s all very well to choose not to consider those who differ with us enemies, but in some cases they will consider us enemies. I worry about that. — Srap Tasmaner

Remember that Hamilton and Jefferson hated each other to point that there was violence in the air. That's normal when there is no dictator to suppress conflict.

The American system can handle that kind of conflict up to a point. The Civil War shows how the whole thing can break down. If things head in that direction, history shows that compromise only makes things worse.

I think of mass events like that as storms. No one rain drop can do anything but be slung around like a character in War and Peace. No point in worrying about it before hand.

The title of the OP obviously makes all these issues "the same" with respect to the question of "worth engaging with". That's the question. — boethius

As I mentioned before, only in the sense of irrationality -- immunity to facts, being non-persuadable, etc. Otherwise they're very disparate topics indeed -- and there are plenty of others.

Again, if whole countries don't have mandated vaccines, it's no where close to "settled science" and "settled ethics" like the earth is round like a ball. — boethius

No one has once equated the two. You're welcome to quote me, but you won't find it.

What countries are you referring to? And the science is indeed settled, however governments wish to carry on about it. The advice from ethicists vary, depending on the country and its unique set of issues. I've restricted my criticism mostly to the US. Not every country has an abundance of vaccines, which also changes the dynamic.

The world is a complex place.

Norway is particularly interesting (because, it's not "unconstitutional", but they haven't don it, because competence generally means they don't really need to consider it): — boethius

Fine -- good for them. The US wouldn't have needed to mandate vaccines if much of the population weren't being completely irresponsible. Now they've been pushed into doing so -- despite an abundance of vaccines, free vaccinations, convenient sites, etc.

Do I wish our population were more like Norways? Yes, I do.

That's a political and legal issue. The WHO has been pretty clear on their recommendations. No one is saying we want to physically force people into vaccinations -- that's a false characterization and a red herring. — Xtrix

I've made it clear I am talking about needing papers to participate in normal society, which I would define as "force". The force is the fines or prison (and prison if you don't pay the fines); clearly using force.

However, I'm fine with the word coerce or just internal vaccines passports.

In exchange for not giving the state power that could easily be abused (people needing "papers" to participate in normal society), there are costs to that. — boethius

There's sensible debate to be had about the legitimacy of state power, and whether vaccine mandates are an example of such. I get the concern. I'm not equating this with anti-vaxxers, and especially not flat Earthers. But I do think the case is clear cut and that people are arguing for the sake of argument -- typical in philosophy forums, I suppose. — Xtrix

This is all I'm trying to say here.

I'm not saying the issue is clear cut; I even stated a scenario could be so extreme that I would support forced medical intervention. Maybe aliens (from the movie aliens) come to earth; what do we do then?

However, what seems pretty clear to me in the pandemic is that competent governments that really do "follow the science" didn't need vaccine mandates or hard lock-downs (those "restrictions" for the sake of public safety), with disastrous health consequences anyways (both on lot's of people who got covid as well as the trauma to health professionals trying to deal with the situation) ... because they took science and public safety seriously to begin with.

And, because they took science and public safety seriously to begin with, people have high confidence in such a government and vaccine uptake is not only high it's done before there's any significant wave (reaping the full benefits the vaccines can offer to society, assuming they work as advertised).

Of course, I think each issue is worthy of discussion, and feel free to start a thread on anything that don't already have a thread about.

Even the "flat earth" issue is worth while to go over why we are as certain the world is a ball as we can be about essentially anything; though, more interesting to me is the what's pretty clear to me the media making "a thing" about flat earthers to make the intellectual equivalence with dissent of essentially any kind. Why wasn't "flat earth" an issue of any relevance before? Because it's not an issue of any relevance now; and I'm pretty sure 99% of "true believers" only found out about it because the media turned it into some sort of relevant public debate (which it's not), I'm nearly 100% confident the entire flat earth content was started as a joke (extremely typical engineery / physicicsy joke material).

The force is the fines or prison (and prison if you don't pay the fines); clearly using force. — boethius

That's not on the table in the US. No one will be sent to prison. You get vaccinated or you don't come to work/school -- simple. That's coercion? Fine -- then it's excited for decades. Have you been against this for decades -- the measles and smallpox vaccines, for example? Tuberculosis shots for healthcare jobs? Etc?

