It's only a personal choice if you do not come in contact with anyone else as best as you can.
Else, you run the risk of being infected, not knowing it, passing it onto other people who "have made a personal choice", involuntary manslaughtering them (unless you're religious, then you've biblically murdered them); or, alternatively, you run the risk of ending up in the ICU, and now somebody who did get the vaccine now needs that ICU bed, and they die because you're wasting a perfectly good ICU slot because you "made a personal choice."
Your rights end where the rights of others begin, this is the fundamental rule of modern western society above all others. Be very careful when you think that doesn't apply to you, not all mistakes can be corrected.
Since vaccinated are spreading this around nearly as much as unvaccinated, the involuntary manslaughter argument is moot. Getting your own vaccine doesn't help other people not die...only you. Even high-vaccination regions are having waves of infection that dwarf previous ones. (Israel, Scotland, Hawaii)
That said, allowing civil suits to punish people that gave you a virus that killed you, would be effective to keep both vaxed and unvaxxed careful and staying at home while sick. Hard to prove where you got it, but just a few successful suits will keep people honest.
Mea culpa, though: the chart I remember was of cases not spread/fan-out. I guess it is pretty hard to judge who is spreading it and who is not, in the public. Most articles tend to measure viral shedding or load as an indicator, which does support my stance, but that's science journalism which has been wrong a lot lately. I won't ask any HN reader to make a conclusion based on what I claimed.
I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but vaccination doesn't stop the spread of the virus. It probably slows the spread, which is good, but the magnitude is unclear.
I went down the rabbit hole of looking at COVID cases in Scotland, where vaccinations are quite common. It's worth considering all of the numbers here.
It can reduce or minimize the number of cases you spread while infected (i.e. you won't be infected for as long on average), though, and the positive impacts of this at scale are large. (Consider that case numbers grow exponentially, so even preventing e.g. 20% of transmissions in one month will have outsized effects weeks or months later.)
Is it though? If it’s a personal choice, why is drunk driving banned, and why do we have seatbelt and helmet laws?
If you know that you feel sick, and haven’t been vaccinated, yet go to work at a nursing home and end up spreading a breakthrough infection that kills an immunocompromised resident, is that not manslaughter? How is it different from knowingly getting in a car when intoxicated, and then causing a deadly accident?
You can crash your car even while sober. And you can arrive home safely even while drunk. You don't have "complete control" over whether you crash. But the responsible thing to do is exercise what control you do have. Yes you could catch and spread the virus even after vaccinated but it is still irresponsible to disregard this and risk the lives and livelihoods of others. It is a trivial request and the consequences of spreading the virus are non-trivial.
Liberty has never been (nor should it be) unfettered. Public intervention of any kind, whether it's jailing murderers, enforcing speed limits, pulling over drunk drivers, or requiring minimum food safety standards in restaurants, represents a perceived "liberty" being infringed upon. Unless a specific right is protected in the Constitution, it's fair game when it comes to public policy.
I think that opinion is complacent... spawned out of modern wealth and qualify of life.
Liberty is incredibly broad.if you're approach to the constitution (which I think many today share) is that you may restrict anything that isn't specifically mentioned then you are missing the whole point. Eventually aspects of life/liberty that you hold important will be restricted by those who share your approach.
Because he was drafted and forced to fight? Or would have faced jail time and ostracism if not? Or maybe shot for deserting... Now better question is why did he not fight and liberate eastern Europe against soviets after Germany was defeated? Was he coward? Was he evil?
So it is a personal choice. Would you be OK with the consequences of qualifying it as such?
What if an unvaccinated (by personal choice) person comes down with COVID and has to be hospitalized or - worse - put into ICU. Do you think they would be OK if doctors, faced with the crunch of beds, place them into a second tier, behind all the breakthrough cases? Hospitals do not do that currently, but this is not unheard of (e.g. bumping smokers and alcoholic patients in organ donation queues).
I am willing to accept this is a personal choice if people making that choice accept responsibility for it.
They accept responsibility by paying for medical care, paying insurance, or paying taxes into a socialized healthcare system, depending on which country you live. Refusing to treat sick people is not forcing them to take responsibility for their decisions, it is coercing them into making a decision they don't want to make, and I think k you know that.
