HotelVitale wrote:jfs1000d wrote:jg77 wrote: Still not understanding why you would support mandates. Why would you want anyone to be given an ultimatum with taking a vax or losing their livelihood. In what world is that the right way to go about something?
 This is a great question. And I understand it and struggle with it.  My answer would be - the seriousness of the pandemic determines it. There is a debate about how serious COVID is. Still. I think many anti-Vaxers are also anti-maskers and were anti-shutdown.  They just don’t see the same peril. So, in that case, their compliance is superfluous because they don’t think by not complying they are actually harming people. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I'm sympathetic to people not wanting to jump into medical measures, and to there being some ambiguity about the overall good of mandates, but it's not arguable that you're not harming people around you by refusing the vaccine. There's nothing ambiguous about that--COVID is a quick-transmitting disease with a high fatality rate and the vaccine makes transmission less likely and serious or fatal cases far less likely. For every person who's not vaccinated, COVID is stronger and more likely to continue spreading. Most arguments denying that are just slippery slope things (what about the flu? what about alcohol? etc) that still leave unchecked the central fact that COVID is a special kind of harmful crisis.
I can understand an argument that your body and health have to be your own domain, but I honestly think a lot of that is fed by a fantasy people like to maintain about how much of their life is theirs vs how much of it is fully governed by something else. Every single job has literally dozens of mandates that we all comply with every day. I don't have a very strict workplace but I have to show up at a certain time, maintain a certain appearance, document my work in certain ways; I'm under a constant mandate not to be racist, sexist, etc too, and we all know we're not allowed to act in certain ways in professional contexts that could damage our work goals. That's without even getting into the fact that we all follow thousands and city, county, state, and federal laws at all times, under permanent threat of fines, social shame, imprisonment, etc. None of us are our own people and our 'liberty' only concerns a very small, proscribed set of choices within lives that are structured by systems. I think people prefer not to see things that way.
 
My "freedom" to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.
The virus that transmits COVID-19 is airborne and - in the case of Delta, at least, highly contageous.
There are so many logical reasons why vaccinations should be made mandatory, except for legitimate medical and (I guess so...) religious exemptions.  The stress on the health care system.  The reduced viral load of vaccinated people versus unvaccinated people (which reduces the amount of time that a vaccinated person with active COVID can spread it).  The reality that people can spread the virus even when they are asymptomatic.
And, from a standpoint of whether a COVID vaccine mandate can be legally enforced, there are untold jobs and places of work (health care facilities, schools, camps, etc..) where vaccines for other highly contageous diseases like measles and chicken pox are mandated.  For chrissakes, George freaking Washington mandated smallpox inoculation for all soldiers in the Continental Army, and that process was WAY nastier than a needle prick.  But do you know why he did it?
IT WORKED.
He didn't have a CDC or other medical research infrastructure to give him feedback on side effects.  All he knew was 1) smallpox (and other diseases) killed as many - if not more - troops than battles in the field; and 2) his undermanned army didn't have any excess soldiers to spare.  So, while Cornwallis' army was ravaged by the pox as it moved northward from South Carolina, Washington was able to hold onto enough of a force to (with timely help from the French navy) defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown.
I should know better than to get involved like a thread like this on the GB.  Back to basketball.