I blame rampant corruption, self dealing, and identity politics. Americans have massive distrust in their leadership for very good reasons. That trust is really important for these exact situations. We all know all of our politicians are dishonest fuckheads - why believe them about COVID or vaccines?
I am pro vaccine and I am vaccinated - just explaining that I understand people's reluctance to believe anything they hear.
I am vaccinated too, since January. HN is no longer able to understand nuance, thus we are both downvoted. I remember the HN of founders in 2010. Now it's HN of employees. Very different forum.
Not just that, the southern states were flooded with OxyContin and had the opioid epidemic as a result of flagrant big pharma abuse. It's entirely understandable that they've burnt all goodwill there
I’d be inclined to agree if it was actually people distrusting leadership in general, but too many instead the opposition one side while gobbling up whatever their team is spewing without question.
these are public spaces because members of the public congregate there. If you think these are private spaces, who do they belong to? Hopefully the business owners, not the government. In that case this order is even more troubling since it prohibits certain actions in private spaces, which is equivalent to prohibiting certain actions altogether, which makes this equivalent to making it illegal to be unvaccinated.
You can't go to a bar if you are under 21 in the US. It's been deemed a danger to American society to allow those to drink (even though I believe 21 is heavy-handed). But minors in most countries are barred from being in a bar, to avoid endangerment to themselves and others.
Same thing, you can't go to a bar if you aren't vaccinated, you will be a danger to yourself and others.
> How is an unvaccinated person a danger to a vaccinated person? If they are then what is the purpose of getting the vaccination?
Given the Enormous Volume of professional discussion on these matters, what's the purpose of rehashing that question here? Do you expect an expert viral epidemiologist to jump in and provide a new angle on the discussion?
how about this; sars2 can be carried in the nasal vault by an immunized person due to the short duration of immunoglobin A
in the nasal mucosa. vaccination intramuscular in the deltoid or tricep induces primarily Ig M; and Ig G antibody response. these are of long duration and comprise the majority of immune response.
sar2[covid19] can be carried in the nasal vault by persons vaccinated or persons of naturally aquired immunity
vaccinated persons may have a breakthrough infection; or go on to spread to others.
<<If they are then what is the purpose of getting the vaccination>>
the vaccination gives you an edge on the virus from the start; meaning prompt immune response, not having to wait until an antigen is perceived in order to develop antibodies, reduced severity of illness, and squelching of viral reproductive cycling
I think the implication is if you aren't able to be vaccinated, until sufficient overall immunity is reached you probably shouldn't be in areas where the disease is easily passed around
how is "sufficient overall immunity" aka herd immunity going to be reached? a combination of vaccines and infections. How will we get there if 40% refuse vaccines and we also prevent them from being infected?
This was specifically about people who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons. They are only a small fraction of the unvaccinated, and usually the medical reasons that keep them from getting vaccinated also make COVID particularly dangerous for them.
It allows presentation of the NYC COVID Safe Pass and the NY State Excelsior Pass - I'm not a NY resident and am not certain what these cover but medical exemptions may already be baked into those proofs of vaccination. Otherwise yea - I agree that there isn't an accommodation for those with medical conditions precluding vaccination.
However, I think the negative test result in lieu is a very different question - those tests are highly effective but allowing test proofs in lieu of vaccination would likely burden the testing framework (which I believe is still freely offered by the government in the states) and would allow a route for objectors to avoid vaccination. I believe at this point the primary goal is to increase vaccination proportions to prevent more disease waves.
A negative test of infection is not acceptable because you can get infected at any moment.
but they should accept a positive test for anti-body so that people that already recovered from the virus are equal to vaccinated people.
if you have a medical condition precluding vaccination you should not go to indoor activity that are not essential. But i would love to be proven wrong about that.
Current vaccine only have 88% efficacy against variants! I still call this a significant risk given the 5% fatality rate.
> I still call this a significant risk given the 5% fatality rate.
