To be fair, he said he'd do this during the election a couple weeks ago, and got reelected. Still a minority government, but honestly the same result as the last election.
Canadians are, for the most part, okay with these restrictions.
We are not okay with them, but our inability to organize and vote against them appears to show we deserve them.
If you wanted to make a generalization about Canadians and our view of our politicians, it's that we can't stop cringing long enough to mobilize an effective movement to change them out. It's a national paralysis of cringe, and at this point it's probably by design.
100% this. Trudeau was upfront about doing this and was rewarded with basically no change. Nobody should disapprove of Trudeau doing this, this is the will of Canadians.
To be fair, the far left peoples party was the only party who stood up for freedom. This gained them nearly a million more votes. The NDP picked up ~120,000 more votes compared to last election, but otherwise all other parties lost votes. Liberals and Cons lost about half million votes each.
Yes, the people party gains were heavy in the hippie anti-vaxxer far-left stoner category, but there's nothing wrong with that. The problem was their stance on defunding the media. It made the media the enemy and the media smeared them with massive lies calling them nazis, white supremacists, and far right. Which is absolutely false but here we are.
There are a few outs for this in the event of legal challanges. It's likely this goes against the Charter, and it would be absurd for a minority government to invoke the "notwithstanding clause," to force it through, which is a government veto on everything else in the charter.
A mandate also means the people subject to it are not giving their consent, sort of like how you "consent" to an invasive search in an airport, which violates privacy laws for health information in most provinces. The policy is contemptible, and even though I can't think of a better cohort for forced medical procedures than the architects of this appalling attack on freedom who work in the permanent state, I would still defend their individual liberty and bodily integrity as much as the next Canadian.
Further, you get nothing back for complying. You still wear masks, you still show a vaccine passport to eat indoors, (with slots for 10 or more boosters in some cases), the government still destroys small businesses and forfeits its accountability to "committees" of scientists, who are mostly social scientists, as though letting scientists decide policy was legitimate at all. So called emergency powers that enable random stop and question powers for vague deputized and untrained people remain on the books "just in case."
I understand your passport shows the date of your shot that you have to share with whoever demands it, so once you have hesitated, does it really matter how long, comrade?
Authoritarianism isn't science. Submission is not a civic duty. I've been predicting this stuff since the beginning and haven't been wrong yet. However, this country is so divided I'm not even angry, as that would be frustration from the assumption these people can be reasoned with. The only thing you can do is hold them to the law.
The people resisting mandates and passport policies are contributing to the well being of their society more than I think this comment understands. As someone who has logged more volunteer hours during covid than I have in years, on top of a couple of jobs, the people who are against mandates and passports are what being civic minded looks like.
The way these people talk, I wonder if they also have issues with "complying" with: having to insure their vehicle, wearing a seatbelt, not farting in a crowded elevator, sneezing into their sleeve, wearing clothes in public...
How is it against the Charter†? Airlines, to take one example, are federally regulated: so if there's a new regulation that says to fly you have to have been vaccinated, how is that stepping on provincial jurisdiction?
† Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for non-Canadians.
> Further, you get nothing back for complying.
How about reducing the probability of using up an ICU bed by a substantial margin? In many places (in CA and US), out of 100 ICU beds often >95 are taken up by the non-vaccinated. In some places 100% of new admissions are the unvaccinated:
But this isn't an argument about not being vaccinated, this is an argument about mandates and passports, and conflating them is the histrionic authoritarian problem.
While we're not going to litigate the charter federally in an HN thread, the separate provincial privacy laws about health information and consent apply to patients as individuals, and just because you're flying between them doesn't remove your rights. They are different from the charter issue, but there are still avenues for challenge.
Even taking the data at face value, blaming "the unavaccinated," as an outgroup has nothing to do with passports, and everything to do with a petty, cowed, and propagandized population, whose apprehension of ethics and morality is on the level of a superstitious mob watching professional wrestling.
These are what makes the issue irreconcilable, and why all that is left is the law.
>There are a few outs for this in the event of legal challanges. It's likely this goes against the Charter, and it would be absurd for a minority government to invoke the "notwithstanding clause," to force it through, which is a government veto on everything else in the charter.
Some (atlantic)judges have already ruled on how the charter reacts to health pandemics. Not-withstanding clause is not needed.
