Should the Covid vaccine be mandatory?
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8ball
Decolonise colons!
Yeah, but to the degree of seeing the vaccine as a bad thing? After looking at the degree of scrutiny this vaccine was under?
I find it hard to see how someone refusing the vaccine could be considered suitable to care for patients.
elbows
Well-Known Member
The stuff I mentioned was only one aspect, there are many others. Plenty of people have experienced staggering levels of medical ignorance or arrogance from those who are supposed to be the experts with a duty of care. My brother has been type one diabetic since he was a teenager and the levels of ignorance about some of the very basic aspects of that were never far from view, I'm still haunted by memories of this featuring paramedics and doctors.
There are also some complex cultural reasons why uptake is poor in some groups, and the NHS has relied quite heavily on some of those groups when recruiting over many years.
And when I mentioned arrogance earlier, that includes that attitudes of some doctors etc who absolutely refuse to accept that some of their behaviours are responsible for hospital spread of various diseases. Sometimes they take such matters as unfair personal accusations against themselves, and the good they do in their role can act to reinforce their attitude that they are only part of the solution, never part of the problem.
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
That doesn't explain how someone who has been subject to/witnessed these horrors - I've had doctors searching for my daughter's testicles, a wife harranged to the point of tears, for weeks, about breastfeeding despite having 'she can't breastfeed because of the anti-epilepsy drugs she's on' written in big red letters on her medical records and all the other good stuff - decides to then work in the NHS but isn't big into the medicine.
If you either 'don't believe' in medical science, or think the NHS's staff are mainly a bunch of shit-flinging Gibbons on Crack who shouldn't be trusted with a bag of chips, then why on earth would you be working there?
If you either 'don't believe' in medical science, or think the NHS's staff are mainly a bunch of shit-flinging Gibbons on Crack who shouldn't be trusted with a bag of chips, then why on earth would you be working there?
mojo pixy
...שלא נמצא בשמאל
Thing us you could say this about anything risky that has consequences for other people than just the individual that does it Why do people smoke? Why do people take addictive drugs? Why do people speed around in polluting vehicles? Why do people do anything that's basically selfish and can affect other people badly? Because we're irrational and we apply different standards to ourselves than we apply to others.
Meanwhile, shifts everywhere are understaffed, recruitment has become a trickle, and vulnerable people are uncared for. Unintended consequences, I'm not certain.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Its not that simple though is it, people pick and choose aspects and can be full of contradictions. You can believe passionately in offering people care and treatment but still be skeptical about specific treatments or whether the benefits outweight the risks for a particular individual such as yourself. And attitudes towards sense of personal risk can be all over the place.
mojo pixy
...שלא נמצא בשמאל
Because they're willing to? I don't know, is that not enough? Are you going to take a vacancy?
8ball
Decolonise colons!
I'd have hoped our standards were higher. This approach hasn't exactly served us well with the police.
mojo pixy
...שלא נמצא בשמאל
I'd have hoped so too, but unfortunately many (most, i think) basically look down on care work, don't want to do it themselves, and I believe it's a widely held opinion that care workers are people who can't really do anything else anyway.
We want our vulnerable cared for but we put them in homes because we don't particularly want to care for them ourselves. Fair enough, it's hard looking after someone with (eg.) advanced dementia, it's not a job anyone can do. Or would want to. It takes a special kind of person to want to do it, to deal with the emotions it arouses, even to enjoy the experience and find it fulfilling. And guess what? A lot of those people are more emotionally-driven, than rational. They have loads of stupid reasons for not getting vaccinated - but they do something that needs doing, and not a lot of people want to do.
So how will it help to alienate and discard them? Who's going to replace them? Probably not any of the people yelling ''sack 'em!" from the sidelines.
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
essential staff taking preventable health risks - as well as being a reservoir of disease in a hospital.
Riklet
procrastinación
No to all, IMO.
Im pretty much against mandatory vaccines and more in favour of softer community measures that make people want to get jabbed. We still havent learnt that lesson by looking at other countries with really high uptake - Whats the messaging? Whats going on differently to here?