The infection fatality rate is not remotely close to 5%. It's remarkable that we are now over 18 months into this pandemic and so much of the public is still in the thrall of the fearmongering and misinformation about the real magnitude of the threat SARS-CoV-2 poses -- especially to them personally, if they are not in a high-risk group.
I talk about IFR (which is the relevant risk metric for "fatality rate," since anyone might get a non-confirmed infection) and you link to an article citing CFR data as of July 2020?
This doesn't even line up with the CFR numbers you get when you type "US coronavirus cases" into Google.
Looking forward to the vaccinated only water fountains next. The US government has found the ultimate power grab that they can now use to control the population at their desire. This has never been about them caring about the health of their citizens (feel free to smoke and drink all you want). Those in power aren't even able to follow their ridiculous health standards they've created. One politician after another is spotted not wearing a mask, going to places they told us not to etc.. It's such a sad state we are in now and I fear we've gone too far to undo it.
> Looking forward to the vaccinated only water fountains next.
This feels a touch melodramatic. I understand the point you want to make, but maybe a 1984 reference would work better.
Vaccination is (barring some relatively uncommon exceptions) a choice, and not something that you have no control over.
How being vaccinated allow the government to control you? Are you implying there is a chip in the vaccine allowing them to control you?
I’m half joking each time i see a comment like that I don’t understand what you think the government is trying to achieve by vaccinating you.
The only evil thing I can think of is some politicians would make more money if more people get vaccinated because they own shares of the company producing the vaccine.
But if that’s is the case nothing is stopping you to go ahead and also buy stock of pharma
> Are you implying there is a chip in the vaccine allowing them to control you?
This is a rather disingenuous comment.
Since the fragile card stock vaccine record is not practical to carry everyday & everywhere, this will push people towards installing apps on their phones. This opens the door to digital tracking.
Next, strictly speaking, having the app is not sufficient. You also need to show ID. Which ID?
> “Identification” means an official document bearing the name of the individual and a photo or date of birth. Examples of acceptable identification include but are not limited to: driver’s license, non-driver government ID card, IDNYC, passport, and school ID card.
Great. Now there is the problem of how to check these are not faked. Bars/restaurants have all sorts of methods and some of them actually involve scanning your identification[1].
Please add two and two together and recognize two-pronged approach to constant tracking of everyone's everyday activities.
Sadly the government already tracking you through credit-card, cell phone, face recognition and voice fingerprint. you just don’t know about it.
The only difference is that we would force business owner to enforce the law.
Well I have been shouting at the heavens about how this was overreach since March of 2020. Good to see many more people on HN realizing what is playing out. Moved the frickin whole family out of LA cause I knew they weren't gonna stop. Now it is a contest between CA and NY of who can be the most authoritarian. Meanwhile, down here in the south, everyone is fairly over this charade.
The flood of illegals has brought in a lot of people with covid, among other diseases to the south. If the federal government cared about covid and my safety they would protect the southern border. Just more evidence of how two faced they are behaving.
I’ve spent the last year between New York and California and I have felt zero authoritarian measures in my life. Not one aspect of my life has changed aside from donning a mask when I go to and from a public building. And even that is a personal choice - legally it’s completely optional.
I am a bit surprised this was passed but I do think that public sentiment in NYC has reached a point of it being acceptable. I think the real challenge through this pandemic has been juggling public opinion and trying to encourage high levels of vaccination while also avoiding large riots in the streets that will only further the spread of the pandemic.
The disease is a challenge at this time - but managing the public's reaction seems to be the more difficult issue. We've solved the technical problems of this pandemic (we have a vaccine) now we just need to solve the social side of it - distributing it globally and making sure everyone gets vaccinated.
To this end NYC seems a pretty good test bed due to the strong liberal leanings there and high vaccination rates.
It's high relative to the south or florida but the order says the vaccination rate is 56%.