Why wasn't "flat earth" an issue of any relevance before? Because it's not an issue of any relevance now; and I'm pretty sure 99% of "true believers" only found out about it because the media turned it into some sort of relevant public debate (which it's not), I'm nearly 100% confident the entire flat earth content was started as a joke (extremely typical engineery / physicicsy joke material). — boethius

I think similar things are happening here with the covid vaccines. But not only that -- when anything big happens, people feel the need to settle on an "opinion" and some memorized lines to say to friends and family.

As far as flat earth -- I think a lot of it was a "joke" tweet by the basketball player Kyrie Irving.

That's not on the table in the US. No one will be sent to prison. You get vaccinated or you don't come to work/school -- simple. That's coercion? Fine -- then it's excited for decades. — Xtrix

People (especially in the US) need to work to survive; obviously it's coercion if "enough" jobs require vaccine that you cannot practically find work at a "normal level" (making you a second class citizen); likewise, suddenly changing the policy for professions that previously had no such requirement is coercive to people who depend on that profession and did not provide "informed consent" when they started in that career.

If such mandates are for a limited set of professions, then easy to argue you can do something else, so depends on how many such work places we're talking about.

School has other issues (parents rights vs. state rights; children can't "consent") etc. lot's to debate about.

However, what's clearly coercive is needing "papers" to simply exist in any sort of normal way in society, which is pretty much the explicit goal of the pro-vaccine-passports partisans on the internet.

Now, UK government I believe just backed down from the internal vaccine passport policy.

And, if few governments, including the US, have even implemented any such policy, seems just to support my view it's not obviously ethical, settled medical ethics question, which was the statement of yours I was responding to.

To speak of young children being hospitalised with Covid-19 has the the same fearful effect as speaking of all the anecdotal reports of horrific vaccine injuries. Do you dismiss the latter as being unverified and unrepresentative? If so it seems worth considering that you may be employing the same trick. — AJJ

Ah. Well it was not intended as a trick, but only to demonstrate that children are not immune. The only reason to demonstrate that children are not immune is because exactly that claim had some traction earlier in the year in some media circles, and maybe still does though I doubt it.

Here’s John Ioannidis, a highly respected researcher in epidemiology, saying that according to his research (in places such as Germany) the absolute risk of an under-65 dying from Covid-19 is about the same as driving your car to work — AJJ

Ioannidis is a pretty smart guy, and I would trust his statistics. But that video is from over a year ago, and we should have a better idea by now what the actual mortality rate is, and how it compares to, say, seasonal flu. Here's something from Johns Hopkins. I didn't realize the rates were so variable, which I suppose is down to quality of care. Seasonal flu is usually around 0.2% or 0.3% right? So a lot of countries are less than one order of magnitude bigger than that, and a lot of countries are much higher (but may also have much higher rates of death from seasonal flu). Higher than he thought a year ago, but within an order of magnitude, so not bad at all for an estimate. (Is there an easy-to-find breakdown of case-fatality rates broken down by vaccination status? That would be worth seeing.)

What I don't understand is what use you're making of case-fatality rate. Are you telling parents they shouldn't care if their kids get sick because they're less than ten times as likely to die from covid than they are from the flu? I mean, yeah, it's not Ebola, but you and your family ought to get vaccinated. Right? It's a risk that can be dramatically reduced.

Early on, it seemed to me that most of those hardest hit were black and Latino. Now I'm finally seeing one fat, diabetic unvaccinated white person after another dying. — frank

And I've made the straw/camel back argument but don't expect you to get it. Or the variant issue and how, as you say, we lost the war. Whatever, let's blame fat people. For now.

The American system can handle that kind of conflict up to a point. The Civil War shows how the whole thing can break down. If things head in that direction, history shows that compromise only makes things worse. — frank

Civil war feels decidedly less hypothetical than it did when I was a kid. We're basically living through a cold civil war right now (with occasional open fighting, January 6 did actually happen).

