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New York City has been ordered to reinstate with back-pay city employees who were fired for refusing to get the covid-19 vaccine. When I first encountered this story, the quote that was bandied from the judge was "Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19" and my initial impression was of a fringe anti-vax judge. But the judge meant this literally, as in "the vaccine is not 100% effective" and what he writes in the decision is much more nuanced and generally in support of vaccination.
I am not philosophically opposed to vaccine mandates. Vaccines are easily one of the greatest inventions of mankind, and I don't find it unreasonable to impose a cost on individuals to the extent it can potentially mitigate negative externalities. I'm also not someone who opposes other public health mandates in general, and I was OK with mask mandates for the most part, up until we had widely available vaccines. What never made sense to me was the incoherent overall set of rules. For example, some time around mid-2021, my gym instituted a vaccine passport system whereby you could show proof of vaccination and thereafter be able to work out without a mask. I was totally fine with this system, especially since it was a private entity finding a way to accomodate the needs of a varied clientele. A few months later however, the government ordered all gyms to require masks no matter what and I was fucking pissed. I had to now wear a mask at the gym despite being surrounded by vaccinated people, but meanwhile I could go maskless for several hours at a time at restaurants surrounded by unknown quantities. It didn't make any sense, and it just needlessly burned up whatever credibility public health authorities had. I made the same point at the height of the BLM protests/riots, when social distancing magically didn't matter anymore.
So back to New York City, in October 2021 the city ordered all public employees to be vaccinated. The judge in this case found the order to be "arbitrary and capricious" largely because of how nonsensical the implementation was. If the purpose of the mandate is to increase vaccination with the goal to decrease the spread of a deadly contagion, why exempt certain professions like athletes, artists, and performers? And why allow city employees who are appealing the mandate to continue working full-time as their appeal is pending?
The term "pretextual" comes up sometimes in legal contexts, and it's where a false reason is provided as a bid to hide the true motivations of an action. For example, a cop can say they stopped a vehicle only because the car was speeding, but their true motivation for the stop is to create an opportunity to investigate something else entirely. In Whren v. United States, SCOTUS unanimously decided that pretextual traffic stops were legal (they call them "mixed-motive stops" which is lol) and to date Washington and New Mexico are the only states that prohibit the practice. Because it is virtually impossible to perfectly comply with traffic rules at all times, the practical effect of allowing pretextual stops is that a cop can pull over basically any car they want to. They just need to watch them long enough.
New York City may claim their goal is purely public health related, but it's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of their stated reasons when the implementation does not align with their goals. The judge in this case wrote:
Perhaps they can overcome this suspicion by providing a damn good reason for how art protects against transmission, or how pursuing an appeal makes one less contagious, but I have not been able to find one. In the absence of a good reason, I can conclude their stated goal is pretextual. Despite their claims otherwise, it's obvious that the stated goal of public health was not always an overriding priority. The city was apparently willing to let the Very Important Goal be subsumed by comparatively trivial concerns, like not pissing off Very Important People in the entertainment industry. So next time New York City or similar claims they are doing something in furtherance of public health, it's reasonable to assume they're lying until you see evidence otherwise. If the public trusts these bodies less, they can blame themselves.
Note that the first reason he found it arbitrary and capricious is that the state did not order a vaccine mandate for the private sector until several months later. So, had the vaccine mandate been applied to everyone, it would not have been fine. This sounds like it might be a pyrrhic victory for those opposed to vaccines.
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I find the idea of being unvaccinated creating an externality, and therefore receptive to externality-targeting policy, to be a very weak. Not specifically for covid, but in general for vaccines.
When calculating externalities, you need to set a reference point - externality relative to what. Generally, this reference point is set relative to doing nothing. For instance, when it comes to climate, we choose the reference point of no pollution, and therefore class polluters as inflicting a negative externality. If we instead, erroneously, set the reference point of yes pollution, we'd instead find that non-polluters are inflicting a positive externality. Opposite of consensus on how this is calculated. Since the default state of humans is to not be vaccinated, externalities need to be set relative to this. Because of this, the demand for someone else to be vaccinated creates the externality. I'm yet to see a rigorous explanation of why being unvaccinated is the negative externality, rather than demanding that others be vaccinated creating the negative externality.
To give an example this applied to a hypothetical situation of whether unvaccinated and vaccinated people should meet at a venue.
Nobody wants to be there: No externality.
Only one person wants to be there: No externality.
Both people want to be there: No externality.
Both people want to be there but one of the two insists the other be vaccinated: Externality, as they impose a cost of being vaccinated on someone, while reaping all the (hypothetical) reward of supposedly lower chance of being infected.