Seattle has a 78% vaccination rate [1] and SF has a 71% rate [2]. NYC is pretty low rate of vaccination relative to major libral cities. It seems that boston, a comparable east-coast city has a closer, but still higher vaccination rate of 65% (link somewhat out of date) [3]
FWIW, the Seattle rate you've cited is for people 12 or older, while the 56% NYC rate is for everyone in the city. NYC's vaccination rate for those over 12 is closer to 75%.
When I got my 2nd shot, I talked to some of the (black) workers there and they also commiserated that their friends and family still distrusted any government vaccination due to real atrocities like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (perpetrated for 50 years!) and other situations.
One approach might be to suggest that they go to a white part of their town and get vaccinated at a pharmacy there where white people are getting vaccinated.
As bad as what happened at Tuskegee was, black patients were not injected with syphilis or anything like that. Patients with syphilis were not told that they had it and were monitored over the years to see what would happen.
It's not a synonymous event, but trust relies on honesty, and they were being lied to. So the trust isn't there. Also it's a result of the slavery mindset that's endemic to this country since before it's founding.
Those interested in public sentiment in NYC can check out the 3,800 people who are organizing on Facebook for pro-science policy that respects medical freedom, https://www.facebook.com/groups/203524481709348
Unlike the EU health pass, the NYC health pass does not have a provision for negative tests or proof of recovery/immunity. CDC recommends testing, since vaccinated people can be infected and the vaccine suppresses symptoms, so they won't know to self-isolate, https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210729/cdc-reverses-guidan...
> Even if they’re not showing symptoms, fully vaccinated people should “get tested 3-5 days after exposure to someone with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 and wear a mask in public indoor settings for 14 days after exposure or until they receive a negative test result,” ... “Our updated guidance recommends vaccinated people get tested upon exposure regardless of symptoms,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, told The New York Times
This isn't how pandemics work - and this is a large part of why I emigrated from America. There is this insane conflation of liberty and personal freedoms.
You aren't getting vaccinated for yourself - you're getting vaccinated to help create a safe environment where this pandemic can be stamped out. We've lived with this for more than a year now - it isn't just going to magically disappear and, if we haven't done anything by winter, it's going to get worse again.
Unvaccinated have a much higher probability of catching, spreading, and evolving new variants of the virus.
Vaccination protects individuals, but does not prevent the disease. There are still vaccinated patients showing up to hospital ERs (granted, at a substantially lower number than unvaccinated).
If 80+% of people get vaccinated, the virus will have a much harder time spreading and evolving.
As it stands, the virus is still having a field day. I don't want unvaccinated, higher probability infectors/spreaders around me and my loved ones.
If you love this country, do something for your fellow Americans and get vaccinated.
I'm not saying it with irony. We actively don't hang out with vaccinated people, because of their spike protein shedding. It has caused things like missed periods, and cuts where the blood won't clot. Why would I ever take the first thing the government has ever tried to not make money on? It's not a goodwill gesture.
> Section 1. I hereby order that a covered entity shall not permit a patron, full- or part-time employee, intern, volunteer, or contractor to enter a covered premises without displaying proof of vaccination and identification bearing the same identifying information as the proof of vaccination.
While people in other countries may be used to always having to carry identification, this is rather provocative in a city and state which does not require identification, among other situations, when you register to vote or vote. It is also deputizing museum workers, gym owners, restaurant waitstaff as identity checkers. This will presumably drive all those business to install identity check solutions used by bars but expand their used to a whole range of activities. It is an amazing amount of extra tracking/surveillance that is being introduced to everyone's everyday activities and is an intrusion into the lives of all, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
> It is an amazing amount of extra tracking/surveillance that is being introduced to everyone's everyday activities and is an intrusion into the lives of all, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
A simple regulation could also make this safe from surveillance while still allowing verification:
Allow people to check identity, but make it illegal to store or share this information.
There are so many small, simple laws that could go long ways to protect people from surveillance while still allowing us to do new things to protect us. I wish we got 10% of the obvious laws many people want.
"this is rather provocative in a city and state which does not require identification"
I've spent not more than a couple of weeks in total in the NY and during that time I was required to produce identification more times than I had in years spent in various continental European countries - where in theory you were obliged to carry Id with you at all times.
