It's hard to take some of these arguments seriously when one of the core arguments:<p>> In people who are previously infected vaccines offer zero additional benefit with respect to hospitalization<p>is so fatally flawed. The reason that previously infected people have lower hospitalization rates is that some percentage of people who were previously infected and at risk of hospitalization _died_. You're literally clearing out the population that is most likely to skew these numbers.<p>Second, this argument:<p>> vaccinated and unvaccinated persons with detectable infection have the same viral loads, despite the reduction in disease severity for the former group.<p>is similarly flawed, in that it goes right to transmission after successful infection, without touching on infection rates themselves. Sure, yes, when you have a breakthrough case, and are infected, you're probably similarly likely to infect household members. It's common sense.<p>But the raw infection rates for fully vaccinated people are much lower, even with omicron. The data from NYC is very clear:<p><a href="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/fQBNe/16/" rel="nofollow">https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/fQBNe/16/</a><p>So vaccination is important because it reduces spread, and reduces infections. The medications he cites as justification for reduced need for vaccination are not widely available, and in the case of fluvoxamine, not widely prescribed. Over and over the author simply manipulates data to support their argument.
Finally, an article I can get behind.<p>In a nutshell:<p>- Vaccines help
- Natural Immunity is best
- Mandates don't need to be here now.<p>Thanks for posting this, very helpful
Adding to the purely scientific argument against mandates (well covered in this article), there are also civil rights concerns which remain deeply important and under-appreciated.<p>Most civil liberties experts have been very consistently against vaccine mandates, on the basis that they are divisive, dangerous, and quite likely to be counter-productive.<p>Exceptions, such as the ACLU's recent pro-mandate stance, are based entirely on the scientism which this article takes down so well.
> There are many reasons I have heard put forth for why vaccines should be mandated, but one dominant argument stands out: Mandating vaccines will protect vaccinated people from unvaccinated people.<p>That ones new to me. It almost sounds like a strawman. But I think its just the phrasing. Obviously, vaccinated people are already "protected" from the virus, especially against severe illness and hospitalization, but less so for transmission. So vaccinated people can't really be protected any further, other than by lowering the probability that the person next to them has the virus (which I suppose would be the definition of "protecting vaccinated people" above, or protection from transmission).
I find vaccine mandates to be a solution to a problem that will never exist. in most countries, 80% was willing to get vaccinated before any kind of restrictions happened. This shows the trust and faith most people have in the benefit of the vaccine to their daily lives. If no one trusted the vaccine, then using political force would be the most destructive influence you can have on a democratic society where the majority is supposed to agree with the rules set forth.<p>Trying to force the last diverse 20% to take something they chose not to is also a clear violation of the Nuremberg code. There's two rules in the code which I believe is relevant for denying participation in vaccinations and their imposed restrictions.<p>"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion"<p>"The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment."<p>The second point is mostly related to vaccinating younger people "for the benefit of the populace" If you claim something benefits the group, you still have the responsibility of proving that it benefits the group. which for very young people, natural infection might similarly benefit the group just as much as taking the vaccination.<p>Whether or not the Nuremberg code has any standing in todays courts is debatable but as this experiment has no defined solution it is clear that someone should be able to deny participation.
1) The article consistently minimizes vaccine benefits.<p>The study it points to shows that vaccination reduces spread by 40%. It’s a small study with n’s of <40 people, but 40% is a significant reduction in transmission.<p>Beyond that it tries to somehow ignore the massive benefits in reducing the risk of hospitalization (therefore ignores the fact that even when the vaccinated spread the virus, they are likely to in lower intensity), by claiming that a bad flu year has 50-70k hospitalized Americans. Which is true, and just goes to show how much worse the impact of COVID is on hospitalization when the hospitalization winter peaks have been 140k and 160k, more than double the worst flu season in the US. And no, 12% of the staff not being available (largely because they are burnt out because of COVID) is not even a part of the reason that hospitalization is so much of a problem when hospitalization is 100% greater than the worst flu year.<p>2) The article does not provide strong studies showing the benefits of reinfections. Other than a letter to the editor, the data ends pre-Omicron, but more importantly, covers a period which is well within the 6-9 month period of the last 2 surges where immunity from both vaccines and infection is considered strong. There is research showing that immunity due to infection does, in fact, reduce dramatically after 6-9 months. It may take some time for the effects of Omicron to be isolated, but either way, at best it shows that variants are able to evade immunity by infection.<p>3) Finally, they don’t actually provide any downsides to the vaccine mandates. And there are no novel civil liberty based defenses one can hide behind because vaccine mandates already exist for many vaccines. At least in the US, courts have ruled in favor of mandatory vaccinations even over religious objections.<p>Arguably the likes of Jenny McCarthy, who have been anti vaxxers well before COVID-19 existed can take a principled stance against vaccine mandates, but it’s very difficult for others to do so considering they’ve been accepting them for so long with nary a word against them.<p>Consequently, an argument against a strong vaccine mandate must test on a cost benefit analysis, and it’s hard to argue against the mandate on a cost benefit analysis, and I don’t see how pointing out a bunch of benefits, without showing any costs (to those who don’t have medical exemptions, who presumably would be exempt from any version of a vaccine mandate) leads to a conclusion against mandates.