When I see posts that belittle the intelligence of people because their conclusion was to not get vaccinated, I usually dismiss the post out of hand as fast as they’ve dismissed any arguments against taking the vaccine.
There are a number of arguments against being vaccinated and with few answers to rebut those arguments in a compelling way, the government and its supporters have engaged in a multi-front PR campaign, including ad hominem attacks against those who’ve come to a different conclusion then they.
Medical science as a practice is still closer to the Wild West than to other sciences, such as physics or chemistry. And I’m old enough to have lived through a number of “settled science” health recommendations from the government that turned out to be bullshit from the get go. The biggest being the underlying driver of today’s obesity crisis.
Those who choose to pump the brakes just a bit, when failed by the government, corporations, and the elite power structure many times in the past, shouldn’t be vilified. I mean, these same people will let you die for any number of reasons just to simply preserve profits or maintain power. (See current insulin market in US as an example.)
However, I’m glad to see some on the left in the US beginning to embrace personal responsibility as a construct. I hope they remember that when the upcoming financial meteor hits.
Yea I'm sorry this sounds like a very reasonable and nicely articulated position but its BS. Obesity is indeed a difficult nut to crack and even today we are going round and round. Psychology has been going round and round for even longer (Freud in, Freud out, Behaviorism in, out etc etc). But you know, infectous air borne viral disease is not exactly cutting edge. Vaccines are not 'the wild west'.
The 'reasons' for not getting vaccinated are almost entirely stupid. That's not ad hominem, that's a fact. (BTW, ad hominem does not mean 'insulting' or 'mean' or 'makes me cry', it is a logical fallacy. "You stupid because you say stupid things" is not an ad hominem but "You're a stupid person therefore your position on trade policy must be wrong" is).
But how can we know they are stupid when so much is uncertain in life? Well for one when they are based on obvious falsehoods, when they are made by people who say some things are important to them but clearly they don't actually care....(example relative who talks about unclear long term effects and FDA unapproval as he sucks his vaping device). I'm also done with "but this or that gov't official changed or was wroung about X" when the people pushing this line never seem to take any responsibility for their flip flops, dead ends, blind alleys (HCQ, ivermectin, 'demon sperm doctor', claims that the population hit herd immunity starting back in March 2020 and going on since then, etc. etc.).
But look, that's ok. You're never going to get 100% of people to do anything. Just about everyone has some stupid idea in their head about something. Most of us are going to die sooner than we should because we make stupid calls every day (hello Wendys, McDonalds, Burger King etc.). A lot of us will do stupid things but we won't suffer for it because others pick up the slack to some degree or we just luck out.
However we had some states go to 50%+ vaccinated up to 70% right now while others kept themselves barely below 40% at best. That's not going to work. We need more like 70% vaccinated. That still leaves plenty of room for people saying no for mostly stupid reasons (but a few with good reasons). And here's the thing, we are either going to get that or we will eventually get a mutation that dodges vaccination and we are back to 2020 all over again with governors declaring everything is OK and 3 weeks later discovering they have a state of emergency.
Since Fauci’s announcement yesterday, that vaccinated and unvaccinated produce almost identical amount of new viruses, your argument that unvaccinated would increase the mutation rate is invalid.
Your standpoint is clear, but why not let the unvaccinated make their own choices? It won’t affect the vaccinated at all. Heck, you’d probably be glad when/if all “stupids” (according to you) eventually die off, right?
I am acting perfectly responsibly by living a healthy lifestyle. As someone in my 20's, it is nonsensical for me to get a vaccine when the side effects might be worse than the actual virus. I don't get flu shots either, because the perceived benefits are non-existent. I don't change my behavior based on hysterical media reports, and where I live, hysterical media reports were the primary, if not the only, evidence of a pandemic.
Except the side effects won't be worse than the virus... Unvax'd people I know who got COVID were sick for a week or more with symptoms worse than the flu. whereas I only had a sore arm and a mild 24-hour fever after my second mRNA shot.
if I had to pick between being mildly sick for 1-2 days or being moderately/severely sick for 7-10 days I'd pick the first every time...!
Tell that to India. Median age there is 28 versus countries like the US (38.1 yrs) or Italy (47.3 yrs). Yet plenty of 20-somethings have died trying to get hospital beds (or even in hospital beds).
You're basically peeing in the pool we're all swimming in and telling us since we swim with our mouths closed what's the big deal. To a degree you can have some people do that without causing a problem but the key word there is 'some'.
Ok, so how much is "some"? Given that over half the U.S. population is vaccinated, how many more people with statistically tiny risk need to be vaccinated?
Also, how many other deadly diseases do you think I'm carrying without knowing anything about me?
Weirdly enough, plenty of people swim in public pools.
People swim in public pools because the pee-ers are sufficiently small for us not to notice. Make it a norm to stand on the side peeing in the pool for all to see and, assuming you're not arrested because you've conned the gov't into thinking its your 'freedom', and you'll see public pool use drop a lot.
And while almost everything has opend back up, the real restriction on freedom is the fact that people are NOT going out as much and enjoying things as much because the virus has not been eliminated. Yes you will find a packed bar here or there but plenty of people have altered their behavior (even if it is subtle).
Anyway, you are probably not carrying any deadly diseases that you can pass to others easily from normal non-sexual, non-sharing needs interactions. I'm assuming you have not just arrived home from an ebola hotspot or have been trying to reconstruct smallpox in your basement lab, of course.