And I've made the straw/camel back argument but don't expect you to get it. — James Riley

What straw/camel back argument?

Civil war feels decidedly less hypothetical than it did when I was a kid. We're basically living through a cold civil war right now (with occasional open fighting, January 6 did actually happen). — Srap Tasmaner

There are pretty deep divisions now, yes.

What straw/camel back argument? — frank

Never mind. I sometimes forget that not everyone reads the whole thread(s) on a subject. I tire and don't want to repeat myself.

Never mind. I sometimes forget that not everyone reads the whole thread(s) on a subj — James Riley

:up:

There are pretty deep divisions now, yes. — frank

I think about waking-up-from-a-coma-on-January-6 scenarios. Fifty years ago, pre-Watergate, the scene itself might not be surprising -- students had been occupying university administration buildings and stuff like that -- but this was a large and violent group of people who believed the election had been stolen. (Not protesting but attacking, and not a policy, but questioning the legitimacy of the government.) Nixon won the election he was so worried about in a landslide.

Post-Watergate, the idea that some group might conspire to rig a national election is more plausible, but still fringy. Today, there have been all sorts of polls showing a majority of Republicans think the election was stolen. What was the last day, between Watergate and January 6, that you could have gone into a coma and then wake up to find what was happening surprising? Twenty years earlier? Ten? Five? One? How did we even get from A to B?

Ah. Well it was not intended as a trick, but only to demonstrate that children are not immune. — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe it wasn’t intended that way but it is tendentious, just as speaking solely of the vaccine’s potential harms is, and so suggests your view is not balanced (not assuming that mine conversely is).

Is there an easy-to-find breakdown of case-fatality rates broken down by vaccination status? That would be worth seeing. — Srap Tasmaner

Presumably the JCVI had information of that sort and concluded the risk to the very young was marginal enough to warrant a precautionary approach to vaccinating them all.

What I don't understand is what use you're making of case-fatality rate. Are you telling parents they shouldn't care if their kids get sick because they're less than ten times as likely to die from covid than they are from the flu? — Srap Tasmaner

No. Questions such as this are a slippery way of defaming someone.

I mean, yeah, it's not Ebola, but you and your family ought to get vaccinated. Right? It's a risk that can be dramatically reduced. — Srap Tasmaner

What is the risk of a young, healthy person dying from Covid-19? According to research such as Ioannidis’s, tiny. What is the risk of a person being injured by one of the vaccines? We don’t really know, but it exists. So where does this dramatic reduction in risk you claim actually come from?

It does. That's not what "begging the question" means. I wonder if you and AJJ are the same person. — Xtrix

"begging the question occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it."
Why is it more likely the majority is right? Because the majority is greater in number, there is a higher probability they are right.
Is that not the gist of your argument? If you would rather call that circular reasoning, I'm ok with that.
The important point is that you haven't offered an argument that doesn't assume your conclusion is right.

I think when it comes to the exemplars on this forum, both sides actually believe it. Both sides think the other side is the enemy of everything good in the world. — Srap Tasmaner

We don't have both sides on this forum, as far as I know. I haven't seen any vocal anti-vaccers here.

From what I have seen, there are only the vocal pro-vaccers and the moderate pro-vaccers here. The vocal pro-vaccers automatically class the moderate pro-vaccers as the enemy.

Further, the moderate pro-vaccers don't see the vocal pro-vaccers nor the vocal anti-vaccers as the enemy, much less as "the enemy of everything good in the world".

People (especially in the US) need to work to survive; obviously it's coercion if "enough" jobs require vaccine that you cannot practically find work at a "normal level" (making you a second class citizen); likewise, suddenly changing the policy for professions that previously had no such requirement is coercive to people who depend on that profession and did not provide "informed consent" when they started in that career. — boethius

That coercion is legitimate, considering the stakes. This is a public health issue. Likewise, school and work vaccines that have existed for decades are also legitimate.

And, if few governments, including the US, have even implemented any such policy, seems just to support my view it's not obviously ethical, settled medical ethics question, which was the statement of yours I was responding to. — boethius

The vaccine passport idea is perfectly ethical in situations I’ve heard so far: travel, concerts, etc. how else will we know if those are vaccinated or not?

