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Comment by betterunix2 | Hacker News Reader

Vaccination is not a political position. Vaccines only work if a large majority of people are vaccinated and people who refuse to receive the shot are putting everyone else in danger. A basic function of a government is to protect public safety, and that is what a vaccine mandate does.

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Clearly it has become a political position. A progressive way of thinking about this move is to depoliticize it by making it the enforced norm because it's a stupid thing to politicize. A cynical view is that it'll force non conformers out.

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.

COVID vaccination may have become a political position, but vaccination in general is not. Where are all the debates about MMR, hep-B, polio, etc.? We have required vaccinations in our children beginning in infancy for generations, and I am not hearing any governors or representatives saying that we must end the practice.

Each of these illnesses you state is multiple times more serious than covid. And each of their vaccines had the clear benefit of being an actual vaccine.

Covid was the third leading cause of death in the US in 2020. Just because it’s not a uniform risk profile across the population does not make it an unserious disease.

Hepatitis-B is more serious than Covid-19?

By what criteria?

Vaccines only work if a large majority are vaccinated

Thats not true at all. If I get vaccinated it reduces my risk of serious disease - the vaccine works.

> Vaccines only work if a large majority of people are vaccinated and people who refuse to receive the shot are putting everyone else in danger.

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.

Citation needed, because that contradicts the CDC's guidance:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

"people fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna) are less likely than unvaccinated persons to acquire SARS-CoV-2 or to transmit it to others"

emphasis mine

"less likely" is bureaucratic weasel language which could encompass a percentage reduction anywhere from 1 to 99 percent. But what the CDC specifically said in the Provincetown study is that "vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated." https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/29/cdc-mask-gu...

Also from that article: > The breakthrough cases are to be expected, the CDC briefing states, and will probably rise as a proportion of all cases because there are so many more people vaccinated now. This echoes data seen from studies in other countries, including highly vaccinated Singapore, where 75 percent of new infections reportedly occur in people who are partially and fully vaccinated.

Your vaccine does not work unless someone or everyone else has one? Has this been observed with previous vaccine products?

Everyone getting vaccinated has clear benefits, and helps avoids breakouts. See mumps, measles, polio, etc.

Well, probably not the people with myocarditis or Bell’s palsy.

Yes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_infection#By_dise...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

Do not think in terms of "your vaccine," because vaccines are about preventing the spread of a disease within a population.

The Delta variant is so contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect. So I would encourage everyone to get vaccinated to protect themselves.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

Yes but here immunity is impossible :-/

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

By that argument you can sate your hunger by forcing me to eat a sandwich.

Not only did you come forward with a political position while stating that it isn't, you are also wrong about what the vacines do and do not protect. If vacines didn't protect the person taking them, there wouldn't be any use to them at all.

For comparison the flu shot prevents infection in about 60% of people who receive it. The point is not to prevent infection in every single person who receives the shot, it is to prevent infection in or transmission from enough people that the virus will not spread from person to person.

Vaccination is not a political position in the US. We require children to receive numerous vaccines from infancy onward and that policy is broadly supported across the political spectrum, and has been for generations now. Where are all those political debates about the polio vaccine, or MMR, or hep B etc.? All I hear are crickets...

The flu shot is not mandatory, nor should it be. Partly becase low effectiveness, partly because it's sensitive to mutations, partly because the risk of complications, while not zero, is relatively low.

Polio vaccine is a bit of an outlier. 3 doses give 99% effectiveness.

MMR 2 doses is 97% effective against measles and 88% against mumps.

The jury is still out on how effective mRNA is against covid delta, studies are all over the place, 42% to 96% for Pfizer. A lot of people are concerned that mutations evading the vaccine are likely to occur, including Pfizer CEO.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-dur...

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heres-how-well-covid-...

>Vaccination is not a political position in the US.

Antivaxers aren't new, but it became a serious political question/fight when the covid vacine hit. As for right now there was multiple post about it on /r/politics.

Just because you do not think it should be a political issue does not mean it isn't.

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