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

This is not true. We understand a great deal about the human body. What's relevant here is that we understand the mechanisms that cause serious vaccine side-effects, and we understand why those side-effects appear within a few months.

> Spike protein accumulating in cardiac tissue leading to myocarditis.

Myocarditis occurs soon after vaccination, not long afterwards. It's also a very rare side-effect (it actually occurs more often from the virus itself).

> The whole point of a vaccine is to cause long term effects. That intended effect is immunity to disease.

What does this have to do with long-term adverse side-effects? The types of changes that a vaccine causes in the immune system are understood, and the reasons why those changes sometimes cause adverse side-effects are also understood. The mechanisms do not spring into action years later. The side-effects begin within months, at the latest.

> "Nothing else could possibly persist" smacks of hubris to me.

You're just dismissing immunology out-of-hand, based on vague statements about science not knowing how the body works.

> especially when the process has been politicized.

The politicization was on the side of the vaccine "skeptics." One of the most infuriating aspects of the pandemic has been how the most effective single tool for saving lives, a tool that has minuscule risks, has been subject to so much FUD. This tool is safe enough and beneficial enough that I would have absolutely no problem with mandating it for participation in society, the same way that seat belts and airbags are mandated.

They do and have done so many times throughout history.

> I am saying that the visceral reaction to plague is an instinctive human universal, not something that has to be cultivated.

Fear is an instinctive response to many things, and that can be and is manipulated.

Arbitrary here means that the rule wasn’t decided rationally. The government must typically establish a “rational basis” for any rule that they want to impose on people.

It is commonly understood that being indoors with a lot of people increases the risk of transmitting a virus between those people. The risk is understood to go up when more people are present, but it is also higher when the building is smaller than when it is larger.

Thus, a rational basis for the maximum occupancy of a building during a pandemic would be based on the number of people per square foot. A rule such as “1 person per 100 square feet” treats both large and small groups fairly, as well as treating large and small buildings fairly.

When we look at specific rules that were actually in place during the pandemic, we often find that there was no such rational basis. The rules were instead arbitrary. In NYC, churches were limited to a flat 10 people in the building at any one time, regardless of the size of the church building. This limits a large church more than a small one, and thus the rule is arbitrary. It would have been no more arbitrary if they had rolled dice to pick the number.

Similarly, the same rule in NYC did not apply to big–box hardware stores. A Home Depot could have hundreds of people in it all the time! No matter how important hardware stores are, this is an arbitrary distinction. There is no rational basis under which the virus is dangerous to a group of 11 people who are in a church, but not to a group of 11 people who are in a Home Depot. The relative importance of churches and Home Depots is not important. What is important is that the difference in how the rule applied to them was arbitrary.

> Risk for benefit may be worth taking, depending on how much benefit.

This is true. We each judge both the level of risk of each action we take, and the amount of benefit we gain from it. It is an _individual_ decision whether or not to go into a building, based on our _individual_ level of risk tolerance and our _individual_ benefit from whatever is in the building.

As a result, we long ago decided that if the government wants to step in and ban something that is risky, it must always have a rational basis on which that level of risk is determined. This prevents the government’s decisions from being arbitrary, and from favoring one party or group over others. (There are other requirements as well.)

For example, at some point we decided that crowded buildings were too large a fire risk. The government decided to allow the fire department to regulate the maximum number of people that could occupy every room of every building. In order to prevent this from being arbitrary, the fire department must base their determination on the actual fire risk: the materials the building is made from, the rate at which fire can spread in those materials, the number and size of the exits from the building, etc. The purpose of the building doesn’t matter: a church with 10,000 square feet and fire doors gets exactly the same maximum occupancy as a store with 10,000 square feet and fire doors (all else being equal; a real store would probably get dinged for having a bunch of additional flammable material in it).

It doesn’t matter that some buildings are used for frivolous purposes like entertainment while other are used for serious business. The fire doesn’t care about that, so neither can the fire department. This protects everybody against corruption and abuse of authority. Suppose the Fire Marshall was a crazy Fundamentalist, and arbitrarily decided that your bar should have a maximum occupancy of 2? You’d be out of business, and quite angry. By the same token, suppose the Fire Marshall was anti–religion, and arbitrarily decided that your church should have a maximum occupancy of 2? Same result. The rational basis rule is intended to protect us all from oppression at the hands of our neighbors, even when we have differing ideologies.

A virus doesn’t take into account the importance of the building when it infects people, and therefore pandemic restrictions on occupancy cannot take that into account either.