Do you have a moral obligation to get vaccinated?

[chewybrian]

Do you think people have a moral obligation to get the vaccine for covid? Don't the benefits to you outweigh the risks to you? More importantly, aren't you protecting others without any net cost to yourself, on balance? Why are so many people resistant to getting vaccinated? Are they getting bad information?

I would make a case along the lines of second hand smoking. If you want to smoke, that is your right. It's your money, your health, your life. But, we've decided as a society that you don't have the right to put others at risk by smoking indoors around people who don't wish to be exposed to the risks you've accepted. Unlike smoking, though, it's not practical to only be unvaccinated away from others. So, the only practical and fair solution is for everyone to get vaccinated.

Do you have valid reasons (beyond a weird medical exception) that any of us should not get the vaccine at this point? If we continue to allow something like 50% rates of vaccination, won't we just invite this problem to be with us indefinitely?

[Tegularius]

...not so much a moral obligation as a societal one, which, in your clearly written post, you pretty well confirmed. A societal imperative rarely falls short of a legal one. A moral obligation allows one to choose; a societal one forces the decision to one conclusion where you are no-longer granted the right to decide as an individual when it counters the well-being of a group. In effect, you have a societal obligation to be vaccinated notwithstanding any objection which isn't medical in nature.

[psyreporter]

There is a great 'push' from the scientific establishment to reduce world population. When considering the risks from a Big Pharma led initiative, one should at least consider that social actuality as part of a risk assessment.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)

Eugenics is an emergent topic in recent years. In 2019 a group of over 11,000 scientists argued that eugenics can be used to reduce world population.

(2020) The eugenics debate isn't over – but we should be wary of people who claim it can fix social problems
Andrew Sabisky, a UK government adviser, recently resigned over comments supporting eugenics. Around the same time, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins—best known for his book The Selfish Gene—provoked controversy when tweeting that while eugenics is morally deplorable, it "would work."
https://phys.org/news/2020-02-eugenics- ... eople.html

(2020) Eugenics is trending. That’s a problem.
Any attempt to reduce world population must focus on reproductive justice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ ... s-problem/

The idea behind eugenics - racial hygiene - that led to the Nazi Holocaust was supported by Universities around the world. It started with an idea that was not naturally defensible and that was thought to require trickery and deceit. It resulted in a demand for people with the capabilities of Nazis.

The famous German Holocaust scholar Ernst Klee has described the situation as follows:

"The Nazis didn't need psychiatry, it was the other way around, psychiatry needed the Nazis."

20 years before the Nazi party was founded German psychiatry started with the organized murder of psychiatric patients through starvation diets and they continued until 1949. In America, psychiatry started with mass sterilization programs and similar programs have also taken place in several European countries. The Holocaust began with the murder of more than 300,000 psychiatric patients.

Critical American psychiatrist Dr. Peter R. Breggin has researched it for years and says the following about it:

Yet, while the Allied victory had ended the deaths in the concentration camps, the psychiatrists, convinced of their own goodness, had continued their macabre murder task after the war ended. After all, they argued, "euthanasia" was not Hitler's war policy, but a medical policy of organized psychiatry.

The patients were killed for their own good as well as that of the community.

In 2014, New York Times journalist Eric Lichtblau published The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men, which showed that more than 10,000 high-ranking Nazis emigrated to the United States after World War II. Their war crimes were quickly forgotten, and some received help and protection from the US government.

(2020) Is America Starting Down the Path of Nazi Germany?

I cannot express how truly sad writing this op-ed has made me. But I'm a patriotic American. And I'm an American Jew. I have studied the beginnings of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. And I can clearly see parallels with what is happening in America today.

