Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Not sure why the right wing works so hard to cull its members. COVID in the US is becoming a preventable disease that mostly kills Republicans. I don't believe the Chinese government created this virus, but they have to be getting a huge laugh out of that. They could not have engineered such an outcome even if they had tried.

 

Any idea if or how much of the Covid hospitalizations is covered by the govt/taxpayers?

 

In the past, yes. But now that here (I should have mentioned local context) almost all adults have had the opportunity to be fully vaccinated but under-12s have not, the situation has changed.

@zonto - sorry (meant the Canadian way, ie not really), but anybody ranting at me about their right to remain unvaccinated will be asked what they think about their responsibilities to unprotected children. Yes, viral loads can be similar among the infected whether vaccinated or not - but the fact remains that vaccination is very effective against infection - and much more so against serious disease, thereby taking pressure off medical facilites that need to treat other emergencies.

 

COVID has seen such a weird reversal in the anti vaxx population. It used to be crunchy granola hippy types, but has completely jumped to the opposite end of the spectrum. I guess having powerful people actively politicising human health will do that.

 

No idea in the US. But I've seen reports from a lot of large employers that are freaking out about their health insurance plans. Hospitalisations for COVID start at about $20k.

In Canada, the backlog of elective surgeries is enormous. Massive long term health and economic damage that from now on will be almost entirely due to unvaccinated people.

 

Early on the Trump admin was pretty serious about the whole thing. Then the first data started coming out that it disproportionately affects blacks (urban vs rural population density duh) and he quickly changed his tune. "It will magically disappear", "masks are a liberal socialist limiting of rights", "it's a hoax", etc. Naturally, Rep leadership joined in.

I suppose the calculation now is that it's less damaging for the party to lose some voters to death than lose a lot of voters by admitting to lying to them.

 

This is occurring it could be argued. With Big Airlines, Big Tech, Big Soda Pop and the like requiring their employees to be vaccinated. Thing is the management (and most of their investor class) of these corporations are not "fiscally conservative" as that phrase was meant when it was more popular 20 years ago.

Your right, the anti-authoritarian left and right have a common enemy in the heterogenous elite who run civil society (government, private, media, universities, etc.), though the left have more in common with these elites at the end of the day than most on the right. The fact is both groups (i.e. crunchy left and libertarian right) share the same essential principles and philosophical (i.e. metaphysical) grounding. They both cling to radical individualism in all things, and thus neither are good community actors when circumstances call for it.

Wait, you mean to say that Canada's cost driven socialist system was not already "backloged" before

 

There's also data indicating that viral load decreases faster in the vaccinated VS unvaccinated who are infected

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v1

So it's likely even when infected the vaccinated are contributing less to the spread

 

Oh, absolutely. But the disconnect between corporate America and traditional political allies is huge. I'm trying to remember anything similar, and just coming up blank.

Yep, with half the annual cost per person and better average outcomes, it's positively awful up here!

 

Most do, even here in America. What has occurred is a fundamental shift in America
culturally, but this is lost on most because they only look at the symptoms on a political level. This underlying cultural shift of the last 20 years, which is really just a continuation of the cultural revolution that started in the 1960's, has made most peoples understanding of "left/progressive" and "right/conservative" not completely meaningless but mostly so and not very predictive. At the root of it is this internal argument/tension within Classical Liberalism around what it means to be human and "The Good" on a personal and communal level.

 

"Your right to swing your arms ends at my nose." It was from my old hardscrabble Appalachian grandmother. She was tougher than woodpecker lips. Another great one was "Nobody ever got walked on who didn't lay down first."

 

There are all kinds of behaviors that people can take to be less of a burden on the healthcare system. Not consuming alcohol. Eating as healthily as possible. Working out an optimum amount. Minimizing leaving your home to the most essential needs and driving well below the speed limit when you do. Most definitely not engaging in any exciting but risky activities like hang gliding, sky diving or riding a motorcycle.

Do you make all of these behavioral choices to minimize your cost on the healthcare system? Do you wish to live in such a society? I certainly don't.

