When a vaccine is viable and available...should the government, either federal or state, mandate it's use?

Proof please.

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Yeah…almost have to call BS on that. If anything those without health insurances are more likely to take precautions from getting it.

I don’t think it is a matter of if…but when? I think there will be one…I have read about the one that was invented at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The patch. I think that one could be very effective, and simple to use. But it is a matter of when!

How’s the flu vaccine working?

Right, but there are others in the herd who the vaccine is in-effective…so you have 100 people, and say 3% of those 100 had an ineffective outcome to the vaccine, it wasn’t effective. You come into that group of 100, say in a college dorm, or a work place, and have not been vaccinated…those three people are not protected…but the other 97 people are. So it should not matter. But you come in as person 101…and one of those three gets COVID 19 and they come in contact with you, coughing or sneezing in your dorm room or office…then bam…you potentially lose the heard immunity because those three people were not inoculated effectively against the virus. Then you pass it on to the other two…now 4 of you are infected and if there are others who did not get the vaccine outside of the original herd of 100, then the potential is there for them to get sick. This is exactly what happened with chicken pox a year or so ago…or was it measles. Either way, it’s slow, but it still becomes an outbreak after a certain amount of time and number of cases.

I think there are recent data sets from places like Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis and other big cities at least here in the midwest, that show that minorities are having a bigger number of cases and deaths…but I think it is also somewhat misreported. I looked at a break down for Indiana, where there was a larger percentage of white people getting the disease, while a smaller number of minority people were getting the disease but a disproportionately larger number of minorities were dying from it. This was largely reported this weekend out of Chicago. Mayor Lightfoot rightly reported that this was largely due to underlying health conditions found in the African American community…diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney disease to name a few.

It works pretty well. My wife who is an extreme high risk, gets one every year, and she hasn’t had the flue for 7 years now, and before that wasn’t getting it. She also gets a pneumonia shot every few years. And she doesn’t even get bronchitis anymore. She used to get it every spring and every fall.

So I know that there is a lot of disbelief in the flu shot…but for her it works very well and keeps her very healthy…which is good, she only has one pulmonary artery or her left side which means when she was born her right lung never developed, and really doesn’t work. She only has one healthy lung…so it has to be protected.

No doubt you will ask me to prove that poor people are less likely to have health insurance.

Look it up

Any evidence for that. One of the issues in New York City is that people in higher paying professions that are information based are able to work at home or able to deal with periods of not working, while people in low paying service jobs have to expose themselves to greater risk.

I think one thing you have to be concerned about in poorer minority communities, is that these individuals are less likely to have a family doctor and they use the ER or urgent care facilities to do drive in doctoring. Because of this when many urgent cares are either over crowed with sick people are shut down all together. Where do these people go to get medical help…They walk right into the epicenter of this thing. A Hospital ER.

I feel very fortunate to be able to do this for starting on my second week. I took it upon myself to set up VPNs for most of our office three weeks ago so most people could work from home. I did this without my boss’s knowledge because he told me it would not be necessary…I did it anyway. And now we are good. My wife and Son are teacher and are teaching from their separate in home classrooms.

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So effectively, the 97% are still protected? If only the ones without the shot are the ones that get sick, then why the push to force it? If you understand the risk and you get sick, that’s on you, no?

Because the more people who belong to the herd with immunity, the less likely those who are not inoculated against it, or who may still be likely to be effected only less severely, like my wife, the less likely we are to have any kind of out break. Herd immunity does not have an all out every one is protected. But the more people protected the less likely those who aren’t protected…the 4 out of 100…are likely to get sick.

Well put. Let me just add that the reliance on ER/Urgent Care comes with a lack of attention to preventive care and with a tendency to wait until a situation is more extreme before taking action.

This is a good question.

And I look forward to reading through the thread to see how it gets answered.

“Will be”. Not proof.

Look at the data on impact by race.

Great thread, BTW.

You kind of answered this question how I would answer it – specifically with respect to the annual flu shot.

The anti-vaxxers see more threat from those vaccines than from the diseases they address. (Kind of a generalization, but that’s how I see it. PS: I’m not an anti-vaxxer.)

But the threat of COVID, it’s seemingly random fatality, and its high contagiousness, might flip the philosophy for many anti-vaxxers.

(BTW: The flu “vaccine” isn’t really a vaccine in the full sense of the term. Vaccines are a once-and-done administration. Smallpox, measles, polio, etc. We don’t need to get them refreshed. But the flu shot is an annual thing. And it’s a best guess by researchers for the most likely flu strains that they predict will be prevalent in the upcoming year. If some new flu crops up (COVID, anyone?), it’s ineffective against it.

The COVID vaccine (still to be determined) … nobody is saying whether it will need to be an annual shot or a once-and-done. (I hope it’s the latter.)

All that aside, COVID has been presented as a possible kiss of death, and I’ll bet there will be far less resistance to it from anti-vaxxers than a mumps vaccine.

Earlier in the thread it was asked if the other vaccines were mandated. I’ll bet nearly every mother out there clamored for her kids to get the polio vaccine when it came out. (I know my mother did! I was a toddler in 1960 when the vaccine became widely available.) They grew up knowing friends who had gotten it. They feared the disease and wanted to make sure their kids didn’t have to face it.

Likely (or, at least, I hope so) most mothers would want their kids safe from this virus too.

Actually, there is also testing out there to see if you already have the antibody in your system. (You may have acquired it and been asymptomatic, but you would still have developed the antibodies.) Perhaps the standard course would be to get tested for the antibody, and if you don’t have it, then you get the shot.

And I’m not sure I buy into that BS either The media has lied, mislead the public so much over the years they’re like Chinese goverment…you can’t trust what they say. It’s all propaganda.

As for overall health of minorities. But also keep in mine they live in tighter quarters. They don’t have a mansion to come home to with servants. :wink:

I’ve wondered about implementing something like that for seatbelts. I think it’s a personal decision. But if you’re in a car accident and get injured because you were not wearing a seatbelt, then your insurance should not have to cover anything, or maybe there could be some large up-front deductible before insurance covers such injuries.

Likewise, getting a disease that could have been prevented by a vaccine could carry an additional deductible for treatment costs.

The thing about seatbelts is that generally the personal decision impacts only yourself. (Usually. Of course there are exceptions.) But getting a contagious disease puts others besides yourself at risk.