Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Looks reasonable to me; but this analysis doesn't really try to grapple with the political consequences of the coercive vaccination campaigns backed up by what were, as far as I can tell, human rights violations:

1) Massive and public damage done to the cause of liberty. Picking a minor, I wouldn't want to imagine the looks that someone protesting the Roe v. Wade overturning got if they tried to chant "my body, my choice!". There is firm precedent now for a generation that your body, government's choice. We're more likely to regret that than a few people hurting/killing themselves out of stupidity refusing to take a vaccine as the authoritarians start making more invasive demands.

2) Forcing someone to do something against their volition, followed up by the rather obvious point that the coercers were acting without full information or particularly good intent (see: "Why did COVID become so polarizing?"), will have consequences just from the bad blood it created. There are some angry, angry people out there now. People who have a very compelling argument that it is acceptable to coerce your political opponents and punish them in disproportionate ways.

3) It still isn't obvious that the all in cost/benefits of the policies were worth it factoring in 2nd order effects and opportunity costs. We're staring at nuclear war between the two countries with the largest arsenals right now. It might have been worth just ignoring COVID, letting people make their own choices for better or worse and focusing on not finding a diplomatic peace in the northern hemisphere. The nuclear war risk is probably higher than the COVID risk, although a lot more all-or-nothing. It was almost completely ignored because of the resources spent trying to keep unwilling people inside their own homes. Also the global economy overall is in a terrible place, the damage is incalculable but large and probably comparable to losing 1% of the population. There is a famine problem out there [0].

A well-meaning analysis and noting that 1% of the population could die doesn't really capture the trade offs here. 1% of the world is going to die every year anyway; doubling that is bad. Normalising, justifying and defending mass suspensions of human rights is, amazingly, probably going to be worse.

[0] https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-h...

Just to clarify, were vaccines mandatory where you lived? They were not in my country other than for health professionals if I remember correctly - but I was chatting with my dentist this week that didn't get it.

They were never "mandatory" in the sense that if you didn't get it the government would fine you or cart you off to jail, but there were "soft" mandates in the form of "if you want to do [activity], you need to be vaccinated", where [activity] ranged from "indoor businesses" to "indoor events with more than 1,000 attendees "

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/State_government_policies_about_vacc...

I explicitly didn’t touch the forced vaccination part in the article to avoid being misquoted tbh. As far as I can tell the United States did not make any undue coercive steps; are you talking about the period when some states required vaccination proof for entering public closed spaces? How is that different from banning smoking in closed spaces?

One difference, without picking a side of where that lands in impact(and based on Ontario, Canada's rules):

Natural immunity wasn't allowed.

Did natural immunity work though? Pretty much every active American I know has gotten Covid not once but twice at the least. Of course even in that statement the nuance of what strains etc was lost.

I’ll actually agree that by the time vaccine mandates were made the strains didn’t diverge that much and it should have been perfectly acceptable to show iron clad proof of prior infection as an alternative for vaccine proof (if I’m not wrong that was actually the case in some scenarios).

There was a period of time (around when Delta showed up IIRC) when the evidence was pretty compelling that infection plus one vaccine was substantially more protective than no infection and two vaccines.

Right now the evidence that boosters are more than a little bit helpful is rather lacking.

I am/was pro-vax but they should've made cert of prior infection equivalent. Because it was nearly as good at one point, and then it actually became a better indicator of resistence

From most of the studies I saw natural immunity was more effective than the vaccines - and both were (slightly) better yet.

I say this as someone that got the original strain and then delta - and both were quite serious. I remember at the time I got delta there was supposed to be about a 1% chance of me getting reinfected, though that study might have been pre-delta as I got it quite early.

> Did natural immunity work though?

Looking at your answers looks like you really don't have a clue, but the worst thing is you don't realize that you don't a have clue. Just like ChatGPT. You think it is intelligent, but it is not.

I'm guessing they didn't allow natural immunity for fear that it would lead to "Covid parties" to acquire natural immunity.

