NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

Relationship management and government oversight.

What are some of those "obvious good policy decisions"? Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.

Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.

And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers.

Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making. Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.

Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar. Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.

But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.

All of it?

I think people of a particular viewpoint have allowed their bias to drown out reason.

To top it all off, it will be very difficult to argue in good faith the mandate was not arbitrary. It quite literally came down to a single dude deciding who he liked better.

Just in this very thread we have people admonishing Adams for "ruining" the mandate, and if he had just been more careful then all these anti-vaxxers would be out of luck... as-if the mandate was a weapon to use against those we don't agree with. That's wrong.

So, while you may assert there isn't much substance to the case, I assert you are very wrong. There is no reality where what happened is legal and there should not be a reality where what happened is legal.

This was the first step in undoing some very great injustices.

> The trials weren't designed to detect anything except reduced PCR test positivity i.e. infections.

> They didn't attempt to determine what a "severe case" was because that distinction was invented only after the falling effectiveness made it necessary to do so

I'm sorry, but you're wrong on both of these points. From the Moderna phase-3 trial description [0] on clinicaltrials.gov:

> Primary Outcome Measures:

> 1. Efficacy: Number of Participants with a First Occurrence of COVID-19 Starting 14 Days after Second Dose of mRNA-1273

If you look at the trial protocol, there is no regular PCR testing (except for at the start of the trial and at administration of the 2nd dose). Only people who have two or more symptoms are tested. This means that the trial is only meant to test efficacy against symptomatic infection (also known as "CoVID-19," the disease, as opposed to the virus, "SARS-CoV-2"). From the scientific paper[1] on Moderna's phase-3 results:

> Covid-19 cases were defined as occurring in participants who had at least two of the following symptoms: fever (temperature ≥38°C), chills, myalgia, headache, sore throat, or new olfactory or taste disorder, or as occurring in those who had at least one respiratory sign or symptom (including cough, shortness of breath, or clinical or radiographic evidence of pneumonia) and at least one nasopharyngeal swab, nasal swab, or saliva sample (or respiratory sample, if the participant was hospitalized) that was positive for SARS-CoV-2 by reverse-transcriptase–polymerase-chain-reaction (RT-PCR) test.

Then, later on from clinicaltrials.gov:

> Secondary Outcome Measures:

> 1. Number of Participants with a First Occurrence of Severe COVID-19 Starting 14 Days after Second Dose of mRNA-1273 or Placebo

So you see that the idea of preventing "severe CoVID-19" goes back all the way to the formulation of the trials in early 2020.

And more detail from the scientific paper:

> A secondary end point was the efficacy of mRNA-1273 in the prevention of severe Covid-19 as defined by one of the following criteria: respiratory rate of 30 or more breaths per minute; heart rate at or exceeding 125 beats per minute; oxygen saturation at 93% or less while the participant was breathing ambient air at sea level or a ratio of the partial pressure of oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen below 300 mm Hg; respiratory failure; acute respiratory distress syndrome; evidence of shock (systolic blood pressure 0. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427

1. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2035389

Yeah, I also meant opening day roster, not starting roster. Can you tell I couldn't sleep last night?