If Canadians had a problem with this. They wouldn't have voted Liberal, Con, or NDP. The Peoples party provided an alternative option and they didnt gain a single seat.
I agree with some of the quoted unions/groups: implementation details are too vague.
Pilots and aircrew are not federal employees, do they need to be vaccinated? (I know the answer, but it's addressed poorly by this policy.
There was talk about very strict medical exemptions, which is great as it is otherwise a path ripe for abuse, but I'm hearing that religious exemptions are still being considered.
The unions I've heard about are encouraging religious exemptions and a "take your word for it" proof policy, where your supervisor can ask for evidence but is not required to.
Results in some funny situations like truckers not getting provincial holidays. And some holidays are federal only (so you get it if you're a federal employee or in one of those few federally regulated industries).
I think that kids should be vaccinated despite having a significantly reduced risk profile (not “no danger”). I think this enough that my kids are participants in the Pfizer pediatric trial. I have seen no evidence that the vaccine presents a risk of short or long term sequelae that is greater than (or even close to equal to) the risk of complications from getting covid itself, and I’ve seen no evidence that there is any reason to believe that the vaccine presents risks that infection does not. In both cases, infection has a much greater risk profile than vaccination, even in low-risk populations. Given that calculus, I would rather my children not be immune naive when they eventually encounter the virus. The vaccine also appears to induce strong short-term sterilizing immunity and still lowers the risk of infection over the long term, which means that once vaccinated, my kids can more comfortably visit their high-risk grandparents (they have been, but vaccination makes this a lower-risk interaction going forward).
It’s not necessarily about the danger to them, but the danger of their transmitting to others. Even vaccinated, there are people who are immunocompromised and less protected.
And then honestly - I know a number of people who have had Covid after being vaccinated and it still sucks. If I can reduce the chances that my kids come home and get me sick, I’m on it in a second, assuming it’s safe (and it is).
The US is apparently a big outlier in the number of reported children's deaths (5 per million) compared to other developed countries. There are also other confounding factors such as under/over reporting of symptoms and side effects. See here for a review: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13678
the mortality in kids seems to be orders of magnitude smaller than the seasonal flu:
> as of May 2021, data from 79 countries accounting for 2.7 million COVID-19 deaths (69% of all documented global COVID-19 deaths) show that over 8700 (0.3%) of these deaths are in children and adolescents under 20 years of age (40% in children 0–9 years old and 60% in adolescents 10–19 years old). For illustrative comparative purposes, estimated annual fatalities for seasonal influenza preceding the COVID-19 pandemic included 9243 to 105,690 deaths of children younger than 5 years
The comparison to make isn't to the risk of dying from everything else, it's to the risk from vaccination.
Which there isn't really anything published for young children yet, but for age groups where use of a vaccine has been approved in the US (12+ more or less), the risk of severe side effects from vaccination is lower than the risk of severe illness.
Annualized, that's about 25 per 100,000. So COVID won't be the leading cause of death, but it's high enough to be classified as a major source of child fatalities.
For something easily preventable once the vaccine is available.
You're right, atypical influenza is also risky. I know people who have died from it, and have two close friends that have had their life ruined by side effects from H1N1. (Guillaume Barre syndrome and Chronic Fatigue). I wouldn't wish either of those on my worst enemies.
Some risks in life you have to accept, but ones that are trivially avoidable?
Shutting down schools to prevent children from getting COVID has too many side effects given the risk level, but the vaccine has such a low cost and so few side effects.
Except it would not be far fetched to think that child cases are vastly under-reported. My wife and I both tested positive and my three children showed mild symptoms. I saw no reason to go through the hassle of getting them tested when it was clear what it was.
Herd immunity sure as hell does reduce transmission. And you won't get that without vaccinating children.
Personal opinion the semi hysterical hand wringing over the imminent vaccination of children is because the anti-vaxers know that's the last shoe to drop.
Card carrying anti-vaxxers are generally not just trying to be contrarian, from their perspective they are genuinely concerned for their and their children's health, however misguided you believe they are. So the hysteria is their actual fear of harm.
South Korea's cases and deaths have been increasing for a few months, while Spain and Japan have very recently had very large spikes (Japan's was several times larger than their previous spikes).