A temporary limitation to your freedom vs being forced to bear a child. I think those two things can be confused only if you intentionally want to confuse them.

You’re downplaying one and, uh, up-playing the other. Vaccines can technically have permanent side effects. You’d only be” forced to bear a child” if you decide to have sex without adequate birth control. There’s also another body involved.

Just to be clear I’m pro-choice, though I think abortion should be done as early as possible. I just really dislike dishonest rhetoric.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was talking about the where people felt their rights were infringed because they couldn't go to a restaurant without a vaccine.

Surely, forcing people to get a vaccine at gunpoint is as serious as it gets.

The middle-ground is trickier: how to think about professionals who have been effectively forced to get a vaccine at the cost of losing their jobs and livelihood.

In practice though I've heard way more complaining about absolute freedom from people in the former camp.

As for the adequate birth control angle: sure, some people are careless, some people are just young, birth control methods do fail, etc. there are so many ways you can end up with a unwanted pregnancy, including some that are easier to sympathize with even for the most strict defender of the morals (I hope), like rape.

I doubt there are good stats on this, but the only people I've ever known to have an abortion it was because they weren't using birth control (or correctly). My wife used to watch that MTV show about teen pregnancy, and they all pretty much had the same story.

If I were king for a day I'd make every abortion more expensive than the last, and I would also make it more expensive the further along you are - barring fetal abnormalities and other gotchas. Those fees would go towards birth control and education about it.

I suspect the chance of accidental pregnancy > the chance of vaccine problems. Neither of these are absolute-success kinds of things. And not every vaccine target is genetically stable.

The limitations from abortion are similarly brief, they only apply for a handful of months. This is the issue that the abortion debate now has - we've established that people absolutely can make substantial medical decisions on behalf of others and overrule their opinion on what is in their own best interests. Killing a baby is obviously more important than statistically killing grandparents, and that was enough to overrule bodily autonomy. The justification for ignoring the pro-lifers is flimsy if you accept that the COVID mandates were reasonable - pretending that "my body my choice" is an accepted standard after COVID simply isn't feasible. It should be true, but the evidence against is overwhelming.

I have business-owning anti-vax neighbours, I saw what they had to put up with. While I do agree that abortion is probably a bit more consequential the government was putting in an honest-to-goodness effort to destroy their lives and socially ostracise them through COVID. And, in hindsight, largely for insufficient reasons with questionable benefits. They eventually got COVID despite all that they were hit with too so all the abuse was for nothing.

It just is a laughable position that we can force people to stay at home, force them out of work, isolate them from their peers, demand that they get vaccinated when they aren't comfortable with the idea and then expect them to pretend that making some pregnant woman carry a child is somehow more problematic. It isn't. It is less problematic. The former was much worse. If the former is an option on the table then the latter is an option on the table. A lot of nasty stuff is, apparently the standard is just 'if the government thinks it is a good idea'. That is a lousy standard, but that is what was just set for a lot of people.

You're making a lot of assumptions, some of them almost slight-of-handish and it makes this whole thing read as not particularly trustworthy to me.

For example what is "the cause of liberty?" As phrased nearly anyone would support that abstract concept, but when they find out what concrete policies other people mean by that it's a source of vicious conflict. So what do you mean by it?

Another is the repeated assumption that covid mitigation steps like isolation and vaccination have no impact beyond the individual. This is a normative american mindset, maybe, but completely insufficient for addressing a public health issue like a pandemic. As witnessed by the US having something like 1/5 of the global covid deaths. Rhetorically irresponsible not to address this point, given the subject and context.

And then finally you're assuming a lot of things happened because of covid, when it's possible-to-likely covid provided only the proximate trigger or justification. To address your examples: russia and ukraine were already at war & this escalation had been predicted for years; famine is well understood to be a political phenomenon and covid provided a justification to accelerate policies of austerity and inequality, but none of them were invented recently.

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