I agree with a lot of this, but I really don't like mandates. For businesses I tend to think its legal, though I don't like employers asking about my medical history, and I'm not sure I want to allow that, and as a customer I'd prefer to use businesses that don't ask if I am vaccinated. First, and probably most clearly true, asking if I am vaccinated imposes a cost on the vaccinated, who as you say are at basically 0 risk, and so stand to gain very little from dealing with this question. I also think if I have been vaccinated or been infected by something before should be private medical information (how would people feel about sharing if they have had the HPV vaccine, or have acquired immunity), and I'm especially concerned about this setting a precedent. It seems obvious of your three options live with restrictions forever should be out, but I'd really like to understand why you seem to prefer forcing people to get vaccinated to getting rid of restrictions and letting people live with the consequences of their actions? Do you simply think its not possible because some people don't have the stomach for it, or is there another reason?
I agree that the 9/11 reaction was ruinously costly and not justified, but you do leave out one significant "steelmanning" point: that the pro GWOT crowd believed that if we didn't do the GWOT the terrorists would eventually nuke us. "We can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud" was the slogan. And of course given the massive scale of death and destruction that would have resulted from a nuclear attack, if GWOT measures had actually reduced the likelihood of that substantially, the cost/benefit calculus would have been quite different. Of course the vast majority of GWOT, TSA, etc measures large and small did absolutely nothing to reduce that risk, but that's an important fact to adduce when making the anti GWOT, TSA, etc argument.
I think the analogous tail risk to consider in the COVID case is the risk of a "full vaccine escape" variant, or a variant which has significant mortality rate for kids, evolving. The notion that we need to continue restricting people's liberty to reduce that risk is probably also not justified when you run the numbers, but we do need to run the numbers.
The 'ruinously costly' reaction to 9/11 here has the Iraq War doing most of the heavy lifting. But we should consider the war was just as much the realization of neo-conservative ideology which envisions the US converting 'bad nations' into 'good ones' which was popular well before 9/11 happened and continues to this day. After Trump lost the election we now know Pence and others were supporting invading Iran 'because they were evil'.
Consider an altenative universe where the only reaction to 9/11 was the TSA and law enforcement. The analogy seems a lot less real.
“People that behave irresponsibly”. If they are young and healthy it may be a very logical decision not to get vaccinated given the unknown long term risks. If those risks turn out to be large, all the non vaccinated might be right. I’m 62 and overweight, taking the vaccine seemed a good risk benefit to me, but as a biochemist who has followed the outer edges of vaccine data if I was a young, healthy woman wanting to have children I wouldn’t touch it.
Just want to point out that it's possible/non-contradictory to believe that at least some people who are poor don't "deserve" to be so, and yet oppose people being forced by the government to redistribute wealth to anyone. Such a person may also believe that the right solution is voluntary redistribution instead.
So why do we have to check our shoes? Is it because one guy every 30 years wants to blow a plane up? No there's plenty of people who want to blow up planes. But since everything is checked, pulling it off is hard. Hence we almost never hear about hijackings or bombings of planes post 9/11. If tomorrow we stopped checking shoes, why wouldn't multiple people try to bomb planes? Yet this dynamic thinking is missed by people who write stupid things like:
"So even though Richard Reid failed to kill a single person, he levied a tax that is the time equivalent of 14 lives per year."
Tomorrow stop checking shoes and let one Reid pull off a bombing and you'll kill more than 14 people in one shot AND cause millions to stop taking planes.....which will be a 'tax' much more than 14 lives per year in terms of longer travel times, more accidents on the road, forgone travel etc.
Now if you said "manually checking everyone's shoes costs 14 lives a year in time, let's come up with some type of mat that can automatically scan shoes so no one has to take them off", I'd say go for it. But make no mistake, you're incurring a real opportunity cost. The people who create the scanning mat could have been working on a scanner to detect cancer early or helping Musk figure out how to get self driving cars to finally work. Once the scanner is invented, it may feel 'free' but it isn't. It does, however, SOLVE the problem.
What doesn't solve the problem is saying "do less because we will only have one Reid every generation, and he wasn't even able to get his shoe bomb to work!". Maybe but odds are once you get another Reid you'll end up with a lot more since such things seem to breed copy cats.
"I’ve been highly critical of the Republican Party. But perhaps having a party that is more skeptical of vaccines is the price you pay for having a party that distrusts experts enough to not mask their children forever for no good reason"
I notice this line of argument a lot. People making crazy assertions are to be tolerated because maybe it is our own fault for getting X Y or Z wrong. Here's the thing, though, no one has ever proven kids cannot get and spread the virus. Every child lives with at least one adult and every child in school interacts with adults. It's not unreasonable to wonder if schools can be sparks for new outbreaks esp. in populations where the forest is very dry (i.e low vaccination levels and spreading virus).
I can imagine a nightmare case where schools are open in low vaccination states, outbreaks are increasing and a sizeable portion of parents start saying they will pull their kids out....AND various Republican governors declaring they will not offer online options because "something something freedom". We are also one variant away from a mutation that is better at evading immunity and we are all set back to where we were a year ago.
So I'm not going to say close schools or even necessarily demand student masking everywhere but I see a pattern where every time cases go up we get a chorus of "do less" and that does not solve the problem but sets us up for yet another round of it.
Since this doesn't happen, your model of the world needs adjustment. Or is this supply of Reid copycats dead-set on using shoe-bombs and will never try firearms?