Just because I wanted to buy a beer or order wine with food in a bar or restaurant. I was in my late 20s at the time.
"While people in other countries may be used to always having to carry identification, this is rather provocative in a city and state which does not require identification, among other situations, when you register to vote or vote"
I don't know why it's so provocative compared to us people from "other countries" as my experience in the US involved being required to present identification far more frequently than I had in many European countries.
I'm not sure the full quote changes my point much?
> It is also deputizing museum workers, gym owners, restaurant waitstaff as identity checkers. restaurant waitstaff as identity checkers
Every gym I've ever been a member of requires you to validate your ID. You either swipe your membership card (which has your personal information tied to it), or provide your license to get into the gym. If you can't provide either, they aren't letting you in the door.
Every restaurant in the US is already supposed to validate your ID when you order an alcoholic drink. Bars won't even let you in the door without showing an ID.
I don't think anyone is happy this is required, but when people that are unvaccinated decide to put others at risk because they don't want to be inconvenienced, this is what happens.
Pretty much any bar in a downtown area of a major metro on the weekends has a bouncer at the door. There’s no planet on which the bartenders could keep up if they had to check everyone’s ID. I suppose you may find the one off who doesn’t but their liquor license won’t last long.
I lived in Arizona for two years, Michigan for one year, New York for three years, Washington state for two years, California for the rest of my life. Liberal cities, conservative cities, and towns with and without colleges. Have visited a bar in well over thirty different states.
The only time I’ve been let into a bar without showing ID was in New York City.
> While people in other countries may be used to always having to carry identification, this is rather provocative in a city and state which does not require identification, among other situations, when you register to vote or vote. It is also deputizing museum workers, gym owners, restaurant waitstaff as identity checkers.
Restaurant waitstaff are already regularly “deputized” that way by alcoholic beverage control laws.
This seems ridiculous. If the government doesn't have the authority to mandate vaccinations, then banning unvaccinated people from participating in life should also be outside of its authority.
We should not be taking further steps to protect people who are able but not willing to be vaccinated. If you are unable to be vaccinated, then you can stay home voluntarily (this order just makes it mandatory which doesn't seem like an improvement).
I was thinking the other day how odd that these people aren't all up in arms about being required by law to wear a seatbelt. In my opinion that's much more controlling than requiring a vaccine.
You think it's "much more controlling" to be required to wear a device which has been in existence for decades and shown to pose no health risks whatsoever, while driving an automobile, than it is to be required to take an experimental injection with adverse events being reported at 100x the rate of flu shots to go to public indoor spaces?
if you like number think about this. There is 25% chance you get covid this year and if you get covid there is 0.5% (IFR) chance you will die and 100% chance you will infect 7 other people.
How does this compare with the odd of adverse reactions to the vaccine?
>If the government doesn't have the authority to mandate vaccinations
The government absolutely has the right to mandate vaccinations, they just have chosen not to. I've heard this repeated more than once and I don't know where people got it from. On top of the supreme court ruling, just about every state has a state-level law giving the governor the right to enforce vaccinations as well.
> This seems ridiculous. If the government doesn't have the authority to mandate vaccinations, then banning unvaccinated people from participating in life should also be outside of its authority.
Are you trying to make a general argument, or an argument specific to just vaccinations.
If the former, there is quite a bit of historical precedent that says otherwise. For example,
the government does not have the authority to mandate that I have a motor vehicle, but they can ban me from walking or using a non-motorized vehicle on the freeways. I'm sure you can think of plenty of other examples where the government can require that you have something or meet particular conditions in order to do some activity or enter some place, but they cannot mandate that you have that something or meet those conditions.
> We should not be taking further steps to protect people who are able but not willing to be vaccinated.
Unvaccinated people increase risk for vaccinated people. There was a useful infographic in this Ars article [1]. Imagine two hypothetical states, each with a population of 1 million. State A is 70% vaccinated, state B 30%.
