Quote (Handcuffs @ Dec 20 2021 10:05pm)

I wonder what others think.

Quote (Goomshill @ 21 Dec 2021 05:44)

So here's a couple arguments

1) The vaccines are showing to be less effective/ineffective at stopping the spread of coronavirus, but effective at stopping serious hospitalization/death. This weakens the argument for mandatory vaccinations as a means of stopping the spread and justified by the societal weights of personal choice (ie hospital burden), rather than personal health outcomes. This comes at the same time the Biden administration has pushed forward with vaccine mandates that violate Biden's campaign promise not to do that- even though vaccine mandates would have been more effective a year ago when Biden took office. And if the societal weights of personal choice are the justification for vaccine mandates when stopping the spread isn't, then there's actually a much better argument for taking action against fat and elderly people in specific, since they are the real risk groups and hospital burdens. It makes more sense to make vaccines mandatory for the fat and elderly in specific, not the wider population- or to mandate measures addressed at stemming the obesity epidemic.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Dec 21 2021 03:27am)

The correct approach is to adhere to the principle of personal responsibility. In principle, if people are free to choose to go unvaccinated, they and they alone should bear the consequences which arise from this decision. There is overwhelming and practically irrefutable evidence for the effectiveness of the vaccines at preventing hospitalization and death (not infection!), with the minor caveat being that the elderly or immunocompromised need a booster in time. Therefore, if a situation occurs in which a hospital is overwhelmed by unvaxxed covid patients, then (and only then) care for unvaxxed covid patients should be deprioritised to ensure that the treatment of non-covid patients or vaxxed covid patients can be kept up.


Deciding to go unvaccinated is a bet on being able to cope with an infection, with one's health or even life being the wager. As a believer in personal freedoms and liberty, I believe that people should have a right to take this bet. What is unacceptable in my opinion is when they take this bet, lose it and then try make it society's problem in an attempt to weasel out of having to pay the price for their miscalculation. I have no problem with treating them as long as there is capacity, but when there isn't specifically because there are too many unvaccinated clogging up the ICUs, they must come last.

Externalizing the downsides of one's personal choices onto the public is a huge no-go. The same MAGA-hats who decry this kind behavior when it comes to bank bailouts, to foreign wars or to immigration policy are the ones who want to engage in it when it comes to covid.

Quote (Goomshill @ Dec 21 2021 06:20am)

But young, healthy, Trump-loving WASP chuds don't go to hospitals even with the twice as lethal virus, unless they're the landwhale variety.
Most of the arguments around hospital capacity got a giant hole blown through them back over a year and a half ago during the initial outbreak in NYC when the USACE was contracted to build all those field hospitals in anticipation of mass casualties, then wound up decommissioning millions of dollars and tens of thousands of beds worth of field hospitals that served zero patients in many cases, a handful in others. It showed we actually have the resources to break out extra emergency capacity in a crisis that demands it, but this crisis didn't demand it. But now here we are over a year later, with the vaccines, with clear proof that the burden is almost entirely on the fat/elderly/immunocompromised, and Biden elected president after campaigning on a promise not to mandate vaccines, after refusing to mandate them all throughout the stages when it would matter most. And now they're pushing ahead with both very authoritarian measures to mandate the ineffective measures that put the burden on people they disagree with politically, while refusing to take the effective measures that would put the burden on their supporters. If you refuse to get vaccinated you can't even work in NYC, but if you get vaccinated you can go to bars and clubs with thousands of people packed in. And what has been the outcome? NYC has been the case study showing zero difference from other major cities without such restrictions. They're still setting record numbers of new cases during this current wave, surging each day and spike rapidly, this omicron wave is even bigger than the last two waves in NYC.

The longer this drags on the more obvious it gets that these policies are grounded only in political animus, not scientific pragmatism. Masks and Vaccines don't stop the spread. Lockdowns do. They don't have the stomach to lock themselves down, but they'll pillory the anti-vaxxers for their own sins.

Quote (Goomshill @ Dec 21 2021 10:45am)

The government has the resources to treat people for the health consequences of their own bad decisions, even when the system is at its supposed breaking point, because they aren't bothering to deploy the emergency measures they used at the start. I don't see why the argument for ruthlessly abandoning the unvaxxed should be any more valid than people who say we should cut junkies off of the social safety net, turn them away from soup kitchens and let them freeze to death. Why not say that fat people should be turned away from the ICU too? Its their lifestyle choices that are the real root cause of the pandemic's lethality, not the unvaccinated.

But the issue with personal responsibility and personal choice is that the government has a compelling interest that justifies restricting personal freedoms when those choices result in a greater harm to society, not just the self. I like to believe in the ideals that such government interventions must be narrowly tailored, the least restrictive means as set forth by the strict scrutiny standard, but also be in response to direct causal issues and not nebulously defined, diffuse impacts like the intrusions on freedom of speech. All that is to say that during a pandemic, the government can and should take restrictive measures as necessary and proportionate. The issue becomes when those measures are no longer necessary, no longer proportionate, no longer justified by science but instead political bludgeons and oppressive measures borne of political animus. And that's where we are now.

Quote (Goomshill @ 21 Dec 2021 10:45)

The government has the resources to treat people for the health consequences of their own bad decisions, even when the system is at its supposed breaking point, because they aren't bothering to deploy the emergency measures they used at the start. I don't see why the argument for ruthlessly abandoning the unvaxxed should be any more valid than people who say we should cut junkies off of the social safety net, turn them away from soup kitchens and let them freeze to death. Why not say that fat people should be turned away from the ICU too? Its their lifestyle choices that are the real root cause of the pandemic's lethality, not the unvaccinated.

Quote

The longer this drags on the more obvious it gets that these policies are grounded only in political animus, not scientific pragmatism. Masks and Vaccines don't stop the spread. Lockdowns do. They don't have the stomach to lock themselves down, but they'll pillory the anti-vaxxers for their own sins.

Quote (JohnnyMcCoy @ 21 Dec 2021 12:03)

exactly, covid is a pandemic of the old and overweight/obese, end of story

but somehow nobody gets the idea to fight trash food, give better education or hand out gym coupons instead of "infrastructure bills" and molesting healthy people

there is no money to be made with based, healthy people

Quote (JohnnyMcCoy @ 21 Dec 2021 13:03)

exactly, covid is a pandemic of the old and overweight/obese, end of story

but somehow nobody gets the idea to fight trash food, give better education or hand out gym coupons instead of "infrastructure bills" and molesting healthy people

there is no money to be made with based, healthy people

Quote (Saucisson6000 @ Dec 21 2021 01:11pm)

Following this ideology you can also execute handicaped people or exterminate some minorities.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Dec 21 2021 01:13pm)

Fighting obesity is not a short-term solution, so what do we do with the whales throughout the months or years it would take them to slim down?
And what's your solution for those who are at big covid risk because they are old? Would you support a vaccine mandate for, say, everyone above the age of 60?