More of everyone will die. It's not just the anti-vax children, infants, eldery, chronic, or, the immunocompromised people who get it worse when herd immunity disappears. Vaccines are risk reducers, but it's not like they are perfect + the increased toll on the hospitals make more outbreaks bad for everyone.
It's one of the reasons the anti-vax movement never made any sense to me. Flat Earth is silly, but at least it's perfectly harmless, but anti-vax?
You're applying technical info to a social problem.
Americans don't trust the medical system, MAGA Americans are likely to trust it less statistically due to who the opioid pandemic/over subscription issue hit (watching a potentially close family member go from productive to an addict that started on legally subscribed drugs is hard).
> MAGA Americans are likely to trust it less statistically due to who the opioid pandemic/over subscription issue hit
Quite on brand to go from "personal responsibility" and "you can always avoid bad businesses" to directly blaming someone else when something actually ends up affecting them personally.
Not to mention two giant problems with the entire scientific community:
1. It just sucks at communication. Many people have been misled because marketeers lied to them "it's scientifically proven!" while scientists did nothing to fix that, because they only cared about preserving communication channels between themselves. The mistrust in science is obvious if you take this into account.
2. At the end of the day, scientists are people who have their biases and weaknesses. There have been well-documented cases of the entire scientific community doing a massive fuckup. So when now a bunch of scientists come and say "trust us bro, this time it's legit" it's reasonable to be sceptical.
None of those are generally made mandatory. It's a reasonable position to say the government shouldn't be able to compel you to put any particular drugs in your body, even if it would benefit the population at large.
The opposite position is also reasonable: the government should be able to compel you to take certain medical treatments in the name of improving public health. Reasonable people not blinded by ideology can accept both of those positions and handle individual cases on their merits. In the modern liberal world we've reached a consensus something like: measles vaccine OK, sterilising people with hereditary defects not OK. But people in other times and places settle on other compromises.
Note: I'm aware that this decision isn't about forcing anyone to have the vaccine, it's just "advice". But it's only one step removed from that. Public schools already withhold services from kids who don't have CDC-recommended vaccines, and we've seen various governments willing to go much further during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now that the original thread is flagged and hidden, we can discuss without fear.
In capitalism, the incentive of the manufactures to maintain product quality is that people won't buy the thing if it is bad, or does not appear to work.
This cannot be cheated. You cannot "bribe" a population.
But when government mandates a product, then it changes the equation greatly against the population. Manufacture is no longer incentivized to maintain quality. If the quality is not easy to identify then it becomes much more easy.
Now, they are outside capitalism. Now they can bribe the government, and enjoy perpetual sales.
So to answer your question, if it was not mandated, there would be no push against it. Such businesses will run out of business as capitalism run its course.
I just interpreted as "government icky" rhetoric that is very common around here.
Corruption is a tool of any power structure. Gesturing vaguely towards it to invalidate any societal initiative is not an argument, it is just bad-faith whinging.
"Why build roads? The government can be bribed"
"Why trust the courts? The government can be bribed"
> if it was not mandated, there would be no push against it.
Do you really think that? You can’t think of any other health choice that has zealots protesting other people’s choices?
You get anti-vax people wanting to avoid the vaccinated, removing masks from those wearing them, claiming not to hear the voice of people wearing masks.
Because their manipulators only need a couple subjects for identity politics. If they sow too many seeds of doubt, the world becomes too complex again, while the goal is the opposite.
It isn't particularly hard to understand - people should be allowed to make their own determination about what is good for their health, what isn't and what risk tolerance they are personally comfortable with. If that principle is embraced a whole heap of good things are fairly obvious - why there shouldn't be state-backed eugenics programs, why exercise is voluntary and it makes health policy a lot less charged. If the principle is thrown out then a lot of problematic policy becomes hard to reject.
I mean, look at what the vax-mandatory movement got - they enraged a bunch of people, helped secure Trump II, made vaccine scepticism a mainstream and popular position which arguably handed the US health department vaccine policy to anti-vaxers. Maybe avoiding authoritarian tactics and sticking to principle would have gotten them a better outcome? Hard to see how it could be worse, to be honest. They screwed up pretty badly.
Aren't they optional in most cases? You can opt-out of vaxing your kids today right? They just won't be welcome in public schools. I guess the other common cohort is health care workers (which seems reasonable) per https://leadingage.org/workforce-vaccine-mandates-state-who-... More than 1 million people died in the US from the COVID pandemic so it seemed reasonable to work hard to get herd immunity but the backfire effect made that counter productive. Hindsight is 20/20 though.
> More than 1 million people died in the US from the COVID pandemic so it seemed reasonable to work hard to get herd immunity but the backfire effect made that counter productive.
There is no herd immunity for COVID, because you can get it more than once. Vaccination only protects for a few months, and doesn't reduce spreading much.
It's not a "sterilizing vaccine".
