Near the start of the pandemic, I thought the most intrusive state powers would barely be needed. Why would you ever need to make a vaccine mandatory? What rational person would refuse a lifesaving medicine offered to them for free?
Well, I've got my answer.
Libertarians believe that force should be applied to person A to protect person B from person A in certain circumstances.
If person A wants to punch person B in the face, restricting person A by force is perfectly consistent with libertarian values.
If person A threatens to infect person B with a deadly disease due to refusing a vaccine, then a vaccine mandate has some justification under the same ideals. The devil will be in the details (e.g., how deadly is the disease, etc).
It's also why a carbon tax and many other measures are not inherently inconsistent with libertarian values on a first principles examination.
But for some reason, libertarians in practice tend to dislike these policy proposals, even though they can follow in principle from the founding axioms. I attribute that to group-think and a general disbelief in the existence of negative externalities, not to a problem inherent in libertarianism.
Nobody stands up and starts with "Lets approach this irrationally and ..."
Somebody who has already had covid. They've already taken on risk - why expose themselves to more?
Your argument of people acting rational breaks down in a lot of cases. Plenty of people have self destructive behaviors (many with externalities that affect others) that we are ok with.
But vaccination is a community thing more than an individual thing. If it were just about hurting yourself, then I'd agree that the discussion should be framed as paternal.
What I mean by punching yourself in the face is: Even if you don't have any family and you hate your neighbours, getting vaccinated is still in your own interests, because it stops you dying.
Right. It's more like running red lights in an absolutely massive armored vehicle. Little risk to self, potentially fatal consequences for others.
A vaccine goes into an individual body, so it is a personal thing subject to medical privacy.
The populace is increasingly being treated as children and pretend adults in leadership. We will force you to wear a seat belt or else. Force you to take a vaccine, circumstances be damned. The ACLU prior to their destruction pre power grab warned us all about what is about to happen… more things will be forced upon us “for our own good.” We are about to have a purge of the government and never has a purge of a government gone well.
When you look at the hold-outs, it's largely young people who are at very low risk of serious illness. (85% of 65 and older are vaccinated, but just 57% of people 18-29.) So it makes sense to me that they are more hesitant.
My rant aside, I think there are better and worse ways to infringe on people's liberty when needed. And given the way the winds are blowing, it would be much better to enforce vaccination at the federal level, i.e. compel people by law to get it. There can be exemption of course, but the point is it becomes between you and the state. The current patchwork creates all kinds of disparity, invades privacy be repeatedly making you tell others about your health and identify yourself, and burdens businesses and others with enforcement. It also lets the government avoid the ire of people who don't want a mandate, by moving the front lines of enforcement elsewhere.
I think business and local level mandates are more popular because they play on people's desire to punish the unvaccinated, instead of working positively to tackle covid.
That's not to say that it's unreasonable to question and philosophize the implications of a mandate. At the same time, barring a more effective plan, the implications of not having a mandate seem particularly horrific.
All the same, I do agree with you that if there is to be a mandate, that it's best to come from the federal government to create a uniform set of guidelines. I also agree that the patchwork of rules has been a mess.
People are punching themselves in the face all the time, see obesity crisis for example. Should we ban hamburgers & fries next?
Assuming you have luck and live in a rich country that offers one of the actually working vaccines.
Everyone is still a very far stretch
1. Young, healthy and fit people who don't have any prior medical conditions. I checked the stats in Canada and I have a lot more chances of dying in a car accident than COVID in my age group.
2. Minorities who have had very bad treatment by the medical community in the past. Numerous examples of blacks, Latin Americans, indigenous being used for experiments.
3. Similar to point 2, anyone who's low income and therefore had poor treatment by the medical community.
4. Everyone who's already gotten natural infection immunity. There's numerous studies of this being much stronger and longer lasting. While they also say that an extra vaccine might boost the immunity slightly more too, there's very little benefit imo, especially if you are already young and healthy.
5. Many vaccinated folks also oppose vaccine mandates because that requires disclosing personal information. Quebec's vaccine passport app already got hacked including name, date of birth, IP address and which vaccines. And the Quebec government was very dismissive of this whole thing too which didn't instil any confidence in them.
Vaccine mandates are also opposed by many in the minority community as they know this is just another reason which will cause more law enforcement actions.