I think care workers and hospital/medical staff are the only jobs that really should be compulsary. Cos youre dealing with much more vulnerable people. This whole "reservoir of disease" is a load of unscientific nonsense though - much more likely most people in these professions do have some/significant natural immunity to covid by now. People who are badly immunosupressed etc much more likely...
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
But, we have really high uptake, it was over 90% of over 18's, even now it's reported as for over 12's, it's 86.2% on first dose, which considering we were late starting on kids, seems bloody impressive, TBH.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
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mojo pixy
...שלא נמצא בשמאל
Like smoking on shift, working hungover, coming to work ill because they can't afford to be off sick, that kind of thing? I'll see your unvaccinated staff, and raise you MRSA
l'Otters
.
No, for the reasons given by several others already but put closest to how I feel about it here ^The only thing making it mandatory will achieve is anger and riots. As it has happened in the past, in Rio. (I hight recommend reading this, it's quite interesting)
Vaccine Revolt - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I do, however, wish everyone who can get would get it.
I don't agree with making it mandatory for certain jobs either.
Care workers and nurses work long and hard hours for not enough pay. I disagree wholeheartedly with making their lives worse by introducing threats over this.
Be better to offer a lot more information, opportunities to ask experts about anything which gives them qualms about it, and offer proper incentives. Paid time off to go and get vaccinated, and more of the same if they got a reaction to it, for starters.
Anicdote but there are a lot of stories of people having problems with the vaccine. More accurately ascribing medical problems to them having recently taken the vaccine.
2 I've come across recently. A mate who said it's given him high blood pressure.
Someone else, that a relative died shortly after the Astra Zenica. And that is why they were given Pfizer. Which has given them arithmia. They were still pro taking the vaccine but obviously perturbed.
Yes I know there may be medical conditions, corrilation is not causation etc. These were things I've heard in IRL contact, not read on Facebook. The point is with experiences like this getting distorted, magnified by social media(I haven't posted about them elsewhere obv,) rumers spread around the virtual playgrounds of the world, mandating vaccine would be totally counter productive. The state doesn't have the resources to do it anyway. Imagine the lorry driver shortage effect but in every working sector, every job with missing staff. Actual widespread protests and disruption.
2 I've come across recently. A mate who said it's given him high blood pressure.
Someone else, that a relative died shortly after the Astra Zenica. And that is why they were given Pfizer. Which has given them arithmia. They were still pro taking the vaccine but obviously perturbed.
Yes I know there may be medical conditions, corrilation is not causation etc. These were things I've heard in IRL contact, not read on Facebook. The point is with experiences like this getting distorted, magnified by social media(I haven't posted about them elsewhere obv,) rumers spread around the virtual playgrounds of the world, mandating vaccine would be totally counter productive. The state doesn't have the resources to do it anyway. Imagine the lorry driver shortage effect but in every working sector, every job with missing staff. Actual widespread protests and disruption.
MickiQ
In My Defence I was left Unsupervised
What do you mean by mandatory, holding people down and giving it to them by force? In which case I'm a vote for No, not that I have any qualms about it but I can see the problems with doing it that way are going to be far worse.
Mandatory by making it more difficult for refuseniks to work or go to school or travel without proof of vaccination? then I'm a Yes for that but I would like to see lots more persuasion first. I've always took the view that if we had gone down the route of giving everyone a £50 note along with their second jab we would have had 99.9999% take up from day one.
Mandatory by making it more difficult for refuseniks to work or go to school or travel without proof of vaccination? then I'm a Yes for that but I would like to see lots more persuasion first. I've always took the view that if we had gone down the route of giving everyone a £50 note along with their second jab we would have had 99.9999% take up from day one.
50 quid isn't gonna swing it for the idiological antivaccers. And as mentioned by kabbes setting up such financial incentives for this sort of thing presents and creates a whole problematic framing of ideas about social responsibility, marketisation of such. Undermines anything else contingent on people recognising their obligations and rights in a civilised society.