Wayne Allyn Root - bestselling author and nationally syndicated talk show host on USA Radio Network

https://townhall.com/columnists/wayneal ... y-n2570979

New York Times columnist Natasha Lennard recently mentioned the following:

(2020) Eugenics is an American tradition and an eugenicist system exists today
There need be no explicit policy of forced sterilization for a eugenicist system to exist. Normalized neglect and dehumanization are sufficient. These are Trumpian specialties, yes, but as American as apple pie."
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/17/for ... s-history/

As can be seen, there are some indications that eugenics may be a serious risk to consider when evaluating whether (the information behind) vaccination is honest and safe.

[LuckyR]

Do you think people have a moral obligation to get the vaccine for covid? Don't the benefits to you outweigh the risks to you? More importantly, aren't you protecting others without any net cost to yourself, on balance? Why are so many people resistant to getting vaccinated? Are they getting bad information?

I would make a case along the lines of second hand smoking. If you want to smoke, that is your right. It's your money, your health, your life. But, we've decided as a society that you don't have the right to put others at risk by smoking indoors around people who don't wish to be exposed to the risks you've accepted. Unlike smoking, though, it's not practical to only be unvaccinated away from others. So, the only practical and fair solution is for everyone to get vaccinated.

Do you have valid reasons (beyond a weird medical exception) that any of us should not get the vaccine at this point? If we continue to allow something like 50% rates of vaccination, won't we just invite this problem to be with us indefinitely?

As long as you are paying your health insurance premium, I don't care (and society shouldn't either) if you don't get vaccinated. You're only hurting yourself (and other unvaccinated people like yourself). Go for it, get sick, maybe really sick. At this point the caregivers are immune, you're not on Medicaid, it is really one of the truly contained self harms, without hurting society.

Don't care, after wasting energy talking to folks who don't want to listen.

[psyreporter]

As it appears, many US doctors refuse the vaccine.

Majority of Physicians Decline COVID Shots, according to Survey (June 16, 2021)
AAPS - Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
https://aapsonline.org/majority-of-phys ... to-survey/

Over 100,000 doctors and health professionals have now united against the government planned genocide by the pharmaceutical giants via an untested vaccine that purposely skipped animal trials.

(2021) Up to 60% of US health workers are refusing to get COVID vaccine
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/arti ... cines.html

(2021) COVID vaccine: Nearly forty percent of US Marines decline it
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 173918002/

(2021) Alarming number of US health care workers are refusing COVID-19 vaccine
https://nypost.com/2021/01/01/alarming- ... 9-vaccine/

[chewybrian]

...not so much a moral obligation as a societal one, which, in your clearly written post, you pretty well confirmed. A societal imperative rarely falls short of a legal one. A moral obligation allows one to choose; a societal one forces the decision to one conclusion where you are no-longer granted the right to decide as an individual when it counters the well-being of a group. In effect, you have a societal obligation to be vaccinated notwithstanding any objection which isn't medical in nature.

Reading this, it strikes me that we don't really have a society here in America, but a collection of individuals. We have important rights like freedom of speech which should be celebrated, but we don't have all the responsibilities that arguably should go with the rights. I'm tempted to agree with you that we should be told to get the vaccine, but this runs so counter to our culture that I don't see it happening. We are so busy protecting our rights that we fail to see the benefits that could come from imposing responsibilities. We would sooner protect a 'right' to do something silly and wasteful and unimportant than a responsibility to do something good, valuable and important, even when it is easy to do. There is no balance and it is not likely to arrive any time soon.

[Steve3007]

Yes, I would say that we have a moral obligation to get vaccinated but I wouldn't go so far as to make it a legal requirement. As you say, the benefits far outweigh the costs. I and everybody I know over the age of 18 have now had at least one shot of one of the vaccines (mostly AstraZeneca and Pfizer here). Most have now had two. I have. First in March, second earlier this month. It is very clear here that as a direct result of this vaccination campaign the amount of serious illness and death caused by Covid 19 before the vaccine rollout has been massively reduced, despite the number of infections rising again. It's absolutely clear from the evidence that the vaccine rollout has broken, or at least severely damaged, the link between infections and deaths. And it's also absolutely clear that, so far at least, the scare stories are largely BS.

