’est la vie.
I don't honestly think that most people care about people "living differently". They care because people affect each other. And the rules in your state affect me living in my state quite a bit.
> And the rules in your state affect me living in my state quite a bit.
So two things about this: you’re not exactly wrong, but as far as humanity goes: the Earth is a closed system which means as far as we go there’s no limit to this line of thought except those we impose upon ourselves. Recognizable borders are a compromise, even internal ones.
What I do might affect you, and things my State does might change conditions in your State in the abstract, but in the absence of a damages claim or a legitimate grievance, we are not automatically entitled to effect the lives of others as we see fit. Which is why we have representative legislatures and governments: these are chambers and actors which are vested with powers to negotiate amongst themselves on behalf of their constituents and diplomatically engage with other governments.
I do wish that more federal functions would be spread out throughout the country, in the same way that Germany does; many of their federal agencies are headquartered in places far away from Berlin. There's no reason why the USDA shouldn't be headquartered in Kansas City, the Fed in New York, and the Department of the Interior in Wyoming.
So then I assume you also reject Full time work from home?
I can not think of a single reason why Congress needs to be in the same physical location to read a bill, take public comment on a bill, then vote on if that bill is good for their community or now. That is the SOLE and ONLY function of the US House of Representatives.
If they are doing other things, well that is beyond their scope of work and should be curtailed.
> that is beyond their scope of work and should be curtailed
You and me both ;-)
"For the important stuff, insist on two votes, but for everything else, make it easy to get stuff done fast"
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/streamlining-the-actual-pro...
Of course, there's the huge complicating factor that the official figures for "covid deaths" conflate "died with" and "died from".
I believe this is the most cynical thing I've read yet today.
> I don't see what doesn't make sense here
If the Athletes and Performers are so irreplaceable, then wouldn't you demand they be the most protected by the vaccine, and thus require them to have it before you would require the firefighters? They are so replaceable, afterall...
> so they came up with this policy.
They wanted to force compliance, but then realized there are some people who see themselves as above compliance, so they carved out their own policy in a telling way to kowtow to them.
Dollars are replaceable. People aren't. You can't actually be happy to wrap this cynicism around this, can you?
No, because they will just refuse. That’s the whole problem.
So apparently getting vaccinated is critically important, but not more important than money.
Spoken like someone who hasn't been to New York. I love the city, its a fun and vibrant place. But they have some unusual trash policies (primarily they don't have alleys so trash has to be dumped on the main sidewalk) and wherever you go its not uncommon for the sidewalks to be lined with trash waiting for pickup.
The number one thing I have noticed in New York was they seem to make trash collection as loud as possible ideally at 3 in the morning :)
I'm not really convinced about this new explanation either. I've seen little to no evidence that upsetting significant numbers of people factored into any other decisions around covid response, including the significant number who were upset by the creation of these double standards.
I'm going to have to stick with pure and simple corruption as the simplest and most likely explanation, unless there is some extraordinary evidence supporting some other less likely one.
Vaccines offer some personal protection but predominantly become effective by achieving herd immunity. Vaccine hesitancy undermines this goal and weakens the system. Being pro-vaccine is senseless without being in favor of enough people being vaccinated to provide strong immunity, including for those who cannot be vaccinated due to medical complications.
Even if you were to argue on behalf of one who is indifferent to vaccines but is against mandates, so long as those mandates encourage vaccination, they effectively are discouraging vaccination and are thus anti-vax.
It can be hard to recognize all of this without the right perspective. In isolation, it is easy to claim that one is not anti-vax; however actions speak infinitely louder than words.
The term used was 'insuburdination' - disobeying legitimate command of employer.
If employer can command you to vaccinate, then they can alsi command you to have windom teeth removed. They can command you to tatoo a barcode on your forehead.
I think everyone where I live should probably be supplementing vitamin D in the winter months because it is damn near impossible for even people working outdoors all day to get enough vitamin D through natural sunlight at this parallel. Never would I dream of mandating a vitamin D regimen to people. My lack of wanting a vitamin D mandate, by your very argument, would make me anti vitamin D.