If people were smart and decent, these measures wouldn’t have to be taken. So these proposals are necessary because all other rational pleas have failed.

What’s the alternative? Let things go on like this? Check out what’s happening in Idaho— with hospitals so overflowing they’re moving them to neighboring Washington state, with much higher vaccination rates.

Right now, those who are unvaccinated are dying at a much higher rate, and taking up hospital beds.

What about coworkers who don’t want to have a higher likelihood of getting infected do? Quit their jobs? Isn’t that also coercive?

The important point is that you haven't offered an argument that doesn't assume your conclusion is right. — Yohan

So you wouldn’t go with the 99 doctors. Got it.

I think that’s demonstrably stupid. Same as going with Alex Jones over the IPCC. You can apply the rationale you’re employing to this as well.

As laymen, it’s prudent to listen to the consensus of experts. This is so commonsensical it’s essentially a truism. If you want to have an abstract, academic conversation about it, I’m not interested.

What was the last day, between Watergate and January 6, that you could have gone into a coma and then wake up to find what was happening surprising? Twenty years earlier? Ten? Five? One? — Srap Tasmaner

Good question.

How did we even get from A to B? — Srap Tasmaner

Wendy Brown describes a left leaning narrative:

"Taking even themselves by surprise, hard-right forces have surged to power in liberal democracies across the globe.1 Every election brings a new shock: neo-Nazis in the German parliament, neofascists in the Italian one, Brexit ushered in by tabloid-fueled xenophobia, the rise of white nationalism in Scandinavia, authoritarian regimes taking shape in Turkey and Eastern Europe, and of course, Trumpism. Racist, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic hatefulness and bellicosity grow in the streets and across the internet, and newly coalesced far-right groups have burst boldly into the public light after years of lurking mostly in the shadows. Politicians and political victories embolden far-right movements, which in turn acquire sophistication as political handlers and social media experts craft the message. As recruits continue to grow, centrists, mainstream neoliberals, liberals, and leftists are reeling. Outrage, moralizing, satire, and vain hopes that internal factions or scandals on the right will yield self-destruction are far more prevalent than serious strategies for challenging these forces with compelling alternatives.

"We even have trouble with the naming—is this authoritarianism, fascism, populism, illiberal democracy, undemocratic liberalism, right-wing plutocracy? Or something else? Failure to predict, understand, or effectively contest these developments is due partly to blinding assumptions about perduring Western values and institutions, especially progress and Enlightenment and liberal democracy, and partly to the unfamiliar agglomeration of elements in the rising Right—its curious combination of libertarianism, moralism, authoritarianism, nationalism, hatred of the state, Christian conservatism, and racism. These new forces conjoin familiar elements of neoliberalism (licensing capital, leashing labor, demonizing the social state and the political, attacking equality, promulgating freedom) with their seeming opposites (nationalism, enforcement of traditional morality, populist antielitism, and demands for state solutions to economic and social problems). They conjoin moral righteousness with nearly celebratory amoral and uncivil conduct. They endorse authority while featuring unprecedented public social disinhibition and aggression. They rage against relativism, but also against science and reason, and spurn evidence-based claims, rational argumentation, credibility, and accountability. They disdain politicians and politics while evincing a ferocious will to power and political ambition.

"Where are we? There has been no shortage of efforts by pundits and scholars alike to answer this question. A composite Left account, whose limits will soon become clear, goes roughly like this: in the Global North, neoliberal economic policy devastated rural and suburban regions, emptying them of decent jobs, pensions, schools, services, and infrastructure as social spending dried up and capital chased the cheap labor and tax havens of the Global South. Meanwhile, an unprecedented cultural and religious divide was opening. Hip, educated, slender, secular, multicultural, globetrotting urbanites were building a different moral and cultural universe from the midlanders, whose economic woes were salted with steadily growing estrangement from the mores of those who ignored, ridiculed, or disdained them. More than hard up and frustrated, the Christian white rural and suburban dwellers were alienated and humiliated, left out, and left behind. Then there was enduring racism, rising as new immigrants transformed suburban neighborhoods and as policies of “equity and inclusion” appeared to the uneducated white male to favor everyone over him. Thus, liberal political agendas, neoliberal economic agendas, and cosmopolitan cultural agendas generated a growing experience of abandonment, betrayal, and ultimately rage on the part of the new dispossessed, the white working-class and middle-class populations of the First and Second Worlds. If their dark-skinned counterparts were hurt as much or more by neoliberal decimations of union-protected jobs and public goods, by declining opportunities and educational access and quality, what blacks and Latinos did not suffer was lost pride of place in America or the West.

