EmilyD wrote:
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3. Religious people have a serious commitment to their faith and their belief. To force them to forego those sacred beliefs would be considered sacrilegious.
Somebody has a sacred belief to not get vaccinated? Does that relate to something in the Bible (I don't think so)?
Isn't there something in the Bible about contagious diseases? Lepers had to live separately. Also, there's something in Leviticus about "running issue[s] out of [a person's] flesh", apparently relating to contagion: Lev 15:4b: "and every thing, whereon he sitteth, shall be unclean." It all seems to point to avoiding (essentially isolating) the person who has some contagious disease.
Perhaps most (though not all) sacred beliefs arose from something sensible (or at least partially sensible) like that. So, I would think that people with sacred beliefs today ought to be able to work out some way to avoid spreading contagious diseases. If they don't want to get vaccinated in a pandemic, why don't they isolate themselves like the person in Leviticus would have done? The person in Leviticus was deliberately _not_touched_ while he was unclean; things he _touched_ were unclean and people avoided _them_; if he wasn't isolating himself, then he would have _been_ isolated, even by force if necessary, to protect the community from the contagious disease.
And if it's a sacred belief for them, why don't they write that one down specifically to inform the rest of us that they'll obey it? If we find that they're successfully isolating themselves and none of them (or extremely few of them) are spreading Covid (detectable from contact tracing), then we wouldn't need to care so much about them getting vaccinated, and moreover if their practice is working then very few of _them_ will have Covid.
But now that's not true, because _many_ of them do have Covid, and some of them are taking up scarce resources in our hospitals because of it!
Just like the saying "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins", now "Your right to your sacred belief ends where it infringes on _my_ sacred belief."
EmilyD wrote:
They would not do it. Then what? They get arrested?? Besides, it is against the First Amendment that says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Mandating a vaccine that goes against their faith would be prohibiting their free exercise of their religions.
4. Medical problems should not be taken lightly or ignored by people who are giving the injections. In most cases, those people (think of an employee at a CVS) don't have access to the person's medical history, and don't pass out the information sheets from the pharmaceutical companies that list the warnings to consider when taking the injection. People who have had serious medical problems would be much more susceptible to even more problems if they were forced to be inoculated. For instance, people with pulmonary weakness (have had pneumonia, lung disease, serious smoker), heart disease (such as people who have had bypass surgery...all of them have compromised oxygen supply to their bodies since their repaired hearts no longer function at 100% capacity), cancer, diabetes, obesity, blood disease, etc.
Mercury is one very good reason to reject this unapproved, untested, gene-manipulation inoculation. M-RNA is another very big concern. No one (no one!!!) knows how it will affect humans down the road!
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Some of that's a good argument, at least partially. Usually when I get vaccinated it's at Kaiser which has my medical history. A couple of times I got flu shots at drug store pharmacies. At least once I asked about single-dose/multi-dose vials so that I could get the dose that doesn't have the mercury.
You write "No one (no one!!!) knows how it will affect humans down the road!". The same could be said of long Covid. What we do know is that Covid overall, including long Covid, and including more deaths than in a typical war, has already had much worse effects on the vast majority of people than the vaccines have. And "no one" knows _exactly_ how Covid will affect humans down the road; the indications so far are that Covid will have much worse effects on humans down the road than the vaccines will -- but we don't know exactly _how_ much worse.
But all that's not the main issue about it. The main issue is that what one person does (adversely) affects the amount of risk that _other_ people have -- unless that one person is reliably isolated from others (or alternatively here, is vaccinated).
EmilyD wrote:
5. I don't believe, and I doubt many Americans do either, that these people who have a great risk of dying or having their quality of life greatly reduced if they are forced to put a toxic drug cocktail into their bodies should be punished by forcing them to live apart. It would be too much like Hitler's concentration camps. If this were the Bubonic Plague, I might think differently, but it's not. Far from it.
I agree that, thus far, the Bubonic Plague has been worse than Covid.
That's not saying much, though. The Bubonic Plague was worse than a lot of things. Maybe Covid will eventually catch up to it. Some of these virus variants are getting more and more impressive. We have quite a large population of incubators (unvaccinated people) in the world, in which to mutate. "Survival of the fittest" is at work among the variants.
Are quarantines "punishment"?
I disagree on the point about whether the non-vaccinated should be forced to live apart (or take equivalent precautions). Depending on the evaluated risks they pose to others, if they are hazardous to other people's health then they should live apart (or take equivalent precautions) (sometimes even if that means forced, to live apart) until the hazard is somehow overcome. I wouldn't call that "punishment". I'd call it public hygiene or public safety.
I wouldn't want a sprayer of bullets nor a sprayer of Covid viruses out loose in the same public spaces where my children go. We lock up the sprayer of bullets (the mass shooter)...
EmilyD wrote:
6. If it is ok for the government to mandate everyone be inoculated, yet not be held financially responsible if something goes wrong, seems Draconian to me.
This "financially responsible" point was addressed earlier. I (and a lot of people) (probably most people) would be glad to make our government financially responsible for all your medical care as long as you aren't taking really unreasonable risks with your health; but, for us to do this, you'd have to let us make a universal single-payor health care system (or something that good). For each pandemic or epidemic or other natural disaster that comes along (Covid won't be the last), we can't make a big exception for it -- it would be either universal health care or not universal health care. And that would be a lot more efficient and overall less costly than carving out exceptions.
EmilyD wrote:
I suppose that goes along with culling the herd that Bill Gates and others condone.
Oooh!! That burns me up! A blown up, specious conspiracy theory, spun into existence and milked for a thousand times what it's worth, and more!
