Legault announces vaccination passport
François Legault has just announced that Quebec will have a vaccination passport and that how it will work will be announced soon.
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Kevin 12:04 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
The people screaming this violates the constitution have never read the first Article of the Constitution.
Kate 13:25 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Sometimes people here will talk about “the constitution” then you realize they’re parroting things about the U.S. constitution they’ve heard on TV.
Ephraim 13:29 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Chris Loder has a great thread on https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1421931374567563264 about all the paid actors in the antivaxxer and insurrectionist communities.
Basically, antivax is now all about the money. Even CBC Marketplace showed that a few years ago.
dmdiem 14:24 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
A vaccine passport only makes sense if the vax confers immunity. It doesn’t. It only grants resistance. A resistance that declines over time. What the vaccine does is provide strong protection against serious illness and death. All a vax pass is going to do is give people a false sense of security while they are passing the virus around asymptomatically. It’s not going to stop the spread.
If the purpose of the vax pass is to push people to get the jab, we already are. We have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. Literally every dose that arrives in Canada gets put in to an arm. The rates prove that the antivax people are a minuscule section of the population. Stop giving them attention.
The vaccine passport is pointless theatre.
DeWolf 14:48 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
I don’t know if you’re deliberately parroting antivax rhetoric, dmdiem, but you are. The latest data from Israel shows that even with Delta, the vaccines are 64% effective at stopping all forms of infection. That’s a hell of a lot more than the 0% protection unvaccinated people have.
There’s also no evidence the vaccines become less effective over time. The reduction in efficacy has to do with Delta.
DeWolf 14:51 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Sorry, the latest figure from Israel is 39%, but that particular study has been criticized for its methodology, and studies from Singapore, the UK and Canada echo the previous finding that the vaccines offer a strong protection against all infection.
Ephraim 15:09 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Let’s ask this question in another way. If someone decides that they don’t want to vaccinate, they discuss their freedoms… but they don’t discuss my freedoms. Do I have a right to control my own health by avoiding them? Do they have a right to make me feel unsafe? Do I have a right to refuse them service because they make me feel unsafe? And in my case, my business is in my home, do I have a right to refuse them service? Can I put different constraints on them?
Why do other people have a right to decide my risks?
dmdiem 15:19 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
i’m not antivax. Quite the opposite. Vaccines are 100% our way through this. My point is that vaccine passports are pointless.
64% or 39% it doesn’t matter. Ii’s still resistance, not immunity. Vaccinated people can still spread the virus. So if the purpose of the vax pass is to stop the spread, it fails.
j2 15:51 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
The difference is whether r0 falls below 1 for vaccinated individuals. If it does, then it is effective herd immunity amongst the vaccinated, QEDOMGBBQQCVAXPPFTW
(this ignores the argument that r0 is the wrong measure and that p, ie superspreader events, are the true transmission vector; well to be fair it just gets transferred to and has to be true for p).
Chris 18:04 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
>Why do other people have a right to decide my risks?
Why are people allowed to drive huge SUVs? They make me feel unsafe as a pedestrian and cyclist. They damage my health with their pollution. They contribute to global warming, forest fires, and thus yet more damage to my health. This all exceeds my risk tolerance. Why do other people have a right to decide my risks?
Blork 18:47 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
@Chris: false equivalency. The same threats exist with all vehicles (pickup trucks, mini vans, sports cars, sedans, etc.) but transportation has enormous social and economic utility, so it’s not going to disappear and its threat to your right to not have people drive vehicles is trumped (lowercase “t”) by that utility. But where is the social and/or economic utility in having unvaccinated people walking among us?
Chris 19:34 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
>The same threats exist with all vehicles
Not quite, the threat of injury and amount of pollution is proportional to the size of the vehicle.
>But where is the social and/or economic utility in having unvaccinated people walking among us?
The economic utility of letting them shop is that they purchase goods and services, contributing to the economy. The social utility of not ostracizing people is social cohesion, social peace.
