NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

> The excess death statistics would like to have a word with you

Independent of the rest of your argument, this one is not a good one to hinge on.

"Excess death" is a pragmatic term, not a normative term. The baseline death statistics doesn't mean those deaths were OK, or natural and acceptable to endure. They include many peer to peer (e.g traffic accidents) or institution to peer (many "lifestyle" diseases') deaths too, which in themselves are also excess deaths in comparison to another baseline (e.g. obesity related deaths in comparison to 1960s).

These feeds back to the arguments of risk tolerance and freedoms; there is a mutually tolerated, implicit risk of peer-to-peer death in driving too. I am not saying this is comparable to the risk of death by covid (it is obviously not), but we can't make principled arguments of absolute safety nor absolute freedom without keeping things proportional to the risks and freedoms we're already been balancing.

> Basic human rights were not lost from the world by smallpox or other vaccination mandates.

If we're being anal about it, it is not entirely true. People have a right to keep the functional and structural integrity of their bodies; and even enhancing immunization would be a change in that, and that has an element of intrusiveness to it. Again, being a transmitter of the virus and harming other people's bodies is also a threat to the functional and structural organization of those bodies, and that is (very) intrusive too, but two things can be true at the same time, and therefore this is not the principle to argue from.

The honest argument would be accepting the need for striking a balance, accepting the sense of anxiety from both sides, and not pushing conclusions into people. We have to have people participate in the rationality of the decision making, from a place of empathy and growth.

I hope this is a moment we can also realize that just like public health is a shared resource and lack thereof is a shared liability, public rationality and sound decision making capability is also a shared resource and lack thereof is a shared liability. We've been turning a blind eye to all sorts of media training people to be more and more polarized, using shaming as a short-term compliance tool that has long-term stupefying consequences. Now we depend on all of us coming to our senses to survive this thing; we need a herd immunity against irrational self-deception just as much.

If 99 out of 100 people are vaccinated, the remaining person should be fine. "Should be" is the key phrase here—there are no guarantees in life—but while vaccinated people can still spread the virus, they're still much less likely to do so.

It's all a probability game. Add to this that the sole unvaccinated person is the one most at risk in any given setting, and I'm really fine letting them make their own choices.

You should probably supplement that with at least one other survey. Trafalgar is by far the most right-leaning polling group and got the 2020 election predictions the most wrong based on their polling. 538 has some more info on their methodical issues.

So let's give the risks here the benefit of the doubt and assume the odds of dying from the vaccine are 1 in a million. Given that we've administered >1B doses, that would mean >1000 people have died from the vaccine. This clearly isn't the case. Any argument that the death rate will increase long term just shows a clear misunderstanding of the immune response. But that aside, let's still give it one in a million.

The one-year chances of dying in a car crash are ~20 in a million [1]. I assume then that if the vaccine "risk" concerns you, you've clearly given up driving, right?

A quick search suggest that US has had ~35M cases of Covid-19 and ~615K deaths. Deaths in particular is likely underreported but we'll go with the official figures.

That puts the odds of dying from Covid-19 at ~2%, which is of course 20,000 in a million. The vaccine isn't perfect but recent data shows that almost all severe cases (including death) occur in the unvaccinated population, even when there's a breakthrough infection of someone vaccinated.

This is the problem many including myself have when anyone raises the specter of "risks" because even if you assume the worst case scenario of getting the vaccine, not getting it is literally thousands of times more likely to kill you.

And that would be fine I guess if that only applied to you but it doesn't. The unvaccinated pose a health risk to everyone around them.

The anti-vaxxer position just completely defies logic. Worse, defying logic seems to be a badge of honor for some.

[1]: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...