Here's Aba & Preach, 2 of the largest black YouTubers of Canada, explaining why they oppose such vaccine mandates even though they themselves are vaccinated. They explain how historical poor and unethical treatment explains why many minorities or those from poor families are skeptic of the health care institutions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6yHSIqsT9g
So there's many reasons of not getting the irreversible, non-long term tested, declining efficacy and short lasting vaccine. There's no guarantees of how many boosters and how often they will be required. Israel is already talking about the 4th booster shot.
Also this whole mandate thing just makes the public even more accepting of more surveillance.
A rapidly developed vaccine using new experimental tech, with an emergency use approval…and someone in our government suggests that the black folks should line up first. Talk about clueless.
If you want to build a system as large as 300,000,000 people, you need some way to control the dynamics of that system so that outliers don't cause catastrophes, and the larger the system, the more extreme the outliers you'll encounter.
You are telling me that I am not allowed to disagree with you.
(2) There is an almost endless list of things people do that are to their detriment. A core part of libertarianism is that people have to be free to make their own mistakes. We don't mandate exercise, prudent spending, safe sex practices or sensible family planning. The reasons to mandate vaccination are not robust enough to justify mandating that either.
Although I think it is humourous that the "my body my choice" slogan is being studiously avoided by both wings of politics at the moment.
If a sizeable chunk of the population chooses not to participate in that collective action, they endanger themselves (which can be argued is their fair choice), but also those around them who are unable to take the vaccine. There is no individualist refusal to vaccinate, the effect is still collective, just in a negative direction.
Depressing that it wasn't enough.
It is easy to blame people for what could be your shortcomings. But this is not 5% or 10% of your population, it seems to be around 40-50%. This is more of a crisis of faith on both public and private institutions and it certainly doesn't get fixed with sticks and by removing more rights (and thus reinforcing the believes that made these people refuse the vaccine in the first place).
This is just false, though. The whole point of democracy is to allow folks to have a voice in their politics, not to avoid forcing folks to do things. We force folks to do things all of the time. This is what laws do: Sometimes they are easy to follow, but we also know that if we don't have, say, building codes and food safety laws that some folks will cut too many corners building or add weird things to bread (like in the 1800's).
Simply put, you aren't always going to be able to use words. And it seems vaccinations are similar.
Every rational person. If i gave you a free medicine (drugs for example) will you take it ?
The problem was that the political class undermined all trust in vaccination: promising more liberties to vaccinated people, contradicting the responsible state agencies ( this was the worse they could do), pouring money in Pharma companies and then buying their products ( looks like corruption), lying that the vaccines have been tested but in reality they had express approval, dismissing other vaccines ( Sputnik) for political reasons and forcing the people in a so called lockdown which (except in some countries) had no effect on the pandemic because the measures were pure propaganda (for example the child must stay in quarantine but the rest of the family, not)
The current case fatality rate is averaging around 2%, but that's with access to medical care.
The CFR at the early stages of the pandemic, and in countries without good medical systems, is much higher. See Italy during the first wave, which peaked at around 15%, or several Central and South American countries, which have averaged between 5% and 10%.
This is an order of magnitude off from what the data actually say.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
See table 4.
Delta: total cases: 92,029 Deaths within 28 days: 117
100 * (117 / 92,029) = 0.127%
No, not anywhere close to 2%. 5%? 10%? It never got anywhere near that.
This disease just isn't that deadly and we need to recognize that.
Here is the director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic discussing the issue [1]:
> “Vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body,” Goepfert said. “This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn’t expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine.”
> “The side effects that we see occur early on, and that’s it,” Goepfert said. “In virtually all cases, vaccine side effects are seen within the first two months after rollout.”
[1] https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12143-three-things-to-k...
The current set of vaccines have been fielded for nearly 2 years. How long term do you want to get?
It's a very efficient way to cleanse your entire bureaucracy of doubters.
I can't think of another example where a democratic republic, which by definition includes a spectrum of opinions, has its whole bureaucratic hierarchy re-aligned with the ruling party's platform.
Maybe this is due to the fact, that this is inherently undemocratic?
SCOTUS ruled that mandatory vaccines are constitutional back in 1905. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
The same reasoning that justifies this mandate would justify a state-imposed limit on daily calorie consumption, a state-imposed exercise requirement, and all sorts of other coercive measures that, while good for people's health, are flagrant violations of principles of bodily autonomy and informed consent for medical treatment.
This isn't about the vaccine and it's not even about COVID. This is about one political tribe using the state to hurt the other political tribe.
Under Biden’s change (correct me if I’m wrong), I can believe whatever I want about vaccines and say anything (so: have a political position)… as long as I get vaccinated (this is not a political position).
