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A Question for Mandated-Vaccination Advocates
How are you quantifying the public health risk represented by any given individual not getting vaccinated? Can you give it to me in units of, say, third-party life years lost per year by the decision to remain unvaccinated? Can you give me an estimated probability that the failure of individual X to get vaccinated will result in the COVID death of some individual Y?
No? Can you at least try?
Because you’re giving us a value-of-freedom vs. cost-of-risk inequality that looks something like this:
Freedom < Risk
And I want to know when you think the cost of the risk no longer outweighs our personal freedom to make health care choices for ourselves.
If you can’t give me a number, can you give me a ratio? Can you tell us what relative reduction in risk will drop it below the value you seem to place in individual choice?
Don’t tell me you don’t know. We don’t want to trade our freedom for don’t know.
And it isn’t obvious to me that you’ve got the direction of that inequality right even now. If neither of us knows what the actual risk is, I at least know how much I value individual freedom. So the ball’s in your court and, until you come back with some science and a better argument than I’ve heard, I’m going to assume the freedom I value outweighs the risk you can’t or won’t quantify.
And, until you put a number on it, don’t call it science.
Published in Domestic Policy
It would be rich if the poor performers get vaxxed and the producers decline. Someone’s in line for a promotion!
duplicate
You can still go to public school if you are unvaxed.
From Instapundit
Since we are no longer a democratic republic, I say “Instapundit for President for Life!”
He’s better than what we have now.
So is an expired can of pea soup.
True, but then I wasn’t comparing Instapundit to Pea Soup. I think Instapundit is much much better than Pea Soup.
All the samizdat suggests that in ten years we’re going to look back on this “vaccine” as one of the most horrific medical “mistakes” ever made.
May a trillion lawsuits bloom.
Mein Gott! Everything* is better than pea soup.
*Except China Joe
This sounds like the “savants” on Star Trek: DS9 who argued that the Federation should surrender to the Dominion because it would “save lives.”
I’m not talking about those elites. Newsom didn’t “win” in the recall because the people who voted to retain him believed that only HE and his coterie would keep their freedoms. The people who voted for him probably believe THEY will keep their freedoms too. Maybe because they’re all vaccinated, who knows? Of course they’re wrong, they just don’t see it yet. Or, they don’t care.
Someone did attempt to answer your question, Henry. It was just recently published on-line in JAMA. They looked at the benefit to family groups–where much of transmission occurs, for obvious reasons–of immunity in one or more members of the group on the whole and found a positive correlation. They combined both immunity from prior disease, single vaccine dose, and full double dose vaccine, and found all to be significantly protective. I hope you’ll agree that immunity achieved by vaccination is preferable to going through having the disease. You would if you knew any significant number of people who’ve suffered through it.
Here’s a small clip stating their conclusions. To get the numbers you seek, go to the article linked above.
Conclusions and Relevance In this cohort study, family members without immunity had a 45% to 97% lower risk of contracting COVID-19 as the number of immune family members increased. Vaccination is a key strategy for decreasing the transmission of the virus within families.
JAMA Intern Med. Published online October 11, 2021. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.5814
I don’t see it that way. Jerry is the thorn in my side, a perpetual dark cloud on my otherwise rosy and optimistic day. I acknowledge that. But he isn’t throwing in the towel here.
I also was struck by the numbers, found them more negative than I expected, and had to pause to think about my position. There’s nothing wrong with that. I commented on that above (#25). I value Jerry’s input, and want more.
Thanks for the link.
I got vaccinated as soon as I was able. I am not willing to die a horrible death in a hospital just to “stick it to the establishment.”
I do not advocate mandated vaccines but I will try to explain why its being considered in a general way since I don’t have the specific, actual details. But I think I can conceptualize the concerns.
Think of it this way. When you get the flu, you may be sick for seven days, but you are not contagious for the full seven days. You are contagious say two to three days. I don’t have the specific numbers and they probably vary somewhat based on the person. But it’s something like that. So when you get a flu vaccine, you still can get the flu, but the symptoms are reduced, greatly in some cases, and the period of illness is reduced to say three or four days or less. But more importantly to the general public, your window to spread the virus is reduced to say one day.
