The core argument of this article is one I agree with. If you give government the ability to do whatever they want, eventually power will change hands and act against you. It’s a cycle of progressively more wild pendulum swings.
Good times create weak men. I fear what comes next.
But it's not a cycle. Governments have been trending towards policies I like since long before I was born.
And the people who want to hold back the progress I want, don't seem to respect precedent any more than I do. Why should I be faithful in this game theory when they seem to have already betrayed?
To point out the exceedingly obvious: vaccine mandates are not carte blanche.
They aren't even new, and the government did not have to pass any legislation to require vaccination in many domains because we already had a (century old!) body of law dedicated to vaccination.
Except that the CDC changed the definition of "vaccine", hence the century-old body of law is describing a different set of nouns, outcomes and policy choices.
The WHO also changed the definition of "pandemic" about a decade ago.
This reeks of "sovereign citizen" reasoning: existing laws around vaccination don't apply because someone at the CDC updated the website! I guess that's even simpler than looking for the gold fringe on the flag.
> Except that the CDC changed the definition of "vaccine", hence the century-old body of law is describing a different set of nouns, outcomes and policy choices.
I can't find a direct link to what, exactly, they changed when I look this up. I would appreciate an official reference.
Speculating idly: I'm guessing they probably introduced some language clarifying that vaccination does not guarantee that the individual can't be infected with the disease in the future. This has always been true, and it's why vaccination policies have always striven towards herd immunity. I don't believe any court of law would consider the CDC's clarifications in those respects to be a meaningful undermining of what it means to be given a vaccine.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against OSHA mandates.
Amorphous "protection" is not the same as the historical gold standard of "sterilizing immunity". No one claimed that historical immunity of prior vaccines was 100%, but it was close enough to stop infections and transmissions, unlike the current Covid-19 injections which do not -- and decline even further in efficacy on a monthly basis.
I just skimmed the concluding paragraph to see what this is about but this is patently false: "I recall a conversation with a family member some months ago, when Omicron was a big thing in the media. My family member, a retired boomer and avid consumer of CNN and Fox News and MSNBC was entirely unaware that exposure to covid itself was bound to confer natural immunity with equal or better protective effects than any vaccine."
Yea, post-infection immunity can generate all kinds of results, some better than the vaccine and some worse. Up to a third do not generate usable antibodies post-infection. Most importantly, to gain this protection, you must survive infection which may win you a ticket to being disabled with Long COVID or a ferry ride across the river Styx.
Of course, at this point it should be pointed out that the vaccine gives good results against hospitalization, but if you want ~70% protection from infection from Omicron for 10 weeks (declines after that, probably not to zero though), you need to be boosted.
"In summary, we show that patients with low SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in their respiratory tract are less likely to mount a systemic antibody response. Although we cannot formally exclude false-positive RT-PCR results in some participants, PCR contamination is highly unlikely as an explanation for our findings (Appendix). We also show that clinical illness does not guarantee seroconversion and that laboratories with highly sensitive RT-PCR assays are more likely to detect serologic nonresponders. These results provide an explanation for the puzzling variability of seroconversion in different cohorts."
> the CDC’s near-total dismissal of natural immunity. Many other countries consider recovery from prior infection as a vaccination equivalent or better, an assumption that makes both medical and intuitive sense, but the CDC has steadfastly maintained that everyone needs the same number of vaccinations whether they have recovered from a COVID infection or not. This view is countered by data showing that vaccinating people who have recovered from COVID results in more severe adverse events than vaccinating people who have not had COVID.
> .. Months later, the CDC published a stronger, cohort study showing clearly that natural immunity was more robust than vaccine-induced immunity in preventing future COVID hospitalizations, and moreover, that people who survived infection were massively protected whether vaccinated or not.
> This is a precarious situation, as it undermines trust in federal agencies and naturally leads to a trust vacuum, in which Americans feel forced to cast about in a confused search for alternative sources of information. Once that trust is broken, it’s not easily regained... Science itself is transcendent, and will outlast our current challenges no matter what we choose to believe. But the more it becomes subordinate to politics—the more it becomes a slogan rather than a method of discovery and understanding—the more impoverished we all become. The next decade will be critical as we face an increasingly existential question: Is science autonomous and sacred, or a branch of politics?
Part of the reason they don't really consider natural immunity is because everyone and their uncle will just say "oh yea, I think I already had it". Validating that with a blood draw and neutralizing titre measurement is too expensive across the population vs a quick and nearly painless needle stick mass produced economically.
A subset of kinds of people that refuse to get vaccinated are the kind of people that would just make up stories in their own head about how they already got it because they had the sniffles in January 2020 and that mild case means they're alpha. I know at least one person that is precisely this stereotype, and probably two, but the second one got vaccinated.
> will just say "oh yea, I think I already had it".
In large urban areas where cities are providing free PCR testing on street corners, there is a large body of evidence on which assessments can be made. Millions of positive PCR test results are currently in centralized databases. The UK's weekly health surveillance report tracks prior infections and reinfections.
And a lot of people who know they had it because they tested positive.
Or are we now going to walk back the test results and claim that they can’t be trusted after forcing people to do all sorts of difficult things because the test said they have Covid?
That's a fair point, but based on the papers I've read the post-infection immune response is weaker. Positive PCR will also identify asymptomatic people, who are the most likely to not develop useful antibodies.
> based on the papers I've read the post-infection immune response is weaker
Please provide a citation for one of these papers.
> Positive PCR will also identify asymptomatic people, who are the most likely to not develop useful antibodies.*
UK health data showed in 2021 that Delta/Apha Covid reinfections were in the range of 0.1% and 1%.
Blood serum antibodies are one small component of a very complex array of immune system defenses. If someone is asymptomatic (NOTE: near-ideal scenario for the benefit claimed by vaccines, i.e. reduction of symptoms), one scenario is that their immune system mounted a strong nasal/mucosal response in the upper respiratory system, based on exposure to prior coronaviruses. So not only did they defeat Covid the first time, but their immune system has now been upgraded even further against future Covid-and-neighboring threats.
> one scenario is that their immune system mounted a strong nasal/mucosal response in the upper respiratory system, based on exposure to prior coronaviruses.
Another scenario is they got a small dose and their innate immune system worked. A bigger dose would just restart the process from scratch. I'm not claiming the vaccine is a miracle cure, but it's layer #1 of a defense in depth strategy. In any case, studies have shown infection + vaccine is even better.
> but it's layer #1 of a defense in depth strategy
It's literally not: Layer 1 defense for an airborne respiratory virus is the upper respiratory system with nasal/mucosal immunity.
Vaccines delivered by injection to the deltoid muscle provide blood/serum defenses, we could call that "Layer 2", defending against whatever makes it past Layer 1.
The author can write massive volumes intended to prove that he is a Serious Person Worth Listening To. But that does not in fact make him a Serious Person Worth Listening To.
Not unlike wearing a Mickey Mouse hat to a Senate committee meeting, comparing a vaccine mandate to the Holocaust is a signal that the author is not capable of engaging seriously with the topic. People who behave that way do not get a free pass from me just because they also happen to have mastered basic prose.
Good times create weak men. I fear what comes next.