Not to mention that both ruling parties at the top are urging all to get vaccinated.
Ah good, the stuff they come together on is always really great.
Certifying to not boycott something is hardly comparable to have something injected into your body.
While with the latter your livlyhood dangles on an administered injection of a substance into your body (and probably regular boosters) any pledge to not do something in private is virtually un-enforcable and thus just lipservice.
But its hardly novel to make government employees do politically slanted things. I'm sure a lot of government employees on the democrat or neutral side felt strong opposition to demands made of them during the trump admin.
I'm for this one.
Thats not true at all. If I get vaccinated it reduces my risk of serious disease - the vaccine works.
I assume by "work" you mean herd immunity (I can't make sense of the statement otherwise), but even 99% vaccinated regions are seeing transmission because the Covid vaccines are not sterilizing and do little or nothing to reduce transmission. Herd immunity arguments don't apply here.
The people being "cleansed" here are the crazies (of any political flavour).
no matter what your political affiliation might be[0], we should always oppose such naked political power-grubbing.
[0]: note that i'd strongly argue against having one, not just as a matter of principle, but simply to make politicians really (rather than superficially, as it now is) work for our collective and individual support.
This paper says natural immunity better: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
Unfortunately the science is evolving so fast and the variants are coming so fast, it's impossible to keep up!
Google around and you should find these.
These kinds of vaccine mandates get some of those at the greatest risk vaccinated but also ends up being a giant distraction in the US and makes it harder for the rest of the world to get the vaccines that they need as well. I think the blanket mandate approach is used because it is a lot easier for the leaders at the top to make these proclamations then to organize an outreach approach that actually reaches those most vulnerable.
The fact is that a particularly vulnerable person is better off surrounded by vaccinated people even if they themselves are unvaccinated than if they are vaccinated but surrounded by unvaccinated people. This is a good and long overdue policy that should be widely replicated wherever vaccine supply permits.
However, this vaccine is non-sterilizing, meaning that it does not stop people from getting infected in the nose but stops progression to the lower respiratory tract thus preventing hospitalization. Before the delta variant the vaccines also worked surprisingly well at reducing infections, but with the Delta variant this is much less clear (if you have any links to studies on this topic I am very interested to see them).
Now we are risking the opposite situation. Most people that I encounter say "I am fully vaccinated" (so I don't need to wear a mask, take precaustions, etc). But the studies on these COVID vaccines have always shown that with great enough exposure the vaccinated will get infected and transmit that infection to others.
As the vaccines are failing harder and harder, convenient to blame those that weighted long term risk over short term protection.
Therefore this protective layer you describe would be most quickly and effectively formed by letting people at low risk all contract the disease.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
Whitehouse briefing:
COVID plan:
That's strange.
I need to get this vaccine, not to protect myself, but to protect you.
That's strange.
That's 2 strange things in a row.
When you see 2 strange things in a row like that, it smells fishy.
> That's strange.
Can you elaborate? Not sure I get it.
https://nypost.com/2021/09/09/usps-exempt-from-biden-vax-man...
thus proving this is not about science, but political, e.g. to stop talking about the Afghan fiasco.
> The USPS exemption was initially believed to allow postal workers to duck the private-sector mandate, too. But nearly four hours after that understanding was reported, the White House issued a clarification saying that postal workers will have a choice between getting vaccinated and getting tested once a week, just like workers at large companies.
“USPS is not included in the executive order requiring vaccination of Federal employees. USPS has a separate statutory scheme and is traditionally independent of federal personnel actions like this,” a Biden administration official said.
He added: “That said, USPS is strongly encouraged to comply. Also, [the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration] will cover USPS through the [emergency temporary standards], meaning that postal workers will be subject to the vaccination or testing policy announced today”
Maybe so, but when you use naked force to make people do things, you make an enemy for life. Anyone forced to choose between his bodily integrity and feeding his family will never, ever, not a million years, forgive you, even, and he will hate you for the rest of your days.
This sort of quip really makes me distrust NPR.
White people are more vaccinated than blacks or Latinos, but the journalist couldn't help but try to throw in a dunk on their favorite bogeyman.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/percent-of-total-p...
# Definitely not get the vaccine | white: 65%, hispanic: 13%, black: 13%
# Wait and see | white: 50%, hispanic: 27%, black: 14%
# Unvaccinated adults | white: 57%, hispanic: 20%, black: 13%
"Partisanship also plays a major role with more than half (58%) of the “definitely not” group identifying as Republican or Republican-leaning. In addition, religious identity also plays a role as White Evangelical Christians make up nearly twice the share of the “definitely not” group (32%) as the “wait and see” group."