The same thing works with Covid. With the vaccine your symptoms are reduced, your period of illness is reduced, and more importantly to the general public you window to spread the virus is greatly reduced. Yes, you can still get Covid and you can still spread Covid, but that period of being contagious will be a fraction of not being vaccinated. So there is a public interest in people being vaccinated.
I don’t advocate mandated vaccines because the risk of people succumbing to the virus is low, except for elderly and people with risk conditions. I advocate having a temperature check at all business upon entry like they do in doctor’s offices. It’s not perfect but it’s a reasonable check. Now if we had a situation like 14th century Europe with the plague where one out of two were dying, mandated vaccines would certainly be warranted. However, the risk here with Covid is sufficiently low.
Now this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get the vaccine. I think you should, for yourself and for those around you. You do have a moral obligation not to pass it on to others. And employers do have a right to mandate it as a requirement for employment. They have an obligation to protect their employees and the public. If you don’t want to take the vaccine, then find a job that doesn’t require you to.
Lord knows I’m going to get blowback on this. Every comment I make on Covid gets me blowback.
Isn’t Jerry making a case that people should be forced to get vaccinated because it will save lives/life-years/whatever?
He even writes in #19: “This is actually causing me to consider re-thinking my opposition to vaccine mandates. ”
Next he’ll be calculating what children must be taught in school, jailing their parents if necessary if the parents object, in order to maximize their income and thereby their taxable value to The Community.
Seems like the government is willing to let you die a horrible death in a hospital just to keep you from using treatments they don’t approve of.
Jerry’s on my turf!
A big part of the problem is that these things are not actually known.
Yes, and I think it has to do with the window to spread the disease is shortened. See my comment above.
I advocate boycotts for any business that would do this.
Knowingly, yes. It would be immoral to knowingly pass it on. It would also be immoral to knowingly pass on a cold. The severity doesn’t matter.
However, if you don’t know you have COVID, and you pass it on to someone else, you have not committed any sin. It is, however, sinful to force others to wear face masks or get an experimental medical procedure in order to mollify your fears.
You can believe what you want but that is just not true.
I don’t disagree with any of that.
The government is not willing to let you drink deer urine as a treatment for Covid and the only reason why deer urine isn’t available at hospitals is because the government wants us dead.
What are you on about?
It was a sarcastic response to kedavis’s remarks about how the government wants to deny people effective treatments for Covid.
He’s right. They do.
Caryn, thank you. I’ll read it.
I do know a significant number of people who have had COVID; for the most part, it’s presented as somewhere between a bad cold and a bad flu. I agree that, for certain demographics, vaccination is preferable. I’m not convinced that that’s true of children: I’m not sure that the risks of vaccination outweigh the risks of the disease, nor that they will get as effective an immunity from vaccination as they will from actually having the disease. So the direction of infection (parent -> child vs child -> parent) might be significant to me.
I did take a quick glance at the study you linked, and I’m struck by something. The study was of families that had “2 to 5 family members.” Given that, I would certainly expect a dramatic falling off of rate of infection of unvaccinated family members when three or four family members are vaccinated: in most cases, that probably means that the entire family has been vaccinated. I’m not sure what that tells us about actual rates of transmission.
Another thing I wish the study made clearer is exactly what “COVID-19 diagnosis” means. Does that mean that they found the subject positive for the coronavirus, or does it mean that the subject exhibited symptoms of coronavirus infection — what most of us mean when we talk of COVID-19 as a disease? Given that a substantial number of the infected were likely children, who are the most likely demographic to be asymptomatic, I wonder if the study is calling all instances of positive test results “COVID-19,” or only symptomatic cases.
I will read the study more closely when I have time. And thanks again for sending it.
Yes, both KE’s comment and your caricature of the reason some people choose not to get vaccinated are perhaps a little silly.