"As this phenomenon first took shape, the story goes, conservative plutocrats manipulated it brilliantly: the dispossessed were thrown under the economic bus at every turn while being played a political symphony of Christian family values along with paeans to whiteness and to their young sacrificed in senseless and endless wars. That is “what’s the matter with Kansas.”2 Combining patriotism as militarism, Christianity, family, racist dog whistles, and unbridled capitalism was the successful recipe of conservative neoliberals until the 2008 finance capital crisis devastated incomes, retirements, and home ownership for its working-class and middle-class white base.3 With even the economists muttering that they had been wrong about unchecked deregulation, debt financing, and globalization, serious displacement was now required. This meant screaming about ISIS, undocumented immigrants, affirmative action myths, and above all, demonizing government and the social state for the economic catastrophe—slyly shifting the blame from Wall Street to Washington because the latter mopped up the mess by rescuing the banks while hanging little people out to dry. Thus was a second wave of reaction to neoliberalism born, this one more unruly, populist, and ugly. Already galled by an elegant black family in the White House, disgruntled whites were also fed a steady diet of right-wing commentary by Fox News, talk radio, and social media, inflected from the fringes as a potpourri of previously isolated movements—white nationalist, libertarian, antigovernment, and fascist—connected with each other via the internet.4 Especially given widespread disillusionment with the interminable Middle East wars, militaristic patriotism and family values were no longer enough. Rather, the new hard-right populism was bled directly from the wound of dethroned privilege that whiteness, Christianity, and maleness granted to those who were otherwise nothing and no one.

"The dethronement was easy enough to blame on job-stealing immigrants and minorities, along with other imagined undeserving beneficiaries of liberal inclusion (most outrageously, those of putatively terrorist religions and races) courted by elites and globalists. Thus were the causalities of neoliberal economic policies mobilized by the figure of their own losses, mirrored in a nation lost. This figure drew on a mythical past when families were happy, whole, and heterosexual, when women and racial minorities knew their place, when neighborhoods were orderly, secure, and homogenous, when heroin was a black problem and terrorism was not inside the homeland, and when a hegemonic Christianity and whiteness constituted the manifest identity, power, and pride of the nation and the West.5 Against invasions by other peoples, ideas, laws, cultures, and religions, this was the fairy-tale world right-wing populist leaders promised to protect and restore. The campaign slogans tell it all: “Make America Great Again” (Trump), “France for the French” (Le Pen and the National Front), “Take Back Control” (Brexit), “Our Culture, Our Home, Our Germany” (Alternative for Germany), “Pure Poland, White Poland” (Poland’s Law and Justice Party), “Keep Sweden Swedish” (Sweden Democrats). These slogans and the aggrieved spirit they express connected heretofore disparate racist fringe groups, right-wing Catholics and Christian evangelicals and merely frustrated white suburbanites falling out of the middle and working classes. Growing siloization of media consumption, from cable TV to Facebook, strengthened these connections and widened the chasm between the midlanders and the educated, urban and urbane, mixed race, feminist, queer affirmative, and godless. At the same time, neoliberalism’s relentless diminution of nonmonetized existence, such as being knowledgeable and thoughtful about the world, converged with the privatization choking off access to higher education for the many.