Or it could also mean people who want to get bombs or guns on planes to cause a hijacking or terrorism are not very sophisticated and tend to give themselves away. I'm sure the KGB or James Bond's support team could devise a way to get stuff on a plane, but even terrorist organizations are not at that level. Hence the glance at the shoes is sufficient, although time consuming, to intimidate them.
Yet isn't it odd that no one brings a gun on a plane or if they do they are well behaved people who don't cause problems with it?
It seems to me either the 'gun detection measure' is wrong, or they are able to give the impression to would be hijackers that getting a gun on board is harder than it is, or somehow human nature has turned good since 9/11.
Let's say I'm a person who wants to shoot up a plane for my 15 minutes of fame. A 30% detection rate is roughly like playing Russian Roulette two times. I'd be pretty nervous playing one round of it, let alone two. Perhaps 30% is good enough or perhaps perceptions are doing the balance of the work here.
Russian roulette? If your gun is discovered the TSA will confiscate it, or throw it in the conveniently located nearby bin they carelessly toss all the potential liquid explosives that they discover. You might even get a fine, like all dozens of other fools who forget to take their gun out of their backpack before checking in for flights every year. Some are even turned in at the destination airport, having failed to be detected. If such a terrorist is not smart enough to do such a risk of capture evaluation, then instead of making everyone remove their shoes an adequate deterrent could be a red shaggy rug printed with “bomb detection in progress” , or a similarly labeled vest on a beagle.
I suspect you get a fine after some investigation, and an investigation that gets pretty intense if you do not seem like just a casual gun owning person who forgot he had it in his bag.
But regardless, we still have the fact that no one has done much plane related since all this went into effect. It is true terror styles seem to follow fads. For a while it was truck bombs, then shooting up schools, then I recal incels in N. America and Islamists in Europe started driving into crowds of people on streets. Perhaps a misperception of how good the TSA is has combined with changing fads to leave planes untouched for the last decade or so.
Remember the 'tax' here of having to take off our shoes is a very real tax. But it is not imposed by the TSA, it's imposed by the Richard Reids of the world who are happy to cash in on their Andy Warhol entitlement of 15 minutes of fame by going out in an explosion of glory (and I guess you can say this is a tax imposed by human nature, you can't get a few million of us together without getting one or two aspirational 15-minute types). The TSA I'm sure is guilty of not finding better solutions to this tax (i.e. shoe scanning, but then I'm no expert on bombs or scanners so I have no idea how easy such a device would be), but a solution is NOT 'open gates' for shoe bombers because you'll get more than one Reid.
I agree mostly with this post, but take issue with your characterization of people choosing not to vaccinate, especially given your acknowledgement of the low risk of COVID19 for most people. I don't think a person's intelligence should be belittled for not trusting a vaccine that relies on novel (vaccine) technology and an accelerated approval process, and which has not yet been approved by the FDA (if that matters). Given how quickly it moved through testing, how can we possibly know with certainty the magnitude of long term effects?
When you consider the very limited risk of COVID19 for most people, which you've noted, a CBA-informed decision making model for individuals taking the vaccine is extremely sensitive to our assumptions about the vaccines long term safety. Again, given the inevitable uncertainty about long term safety, I don't think we should be so harsh to judge people for whom projection of uncertain risk outweighs the limited personal benefit for them of the vaccine.
The point I always make to people who have this concern is that while it's common for medicines you take every day to cause longterm side effects, this is far less common and plausible from a vaccine you take once or twice. It's hard to imagine a biological mechanism for "you take vaccine, feel sick for a day or two, and then five years later something horrible happens".
I will grant that not everybody knows this, and people have been primed to expect longterm side effects from everything because of those ridiculous drug advertisements.
Interesting if true. Have you seen any good pieces taking long term concerns seriously, but finding them unwarranted? Are the typical multi-year vaccine approval processes then not testing for long term effects? It's just bureaucratic sclerosis that leads to such a lengthy process?
I will also add that there is also reason for short term vaccine skepticism. The media and social media has been so loathe to permit discussion of actual side-effects, with FB even censoring peoples private posts discussing personal experiences with side effects. I think this leads people to rationally suspect that the immediate side effects are more common than we are led to believe. Then you have the CDC changing their VAERS numbers, reducing them by half (
I'm vaccinated, but my point is I don't think idiocy is the only reason not to be. And I think our public health communication during this pandemic has been atrocious, especially by many of the same entities that scold folks to vaccinate now. I think rather than blaming and insulting people who aren't vaccinated, we should reflect on how we can improve public health communication credibility and effectiveness.
So, I don't think I've read any comprehensive pieces I can link about this (I'm a scientist, but I don't expect you to take things on my authority especially seeing as how I'm writing using a pseudonym on the internet). But if you look in literature for examples of long-term side effects from vaccines you basically get two. One is Guillain Barre. The 1976 swine flu vaccine caused Guillain Barre with a frequency of 1 per 100k, the seasonal flu vaccine causes it with a frequency of 1-2 per million. Most people recover fully, some don't. Guillain Barre seems to arise as a byproduct of a lot of immune responses, usually viral infections, occasionally vaccines. Notably, it sets in pretty quickly after vaccination, a result of the initial immune response. Also, it is insanely rare, far less dangerous than the diseases being immunized against.
The other danger is antibody dependent enhancement (a weird mechanism where prior immune response makes the disease worse). The famous alleged example of this is Dengvaxia. If this were an issue with COVID vaccines though, it would have been screamingly obvious in the clinical trials.
