NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings • Hacker News Board

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#51

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

alecst wrote: post #9

Pretty dismal discussion in here at the time of writing. Largely complaints about tyranny. Makes me sad that we can't have a calm discussion about the merits of the policy. From what I can tell, you might be opposed to this policy if: 1. You have fears about getting a vaccine, moreso than for coronavirus. If this is you, do you prefer a mask mandate? And if so, how do you enforce this in a restaurant, where anyone ea…

I have a family member who, despite acknowledging that seat belts work and save lives, refuses to wear his seat belt purely out of petty spite "because I'm not gonna let the tyrannical government tell me what to do!" This endless conversation about vaccines is feeling more and more like that. Orthodox Individualism has become a religion.

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#52

Post by _Microft » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

BrianOnHN wrote: post #19

alecst wrote: post #9

Pretty dismal discussion in here at the time of writing. Largely complaints about tyranny. Makes me sad that we can't have a calm discussion about the merits of the policy. From what I can tell, you might be opposed to this policy if: 1. You have fears about getting a vaccine, moreso than for coronavirus. If this is you, do you prefer a mask mandate? And if so, how do you enforce this in a restaurant, where anyone ea…

Meta: What do you think about the timestamps on the children comments here? So many/much responses in <1min from the parent comment? GPT-3 manipulation?

That's because it was not submitted when you think it was. The submission came here via the second-chance pool. That means that it was submitted recently, in this case yesterday. It might have gotten a few points and comments at best but did not really catch on. It was deemed interesting enough and moved to the second-chance pool to be automatically put on the frontpage a few hours later again. The process rewrites timestamps as far as I know. You can see it in the list at time of writing this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

(You can also access the second-chance pool via the link labelled "Lists" in the footer of the front page if you do not want to remember it.)

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#53

Post by analyte123 » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #27

mandmandam wrote: post #2

Privacy watchdogs, data protection groups, and human rights councils have largely condemned these "vaccine passports". To date, I haven't seen their concerns mentioned - mentioned - in any of these pronouncements. I get that there are enough people willing to go along with this that they'll likely stick around for a bit - but another thing I haven't seen is an end game. Corona is in the deer, it's in pets. Are they a…

Obviously the end game isn't seen. We're nowhere close to the end game. We don't know about lasting immunity or about variants that don't even exist yet. Maybe we can eradicate it, maybe not. Literally no one knows what the future holds here.

Eradication is not happening. You might as well be talking about eradicating the flu, which is another contagious respiratory virus that rapidly mutates and is not completely controlled by vaccines. This was obvious even a month ago, when over 10% of a naval ship tested positive for Covid despite every single person being fully vaccinated [1]. I only hope that the "end game" is not permanent restrictions on travel, movement, and trade.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/14/covid-outbreak-a...

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#54

Post by mthoms » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

tboyd47 wrote: post #11

alecst wrote: post #9

Pretty dismal discussion in here at the time of writing. Largely complaints about tyranny. Makes me sad that we can't have a calm discussion about the merits of the policy. From what I can tell, you might be opposed to this policy if: 1. You have fears about getting a vaccine, moreso than for coronavirus. If this is you, do you prefer a mask mandate? And if so, how do you enforce this in a restaurant, where anyone ea…

Requiring people to consume a medical product, especially one that has not been subject to the full FDA approval process, just to live their normal lives is morally wrong. They are making people into test subjects for a multinational corporation. It doesn't matter if we already do this to an extent with other vaccines; nothing in the past has ever come close to this. It doesn't matter if you think the vaccine is more…

Your rights end when exercising them endangers my life and the lives of my family. That’s also a basic tenet of civil society (see traffic laws for example).

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#55

Post by lolc » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

drngdds wrote: post #31

Vaccine mandates are good in concept* and will probably spur a lot of the "I'll get it if it's required" or "I'm going to wait and see" people to go ahead and get it. But they're kind of weak as implemented here. Considering that a photo of a vaccine card is considered valid proof (and the guy checking cards at the bar or whatever is only going to spend two seconds looking at it), some enterprising scumbag could prob…

Regarding security: You can get fined over using fake certificates. So most people won't use fakes as long as the incentives are right. There's no need for airtight security here.

