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Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

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Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#481

Post by bruceb »

oceanplexian wrote: post #417
scarmig wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something can be endemic and deadly and still something we accept the consequences of without government imposed restrictions. For example: HIV is something that is now endemic and (still) deadly. And yet we don't go around forcibly shutting down gay bathhouses, bars, and Grindr and implementing condom and prep mandates, even though they would be effective at reducing its spread. And for good reason: it'd be a massiv…

So we did do that, and there is a bit of irony there. Back in the 80s AIDS was used to push homophobia and lots of states passed laws making promoting homosexuality illegal. At the time Dr.Fauci went on national television to tell the public you could get AIDS simply by touching or being in proximity to someone who had the virus. So if you want to talk about moralizing science, well actually…

"states passed laws making promoting homosexuality illegal."

Did they? Seems laws have only gone one way, decriminalizing since the late 70s

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#482

Post by Fernicia »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #209

(USA point of view) I feel like given that vaccines do an acceptable job at reducing risk of hospitalization and death, there is only really a few things worth discussing, in relevant order: - Are hospitals actually being overloaded by covid cases to the point of being an issue (according to many, yes. but according to [1] Johns Hopkins, no, or only in some cases?). - Are the unvaccinated actually the majority of the…

> - Are the unvaccinated actually the majority of the covid related cases (as far as I'm aware, yes).

They needn't be a majority. The mandate acts to reduce strain on the hospital, so ask whether it achieves that (I think the answer is yes)

> - Are unvaccinated hospitalizations significantly worse compared to other personal decisions (diet, exercise, risky hobbies).

It is harder to fix these than getting a jab.

> - Finally, what actions, if any, should be taken to correct the hospital load? (nothing, vaccine mandates, accelerated hospital expansion, turning people away, etc)

An alternative would be to charge unvaccinated people a premium on hospital costs, as I'm sure health insurance providers would be keen to do.

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#483

Post by kansface »

mike00632 wrote: post #249
anonfornoreason wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adjust for median age and your argument is moot

No. The vaccine prevents death. More people are dying in Florida because they are unvaccinated, not because Florida trends older.

Risk of death from Delta was ~200x higher for the elderly. Obesity added another ~4x. It doesn't matter if vaccines lower that by ~90% because the baseline risk is still there. Florida skewing much, much older has a massive impact in absolute numbers! You can't naively compare Florida stats to CA stats just like you can't compare Utah stats (a very young red state) to CA stats. A more fair comparison is the percentage of the elderly who died in Florida vs CA - the last time I tried to do the math, Florida came out slightly ahead, but you'd probably need a few days for a semi-rigorous comparison.

In truth, I don't think you can actually just multiply all of these numbers because they are correlated (and possibly non-linear). Also, the vaccines are less effective in the elderly population.

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#484

Post by gonehome »

app_gorilla wrote: post #471
gonehome wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, but I think the core difference with HIV is how it's transmitted. You're more in control of your transmission risk. That's less true with Covid given its contagiousness through the air. I'm of the opinion that private companies have every right to require restrictions they see fit. I'm more mixed about government restrictions now that we're post vaccine (with the exception that requiring vaccine manda…

vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected on exposure? With Omicron, vaccinated people are MORE likely to get infected, 90 days post-vaccine. Source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...

Yeah, more likely to get infected on exposure than an unvaccinated person that has not previously had the disease.

The source link supports that claim as far as I can tell from what's on that page and doesn't say anything about vaccinated people being more likely to get infected vs. unvaccinated (both without natural immunity).

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#485

Post by jrockway »

lmkg wrote: post #281
jrockway wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to comment a little on the "choice" thing. I'm not sure that every person who is unvaccinated chose that. I had to try very hard to get my three doses. For the first series, I had to go to a faraway FEMA-run site. For the booster, I scheduled three appointments with CVS; the first two times, they canceled my appointment on the walk over (I made the first like 3 weeks in advance, and they canceled with 10 min…

Access is also a larger issue in under-served populations. I'm fortunate enough, as probably are many on this site, to be able to just swing by CVS during some downtime while WFH. A person who is paid hourly for an in-person job and reliant on public transportation will have a much harder time. I wish there were stats on "want to vaccinate, but haven't been able to."

Very true. I'm the best possible case, right? I get my full salary and benefits to wander over to CVS only to be told they're out of vaccine. I get my full salary and benefits while filling out all the paperwork. And if I do get COVID, guess what -- full salary and benefits while I recover.