I take vitamin D daily, and have convinced others they probably should too, which I think makes me an advocate on some level. If even your top percentile advocates are "anti" from your operating definition, because they don't go far enough, you may be an extremist.
Being anti-vax-mandate for an ineffective vaccine is not anti-vax in any way.
Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.
I have not touched the COVID shot because I did not trust it for these reasons:
- vaccines take years to test not months - there were new untested biotech involved - in short order I was being told that it does not work for this flavor of COVID.
And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.
How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.
This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.
This time, there was a financial backer (the government) that was willing to fund development of a whole bunch of vaccine candidates, without any preconditions. That's never happened before.
Normally, if you want to develop a vaccine, you have to go to investors, and convince them that your vaccine has a high probability of succeeding, not only technologically but financially. If you're lucky, you find someone to fund phase-1 trials. After those trials are done, you analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-2 trials. You have to finish those trials, analyze the results, and then go try to convince investors to fund phase-3 trials, which are extremely expensive.
If there's someone who guarantees funding for all three phases up-front, you can go a lot faster, without sacrificing scientific integrity at all. You can begin recruiting people for the phase-3 trials before phase-1 trials even begin. You can immediately begin the next phase of the trials once you know the vaccine passes the requisite safety threshold, even if the previous trials are still returning data.
Normally, these things are done strictly in order in order to minimize financial risk. If there is no financial risk, you can do a lot of things in parallel.
> And now it is acknowledged to not protect you or prevent the spread of COVID.
The vaccines reduce your risk of serious disease or death by orders of magnitude. That's extremely strong protection. They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.
> How can you claim any social good here? it has bad side effects and does not work.
The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.
Your arguments, however you feel may be justified, are not in favor of vaccination, and by definition are anti-vax. Ask yourself what would need to be different for you to be in favor.
Herd immunity does not make vaccines work better, but is a tertiary effect whereby unvaccinated individuals can receive effective protection simply by living in an area with a high vaccination rate. In extreme cases (such as with smallpox) diseases can even be completely eliminated, but this requires extremely effective vaccines that prevent infection and spread, vaccines that are robust against mutations, and diseases that are unlikely to be able to exist without humans. None of these factors apply to COVID or the vaccines developed for it.
Namely, herd immunity absolutely does make vaccines work better, and is the basis of all vaccine policy in the modern world. I'm not even sure how you can state it's a tertiary effect when it is the primary reason vaccine policies exist.
You're simply spreading misinformation. Herd immunity due to vaccination has resulted in the eradication or near eradication of multiple deadly infectious diseases over the last few centuries. And if not for humans, then look only to farm medicine. Ignoring the power of vaccine policies and mandatory vaccination walks humanity back hundreds of years. Eradicating small pox took hundreds of years. We've been combating COVID-19 for close to three years.
Ask yourself: what qualities of a COVID-19 vaccine would satisfy you?
The US has very complex society and diverse population, so mandates do not work and might create backclash.
I think mass vaccination can be easily achieved by mass marketing. Mandates just made this way too political: and as we can see did not achieve a thing.
That's not true! It used to be you had to show your smallpox vaccine scar (the vaccine left a distinctive mark) in order to enter many businesses.
The common western covid "vaccines" do not have the properties of other common vaccines. They are at best comparable to flu shots which I know no one under the age of 50 who has ever took them. Are these all anti-vaxers now too? Have you ever head anyone talk about herd immunity related to flu shots pre-covid? Almost everyone alive today apparently prevented herd immunity for flu most of his life by not taking the flu shot. So we're all anit-vaxers.
>I thought about this for several moments, and I disagree.
You need some more moments I guess, you clearly didn't think this trough.
For example they could argue that people will rebel against "you must do X" reflectively, but a well designed and sensitive information campaign might win them over.
One would then be quite ignorant of the history of how vaccines are rolled out. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211029-why-mandatory-va...
The vaccine does not target your mucosal immune system. It's injected. Thus, the vaccine will help you if you develop a severe case of Covid that spreads beyond your throat/sinuses/lungs. Immune system compartments work largely independently. [1]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27169/
> The first is that immune responses induced within one compartment are largely confined in expression to that particular compartment. The second is that lymphocytes are restricted to particular compartments by expression of homing receptors that are bound by ligands, known as addressins, that are specifically expressed within the tissues of the compartment. (Immunobiology: The Immune System in Health and Disease. 5th edition.)
