My first response to seeing that was ācovid is over, get a lifeā. However itās a serious post so it deserves a serious response.
Firstly, Iām not sure if I ever supported vaccine passports and you rightly say that the high vaccination rate, coupled with the complete poss-take that is omicron has destroyed much of the rationale. Also the vaccine pass was introduced at a time when best available science as regards transmission amongst vaccinated people was different than what we know now. These are fine points to make.
However, governments are absolutely 100% morally entitled to push as many people into vaccination as they possibly can. They are as entitled to push vaccine-reluctant people just the same as anyone else.
There are 2 reasons for this.
Firstly, a vaccinated person is much less likely to develop severe covid symptoms as an unvaccinated person. Although risks are lower for younger people, this applies to all age groups. Forcing someone to get vaccinated, even if they donāt want to, is for their own good. This is the exact same as forcing someone to give up cigarettes. Smokers are forced to pay for their own extra health care through taxes but unvaccinateds are now.
Secondly, unvaccinated people are more likely to take up hospital beds for vaccinated people.
As I said, Iāve always been ambivalent about vaccine-passes but the one thing I have been serious about, and every poster here will attest to this, is that the dirty nasty unvaxxed should be thrown out of the hospital windows onto their fucking heads. This for me would completely end the need for vaccine-passes, would basically just end the pandemic overnight and would be completely fair.
(There is a third, weaker, argument, which is that vaccination is still thought to lower transmission somewhat, just not as much as was hoped. Youāre cherry-picking your preferred science about this I feel.)
You have to admire the refusal to accept that the latest variant has had any significant affect, as if itās the exact same virus that weāve dealt with all along
Did somebody mention Japanese Soldiersš
Something (is it a dog?) with a mallet up itās hole will know that this is very near end game now in all likelihood, we have a vaccine and a soft old variant, thatās whatās done it, and hallelujah for it
Are you serious? The government have no right to push anyone. At least call it for what it is without talking about āmoralsā- itās coercion by any definition. And take a read at the UNESCO Declaration on Human Rights and Bioethics. Ask yourself if you support it or if youāre on the side of the tyrants the declaration is partly aimed at opposing.
I agree with tank here the goverment should push or encourage as many people to get vaccinated. But this still has to be voluntary and it is well within all human rights. Where I draw the line is mandatory vaccine which will not happen here, I would be very surprised if we went that route. The vaccine certs not only are useless but are over that line of encouraging and pushing people to volunteer to take it. The carry on of macron in France is an example of what Iāll find unacceptable but we got 95% of adults to take the vaccine without being forced which is a great achievement
Jayses I was expecting all out war on this thread when I heard the announcement of the 1k bonus today. Thought thereād be lads at each others throats. Very disappointing.
You went to the effort of typing a big long post so Iāll answer. I donāt care if vaccine passes are kept or not, I want to see a return to normal. If theyāre gone tomorrow, great, if theyāre kept thatās also fine.
First, it doesnāt matter that vaccines donāt fully stop transmission. They stop serious illness and death, and serious illness and death is what blocks up the health service and if the health service is overwhelmed you get a lot of death. We saw this happen.
Your straw man of the five year old is not an issue, to my knowledge we donāt require vaccine passes on order to educate five years olds. Weāre only talking about pubs and hospitality. Your points about smokers and BMI are also false comparisons, there is no magic wand that they refuse to wave on themselves to magic away the risk they pose. Neither do they overwhelm the health service in the same way as the unvaccinated. They have not been an immediate risk in same way unvaccinated people have chosen to be.
We had more restrictions introduced again just recently because we ran out of ICU capacity because 6% of the population were taking up more than half of ICU capacity. That is the simple fact. The unvaccinated gave us a restricted Christmas. Without them affecting our health service we had plenty of capacity. If they were fucked out on their ear we could have all carried on. Simple facts. Their choice meant restrictions on everyone.
Given the burden of unvaccinated people on the rest of society I see no harm in restricting them from the rest of society so they are less likely to get covid and get sick and impact us further.
Now, there is no discrimination at play, at all. People have a choice. There is no discrimination in their choice having negative consequences for them. That is not what discrimination is. I find it hilarious to see lads bleating about being discriminated against for the results of their own choice and simultaneously preaching āpersonal responsibilityā.
Finally, I see not getting vaccinated as stupid, but more so as extremely selfish. Especially at the point when vaccines were introduced when they initially put a stop to spread, in the teeth of the pandemic choosing not to get vaccinated was a choice to continue to put others at risk. They clearly donāt care about the rest of society. I honestly donāt give a fuck about people who are that selfish being excluded from hospitality. (Iāve already said Iād make exceptions for people not vaccinated due to being non-english speakers or from disadvantaged backgrounds.) Otherwise itās entirely the result of their own selfish choice, and it doesnāt cost me a second thought to see them excluded from hospitality. in fact thereās a god bit of schadenfreude to be had out of it. And I also do enjoy taking the piss out the lads whingeing about discrimination when itās the result of their own choice.
We probably wonāt need vaccine certs to help protect the health service any longer. Mind you, maybe we should keep them until hospitals clear backlogs of treatments too. Whatās our priority, unvaccinated people who choose to get sick or everyone else who needs treatment? Easy choice.
I think vaccine passes will end soon. But like I said, I donāt care if theyāre kept. Iāll enjoy going to pubs and clubs and concerts again and continuing to take the piss out the awkward squad.
Vaccine passports are pointless in terms of trying to stop transmission. It would be much more advantageous to a person who was worried about getting infected that an individual would have done an antigen test 15 minutes before sitting down next to them as opposed to having taken a vaccine and not been tested.