Imagine this scenario: You have one ICU bed and two people with gunshot wounds. One got the wound because he played with a gun and shot himself. The other got the wound because he was shot accidentally by the first person. Only one person gets the bed. Which one do you give the bed to?
Let's make it a little more topical: Both people were told not to play with the gun and that there were insufficient ICU beds. The first person still played with the gun and shot himself and another person. This was a personal choice he made. His luck was against him (and the person he shot).
Let's make it more topical still: The two people were told, "Look, we know you want to play with guns. We really don't want you to. Receiving treatment for gunshot wounds is less likely to lead to long life than simply not getting shot, and we have other illnesses we need to treat.
Here's an additional incentive: if we don't have sufficient medical resources to treat everyone, the people who ignore this warning will get treated after those who don't." Yes, this is coercion, inasmuch as it is influencing their decision, but under this definition of coercion, coercion hardly seems like something to worry about, certainly not as much as getting shot.
Should vaccine refusal then result in increased premiums, or increased coinsurance for covid-related care? How many people would make the choice if they had to bear even part of the expected value of their increased medical costs themselves?
Maybe, but that is for insurance companies to decide. Just like they decide rates for smokers, obese people, etc.
Although I don't know of any insurance companies that have rates for people that have not undergone certain medical procedures. That sounds unethical to me.
no, public health isn't a personal choice: public health exists to apply population wide, standardized (possibly tailored somewhat) principles and actions and their loss function is to minimize overall suffering.
Personal choice goes against that, because many people's personal choices will be selfish or convenient to them while putting other people in harm's way. Within a large society, we must be cognizant of the likely impact of our decisions, but history shows that most people will not do so, and therefore must be compelled, legally, to take actions which are for the best of society.
Some freedom is defined and assigned at the federal, not personal level, with the goal of ensuring the national survives existential challenges (of which COVID may be one).
> Some freedom is defined and assigned at the federal, not personal level...
That's one philosophy of governance. I believe it to be fundamentally incorrect. But that's your philosophy and your view on this topic stems from that. I get your point, I just disagree wholeheartedly.
I have a right to be selfish. I owe no obligation to anyone else that I have not voluntarily entered into. If you want to redefine "putting other people in harms way" to include breathing the air around me without getting a medical procedure you can, but it is wrong IMO.
This isn't just a philosophy of governance, it's how nearly every country in this world works. You clearly have limits on the freedoms you claim. For example, if you live in the US and you're male, you're subject to the draft and the government will put you in jail otherwise. There are no universal human rights to be selfish (or any others, either).
> You clearly have limits on the freedoms you claim
We aren't talking about how things are, we are talking about how things should be, specifically, whether there should be vaccine mandates or not. Other existing violations of rights are wrong also.
So it is fundamentally about philosophy of governance. You believe society should come first, individuals can be compelled to benefit society even potentially at great cost to themselves, and that a person is morally wrong for not wanting to go along with that. I believe that it is morally wrong to expect a person to value anyone over themselves that they have not chosen to, or to be compelled to do anything on behalf of someone else.
So, your argument is that personal choice can be ignored in favour of your personal definition of 'public health'? Take your logic a step further - why can't we just completely ignore your personal opinion of what's a public good or what is 'public health'? Another step further - ignore everyone's opinion of what's public good and have a small group of elites define this for us? Your argument is nothing more than blanket support for literally any top-down policy which labels itself 'for the public good'. Yawn.
And walking around after that still spreading the virus because you wouldn't feel the symptoms. The vaccinated people look to be the main source of infection these days.
Vaccinated people are way less likely to get infected.
And I don’t think there’s any evidence that vaccinated people have higher viral loads with less symptoms - that would be extremely surprising if true. I understand that vaccinated people can have high viral loads in breakout cases, but presumably in those cases they’re symptomatic - I don’t recall seeing any analysis of this.
The chances of infection for unvaccinated is 4 times of that for vaccinated. They have the same load - Wisconsin study for example, without control for symptoms. They have less symptoms - that is being tought by everybody everywhere. Putting these facts together is obvious.
When people appeal to morals it is an immediate big red sign for me as their appeal most probably have no backing or even goes directly against the facts, just like back in the USSR.
