Coronavirus thread

[steve ridgway]

When is this risk going to show up?

Good question, along with when will it become impossible to cover it up any more? Only time will tell. I didn't come here to argue as people are already committed to their decisions, but just to state my own point of view.

[krummholz]

Good question, along with when will it become impossible to cover it up any more? Only time will tell. I didn't come here to argue as people are already committed to their decisions, but just to state my own point of view.

Are you suggesting that there are a large number of serious adverse reactions to the vaccines that are being covered up somehow?

[Mandryka]

One issue is long term undesirable consequences. Obviously no-one knows whether there are going to be any serious ones, but that's precisely the point. To say that, given your age, health and lifestyle, you'd prefer to take the risk of not being vaccinated than take the risk of long term effects, is not a point of view that can be easily criticised from the point of self interested rationality.

For me the interesting questions are to do with our vision of society, and the degrees of freedom available to our political leaders. Can we financially afford a society with a group who reasonably decline the vaccine, even though it may increase their immediate need for hospitalisation if they come down with a serious case of COVID? Do we morally want a society where people are constrained to vaccinate against their self-interested wishes, wishes which are not obviously irrational. 

I'm afraid there's no avoiding very complex and very fundamental questions. Our political leaders and their influencers are certainly not avoiding them, though they may prefer to encourage the populations they govern to think in simple populist and divisive terms, just as a means of social control.

[Karl Henning]

Court rejects religious challenge to New York's vaccine mandate for health care workers

By Amy Howe
on Dec 13, 2021 at 8:59 pm

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down two requests to block New York's vaccine mandate for health care workers. Two groups of health care workers are challenging the mandate, arguing that it violates their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion. But over the public dissents of three conservative justices, the court denied the workers' requests to put the mandate on hold while litigation continues.

The dispute centers on a regulation issued by New York's state health department that requires all health care workers in the state to be vaccinated against COVID-19 unless they qualify for a medical exemption. The regulation does not contain a religious exemption.

The challengers went to federal court, contending that they cannot comply without violating their religious beliefs because the three vaccines available in the United States all were tested or developed with cells descended from decades-old aborted fetal cells. One set of challengers told the justices that the vaccine mandate "imposes an unconscionable choice on New York healthcare workers: abandon their faith or lose their careers and their best means to provide for their families."

The use of historical fetal cell lines is routine in the development and testing of drugs and vaccines, and the COVID vaccines themselves do not contain aborted fetal cells. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other anti-abortion religious leaders have said it is ethically acceptable to receive the vaccines.

After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit declined to freeze New York's mandate earlier this fall, the health care workers came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to intervene on an emergency basis. The workers told the court that, like restrictions imposed on worship services to combat the spread of COVID-19, "vaccine mandates raise difficult questions about balancing indubitably strong public health interests on one side and core constitutional rights on the other." However, the workers continued, "it is not difficult to see that New York's uniquely punitive treatment of religious objectors, which is an extreme outlier nationally, violates the Free Exercise Clause." They complained that New York had originally included a religious exemption but then eliminated it while maintaining a medical exemption.

New York urged the justices to leave the mandate in place. It compared the COVID-19 vaccine requirement, with only a medical exemption, to "preexisting vaccination requirements for measles and rubella that have been in effect for decades." And the state pushed back against the premise of the health care workers' objection to the vaccine, telling the justices that Pope Francis and the Conference of Catholic Bishops have encouraged people to get vaccinated. Fetal cells used during the research and development phase of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the state said, "are currently grown in a laboratory and are thousands of generations removed from cells collected from a fetus in 1973." Moreover, the state stressed, "the use of fetal cell lines for testing is common, including for the rubella vaccine, which New York's healthcare workers are already required to take."

Although both cases have been fully briefed since Nov. 17, the justices did not act on them until Monday, disposing of both with one-sentence orders. In October, the court rejected a similar challenge to Maine's vaccine mandate for health care workers who sought religious exemptions. In that case, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the court's emergency docket is not the proper place to resolve the merits of the challenge. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch dissented from the court's decision not to intervene in the Maine case, with Gorsuch writing a dissenting opinion.   

Gorsuch again issued a written opinion dissenting from Monday's order denying the New York challengers' emergency request in Dr. A v. Hochul. He would have put the mandate on hold until the Supreme Court can fully take up the challengers' case. Alito joined Gorsuch's dissent; Thomas indicated that he would have granted the challengers' application but did not join the Gorsuch dissent.

Gorsuch emphasized that the challengers "are not 'anti-vaxxers' who object to all vaccines" and that "no one questions the sincerity of their religious beliefs." The challengers' religious opposition to the vaccines, he continued, did not originally pose any problems, because former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had indicated that any vaccine mandate would contain both medical and religious exceptions. "The trouble here began only" when Cuomo was replaced by the current governor, Kathy Hochul – who, Gorsuch noted, "expressed her view that religious objections to COVID-19 vaccines are theologically flawed."

