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ZerZer's avatar

Perusing your articles after reading 2 or 3 I liked, I found this one strange and disappointing. There's a bit of a lack of critical thinking as it applies to the premise.

I think that there is something to be said for the *messaging* around vaccine requirements and passports being off kilter as it relates to transmission (even though, even here its an issue of specificity of language rather than anything else), and acting as if vaccine requirements were entirely arbitrary.

Consider the following premise:

Assuming that vaccinated individuals are less likely to catch COVID-19, and that people less likely to catch COVID-19 reduces total viral load in the population, then does that not inherently imply that those who are vaccinated are not also less likely to be infectious and able to spread COVID-19?

While the vaccine may not make a person who *is* positive less likely to spread the virus, would a population of only vaccinated people inherently not have a lower incidence/rate of covid positivity? Assuming of course that people remain responsible and rest/recover at home?

Alternatively there is another premise under which the article falls apart:

Let us assume, I think quite rightly, that the objective for any COVID management related policy in 2021 was to reduce transmission of a highly transmissible virus *for the purpose of reducing COVID transmission related impacts on the healthcare system*. In this context, knowing that the vaccines do in fact have a significant impact on COVID related complications that would need direct intervention, then restricting access to particular activities to vaccinated people serves multiple goals in relation to vaccine requirements. In the short term anyway as they would be inadequate over the long term assuming that COVID like many other easily transmissible viruses before it becomes less severe as it becomes endemic.

First, it encourages individuals who are fully capable of getting the vaccine for no reason other than hesitancy to cross the line into getting their vaccines. This helps to protect them from serious complications or severe illness thereby reducing their need to seek the ultimately limited resource of direct medical intervention. In aggregate, this should achieve the policy goal of reducing healthcare system strain so it can more effectively address other health issues.

Second it reduces the avenues for COVID transmission amongst those most likely to require medical intervention because they are more likely to have severe complications without the vaccine than with the vaccine. In the short term, this also achieves the policy objective of reducing impact on the healthcare system. At least here in Canada where I live, statistics late last year and early this year were showing that if every unvaccinated person in hospital and acute care for COVID related illness had been vaccinated, applying the same rate of infection:illness to that population, we'd have had a significant reduction in the number of people taking up ICUs and hospital beds. This had real impacts on the number of surgeries hospitals could perform and emergency room response times for other problems.

I also take issue with the reference to apartheid given just how specific and heinous that is. Here in Canada apartheid was never used but the way Nazi Germany put stars on jewish people's clothing and on their storefronts, even as far as internment and concentration camps were common similar refrains. But setting that aside since someone else described the differences so well, I just think the article really misses the forest for the trees and criticizes the wrong thing. Which was the focus on transmission reduction as a direct result of vaccines rather than indirect one, as an alternative to lockdowns to reduce overall levels of severe illness/serious outcomes of any given infection impacting the health systems in any given country.

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Nicholas Gruen's avatar

Well there's no way to automate a choice. There are many criteria. For instance

* The reputation of the authors of the studies and those doing systematic reviews

* The power and quality of the studies and their data

* One's own 'commonsense' — properly open to challenge and correction by the studies and so on.

Based on that and my brief Googling and so on, it seems to me that most people who seem to be trying — who aren't just arguing a line — believe on the evidence that masks are effective.

But everything must considered in context. Even if my own reading should lean in the other direction, one then tries to compare costs and benefits. One might be against widespread mask mandates but focus them where if there is an effect it can be most useful at least cost (considered broadly to include people's inconvenience and so on). That's why I support mask mandates in the most obvious and targeted cases (I'd be happy with public transport) where it could do a lot of good, can't do any health related harm that I can think of. It's only cost is some temporary inconvenience for travellers.

More to the point, I'm afraid — unless someone can explain to me why this is wrong — it enables me to identify people who are not really trying to weigh things up and instead have joined one of the tribes on either side of the culture war that now rages around this. That's much more than a waste of our time. It's degrading public reason.

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