There are sterilizing vaccines for many childhood diseases. Measles, diphtheria, polio, etc. Can't get the disease at all if vaccinated. Those vaccines can almost eliminate a disease. With smallpox, this was taken past "almost" all the way to eradication.
Here's a list of 14 almost forgotten diseases, eliminated by vaccination.[1]
The current generation of parents has not seen most of them.
Google Joe Rogan Measles. This is the level of information that people are using to make these decisions, being fed to them by the LARGEST mainstream media source (Joe Rogan has the largest mainstream media audience).
Have infectious diseases stopped spreading? And all this is happening in the shadows of COVID where the vaccines famously had no significant impact on the rate of the spread. The people claiming they would turned out to be part of the misinformation crowd.
We ran a natural experiment in Australia. Everyone got the vaccine, then everyone got COVID over the course of a month or two. The official numbers were high and aren't even accurate because there were too many cases to count, it got everywhere and the measurement kits ran out.
> That's quite a claim. I see you provided no sources.
Why do I need to source anything? Nobody credible ever claimed the vaccines would slow the spread, no evidence was ever provided that vaccines slow the spread and theory suggests they probably won't slow the spread. The people making things up in defiance of the obvious are the ones who need to start providing sources on this one.
If you want to check the numbers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Australia - we've got 22 million vaccinated people on a population of around 25 million in 2021. We see ~12 million confirmed COVID cases and in the immediate post-lockdown period the testing system crumbled under load. Do the math. An exponential process that everyone was exposed to was downgraded to ... still an exponentially growing process that everyone was exposed to. Maybe it spread the pandemic phase out to 2 months instead of 1 (based on my memory of watching the stats at the time).
The vaccine didn't cut down on the number of infections. It was strictly personal protection. Members of my family regularly get COVID.
Vaccination slowed the spread of the primary varients and reduced the health impacts on those that tested positive for COVID by preloading the immune response.
Yeah. That is a really good argument for recommending people get the vaccine. But it concedes any reason to start coercive medical treatments. The COVID vaccines were very much about personal protection. It circles back quite neatly to the idea that people should be allowed to make their own determination about what is good for their health, what isn't and what risk tolerance they are personally comfortable with.
The people arguing that collective action knows best once again blew their credibility with COVID, making up the theory about herd immunity was a big shot in the arm for the anti-vax movement. And as you can guess I'd rather side with the anti-vaxers, they're better friends than the authoritarians.
> I sourced my claims: smallpox, polio, measles, mumps.
1. That isn't what sourcing a claim means. It means to provide sources for why your claims are true; or at least where you heard the claim first. Picking specific examples is helpful, but it isn't providing a source.
And despite those examples, I still catch an infections disease ... basically annually.
2. I suppose I assumed it was going to be made obvious by context, but I don't care about smallpox, polio, measles or mumps and I'm not talking about them. Nobody forced me to do anything in relation to them, nobody threatened my livelihood over them and I don't feel at any risk of being forbidden from leaving my house because of them. It is a good point but I didn't intend to talk about it - it stands alone as a point and beyond that I don't care. Since you bought it up more then once you get this paragraph. But if it is necessary to put up with measles to put the authoritarians in a box? So be it. The anti-vaxers are the lesser of two evils, they're minnows compared to the sharks who were showing their colours through COVID; we're lucky that episode only lasted long enough for the authoritarians to do terrible economic damage.
Absolutely is. Those are examples of serious, deadly, infectious plagues that were either eradicated or seriously contained by vaccines.
> but I don't care about smallpox, polio, measles or mumps and I'm not talking about them.
I know you don't care about evidence. You care about vibes. Vaccines are icky, governments are authoritarian, you want to live in your fairy-tale self-serving world and society be damned.
I was replying to you not under any fantasy that I would convince you otherwise. I understood pretty well from the outset what sort of rhetoric you were on about.
I replied so it was made clear for others what exactly is being discussed here.
> But if it is necessary to put up with measles
It is. I am extremely grateful that the advances in medicine in the past couple of centuries allowed me to live without having to worry about serious plagues such as measles.
Either way, you didn't disappoint me. Have a great weekend.
No one is asking you to “believe the government”. We’re asking to believe the scientific literature and the non partisan experts who decide these recommendations.
Further, these recommendations are not new. They have a track record. You can look io the number of lives they’ve saved/reduced damage to.
The people who insist that we should throw out the expert advice based on openly available scientific research and literature in favor of one person’s feelings because he happens to hold a politically powerful position are the ones asking us to trust the government blindly. Actually, not blindly, but contrary to the evidence that our eyes see.
I didn't write "belief" but "trust", which is a related but different thing. You'd be very naïve to think that the powers that be are automagically uninvolved in both the Scientific Truth^tm that trickles down to the layperson and the source research and studies (both due to funding, censorship and outright lies in some hot fields like sociology).
tl;dr: I'm ready to believe in the vaccine theory, not in the infrastructure; applied science doesn't live in a vacuum