I suppose there's one other example, which is polio infection from inadequately inactivated polio, but that's more like a manufacturing issue than a vaccine danger and is not relevant to a vaccine like this.
Why do trials last so long? Partly bureaucracy, partly because you usually have to wait a long time to get enough cases to hit statistical significance. COVID was just so rampant in summer 2020 that they could finish the trials quickly.
I do agree with you that the censorship efforts here are weird, off-putting and quite possibly counterproductive.
I wonder how much of side effect worry is really masking uncomfort with getting a shot? I suspect a lot of people who demand more data, more certainity have no issue taking a new pill. And if we raided their medicine cabinates we'll find pills there that did not exist a decade ago.
Of course there are plenty of cases of this or that pill that later turned out to have various side effects. Yet psyhologically I think people feel safer eating something than getting an injection.
Contemplating this as my 20-something family member told me a few weeks ago he was reluctant to get the vaccine because it is 'experimental' and not 'FDA approved' as he sucked his vaping device.
Somewhat (though the mechanism for mRNA vaccines doesn't really allow for 6-month-plus-latent-side-effects). But if you're specifically worried about mRNA, there are vaccines made with traditional approaches (J&J's Janssen in the US, AZ vaccines in most of the rest of the world), so just go for those. Less effective overall, but still pretty good (substantially better than flu vaccines).
This is a great way to look at the situation. A friend who was three month pregnant at the time read a news piece that the vaccines had no long term effects on pregnant women or their babies. She just said, “How do they know? It hasn’t even been nine months.” That was a great question.
The communication definitely is and has been terrible. I'm personally reasonably convinced getting vaccinated is worthwhile and the long term risks are small, but I can understand someone wanting to wait longer to see if there is any unknown unknowns. So I'm fine with not judging people for whatever choice they make, but its high time we get rid of restrictions and let people live with the consequences of their choice.
I think letting the unvaccinated live with the consequences of their choice means allowing them to get COVID19, not excluding them socially and economically. People who trust vaccines and want their protection are protected, even in an encounter with an unvaccinated, right? Positioning the unvaccinated as dangerous and requiring isolation undermines the message that vaccines protect those using them, since the implication is that the vaccinated need protection not only by vaccines but also by decree. I don't see how this makes sense, unless the goal is to eradicate COVID19, but I don't think that's what we're discussing here.
Your second graf is inane. Try this: "Consider that Pearl Harbor killed 2,403 people." Wars always kill more people than the specific violent events that mark their beginnings. It's fatuous on its face to complain that "fewer people were killed before the war started." Duh! And just as fatuous to suggest that fact alone means the war in question is an "overreaction."
Great article but why are you belittling those who don’t want a vaccine that hasn’t even received full FDA approval? Choosing not to be injected with an experimental vaccine doesn’t seem that crazy.
The author neglects a few things: 1) The COVID vaccines are not effective--data from CDC studies, and also from Israel, is showing that the vaccines have efficacy of about 40 percent, similar to recent flu vaccines. Therefore, universal vaccination will not stop the spread of the virus.
2) The COVID vaccines are not safe. The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) has over 11,000 reports of death associated with COVID vaccination for the first 6 months of 2021. In a typical year, VAERS shows less than 200 deaths associated with all types of vaccination for about 70 different vaccines. There has never been anything like what we are seeing reported with the COVID vaccines, and in a sane society, we would have stopped the vaccine roll-out long ago while we investigated what was happening.
3) There are alternative treatments for COVID19 that are quite effective and do not carry the risks of the vaccines. Treatment regimens that include Ivermectin are one example, and have been used successfully in many countries, as well as in the U.S. It is not a case of getting vaccinated or nothing.
I've noticed a lot of people simply recycling their 2020 arguments for the current situation, not taking any notice of the possibility that the facts may have changed in the interim.
Though, yes, I see dem tendency to discount of free trade economics, and as you point out, their over valuing of masks fairly similar to republican tendency to discount of climate change, and vaxing.
I'm not liberterian but I really like Jason Brennan idea of epistocracy.
"price you pay for having a party that distrusts experts enough to not mask their children forever for no good reason."
No, no, IMHO.
repubs distrust experts when and if they dont align to thier pre-existing values, but not the other way around. Perhaps Democrats are similar but at least they didn't deny the vaccine science.
Also, while democrats and republicans have allowed airport tsa to exist, republicans created it, and they seem a bit more willing to give it power.
"For the extra spending to have been justified using conventional tools of cost-benefit analysis, assuming a 75% reduction in risk, it would have needed to prevent an otherwise successful 9/11-level attack every two years, or a 2005 London bombings-level event every few weeks."
When I see posts that belittle the intelligence of people because their conclusion was to not get vaccinated, I usually dismiss the post out of hand as fast as they’ve dismissed any arguments against taking the vaccine.
There are a number of arguments against being vaccinated and with few answers to rebut those arguments in a compelling way, the government and its supporters have engaged in a multi-front PR campaign, including ad hominem attacks against those who’ve come to a different conclusion then they.
Medical science as a practice is still closer to the Wild West than to other sciences, such as physics or chemistry. And I’m old enough to have lived through a number of “settled science” health recommendations from the government that turned out to be bullshit from the get go. The biggest being the underlying driver of today’s obesity crisis.