"A generation turned away from liberal arts education was also turned against it. The accent marks in this story vary. Sometimes they are on neoliberal policy, sometimes on putative Left-liberal absorption with multiculturalism and identity politics, sometimes on the increased political importance and power of evangelicals and Christian nationalists, sometimes on the growing vulnerability of an uneducated population to lies and conspiracies, sometimes on the existential need for horizons and inherent unattractiveness of a globalist worldview for all but elites, and sometimes on the enduring racism of an old white working class or the new racism cleaved to by younger uneducated whites. Some stress the role of powerful right-wing think tanks and political money. Others stress new/old “tribalisms” emerging from the breakdowns of nation-states or previously more (racially or religiously) homogenous regions. However, almost all agree that neoliberal intensification of inequality within the Global North was a tinderbox and that mass migration from South to North was a match to the fire. With its various inflections, this has become the Left’s common sense since the political earthquake of November 2016. The narrative is not wrong, but, I will argue, incomplete. It does not register the forces overdetermining the radically antidemocratic form of the rebellion and thus tends to align it with fascisms of old. It does not consider the demonized status of the social and the political in neoliberal governmentality nor the valorization of traditional morality and markets in their place. It does not recognize the disintegration of society and the discrediting of the public good by neoliberal reason as tilling the ground for the so-called “tribalisms” emerging as identities and political forces in recent years. It does not explain how the attack on equality, combined with mobilization of traditional values, could turn up the heat on and legitimate long-simmering racisms from colonial and slave legacies (what Nikhil Singh calls our “inner and outer wars”) or the never-go-softly-into-the-night character of male superordination.6 It does not register the intensifying nihilism that challenges truth and transforms traditional morality into weapons of political battle."

-- Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism

As laymen, it’s prudent to listen to the consensus of experts. This is so commonsensical it’s essentially a truism. If you want to have an abstract, academic conversation about it, I’m not interested. — Xtrix

Thanks for only sharing this now. Could have saved mine and others time, I imagine.

That coercion is legitimate, considering the stakes. This is a public health issue. Likewise, school and work vaccines that have existed for decades are also legitimate. — Xtrix

Obviously it's not legitimate for a lot of people considering many government have made no coercive measures. Again, clearly not on the same level as flat earth and 6000 year old earth, which this thread is supposed to be equally about according to your own OP.

You've also answered your own question, on at least this vaccination point, by engaging with me.

The vaccine passport idea is perfectly ethical in situations I’ve heard so far: travel, concerts, etc. how else will we know if those are vaccinated or not? — Xtrix

The issue of the vaccine passport is "how much". But again, zero vaccine passports and no serious talk of making any where I live.

If people were smart and decent, these measures wouldn’t have to be taken. So these proposals are necessary because all other rational pleas have failed. — Xtrix

What about the "rational plea" to governments to contain the virus when it first broke out?

Or the rational plea to prepare enough resources for the next waves ... or even the first wave with just keeping existing legally obliged stocks of emergency supplies up to date and so on.

If governments (so incompetent as to let the crisis get out of hand where other governments "following the science" haven't) aren't held accountable for existing policy failures, why should people trust the next policy? All I hear is "yeah, yeah, yeah, government fucks you and lies to you all the time, will ruin your health and planet in a heart beat if corporations can gain anything from it, but! but! this particular issue is different".

Trust needs to be earned. Governments that have not earned any trust shouldn't be surprised when they start to lose the basic trust needed to govern in the first place.

I haven't heard of police dragging anti-vaxxers off to a facility and forcefully vaccinating them. Anyone? The likes of kindergartens, schools, hospitals, military, is where vaccination has been mandatory (or at least some vaccinations have), for some time. I suppose the unvaccinated don't qualify for some things (the blind don't qualify for driver's license, either).
Reasonable, whether imposing/"discriminatory" or not. (y)

Another dilemma related to anti-vaxxers is parents choosing for their children. I guess a common example is Jehovah's Witnesses denying blood transfusions. The situation has also been treated by various fictional accounts, e.g. a Babylon 5 episode called Believers (science fiction can sometimes defuse taboos). We have real life examples of criminal negligence where peers imposed whatever their religious faiths were on others, disregarding medicine, kind of bordering on murder in a way.
Irrational/ignorant, and a bit creepy. (n)

Medicine/science informs, ethics/morals decides, policies/politics implements. Presently, getting vaccinated comes out on top. While partaking in society do we not also have at least some social obligations? Seems responsible to take part in stomping the pandemic down.