> South Korea's cases and deaths have been increasing for a few months,
That's because Korea had relatively slow roll out of vaccination + large national holiday (Chusuk). Given that Delta needs full vaccination to meaningfully slow down the spread, this is expected. The last week's R was less than 0.9, which coincides with recent vaccination program focused on the second shot while the mobility number is steadily increasing! There's a certain threshold where vaccine shows meaningful impacts on a reproduction rate, so you cannot simply saying "# of case is rising, vaccine is useless".
> while Spain and Japan have very recently had very large spikes (Japan's was several times larger than their previous spikes).
Japan also had pretty slow roll out, it had ~40% of full vaccination at the point of the spike but the number rapidly dropped as full vaccination rate goes up rapidly. This actually proves my point of strong correlation between reproduction rate and full vaccination rate. I know Japan now somehow arbitrarily limits free testing but positive test rate also has dropped significantly.
Spain's the most recent spike was mostly due to their lack of lockdown option. It also had some level of vaccine hesitancy (which led to much lower fully vaccinated than partial vaccination rate) but the recent spike led many people to take their second shot. And they're now seeing a significant drop without declaring state of emergency.
All of those slowing downs are strongly correlated with full vaccination rate. Of course, vaccine's effectiveness wanes over time so some sort of booster will be needed to keep its effectiveness.
Israel still has pretty low vaccination rate (less than 70%) while it has completed most of their vaccination earlier this year. Vaccine's effectiveness wanes over time, so this simply proves that they just need a booster shot.
Singapore recently dropped their zero COVID strategy so it's expected to see some rising numbers. Vaccine is not supposed to eliminate virus, but keep their reproduction under control so our health care system won't explode. Why do you think it's a counter example for vaccine's effectiveness?
If the risk was meaningful, they would have been getting the vaccine already. But yes, there is tons of unnecessary risk we apply to children every day, but we still do it (I don't think you need the whole driving statistics spiel). We measure risk by acceptability, not by existence.
There's not a lot of data. ACIP found that there was more severe illness than vaccine side effects in 12+ age groups (with a disclaimer that the group had less data due to less 2nd doses being administered):
At the very least, I don’t understand why these are vaccine mandates and not antibody mandates. A mandate that does not take natural immunity into account is political policy that ignores science.
I think that's logistical. It's much much straight forward to simply get and produce evidence of getting the necessary vaccines available to us than test every individual for antibodies for each contagious viral threat in existence, past or present.
That's the quiet part out loud though. Covid was exceptional, showing proof you have taken injections for arbitrarily "necessary," medications is population management.
I mean... yes. So what? The same thing happened for smallpox[1] and polio. I think we're all constrained by laws that allow society to function. Why is this news or shocking? The only shocking thing is how resistant some have been to taking a vaccine that, at this point, has been administered to millions of people with very few, very rare side effects more serious than a sore shoulder.
If VAERS is to be believed, the odds of dying from it are about 1 in 11,000. Relative to other vaccines, that is astronomical, and is far worse than a "sore shoulder". I'm not sure it qualifies as "very few, very rare" either. I know all of the issues with VAERS, but the truth is somewhere in between the CDC's official position that no one has died from the vaccine, which is preposterous on its face, and the VAERS numbers, which currently stand at 16,310 deaths [1] out of ~180 million vaccinations.
IMO, the reason for the hesitancy is the heavy handedness with which it is being pushed, and the obvious lies of the CDC. When the CDC says that it can't be proven that anyone has died from the vaccine, and then there are multiple credible news reports of healthy, relatively young people dropping dead from it, it calls into question everything else they say. They don't want to admit these things because they don't want to alarm people, but IMO coming out and saying "it kills and injures some people, but the benefits outweigh the risks for many groups" would be the right approach. It's the lying that's the problem. Even reporting adverse events based on the total number of doses administered, and not on the number of people that have received doses, is specifically intended to mislead and cut the real statistics in half. It just all looks terrible, and people assume they are lying about everything when they lie or obfuscate obvious things.
Ok, forget the CDC. Let's look at health Canada's site[1]:
> A total of 56,151,862 vaccine doses have been administered in Canada as of October 1, 2021. Adverse events (side effects) have been reported by 17,982 people. That’s about 3 people out of every 10,000 people vaccinated who have reported 1 or more adverse events.