Those who choose to pump the brakes just a bit, when failed by the government, corporations, and the elite power structure many times in the past, shouldn’t be vilified. I mean, these same people will let you die for any number of reasons just to simply preserve profits or maintain power. (See current insulin market in US as an example.)
However, I’m glad to see some on the left in the US beginning to embrace personal responsibility as a construct. I hope they remember that when the upcoming financial meteor hits.
Yea I'm sorry this sounds like a very reasonable and nicely articulated position but its BS. Obesity is indeed a difficult nut to crack and even today we are going round and round. Psychology has been going round and round for even longer (Freud in, Freud out, Behaviorism in, out etc etc). But you know, infectous air borne viral disease is not exactly cutting edge. Vaccines are not 'the wild west'.
The 'reasons' for not getting vaccinated are almost entirely stupid. That's not ad hominem, that's a fact. (BTW, ad hominem does not mean 'insulting' or 'mean' or 'makes me cry', it is a logical fallacy. "You stupid because you say stupid things" is not an ad hominem but "You're a stupid person therefore your position on trade policy must be wrong" is).
But how can we know they are stupid when so much is uncertain in life? Well for one when they are based on obvious falsehoods, when they are made by people who say some things are important to them but clearly they don't actually care....(example relative who talks about unclear long term effects and FDA unapproval as he sucks his vaping device). I'm also done with "but this or that gov't official changed or was wroung about X" when the people pushing this line never seem to take any responsibility for their flip flops, dead ends, blind alleys (HCQ, ivermectin, 'demon sperm doctor', claims that the population hit herd immunity starting back in March 2020 and going on since then, etc. etc.).
But look, that's ok. You're never going to get 100% of people to do anything. Just about everyone has some stupid idea in their head about something. Most of us are going to die sooner than we should because we make stupid calls every day (hello Wendys, McDonalds, Burger King etc.). A lot of us will do stupid things but we won't suffer for it because others pick up the slack to some degree or we just luck out.
However we had some states go to 50%+ vaccinated up to 70% right now while others kept themselves barely below 40% at best. That's not going to work. We need more like 70% vaccinated. That still leaves plenty of room for people saying no for mostly stupid reasons (but a few with good reasons). And here's the thing, we are either going to get that or we will eventually get a mutation that dodges vaccination and we are back to 2020 all over again with governors declaring everything is OK and 3 weeks later discovering they have a state of emergency.
"The 'reasons' for not getting vaccinated are almost entirely stupid" is the stupidest
thing anyone has ever said in the history of time
Since Fauci’s announcement yesterday, that vaccinated and unvaccinated produce almost identical amount of new viruses, your argument that unvaccinated would increase the mutation rate is invalid.
Your standpoint is clear, but why not let the unvaccinated make their own choices? It won’t affect the vaccinated at all. Heck, you’d probably be glad when/if all “stupids” (according to you) eventually die off, right?
I am acting perfectly responsibly by living a healthy lifestyle. As someone in my 20's, it is nonsensical for me to get a vaccine when the side effects might be worse than the actual virus. I don't get flu shots either, because the perceived benefits are non-existent. I don't change my behavior based on hysterical media reports, and where I live, hysterical media reports were the primary, if not the only, evidence of a pandemic.
Except the side effects won't be worse than the virus... Unvax'd people I know who got COVID were sick for a week or more with symptoms worse than the flu. whereas I only had a sore arm and a mild 24-hour fever after my second mRNA shot.
if I had to pick between being mildly sick for 1-2 days or being moderately/severely sick for 7-10 days I'd pick the first every time...!
Tell that to India. Median age there is 28 versus countries like the US (38.1 yrs) or Italy (47.3 yrs). Yet plenty of 20-somethings have died trying to get hospital beds (or even in hospital beds).
You're basically peeing in the pool we're all swimming in and telling us since we swim with our mouths closed what's the big deal. To a degree you can have some people do that without causing a problem but the key word there is 'some'.
Ok, so how much is "some"? Given that over half the U.S. population is vaccinated, how many more people with statistically tiny risk need to be vaccinated?
Also, how many other deadly diseases do you think I'm carrying without knowing anything about me?
Weirdly enough, plenty of people swim in public pools.
People swim in public pools because the pee-ers are sufficiently small for us not to notice. Make it a norm to stand on the side peeing in the pool for all to see and, assuming you're not arrested because you've conned the gov't into thinking its your 'freedom', and you'll see public pool use drop a lot.
And while almost everything has opend back up, the real restriction on freedom is the fact that people are NOT going out as much and enjoying things as much because the virus has not been eliminated. Yes you will find a packed bar here or there but plenty of people have altered their behavior (even if it is subtle).
Anyway, you are probably not carrying any deadly diseases that you can pass to others easily from normal non-sexual, non-sharing needs interactions. I'm assuming you have not just arrived home from an ebola hotspot or have been trying to reconstruct smallpox in your basement lab, of course.
That above should read 'non-sharing needles'.
IVERMECTIN IN INDIA
I agree with a lot of this, but I really don't like mandates. For businesses I tend to think its legal, though I don't like employers asking about my medical history, and I'm not sure I want to allow that, and as a customer I'd prefer to use businesses that don't ask if I am vaccinated. First, and probably most clearly true, asking if I am vaccinated imposes a cost on the vaccinated, who as you say are at basically 0 risk, and so stand to gain very little from dealing with this question. I also think if I have been vaccinated or been infected by something before should be private medical information (how would people feel about sharing if they have had the HPV vaccine, or have acquired immunity), and I'm especially concerned about this setting a precedent. It seems obvious of your three options live with restrictions forever should be out, but I'd really like to understand why you seem to prefer forcing people to get vaccinated to getting rid of restrictions and letting people live with the consequences of their actions? Do you simply think its not possible because some people don't have the stomach for it, or is there another reason?