Besides, vaccine mandates are not vaccinations. As in, the policy of a vaccine mandate doesn't vaccinate people. It merely punishes them for being unvaccinated. The standard justification for externality-targeting policies is that they can resolve market failures where people impose costs on others for their own benefit, by redistributing both the costs and benefits. However, vaccine mandates don't have benefits to redistribute, they just have the costs of the loss of utility from harming unvaccinated people. Well, I guess you could get really nebulous and claim that e.g firing unvaccinated people redistributes wages to vaccinated people, or suggest that vaccinated people emotionally benefit from seeing unvaccinated people be needlessly harmed, but that's not what any advocate of vaccine mandates claims to want.
Further, if we're doing a full accounting of covid-related externalities, we should do it evenly. Advocates of lockdowns and other restrictions reaped all the rewards (emotional, health risk etc) while imposing costs on me (emotional, health risk etc). This is unfair. I've seen people crunch the numbers on how much being unvaccinated "costs" to healthcare. It's about $1k for the average person, which is way way lower than a lot of other voluntary activities that are considered sacrosanct to restrict, but whatever. Great. I'll gladly pay that amount, provided I am compensated for all the other externalities. I expect to massively benefit from this arrangement overall. The chance of me being hospitalized with covid is negligible. The financial damage of restrictions, once you sum up years of lost income, QALY losses, increased taxes, increased cost of living due to inflation, the loss of government services etc, will come in at well over $100k.
This post seems confused by its own argument. You setup an equivalence between a negative externality of X and a positive externality of not-X, which is logically sound. You then ask why we're treating X as a negative externality instead of treating not-X as negative externality. This does not follow from your reasoning.
Indeed, the logical equivalence of "X is a negative externality with respect to not-X baseline" and "not-X is a positive externality with respect to the X baseline", means that which framing you choose to do the calculation in, cannot possibly alter the result. Minimizing f(x) and maximizing -f(x) gives you the same value of x.
People being vaccinated imposes a cost on them. This cost varies from minor (risk related to the vaccine itself) to really quite substantial (the emotional consequences of being subjected to a medical treatment you do not want). We know some people place quite a high cost on them being vaccinated because of what they were willing to continue suffering in the presence of vaccine mandates. I don't see why demanding others be vaccinated shouldn't be treated as the negative externality, rather than remaining unvaccinated being the negative externality. Similarly, the implementation of vaccine mandates creates a negative externality, via the suffering of victims of vaccine mandates for the sake of either the health or emotional gratification of supporters of the mandate.
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I'm not sure your notion of "default" is really relevant. Either not getting vaccinated causes a negative externality or getting vaccinated causes a positive externality.
The question of whether you want to internalize that by paying people to be vaccinated or levying fines on people for not being vaccinated is, theoretically at least, a minor implementation detail.
Claiming that the government insisting on vaccinations causes negative externalities is a bit weird since the government is typically seen as optimizing for social welfare, and so should already be accounting for the benefits and costs to citizens.
You can argue that a vaccine mandate is bad policy (in which case by all means argue that), but using the word "externality" doesn't absolve you of the requirement to actually argue that.
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Have you ever heard of the Coase theorem?
Property rights have to already be defined in order for the Coase theorem to apply (among a litany of other assumptions). But who has what property rights over their bodies is exactly what’s at issue here.
Very true, the Coase theorem relies on some unrealistic assumptions. However it's relevant regarding the discussion on reference points. If we're talking about a system where pollution is discouraged through taxes, that's not really any different from a system where non-pollution is encouraged through subsidies. That's why I found the talk about reference points to be a bit puzzling.
“Not really any different” in what sense? And evaluating whether something’s an externality still requires a fixed point of reference relative to which it can be considered an externality. That was the whole point of the post above. I don’t really see what the relevance of Coase is there.
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This proves too much. The default state of humans is famously to live lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Maybe you're going for a libertarian argument that the state should be doing nothing or almost nothing, but otherwise this seems like a strange conception of the responsibilities of the state to me.
I think you are misunderstanding the argument. The point he's making about default states is establishing a policy baseline to measure from, not we should never move away from that baseline.
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I'm so glad I read the rest of this post before totally losing my shit, but dude. This has been one of the primary points of the motte "anti-vax" crowd since the vaccines were rolled out. We have all said it ad nauseum at this point - hell man, as you note, you yourself have said it before! And yet your first impulse was to assume that a New York judge was being a fringe anti-vax asshole? What is it going to take to update your priors on this?
On its own it's a somewhat ambiguous statement to make because it is true whether vaccines are either 0% effective or 99% effective. The statement's ambiguity is a good reason to avoid saying it. I don't think I've encountered it much here but out in the wild the only times I really encounter this type of statement is as a prefix to why no one should get or is justified in not getting vaccinated. Given that association I don't think my initial impulse was unreasonable. I might update my priors to the extent it stops being associated with bona fide anti-vaxxers.