> Of the 17,982 individual reports, 13,307 were considered non-serious (0.024% of all doses administered) and 4,675 were considered serious (0.008% of all doses administered).
> Most adverse events are mild and include soreness at the site of injection or a slight fever.
> Serious adverse events are rare, but do occur. They include anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction), which has been reported 307 times for all COVID-19 vaccines across Canada. That’s why you need to wait for a period of time after you receive a vaccination so that you can receive treatment in case of an allergic reaction.
And[2]:
> Up to and including October 1, 2021, a total of 195 reports with an outcome of death were reported following vaccination. Although these deaths occurred after being vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine, they are not necessarily related to the vaccine. Based on the medical case review using the WHO-UMC causality assessment categories, it has been determined that:
> 73 of these deaths are unlikely linked to a COVID-19 vaccine
> 75 deaths could not be assessed due to insufficient information
> 41 deaths are still under investigation
> 6 deaths followed a diagnosis of TTS (refer to the TTS bullet above)
So serious side effects in 4,675/55e6 doses. That's something like a 0.01% incidence rate. And 195/55e6 deaths - 1 in 282,000.
If you don't want to trust any national health service I think we're at an impasse. Your problem is then fundamentally with the government (or even government as a concept) and not with the COVID vaccine.
Looks like Canada is playing this game with “number of doses administered” instead of “number of people actually vaccinated” too. I just don’t understand the propensity to try to mislead people, at least in such obvious ways. Most of these vaccines require two doses. Reporting adverse events on a per-dose basis effectively cuts the actual adverse reaction rate per person, which is all anyone cares about, in half.
FYI I am vaccinated. The statistics lean toward the benefits outweighing the risks for many groups of adults. I just wish these official agencies wouldn’t lie/mislead. They should lay out the actual facts and let people decide on their own. They undermine their own message and cause more of the very problem they are trying to solve.
> Reporting adverse events on a per-dose basis effectively cuts the actual adverse reaction rate per person, which is all anyone cares about, in half.
Cutting it in half doesn't really undermine the conclusion that the vaccine is safe. I'm not really sure if the average person would go "1 adverse reaction in 282,000, that seems safe. But 1 adverse reaction in 141,000? That's too risky!" Arguably the "per dose" incident rate is also most useful for answering the question: "If I go get vaccinated today, what are the chances I'm going to have a very bad day?" Reporting per person would also obscure cases like a person getting both doses and having a serious adverse reaction both times and we might instead be arguing about how they're underreporting those cases.
I think this would be a more pertinent point if the adverse event rate was higher - e.g. 20% vs 10% is a much more significant difference from doubling. Basically, if they wanted to mislead they did a really poor job. To me this points to bad design or some kind of data collection related requirements/restrictions we're not aware of (perhaps it's a problem of correlating reports to a person if you also need to keep this data anonymous for privacy reasons - but I'm just speculating).
I think this would be a more pertinent point if the adverse event rate was higher
The point is that they are intentionally doing something to water down the stats. In the minds of the vaccine hesitant, it destroys their credibility on everything else they say, even when those other things are entirely factual. Just seems like a terrible strategy to me. They are giving their critics both the gun and the ammunition with which to shoot them.
We should mandate that Tinder and other dating sites force people make their current STD test results and last date of testing public on their online dating profiles. Porn performers have to do it in California, and sex workers in Australia, so there's no reason why college students here shouldn't have the same requirement. It's already normal in some places. Then keep a list of anyone who declines, because putting people at risk like that is unethical, surely. That is a poor argument, but one of the same quality as the comment it responds to.
We have never had to show a compliance document to eat in restaurants. Even the age of majority for alcohol was a single event, and not an ongoing compliance test. Equating transportation, restaurants, private employment, and cultural venues - to schools kids are forced into, is a false equivalence.
Get a vaccine, and whether someone else has or hasn't is not anyones business.
Get a vaccine, and whether someone else has or hasn't is not anyones business.
Exactly this. It either works or it doesn’t. If it does, we don’t need to worry about anyone else’s vaccine status. If it doesn’t, then people are taking an unnecessary risk by getting it.