I agree that the 9/11 reaction was ruinously costly and not justified, but you do leave out one significant "steelmanning" point: that the pro GWOT crowd believed that if we didn't do the GWOT the terrorists would eventually nuke us. "We can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud" was the slogan. And of course given the massive scale of death and destruction that would have resulted from a nuclear attack, if GWOT measures had actually reduced the likelihood of that substantially, the cost/benefit calculus would have been quite different. Of course the vast majority of GWOT, TSA, etc measures large and small did absolutely nothing to reduce that risk, but that's an important fact to adduce when making the anti GWOT, TSA, etc argument.
I think the analogous tail risk to consider in the COVID case is the risk of a "full vaccine escape" variant, or a variant which has significant mortality rate for kids, evolving. The notion that we need to continue restricting people's liberty to reduce that risk is probably also not justified when you run the numbers, but we do need to run the numbers.
The 'ruinously costly' reaction to 9/11 here has the Iraq War doing most of the heavy lifting. But we should consider the war was just as much the realization of neo-conservative ideology which envisions the US converting 'bad nations' into 'good ones' which was popular well before 9/11 happened and continues to this day. After Trump lost the election we now know Pence and others were supporting invading Iran 'because they were evil'.
Consider an altenative universe where the only reaction to 9/11 was the TSA and law enforcement. The analogy seems a lot less real.
“People that behave irresponsibly”. If they are young and healthy it may be a very logical decision not to get vaccinated given the unknown long term risks. If those risks turn out to be large, all the non vaccinated might be right. I’m 62 and overweight, taking the vaccine seemed a good risk benefit to me, but as a biochemist who has followed the outer edges of vaccine data if I was a young, healthy woman wanting to have children I wouldn’t touch it.
Just want to point out that it's possible/non-contradictory to believe that at least some people who are poor don't "deserve" to be so, and yet oppose people being forced by the government to redistribute wealth to anyone. Such a person may also believe that the right solution is voluntary redistribution instead.
By some estimates TSA's security theater kills approximately 500 people per year due to people deciding to drive instead of fly. https://www.wired.com/2012/04/is-airport-security-killing-500-people-a-year/
So why do we have to check our shoes? Is it because one guy every 30 years wants to blow a plane up? No there's plenty of people who want to blow up planes. But since everything is checked, pulling it off is hard. Hence we almost never hear about hijackings or bombings of planes post 9/11. If tomorrow we stopped checking shoes, why wouldn't multiple people try to bomb planes? Yet this dynamic thinking is missed by people who write stupid things like:
"So even though Richard Reid failed to kill a single person, he levied a tax that is the time equivalent of 14 lives per year."
Tomorrow stop checking shoes and let one Reid pull off a bombing and you'll kill more than 14 people in one shot AND cause millions to stop taking planes.....which will be a 'tax' much more than 14 lives per year in terms of longer travel times, more accidents on the road, forgone travel etc.
Now if you said "manually checking everyone's shoes costs 14 lives a year in time, let's come up with some type of mat that can automatically scan shoes so no one has to take them off", I'd say go for it. But make no mistake, you're incurring a real opportunity cost. The people who create the scanning mat could have been working on a scanner to detect cancer early or helping Musk figure out how to get self driving cars to finally work. Once the scanner is invented, it may feel 'free' but it isn't. It does, however, SOLVE the problem.
What doesn't solve the problem is saying "do less because we will only have one Reid every generation, and he wasn't even able to get his shoe bomb to work!". Maybe but odds are once you get another Reid you'll end up with a lot more since such things seem to breed copy cats.
"I’ve been highly critical of the Republican Party. But perhaps having a party that is more skeptical of vaccines is the price you pay for having a party that distrusts experts enough to not mask their children forever for no good reason"
I notice this line of argument a lot. People making crazy assertions are to be tolerated because maybe it is our own fault for getting X Y or Z wrong. Here's the thing, though, no one has ever proven kids cannot get and spread the virus. Every child lives with at least one adult and every child in school interacts with adults. It's not unreasonable to wonder if schools can be sparks for new outbreaks esp. in populations where the forest is very dry (i.e low vaccination levels and spreading virus).
I can imagine a nightmare case where schools are open in low vaccination states, outbreaks are increasing and a sizeable portion of parents start saying they will pull their kids out....AND various Republican governors declaring they will not offer online options because "something something freedom". We are also one variant away from a mutation that is better at evading immunity and we are all set back to where we were a year ago.
So I'm not going to say close schools or even necessarily demand student masking everywhere but I see a pattern where every time cases go up we get a chorus of "do less" and that does not solve the problem but sets us up for yet another round of it.
The TSA has a gun detection rate of about ~30%, and this is well known (https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa-misses-70-of-fake-weapons-but-thats-an-improvement/?sh=26a3e1372a38), it used to be even lower (on the order of 10%). The wannabe Richard Reids could just go shoot up/try to hijack an aircraft tomorrow and have 2:1 odds of success, no need to brew his own explosives or anything that complex.
Since this doesn't happen, your model of the world needs adjustment. Or is this supply of Reid copycats dead-set on using shoe-bombs and will never try firearms?