What you'd expect is state A to have 130 cases per week and B to have 5114.
In state A it would be 29 cases among the vaccinated and 101 among the unvaccinated. In B it would be 250 among the vaccinated, 4864 among the unvaccinated. That's a rate of 41 per million among the vaccinated in A, and 833 per million in B. A vaccinated person is 20 times as likely to get infected in state B.
For the unvaccinated, the rate in A is 337 per million and in B it is 6949. An unvaccinated person is 20 times as likely to get infected in B.
Hospitalizations would be 1.4 in A and 18.8 in B.
In A that would be 0.1 among the vaccinated and 1.3 among the unvaccinated. That's 0.14 per million and 4.3 per million respectively.
In B it would be 0.3 vaccinated hospitalizations per week and 18.5 unvaccinated. Those are rates of 1 per million and 26.4 per million.
A vaccinated person in B is 7 times as likely to be hospitalized as a vaccinated person in A. For unvaccinated people, it is 6 times.
Note that in either state, vaccinated people are much better off than unvaccinated, both in terms of cases and hospitalizations. But in B, the state with the low vaccination rate, both vaccinated and unvaccinated people are quite a bit worse off than those in B, the state with the high vaccination rate.
I am stealing this graphic as it's amazingly well put together thank you for the resource.
The main roadblock I often find when talking about vaccination to people is this group effect "You can get vaccinated if you want but I'll make the choice for my body." without realizing that they're also potentially making the decision for my body as well.
Maybe a good way to reframe this is to shift it off of authoritarianism vs. individualism to authoritarianism vs. authoritarianism. One side may be saying that everyone needs to get vaccinated - but the other side is saying "I reserve the right to get everyone else sick" by not getting vaccinated.
Cool! I like numbers, too. How about this: NYC = 8.8 million people [0], U.S. death rate is currently 8.997 per 1000 [1], which works out to 216 people dying per day in NYC. The current 4 week average for covid deaths in NYC is 5 per day [2]. Hospitalizations are increasing, the 28 day average of 70 patients has increased to 88 in the last 7 days.
5 out of 200+ deaths per day and around 100 beds taken by covid patients doesn't sound like a crisis or justification for this executive order. Maybe I'm missing something?
I also found it interesting that the per-capita deaths this year and last don't show an increase over the prior/predicted line on the graph. I assume this is because the baby boomer generation is getting older.
None of this runs counter to the numbers you presented, but does seem to show that this pandemic is not killing people or putting them in the hospital at a rate anywhere close to what it was doing last year. It's predicted that this will continue to affect people less as it becomes endemic, like the other coronaviruses that circulate and don't bother anyone much [3].
First read about this idea in March 2020 when it was going around various conspiracy-related circles. Now you see people making extraordinarily dishonest arguments like, "well you need a yellow fever vaccine to go to Zambia and this is basically the same thing" or "this is just like needing a driver's license." Someone on Twitter aptly described this phenomenon as the "that's a crazy conspiracy theory"-to-"it's always been like this" pipeline.
You can tell that they are trying to roll this and the other mandates out as quickly as possible before it becomes clearer to people that keeping their "fully vaccinated" status (and the attendant freedoms which used to just be a matter of course in 2019) will require getting re-injected at regular intervals in perpetuity.
All these permanent changes to our lives and erosion of our freedom, being meekly accepted to combat (supposedly) a virus that's killed a fraction of the number who died in the 1918 Spanish flu. It's really something to watch.
Is there really a legitimate reason for this post to be flagged? This is the literal text of the rules one must obey if one is going to set foot in NYC.
Even if all the comments you find problematic are flagged and downvoted so that no one can even see them? Would you make the same argument for all the conspiracy theories regarding Apple's CSAM scanning announcement; that we shouldn't be allowed to talk about it because there's too many bad comments?
That unfortunately opens us up to the heckler's veto[1] it's a fine balance to screen content that will produce interesting discussions while also not excluding content that enrages a portion of the user base.