I am against the mandates, and I am vaccinated. Whether or not to get it should be a very nuanced decision, based upon the specific adverse reaction and breakthrough infection statistics for a given person’s age and underlying health conditions vs the COVID statistics for the person. If the CDC had any desire to be honest, they would have an online calculator that would ask a few questions about BMI, age, etc., and then it would tell you the your specific odds of being killed/injured by the vaccine (with the odds of dying from COVID despite being vaccinated factored in) vs the odds of catching and then dying from COVID unvaccinated.
Instead, it has become a test of wills. Tests of wills have historically not played out well at a national level in “free” countries.
This is ridiculously black and white thinking. It's like saying "Oh, you support seatbelts? Well how would you like it if the government had a camera in your house to make sure you're wearing PPE every time you use the table saw!"
> Get a vaccine, and whether someone else has or hasn't is not anyones business.
If only that were true. Unfortunately I don't like lockdowns and new and exciting COVID "variants".
> Historian Michael Willrich was planning to write a book about civil liberties in the aftermath of Sept. 11 when he stumbled across an article from The New York Times archives. It was about a 1901 smallpox vaccination raid in New York — when 250 men arrived at a Little Italy tenement house in the middle of the night and set about vaccinating everyone they could find.
Your options for being able to exit Canada now are severely restricted if you are unvaccinated, particularly if you cannot enter the US. It appears you will need to charter a private plane or ship to emigrate. I suspect the right to emigrate (a human right according to the UN) will be further restricted by authoritarian regimes around the world such as the one running Canada.
Your right to emigrate is not meaningfully impaired, for the same reason that it isn't meaningfully impaired by the requirement that you wear shoes at the airport.
The claim was this was a burden on par with shoes. I claim it is far beyond that and many of the US mandates will be struck down. The precedent is a state level mandate with a $150 penalty.
Organizations/companies can still impose basically any requirements they want to in the US. In general, state/federal requirements are basically air cover.
Here's the full CDC brief[1]. The short version: your religious belief generally has to be "sincerely held" (which means that you don't get to pick and choose which vaccines you take based on political winds). Some states have even stronger constraints, including you to present an affidavit and demonstrate that your religious beliefs are not merely an extension of some misguided personal belief.
> Workers and passengers age 12 and older on trains, planes and marine transport operating domestically - which are federally regulated - must show they have been inoculated by Oct. 30.
Ah this is good. Hope it stays that way. Thank you for sharing. I’m also glad if seeing this fact helps people form opinions how they would feel if it weren’t the case.
You generally have to have a passport and entry visa (or equivalent) to fly internationally. The baseline is not a 'free for all'.
~100 years after arbitrary requirements are imposed on international travel, people freak out about one that is a direct response to exigent circumstances and not likely to be permanent.
It’s about the right to exit. A situation where people sit by while basic rights are eroded for others is most likely to happen when there is a rationalization for reasonable people to support it. See also: the NSA mass surveillance program after 9/11.
I guess you are probably free to walk into an ocean regardless of vaccination status, I'm not sure what other situation post implementation of the international passport system would reasonably be described by a 'right to exit'.
The point is if another destination would have you, it is a violation of your right to be unable to freely exit. If hypothetically Canada did not allow you to board a non-chartered plane to emigrate I would argue this would be encroaching if not outright violating this right.
That stereotyping and scapegoating of the unvaccinated is occurring and is animating the support of increasingly oppressive policies against them. Many of whom have natural immunity and pose less risk than those vaccinated in early 2021.
The oppression is being barred from travel, work, and many aspects of public life. If you strip away your opinions about the risk and benefits of vaccination and look at the people not vaccinated as a group agnotistically, they are being oppressed more and more each week, and many of them have better antibodies than the vaccinated at this point.
What will you do if the government mandates you to take a drug for similar justifications one day, but you actually honestly do not think it is safe for you? Do you think this precedent even if we assume good intentions is a good slope to be eagerly sliding down? What if we find drug interactions or other correlated variables that harm people who take it, or evidence comes along that affect your decision but the government disagrees? How much do you trust the authorities to navigate this, and how much are you willing to give up to them if you are one day on the non-consensus side?
> The oppression is being barred from travel, work, and many aspects of public life.