Or it could also mean people who want to get bombs or guns on planes to cause a hijacking or terrorism are not very sophisticated and tend to give themselves away. I'm sure the KGB or James Bond's support team could devise a way to get stuff on a plane, but even terrorist organizations are not at that level. Hence the glance at the shoes is sufficient, although time consuming, to intimidate them.
Yet isn't it odd that no one brings a gun on a plane or if they do they are well behaved people who don't cause problems with it?
It seems to me either the 'gun detection measure' is wrong, or they are able to give the impression to would be hijackers that getting a gun on board is harder than it is, or somehow human nature has turned good since 9/11.
Let's say I'm a person who wants to shoot up a plane for my 15 minutes of fame. A 30% detection rate is roughly like playing Russian Roulette two times. I'd be pretty nervous playing one round of it, let alone two. Perhaps 30% is good enough or perhaps perceptions are doing the balance of the work here.
Russian roulette? If your gun is discovered the TSA will confiscate it, or throw it in the conveniently located nearby bin they carelessly toss all the potential liquid explosives that they discover. You might even get a fine, like all dozens of other fools who forget to take their gun out of their backpack before checking in for flights every year. Some are even turned in at the destination airport, having failed to be detected. If such a terrorist is not smart enough to do such a risk of capture evaluation, then instead of making everyone remove their shoes an adequate deterrent could be a red shaggy rug printed with “bomb detection in progress” , or a similarly labeled vest on a beagle.
I suspect you get a fine after some investigation, and an investigation that gets pretty intense if you do not seem like just a casual gun owning person who forgot he had it in his bag.
But regardless, we still have the fact that no one has done much plane related since all this went into effect. It is true terror styles seem to follow fads. For a while it was truck bombs, then shooting up schools, then I recal incels in N. America and Islamists in Europe started driving into crowds of people on streets. Perhaps a misperception of how good the TSA is has combined with changing fads to leave planes untouched for the last decade or so.
Remember the 'tax' here of having to take off our shoes is a very real tax. But it is not imposed by the TSA, it's imposed by the Richard Reids of the world who are happy to cash in on their Andy Warhol entitlement of 15 minutes of fame by going out in an explosion of glory (and I guess you can say this is a tax imposed by human nature, you can't get a few million of us together without getting one or two aspirational 15-minute types). The TSA I'm sure is guilty of not finding better solutions to this tax (i.e. shoe scanning, but then I'm no expert on bombs or scanners so I have no idea how easy such a device would be), but a solution is NOT 'open gates' for shoe bombers because you'll get more than one Reid.
I agree mostly with this post, but take issue with your characterization of people choosing not to vaccinate, especially given your acknowledgement of the low risk of COVID19 for most people. I don't think a person's intelligence should be belittled for not trusting a vaccine that relies on novel (vaccine) technology and an accelerated approval process, and which has not yet been approved by the FDA (if that matters). Given how quickly it moved through testing, how can we possibly know with certainty the magnitude of long term effects?
When you consider the very limited risk of COVID19 for most people, which you've noted, a CBA-informed decision making model for individuals taking the vaccine is extremely sensitive to our assumptions about the vaccines long term safety. Again, given the inevitable uncertainty about long term safety, I don't think we should be so harsh to judge people for whom projection of uncertain risk outweighs the limited personal benefit for them of the vaccine.
Factor in the incredibly partisan (https://mtracey.substack.com/p/media-promotes-fake-vaccine-hesitancy) and dishonest (https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.amp) public health messaging, and you've got a recipe for rationally not trusting public health communication on risks (as your article makes clear).
The point I always make to people who have this concern is that while it's common for medicines you take every day to cause longterm side effects, this is far less common and plausible from a vaccine you take once or twice. It's hard to imagine a biological mechanism for "you take vaccine, feel sick for a day or two, and then five years later something horrible happens".
I will grant that not everybody knows this, and people have been primed to expect longterm side effects from everything because of those ridiculous drug advertisements.
Interesting if true. Have you seen any good pieces taking long term concerns seriously, but finding them unwarranted? Are the typical multi-year vaccine approval processes then not testing for long term effects? It's just bureaucratic sclerosis that leads to such a lengthy process?
I will also add that there is also reason for short term vaccine skepticism. The media and social media has been so loathe to permit discussion of actual side-effects, with FB even censoring peoples private posts discussing personal experiences with side effects. I think this leads people to rationally suspect that the immediate side effects are more common than we are led to believe. Then you have the CDC changing their VAERS numbers, reducing them by half (
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/spike-in-death-reports-following-covid-19-vaccination-an-error-cdc_3911934.html).
I'm vaccinated, but my point is I don't think idiocy is the only reason not to be. And I think our public health communication during this pandemic has been atrocious, especially by many of the same entities that scold folks to vaccinate now. I think rather than blaming and insulting people who aren't vaccinated, we should reflect on how we can improve public health communication credibility and effectiveness.
So, I don't think I've read any comprehensive pieces I can link about this (I'm a scientist, but I don't expect you to take things on my authority especially seeing as how I'm writing using a pseudonym on the internet). But if you look in literature for examples of long-term side effects from vaccines you basically get two. One is Guillain Barre. The 1976 swine flu vaccine caused Guillain Barre with a frequency of 1 per 100k, the seasonal flu vaccine causes it with a frequency of 1-2 per million. Most people recover fully, some don't. Guillain Barre seems to arise as a byproduct of a lot of immune responses, usually viral infections, occasionally vaccines. Notably, it sets in pretty quickly after vaccination, a result of the initial immune response. Also, it is insanely rare, far less dangerous than the diseases being immunized against.
