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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

If the risk of myocarditis after covid vaccination is lower than the risk of hospitalization due to covid infection, mandating vaccination is still good public policy. It ultimately shifts the risk around, it is true, but it still improves the odds of survival for the people who will contract myocarditis also, because there was significant risk of covid crashing the medical infrastructure. This is the part of the story people seem to forget... It wasn't the primary risk of fatalities due to covid that triggered mandatory quarantine and vaccination policies, it was the threat of saturating healthcare facilities to the point where people would die of myriad preventable conditions.

In the United States, we are still short-handed because nurses retired and nobody is stepping up to replace them.

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The question is whether or not you can ever morally coerce someone to inject something into their body.

It's an interesting question but (at least in the US) a culturally very well-settled one. There's an extremely long history of vaccination being required for participation in various aspects of society, from the military to public education.

During the pandemic, it broadened to "presence in office."

The three tools a society has to defend against rampant disease are hygiene, vaccination, and quarantine. Those who cannot or will not participate in the first two may, if necessary, be handled via the third, and this is pretty bog-standard "How not to have a whole city suffer from typhoid" stuff. As we're talking morality and not the law: there's nothing immoral about "No shirt, no shoes, no service."

> It's an interesting question but (at least in the US) a culturally very well-settled one.

The fact that people disagree means that it is not.

Historically well-settled. This is just the first time this generation of Americans had to deal with an airborne pandemic like this. Many were surprised at the authority government has during a disease crisis (I blame a lack of civic education), but the questions had been asked and answered before they were born.

People chafed at the restrictions during the 1918 flu also, and many died who flouted them. Philadelphia saturated the city's capacity to process corpses.

This was never in question. What was being debated was "Can we coerce people to inject something into their body if they want to continue to have normal day-to-day interactions with their community.

We live with a social contract. The entirety of the state is build on mutual trust. There are avenues to people who are willing to put their neighbors at serious risk because they don't want to inject something, and that's fine.

Though, firing medical staff based on vaccine status(that has little impact on transmission) while saying "we need all the medical staff we can get to ensure healthcare facilities don't collapse" doesn't square up. Here in Australia it's still the case that our hospital staff require the vax, while we're deeply unstaffed. It begs the question if their exclusion is of any net gain to society despite the ostensible risk they pose to patients, or if their ability to contribute to the healthcare workforce would outweigh that 'risk'.

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