I'm sorry, but you're not oppressed. You've decided not to take a free and effective vaccine, and society is going to make collective public health decisions whether you participate or not.
Not really. If you disagree, I dare you to burn your vaccination card and see how life is for you over the coming months.
There are many people like me who do not like seeing what is going on and are fully vaccinated. We have read enough history and have seen the hatred forming towards people divided on political and cultural lines, as the state pushes the envelope of acceptable oppression as it always does. Authoritarianism only happens when enough people can form a “reasonable” argument justifying it, usually out of fear or hatred of others, not rationally. Given the lack of acceptance of natural immunity, rationality seems not a full explanation.
Just because you think getting vaccinated is a good idea doesn’t mean you can ignore oppression around you towards those who are trying to defend their right to body autonomy. Besides, what if you are next?
> Not really. If you disagree, I dare you to burn your vaccination card and see how life is for you over the coming months.
New York state, in its infinite wisdom, has electronic vaccine records. There's even a blockchain involved, for some reason.
I shared my vaccine records with my elementary school, middle school, high school, and college before attending each. If I had burned those records, they would have made me get vaccinated again. But that doesn't make me "oppressed," it makes me a fool who burned my vaccine records.
> Besides, what if you are next?
Oblique comparisons to the Holocaust are as ridiculous and offensive as direct ones.
I was required to get a DTaP vaccine in college (in another state, mind you) because I couldn't prove that I had gotten one as an adolescent. I had gotten one, but I'd lost the record.
No, you’ve misunderstood: I lost the records between high school. I have multiple friends who were required to get their MMR vaccines again in high school because they couldn’t find their records.
Ever heard of the tyranny of the majority? This is it.
It's not the government oppressing unvaccinated, it's us, the majority doing it, because we consider unvaccinated people irresponsible.
But oblio, I hear you say, that's mean, that's not fair, it's not democracy. Yes it is, that's why modern democracies have constitutions that protect basic rights and minority rights.
Basic rights apply for all but if unvaccinated basic rights (in this case the right to not be inconvenienced for a bit by vaccination) infringe majority basic rights (the right to life and long term wellbeing), frequently they don't apply.
Plus unvaccinated people are not a valid minority. They're not a protected minority anywhere in the world.
Thankfully being anti-science and antisocial is not a protected category anywhere in the world that I know of.
What makes unvaccinated people smarter than ALL the rest of us? Do they think that we're all collectively and individually dumber than them? Their arrogance is astounding. They all think they're Galileo when 99.9999% are Bozo the Clown, or worse, shortsighted and maliciously selfish people.
Maybe think a bit harder on what it means to set the precedent if the government can bar you, as an adult, from all employment or travel based upon your willingness to take a drug or not. Or pick up a history book about what happens when an easily identified group of people (who, in this case, are typically stereotyped as being of a certain race, political party, and culture) start being blamed for things such as the deaths of children from a virus, and are stereotyped by the media and those in government as collectively selfish, ignorant, and the cause of all of our problems.
Don't let your fear or contempt for others land you in the category of people that have led the charge on setting up systems that are eventually turned on them once the next group gets their hands on the reins.
As far as being anti-science goes, the vaccine mandates which do not account for natural immunity or the date you got your vaccines are fundamentally anti-science.
> Maybe think a bit harder on what it means to set the precedent if the government can bar you, as an adult, from all employment or travel based upon your willingness to take a drug or not. Or pick up a history book about what happens when an easily identified group of people (who, in this case, are typically stereotyped as being of a certain race, political party, and culture) start being blamed for things such as the deaths of children from a virus, and are stereotyped by the media and those in government as collectively selfish, ignorant, and the cause of all of our problems.
This is gross, it's basically an end to the dicussion. One is an immutable characteristic (being Jewish), the other one is a choice.
Your comment either contains a huge fallacy, or more likely, considering your other comments, pushes an agenda.
> As far as being anti-science goes, the vaccine mandates which do not account for natural immunity or the date you got your vaccines are fundamentally anti-science. Either way, goodbye!
> As far as being anti-science goes, the vaccine mandates which do not account for natural immunity or the date you got your vaccines are fundamentally anti-science.
In Europe at least the green passport also includes:
* a recent test
* proof of having had Covid
But then again, I'm getting nowhere with this discussion and hopefully sane governments won't listen to people like you.