[chewybrian]

Do you think people have a moral obligation to get the vaccine for covid? Don't the benefits to you outweigh the risks to you? More importantly, aren't you protecting others without any net cost to yourself, on balance? Why are so many people resistant to getting vaccinated? Are they getting bad information?

I would make a case along the lines of second hand smoking. If you want to smoke, that is your right. It's your money, your health, your life. But, we've decided as a society that you don't have the right to put others at risk by smoking indoors around people who don't wish to be exposed to the risks you've accepted. Unlike smoking, though, it's not practical to only be unvaccinated away from others. So, the only practical and fair solution is for everyone to get vaccinated.

Do you have valid reasons (beyond a weird medical exception) that any of us should not get the vaccine at this point? If we continue to allow something like 50% rates of vaccination, won't we just invite this problem to be with us indefinitely?

As long as you are paying your health insurance premium, I don't care (and society shouldn't either) if you don't get vaccinated. You're only hurting yourself (and other unvaccinated people like yourself). Go for it, get sick, maybe really sick. At this point the caregivers are immune, you're not on Medicaid, it is really one of the truly contained self harms, without hurting society.

Don't care, after wasting energy talking to folks who don't want to listen.

You are right that people don't want to listen, but wrong not to care. These people are not only risking their own lives, but the lives of others. They are not only risking their resources and their well-being, but those of other members of society. There are a small percentage of people who can never get the vaccine who need the protection provided by those who can accept the vaccine getting vaccinated. There are costs to society when people don't get the vaccine and get sick and/or die, even if they paid their health care premiums. There are also emotional costs to their families and friends when someone is lost for no good reason. Do you have a responsibility to stay healthy for the benefit of your children, for example, if doing so is free and painless?

Perhaps more critically, there is good reason to think the virus will mutate and get more powerful the longer it is allowed the room to do so. Every unvaccinated person is another unnecessary risk for a new strand to fight in the future. The new viruses will tend to be stronger and more resistant to vaccines or treatments, and we could be stuck in that cycle indefinitely if we don't make the effort to get close to full vaccination.

[chewybrian]

Yes, I would say that we have a moral obligation to get vaccinated but I wouldn't go so far as to make it a legal requirement. As you say, the benefits far outweigh the costs. I and everybody I know over the age of 18 have now had at least one shot of one of the vaccines (mostly AstraZeneca and Pfizer here). Most have now had two. I have. First in March, second earlier this month. It is very clear here that as a direct result of this vaccination campaign the amount of serious illness and death caused by Covid 19 before the vaccine rollout has been massively reduced, despite the number of infections rising again. It's absolutely clear from the evidence that the vaccine rollout has broken, or at least severely damaged, the link between infections and deaths. And it's also absolutely clear that, so far at least, the scare stories are largely BS.

I can tell you that your experience of most people you know becoming vaccinated is not the case here in the US. I thought to post this thread after the discussion at work yesterday. We heard on the news that there was a very rare complication from the vaccine, in which young people might get a temporary inflammation of the heart. My response was "Great; one more excuse for the nut jobs not to get the vaccine!"

Well, it turned out the woman to whom I made that statement was one of the nut jobs. I went to someone else and relayed that experience, without naming the woman, and the second person turned out to be another nut job. When I say nut job, I mean that they had accepted some story about a danger of the vaccine, or thought they should wait a year or two before getting it to make sure there were not unknown side effects. Of course, I was appalled at the lack of understanding of the most basic statistical analysis. You simply don't avoid a large chance of saving your life or health in favor of a very small chance of harming yourself. It's like justifying smoking because your aunt Martha smoked every day of her life and lived to be 90.