That really isn't what normal people infer from the term.
The rules vary somewhat from state to state, but in general a government order must be narrowly tailored to serve a legitimate government interest, there must be a rational basis for how the order will actually serve that interest, and it must not be arbitrary or capricious. It has to have all three or it’s out. Notably, “I thought it would help” isn’t quite on the list.
If you can explain why something might help, then that could form your argument for the rational basis test (although it would be better if you could explain how it _will_ help, rather than how it _might_ help). But the order had better meet all the other requirements as well.
There are often other requirements as well. The agency writing the order must have the explicit authority to do so. Some types of orders are limited ahead of time by legislation. For example, many states have a written maximum amount of time that any order based on a state of emergency can last. Etc, etc.
More like I want to solve an increasingly unsusatinable cost to society:
>People with obesity experienced a statistically significant twofold increase in average direct healthcare costs per year (EUR 5,934), compared with controls (EUR 2,788) and had statistically significantly higher indirect costs compared to controls. Total healthcare costs for people with obesity and one or more of the 11 comorbidities were 91.7%–342.8% higher than total healthcare costs of the population with obesity but none of the 11 comorbidities.
>Obesity was associated with an increase in both direct and indirect costs. The presence of comorbidities was associated with additional healthcare costs.[0]
A comparable analogy would be mandating, under penalty of legally enforced isolation, that you eat a certain amount of vegetables per unit of body weight.
It literally is not. I don't think you understand what "arbitrary" means. It's not "I don't see the difference".
> For many people, religion is much, much more important than daycare.
So have the service in the parking lot of the church. Or on an open field, the way JC used to preach. Not having daycare is far more disruptive to far more people objectively. Way more people go to school and daycare every day, than go to church. Way more people depend on having a school or daycare to send their kids to, than go to church.
Arbitrary here means that the rule wasn’t decided rationally. The government must typically establish a “rational basis” for any rule that they want to impose on people.
It is commonly understood that being indoors with a lot of people increases the risk of transmitting a virus between those people. The risk is understood to go up when more people are present, but it is also higher when the building is smaller than when it is larger.
Thus, a rational basis for the maximum occupancy of a building during a pandemic would be based on the number of people per square foot. A rule such as “1 person per 100 square feet” treats both large and small groups fairly, as well as treating large and small buildings fairly.
When we look at specific rules that were actually in place during the pandemic, we often find that there was no such rational basis. The rules were instead arbitrary. In NYC, churches were limited to a flat 10 people in the building at any one time, regardless of the size of the church building. This limits a large church more than a small one, and thus the rule is arbitrary. It would have been no more arbitrary if they had rolled dice to pick the number.
Similarly, the same rule in NYC did not apply to big–box hardware stores. A Home Depot could have hundreds of people in it all the time! No matter how important hardware stores are, this is an arbitrary distinction. There is no rational basis under which the virus is dangerous to a group of 11 people who are in a church, but not to a group of 11 people who are in a Home Depot. The relative importance of churches and Home Depots is not important. What is important is that the difference in how the rule applied to them was arbitrary.
It absolutely is. The risk between churchgoing and Home Depot shopping, or going to school vs a bar may be equivalent, if we accept your analysis. But when taking risks, we also consider benefit. Risk for little to no benefit is best not taken. Risk for benefit may be worth taking, depending on how much benefit. If you can't accept this basic principle, there's no point in continuing this discussion further.
Education/childcare and having a habitable home are more important, objectively, than getting drinks or worshipping in-person inside of a building. Safe alternatives for the latter existed - drinking beers on your porch, or having church services in a field.
There is really no example of a country that successfully "did something well" as a matter of policy; the countries that fared better in terms of death rates did so on the basis of their demographics or their cultural habits. Countries with younger or fitter (less obese) populations did much better. Countries with more group-minded cultures, like the East Asian countries, did better, but those countries are also much less obese so it's unclear how much the habitual masking in those places helped. If you have counterexamples, I would love to hear about them.
