Regardless of if they were the right thing to do, many of the various covid mandates being enacted through whatever form of decree really didn’t seem like they fit inside the authority of the government executives trying to enact them. Many were also made to be unenforceable so they’d never be tested in court while still influencing people.
The rule of law is important and limiting the power of “rulers” to make large sweeping regulations by themselves is important. Agreeing with what they’re trying to do doesn’t make it right. People have been cheering for authoritarianism more and more and it’s disturbing.
Us Americans are so obsessed with government overreach that you'd think our corporate overloads are actually treating us well and that the government is the bad guy.
When the government wants to fuck us over, think what the NSA has been doing, they won't look for precedents so there's no point in treating every decision they make as a potential sliperry slope.
Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.
Forgive me, but what is it a slippery slope of? I immediately thought this logic was already applied to things like child toy regulation or lead paint warning regulation or food recall regulation or workplace safety regulation… it’s really common for the government to enforce people to do things (or ban people from doing other things) in certain contexts because of the danger otherwise.
> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.
There's a pretty significant difference between "you may not sell dangerous products" and "you must use X medicine".
Next up, government mandated pedometers with minimum step counts, broccoli consumption, teeth brushing (prevents heart disease that kills people!), flossing, and minimum hours of sleep per night.
Once we've kept the fat, foul-breathed insomniacs out of society, government bans you from going into the wilderness (bears! bee allergies!), driving a car, riding a bike, running with scissors, and using a computer for more than a few hours a day.
Some of these things obviously kill more than others, but heart disease, cancer and "accident" are all leading causes of death in the US, with heart disease and cancer beating out COVID in 2020 and probably 2022.
I actually think the government can and should regulate food consumption. We already did it with cigarettes and trans fats. Omega-6 fatty acids should be next. A more fair but less politically viable alternative is to tax the healthcare of people with >%30 body fat. But these should probably have 10 year limits with the ultimate goal of changing people's habits.
>Ok, you want a big brother to tell you what to do.
More like I want to solve an
increasingly unsusatinable cost to society:
>People with obesity experienced a statistically significant twofold increase in average direct healthcare costs per year (EUR 5,934), compared with controls (EUR 2,788) and had statistically significantly higher indirect costs compared to controls. Total healthcare costs for people with obesity and one or more of the 11 comorbidities were 91.7%–342.8% higher than total healthcare costs of the population with obesity but none of the 11 comorbidities.
>Obesity was associated with an increase in both direct and indirect costs. The presence of comorbidities was associated with additional healthcare costs.[0]
So you want to solve a problem created by authoritarian enforcement of healthcare costs distribution by introducing authoritarian enforcement of lifestyle?
These are still negative regulations (don't do this), which are fundamentally different than the COVID vaccine regulations.
A comparable analogy would be mandating, under penalty of legally enforced isolation, that you eat a certain amount of vegetables per unit of body weight.
Sounds like the more reasonable solution is to remove taxpayer funding for healthcare. That way, people who make bad choices wouldn't be subsidized by the public.
> Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.
They don't though.
None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.
And only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID. If you're not in either of those camps, or have natural immunity the risk is negligible.
>None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.
The popular narrative being told to people from all sources was that vaccines were to prevent transmission which was quietly toned down when it turned out not to be true and then people now say things like "we never said that" when nobody mentioned it at all in the beginning that vaccines quite possibly weren't going to prevent disease or transmission.
People just move goal posts, fail to outline risks that don't align with their advice before those risks are undeniable, and generally always pretend they were right all along.
Yes, exactly. We shouldn't upend everyone's lives for the sake of the elderly and the feeble. The median age of a Covid-associated death in the US is near the average life expectancy[0]. There's a case to be made that the lockdown-related life loss, including the great increase in deaths of despair, as well as future poverty in children who more or less lost two years of schooling, will exceed the Covid death toll. Our policy response has been madness.
I sat in the ICU as my father died and listened to the many ventilators as a result of policy failures. I had lots of time to contemplate possible policy decisions. Pretending that the only possible choices were "do nothing" and "do something stupid" is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.
Yes, many person years were lost, mostly among the elderly and infirm. I am truly sorry for your loss, whether your father was in that group or not. But the fact on the ground is that "do nothing" and "do something stupid" were the only two choices that actually happened around the world, and regrettably mostly the latter. Pretending otherwise is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.
There is really no example of a country that successfully "did something well" as a matter of policy; the countries that fared better in terms of death rates did so on the basis of their demographics or their cultural habits. Countries with younger or fitter (less obese) populations did much better. Countries with more group-minded cultures, like the East Asian countries, did better, but those countries are also much less obese so it's unclear how much the habitual masking in those places helped. If you have counterexamples, I would love to hear about them.
In the end, there's not much policy-wise you can do in the face of a highly transmissible airborne disease that's not actually deadly enough to scare people into staying away from each other. Governments can issue as many policy decisions as they would like in the moment, but in the end everyone is going to get it, and some will die.
Long-term policies that encourage people to actually be healthy would help a lot more; but instead many countries, and especially the developed Western ones, did the opposite and encouraged or forced people to stay home, next to their refrigerators, in fear, away from laughter and joy from their social groups, all the while demonizing those who broke the arbitrary and capricious rules at the same time that political leaders were visibly flouting their own rules. I suppose we can agree that we learned a lot about what not to do for the next pandemic.
What are some of those "obvious good policy decisions"? Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.
Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.
And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers.
Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making. Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.
Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar. Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.
But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.
> What are some of those "obvious good policy decisions"?
I stated the biggest example in my previous reply: Paying the sick to stay home would have been smarter than the lockdowns.
Spending on infrastructure for health testing at airports and air monitoring in public spaces would have been smart and we will need this for future pandemics.
The country with the most nuclear aircraft carriers could have invested in getting PCR machines installed everywhere. Instead, it propped up the cruise ship industry.
> Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.
Yes, all government policy decisions are about allocation of capital. I never wrote otherwise.
> Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.
Yes, spending money training doctors and nurses would have been smarter than corporate welfare in the form of PPP and Fed bond purchases. Our demographic collapse will have us needing more doctors and nurses even without accounting for future pandemics. Imagine if elected representatives were able to make decisions that made sense in the long term.
> And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers.
Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making.
According to that table, there is a difference of over 1,000 excess deaths per 100K people. Clearly, some cultures will survive pandemics better than others.
> Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.
> Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar.
I see no mystery here. There are no ways for states to protect themselves from the citizens of other states. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution enables effective virus distribution. Where there are differences, the simplest explanation I see is difference in elderly population versus seasonal cold, dry air.
> Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.
The excess death curves for California and Florida are very different. I live in Florida. I have been tracking the CDC data since early 2020 and built tooling around it to better understand the failures: https://mcculley.github.io/VisualizingObservedDeaths/
> But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.
This is a false dilemma. Of course we expect government to do smart things which result in fewer excess deaths, especially when we can see other governments doing smarter things.
Those are the exact people who should get the vaccine. It's great that it exists. Forcing people who are not at risk, to inject something into their bodies which will not help them is authoritarian overreach, even if the vaccine DID protect from infection. Now that everyone admits it does not prevent infection, or "spread", there is not even a bad reason to mandate vaccination.
Absolutely. This is why I laugh when republicans who support all republican actions try to consider themselves libertarians. I guess it's the trendy term to be now.
If you're a libertarian, you vouch for liberties across the board. Not seesawing utter power against the other side every election cycle.
Speaking for myself, I'm obsessed with corporate overreach in general. It just so happens that government is the largest and the most well-armed corporation around, so it gets considerable attention as such.
