Watcher of the Skies

I didn’t say that people don’t get sick if vaxed. I repeated the science on public health: people are 10-18X more likely to get sick if they are unvaxed. That means the number of vaxed deaths should be a very small percentage of the total.

I’d say the DUI example is analogous to somebody knowingly having COVID and deliberately breathing in others’ faces. If Archie knowingly gets COVID, refuses to tell the team, doesn’t quarantine, plays with the team, and passes it on to them, then sure, punish him.

That’s different from not getting vaccinated.

Long COVID/myocarditis/etc is very rare among people who don’t get hospitalized. And it’s very rare for kids to get hospitalized. So kids are at an extremely low risk of myocarditis. I totally understand that people have concern for their kids. But that concern has led to the end of free-range childrearing, and helicopter parenting. This has likely been a primary cause of the huge spike in anxiety among Millennial/Zoomer kids. (See Haidt and Lukianoff on this. https://mobile.twitter.com/glukianoff/status/1349830006143414273?lang=bg)

I get the point about Heatley’s recklessness. But lots of NHL players are reckless, and lots of them always have been. Was Heatley any more reckless than a lot of them? I doubt it – he was probably just more unlucky in his recklessness. That’s probably why Atlanta took him back, and why Ottawa was willing to trade Marian Hossa for him, and why we were willing to trade Penner/Cogliano/Smid for him. And I’d bet that every team retained players who were more reckless than the reformed, post-crash Heatley.

Well, maybe.

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If Archie physically can’t perform in a big chunk of the season due to US entry protocols, then sure, that’s an issue relevant to team/performance. (I don’t like the US law in the first place, but the fact is, it’s the law, and the team has to deal with it.)

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On the other hand, if Archie microscopically raises the risk that an unvaxed 98-year-old somewhere dies of COVID, that’s not really related to his team/performance. Even if I think (as I do) that the science generally supports getting vaxed, I don’t want all unvaxed people to lose their jobs.

I’m genuinely sorry for the loss of your neighbour. I can understand that my argument wouldn’t strike you as welcome. (And yeah, the 40% vax rate sucks.)
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All the same, public policy has to drive from aggregate data, not from anecdote. That’s how science works. Data is not the plural of anecdote, even if anecdotes are compelling and pathos-inducing. The alt-right has compelling anecdotes too; that doesn’t make them correct.
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To clarify, I don’t think that refusing a vax is only self-injury. I do think that refusing a vax, when other people can obtain 95% protection against you, creates a very small risk of injury to others. (I’m sorry that your vaxed neighbour happened to be among the very small percentage affected.) The smallness of the risk is especially true when at-risk people can wear N95 masks, to reduce that risk by a further 95%. (How many of those who are concerned about contracting COVID are wearing N95 masks, which protect others and themselves, rather than regular masks, which protect others but not themselves? Why are we not promoting the use of N95/KN95 masks? There’s been 18 months to ramp up production of them, so as not to take those masks away from health care workers.)
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We are justified in making laws that protect society against people who cause major risks to others. We can’t protect society against people who cause very small risks. Or at least we can’t do so in a free society.
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For example, there is a major outbreak of syphilis going on right now, although you won’t hear about it in the media. To protect society against this risk, we could criminalize sex outside of marriage. But in a liberal-democratic society, we don’t.
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“All over the place” is an interesting synonym for “nuance”. Of course, nuance is a pretty unfamiliar thing in debates today. Should it be surprising that a vaxed person doesn’t think unvaxed people should be fired? I don’t think it’s surprising that I can have opinions while contentedly living together in a society with people who have different opinions, including people who put me at some small risk due to the actions following from their opinions? That’s a position pretty consistent with liberal democracy. In fact, a society that doesn’t have those kinds of people is a society that may not remain liberal-democratic for long. That’s my concern.
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The WWII analogy is an interesting one. But I don’t see the risk of getting bombed by the Luftwaffe as being comparable to the risk of dying from COVID.
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Anyways, Fuhrious, I appreciate the food for thought. Always happy to have civil disagreement.
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(Unrelated: LT/Ryan, is there any way that we can get paragraph breaks back, without having to insert markers like asterisks?)

