I’d argue it’s higher given the exponential nature of disease transmission. While the odds of harm in who you directly transmit the virus to might be lower than the odds of you hurting someone drunk driving, if you play the tape forwards it’s almost a foregone conclusion that you’ll kill more people in the chain of people you infect than you would if you were drunk driving.
Also vaccine requirements aren’t anything new, so is the concern here that they’re mandating vaccines or this specific vaccine due to how new it is? If the latter, then what’s your bar for acceptance?
The logic in these rulings is very weak: being vaccinated does not 100% prevent infection/transmission in the same way that being sober doesn't not guarantee you won't crash your car, it doesn't make drunk driving ok, especially for an employee...
Whether it is reasonable depends on how much more likely a drunk or unvaccinated person is likely to hurt people. We have good numbers on drunks. We do not yet have good numbers on unvaccinated people.
Also, you may not have heard it, but I heard all over the place from "experts" that vaccinated people would not spread the virus.
We knew vaccinated people might spread the virus and official sources didn't make any claims that they don't until research was done that indicated that vaccinated people spread the virus way less than the uncaccinated.
So basically what you wrote is false. Except that vaccinated people also might hurt people. It's just way less likely than dor unvaccinated.
Same way as drunk driver has higher probability of hurting someone then sober driver, but sober driver might hurt someone too. Despite this we still have a strong stance against drunk driving. Which is reasonable.
Less dangerous on an average individual level, more dangerous since its so contagious and can infect every last unvaccinated person who doesn't have antibodies (and a few who do).
Way more infectious that the vaccine, though, and probably not any more effective. Nobody's caught the vaccine from the exposure that I've seen mentioned.
The issue is that a vaccine would be given to billions of people, whereas the virus is only infecting hundreds of thousands per day. Because vaccines are given to healthy people that may never be exposed to the disease the bar for safety is different.
That's not boolean: vaccinated individuals transmit _less_ than the unvaccinated. It's not as good as we'd like but it's better than doing nothing and given how quick, easy, and cheap vaccines are it's like mandating seatbelt usage even if you know that some people will still be injured.
I mostly agree, but I think the core difference with HIV is how it's transmitted. You're more in control of your transmission risk.
That's less true with Covid given its contagiousness through the air.
I'm of the opinion that private companies have every right to require restrictions they see fit. I'm more mixed about government restrictions now that we're post vaccine (with the exception that requiring vaccine mandates for healthcare workers seems reasonable).
What gets to me about this whole thing is it's not binary but people often talk like it is (probably just political tribalism).
Vaccinated people who are infected spread the disease like the unvaccinated, that's true - but since vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected on exposure things like the vaccine mandates for restaurant entry do have an affect and are not just theater. They reduce the overall probability of positive people in the restaurant.
I think people like Bret Weinstein have done a lot of harm and I'm often surprised by the extent to which intelligence is independent from accuracy.
Basically, the argument in that is a little reason (incompletely applied or understood) can be a dangerous thing and blindly following consensus is sometimes the adaptive behavior. It's a little misapplied to vaccines since in that case someone did actually know the details and understand the mechanism, but it's possible for a cultural understanding to be entirely selected by natural selection and the reason for it was never understood by anyone!
When we see animals do complex behavior we don't usually assume it's because they understand fully why that mechanism is adaptive, but we often misapply this understanding to ourselves.
Mostly getting off topic, but I thought this was an interesting thing to think about.
That's technically true, but I'd be really surprised if vaccinated people didn't spread it less...so surprised that I'd argue it's a risk worth taking.
Think it's still preferable just because vaccinated people can still catch and potentially spread it, and the risk of exposure is still pretty high due to all the people not vaccinated.
That's a good point. I suspect that being vaccinated reduces the likelihood of spreading it to other people somewhat, but I don't know if the data supports that.
Also vaccine requirements aren’t anything new, so is the concern here that they’re mandating vaccines or this specific vaccine due to how new it is? If the latter, then what’s your bar for acceptance?
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