Medical Discussion of Coronavirus

[artemis]

Regarding nurses and other staff leaving places with mandates to go to the "middle of nowhere": I live where most people would consider the middle of nowhere in a state that legally forbids discrimination based on vaccine status / employer mandates and we still have staffing issues.

That's because most people who say they'd move to the middle of nowhere to avoid being vaccinated have never actually LIVED in the middle of nowhere. Once they discover what life is like in such a place, they quickly change their minds.

[StateOfMyHead]

Fever, myalgias, headache, vomiting, etc in bed for three days. Both Moderna vaccine.

I only know one person a 30yo colleague who reported severe flu-like to the first Moderna. Their second was similar but not as severe. They weren’t put off by it and assume a robust response.

[CordMcNally]

That's because most people who say they'd move to the middle of nowhere to avoid being vaccinated have never actually LIVED in the middle of nowhere. Once they discover what life is like in such a place, they quickly change their minds.

To be fair, sometimes being completely excluded from most of society is a good thing. It would probably benefit everyone to spend a week by themselves or with immediate family alone in nature with no contact with outside society. That’s a tough life to live forever but can really give us perspective as humans and how many of the things we bicker about is trivial.

[Tim]

Science is a process not an encyclopedia.

There is an end for a specific process. Care to tell me where we are with Covid?

As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." "Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophy." ~ Sumner Redstone

[Bmac]

Regarding nurses and other staff leaving places with mandates to go to the "middle of nowhere": I live where most people would consider the middle of nowhere in a state that legally forbids discrimination based on vaccine status / employer mandates and we still have staffing issues.

Yes. I hear about how all these nurses, first responders, law enforcement officers, etc. are going to be quitting or get fired for not complying with vaccination mandates and just wonder how likely it is that they will actually go through with it. It doesn't seem to me that most folks, when push comes to shove, will have the wherewithal to leave a good paying job in the place that they live and completely uproot their lives in order to avoid a vaccine.

[FIREshrink]

And everyone else has the right to choose not to have their bodies infected or their lives compromised by the unvaxxed.

Theres just no place where the my body take, which is so superficially vapid and dumb, doesnt end at someone elses body. If you live in a society you have these tradeoffs. Its not some simple stupid model.

There is no smart logical retort that fixes this. My body my choice, fine, choices have consequences like reduced civil liberties. That is the tradeoff. Dont like it, too bad.

And yes variants come from unbridled spread in the unvaxxed populations.

As a society, ours specifically, we have strictly limited infringement on individual rights and so the bar is much higher. This is not a matter of opinion or values alone, this is a matter of law.

My point is a mandate (by whom, for whom, mandating what exactly?) has to offer enough societal benefit to overcome the intrinsic negative of restriction of individual choice. Covid vaccine for HCWs makes sense to the extent it markedly reduces transmission of covid. But I'm not required to have a vaccine for every contagious illness to be a HCW (chicken pox, HPV, meningococcal), only those few for whom societal benefit is sufficient to justify the infringement. Flu vaccines and others are required for school attendance, but HPV is not, and, for example, an HIV vaccine would be hard to justify.

I'm not taking a stand against covid vaccine mandates for HCWs , but i think it's fair to ask what minimum level of performance is required to justify a mandate.

[Zaphod]

As a society, ours specifically, we have strictly limited infringement on individual rights and so the bar is much higher. This is not a matter of opinion or values alone, this is a matter of law.

My point is a mandate (by whom, for whom, mandating what exactly?) has to offer enough societal benefit to overcome the intrinsic negative of restriction of individual choice. Covid vaccine for HCWs makes sense to the extent it markedly reduces transmission of covid. But I'm not required to have a vaccine for every contagious illness to be a HCW (chicken pox, HPV, meningococcal), only those few for whom societal benefit is sufficient to justify the infringement. Flu vaccines and others are required for school attendance, but HPV is not, and, for example, an HIV vaccine would be hard to justify.

I'm not taking a stand against covid vaccine mandates for HCWs , but i think it's fair to ask what minimum level of performance is required to justify a mandate.

Thank god, as has been said a million times already, this has already been decided previously and reinstated recently, by the US SUPREME COURT.

If not this then what? Some of the extraneous examples you've provided are just straw men.