I fully agree transportation has enormous social and economic utility! The point is that there are tradeoffs. Personal freedom vs group protection. I think there are good arguments to be made that the downsides of automobiles have exceeded the benefits, and vice versa. Just as there are good arguments on the tradeoffs in the covid case.
We’re never going to have 100% safe roads. But we have mitigations like seat belts, speed limits, etc. We accept the remaining small risks. Likewise, we’re never going to have 100% protection from covid. But we have mitigations like vaccination, hand washing, distancing, etc. But many seem unwilling to accept the remaining small risks. They seem hellbent on zero risk. For me, accepting that 15% are unvaccinated is like accepting that sometimes some people will drive drunk. Forcing vaccine passports seems like forcing breathalizers in every car, before every car trip.
dhomas 20:04 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Using one of your examples, Chris, if you drive without a seatbelt and get caught, you get a fine. If you go out into the world without getting vaccinated, there should also be negative repercussions. The carrot (protecting yourself) is obviously not working, so we move onto the stick.
I remember people would complain about seatbelt laws and how they shouldn’t exist because “I’m only harming myself”, which is true to a certain degree. But people got used to seatbelt laws. Remaining unvaccinated is worse, because you’re also potentially harming others.
dmdiem 20:38 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Everyone here is arguing abstractions.
I have yet to hear a single, cogent, real world example of how vaccine passports will help anything in any way whatsoever.
qatzelok 20:39 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Ephraim, you didn’t provide a link to that Marketplace episode from a few year’s back the demonstrated that anti-vaxxers were just in it for the money. Could you provide it?
I’d be thrilled to see this particular segment.
Chris 21:03 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
>The carrot (protecting yourself) is obviously not working
The carrot is working. Something like 83% have had a first shot, and it’s growing every day.
Blork 21:39 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
@dmdiem: at the very least, peace of mind. Knowing that you are among vaccinated people and not rogue COVID deniers makes for a more enjoyable experience. At another level, it might encourage some on-the-fence people to grow TF up and do what’s right, even if it’s for the selfish reason of just opening doors.
Tim S. 22:07 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Keeping with the driving analogy, is there a significant practical difference between a driver’s license and a vaccine passport? Plenty of people I know don’t want to drive, for various reasons, and accept that there are certain exclusions that come with that. If someone doesn’t want to get vaccinated, that’s fine, but accept that there are certain consequences that come with it.
@dmdiem: I’m not convinced that vaccine passports are going to turn out to be a great solution, but I think there’s going to be a lot of trial and error over the next few months, and by January we’ll have a better idea of how useful they are. I suspect that for a lot of us the next while will actually be the most stressful, as we try to live as fully as possible as the data about the various risks keeps changing.
PS: Chris, I actually agree with most of what you say. But surely the best solution is to reduce the damage caused by vehicles just like we’re trying to reduce the damage caused by the virus, and not just be nihilist about it all?
dmdiem 22:33 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Blork.. So your justification is a smug sense of superiority. Wow. Just wow.
Tim.. Define “useful”. That’s literally my point.
j2 23:02 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
Scientifically it has been established the vaccinated are less transmissible and suffer less severe health effects. This is still a net benefit to society and to the individual.
Vaccine passports keep the more transmissible, more expensive for health care, unvaccinated away from mass public environments thus reducing transmission, cases and actually important – hospital care. This reduces the chance of more dangerous mutations, reduces health care costs as born by tax payers and keeps more people alive and more productive.
The cost is a – historically established – limiting of freedoms, see historical requirements for vaccinations to attend schools and work in healthcare (before the modern politicization of anti-vaxxers).
This imposes on the unvaccinated less limitations than those of lockdowns but more limitations than the vaccinated experience. This imposes on un-vaccinable minorities unfairly but the greatest risk to these people are the vaccinable unvaccinated.
jeather 09:12 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
I am super curious what will happen to people who can’t be vaccinated (age, medical reasons).