Most people are not that lucky, and unfortunately have to choose to roll the dice on COVID to avoid the certainty of being fired for missing work.

I would love it if there was data on "want a vaccine but couldn't get it". The vaccine finder website could have you indicate "I'm interested" and then email you every month and ask you to confirm that you got a vaccine or that you gave up or that you're still looking. I fear that people don't ask questions they don't want to know the answer to; "300 million people are looking for a vaccine but only 200 million got it" would not look good. Sigh!!

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#486

Post by AnthonyMouse »

skillpass wrote: post #303
tzs wrote: post #30

Something from the NYT mailing list yesterday: > The Covid vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing serious illness. If you’re vaccinated, your chances of getting severely sick are extremely low. Even among people 65 and older, the combination of the vaccines’ effectiveness and the Omicron variant’s relative mildness means that Covid now appears to present less danger than a normal flu. > For the unvaccinated,…

I agree - I am worried about taking hospital capacity claims at face value though. From what I've seen, it was common for hospitals to report being overwhelmed even during flu seasons pre-covid. I wouldn't classify that level of 'overwhelmed' worthy of mandates upon society. I don't doubt that during these periods of time hospital resources are strained in some way, but there's a difference between this routine level…

The thing they don't always mention is that hospital capacity is always close to being overwhelmed, by design, because otherwise you're sitting around with a large amount of extraordinarily expensive idle hospital capacity. A small change is enough to go from "almost full" to "over capacity."

The seemingly obvious thing to do would be to build some temporary capacity specifically for COVID patients. We've had quite a long time to do this now so I'm not sure what's preventing it. Maybe it's caught up in that thing where captured regulators are gatekeeping medical certifications to maintain labor scarcity or some such thing?

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#487

Post by crackercrews »

GiorgioG wrote: post #352
crackercrews wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people you elect to represent you (for those of us with a democracy-like government) The problem is that so many elected officials don't abide by the rules that they push. Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, London Breed, etc. When the powerful can ignore their own rules, they're more likely to enact sweeping mandates.

Yes because only democratic politicians ignore the rules.

Surely not. But I couldn't think of a single republican politician who has either created or advocated for a rule that he/she then broke. Can you help with examples?

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#488

Post by dham »

mgh2 wrote: post #216
quaffapint wrote: post #66

I'm vaccinated and boostered by my own choice. My problem with mandates is where does it end? Why this mandate and not other mandates? Who gets to decide that?

I rather think of vaccination as a responsibility toward your fellow citizens, rather than a "choice". This belief might be to blame for many of society's crises. https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...

> I rather think of vaccination as a responsibility toward your fellow citizens, rather than a "choice".

We make decisions every day of our lives that impact our fellow citizens negatively. Your point is what?

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#489

Post by walterbell »

benstrumental wrote: post #462
walterbell wrote: post #38

The media's binary separation of populations into vax and unvax is a false dichotomy. More causal factors would be represented by: 1. Covid-recovered 2. Vaccinated 3. Partly-vaccinated ( CDC reporting bundles #3 and #4. UK reports all 4 categories separately. #1 was already a high percentage in 2021 and is now higher due to Omicron. Edit: CDC estimated pre-Omicron #1 as 146 million people (as of Oct 2021), https://ww…

You may even split up (1) into omicron-recovered and other-variants-recovered , since recovering from omicron strain seems to give a stronger resistance against reinfection for both omicron and delta, whereas recovering from delta offers little reinfection resistance to omicron[1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/health/covid-omicron-anti...

Good point, thanks.

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#490

Post by tzs »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #364
theandrewbailey wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd say the answer to that should be determined by the hospital capacity. If a region has sufficient hospital capacity that it would not be overwhelmed by the increase in COVID cases among the unvaccinated go ahead and lift most restrictions. Having anyone's freedoms dependent on available hospital capacity is a terrible way to run a society. Note that these freedoms were debated and won in an era where medicine wa…

Especially since hospital capacity is induced scarcity due to government regulation and the AMA.

We'd be having the same shortages right now even in a completely unregulated free market hospital system. A free market isn't going to build and maintain a bunch of extra capacity that goes unused except during once in a hundred year outliers like major pandemics.

All that an unregulated free market would change is how we decide who gets treated when there isn't enough capacity to treat everyone.

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