In the end, there's not much policy-wise you can do in the face of a highly transmissible airborne disease that's not actually deadly enough to scare people into staying away from each other. Governments can issue as many policy decisions as they would like in the moment, but in the end everyone is going to get it, and some will die.
Long-term policies that encourage people to actually be healthy would help a lot more; but instead many countries, and especially the developed Western ones, did the opposite and encouraged or forced people to stay home, next to their refrigerators, in fear, away from laughter and joy from their social groups, all the while demonizing those who broke the arbitrary and capricious rules at the same time that political leaders were visibly flouting their own rules. I suppose we can agree that we learned a lot about what not to do for the next pandemic.
And, also critically, there is no non-human transmission vector for smallpox. It travels exclusively between humans, contrasted against COVID which thrives in both human and animal populations. So if you were unvaccinated and spent all your time around milkmaids - you would not become infected, because there was no vector for the disease to get to you. If 90% of your company were milkmaids, you may get it if one of the other unvaccinated was infected, but the odds would be reduced. This is what herd immunity refers to.
You can observe the effects of 'herd immunity' with the current COVID vaccines in places such as Gibraltar. They achieved greater than 100% vaccination rates, and early on, by vaccinating not only their entire population, but even a large number of migrant workers. They ended up with a death rate of 3,204 per million contrasted against 3,266 for the US. And their infection rate was one of the highest in the world at nearly 60%, but that was probably more so due to extensive testing than greater susceptibility.
e.g., Those countries that paid only the sick to stay home were smarter than those who locked down everyone.
We should have invested in the infrastructure that will be of use in the next pandemic.
There are many obvious good policy decisions other than "do nothing".
I do realize that in the country run by Democrats, Republicans, and Trumpers that nothing useful will happen.
Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.
And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers.
Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making. Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.
Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar. Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.
But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.
They do and have done so many times throughout history.
> I am saying that the visceral reaction to plague is an instinctive human universal, not something that has to be cultivated.
Fear is an instinctive response to many things, and that can be and is manipulated.
Sadly, though, some of the most awful scapegoaters of the unvaccinated were indeed on the "left." Noam Chomsky even said they should be excluded from society completely, and if that meant they couldn't even obtain food, well, that would be their problem.
I stated the biggest example in my previous reply: Paying the sick to stay home would have been smarter than the lockdowns.
Spending on infrastructure for health testing at airports and air monitoring in public spaces would have been smart and we will need this for future pandemics.
The country with the most nuclear aircraft carriers could have invested in getting PCR machines installed everywhere. Instead, it propped up the cruise ship industry.
> Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.
Yes, all government policy decisions are about allocation of capital. I never wrote otherwise.
> Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.
Yes, spending money training doctors and nurses would have been smarter than corporate welfare in the form of PPP and Fed bond purchases. Our demographic collapse will have us needing more doctors and nurses even without accounting for future pandemics. Imagine if elected representatives were able to make decisions that made sense in the long term.
> And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers. Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making.
According to that table, there is a difference of over 1,000 excess deaths per 100K people. Clearly, some cultures will survive pandemics better than others.
> Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.
Sweden did not “do nothing” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to...).
> Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar.
I see no mystery here. There are no ways for states to protect themselves from the citizens of other states. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution enables effective virus distribution. Where there are differences, the simplest explanation I see is difference in elderly population versus seasonal cold, dry air.
> Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.
The excess death curves for California and Florida are very different. I live in Florida. I have been tracking the CDC data since early 2020 and built tooling around it to better understand the failures: https://mcculley.github.io/VisualizingObservedDeaths/
> But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.
This is a false dilemma. Of course we expect government to do smart things which result in fewer excess deaths, especially when we can see other governments doing smarter things.
The decision of St. James's parish to remove a handle from a well pump is the canonical example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...) Should they have done nothing instead?
I enjoy civilization. I choose to live in a city. This requires compromises due to density. Should we have no regulation for how sewage is treated?
And why did they check for scars? Because people were forging their vaccination certificate (like now with COVID). So this mandate thing did not really worked well.
