Make the Conservative Case for Overriding Various COVID restrictions

Great Debates
61

You are making the case that private stores and such have every right to block customers. That is indeed a conservative position, but the OP was asking for a conservative defense of the government overriding those private choices. In my opinion, that’s indefensible from a conservative position.

If a private store wants to exclude the unvaxxed, they should have that right. That’s the conservative pisition. But in this case it runs up against disparate impact jurisprudence. The first African American refused service because they don’t have a vaccine card could trigger a civil rights lawsuit under disparate impact. At least that’s my understanding.

And the real world fact is that you will be blocking 2/3 of the black community, but only 1/3 of whites. That seems problematic.

62

Are you saying that, hypothetically, if only 30% of Black people have been vaccinated, that would be a disparate impact? Because I can’t find any cites that show that kind of disparity.

63

I’m going to take a stab at this. To be clear, i favor vaccination and masking. But I’ve spent a lot of time on another message board arguing with a fairly reasonable conservative who opposes vaccine passports and mask regulations, and i think i can channel him for this thread.

First, let’s start with his understanding of the facts:

  1. covid will never got away. Because it spreads readily and has many animal reservoirs, we aren’t discussing short-term regulations but potential perpetual ones.

  2. fear of covid is vastly overblown. Many of the people reported as covid deaths were dying anyway, and just happened to have covid. In particular, covid is not very dangerous to children or healthy young adults.

  3. the vaccines appear to work, but they are new and unproven, and we don’t know the long term side effects. While it makes sense for a sixty year old to get vaccinated, the benefits don’t outweigh the potential harm for many younger people. (Especially children).

  4. natural immunity, that is, immunity from having recovered from covid, is at least as protective as vaccination.

  5. in addition to unknown risks of vaccines, there are known risks, like the risk of losing a day of work because you feel shitty and have a fever the next day. This is a major cost to most hourly “essential” workers, many of whom have natural immunity from having been forced to be in public while the upper class stayed home and worked over zoom.

  6. face masks don’t work to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases in general, and covid in particular. They are woo.

  7. face masks have many downsides. They are uncomfortable. They interfere with nonverbal communication. They can block a portion of the visual field and increase the risk of tripping. They interfere with verbal communication, too, the as they muffle sound and prevent others from reading your lips.

Fwiw, i agree with him on 1, 5, and 7, and while the data is mixed on 4, there is no question that recovery from covid confers some immunity in most people who would have benefited from a vaccine.

Also, while i think he’s overly focused on mortality, and not the other risks of contacting covid (including the potential for long-term brain damage) he’s right that at least prior to Delta, kids were at little risk. The number of kids who died was extremely small, and most of the dead kids had known conditions that increased their risk.

For other reasons, I was looking at mortality by age based on my state’s data pre-vaccine this weekend. The relative risks looked like:
0-19 0.002
20-29 0.17
30-39 0.27
40-49 1
50-59 2.4
60-69 6.6
70-79 19
80+ 96
I arbitrarily selected 40-49 as my “base rate” and estimated the others relative to their risk of death. And yes, the risk of death to someone over 80 was roughly 5000 times as great as the risk to someone under 20. Which means that if vaccines are 99% effective, a vaccinated 84 year old is at much higher risk of death than an unvaxinated 12 year old.

I think his beliefs lead fairly obviously to his stance re covid. Mask mandates are harmful, and government should discourage harmful woo, especially as it affects those with no choice. (I don’t think he cares if a grocery store requires masks, but he’s really angry that his child’s school will require masks.) He doesn’t want to live in a “show your papers” society where a government registry declares whether you are “clean”. And he’s deeply resentful of a government-backed vaccine requirement that ignores natural immunity.

64

The guy I’m channeling quoted a stat with that number, but it was for Black people under… Maybe 50. Hang on, let me see if i can find it.

eta:

Hopefully, this Twitter link works:

It’s a bit if a stretch to go from “28% of this 18-44, so 72% of everyone is denied service”, but in that age range his numbers are extremely plausible, although i haven’t personally checked them.

65

To follow up, the argument would go that life itself kills 84 year olds at far higher rates than 12 year olds and that is exactly how it is supposed to be. Sure it is sad, and nobody wants grandpa to die, but he is 84 years old. He has exceeded his natural life expectancy, a life in which he got to experience close human contact without masks and social distancing, so why are we denying young people proms, graduations, a normal school experience, etc. just so an 84 year can live to be 86?