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#56

Post by Wowfunhappy » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

polote wrote: post #25

alecst wrote: post #9

Pretty dismal discussion in here at the time of writing. Largely complaints about tyranny. Makes me sad that we can't have a calm discussion about the merits of the policy. From what I can tell, you might be opposed to this policy if: 1. You have fears about getting a vaccine, moreso than for coronavirus. If this is you, do you prefer a mask mandate? And if so, how do you enforce this in a restaurant, where anyone ea…

This measure can't be a way to create "zero covid spaces" because people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus (even though less than unvaccinated people, but it doesnt seem to be a 90% reduction either). So the goal here is to increase the vaccination rate. It seems pretty weird to ask the indoor business owners to be the ones who are in charge of controlling that the vaccination rate is increasing and to…

But we're okay requiring masks, and we're okay putting the onus on businesses to enforce that.

I'd much rather enforce vaccinations than masks.

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#57

Post by tracedddd » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

alecst wrote: post #9

Pretty dismal discussion in here at the time of writing. Largely complaints about tyranny. Makes me sad that we can't have a calm discussion about the merits of the policy. From what I can tell, you might be opposed to this policy if: 1. You have fears about getting a vaccine, moreso than for coronavirus. If this is you, do you prefer a mask mandate? And if so, how do you enforce this in a restaurant, where anyone ea…

We shouldn’t applaud the normalization of health status checks outside a border crossing. The world has a nasty trend of using crises to erode privacy and we collectively never recover - what was sold as temporary becomes permanent, endlessly extended and expanded.

I’m not an antivaxer. The vaccine works and I believe it’s really safe. I’m vaccinated. Nearly anyone who is capable to go to a bar can easily go get vaccinated. If they don’t, I’m not interested in saving them from themselves, honestly.

If the spread or variant breakthrough or some other aspect is so critical that we need to resort to novel privacy violations we should just shut down again instead.

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#58

Post by AndrewBissell » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #44

tboyd47 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring people to consume a medical product, especially one that has not been subject to the full FDA approval process, just to live their normal lives is morally wrong. They are making people into test subjects for a multinational corporation. It doesn't matter if we already do this to an extent with other vaccines; nothing in the past has ever come close to this. It doesn't matter if you think the vaccine is more…

How many compulsory vaccines were necessary for you to attend school? For me, it was three or four at least, and until some genuinely inimical people decided vaccines were a good way to get famous at the expense of the body politic, nobody cared .

Are you drawing a comparison between requiring vaccinations (with 30+ year safety records) against measles and polio, for children to attend public school, with requiring vaccinations (with no long-term safety data whatsoever) against Covid for people to go to public establishments?

Did you ever need proof of a polio vaccine to get into Equinox?

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#59

Post by polote » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #56

polote wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This measure can't be a way to create "zero covid spaces" because people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus (even though less than unvaccinated people, but it doesnt seem to be a 90% reduction either). So the goal here is to increase the vaccination rate. It seems pretty weird to ask the indoor business owners to be the ones who are in charge of controlling that the vaccination rate is increasing and to…

But we're okay requiring masks, and we're okay putting the onus on businesses to enforce that . I'd much rather enforce vaccinations than masks.

It more or less made sense to require masks when people where unvaccinated. But now there is no reason to be OK to require masks either unless you are for mask wearing mandate for everything, everywhere, all the time

Re: NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

#60

Post by thinkharderdev » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

keneda7 wrote: post #15

alecst wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great reply, thank you. I don't want to get into a long argument, but a lot of what you say hinges on that 40% number. I'd like to know what that refers to. My reply to that 40% number: I thought that vaccines made you something like 20x less likely to end up in the hospital from coronavirus (widely cited as 95% protective.) And that unvaccinated people spread at 5x the rate of the vaccinated ones. https://www.nature…

Not the original poster but The article you link says the delta is unknown. Delta is rapidly becoming the most common variant in the US. ( https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210720/delta-variant-now-a... ) I believe the 40% is coming from the data out of Israel. ( https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v... ) Also data from the CDC on the latest outbreak they studies shows that 74% of the positives…

Whether it is proper for the government to mandate vaccines in certain situation is a complicated question but I think some of your priors are incorrect.

1. The data out of Israel on vaccine efficacy with Delta is out of line with other studies on the matter and is generally considered to suffer from some methodological flaws. See https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891 for a study out of Britain showing an efficacy of 88% against symptomatic infection. There is much more data that corroborates only slightly reduced efficacy and the Israel study is the outlier so anchoring to that number is probably a mistake.

2. The Pronvicetown study (where 74% of infected were vaccinated) doesn't tell you anything about vaccine efficacy. The vaccine rate for the town or state are irrelevant since the event in question included a large number of tourists. The town itself only has ~3000 people but there were 60k people there from all over the country at the week-long event.

3. Here is a study showing higher mutational variance in unvaccinated patients: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v.... This is exactly what we should expect. Vaccines drastically reduce the rate of transmission so we should have a strong prior that they would also reduce the rate of mutation.