It's okay if some unvaccinated people manage to cheat the system, as long as the vast majority cannot. Similar to how laws against thievery are useful even though thieves still exist.
> Risk for benefit may be worth taking, depending on how much benefit.
This is true. We each judge both the level of risk of each action we take, and the amount of benefit we gain from it. It is an _individual_ decision whether or not to go into a building, based on our _individual_ level of risk tolerance and our _individual_ benefit from whatever is in the building.
As a result, we long ago decided that if the government wants to step in and ban something that is risky, it must always have a rational basis on which that level of risk is determined. This prevents the government’s decisions from being arbitrary, and from favoring one party or group over others. (There are other requirements as well.)
For example, at some point we decided that crowded buildings were too large a fire risk. The government decided to allow the fire department to regulate the maximum number of people that could occupy every room of every building. In order to prevent this from being arbitrary, the fire department must base their determination on the actual fire risk: the materials the building is made from, the rate at which fire can spread in those materials, the number and size of the exits from the building, etc. The purpose of the building doesn’t matter: a church with 10,000 square feet and fire doors gets exactly the same maximum occupancy as a store with 10,000 square feet and fire doors (all else being equal; a real store would probably get dinged for having a bunch of additional flammable material in it).
It doesn’t matter that some buildings are used for frivolous purposes like entertainment while other are used for serious business. The fire doesn’t care about that, so neither can the fire department. This protects everybody against corruption and abuse of authority. Suppose the Fire Marshall was a crazy Fundamentalist, and arbitrarily decided that your bar should have a maximum occupancy of 2? You’d be out of business, and quite angry. By the same token, suppose the Fire Marshall was anti–religion, and arbitrarily decided that your church should have a maximum occupancy of 2? Same result. The rational basis rule is intended to protect us all from oppression at the hands of our neighbors, even when we have differing ideologies.
A virus doesn’t take into account the importance of the building when it infects people, and therefore pandemic restrictions on occupancy cannot take that into account either.
Because a lot of products can't stay outside. It would be incredibly disruptive to operations. Not to mention that many stores, including Home Depot, did start offering curbside pickup to reduce risk.
Fire danger is omnipresent and essentially forever. Pandemics are not. So your analogy doesn't apply. I don't even know why I'm bothering. F it. Have a good weekend. Pretend you won the argument.
Wrong. Some viruses don't get transmitted if the person is not symptomatic, even if there's an infection. Your lack of understanding belies your argument.
> Ask yourself what the efficacy would need to be for you to be pro-vax-mandate. I suspect I already know the answer.
Well, first of all, the vaccine has to be:
* effective,
* free of major side effects,
* for a virus that kills a large portion of the infected and that kills more than just the elderly and obese,
* and not mandated for people to actually live.
The COVID shots and mandates did not meet any of those requirements.
And if you complain that my last requirement is too much, remember that in the United States, the Federal Government has severe limits on its power on purpose. Sure, the government should be able to prevent unvaccinated people from accessing government facilities, but only temporarily (while the pandemic is going on) because the government has jurisdiction over those things.
But it does not have jurisdiction over telling businesses who they can and cannot do business with.
They care about their finances and those of their friends and lobbyists and donors, so corruption is the simplest and most obvious explanation.
> This is because of money, not because of fundamental scientific issues.
This is not at all true. There is only so much you can parallelize things, as every software dev should know. It will always take 9+ months to figure out what the effects are for a mother that was vaccinated before conception, for instance. (Does this trigger autoimmune issues? Birth defects, like thalidomide did? And some birth defects - mental ones in particular - might not become apparent for years!)
> They reduce your chance of infection and transmission by a bit (more in the first few months after vaccination), but not as much as they protect your health.
There's a decent bit of data now saying that having been vaccinated in the past increases your chance of infection after 12+ months.
> The vaccines have likely saved more than a million lives in the US. The worst side effects are extremely rare, and are caused at a higher rate by the virus itself.
One problem is that the lives saved and the side effects happen in different and only slightly overlapping populations, and long-term side effects (for both covid and the vaccines) are not yet known or knowable.