66

To follow up. Another thing that “bolsters” that argument is similar to the one we commonly hear about how “I lived through the 70s and 80s around second hand smoke and didn’t wear seat belts or bike helmets and drank contaminated well water and I’m just fine.”

Yes, the people saying this are the lucky ones who didn’t have adverse effects from not wearing a seat belt/exposure to Covid. Only the people who are alive are here to say they are “fine.”

67

Sure, when the audience is the staff of the politician making the case:

  1. Masks are an issue that polarizes all citizens
  2. Taking a stand against masks gets immediate nationwide media coverage
  3. The rewards of an anti- mask position are donations and a base of future votes
  4. There is no risk to an anti-mask position - it will be forgotten by the left and remembered by the right
68

Is it your position that in order to be a conservative one must be opposed to public accommodations laws? Be opposed to the 1964 Civil Rights Act? Or even if opposed, cannot one still be conservative, yet acquiesce to the idea that “private businesses” who are open to the public cannot discriminate based on X?

If there is support or acquiescence by conservatives to public accommodations laws, then why isn’t it conservative just to say that this thing should be added to it? Do those laws have to be necessary evils that only their ardent supporters define the parameters of? IOW, given that we are going to live in a world where private businesses are forbidden from choosing their customers for certain reasons, why can’t we be a part of picking those reasons?

69

First of all, let’s not confuse “conservative” with “Republican”. Republican positions these days don’t require any fact-based rationalization. A lot of them are just knee-jerk opposition to anything they don’t like, especially anything favoured by Democrats. Ron DeSantis is a good example. Everything he either supports or opposes directly contributes to promoting the spread of COVID. It’s as if the COVID virus became sentient and hired him as their paid publicist.

Because this has nothing whatsoever to do with “public accommodation”. This is about a walking virus factory, basically a plague-spreading device analogous to a biological weapon. It’s a travesty of logic to believe that a walking biological weapon has all the same rights to occupy public spaces as anyone else. Especially when said walking biological weapon has readily available means to become immunized and healthy.

70

Respectfully, this hyperbole feeds into the conservative counter response. Covid is bad, very bad indeed. But it is not a biological weapon or anything like you have described. Look at the data a few posts above yours. If a country tried to weaponize Covid and turn it into a biological weapon, it would be the most laughably ineffective biological weapon ever invented.

Further, you are equating “unvaccinated” with “definitively having the worst case of Covid ever.” There are many unvaccinated people who have had Covid and retain immunity. There are many unvaccinated who are not even sick.

So, yeah, I can go along with a business requiring masks, and I’m almost at the point of requiring a vaccination, but to say that people who are not vaccinated are the rhetorical equivalent of a walking biological weapon is simple hysteria and not at all supported by any science.

71

Would you be happier if I said “potential biological weapon”?

At what point do “conservatives” consider public safety a sufficiently important objective to override their ideological pet preferences?

72

This is a nice impartial summary. Thanks.

73

Putting this to the side, what I was responding to was the idea that some posters have shared that basically argue, “But this is a private business! How can the government tell a private business that they can’t exclude certain customers?”

My response is that such a ship sailed a long time ago, for good or ill. The government has a pretty heavy hand in regulating private businesses with regard to their choices about which customers they wish to serve. So even if it is a bad idea, a terrible idea, to tell private businesses that they cannot refuse to serve the unvaccinated, the response of “but they are a private business” is pretty meaningless.

74

Indeed, as with many politicized issues, it devolves into “it’s OK if MY side does it”. So no, your city/county cannot declare itself an immigrant sanctuary… but if it wants to be extra hardcore, go ahead and knock yourself out, Sherriff Joe! You cannot force a city to remove a statue of General Jehosaphat T. Raitor if they don’t want to… but you can also make a law that the city itself, those recent-arriving urbanites with no sense of tradition, cannot remove it w/o permission from the state.

Which is part of the problem – what if the state itself is unwilling to make it easy even if the citizen wants it?

Ah, yes, but that’s the thing, isn’t it… because what we are discussing is really a two parter:
1: Is “unvaccinated” a protected class.
2: Is taking a cruise “exercising a right” or the cruise line a “public accommodation”
As stated, the populist (“conservative” got nuthin’ to do with it any more) position is that either everyone and everything must be allowed, or else anyone and anything may be freely discriminated against. And that is not so in the reality we live in.

75

I can’t believe I’m doing this, but to continue to channel the conservative case…

For the same reasons that children are unlikely to become seriously ill, their robust juvenile immune system also makes them far less likely to spread covid that an older and more susceptible adult. And the same can be said of the 20-something who works in retail and has probably been exposed and developed some immunity, even if they never explicitly had a positive test.

