LogFAQs > #962273943

VideoboysaysCube posted... What I mean by zero measures is that there's no laws preventing you from refilling your soda cup more than once. Regardless of what they serve at school lunches, you can still go home and stuff your face full of Twinkies. The point is these people ultimately still have a choice of how to live their lives, despite the amount of harm they're doing to themselves.

Ultimately, yes. There are ways to get around whatever education, encouragement, and inconvenience measures are put in place. That doesn't mean they don't help, though. Even if people can go back for seconds, mandating smaller initial portions tends to reduce how much people eat because people are naturally inclined to feel obligated to finish everything on their plate. There are limits to that, of course (too small, and they'll still be hungry and go back for seconds. Too big, and they'll recognize their limits and pack up half of it to eat later), but there's a lot of psychology behind food and eating that can and is being manipulated. Unfortunately, most of that manipulation is coming from the marketing end (in favour of eating more and therefore buying more) and lobbying from those companies makes it harder for the government to push it in the other direction, but efforts are still being made.

VideoboysaysCube posted...

Also, obesity can be contagious in the sense that children of obese parents are incredibly likely to pick up their same habits.

While true, that's not really "contagious" in the sense that it warrants a major public health response. It needs to be addressed, certainly, and that's part of the goal of improving school lunches, phys ed programs, and teaching nutrition/cooking in schools, but it's not a matter of one obese person potentially causing everyone around them to become obese. Having a hard maximum on the disease's R value (the average number of new people a given case infects, which in this case is going to be limited to only the person's kids) makes it much less of a public health concern.

VideoboysaysCube posted...

Also, this is just speculation on my part, but if people in this country had better eating habits and actually used face masks consistently, we would never have suffered the amount of losses that we did. Take a country like Japan for example, where obesity is rare and everybody wears a mask. Their case to death ratio is .006%, whereas the U.S. is .01%.

I think you're absolutely right (though you divided by 100 one too many times, their actual CFR's are 0.7% and 1.6%, respectively). Fundamentally, Japan is a much more collectivist culture, while the US is more individualistic. It is normal there to take precautions to avoid getting other people sick, while so much of the US balks at the idea of being even remotely inconvenienced for anyone else's sake. That has very much contributed to the US having worse outcomes than many other countries, as has the worse average overall health.

VideoboysaysCube posted...

So basically, this country has issues, and Covid is just exposing some of them. Trying to mandate this particularly vaccine isn't going to fix the underlying issue.

It is not, that's correct. In an ideal world, the vaccine wouldn't need to be mandated. People would get it of their own accord in sufficient numbers to achieve herd immunity (or at least reduce the number of unvaccinated people to levels that would put the health care system at risk, assuming an Omicron was inevitable). Unfortunately, they haven't, due to a combination of that individualism (outright anti-collectivism, in many cases), the fearmongering and identity politics surrounding the vaccines, and a dash of legitimate concerns and skepticism that have been hard to address because of the other factors.

That has necessitated countermeasures, mostly to limit what the unvaxxed can do so they have fewer opportunities to get infected/infect others, with the secondary benefit of providing an incentive for them to take the plunge and render the issue moot. Vaccine mandates are not going to fix the underlying cultural and social issues that have turned this whole debacle into a worse problem than it needs to be, but they are going to mitigate the damage those problems can do (Omicron aside, though even then they're still better than nothing).

VideoboysaysCube posted...

What it really does is set a dangerous precedent moving forward. You have people supporting the denial of medical treatment for unvaccinated patients. What if somewhere down the line your health insurance decides not to cover something that they believe you could have prevented?

That already happens in a non-trivial number of cases (though more commonly it's people being denied new policies than being denied coverage within an existing policy). I fully expect that we're not far off of people's insurance premiums going up if they aren't vaccinated for Covid, not as part of any particular agenda, but simply because it's going to be more expensive to cover them on average.

That, I would say, is not a problem with pointing out how risky the unvaccinated are (realistically, insurance companies will make those decisions regardless of what people say, because that's simply how their business model works), but rather a problem with the US health care system at a fundamental level. That's a lot bigger than Covid.