Not imposing a vaccine mandate also has a component of psychological harm to it that cannot be quantified, both from those who cannot be vaccinated and thus rely on the rest of us to do so, and for those who care about the people who die from COVID because there was no mandate.
If someone you cared about got cancer, but they did not want treatment, would you force them to get treatment? In fact, I don't think anybody would force them to get treatment, let alone have a national mandate to do so.
There is no way to tell which one has a higher cost by your own admission, however, vaccine mandates have a benefit that can, and is being quantified. Why do you care about one set of unknown psychological costs over and above another, and in the face of known health benefits?
Do you recall when Hillary Clinton said the real victims of war were not dead men, but the women left behind, who had to live without their fathers, brothers, sons? Those women suffer, certainly, but the people who paid the higher price were the dead people.
If a mandate forces somebody to get vaccinated who otherwise would not have been, that person has to live with the distress of having a medical procedure they did not want and had earlier rejected simply to continue living in society. If a person never gets the vaccine, gets COVID, and then dies from COVID, their life has been made wretched from the time of the mandate until their death, and the person dying has paid the cost of the mandate.
I am providing the numbers, they are in the range of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. That is far too many.
You keep saying 'unnecessary'; what I think you mean is 'preventable by vaccine'.
People take 'unnecessary' risks every day.
No. You continue to refuse to educate yourself regarding the topic we are discussing. The 20% number was from the first week of the vaccine mandates. Mandates which had been enacted for longer periods were seeing about a 40% uptake, driving numbers vaccination numbers for those mandated into the 90% range. That is herd immunity. That is a net benefit for everyone, vaxxed and unvaxxed.
We don't know what the numbers would be without a mandate--the total may also have risen--though not to the same extent, obviously.
Not exactly. As noted, the Delta variant is about 4 times as deadly as the original strain and is also more communicable. The Delta variant has become the primary strain circulating in the US, but these numbers include the considerable amount of time before the Delta variant emerged, therefor the current death rate is higher than 1.6%. That will necessarily change that calculus, but I have no idea to what degree. In places where the virus is allowed to circulate unchecked, it becomes more and more likely that additional strains will emerge that are even more contagious and/or deadly. This is yet another reason to enact broad mandates now.
There are also new treatments coming online for COVID (not vaccines), and there will be people who take the treatments that refused the vaccine. I assume the treatments will be effective in preventing many deaths of the unvaccinated.
It is not like this is the first think the state has mandated for the overall health of the population, including other vaccines. In my State, for example, the chickenpox vaccine is mandated, and chickenpox is several orders of magnitude less deadly than COVID 19. In other words, that "normalisation of the State in forcing medical procedures" ship has already sailed, so why is this your breaking point?
Because the number of acts we permit the State (or parents) to force on people (or do without their permission) is larger for children than adults. We would permit (encourage) a parent to give their child the MMR vaccine when the child is 12 months old. I don't think we would let a parent force the MMR vaccine on their 20 year old, however.
Of course, the State still permits parents to mutilate the genitals of baby boys, so I don't know that I trust the State's judgment in what it allows, forbids, and enforces.
Yes. And you have not presented me with any calculation showing that the cost of the mandate is anywhere near the cost of not having the mandate.
I've explained my reasons, but we differ on our measure of price for different elements.
I can't imagine that you would value the fragile egos of the unvaxxed
You keep doing this. You keep dehumanising the unvaxxed.
over the deaths of hundreds of thousands,
You've done a bait and switch. It is the egos of the
unvaxxed that the mandate hurts, but the deaths of hundreds of thousands is a cost also paid by the unvaxxed.
compounded by the psychological cost of millions more grieving those deaths as well, as those who suffer psychologically because they cannot get vaxxed and are more likely to get COVID 19 and die because of the possible hurt feelings of anti-vaxxed.
The millions grieving would mourn the deaths, but that is not the same as saying they would support a mandate that might have prevented the deaths. I would mourn the death of any member of my family who got a disease but refused to treat it, nor would I support treatment being forced on them to save their life.
You clearly stated that it is not a benefit to overcome apathy.
No, I did not say that. I said forced overcoming of apathy was not beneficial. There are other circumstances where overcoming apathy can indeed be beneficial, in particular where you have fostered the mental attitude to do so.
That seems to be an endorsement of apathy as being beneficial.
No, I did not say that. Being forced to do something against your will is the part that is harmful.
Perhaps you would like to clarify your position on that now. Don't worry, post clarification I will not hold you to your original statement, unlike your treatment of Kendi.
I do not need to retract anything, as you have misconstrued my statement, as explained above.
The problem is that their calculus only includes themselves, and is based on misinformation and flat out lies,
Lots of adult decisions are influenced by 'misinformation' and 'flat out lies' or, more broadly, just general falsehoods. Billions do things they think God wants them to do, and God doesn't even exist. But we don't stop people doing what they think God wants them to do*, unless it's already against secular laws.
*Well, unless you are in Australia, where
praying the gay away is literally a criminal offense in some states. Team Australia!
There are unquantifiable psychological harms resulting from both having the mandate and not having the mandate. Mandates provide a clear and quantifiable health benefit as well. Why do you ignore that in your calculus? What makes your unknowns so much worse than the other unknowns, and how do you then calculate that unknown against he known? This really seems like you basing your position on feelings, not reason. Having read your threads before, I don't think this is a position you would normally take. What makes this topic different for you?
But the entire point is feelings. That you want to prevent death is based on a feeling of wanting to prevent death. If preventing deaths was not valued by us psychologically, we would put the value of preventing deaths at zero, and we would calculate the cost in dollars.
And given that psychological harms are unquantifiable, what if you are incorrect, what if a far lower percentage of the population having been vaccinated, say about 60%, and only one anti-vaxxer stood to have their ego fractured, would the mandate still be unjustified? That is much more equivalent to the question I though I was being asked, so I would like for you to provide an honest answer without modifying the question, like I did.
I cannot imagine that situation in reality (that is, with 40% unvaccinated, many such people must strongly object to getting vaccinated, rather than being made up of the 'apathy' crowd, who do not strongly object but are just apathetic about the vaccine). However, if it hurt only the feelings of a single person, a mandate that was the least intrusive possible to get up to the minimum agreed 'herd immunity' level would be justified, because the feelings of a single person do not outweigh all the other costs. And, the precedent set up for the State is quite different--a mandate where 40% of the population need only a behavioural nudge to get vaccinated is far different to a mandate where 40% of the population actively object to what the State is demanding they do to their bodies.
That calculus still does not take into account the fragile egos of the unvaxxed.
I see your dehumanising language has not taken a break. Still, you are better than most, who have claimed they can't wait for the unvaxxed to die in agony and they will laugh at their suffering.
