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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.
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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