I haven't taken a single vaccine but if you keep trying to flame me il just report to a moderator.

I think the bolded part is raising an interesting question which will become pressing in a couple of months:

It is obvious that vaccine mandates with the current vaccines and Omicron being the dominant strain only still make sense for people belonging to real risk groups, the elderly, morbidly obese, those with significant comorbidities, etc. Definitely not for the young and healthy though. The mRNA-vaccines are currently being adapted to Omicron, these Omicron-specific vaccines should become available in April/May. If their efficacy against infection and transmission turns out to be at a similar level like the OG vaccines against the OG strains, would you support vaccine mandates? Should governments still pursue these mandates? How mild does Omicron need to be so that the marginal health benefit of such vaccine mandates would be outweighed by the division and social disruption they bring?




The current approach of most governments seems to be to let Omicron rip. If this approach works out and society can ultimately cope with this form of the virus without having to go back into hard lockdowns, then the core argument in favor of vaccine mandates (banishing the specter of lockdowns and mass death) is out of the window, so which arguments would even be left for mandates? Imho, even vaccine passports and stuff like that should be abandoned in that scenario. (We are NOT there yet though!)

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 4 2022 04:49pm

Imagine arguing with a medical doctor on the front lines of a pandemic like this.

After Biden's 'handling' of Afghanistan, I don't think I'm going to attribute to conscious decision making what can be adequately explained by total incompetence.
The current approach of our government at least seems to be that Omicron blindsided them and they completely failed to react, and if Omicron had been 10x as deadly as earlier strains we'd all be dying like its the plague right now. Its like how Trump criticized Biden over H1N1, its a fair argument, we just lucked out on how mild it was. Omicron is being let rip because nobody actually tried doing anything new to stop it, just a single very tepid temporary travel ban to south africa.


But yes, the scientific and logical basis for vaccine mandates seems to have already been debunked. Its not stopping the spread from young and healthy people, its not proportional to the threat of Omicron. What's worst is that Biden took 11 months after being elected to actually make his aggressive, and arguably unconstitutional, unilateral vaccine mandate. And by doing so, he not only violated his campaign promise to not mandate vaccines, he also waited until after we found out that vaccines aren't effective for the reasons we thought they would be at the time. If a year ago he promised vaccine mandates on all those same arguments, it would be far more tenable than it is now when vaccines don't stop the new variants and don't stop the spread. Which wasn't necessarily the case last year. Its such a weaker argument, long after it would have mattered most, and still violating his promise

Well, the governments in countries like Canada, Australia, Spain, Portugal, the UK, France, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and so on are all not really going back into lockdown in spite of cases going through the fucking roof. Arguing that the inaction is the result of incompetence and sleepiness might work for the Biden admin, but it cannot explain why all these other countries are more or less letting Omicron rip and only putting up some token resistance against its spread.

I think the true answer is quite simple: Omicron is significantly milder, so the overall death toll of letting it rip will be more politically tenable, and the alternative would have been 3-5 months of hard lockdowns until seasonality and Omicron-specific vaccines bail us out - an approach which just isn't sustainable anymore, probably even outright unenforceable. A variant whose spread is barely affected by the currently available vaccines and which is significantly milder was obviously the moment to change strategy.




The million dollar question is how we would have coped had Omicron shown the same degree of immune escape, but been as deadly as Delta or even more deadly. I genuinely believe that another round of lockdowns, coupled with no more carrot/perspective for people to look forward to ("we will be back to normal once the vaccines arrive/everyone has been vaccinated"), would have brought society to a breaking point.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 4 2022 05:30pm

Biden was following donald's evacuation plan though. In fact donald wanted us to leave even sooner and biden pushed back the return home date, so if you think things went bad they would have been even worse under donald.

ya? donalds plan was "lets leave all the gear there and bogus joe went yup yup yuppers sounds good.......
all you really have then is the bogus dude followed a shit plan means he did a shit job

You mean the gear that belonged to the Afghan government?

lol ya thats it....

So you think the USA should have wasted billions of dollars, months of time, and countless american lives so we could steal outdated gear?

Pretty dumb take, but that's your par.