Ryan McMaken
mises.org
Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Ryan has BA degrees in economics and political science, and an MA in political science from the University of Colorado.
The official line on vaccines is that they are extremely effective at protecting against serious illness. And yet these same people are also claiming that the unvaccinated are a major threat to the vaccinated.
More specifically, President Biden claimed on September 10 that vaccine mandates were to “protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.”
In other words, it is claimed that vaccines are remarkably effective, and that the vaccinated must also be protected from the unvaccinated. How can both claims be true at the same time? They can’t. The idea that vaccinated people are being frequently harmed by the unvaccinated is a complete fabrication, based on the promandate crowd’s own mainstream data.
As Robert Fellner points out, according to the official data,
The odds of a vaccinated person dying from COVID are 1 in 137,000.
The fatality rate for seasonal flu, meanwhile, is at least 100 times greater than that. The chance of dying in an automobile accident is over 1,000 times greater. Dog attacks, bee stings, sunstroke, cataclysmic storms, and a variety of other background risks we accept as a normal part of life are all more deadly than the risk COVID poses to the vaccinated.
Moreover, the risk of death to vaccinated people is similar to the risk of having an adverse side effect to the vaccine. And as the spokesmen for Big Pharma and the regime never tire of telling us, you shouldn’t care about having an adverse reaction, because it is so very rare and inconsequential.
So by that reasoning, vaccinated people shouldn’t worry about getting very ill from covid. Those cases are just as rare as the so, so rare cases of adverse reaction.
And yet, even after all of this, the backers of vaccine mandates are trying to whip up hysteria about how we must “protect the vaccinated,” who are in grave danger, thanks to the unvaccinated.
The level of mental and logical incoherence necessary to come to this conclusion is quite a feat.
It Doesn’t Stop the Spread
It must also be remembered that vaccination does not stop the spread of covid.
Fellner continues:
But as [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s] Dr. Walensky explained last month, while the COVID vaccines remain incredibly effective at preventing serious illness and death, “what they cannot do anymore is prevent transmission.” This reflects the official position of the agency as well, which is why the CDC now requires vaccinated people to mask indoors and follow the same type of social distancing practices as unvaccinated people.
The official confirmation that COVID is endemic, and vaccination cannot stop transmission and thereby eliminate it in the way it could for things like polio and smallpox, makes mandates intolerable to a free society. The entire argument for mandatory vaccination originally rested on the claim that the vaccines could reliably stop transmission.
Moreover, those who are vaccinated often experience a mild form of covid when they are reinfected, which means they often spread the disease without even knowing they have it. The vaccinated also carry the same viral load as the unvaccinated, as noted last month by the UK’s Evening Standard:
While evidence demonstrates that vaccines significantly reduce hospitalisations and deaths, scientists now believe those infected by the Delta variant can still harbour similar levels of virus to those who are unvaccinated.
Previous thinking was that vaccinations would stop the spread, but now
this has been thrown into doubt and raises questions about vaccine passports … which work on the assumption that double-jabbed people are less likely to spread the virus.
Yet again, we see the notion that the vaccinated are being endangered by the unvaccinated is a fantasy of the mandate activists.
At least the CDC is being logical when it says the vaccinated should keep wearing masks. Indeed, every time we hear this from the CDC we should remind ourselves: vaccination does not stop the spread.
They’re Filling up the Hospitals!
There is a secondary fallback position the mandate pushers also use: that the unvaccinated are taking up all the intensive care beds and therefore denying people with other conditions the hospital beds that are allegedly more deserved by others.
As I pointed out here, this is also an inconsistent argument, since this argument rests on the idea that people who make unhealthy choices (like not taking a vaccine) ought to be treated as pariahs.
This only applies to one single “unhealthy choice.” These mandate pushers are apparently perfectly fine with drug abusers, smokers, and morbidly obese victims of type 2 diabetes—the numbers of whom have been multiplying—filling up all the ICU beds. No, those people deserve their hospital beds even though they made the choice to destroy their own health. In fact if one suggests people lay off the meth pipe, the Big Gulps, or the Marlboros—in an effort to improve health—one is an intolerable “fat shamer” or someone who blames the victims.
In any case, recent data has also emerged questioning whether or not the data on hospitalizations is very useful in identifying the load imposed on ICUs by covid patients.
A recent study showed that nearly half (i.e., 48 percent) of covid hospitalizations in 2020 were mild cases. According to The Atlantic (not exactly a hotbed of antivaccine rhetoric):
The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
And why are there fewer severe cases now? It may be because “unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.”
Get Vaccinated Even If You Already Had COVID!
But no matter! All that matters is getting people vaccinated, and it’s all for your own good, and governments ought to be able to force medications on you. The cynical refrain of the proabortion left, “Get your laws off my body,” only applies to one single case. In every other case, the state owns you.
This drive for vaccination no matter what can also be seen in the effort to vaccinate even those who have already recovered from covid. The claim here is that those who have natural immunity should get jabbed because they have a higher incidence of reinfection—although it is admitted cases of reinfection tend to be far milder than the initial case.
Specifically, those pushing vaccination in this case may point to a study suggesting the unvaccinated are 2.34 times more likely to be reinfected than the vaccinated.
Yet, according to the promandate crowd, this is 2.34 times larger than an extremely small number. After all, we’re frequently told that cases of reinfection for the vaccinated are “extremely rare” and inconsequential. So, that means that for the unvaccinated the odds of reinfection are a little more than double an inconsequential number. Now, I don’t have a degree in mathematics, but I have taken enough calculus and statistics classes to know that 2.3 times “basically zero” is also “basically zero.”
But that is the math being used by those who insist that the risk of reinfection for the vaccinated is negligible while the risk of reinfection for the already recovered is an enormous public health crisis.
According to the mandate pushers’ own data, the drive to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated makes no sense at all. But I suspect they’ll stick with the slogan, or even double down on it.
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