Conavirus......

[Yppej]

Our narrative in this country for a long time has been in favor of safety over freedom "if it saves just one life it's worth it". It's okay to take away people's freedom forever if it keeps one person from dying from covid according to some. We can gut our economy. We can run up huge deficits. We can live in fear of hypothetical variants (rather than shut down international borders to prevent them getting here). And apparently now we need to all put our lives on hold forever for people who refuse to get the vaccine. Canvassers are going door to door trying to convince them - I don't think there's more we can do in my state.

[bae]

It's okay to take away people's freedom forever if it keeps one person from dying from covid according to some.

I think you are the only person I've heard issue that opinion.

None of the professionals I work with, who have managed the response in my County, which has had some of the best results on Earth, have ever muttered such a thing. But what do they know, they just do this for a living, and have training and experience.

Carry on.

[ApatheticNoMore]

Perhaps it helps to realize that it really doesn't matter very much what some holdouts from the vaccine in the U.S. do (except to endanger those who really can't take vaccines etc.) so long as the virus is spreading uncontrolled in much of the rest of the world, that could breed a better virus itself. And international travel to the U.S. has never, will never it seems, be shut down. And are we even testing arrivals? I doubt they are quarantined. And much of the rest of the world is predicted to be vaccinated in 2023 or something! Well that doesn't sound very fast.

So someone in the U.S. refuses because Tucker Carlson or something, yea but solve India or that's a far bigger breeding ground anyway, and humanitarian crisis, that too. When the rests of the world has access to the vaccine then holdouts will be the bottleneck preventing elimination. Of course vaccines also continue development. So we may well get vaccines that handle all variants even if we don't have them now. I'm not convinced it needs to be a yearly shot but we'll see what is available.

[ApatheticNoMore]

Our narrative in this country for a long time has been in favor of safety over freedom "if it saves just one life it's worth it".

lol, if that was true it wouldn't be so car-centric. think about it. We accept a lot of deaths for it.

It's okay to take away people's freedom forever if it keeps one person from dying from covid according to some.

but the BS you talk about is not how actual political freedom is defined, it's about right to protest etc., it's not about the right to open or go to restaurants in a pandemic. Noone wants your BS "freedom". Freedom's just another word for dying in a pandemic. Bah, get if off me.

I mean sure there are places where life is very cheap indeed, probably way overpopulated, and poor, and so it's taken as a given. I didn't know that was what we were aspiring to.

[Tradd]

I listen to the BBC a lot online. The local UK oriented stations, not the World Service. Radio 5 Live is their talk radio station. Anyway, I might have mentioned last year that when there was talk about relaxing some restrictions, more than a few people called up and said on the air that anyone who wanted to get back to even a semblance of regular life was a “murderer.” So SOME people seem to think that having a destroyed economy, people’s livelihoods destroyed, etc., are worthless if the plague is still out there.

Frankly, I still think international travel bans should have been continued.

[LDAHL]

I think there’s a sort of freedom/responsibility spectrum people fall on. Freedom isn’t functional in any reasonable sense unless we accept the personal responsibility that comes with it. At one end of the spectrum are the people who childishly want what they want with no regard to any consequences. At the other are people so fearful of consequences that they decide individual liberty is a luxury we can’t afford.

I think most people are mature enough to act on the best advice without a gun to their head, and that the deliberately obtuse science deniers and the pecksniff scolds are both outliers. Otherwise this country would either be impossible to live in or not worth living in.

[LDAHL]

Frankly, I'm about to withdraw from any form of public service, I've given up.

That would be a pity. Understandable perhaps, but still a pity.

Think of the people who aren’t dangerously stupid.

[JaneV2.0]

"Our narrative in this country for a long time has been in favor of safety over freedom "if it saves just one life it's worth it"."

Oh, please. We had nine mass shootings last week and no one batted an eye.

[jp1]

"Our narrative in this country for a long time has been in favor of safety over freedom "if it saves just one life it's worth it"."

Oh, please. We had nine mass shootings last week and no one batted an eye.

And over the last seven days an average of 650 covid deaths every day. That works out to another 237,000 dead people if it stays that high for another year. But some people are trying to claim that we’re already at herd immunity. So absurd.

[Yppej]

States like Minnesota and West Virginia are giving people advance warning mask mandates will go away. That way if this bothers them they can get off the fence and get vaccinated. Makes sense to me.