Consider that this is also why insurance companies want to set premiums based on pre-existing conditions and health status. Someone who is overweight, sedentary, and smokes will also likely have increased heathcare costs.
Isn’t there currently an agreement with the insurance companies that they will cover Covid expenses without copay? The insurance companies could do away with that special agreement for unvaccinated. And also the government program to reimburse for Covid healthcare could only be for those who are vaccinated.
I could be wrong but I think that agreement might have expired. TBH I don’t see how the insurance markets can continue to eat these costs - COVID is a resource hog.
There is always a question about where do you draw the line, but a COVID vaccination is pretty damn easy - the ones you mentioned take major lifestyle changes to instill new habits.
And my wife’s employer is dancing around charging overweight people a healthcare premium, or is at least acting like that is in the offing. And smokers already pay a premium.
Probably what would be useful is if the government put the various vaccines into ranked categories of importance and then businesses and insurance companies could set policy based on those categories. Although I think everyone should get the Covid vaccine, I don’t like how it’s just a hodge-podge of businesses and organizations making up their own decisions about who should get it. I don’t think people should have to trust their healthcare decisions to whatever McDonald’s thinks is important. Rather, the government should say that certain vaccines are in well-defined categories like Highly Recommended, Strongly Recommended, Recommended, and Optional. Then businesses could say that they require all employees to have the vaccines in certain categories. Hospitals could say everyone has to have Recommended and above, McDonald’s could say Strongly and above, etc. As new vaccines are produced, they are put into the appropriate categories and the businesses don’t have to get into fights with their employees about it. Of course, there would be ways for people to get medical exceptions if they couldn’t take the vaccine, but the business could still set policies based on these categories rather than any specific vaccine.
As long as those with an actual medical reason for avoiding the vaccine are not affected by such a rule I’m all for it. The number of people for whom that genuinely applies should be a very small percentage of the population - I’m willing to cover those who can’t get vaccinated as opposed to those who won’t.
Nothing is 100 percent. There always are lawbreakers. Some will homeschool their kids to prevent them from getting the COVID vaccine, as now happens with existing legally required childhood jabs. Also, if the penalty is a fine – and I can’t see filling jails with known contagious people – some rich people will gladly pay.
Today, if someone openly admits to being in vaccine refusal, my response is to ignore it, or to say that they are wrong in their thinking. I’d rather be in the position of making the factual statement that they are breaking the law than criticizing their way of thinking. And I think a lot of conservatives – not all – would rather obey a law than do what people like me say is smarter.
The message of these complicated mandates is that somehow the vaccine is less important than something like childhood vaccines and seat belts, where the law is clear…
And the case for mandatory COVID is much better than for seat belts because – even though seat belts are big life-savers on balance – they cause far more injuries than any vaccine.
Smallpox? Wasn’t that a lot scarier than COVID? Often – no. In the U.S. after 1825 or so, smallpox was almost always variola minor, the milder strain that didn’t ruin your complexion. The old fashioned vaccine requirement applies here. A simple law is traditional and likely to be passed eventually, at least for children. Better sooner than later.
I take a dim view of “personal freedom” where a pandemic is concerned. Time to impose crushing fines upon unvaccinated people, and jail time if they persist. Exceptions only for those with real medical issues that would make vaccination unsafe.
Slightly incorrect. V. minor caused less scarring, not no scarring.
Another thing about smallpox - the vaccine scar was a permanent and lasting proof of vaccination (You can still see mine more than 50 years after the fact), and pretty damn hard to forge. Proof of vaccination was required for international travel. Even in freedom-drunk America in some cities a block would be cordoned off and people were asked to show their vaccine scar and if they didn’t have one would be vaccinated regardless of their protests. In some countries the military was involved and there were instances of people being vaccinated at gunpoint although that was rare.
It’s not that simple. For instance, people in some occupations might plausibly have contact with other people’s blood, while other occupations won’t. There are some bloodborne diseases which are very serious, and so vaccines against those diseases are important for people who might come into contact with blood, but very unlikely to be relevant for anyone else.
Count on bureaucrats to be screwed up about that. I had the smallpox vax as a child and had the scar to prove it. But when I graduated from high school (Class of 1969!) and went to Berkeley, they required everyone to have the vax to get in. My idiot parents didn’t keep medical records for me (or if they did, they never passed them on to me). So when Berkeley demanded my proof of vax, I pointed out the obvious scar. Sorry, not good enough. They couldn’t accept that. So I had to get vaxxed again.
Fast forward many years. The scar is no longer visible.
The size of the smallpox vax scar varied according to when it was done. Earlier techniques (ca. 1915) left a large area more than an inch across (my mom had one). Fifty years later, the scar (from new vaxing) was almost invisible (you can’t see mine).
So I had TWO smallpox vaxes and two scars, the second one being from 1969. IIRC they were about 1/2 inch across. They were quite visible and distinctive for many many years, but gradually faded. But they weren’t good enough as “proof” of vaccination.
Any young-uns on this Board who don’t know what a smallpox vax scar looks like, there are plenty of pics around that you can google up.
Here’s a thought: Maybe they should design the Covid vax (and others) deliberately to leave a scar like the smallpox vax did. Then all us vaxxed folks could wear it like a badge of honor!
While a smallpox vax scar is pretty distinctive, it also wouldn’t be hard to fake, if there were some incentive for that. Though I suppose it would at least be harder to fake than those little paper cards.
To someone who has never gotten that vaccine, this seems so strange. Before you even graduated from Berkeley they had completely stopped giving the vaccine in the US (except to military folks). I imagined that there was a petering out leading up to the discontinuation in 1972, so it’s a bit startling to hear that the college was still so gung ho so shortly before they stopped giving it to anyone.
As a possible defense of the bureaucrats - a smallpox vaccination is only for life IF you are regularly exposed to the virus. This was no longer a common occurrence much of the world past the latter half of the 19th century. Otherwise, the vaccination is only good for about 10 years. So they might have wanted to know how recently you’d been vaccinated and if more than 10 years or “unknown” that’s why they wanted you to get another.
Or maybe they were just idiots. I don’t know, I wasn’t there.
A campus like Berkley would have had international students, and there was a real fear that a case that slipped through the net and traveled internationally might re-establish smallpox where it had already been eradicated. Which might or might not have been a factor.
Even if the vaccine wasn’t mandatory for everyone in the US after 1972 travel to or from certain parts of the world still required it.
You might find the book “An American Doctor’s Odyssey” by Dr. Victor Heiser entertaining. He describes the difficulty in vaccinating the people of the Philippine islands against smallpox.
The book is available at archive.org.
He wrote of telling one “vaccine refuser” that one of his greatest pleasures was attending the funerals of those who had refused to be vaccinated, and making sure that the facts were published in the local newspapers. (That person changed their mind.)
In another instance, he wrote of an associate vaccinating people from an area where they purposely scarified their bodies. The people there demanded the treatment, even after the Doctor ran out of the vaccine. So the Doctor went through the motions, but told the people they had to come back for a “second treatment”.
Thank you! I had been slowly reading Philip Roth’s Pulitzer winning American Pastoral as it vacillated between the superb, the uninteresting, and the unpleasant.
I wonder if all the little stories are true, but Heiser’s National Book Award winner is more fun.
That would be extremely unethical and immoral. Instead take them to some isolated arctic island, declare it “The Republic of Anti-science Land”, take away all of their possessions, and then see how their freedom and independence work out.
