> Shoes and liquids are so 2000s. It's 2023, so it's all about masks and vax mandates
What's wrong with COVID vaccine mandates? It sort of stops people from dying.
Sure you can be annoyed at masks (I don't wear one, for instance), but vaccines? You get poked a couple times and you're done. It's basically nothing and doesn't impact your life whatsoever.
(Unless you have some sort of allergy or immune disorder of course.)
Mandating a medical treatment may be in some cases ethically acceptable, but it should only be done if absolutely necessary. In our current context, this is probably about the COVID vaccines. They don't seem to stop transmission, so mandating them on populations that aren't at risk is hard to justify.
Personally I think if someone only increases risk on themselves, it's the same as refusing cancer treatment or anything else, that's their choice. If it imposes risk on others there is some threshold where mandates might make sense, but I don't think we met it with COVID, given the insufficient safety and efficacy data we had at the time of the mandates. It seems for at least some populations it is a pretty risky (relatively, not absolutely) vaccine.
> In our current context, this is probably about the COVID vaccines.
Of course.
> They don't seem to stop transmission, so mandating them on populations that aren't at risk is hard to justify.
If you transmit to someone who is vaccinated, there's a lower chance they'll get sick. Vaccines are a preventative measure; I would rather see people vaccinated before they become at risk rather than seeing them get COVID because they weren't vaccinated in time.
(Not claiming vaccines completely prevent COVID, just that they definitely seem to reduce the risk of one getting sick from it.)
And what about herd immunity? If, say, 99% of a population is vaccinated, then will 1 in 100 people still be at great (or greater) risk due to the vaccinated population still carrying and transmitting the virus freely? Or would those 1 in 100 people be at lesser risk due to less people coughing and sneezing everywhere?
For example, in the 30-39 year no-risk group (my age group), the number needed to vaccinate to prevent a visit to a hospital is 9,900. To prevent one serious hospitalisation requiring oxygen or ventilation you would need to vaccinate 87,600.
As for the safety of the vaccines, in randomized control trials of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines here in the UK, we now know that the risk of serious adverse effects from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated i.e. a ~1 in 800 chance of serious adverse effects:
In other words, our risk associated with vaccination is more than 100 times greater than the protection we would receive from it - even if we didn't have some degree of natural immunity - which we do.