Let's say (simplistically, & exaggerated to make a point) that there are two theories of how humanity works:
Theory X is that there are vast, evil conspiracies so deep & so complicated that no-one will ever be able to prove anything about them; they are effectively invisible & always will be.
Theory Y: most people want to be good; by observing the world we can learn more; some things are more likely than others; & sometimes one thing is better than another.
Which theory is better?
There's a similar thing in the history of astronomy:
The Earth-centered system could predict the positions of the planets as long as you could keep adding more & more epicycles to the geometry. It was very complicated & didn't have a good simple theoretical foundation to explain why all those complicated calculations were necessary.
The Sun-centered system was far simpler (especially with circles), & still almost that simple when the circles were replaced by ellipses. The elliptical Sun-centered system could predict the positions of the planets just as accurately as the Earth-centered system did, but with far simpler calculations. _And_ the Sun-centered system fit with a theory of gravitational attraction.
When a simpler explanation fits the facts as well as the very complicated explanation, usually the simpler explanation is more useful, & often is more true, too.
EmilyD wrote:
Who needs sick people and old people who are just a drain on society anyway. (/sarc.)
It might be a small percentage of people who have adverse reactions and/or die, or it might be a large percentage....we don't know that now, and won't know it for several years. Experts say it is standard procedure to test a vaccine for 5-7 years to prove its safety and effectiveness. M-RNA has been tested with 100% unsuccessful results since 1987. (Every single lab animal that has been used in testing it have died so far!) Those currently being vaccinated are guinea pigs in a huge clinical trial. I believe that to be a fact, not my opinion.
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It is true that the Covid vaccines were developed (or at least part of the development process was done) in record time.
Since they were new (and since I'm moderately suspicious of both (a) government and (b) drugs), I did not try to get vaccinated really soon. I'm retired in good circumstances and able to live isolated for several months without much effort. (I also didn't want to have to get tested with something stuck up my nose. If given the choice, I preferred to just live isolated for a while longer. And that worked out for me.). But, at the same time, I also knew that my chances with a vaccine were way better than with Covid. And I knew there was a civic duty involved, because Covid isn't just about one individual at a time, it's contagious, so what one person does affects others. So, when it was my turn to get vaccinated, I took it like a man, just like I registered for the draft in 1971, except that getting vaccinated is a lot safer than the draft and is for a more clearly-defined, justifiable war.
EmilyD wrote:
7. It's nice to think the pharmaceutical companies should take responsibility, but the bottom line is they don't. In fact, they will bend over backwards to avoid it...and they have all kinds of disclaimers to prove it. I believe that if people are allowed to sue them, they will go out of business, hearing how many people have already had serious reactions and/or died. (BTW, if a person is likely to die before a lawsuit is finished, their families take over...that's standard practice when a sick person who might die sues someone.)
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I agree with the first part of that. Pharmaceutical companies, similarly as some other kinds of huge corporations in business for profit, are not very accountable to the general public, _unless_ we have a big organization to help us hold them accountable. (That big organization is, effectively, government regulation.)
The part I disagree with is where you say "how many people have already had serious reactions and/or died", as though reactions and/or deaths from vaccines had been a bigger problem than reactions and/or deaths from Covid. The reactions and/or deaths from Covid constitute the far bigger problem; it is so much bigger that a huge vaccination program is appropriate.
[...] (#8 already answered yesterday.)
EmilyD wrote:
Added: Covid has a 98% recovery rate. It's variants will most likely have that stat as well. Mandating people to be vaccinated for something they have a 98% chance of getting over by just staying at home, relaxing and letting it ride it's course, is excessive...even extreme. My opinion is that something else is at work here, and it's not rocket science to figure it out. In one word: Control. The government is becoming larger and larger, and moving away from the "by the people for the people" concept that our country was founded upon. Mandating this injection would be the beginning of the end of America as we know it.
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Those are stirring words, not to stir me to action, but to stir some others (maybe like the people who storm Capitol buildings). Whatever the Covid recovery rate actually is, we can already see that it's not good enough, which we can quickly see by the number of deaths from Covid surpassing the number of deaths of any war we've ever been in.
There was a good joke last year about staying at home in the pandemic. It ran something like this: "Now with the Covid-19 pandemic, we finally get the chance to save the world by staying at home all day watching TV. Don't screw it up."
And what did they do? They screwed it up. You'd think the one thing Americans are good at is sitting around watching TV. But when called on to do that (virtually the same thing: called on to _stay_home_), a sizable portion of America rose up and said: "They can't take _my_ freedom away!" And why did they think _that_ thought, when there are so many other things to think about such as contagion, protecting others, public health, responsibility, etc. They thought _that_ thought because their concept of a war only means the kind where they can shoot guns at people; and any other concept of civic duty they have is really small.
The reality is that freedom is not the only thing. There's freedom and there's responsibility. You need both.
It is true that there are powerful entities that have too much of the wrong kinds of influence (or "control") over us. Some of them are entities in the government, and some of them are entities in huge business corporations. So what are we to do -- it is this: We must _discern_. We must figure out, and come to an understanding as a group, _which_ parts are exerting _too_ much of the _wrong_ kinds of influence. At the same time, we must respect or retain or support _other_ parts which are more about solutions, not problems.
Unfortunately, what many people (maybe even you) are doing is to notice some part or parts going wrong (or at least being told by somebody that those parts are going wrong) (and believing _that_ thing which they're being told); and then (this is where the problem starts), they lose all faith in the _entire_ system, and they try to disrespect, throw out, and stop listening to the _entire_ system. Then we end up with pandemics and other natural disasters without any way to address them -- and no stable democracy left, but instead a demagogue at the top with a corrupt crony system (and I'm _not_ talking about the Biden Administration; I'm talking about the Trump administration).