Maybe it wasn’t intended that way but it is tendentious — AJJ

Then we don't use that word there same way. I wasn't trying to make a broader point with the thing about kids, just the exact point I made, as I've explained. I may be arguing incompetently, but I'm doing so in good faith. I assume you are too.

Questions such as this are a slippery way of defaming someone. — AJJ

And I wasn't trying to defame you; I was asking why you brought up case-fatality rates. How should people use those statistics to inform the choices they must make? (Is that less offensive?)

What is the risk of a young, healthy person dying from Covid-19? According to research such as Ioannidis’s, tiny. What is the risk of a person being injured by one of the vaccines? We don’t really know, but it exists. So where does this dramatic reduction in risk you claim actually come from? — AJJ

I'm not advocating vaccination for children. If people who know more than I do have made the trade-off, I trust that decision.

Given that, I take your point about not lumping in unvaccinated children with adults who cannot get vaccinated. If the risk for children is already extremely low, we should talk about them separately. You are right.

I agree with your read of our little population, for the most part. I was mostly talking about the world "out there".

I haven't heard of police dragging anti-vaxxers off to a facility and forcefully vaccinating them. Anyone? The likes of kindergartens, schools, hospitals, military, is where vaccination has been mandatory (or at least some vaccinations have), for some time. I suppose the unvaccinated don't qualify for some things (the blind don't qualify for driver's license, either). — jorndoe

Making life essentially impossible without an internal vaccine passport, is a use force. What happens if you don't have your papers? Fine or prison. What if you don't pay the fine? Prison. What if you don't voluntarily go to prison? Force.

If something is needed for survival, you are de facto forced to do it. That there is a nominal difference with holding you down and injecting you is not so relevant ethically. If you withheld food from a prisoner unless they danced like a chicken, most people would not quibble that that's not "physically holding them and making them dance like a chicken".

Now, if it's perfectly easy to continue to live a normal life without the vaccine, then I'd agree it's not a use of force or "coercion" for those that prefer that softer lexical version of the same moral thing.

And, as noted, many countries do not have anything close to a "vaccine mandate" or "vaccine internal passport", but common pro-vaccine-mandate sentiments on the internet are: denying care to the vaccinated and making life impossible without your "papers". UK recently reneging on their vaccine passport plan.

Obviously, is up for fairly legitimate debated Which again, my basic point in this threat is that vaccine issues are no where close to the shape or age of the earth (in the sense of 000 or roughly 4 billion) issues.

Part of a narrative to delegitimize any dissent from government policy while serving as a scapegoat for obviously failed government policy.

How should people use those statistics to inform the choices they must make? — Srap Tasmaner

I don’t know how they *should* use them. I’m arguing that they *can* be used to inform a decision to decline the vaccine. I keep bringing up young children and the JCVI judgement because it provides a helpful extreme—it shows there are cases where the trade-off *might* make it not worth getting vaccinated or where the decision is negligible, at least from a personal perspective. Are such cases found in the somewhat older population? I don’t see why not. If this is right then vaccine mandates lose this justification.

Wendy Brown describes a left leaning narrative: — frank

Honestly a good read, thanks for posting.

Would you agree with part below?

The narrative is not wrong — Wendy Brown

And of what follows:

but, I will argue, incomplete. It does not register the forces overdetermining the radically antidemocratic form of the rebellion and thus tends to align it with fascisms of old. It does not consider the demonized status of the social and the political in neoliberal governmentality nor the valorization of traditional morality and markets in their place. It does not recognize the disintegration of society and the discrediting of the public good by neoliberal reason as tilling the ground for the so-called “tribalisms” emerging as identities and political forces in recent years. — Wendy Brown

Of course, the more radical left has not at all been surprised. We usually call it "late stage capitalism".

Here's some sample content:

Thanks for only sharing this now. Could have saved mine and others time, I imagine. — Yohan

We can always abstract things into irrelevance, cutting some corners/particulars here and there. We still have to deal with the current outbreak.

By the way, ad verecundiam/populum isn't quite applicable here. The world (nature, evidence) is the authority here anyway, that's what subject matter experts point at.