I do think it's quite fair that this article was flagged since the comment section quickly got mobbed by some pretty rabid commenters and HN doesn't want to deal with that - but it does have a chilling effect.
i’m curious what you think of an alternate approach.
Look up Larry sanger Encyclosphere!
Basically instead of censorship simply classify the content and let the consumer decide.
I tend to browse in ShowDead but I think it's not a healthy approach to the majority of folks - flagging comments as controversial can end up having the opposite effect from desired since we tend to be drawn toward controversy and the spectacle of it all.
HN has an extremely good moderation system. It has very level headed folks like dang that only use the very lightest touch and the fact that it has downvotes is good - but prevents downvoting replies is even better since it trains people to be more conservative about blindly downvoting things they simply disagree with.
There is definitely an issue with downvote brigading on some articles[1] that it hasn't been able to deal with sufficiently but it's relatively organic brigading and tends to be limited to politically charged topics (and vaccination is definitely a politically charged topic in the US). The solution of slicing political topics out of the general discussion pool seems reasonable as a response and while I would like to have a discussion on the topic with all the interesting people that hang out on HN I can accept that this message board isn't oriented to support that kind of a discussion and is only damaged when such political hot topics rise to prominence.
Oh - if this seems counter to my comment above it's because it partially is. I think this is a hard problem to solve and I don't like any of the solutions out there. HN's moderation system is the is the worst moderation system out there... except for all the others we've tried.
>since the comment section quickly got mobbed by some pretty rabid commenters
In my experience, the first few comments of a post are usually pretty low quality, but after a few hours, thoughtful comments are made, and the low quality ones are downvoted. In this case, yes, the initial comments were bad. But doesn't it make more sense to just downvote/flag those comments, and allow more thoughtful responses to bubble up? There's a discussion to be had here, and it's very easy on this site to ignore the people screaming.
submissions may be problematic, the response may be as well.
HN doesnt like to be a gladitorium or a platform for ideologies. it carries much more wieght to discuss the facts rather than how ones perception of the facts elicits visceral response.
its not about you having done something its about other users and the optics, you may notice those have been moderated as well
All: if you're going to comment in a thread like this, make sure you're up on the guidelines. In particular, please don't post flamewar comments. It leads to tedious, repetitive nastiness. Not what this site is for.
That implies not posting predictable or shallow comments, because when the topic is super inflammatory like this one, those automatically count as flamebait.
It's strange to me that the very same people who are absolutely adamant that the government be kept out of the exam room for some things are now codifying totalitarian requirements for other medical procedures.
I feel like this comes back to whether something is a societal issue or not. I'm not totally certain what other exam room procedure you're talking about since you left it quite vague but I assume you're talking about proposed abortion access or gender reassignment limitations - if I've guessed wrong please feel free to correct me and clarify your statement.
Both of those procedures are exceedingly personal medical decisions the ramifications of which will never spread beyond yourself or, at most, your immediate family. The question of vaccination isn't an individual decision - it's a societal decision. We all (or most, technically) get vaccinated so that we can curtail an ongoing pandemic, it isn't effective if done to only a small segment of the population and the US is currently sitting just short of 60% vaccinated with at least one dose.
The big difference is between it validly being a personal choice or being something necessary for society to function.
I understand that your opinion is that vaccines are different from other medical procedures because you are using an ends justify the means argument that you think is valid there. I disagree fundamentally and I do not believe that the government has any right to coerce people into medical procedures under our constitution. To be clear I am vaccinated and I believe the current covid vaccines benefits outweigh its risks relative to the risks of covid.
There is no evidence that these types of coercion tactics actually increase vaccinations. It's an emerging field of study but there is a growing body of evidence that they actually decrease vaccination acceptance.
2-3% of people are medically contraindicated from getting some or even all vaccines because the risks of the vaccine due to their age, existing illness, genetics and medications are higher than the risk of the diseases prevented.
I think it makes more sense to keep the government out of the exam room in all cases.
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