> This is gross, it's basically an end to the dicussion. One is an immutable characteristic (being Jewish), the other one is a choice.
Nice work plugging your ears and declaring an end to the discussion, this is surely the way to go and a sign of intellectual maturity.
You know that one of the bloodiest wars in European history was fought between who chose to be Protestant and who chose to be Catholic, correct? At the time, people like yourself surely were making the argument the conflict would quickly end if only those foolish and evil Catholics would just understand their error, repent, and do the right thing and join the Reformation. Catholics were, of course, deeply harming society, since an offense on God like indulgences was an offense on all and risked destroying society. And, of course, if you were in Spain, the opposite argument was made regarding the rebellous Protestants undermining the much-needed authority of the Church. While the bodies stacked up.
The nature of tribalistic discrimination is not rooted in choice or not choice. It is rooted in the identification of tribes and the ability for such a tribe to be oppressed due to a power differential, often motivated by fear, stereotyping, blame, or distrust. Tribes of which it is often the case that immutable characteristics drive the labeling process for obvious reasons, but often due to choices or beliefs. Humans have murdered millions and millions of people in tribal conflicts that are entirely grounded in choices of religion, political alignment, or other beliefs or behaviors that allow easy segmentation and identification of who is in which group.
I realize you want to try to clamber up to some kind of moral high ground by boxing me into something I'm not - I'm used to this method being used by those defending the idea it is just that millions of people shouldn't be able to work or go to the grocery store if they are unvaccinated - but you're just making yourself look foolish by declaring an end to discussions because of your emotional reaction to what I am saying. The tribalization of the choice to take the vaccine or not, combined with the very direct rationalizability of the oppression of these people (as nicely demonstrated by your previous reply) is a danger zone and is one that people who understand human behavior and history should be very concerned about.
Unless we have a stroke of luck and the threat of the virus subsides (something which seems increasingly less likely), we we should expect is an increased ratcheting up of oppression of the unvaccinated, who will dig in as well. The result, as always, will ultimately be violence, once the unvaccinated cannot tolerate it any further. Many will never get the vaccine: by making it a form of civil disobedience now, not merely a healthcare choice, we have guaranteed it. So we should hope that we get lucky and the seeds of conflict dissipate by science quelling the threat of the virus sufficiently that bystanders can no longer stomach barring unvaccinated people from public life.
Just because you can spell "stereotyping" doesn't mean that you understand what the word means. There's no stereotyping when it comes to people who refuse a vaccine that is proven to be effective at reducing the symptoms of a life-altering or life-ending virus. They're stupid.
Painting people with a broad brush as you are doing here is stereotyping and is also a sign of stupidity. There are a lot of sane reasons to not get the vaccine. I don’t personally agree with them in most cases (except avoiding it for now in children) - but many of these reasons are not rooted in stupidity but different priors on risk. You have revealed your own ignorance and arguably your own stupidity (given the stereotyping) in several ways here, though.
Yeah but not really the featured nation. The vast majority of Canadians -- >80% of adults -- are in favor. We don't want any more lockdowns and vaccines are proving to be an extremely effective solution to that.
This is really a case of a vocal minority putting up a fight. And unfortunately for them, the nation is going to keep moving forward.
What makes you think the vaccine is an extremely effective solution to lockdowns? There are now many examples of high-vaccination countries with the same rapid case count rises that were the excuse for lockdowns in the first place.
The vaccines are somewhat effective therapeutics whose population-level effects weaken quite a bit after 3-6 months.
Herd immunity of the (virtually no risk) under 60 group continues to be the only way out. I'm sorry that your "sacrifice" of masks, staying home, and getting the jab were not the heroic things you thought they were. But there weren't heroic at all. They meant nothing. This is all now very obvious from cross-sectional international data.
I only intimately know the numbers here in Ontario, and here I can see that the vaccines are extremely effective for the people who take them.
All through the last two months, case counts went up to 10, 11, 12 cases / 100k (high for us) for the unvaccinated. For the fully vaccinated they stayed under 2 / 100k.
Even clearer for hospitalization and ICU admission. In the middle of September, 4.7/100k hospitalization rate for the unvaccinated. For the fully vaccinated, 0.38/100k.