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I don’t find the judge’s reasoning persuasive, but I’m also not familiar with the laws that bind the hands of city officials. You can have a legitimate public health interest in vaccination, while having an overriding “sum total good” interest in keeping athletes and others in your city (who bring in money, which in turn increases sum total health via taxation, and other aids in other interests). An obvious example of such a rule is speed limits. We can save more lives on the road by making everyone drive 10mph, but the increased efficiency of 60mph actually saves lives in the end. Similarly, the counterbalancing interest of retaining unvaccinated city employees engaged in an appeal is so that those with a legitimate reasoned grievance can argue their case; this is a safeguard against negative consequences if it turns out the ruling is wrong, sort of like postponing an execution sentence during an appeal.
So from a simply rational perspective, I’m not persuaded with the Judge’s snippet. I do however find the vaccine mandate to be utterly irrational, given the sheer novelty of mRNA lipid nanoparticle injections. Rationally, it’s a good idea to not have the entire population take a novel and questionable injection that has not been tested long term. Especially when we know that COVID has such a low mortality rate in young people. Like, 40 year olds developing fatal heart issues because of consequences of this new injection is not at all impossible. They essentially gambled all of western civilization (life itself for the vaccinated) on the theoretical beliefs of some scientists who mostly studied cancer patients (no long term trial) and mice (very limited trials) and who had a strong motive to push their product. This is just dumb. This is as dumb as editing coronaviruses in a lab to make them more lethal. It is utter hubris given the history of humanity’s propensity for getting things wrong (cigarettes good, bottle milk for babies good, roundup good, prions in uk cattle, etc)
Glyphosate is relatively harmless. The benefits certainly outweigh the harms.
Not sure what this is referring to. What did humanity get wrong in this case?
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as "mad cow", which also appears as a very rare and fatal prion disease, vCJD in humans. This is believed to be caused by feeding cattle products to cows, which has been largely phased out since the peak of the disease in the early '90s.
For this reason, people who spent time in Europe in the '80s and '90s were, until recently, disallowed from giving blood.
Yes, and I was asking what humanity got wrong in this case. Was there a scientific consensus that feeding cattle products to cows was safe? Was it even researched thoroughly before BSE, or did no one care?
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Oh, did they lift that ban? Damn it, between that and the homo thing I'm running out of excuses.
I went to look it up, and it seems the American Red Cross changed their guidance just a few weeks ago. The change in FDA recommendation seems to have been proposed in January 2020, and presumably was glossed over given other major health news at the time.
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I don't really understand this. The exemption applied to all athletes, artists, and performers, even the completely useless ones that brought in no money to the city. You can make this argument for exemptions about anyone who worked in "essential" industries, especially medical and sanitation.
It's entirely possible to make a good decision in one area, and a bad one in another area, while genuinely intending the good decision. Maybe the entertainers had political capital, maybe there was an internal power struggle over it, in general local governments are often incompetent and make dumb decisions.
True, but it doesn't change the fact that credibility is tarnished. How are we supposed to know which decisions are good and bad in the future? Being lied to once before means we can't accept it on a good faith basis.
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In the same way that an effective anti-crime campaign would really be "lock up all men under 25" but you're not allowed to say that because of some old document or whatever, an effective anti-covid campaign would really be "lock up everyone over 60". But you're not allowed to say that because of some old document or whatever. Almost no bohemians or track and field athletes are over 60, therefore New York's policy is actually great from a covid standpoint.
Yeah it's pretextual, but it's pretextual in the opposite direction than you (and the judge) is claiming it is.
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Yeah, I agree with this. Like you, I have no philosophical objection to vaccine mandates or public health requirements, given potential externalities. But...what they said here....
Is how it pretty much always felt to me. And to me that's a huge problem. It was clear to me that this became, very quickly, something that was pure, unadulterated 100% culture war. That the "Who, Whom" question was fully in effect. I could list the whole big list of things. And I mean, I know a lot of people point to the BLM protests as THE moment, but honestly, it was clear before that.
People ask me why I think the culture war...or more specifically defusing the culture war is so important to me. And I think this is a big reason why, it's a sign I can point to. I don't think this conflict had to happen, or at least not to nearly the same intensity. I think people just had to give a bit more of a care about their out-group, and not believe that because of their status they were above the rules. I do think it's a legitimate counter-question to the whole non-compliance has cost lives argument. If that's the case (and I'm not saying it's not, to be honest), then what about the people who flaunted the rules they supported? Wouldn't it be fair to say they have the most blood on their hands for creating the current climate?
This strikes me as a very American perspective—or rather, since it looks that way from here too, a very American phenomenon. Not that there were no disputes about public health measures in Europe—we have our share of anti-vaxers too—but at least here in the UK conflict didn't break down along existing political lines so obviously as it did in the US, and though we did have some of the "do as I say not as I do" shenanigans (cough Castle Barnard cough PartyGate cough) they were more from the right than the left.
Yeah, I'm not saying this is necessarily a problem with the left per se. Note that I'm Canadian, so that's my perspective. What I'm saying that I think this really did break down in culture war terms...just because people are not yet presupposed into defusing culture war elements. Left AND Right. Like I said, it's just about giving more care to the out-group and their norms, and not believing status was an exemption to rules.
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