Absolutely, it’s all about cost/benefit and incentives. If you look at the share of over-70s that are vaccinated, it’s basically the same extremely high rate regardless of party affiliation. They have skin in the game and so they can’t afford to posture as it very well might cost them their lives to do so.
For 20 year-olds, kind of the opposite currently. Costs very little to use this choice as a political signaling gesture. But if the cost increases, as you say, behaviors will change and people will change their position. Talk is cheap, it’s easy to say “never” when it costs you ~nothing to do so.
But in short, I do strongly agree that mandates will be more persuasive than just approval alone. But I think full approval will still be beneficial in places that won’t make mandates.
Yes, that is ultimately the end goal of the mandates, but the selling point of the mandates is that they are a tool to get people who would otherwise remain vaccinated to get vaccinated by introducing additional costs (ie. coercion)
You're living in a bubble if you think that people only support vaccines because of Mandates. Even in America, which is one of the more vaccine hesitant countries, the majority of adults got the vaccine long before any mandates were introduced
Mandates work up to a point. Eventually you will be left with a portion of the population that cannot be convinced and will not obey mandates.
Once you've reached that point, what purpose does the mandate serve? Nobody else is going to get the vaccines, so there is no public health justification for keeping the mandate around. However, what remains is the continual need to provide your vaccine status to your employer and in various other aspects of your daily life, which is a burden for vaccinated people too.
The United States has probably already reached that point, or will soon.
For me, it's hard to justify a mandate if we don't have a reasonable understanding of how much vaccines actually improves the situation. I agree, they likely do improve it in the ways you say, but if it's a cumulative 25% less likely to spread the disease, a mandate seems like overreach.
That sounds like a reasonable line of thinking that I'd be happy to let slide. But there is quite a lot of evidence that the pro-mandate crowd are unreasonable and don't think that way - which is why mandates were a tool being deployed in the first place.
If it was necessary to mandate vaccines in 2020 then it will still be necessary in 2022 and beyond. The changes are all marginal.
Yeah for kids it is even more difficult to defend a mandate, even to defend their vaccination altogether (we don't do general vaccination for kids here in the Netherlands, yet). There still IS something to discuss, as we see kids spread it (a lot), which does eventually increase the risk of adults for which the vaccine doesn't work. But to me that's not enough.
As for adults, what we've seen here (86% of 18+ vaccinated) is a lot of pressure on health care (and especially, the people working there) directly and on people in need of non-immediate, non-covid care indirectly (as that gets dialed down), as well as society as a whole through new lockdown like measures. This pressure came from unvaccinated people, initially mostly, later still disproportionately (and after boosts, possibly mostly again). It's a crazy difficult dilemma. Luckily we've managed to stay away from mandates so far, but it's costing.
Since the vaccines have been shown to reduce severity of the disease, they will result is less load on medical services. I believe that is the only legitimate reason for mandates.
Exactly my thinking as well. Mandates (and other forms of "encouragement") should be by BMI, age, and comorbidities. I'd be covered by a mandate myself, if one existed: high BMI, (treated) high blood pressure, haven't had COVID (yet, that I know of). That's why I chose to vaccinate myself and that's also why my wife chose to vaccinate. I don't have to do it, I'm self employed, I've done it voluntarily. Moreover, if it were required at the time, in early May, I would not do it at all. Instead we've chosen the most idiotic criteria available - whether or not you work for (or with) the federal government, or whether your employer is woke enough. Google, for example, is woke enough: it even requires vax for _remote_ employees.
Another utterly idiotic thing is that we're not considering 190 million people who are already immune by having had COVID.
For kids or healthy younger adults, looking at the stats, I just don't see the need at all. Feel free to persuade me otherwise, but with data, not sermons or "mandates".
My 17 y/o son who is healthy, and has no comorbidities, won't be getting the vaccine unless he himself decides to get it. I told him we will support him whichever way he chooses, but if he is harmed by vaccintation, he will have no legal recourse, which is true. I'm not sure he understands what that means. For us that could mean up to several hundred thousand dollars in hospital costs, and potentially the loss of the only child.
I just don't think a little over 2800 kids in the 5-11 y/o trial, _none of which got severe disease_ is a sufficient indication of anything, let alone long term safety. Sounds to me like the only person who abstained from the FDA vote [1] concurs, and the rest just don't have the balls to say what needs to be said. They literally said "we won't know if it's safe until we start giving it". I'm sorry, I'm not willing to take that chance. That's for kids 5-11, but I think the reasoning holds for young adults as well. I didn't raise him for 17 years just so someone at Pfizer could make 30 bucks by giving him myocarditis with zero legal consequences.
This view is wrong and that is the primary cause of problems with antivax.
The studies show that giving better information helps to undecided. Whereas vaccine mandates do not help much for staunch antivax.
The real world example (for example, the UK) also shows this in practice. No vaccine mandates are really needed to ensure high vaccination rates.
Vaccine mandates may have improved vaccination rates in certain groups but those groups are not most at risk. The total impact on vaccination rates and public health may even be negative as with more elderly have refused vaccine due to mandates than without the mandates.
Because those young people still have a chance to end up in the hospital, even if they're in great health ( as far as they know it). And it's not like a vaccine mandate can only apply for people in bad health - how would that even be decided? Erring on the side of caution seems to be a decent idea.
I think we're at the point where public mandates are doing more harm than good. I am disappointed that there are so many people pushing back against simple approval of an effective vaccine because they are worried about an unnecessary mandate being imposed.
Not really though. If you go back 2 years, people who were opposed to mandatory vaccinations were generally people who thought their children shouldn't be required to get vaccinated against measles. Vaccine mandates are crucial social policy
IMHO, there either has to be a mandate or a personal incentive to get to herd immunity faster. With the low fatality rates for younger people, the personal incentive to get the vaccine is not high. This leaves mandates. Workplaces and schools can do this.
we’re dealing in counterfactuals here, so we’ll never truly know. one possibility is that vaccine mandates brought a large portion of those on-the-fence in to get a vaccine sooner than later, at the cost of pushing others on-the-fence way far away from ever getting the vaccine. i.e. a short-term boost in vax numbers at the cost of long-term rates. maybe worth it, maybe not (there’s so many second order effects).
in any case, i have friends here in progressive seattle who were part of the “vaccinate and done” group back in Apr/May but once the governor used vaccine uptake as an excuse to enforce new mandates now say “i’ll get the booster once i know doing so means i get to go back to normal”. so mandates definitely do push a certain type of otherwise compliant person away from getting the vaccine. i only have anecdata, but i think it’s worth keeping an eye on that viewpoint. could this “vaccine and done” group grow into a “reject mandates (including boosters) and done” if the mandates prevent them from actually being “done”?
For 20 year-olds, kind of the opposite currently. Costs very little to use this choice as a political signaling gesture. But if the cost increases, as you say, behaviors will change and people will change their position. Talk is cheap, it’s easy to say “never” when it costs you ~nothing to do so.
But in short, I do strongly agree that mandates will be more persuasive than just approval alone. But I think full approval will still be beneficial in places that won’t make mandates.
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