The issue isn't the ineffectiveness of the vaccines. It's the fact that there's still hundreds of thousands, millions, of people unvaccinated. And the virus ran like wildfire through them, despite the rest of us doing our part.
Herd immunity from natural exposure is dangerous and isn't going to happen. A year and a half on, only 4% of the population here has tested positive.
FWIW my parents in Alberta lost 4 friends/acquaintances to COVID just in the past month. Only 2 of them were over 65. All were unvaccinated, devoutly religious & conservative, and dogmatic about their antivax/anti-mask positions.
"Herd immunity from natural exposure is dangerous and isn't going to happen. A year and a half on, only 4% of the population here has tested positive."
That's because a lot of people have had it, never felt too bad, and never got tested while the virus was actively replicating in their body. This has been proven in randomized serological tests in many jurisdictions now.
That would show up in test positivity rates, and it has not. At least not here. The only time when test positivity rate deviated significantly from daily counts was in the first wave spring 2020 when testing infrastructure wasn't there yet.
I can't say anything about places in the US where it spread like crazy through the population in the first wave. But I've seen no studies to back up what you're saying here in Canada. Also various cities have been doing testing of sewer water for the virus, and the values have matched, roughly (and in advance), what has been seen in testing rates.
> What makes you think the vaccine is an extremely effective solution to lockdowns? There are now many examples of high-vaccination countries with the same rapid case count rises that were the excuse for lockdowns in the first place.
What are you talking about? Have you even looked at the data? Vaccines are overwhelmingly effective at reducing infection rate, hospitalizations and deaths. The latter two are down drastically among highly-vaccinated populations. And infections are only up because restrictions have been lifted.
Being able to achieve lockdown-era infection and death rates without a lockdown is pretty fucking spectacular.
> were not the heroic things you thought they were.
I don't think they're heroic. I'll stay home forever. As long as it takes. Was it worth it? Completely. You're clearly not aware of Canada's early vaccine shortage. Lockdowns worked perfectly until we were able to get most people vaccinated. Now we're just chasing the long tail.
> It was your “civic duty” to rat out your neighbors, too. Your framing something as the moral position does absolutely nothing to make it so
I don't think you understood. I wasn't making an argument -- as far as I'm concerned, it's self evident that "getting a vaccine" is the moral position and "ratting on your neighbors for hiding Jews" is not the moral position. You're not being argued with; you're being excoriated for having such a ridiculously warped worldview.
> Most people under 50 are not at high risk from COVID
And they're still capable of transmitting COVID to other people at high risk, which will eventually happen with reproduction rate higher than 1. Do you have any suggestions for keeping the reproduction rate lower than 1 other than vaccination? I'm interested.
> The people advocating for mandates are themselves offensive and I think history will prove them to be utter monsters.
Those people are trying to save the community as whole, not just protecting themselves. To give you a data point, Portugal has fully opened the country without any mandates while controlling the disease, thanks to 85% vaccination rate.
> the Federal Government having the power to take away someone's source of income for their family if they don't take an experimental drug,
Cominarty is fully approved (its true that some products under EUA can also be used.)
It is also not, legally, a drug.
> Look at Florida, the most recent data shows they have some of the lowest infection/death rate despite never locking down and never forcing state wide mandates.
Out of 56 US states and territories, Florida has the seventh highest 7-day per capita death rate, over 1.5× the national rate; hardly “some of the lowest”.
It actually has a fairly low per capita newly-identified case rate, but that seems likely to be because the laxity of control measures is also making nonsevere cases less likely to be detected.
> Cominarty is fully approved (its true that some products under EUA can also be used.)
Only you can't get it anywhere and BioNTech is considered legally distinct, so there's no available FDA approved vaccine at this time. Try calling Pfizer.
> Only you can't get it anywhere and BioNTech is considered legally distinct
Which is interesting for some very esoteric legal reasons, but even to the extent that a formulation only allowed for non-investigatory use under an EUA rather than normal approval might approximately be said to be “experimental” (which is a fairly weak argument itself), the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, which is an identical formulation to the fully-approved Cominarty, but legally distinct because packaging is legally significant in drugs and biologics, would still not be “experimental”.
Canadians are, for the most part, okay with these restrictions.