The other danger is antibody dependent enhancement (a weird mechanism where prior immune response makes the disease worse). The famous alleged example of this is Dengvaxia. If this were an issue with COVID vaccines though, it would have been screamingly obvious in the clinical trials.
I suppose there's one other example, which is polio infection from inadequately inactivated polio, but that's more like a manufacturing issue than a vaccine danger and is not relevant to a vaccine like this.
Why do trials last so long? Partly bureaucracy, partly because you usually have to wait a long time to get enough cases to hit statistical significance. COVID was just so rampant in summer 2020 that they could finish the trials quickly.
I do agree with you that the censorship efforts here are weird, off-putting and quite possibly counterproductive.
I wonder how much of side effect worry is really masking uncomfort with getting a shot? I suspect a lot of people who demand more data, more certainity have no issue taking a new pill. And if we raided their medicine cabinates we'll find pills there that did not exist a decade ago.
Of course there are plenty of cases of this or that pill that later turned out to have various side effects. Yet psyhologically I think people feel safer eating something than getting an injection.
Contemplating this as my 20-something family member told me a few weeks ago he was reluctant to get the vaccine because it is 'experimental' and not 'FDA approved' as he sucked his vaping device.
Doesn't the novelty of an mRNA vaccine weaken the usefulness of comparisons with past vaccines and their side effects?
Somewhat (though the mechanism for mRNA vaccines doesn't really allow for 6-month-plus-latent-side-effects). But if you're specifically worried about mRNA, there are vaccines made with traditional approaches (J&J's Janssen in the US, AZ vaccines in most of the rest of the world), so just go for those. Less effective overall, but still pretty good (substantially better than flu vaccines).
This is a great way to look at the situation. A friend who was three month pregnant at the time read a news piece that the vaccines had no long term effects on pregnant women or their babies. She just said, “How do they know? It hasn’t even been nine months.” That was a great question.
The communication definitely is and has been terrible. I'm personally reasonably convinced getting vaccinated is worthwhile and the long term risks are small, but I can understand someone wanting to wait longer to see if there is any unknown unknowns. So I'm fine with not judging people for whatever choice they make, but its high time we get rid of restrictions and let people live with the consequences of their choice.
I think letting the unvaccinated live with the consequences of their choice means allowing them to get COVID19, not excluding them socially and economically. People who trust vaccines and want their protection are protected, even in an encounter with an unvaccinated, right? Positioning the unvaccinated as dangerous and requiring isolation undermines the message that vaccines protect those using them, since the implication is that the vaccinated need protection not only by vaccines but also by decree. I don't see how this makes sense, unless the goal is to eradicate COVID19, but I don't think that's what we're discussing here.
Your second graf is inane. Try this: "Consider that Pearl Harbor killed 2,403 people." Wars always kill more people than the specific violent events that mark their beginnings. It's fatuous on its face to complain that "fewer people were killed before the war started." Duh! And just as fatuous to suggest that fact alone means the war in question is an "overreaction."
Great article but why are you belittling those who don’t want a vaccine that hasn’t even received full FDA approval? Choosing not to be injected with an experimental vaccine doesn’t seem that crazy.
The author neglects a few things: 1) The COVID vaccines are not effective--data from CDC studies, and also from Israel, is showing that the vaccines have efficacy of about 40 percent, similar to recent flu vaccines. Therefore, universal vaccination will not stop the spread of the virus.
2) The COVID vaccines are not safe. The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) has over 11,000 reports of death associated with COVID vaccination for the first 6 months of 2021. In a typical year, VAERS shows less than 200 deaths associated with all types of vaccination for about 70 different vaccines. There has never been anything like what we are seeing reported with the COVID vaccines, and in a sane society, we would have stopped the vaccine roll-out long ago while we investigated what was happening.
3) There are alternative treatments for COVID19 that are quite effective and do not carry the risks of the vaccines. Treatment regimens that include Ivermectin are one example, and have been used successfully in many countries, as well as in the U.S. It is not a case of getting vaccinated or nothing.
I've noticed a lot of people simply recycling their 2020 arguments for the current situation, not taking any notice of the possibility that the facts may have changed in the interim.
Though, yes, I see dem tendency to discount of free trade economics, and as you point out, their over valuing of masks fairly similar to republican tendency to discount of climate change, and vaxing.
I'm not liberterian but I really like Jason Brennan idea of epistocracy.
"price you pay for having a party that distrusts experts enough to not mask their children forever for no good reason."
No, no, IMHO.
repubs distrust experts when and if they dont align to thier pre-existing values, but not the other way around. Perhaps Democrats are similar but at least they didn't deny the vaccine science.
Also, while democrats and republicans have allowed airport tsa to exist, republicans created it, and they seem a bit more willing to give it power.
"For the extra spending to have been justified using conventional tools of cost-benefit analysis, assuming a 75% reduction in risk, it would have needed to prevent an otherwise successful 9/11-level attack every two years, or a 2005 London bombings-level event every few weeks."
Was this not precisely what was accomplished? AA Flight 63, Brooklyn Bridge plot, PATH tunnels, plot, 2006 transatlantic airline bombings plot, 2007 JFK plot, the Christmas underwear bomber, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11