New York City - New Mandates

[Gooseandamoose]

For anyone who hasn't seen it on the news, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio announced two new vaccine mandates yesterday for New York city

1. All private sector employees will have to be vaccinated without testing as a substitute. This is in addition to the mandates for many public sector workers that are already in place.

1. All children from 5 and up will have to be vaccinated with one shot to access indoor dining, museums and indoor entertainment venues. In addition, "Children between 5 and 11 will also be required to get vaccinated to participate in high-risk extracurricular activities. These activities include sports, band, orchestra, and dance. "

So that's pretty much everyone that will need to be vaccinated to work (unless self employed for the time being anyway) or do anything indoors in NYC, including kids from 5 and up.

Total insanity. Also going to scurper a lot of family holidays to NYC!

@Silverswirl I think some people don’t know they QALYs are often used for making health related policy decisions.

Which of my words in particular have prompted you to single me out for your attention, @Silverswirl?

It's rabbit holes on the internet and the willingness of people with fundamentally flawed reasoning ability to dive into them that have caused the politicisation of the covid vaccine issue (and other pockets of vaccine refusal wrt mmr, dtp, polio, etc) not the other way around.

I thoroughly agree.

@Silverswirl exactly. People are blind.

@Beachcomber, the point of a firewall is to slow the development of mutations by slowing the spread of existing incarnations of the virus.

The virus is infecting, spreading, and mutating in the vaccinated, not only in the unvaccinated.
At a far, far slower rate. You are implying that it is infecting all groups, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, at the same rate, and that is simply not true.

What you are essentially advocating is to forget vaccination and let the virus rip, resulting in overwhelmed hospitals, closed schools, closed businesses, and economic collapse.

The point of vaccination mandates is to save lives both from covid and from economic disaster. NYC had a terrible taste of covid related disaster, with mobile morgues and mass graves, early in the pandemic, and it does not want to see that again.

@megustalacerveza
People just aren't getting that it isn't about them. It isn't about individuals. It's about the collective effort to keep hospitalisations as low as possible so society can keep functioning.

I genuinely think Britain is such a selfish, self absorbed, individualistic nation that a lot of people here truly cannot grasp the concept of a 'greater good'. Not doing things because the government tells you to, but because they're the right things to do. My Japanese and Korean friends have a completely different outlook on all of it.

Agree 100%.

It's a shocking thing to witness.

Right…. And the way to do that is to keep vaccinating young, healthy people (many of whom have had the virus and recovered) and ignore the millions of unvaccinated vulnerable in developing countries?

Yes, @bumbleymummy, we vaccinate young people in the developed world because the developing world needs a functioning developed world in order to survive.

How many people are there on the African continent?
Answer: 1.2 billion.

How many pharmaceutical plants producing covid vaccine are there in Africa?
Answer: 12.

And btw, there are many young people in the developed world who have had the virus more than once. It's not a one and done thing.

Everyone who finds the UK so shockingly individualistic and selfish, other countries are available.

You make me sick. Are you telling me that if it was a choice between an 80 year old or a 5 year old you would choose the 80 year old?

Surely it depends on the relationship. If it was a choice between my 80 year old Mum or Dad and a 5 year old I didn’t know then yes, I would choose the 80 year old. Obviously their health would also also come into the decision

[quote mathanxiety]@Beachcomber, the point of a firewall is to slow the development of mutations by slowing the spread of existing incarnations of the virus.

The virus is infecting, spreading, and mutating in the vaccinated, not only in the unvaccinated.
At a far, far slower rate. You are implying that it is infecting all groups, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, at the same rate, and that is simply not true.

What you are essentially advocating is to forget vaccination and let the virus rip, resulting in overwhelmed hospitals, closed schools, closed businesses, and economic collapse.

The point of vaccination mandates is to save lives both from covid and from economic disaster. NYC had a terrible taste of covid related disaster, with mobile morgues and mass graves, early in the pandemic, and it does not want to see that again.[/quote]
I do not imply that the virus is infecting all groups at the same rate. I don't know what the rates of infection are and I don't believe that you do either.

I live in France where cases are surging again despite high levels of vaccination and covid passes. I have the government app on my phone and I just checked - it says 88.5% of the population over 12 years old are fully vaccinated.

I currently have 2 work colleagues who have covid and who are both double vaccinated (out of a team of 10 people). Anyone in the team who is not fully vaccinated is considered a contact case and has to test and isolate (including me although I have had covid). Anyone fully vaccinated is not considered a contact case and can go about their business as usual (including using their covid pass to go into crowded places).

And no, I am not advocating forgetting vaccination actually. Nor letting the virus "rip".

I believe that the current vaccines have their place - and that is to protect the vulnerable and the very frightened. I wanted the vaccines to bring about the end of the pandemic by providing herd immunity. I really did. But they are not proving to be effective enough at stopping infection and transmission and I think it is better to be realistic about that.

I am very concerned that overuse of vaccines will result in the emergence of variants that are more and more vaccine resistant and more and more infectious.

@MaxNormal

Everyone who finds the UK so shockingly individualistic and selfish, other countries are available.

Yes - I'll be heading to one of them as soon as possible. I feel very sorry for people who are trapped here because they no longer have freedom of movement in the EU after Brexit and are unable to get a visa for anywhere else.

I don't care about the virus anymore. Life is for living. I'll take my chances.

we vaccinate young people in the developed world because the developing world needs a functioning developed world in order to survive.

Why do you think young people need to be vaccinated in order to achieve that? The WHO has made it very clear that they think it’s more important to vaccinate vulnerable people/hcps in developing countries rather than low risk children/young people in developed countries.

@bumbleymummy

we vaccinate young people in the developed world because the developing world needs a functioning developed world in order to survive.

Why do you think young people need to be vaccinated in order to achieve that? The WHO has made it very clear that they think it’s more important to vaccinate vulnerable people/hcps in developing countries rather than low risk children/young people in developed countries.

Like so many other things, guidance only matters when it fits some peoples preconceived narrative.

Not all that different than in the USA, the Biden Administration putting pressure on the FDA to approve and recommend the boosters. It really should have been the other way around...the science directing the politics rather than the politics directing the science.