Because there is no real dispute that the challengers are likely to be permanently harmed if the mandate remains in effect, Gorsuch reasoned, the real question before the court in deciding whether to grant emergency relief was whether the challengers are likely to succeed on their argument that the vaccine mandate violates their right to freely exercise their religion. "The answer to that question," Gorsuch wrote, "is clear," and the mandate is unconstitutional. In light of Hochul's comments about religion and vaccination, as well as changes to the state's unemployment system "designed to single out for special disfavor healthcare workers who failed to comply with the revised mandate," Gorsuch concluded, the overall record of New York's mandate "practically exudes suspicion of those who hold unpopular religious beliefs."

But even if the state had not made its suspicion so clear, Gorsuch added, the regulation would still be unconstitutional because "New York has presenting nothing to suggest that accommodating the religious objectors before us would make a meaningful difference to the protection of public health." Other states have not required religious objectors to receive the vaccine, Gorsuch observed, and New York itself already enjoys a high vaccination rate in its health care facilities.

Gorsuch closed by accusing the court of "stand[ing] silent as majorities invade the constitutional rights of the unpopular and unorthodox." Gorsuch expressed hope that eventually the justices will reach a different result that is, in his view, more respectful of the free exercise of religion.

[Karl Henning]

Air Force discharges 27 service members in first apparent dismissals over vaccine refusal

[steve ridgway]

Can we financially afford a society with a group who reasonably decline the vaccine, even though it may increase their immediate need for hospitalisation if they come down with a serious case of COVID?

Can we financially afford a society with 4.9 million diabetics though? What's really pushing the NHS to breaking point?

https://www.diabetes.org.uk/about_us/news/diabetes-diagnoses-doubled-prevalence-2021

[drogulus]

     World's First Big Omicron Study Suggests the New Variant Could Be Milder

First, the bad: Two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech were found to offer 70 percent protection against hospitalization during the study's time period, and 33 percent protection against infection. That's way down from the 80 percent protection against infection and 90 percent efficacy against hospital admission during South Africa's outbreak of the Delta variant.

However, the study also showed that Omicron appears to cause less severe illness than earlier variants. The findings show that the risk of hospital admissions among adults who caught COVID in November and early December was 29 percent lower than it was in March 2020.

Some of the same semi-Libertarian sources were, way back when, decrying the amount of testing the vaccines had to go through to be released, calling it an example of government slowing down innovation and public safety.

Narratives do change over time.

     Wait, are you covering or uncovering? Which way is "up"?

     We should take hypothetical upcoverings in stride and get the fukin' jabs for the usual abductive reasons. Present information, flaws and all, is the best we have.

     

[drogulus]

Are you suggesting that there are a large number of serious adverse reactions to the vaccines that are being covered up somehow?

     He's "just asking questions".

[fbjim]

     Wait, are you covering or uncovering? Which way is "up"?

     We should take hypothetical upcoverings in stride and get the fukin' jabs for the usual abductive reasons. Present information, flaws and all, is the best we have.

   

I mean that prior to the narrative that vaccines were being pushed by the Liberal Elite, and that masks were purely for left-wing virtue-signaling, the narrative among the Greenwaldian crypto-Libertarians was more or less that the vaccine should bypass the burdensome regulatory process.

I trust pharmaceutical companies about as far as I can throw their headquarters building, and I'm fully aware of cases where they have explicitly made up fake diseases in order to sell medication*. But everything I can see tells me that the greatest interest for all parties involved, be it normal citizens, government workers, pharma companies, or whoever the "elite" are, is ending the pandemic as soon as possible. It makes far more sense that TPTB would far rather everyone go back to their happy lives of consumer spending than having everything be disrupted.



*this is unsurprisingly most common in the field of mental health, where a lack of testing rigor and the difficulty of diagnosing mental health problems creates large opportunities for this. probably most infamously the case of "Premenstrual dysphoric disorder" which was more or less made up as a separate category as standard depressive/anxious systems in order to retain the patent for Fluoxetine

[steve ridgway]

     He's "just asking questions".

Fair enough. I can't cite any mainstream media or authorities so will leave you alone.

[drogulus]

I mean that prior to the narrative that vaccines were being pushed by the Liberal Elite, and that masks were purely for left-wing virtue-signaling, the narrative among the Greenwaldian crypto-Libertarians was more or less that the vaccine should bypass the burdensome regulatory process.