 

If I get blind drunk in my own home, that's still mostly on me, pure individual risk. If I get in my car drunk, I can still make it everyone else's problem.

COVID is contagious. It is more contagious to unvaccinated people, more contagious from unvaccinated people, and more dangerous to unvaccinated people. Unvaccinated people are more of a risk to themselves and others. It is an increase in individual *and* collective risk.

I want to live in a society where people make easy choices to act in the own interests as well as the best interests of others. Getting vaccinated is a smart choice that satisfies both goals. Not getting vaccinated is a profoundly poor choice.

 

But this was not your argument, as I read it. You were claiming that even if the vaccinated can still spread COVID19 to others, the cost of increased hospitalization among the unvaccinated still makes vaccination a public rather than private choice.

 

My argument was "even if" in that post, but the "even if" isn't actually true. Vaccinated people are less likely to catch, less likely to spread, and less likely to cost a fortune in medical expenses. All of these factors provide benefits to vaccination. There is no good argument against vaccination.

 

The fact that the vaccinated can spread COVID19 is not an argument against vaccination, but rather an argument against the mob morality in demonizing the unvaccinated. For one, it makes it very unlikely that COVID19 will go to zero instead of just becoming endemic. So not vaccinating doesn't mean not doing your part to eradicate COVID19 and the unvaccinated aren't keeping the pandemic around (especially considering that natural immunity seems more effective at preventing transmission than vaccine).

Furthermore the vaccine is very effective in protecting those who want to be protected from serious illness and death. So the effect of the choice to get vaccinated or not is still mostly private or internalized with regard to harming others, even if the unvaccinated are more likely to transmit.

So the only public cost that is imposed by the unvaccinated is that of increased healthcare costs from their increased incidence of hospitalization. That is what my initial response to you was about -- we don't want to live in a world where we must consider our behavioral choices (should I eat that burger or not) based on their cost to the healthcare system.

Again my argument isn't against vaccination. Instead it is that vaccination should be regarded as a personal choice and we shouldn't demonize those not making that choice any more so than we say demonize the obese or motorcycle riders who make poor health choices that cost the tax payer.

Unfortunately vaccination has (wrongly - look at vaccination rates by race) become a proxy for the ingroup- outgroup partisan toxicity that we unfortunately can't as a nation resist.

 

Was it always thus? Were there always crazy egomaniacs with absurd beliefs? Well, of course there were, perhaps even more than now, but some things seem more extreme these days. Would we have got rid of polio in so many countries if there had been polio antivaxxers? Did people demand their rights to drink contaminated water, and to contaminate the water of others, in the days when cholera was an everyday thing?

It's a weird world

 

Just picking on that... I think it depends on what you call natural immunity.

Some people were never going to catch and suffer covid: their bodies could deal with it. Baring varieties with which they cannot deal, that sort of natural immunity goes on for ever.

However, from what I hear (very anecdotal, I don't have medical sources), the immunity which results from catching covid can be short lived, which is why those who have had it are still advised to get vaccinated.

In general, vaccination against contagious diseases is very much social thing. Personal choice does not work. Maybe it works for, say, rabies: if someone works with wild dogs and demands the right to risk a horrible death, fine: they are not going to spread it to anyone else. Mumps, measles, polio, covid, etc, not so much.

 

This is just not true. Individual studies vary, but the most recent meta analysis I have seen - several studies combined, weighted for study quality - show natural immunity for delta at about half that of the mRNA vaccines. The best protection is provided by previous infection combined with vaccination.

Your framing of this is just wild.

It shows a deliberate and specific disregard for other people. Oh, I'm only driving a little drunk, it's still mostly just me who is likely to die.

So how stupid and risky a choice must someone make before we are allowed to start demonising them? I keep using the drunk driving as a comparison, but drunk driving injuries and deaths don't propagate exponentially. COVID is uniquely devastating to the people around you.

 

To be fair, getting a shot occasionally is not something I would consider a lifestyle change.