I often stumble upon these situations where the opinions of the general public are not in line with what seems obvious to me. I have a habit of making an informal survey of the first ten people I feel comfortable asking. In this case, I found 4 nut jobs. Interestingly, 3 of the 10 had someone close to them die from covid, and all 3 of them got the vaccine. Also interestingly, none of the nut jobs wore a mask. Work policy does require this, and they could be fired on the spot for not wearing the mask while remaining unvaccinated, yet seemed unconcerned enough to tell me that they were not. Of course, I don't intend to violate the 'code of the schoolyard' by turning them in, yet I made a modest effort to convince them to think about being vaccinated (seemingly without making any headway).

[psyreporter]

When I say nut job, I mean that they had accepted some story about a danger of the vaccine, or thought they should wait a year or two before getting it to make sure there were not unknown side effects.

Would you consider the majority of US physicians 'nut jobs' when they claim to be aware that patients suffer adverse reactions to the vaccine?





Of the 700 physicians responding to an internet survey by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), nearly 60 percent said they were not “fully vaccinated” against COVID.

This contrasts with the claim by the American Medical Association that 96 percent of practicing physicians are fully vaccinated. This was based on 300 respondents.

Neither survey represents a random sample of all American physicians, but the AAPS survey shows that physician support for the mass injection campaign is far from unanimous.

“It is wrong to call a person who declines a shot an ‘anti-vaxxer,’” states AAPS executive director Jane Orient, M.D. “Virtually no physicians are ‘anti-antibiotics’ or ‘anti-surgery,’ whereas all are opposed to treatments that they think are unnecessary, more likely to harm than to benefit an individual patient, or inadequately tested.”

The AAPS survey also showed that 54 percent of physician respondents were aware of patients suffering a “significant adverse reaction.” Of the unvaccinated physicians, 80 percent said “I believe risk of shots exceeds risk of disease,” and 30% said “I already had COVID.”

https://aapsonline.org/majority-of-phys ... to-survey/

[Steve3007]

I can tell you that your experience of most people you know becoming vaccinated is not the case here in the US. I thought to post this thread after the discussion at work yesterday. We heard on the news that there was a very rare complication from the vaccine, in which young people might get a temporary inflammation of the heart. My response was "Great; one more excuse for the nut jobs not to get the vaccine!"

Well, it turned out the woman to whom I made that statement was one of the nut jobs. I went to someone else and relayed that experience, without naming the woman, and the second person turned out to be another nut job. When I say nut job, I mean that they had accepted some story about a danger of the vaccine, or thought they should wait a year or two before getting it to make sure there were not unknown side effects....

That's interesting. As you've acknowledged, though, your sample size in your straw poll is small. If I take a look at some published stats on the percentage of various countries' populations that have been vaccinated, it looks like vaccination rates in the UK rose quite rapidly near the start of this year, compared to the US, but that the gap has got narrower and now there's not a huge amount of difference between the two countries, in terms of the percentage of the population who have had one and two shots.

If I do my own straw poll of my own workplace (a small company of about 25 people) everybody I've talked to seems fully on board with the vaccine, and all have had whatever shots they've been offered when they were offered them. So that means all the middle aged types (like me) have had two shots and the 20 somethings have so far had one. But the difference may be at least partly between the cultures of different companies than the cultures of different countries. Most of the people I work with are engineers. Maybe, due to the nature of their work and the education they've had to do it, they tend to have a slightly better understanding of statistics than the average for the population.

[Terrapin Station]

I'm vaccinated and I'd prefer that everyone get vaccinated. I don't believe that anyone has a good reason for not getting vaccinated.

However, I don't think that people have a moral obligation to get vaccinated, and I wouldn't want to see it be a legal requirement, either.

I'm also not in favor of the rather draconian approach we've taken to things like smoking.

My disposition in general on stuff like this is a minarchist libertarian disposition. I'm on the extreme end of being pro laissez-faire.

[Steve3007]

Of the 700 physicians responding to an internet survey by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), nearly 60 percent said they were not “fully vaccinated” against COVID.

