What I meant is that you found the paper and the quote somewhere else (I'm guessing from a source that compiled stuff in support of vaccine hesitancy), that you didn't just happen upon an ACLU paper on pandemic response on your own.
Wrong again. I've been posting this paper for years on this forum. I have a copy of it saved on my computer (along with other pandemic preparedness plans that were completely ignored during COVID).
It also says "in response to outbreaks of the plague and smallpox". It's talking about forced vaccinations of adults during emergencies, not regular school mandates for children.
Why do you think people's response to forcible vaccination policies would be different during an emergency than concerning routine vaccination? Making someone do something is a surefire way to cause them to NOT want to do it. That's not exactly rocket science.
Not exactly true. It depends on which mandate you're talking about and which part of the efficacy you're looking at.
Among
Canadian health care workers, it increased vaccine uptake and reduced illness. Among
citizens of France and Germany, they increased uptake and likely reduced illness.
Your linked studies show, at best, a marginal benefit. But at what cost? Your first study says this:
Given the benefit that vaccination could bring to HCWs, understanding strategies to enhance uptake is crucial for bolstering health system resilience, but steps must be taken to avert approaches that sacrifice trust, foster animosity, or exacerbate staffing constraints for short-term results.
This is a tacit admission that forcible vaccination has a very real potential to "sacrifice trust" and "foster animosity". Those are very real concerns when speaking of public health. Public health CANNOT be effective without the trust of the people.
In the US, it's more of a mixed bag. At a minimum, there was a backlash against mandates that resulted in lower uptake of boosters and other vaccines, especially among folks who were already skeptical of vaccines.
I'm sure the resignation of the top two vaccine regulators at the FDA over the rushing of boosters was a major factor in the lower uptake of boosters in the US. That's why the Biden administration tried to mandate it. It was becoming quite clear that the vaccine wasn't living up to expectations. But there was an awful lot of money at stake. "Follow the money" is true in just about every circumstance. This was no exception.
How you considered the counterfactual where we had those same variants exploding at that time but without the vaccines?
Yes, I actually have. The claim that the vaccine saved "MILLIONS" of lives doesn't stand up to even a modicum of scrutiny. There simply is no reason to believe deaths would have accelerated at anywhere near the rate that would be necessary for that claim to be true. The cool thing about models in studies is that you can make them say whatever you want. They need not be reflective of mathematical realities.
Oh, you believe that of "most" people? So you agree that there is some segment of the population that does it because they're told to?
Sure. And when you make them do it and tell them to shut up and don't ask questions, you're breeding mistrust.
Ultimately, what you're arguing about is not the science of vaccines, but the psychology of vaccine mandates, which is less a function of vaccine efficacy and more a function of societal expectations and norms.
Partially. There is no questions the efficacy of the COVID vaccines was oversold. Then, they mandated their unrealistic expectations on the population, telling them they wouldn't get COVID if they got the vaccine. When it became clear that was absolute nonsense, they moved the goalposts again and again, still mandating a vaccine that never lived up to its promises. You can believe me or not, but I am telling you you that this did IMMENSE damage to vaccine confidence in general. Gruber and Krause expressed their concerns in their paper int he Lancet for how this would impact vaccine confidence. It also gave people a peek into the laughable regulatory process behind vaccines, and the paucity of data that is required for their approval.
Prior to covid, school vaccines had, by and large, been normalized in the US and it was mainly only kooks who took exception to them.
This is part of the problem right here. Your dismissal of anyone who questions vaccines as "kooks" is incredibly rude and unproductive. There are a myriad of valid reasons why someone may question vaccine mandates. For one thing, vaccine injuries are a real thing that no one wants to talk about. The pharmaceutical companies are granted full immunity from any damages caused by vaccines. People are denigrated as "kooks" if they've been harmed by a vaccine. They have no support and they are attacked and tarred as an "anti-vaxxer" simply for telling people what happened to them.
When I got my second Pfizer vaccine in January 2022, I had a fever of 104 for nearly 12 hours. My joints were so stiff that I felt nearly paralyzed. My wife had to help me move around the house. I reported this to both VAERS and V-Safe. No one ever contacted me. I guess temporary paralysis and a high fever aren't serious enough adverse events to merit follow up from the CDC. It probably just means that it's working...
Do you think I'll ever get another COVID vaccine after that experience? Absolutely not. Have I had COVID since then? Maybe. I've had mild colds they may or may not have been COVID. But I am simply not willing to take the risk to take any other doses of that vaccine.
You know what a mandate would do? It would force me to get a vaccine that I know harmed me. It would force me to take a risk that I don't need to take. I am far better off getting COVID and dealing with minor cold symptoms for a few days than dealing with whatever that vaccine did to my body again.
There was no backlash to them. It's fundamentally not comparable to the epidemics in your ACLU paper, because those vaccine mandates had not been normalized; they were new.
It is fundamentally comparable because it's MANDATING something.
They were also forced on adults, who aren't used to having their bodily autonomy violated all the time, rather than young children, who have their bodily autonomy violated all the time. The backlash wasn't to "vaccine mandates"; it was to a significant disruption to what they were used to.
The backlash absolutely was to vaccine mandates. I was in NYC at the height of the insanity. You couldn't even go into a restaurant without showing your papers. It was a scary look at the freedoms people were willing to surrender for the illusion of safety. Thankfully it was short-lived, but it's pretty obvious there are tons of people out there willing to give up their freedom if the government convinces them they'll be safer because of it.
I don't expect to convince you. I expect you'll continue to believe that RFK Jr and the "kooks" are the real problem while never coming to the realization that vaccine zealotry is the real driver behind vaccine hesitancy.