There seems to have been no increase in hospitalisations and deaths on the back of huge community infection rates so the ācases donāt matter until they do matterā is neither here nor there. The being anti vaccine passport and not thinking cases matter are not directly opposable views. Yes vaccines work well in terms of limiting disease but their effectiveness become statistically insignificant amongst certain age cohorts. Blanket application of a vaccine passport is a rather crude measure of forcing some people to do something for which they would derive no benefit from. It is not being awkward or pig headed. You could argue they are quite informed, do their own research and donāt believe the lies alright. What if they have been infected already and have natural immunity. If someone wants to take a vaccine to lower their chances of getting sick that is on them and should not be coerced through mandates. We had flu vaccines for years that did not require vaccine passes to encourage uptake and people were happy to take if they felt they were at risk.
Cases are now a direct function of inconvenience to society in terms of the ever changing arbitrary rules around isolation and the effect this has on people going to work and performing their duties. The virus is endemic now. We need society to move to a point where having Covid is not taboo and treated like any other respiratory virus. Mass industrialised testing needs to end. Mask wearing needs to become a personal responsibility item. We have become obsessed with the collective and pigeon holing people. This needs to end, isolation rules need to end along with all restrictions and emergency powers.
I get a sense that zero covid still underpins a lot of your beliefs about Covid perhaps with the vaccine evasive variant you alluded to in mind, but the overall Zero Covid ideology proved to be a unicorn. And a flogged one at that. There will always be vaccine evasive variants .There was never an end game. Even New Zealand still canāt allow its citizens back into the country 2 years into this due to quarantine rules. Everything in life has a beginning, middle and an end. Zero Covid people are happy to remain in a state of emergency or existential crisis indefinitely. We need the discourse to change from the collective responsibility to personal responsibility. And the personal responsibility bit is something that can lower your health risks that does not start and end with Covid. Zero Covideers repeat mantras that none of us are safe until we are all safe. Implying that the whole world needs to enter a carousel of continuous inoculation. Even though we havenāt been able to solve seemingly complex problems like half a million children dying of diarrhoea every year or ignoring the fact that in developed world they simply donāt live long enough to die from Covid 19. Take Nigeria for instance. Half our Covid death total despite having over 40 times our population. Do we implore countries like Nigeria to take vaccines to stop spread of pathogens in the Western World? Answers on a postcard please. This mentality that people in the developing world want vaccines and their take up would prevent new variants is disingenuous in the extreme. The idea that worldwide inoculation would prevent vaccine resistant variants is so unpractical as to be unfalsifiable. Many experts will contend that this thing can not be eradicated like Small Pox or eliminated like Polio for a multitude of reasons not least due to volume or asymptomatic carriers, reservoirs of virus in non-humans and no distinct features of Covid to mark it out from other respiratory illnesses. It is burying your head in the sand to think Zero Covid was anything but a pipedream.
Also he only gracefully gave non-nationals and people from a disadvantaged background a pass after I pulled him up on it after himself and @Thomas_Brady spent an afternoon spewing out rhetoric last heard in Munich beerhalls in the 1930s.
Anyway weāre nearly out the gap now so I would imagine that vaccine passports will be rightfully binned by March or April at the latest and thatāll be the end of it.
Thereās very little to be done with someone who canāt understand the difference between a free voluntary option and an option which results in disadvantage
Had we followed Zero Covid type policies - or at least rejected the publican led public health model, I probably wouldnāt have spent 22 days unable to see my father while he was in hospital, only to be allowed in draped head to toe in full PPE to see and hear him making drowning noises as Covid consumed him in the last 36 hours. He died this day last year.
On what we currently know, elimination should still be the goal, even if it takes years or decades to achieve. Elimination measures can and should take many forms, an Omicron specific vaccine, a universal vaccine, a sterilising vaccine, if it can be developed. Ventilation and masks. Otherwise weāre leaving ourselves open to more mutations and more disruption and more mass death. If Covid mutates into a less deadly form, great, but we shouldnāt be taking that chance.
@Tank has already explained why vaccine passes should still be in operation.
You mention Nigeria, well, I mention the world. Hereās why we shouldnāt get all hubristic. The death toll from this pandemic is grossly understated.
Yeah I agree that where my line is. The vaccines are safe and work but you cannot force it on people. But it feels like everything is these days, you are told thatās the way it has to be without being able to question or challenge any data or findings.
Good post. The other mistake is ignoring the basic rule of evolution which is all organisms evolve to adapt to their environment. If everyone in the world was vaccinated then the selection pressure on the SARS2 virus is to evade immunity so it can spread more efficiently within the vaccinated population. Which is exactly what happened with Omicron, which none of the Twitter experts predicted. Mutation leading to variants is a random process, so predicting how the virus will evolve is actually impossible, the same reason we are surprised with new flu variants all the time.
The opportunity for Zero Covid was lost when the CCP bastards allowed 5 million people travel out of Wuhan in January 2020 knowing full well they had a highly contagious virus on the loose. Because of how contagious it was, the fact it was airborne, and in particular the fact that pre symptomatic people could spread it, there was zero chance of stopping it other than an island nation like NZ where you could impose strict travel and quarantine rules. The only hope in most of the world was to try and protect the vulnerable as well as possible (something most countries made a shite of).
The whole concept of Zero Covid in the UK especially has been driven by academic elites who think everyone should do what they are doing, stay at home collecting their full paycheck while at the same time depending on a workforce to sustain their privileged lifestyle that cannot stay at home if they want to collect a paycheck. They are actually a disgusting shower of entitled cunts, who spend most of their lives pontificating on Twitter.