While pre-symptomatic covid is infectious (something my conservative friend tends to gloss over) asymptomatic covid generally isn’t.

As @UltraVires says, your hyperbole does not help make the case. Additionally, blaming children for killing grandma is almost certainly psychologically harmful, and neither likely to be true nor likely to help matters, as kids don’t get to make the decisions.

channeling off: A better case is that there are a lot of people who are vulnerable. Old people, cancer patients, those with certain immune disorders, transplant patients… Even if they vaccinate and mask they remain at high risk. Something like 1 billion doses of vaccine have been administered world-wide, with extremely few adverse effects. We’ve already done the experiment, and it worked. And even among those at lower risk, the vaccine reduces their odds of sharing a deadly infection. We vaccinate children at little risk from rubella to prevent birth defects in other people. We can vaccinate healthy young adults at little risk from covid to prevent death among the more vulnerable.

Of course, Delta means that a lot more people are vulnerable, even after vaccination, which makes reducing the amount going around even more valuable. And death is hardly the only adverse outcome. Personally, I don’t want to spend weeks in the hospital or end up with brain damage, or lung damage, or kidney damage, or sudden-onset diabetes.

There are lot of good reasons to push everyone eligible to get vaccinated. But calling the unvaccinated (including those who probably have significant immunity from catching covid) “biological weapons” is just divisive.

76

I am making the case that ‘conservatism’ isn’t about the virtues of selfishness but about the virtues of morality, social consciousness, and self-discipline. As I was taught

The other kind of conservatism is mere sociopathy in the aggregate, psychopathy in the individual. And it’s this 2nd kind which is in vogue today.

77

¯_(ツ)_/¯

This is still psychopathic. His right to swing his fist ends at my nose. Ergo, he doesn’t have a right to walk around as a, how was it put, a walking biowarfare factory, making others sick.

Beliefs should never, ever, trump reality.

78

But you are vaccinated, right? But you need the other guy to get vaccinated so he is not engaging in “biowarfare” by giving you the virus. But if you can get the virus, can’t he? And isn’t he then still engaging in biowarfare?

(Yes, I know the answer to this, but I’m playing along. The messaging over this has been atrocious).

79

Also, I was flipping through the radio today and a conservative was saying that a mandatory vaccine was “a forced penetration of [his] body.” Hyperbole? Yes. Absolutely. About on the same level as biological warfare.

80

How about if instead of calling them potential biological weapons, we just call them variant factories – the exact words of one infectious disease specialist, meaning they are ideal environments for incubating dangerous new COVID mutations? Is that hyperbole, too? How about we recognize that the unvaccinated are responsible for the latest US COVID outbreak?

Here’s another fact I’d like to see conservatives address. When comparing the US with Canada, which is very similar socioeconomically, one might expect to see very similar COVID numbers, except that Canada has had vaccine supply problems and only recently has sufficient supplies to meet demand. Thus, most Americans wanting the vaccine were able to get it sooner, and in most cases were able to get the second shot within around the recommended 3-week timeframe, whereas Canada put emphasis on the majority getting at least the first shot, and stretching out the interval to the second shot for months, in many cases. For that reason one would expect Canada’s COVID numbers to be worse.

But what we actually see is that the US case count is 112,362 per million population, with 1,913 deaths per million. Canada has seen a case count of 38,074 per million, with 701 deaths per million.

Now, I’m not going to presumptuously declare that I understand exactly why these numbers are so dramatically different. But it must surely be pertinent that while some US states have actually prohibited local jurisdictions from enacting mask mandates, most Canadian provinces have gone in exactly the opposite direction and enacted province-wide mandates that are being widely observed and enforced – at least, they are here in Ontario. Ontario also had an extensive lockdown of non-essential businesses until recently. There is also far less vaccine hesitancy – from the latest figures I could find, 49.6% of Americans are fully vaccinated, while 71% of Canadians are fully vaccinated despite the supply problems, with more than 82% having at least their first shot, and presumably will soon be getting their second.

IOW, although there are probably multiple causes for the numbers being so different, it’s very plausible that the reason the US numbers are so much worse is the direct result of anti-science Republican policies enacted for purely political reasons – anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown.

As for my divisive language and “hyperbole”, sometimes strong language is justified. Using mild and conciliatory language may be good politics but it’s not necessarily good science if it doesn’t convey factual reality. The same accusations have unfairly been made against climate scientists for allegedly being “alarmist” and “doomsayers”.