Googling the ostensibly trustworthy and non-partisan sounding "Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)" results in this:

"The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is an ultra-right-wing non-profit association that promotes a range of scientifically discredited hypotheses, including the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS, that being gay reduces life expectancy, that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer, and that there is a causal relationship between vaccines and autism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associati ... d_Surgeons

So obviously I'd have to look carefully at how they conducted their survey before drawing any firm conclusions from it, because initial indications at least are that they are an extremely partisan group with a very strong desire to find a particular outcome. (Remember our brief discussion about confirmation bias on another thread, in relation to your paranormal visions?)

A bit of searching finds that this appears to be the AAPS survey:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PIIqBu ... Rebj9/view

but I can't find any indication of the methodology. Clicking on links from reports about this survey (which, as these things do, tend to all be direct copies of each other) just leads either to that form or to the other survey (below). Being described as an extremely partisan group won't, in itself, make me discount the findings of the AAPS survey. But obviously it means I won't just accept their stated results at face value. They need to demonstrate that the agenda they are said to have is not skewing the results.

This contrasts with the claim by the American Medical Association that 96 percent of practicing physicians are fully vaccinated. This was based on 300 respondents.

Here's the detailed results of that survey:
https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/2 ... report.pdf

The AAPS survey also showed that 54 percent of physician respondents were aware of patients suffering a “significant adverse reaction.”

I'd say it's unsurprising that a large percentage of physicians are aware of patients suffering “significant adverse reaction”, because they're physicians! People come to them when they suffer adverse reactions. Naturally the number of ill people that a doctor is aware of is more than the number of ill people the average person is aware of. That doesn't necessarily mean that a large percentage of the population as a whole have suffered “significant adverse reactions”.

As I've said, my personal experience is that every adult I know has had at least one shot of the vaccine. That's definitely over a 100. None of them has had what could be called “significant adverse reactions”. Reactions have varied from nothing at all to mild flu-like symptoms that passed after a day or so. That's direct personal knowledge.

[Terrapin Station]

As I've said, my personal experience is that every adult I know has had at least one shot of the vaccine. That's definitely over a 100. None of them has had what could be called “significant adverse reactions”. Reactions have varied from nothing at all to mild flu-like symptoms that passed after a day or so. That's direct personal knowledge.

All of my friends and family are fully vaccinated, many for months now (even for me, I've been fully vaccinated for two months at this point). No one had anything but the slightest side effects from the vaccines (for me, I was extremely tired the following night, a bit more than 24 hours after my first shot, but I also had a physical that day where they took three vials of blood, so I didn't know if it wasn't from that instead; and then after the second shot my arm was slightly sore for a couple days, but not sore enough to interfere with gym or anything). And anyway, there's no more significant side effect than dying from coronavirus. So the vaccine is preferable even if you get flu-like symptoms from it or you get really achy for a handful of days or whatever.

With a lot of the supposed more serious side effects that have been reported as rarities, most if not all have been unclear as side effects of the vaccine rather than just statistical anomalies among persons who would have had those symptoms regardless.

[Steve3007]

(for me, I was extremely tired the following night, a bit more than 24 hours after my first shot, but I also had a physical that day where they took three vials of blood, so I didn't know if it wasn't from that instead; and then after the second shot my arm was slightly sore for a couple days, but not sore enough to interfere with gym or anything)

Very similar experience with me, minus the physical and the gym. (You're clearly more responsible about taking care of your health than I am!) I felt rough for a while about 24 hours after the first shot (in March) and felt no noticeable ill effects, except for a sore arm, after the second shot (early June). I had to have a tetanus shot a few days ago after standing on some broken glass, and that was worse! And I'd say the antibiotics that I'm now on as a result of that are more of a concern for the world in general than the Covid vaccines.

Regarding the moral question in the OP, it's no surprise, from previous conversations, that we disagree slightly, given your minarchist libertarian disposition.