Yossarian
⏭️
Requiring masks, daily testing etc. only for the unvaccinated is the route a lot of public sector employees have chosen - I wonder what the statistics are like for people who won't go to work if there is a vaccine mandate versus people who aren't working because they are vulnerable to severe COVID or live with somebody who is.
MickiQ
In My Defence I was left Unsupervised
Perhaps so, the ratlickers and their ilk are a really weird social phenomenon. There's always been the odd anti-vaxxer hanging around in the darkest corners of society but they've always seemed completely irrelevant. Yet with CoVID and the vaccines against it they seem to have exploded in numbers and stepped into the spotlight in a way they never have before. I suspect lots of PhD students are going to be writing their thesis about this in years to come.
Care homes face closure if Sajid Javid sacks 60000 unvaccinated staff as planned
Unions warn a social care staff crisis could be on the cards as 60,000 staff face the sack if they do not get a Covid-19 vaccine while there are already 105,000 vacancies
www.mirror.co.uk
farmerbarleymow
I'm Petee's spirit animal
We can use you as the guinea pig to test for safety.Genetically engineered spiders with covid vaccine instead of venom
(I'm already vaxxed by the way)
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
This is something that really isn't being discussed enough.
The current vaccines are providing a measure of protection, but nothing like the protection ordinarily obtained from vaccination. We read daily of doubly (soon triply) vaccinated people contracting Covid.
There is evidence that vaccination does tend to lessen the severity if a vaccinated person contracts the disease, but no evidence that I have seen that vaccination absolutely prevents infection. This is why I've been in shops about ten times since Jan 2020.
I read an article the other day about their being 100 or so vaccines in trials, some of which are intended to deal with all corona viruses, so a serendipitous outcome may be the death knell of the common cold.
Until we have a vaccine, which we will have, that prevents people from catching Covid, I don't think that NHS staff should have to be vaccinated. Once we do, that is a whole new ball game.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
I can verify that there are a whole bunch of vaccines in trials, and a lot more in earlier research phases.
One small point - the majority of colds are not coronaviruses (rhinoviruses are most common, then there's adenoviruses, RSV, influenzas, parainfluenzas, a few others), so a lucky vaccine might sort us for the other circulating coronaviruses, but not that other lot.
The vaccine doesn't guarantee you won't catch the Cov2 virus, but it helps a lot (I'm thinking of the REACT study in particular).
My stance on this hasn't changed since post #68 - while the virus remains dangerous, anyone taking their duty of care seriously should have the jab. Refusals are an indicator that they are in the wrong job in the first place. I was in hospital last week and there were a lot of cancelled procedures due to two anaesthetists coming down with the virus on the same day. This is something that affects far more health areas than just Covid directly.
I voted 'no' to compulsion in general, but patient-facing NHS staff (or private medical staff, for that matter) are a different story.
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Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
Aye, I was aware that colds weren't a single virus, so amend to read 'some variants of'.
elbows
Well-Known Member
If you scratch below the surface then it soon becomes clear that some other vaccines arent as effective as people were led to believe either. The most obvious example I can give was the flu vaccine when trying to prevent H3N2 influenza A infections in older people. For quite some years I was looking at the data on that, and the way authorities attempted to muddy the waters, and I concluded that the results were incredibly poor, really bad. But so little was said about it that I wondered if I was misinterpreting the results. But then the authorities decided to switch to a very different flu vaccine for older people, and at that point they were prepared to admit more obviously how shit the prior vaccine had become against H3N2 in older people. I can understand why they downplayed that for years because I didnt feel good when posting about how ineffective the vaccine had become, I worried about putting people off from bothering even though I only had a small audience. Only when the authorities were actually ready to offer an alternative vaccine did they properly highlight the limitations of the previous one.
Some other coronaviruses make up some proportion of 'common cold' cases but I'm afraid there are a bunch of other viruses that contribute significantly that also get lumped under that same label, so a vaccine against human coronaviruses in general wont be the complete end of the common cold. edit - oops I was too late with this part of my reply and this has already been dealt with.
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