Yes, data-driven decisions are the way forward. But here’s the thing: data doesn’t settle all decisions by itself. *Interpretation* of data makes decision. I’m not disagreeing with the epidemiologists’ data. I’m disagreeing with the risk assessment of the unnamed epidemiologists to which you refer. So how dare I question their judgment? The same way I question Richard Dawkins’ judgment about religion, while accepting his judgment about biology.
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Epidemiologists’ job, one properly deriving from their expertise, is to determine how we can stay as healthy as possible. (For instance, they tell us that the vaccine is safe, and they recommend getting it. I agree!) But they are *not* experts in analyzing the societal tradeoffs. If a pandemic gets out of hand, people blame epidemiologists. If we lose valuable freedoms, and small business gets eradicated in favour of making Jeff Bezos a trillionaire, epidemiologists wash their hands of any responsibility. Epidemiologists’ judgments are valuable, but they are not Divine fiat, even when they give us convenient sticks with which to bash the people that we don’t like. We do a disservice when we treat them as absolute, just like we do a disservice when we completely write them off.
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As a comparison, most auto mechanics will recommend the most comprehensive (and thus expensive) treatment. It’s what they are trained to do. They want to fix your car as well as they can. But sometimes you have tradeoffs: you need the money for rent and food. So you get the “good enough” treatment. Or you don’t get treatment at all, for now. The mechanic will, of course, give you *dire* warnings. But that’s because he has a sort of tunnel vision, being concerned about one thing. You, on the other hand, are concerned about many things. And you are probably making a better decision. (This view does not mean that the auto mechanic is incompetent, or part of a global conspiracy of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, or whatever.)
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Take another example: surgeons. Surgeons almost always recommend surgery. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But surgery often has worse outcomes than what GPs call “conservative treatment.”
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I agree with you that small risks add up in the aggregate (like smoking, as you mention). Of course, that is true for *all* small risks. Eating meat is a small heart health risk. 50,000 Canadians die of heart disease every year. Could we not say, “yeah, it’s not a “small” problem.”?
We could heavily tax all meat, like we do with cigarettes. Given that we reduced smoking rates by two-thirds over the years, I’m guessing a meat tax could easily reduce heart disease deaths by at least a third. That would prevent more deaths than COVID death toll in 2020, a year with no vaccine. Isn’t that “not really that big of an ask by society”?

Scungilly Slushy, I admire your philosophical consistency as a business owner. And I appreciate your point that professional athletes are pretty spoiled. I’m not weeping tears for Archie here.
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But I’m concerned about what happens when businesses all become politicized. What if Lowetide says that you have to provide proof of vaccination to be able to comment here? What if Twitter says that you have to provide proof of vaccination to have a Twitter account? What if Google says that you have to provide proof of vaccination to use their search engine?
Such a progression isn’t inevitable, of course. But it does become more likely when high-profile businesses like pro hockey lead the way.
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Liberal-democratic societies don’t politicize *everything*. Far-left and far-right societies do. (And so do societies with lots of far-left and far-right people.) The politicization of everything leads to greater affective polarization, which in turn undermines our ability to live together as a society. This is one case where the business class’s activity of politicizing more and more their businesses might actually undermine liberty. And in the long run, that’s not good for business.

Yeah, that’s a fair point. Or at least it’s a fair point if we accept that there’s a big risk of transmitting COVID to vaxed players. But the vaccine is 95% effective in preventing serious COVID transmission.
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Last year, without the vaccine, how many players got COVID? Not actually very many. (Fewer than I expected.)
This time around, it should be far lower, even with a few unvaxed.
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Yes, I can understand why in-person businesses might want their employees to provide proof of vaccination.
I can also understand why in-person businesses might, for the same reasons, want their customers to provide proof of vaccination. But I do I think that the unvaxed should be prevented from entering all public places? Grocery stores? Police offices? Pharmacies? No. We could try to draw a line between Oiler games and essential services…..maybe. But those lines can be pretty gray. Once we’ve begun to demonize the unvaxed, it becomes pretty easy to push that line further and further. History furnishes plenty of examples of pushing lines against the demonized ever further. How sure are we that we’re not repeating the mistakes of history?

Now go tell that to MADD.
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I probably wouldn’t hesitate to do that. Our “drunk” driving laws are the strictest in the Western world. 0.05? Personally, I will not have even *one* drink if I am driving, because that could put me over the ridiculously low limit.
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We like to think that we’re not Puritans. But we still are.
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The question of not treating the unvaxed is an interesting one. If we start asking that question, it’s going to open up a lot more questions about who else we don’t treat in our medical system. That could be good or bad. It would certainly promote the kind of conversation about Medicare priorities that we’re ordinarily unwilling to have. (Speaking of DUIs, how about not treating people for injuries caused by their own drunkenness? Are you willing to go there? Maybe we should, and maybe we shouldn’t, but be careful what you ask for.)