I trust pharmaceutical companies about as far as I can throw their headquarters building, and I'm fully aware of cases where they have explicitly made up fake diseases in order to sell medication*. But everything I can see tells me that the greatest interest for all parties involved, be it normal citizens, government workers, pharma companies, or whoever the "elite" are, is ending the pandemic as soon as possible. It makes far more sense that TPTB would far rather everyone go back to their happy lives of consumer spending than having everything be disrupted.



*this is unsurprisingly most common in the field of mental health, where a lack of testing rigor and the difficulty of diagnosing mental health problems creates large opportunities for this. probably most infamously the case of "Premenstrual dysphoric disorder" which was more or less made up as a separate category as standard depressive/anxious systems in order to retain the patent for Fluoxetine

     I don't think much is gained by assigning motives that are more nefarious or upcovered than the base level ones like seeking profits or preventing deaths and severe illness.

     

[Mandryka]

Can we financially afford a society with 4.9 million diabetics though? What's really pushing the NHS to breaking point?

https://www.diabetes.org.uk/about_us/news/diabetes-diagnoses-doubled-prevalence-2021

"NHS at breaking point" is a vague concept. In practice what it means is precisely this: media images of people taking their last gasp in a hospital car park because there was no available bed in a ward. Nothing else matters because only that will damage them politically.

[fbjim]

     I don't think much is gained by assigning motives that are more nefarious or upcovered than the base level ones like seeking profits or preventing deaths and severe illness.

   

By far the ones that make the least sense is that they want masks as a form of social control or something which:

[Mandryka]

By far the ones that make the least sense is that they want masks as a form of social control or something which:

Nobody is saying that as far as I know. What people are saying is this: Masks mandates are a form of social control. If people accept them, they are accepting the imposition of a punitive system to control their behaviour, like they do with, for example, drink drive legislation.

Some people say that the mask mandates are not justifiable. Nobody as far as I know says that they are useless at stopping transmission. Some people are saying that they are, in practice, not very effective at stopping transmission. That the benefits are small, though not zero. Note the in practice.

Some people then go on to say that the benefits are so small and the mandates are so divisive that they can't be justified. And they then go on to ask why they're being imposed. There are some interesting answers to that rather deep question.

I'm sorry that this is more complex and nuanced than the populist line -- anyone who doesn't wear a mask is mad or bad or both. But that's how it is.

My own view is this: mask mandates are a distraction from more important, fundamental changes which need to be put into place to make covid endemic. Better health and safety in the work place and in education, better support for isolation, better non-hospital based social care to free up hospital beds to the critically ill.

But  our politicians don't want a lobby for these more fundamental changes to gain momentum. Far better to manage their media relations in a way which gets people hot and bothered about masks.

[fbjim]

The "populist" line is that masks are liberal virtue signaling, and that wearing them is in itself a divisive act. In fact I've seen this argued explicitly in this thread.

[fbjim]

It's something I wear because it's a fairly zero-effort measure, has reasonable intuitive evidence of working, given the uptake in countries with experience dealing with outbreaks such as Taiwan and Japan, and not to politically signal anything.


This is a symptom of the expansion of the culture war to affect everything. This is why someone screamed at me for being a liberal for riding a bicycle to the store, and attempted to kill me. Because nobody can just ride a bike to the store, it has to be smug liberal elitist condensation.

[Mandryka]

The "populist" line is that masks are liberal virtue signaling, and that wearing them is in itself a divisive act. In fact I've seen this argued explicitly in this thread.

(I've just deleted a post because I've understood your point better.)

[Mandryka]

It's something I wear because it's a fairly zero-effort measure, has reasonable intuitive evidence of working, given the uptake in countries with experience dealing with outbreaks such as Taiwan and Japan, and not to politically signal anything.


This is a symptom of the expansion of the culture war to affect everything. This is why someone screamed at me for being a liberal for riding a bicycle to the store, and attempted to kill me. Because nobody can just ride a bike to the store, it has to be smug liberal elitist condensation.

I suspect you're seeing things in the USA which I'm not seeing in the UK yet.

[MusicTurner]

(...)


This is a symptom of the expansion of the culture war to affect everything. This is why someone screamed at me for being a liberal for riding a bicycle to the store, and attempted to kill me. Because nobody can just ride a bike to the store, it has to be smug liberal elitist condensation.

Surreal, and not nice. But if you collect a series of stuff like that, a fiction/documentary script, added a good deal of black humour, would become a success for sure, at least abroad, due to the rare degree of absurdity.

[fbjim]

Surreal, and not nice. But if you collect a series of stuff like that, a fiction/documentary script, added a good deal of black humour, would become a success for sure, at least abroad, due to the rare degree of absurdity.

I've only had it happen to me once, but many of my friends have had this happen. One reason is the lack of consequences - I'm not joking when I say that by far the easiest way to murder someone in the United States is to run them over with a car and claim you didn't see them.