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/dashboard/kff-covid...
Given US demographics, this is exactly what one would expect.
> Unvaccinated adults white: 57% hispanic: 20% black: 13%
Again, this shows white people as more vaccinated than other groups when accounting for population.
>Polling data from the Kaiser Family Foundation released [0] Wednesday morning (week of August 4th) makes obvious the disparity in the importance of each group. It estimates that Black Americans make up about 13 percent of the unvaccinated population and 13 percent of the group that says it will never receive a dose of the vaccine. Republicans, by contrast, make up more than half of each group, including nearly 6 in 10 of those who say they won’t get a vaccine.
Wear protection when grinding axes.
I will say that the study is way too small and not rigorous enough to use as a source for that information.
Interestingly KFF's numbers and polling tell very different stories, so I wonder if kff has bad/outdated/unrepresentative data or if pretty much every demographic has a subset that is lying about their vaccination status: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/nbc-news-pol...
In that poll, white people are lower than both black and hispanic people, and the biggest predictors for low vaccination are rural, republican, and trump support. It's possible that those groups are more likely to tell the truth about vaccine hesitancy?
Even if that were true, it's still a cheap shot from NPR, since the group you'd want to reference in that context would be whoever the largest anti-vax group is, not the ones who are least likely to change their minds.
And in any case, the link they cite as support doesn't actually support the statement: it's about rural whites not getting vaccinated, and mentions Republicans (and Evangelicals) only speculatively and in passing. It might be that NPR sees all these groups as equivalent, and uses one as a shorthand for the other without the need for explanation or comment, which of course they are not.
"The risk of death after contracting the disease was about 30%, with higher rates among babies. Often those who survived had extensive scarring of their skin, and some were left blind."
That is the line now. How far it will go we will see.
New traffic regulations? Everyone needs transportation to get somewhere. Controlling transport controls everything. This is a road to tyranny, etc, etc..
New worker's regulations? Everyone needs a job in our economy! Controlling wages controls people's lives! This is authoritarianism, etc...
New taxes? Everything you need to survive could be taxed! When does it end?? etc, etc..
The most minor policy change anywhere runs into this utterly inane argument. Updated food standards? Building codes? Public hearing to add a stop sign? When will this government overreach end???
It's tired, it's pointless, it's been said millions of times by the same libertarian/anarchists for a century. It adds nothing new to the conversation.
At any rate, "vaccination for a highly infectious, potentially deadly virus" indisputably counts as "health". Everything might be health-based if you want it to be (maybe), but the nature of the American system hopefully and usually minimizes room for abuse of that power - and certainly there's no appearance of abuse of that power here, now.
What is the point of this comment? He is mandating a vaccine during a pandemic.
Vaccination requirements have been a standard practice for well over a hundred years now, and the case for mandating a vaccine for Covid-19 is much, much better than the case for mandating many other vaccines that are already required.
This is health-based, clearly, and not just "if you want it to be".
I prefer to have a choice.
The, "Trust the authority. It's for your own good." argument does not sway me.
Where is the mandate to test / vaccinate these people?
Legal travelers and migrants are required to comply with covid restrictions, but these law breakers are not.
And then, on top of it, they are provided transportation all over the country and dropped off in jurisdictions without any coordination or notification.
How is this mandate supposed to help when the president and his people have been actively undermining the health and safety of this country for months, and have no plan to stop?
We seem to be focused on measuring output rather than outcomes. Other countries are giving recovered people the same status as the vaccinated since they have the antibodies. But I guess that makes too much sense...
Like, between a 100-200$ blood test to prove natural immunity* vs. a free vaccine, it should make sense to get the vaccine.
* IMO, honor system should be de-emphasized for people claiming natural immunity. If they want to fight on this hill, they should be able to prove they have that immunity in the first place, otherwise it's simply inconsiderate.
Everyone (who can) should take the covid vaccine, regardless of their antibody status.
And there are a vanishingly small number of medical reasons to skip it. Most of the people claiming this are making it up.
Apparently I learned that I’m allergic to my deodorant yesterday, it burned when I applied it to the skin and after a minute it became intolerable. Guess what it contained? PEG-8.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughl...
What's to stop the president from issuing another OSHA rule to fire people who are overweight and not actively addressing this risk factor?
The checks on power for the president are politics (reelection), legality / constitutionality via court system, and removal from office via impeachment trial.