, how many (real life) examples do we have? With no workarounds?

There is the problem of when attending school is mandatory and (some) vaccines are mandatory for attending school. (And, for that matter, I guess school can be where ignorance is dispelled in the first place.) What now?

Agreed.

I do wonder how the trade-off is made though, as children in school together represent an excellent way for diseases to spread from household to household, even colds, flu, and the like.

For adults, as @Isaac has argued at length, the baseline risk for a healthy middle-aged person might be low enough that the vaccine offers little additional protection, some but not much. (Though possibly still a good decision given the extremely low cost to an individual.)

That still leaves questions about whether the vaccine helps reduce transmission.

Obviously it's not legitimate for a lot of people considering many government have made no coercive measures. — boethius

I'll repeat yet again: I'm talking about the United States. Whatever country you're referring to -- as most have mask and vaccine requirements -- I'm not sure, but it's irrelevant. Why? Because different situations call for different solutions. If every citizen vaccinated voluntarily (or 80-90% do) then no mandates are really necessary to begin with. In countries without an abundance of vaccines, a vaccine mandate makes almost no sense.

In the United States, this is clearly legitimate use of power. I wish it didn't have to come to this -- but I wish we didn't have to go so far as to create laws for other issues as well, like drunk driving. Responding with "some countries don't have drunk driving laws" is equally irrelevant.

Again, clearly not on the same level as flat earth and 6000 year old earth, which this thread is supposed to be equally about according to your own OP. — boethius

I'll repeat, yet again: No one, including me, is equating a discussion on vaccine mandates and state power to Creationism. If you want to keep repeating falsehoods even after being corrected, you'll be ignored.

The issue of the vaccine passport is "how much". But again, zero vaccine passports and no serious talk of making any where I live. — boethius

Maybe it's impossible for you to understand that different countries are in different situations.

This is exactly what I mean by a waste of time.

If people were smart and decent, these measures wouldn’t have to be taken. So these proposals are necessary because all other rational pleas have failed.
— Xtrix

What about the "rational plea" to governments to contain the virus when it first broke out? — boethius

What about them? I was on here arguing in favor of much stronger measures. Take it up with the Trump administration.

To point out another obvious fact: The Trump administration is not the same as the Biden administration.

Trust needs to be earned. Governments that have not earned any trust shouldn't be surprised when they start to lose the basic trust needed to govern in the first place. — boethius

Yes, which is why the question is a simple one: given the state exerts power all the time, in manifold ways, is this particular act of power legitimate or illegitimate. You're arguing for the latter, and you're wrong. You're wrong for myriad reasons.

These mandates are not only just, but overdue -- given the situation in the United States (which is not Nigeria, or Australia, or Bhutan). The medical community (and medical ethicists) have fielded many questions about all of this, which are all over the internet and media if one deigns to read and listen, and they have been ignored -- by you, and by everyone else fighting against mandates. So now you have become what you're criticizing the Trump administration of doing.

It doesn't make you an anti-vaxxer, but it certainly gives cover to them and legitimizes their position, during a time when we need everyone on deck for the common good.

I haven't heard of police dragging anti-vaxxers off to a facility and forcefully vaccinating them. Anyone? — jorndoe

Medicine/science informs, ethics/morals decides, policies/politics implements. Presently, getting vaccinated comes out on top. While partaking in society do we not also have at least some social obligations? Seems responsible to take part in stomping the pandemic down. — jorndoe

Well said. Now comes the sophistry, the linguistic and logical gymnastics, the red herrings and whack-a-hole style argumentation -- one question answered (and ignored), another pops up (which has also been answered, and which is now re-stated). All in the (otherwise reasonable) name of freedom, autonomy, questioning of authority, liberty, suspicion of the state, and other important values -- all leveraged so that one can feel good about denying taking a damn vaccine.

And they wonder why "patience is wearing thin."

What concerns me is navigating the differing perspectives of our fellow citizens. It's all very well to choose not to consider those who differ with us enemies, but in some cases they will consider us enemies. I worry about that. — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. Apparently, the solution is in lowering one's expectations about mankind, and renounce one's humanist sensitivities.