A couple of things. First, pregnant women are generally excluded from vaccine trials - this isn't something specific to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.
Second, what is the scientific basis for thinking that vaccination before pregnancy will affect women at the end of their pregnancy (that is, 9+ months later)? When you propose a possible harm, there should be a scientifically plausible basis for it. Is there one in this case?
> There's a decent bit of data now saying that having been vaccinated in the past increases your chance of infection after 12+ months.
I haven't seen anything to suggest this.
> One problem is that the lives saved and the side effects happen in different and only slightly overlapping populations
CoVID-19 was one of the leading causes of death across a wide range of ages. The idea that only the elderly suffered from it is not true.
> long-term side effects (for both covid and the vaccines) are not yet known or knowable.
Long-term side-effects of vaccination are very much knowable. There is no known mechanism that could lead to these vaccines causing long-term side-effects, and there are very good biological reasons for believing that they do not cause any long-term side-effects. Vaccine side-effects occur within months of vaccination, for reasons that are understood. They do not arise years afterwards (also for reasons that are understood). Saying that there may be side-effects years from now is simply FUD.
This is perhaps not an argument in favor of the proven safety of vaccines for pregnant women.
> Second, what is the scientific basis for thinking that vaccination before pregnancy will affect women at the end of their pregnancy (that is, 9+ months later)? When you propose a possible harm, there should be a scientifically plausible basis for it. Is there one in this case?
We fundamentally do not understand the human body. We do not know why many common medications work, and many of the reasons we think others work are likely wrong. And we know that many chemicals carry future risks of birth defects.
> CoVID-19 was one of the leading causes of death across a wide range of ages. The idea that only the elderly suffered from it is not true.
This is because people in their 20s and 30s are so unlikely to die outside of accidents and malice, not because covid was a large absolute risk. The risk of death for someone over 65 was iirc 100x that of someone under 55.
When you limit the group to "otherwise healthy people under 40" the risk ratio skews even further. This is normal. But it means that those people receive a much lower benefit from vaccination.
> There is no known mechanism that could lead to these vaccines causing long-term side-effects
Spike protein accumulating in cardiac tissue leading to myocarditis. Antigen fixation, leading to reduced protection against future variants. The immune system identifying the mRNA delivery vector as a threat, preventing the use of future mRNA treatments.
"But those aren't proved" is really not convincing to me. For an EUA for at-risk populations, ok. For mandates? Heeeelll no, go cross those Ts first.
> and there are very good biological reasons for believing that they do not cause any long-term side-effects.
The whole point of a vaccine is to cause long term effects. That intended effect is immunity to disease.
"Nothing else could possibly persist" smacks of hubris to me.
> Vaccine side-effects occur within months of vaccination, for reasons that are understood. They do not arise years afterwards (also for reasons that are understood). Saying that there may be side-effects years from now is simply FUD.
This is medicine we're talking about, a bit of uncertainty and doubt is very much justified - especially when the process has been politicized.
This is not true. We understand a great deal about the human body. What's relevant here is that we understand the mechanisms that cause serious vaccine side-effects, and we understand why those side-effects appear within a few months.
> Spike protein accumulating in cardiac tissue leading to myocarditis.
Myocarditis occurs soon after vaccination, not long afterwards. It's also a very rare side-effect (it actually occurs more often from the virus itself).
> The whole point of a vaccine is to cause long term effects. That intended effect is immunity to disease.
What does this have to do with long-term adverse side-effects? The types of changes that a vaccine causes in the immune system are understood, and the reasons why those changes sometimes cause adverse side-effects are also understood. The mechanisms do not spring into action years later. The side-effects begin within months, at the latest.
> "Nothing else could possibly persist" smacks of hubris to me.
You're just dismissing immunology out-of-hand, based on vague statements about science not knowing how the body works.
> especially when the process has been politicized.
The politicization was on the side of the vaccine "skeptics." One of the most infuriating aspects of the pandemic has been how the most effective single tool for saving lives, a tool that has minuscule risks, has been subject to so much FUD. This tool is safe enough and beneficial enough that I would have absolutely no problem with mandating it for participation in society, the same way that seat belts and airbags are mandated.