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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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