As far as I know it’s not clear how contagious you are if vaccinated but infected with the Delta variant, there is some research suggesting you are as contagious as unvaccinated people are because the vaccine keeps it from getting into your lungs, so all of it hangs out in your nose and throat. The details are sketchy, but it seems likely that if you are vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection then you can pass it along. Fewer health effects is pretty well proven, but transmissibility is a bit up in the air. It’s definitely non-zero.
Kevin 09:35 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
@dmdiem
You’re starting with a false premise and an absolutist perspective. “Meet my impossible demand or be pointless!”
Measures that have been enacted over the past year and a half are designed to reduce the odds of infection.
2 metres distance: cuts droplets by 85%. Masks: reduces droplet travel by half to 95%. Isolation, Quarantine, outdoors — they all reduce odds. Vaccination reduces the odds even more.
Restricting access to certain locations to a select group (one of the oldest of health measures, and one that is still in effect for many diseases, e.g. TB) is one more arrow in the quiver.
The carrots have done all they can — (Going from 81% at the start of July to 83% at the end of July. That’s stagnation) — so it’s time to use a stick, even if it’s a small one, to convince the remaining few to take a minimally disruptive non-harmful step for the greater good of reducing the chance of developing more variants of this disease which has disrupted the entire world for the past 18 months and will continue to cause disruptions for the next two years.
Kate 09:42 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
I’m old enough to have a smallpox vaccination scar on my arm, and I remember being told by my mother that I had to have the vaxx or would not be allowed to go to school. Now, Mom told me a lot of outdated things about school (and other topics), part of the risk of having older parents, and I’m not convinced the authorities here were actively worried about smallpox by that point – but it certainly would have applied when my parents were being signed up for school, and nobody seemed to find it an attack on their precious individual choice.
Come to think, we were also lined up at school and given the polio vaccine as well, and I don’t remember any shouting about excusing kids from that one, either.
ant6n 09:46 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
If 90% of the population is vaccinated, then the odds of spreading are sufficiently reduced for everybody so that reducing the mobility for the rest isn’t really necessary. Unless of course they come together in big groups, rather than being randomly spread around. The question is also how many more percent of extra vaccination rate one would get by reducing the rights for unvaxed ppl, and whether the reduction of rights for unvaxed ppl significantly reduces spreading the disease.
It’s really annoying that a bunch of people somehow don’t believe in vaccines, but I wonder to what extent we can punish them for being stupid with a reduction of rights, especially when the practical implications at a societal level are relatively small.
jeather 10:54 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
Hard to get 90% of the population when more than 10% of the population aren’t even eligible to be vaccinated.
Ephraim 15:14 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
Marketplace link… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V522Hs8E6NU I can’t put more than one link, or the reply disappears.
@jeather – 90% of those eligible.
As I have said before, data shows that those who choose not to vaccinated (not those who can’t) cost the healthcare system over 100x the cost of a vaccinated person. Each vaccination makes you less susceptible to other maladies as well. It’s incredible to think that this technology originates in the 1790s and has extended the average lifespan of people for well over 200 years… until stupidity stepped in.
jeather 16:24 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
With the delta variant, the percentage of population, eligible or otherwise, that needs to be vaccinated is much higher. 90% of eligible (not quite 90%) is around 80%, and that’s probably insufficient.
MarcG 16:30 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
@Ephraim: I believe the reply disappears because it gets flagged as spam and Kate needs to approve it.
Blork 19:13 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
@dmdiem: It isn’t smug if it’s backed by science. I nail pictures to walls because otherwise gravity pulls them downward. (Not smug.) I eat reasonably healthy foods because a diet of nothing but bacon and pie leads to premature death. (Not smug.) I don’t drink and drive because alcohol demonstrably interferes with driving ability and safety. (Not smug.) I prefer to not attend social events with people who are demonstrably at higher risk – by choice – of both getting and spreading a dangerous pathogen. (Not smug.)