Seriously, many need to readjust their focus or content or whatever you're consuming that is causing this inability to logically and objectively assess reality.

This is an embarrassing lack of critical thinking in a domain that should be bread and butter.

[artemis]

To be fair, sometimes being completely excluded from most of society is a good thing. It would probably benefit everyone to spend a week by themselves or with immediate family alone in nature with no contact with outside society. That’s a tough life to live forever but can really give us perspective as humans and how many of the things we bicker about is trivial.

I agree with that! Before COVID, I made a point every year of going on a vacation to a remote place where I would not be easily reachable by email or phone. And I just got back from the Nebraska Star Party, held in the Sand Hills of central Nebraska where the largest "big city" is Valentine (population 2,000). If this was still the late 1800s, Cherry County, Nebraska, would meet the legal definition for frontier, its population is so low.

But I know from experience that most people are bouncing off the walls with boredom after spending more than a week or so in a place like that. Most people just don't have what it takes to live in a truly small town in a real rural area.

[Zaphod]

Tell that to the people who are pro-choice in regards to abortion. Such an odd dichotomy, seem like the vaccine argument has flip-flopped the two groups.

Is there some way in which someone gets an abortion effects someone else not in that family? Of course not and the comparison is ridiculous, but agree the same people that love to tell women what to do with their bodies even when it doesnt effect them, do not want to be told what to do with theirs, even when it does.

[artemis]

Just to interrupt our current debate wrt whether/who vaccines should be required for, here's a bit of bad news coming out of South Africa:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.20.21262342v1.full

Looks like we're going to be playing Whack-a-Mole for at least a while longer.

[OUSOONERDOC]

Is there some way in which someone gets an abortion effects someone else not in that family? Of course not and the comparison is ridiculous, but agree the same people that love to tell women what to do with their bodies even when it doesnt effect them, do not want to be told what to do with theirs, even when it does.

Well I dont think it is a ridiculous comparison. I mean you have people telling others who dont want to get a vaccine that they are potentially killing others by passing on the virus and then in the other situation you are killing another human directly. Obviously you have different views and no need to speak to it any further but the hypocrisy is not lost on me. My body/my choice in the right situation I guess.

[PedsCCM]

The last three responses all make a good argument for individuals to choose to be vaccinated. My question is about mandates, which can only exist to protect others. If vaccinated and unvaccinated have the same viral loads they may be equally capable of shedding and spreading. In that case, I'm not protecting anyone else by getting vaccinated, only myself, and I don't see how a free society could mandate individuals take medicine which only protects themselves.

This got semi-glossed over but I think it's important. Vaccine mandates are reasonable when 1) attempting to achieve herd immunity or 2) decrease overall burden of disease. Breakthrough cases who can transmit affect R0 and herd immunity threshold for vaccinations. It does NOT make the decision one way or another. Threshold = 1 - 1/R0. Frequency of breakthrough cases gets added to the not immunized group. If, for example, the threshold is 80% and breakthrough is 5%, then you actually need 85% of the population vaccinated. However, lower viral titers, shorter viral shedding times, etc will shift the R0 down so it's a little bit of a moving target. I suspect for an excellent vaccine like the mRNA vaccines, breakthrough cases who can transmit provide a strong argument FOR mandatory vaccines as we can still manage to achieve herd immunity.

[Sampter]

The other reason for the vaccine mandates in health care settings is to keep workers at work. For instance we had an employee (unvaxxed) get Covid, was out for 2 weeks. Then one of their family members died from Covid, out another week. Due to Covid that person was not at work for 3 weeks!

[Tim]

Is there some way in which someone gets an abortion effects someone else not in that family? Of course not and the comparison is ridiculous, but agree the same people that love to tell women what to do with their bodies even when it doesnt effect them, do not want to be told what to do with theirs, even when it does.

For society as a whole it does. Example is China restrictions on number of children. It does impact the total mouths to feed and raise. Is it best for population to rise or fall.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1972965

China wanted it lower and Sweden wanted it higher. Mandate or incentive is the question. "Some way" is an easy answer. Yes.

[Shant]

There is an end for a specific process. Care to tell me where we are with Covid?

I do not understand your question. Probably because I do not understand why you think there is an end to the process. The point of science is to continuously question, examine the evidence and iterate, not to get to an end point.