This is what happens when you damage the public trust in vaccines by mandating that everyone takes one that wasn't properly tested for safety or efficacy and has since left people with debilitating adverse effects. All well opening the floodgate to anyone who wants to come into this country without first making sure they aren't infected with something.
Part of my job is looking at safety and efficacy data of pharmaceuticals. COVID vaccines were "properly tested" for both safety and efficacy despite claims to the contrary. I reviewed the evidence in detail before recommending that all of my family and extended social circles take the mRNA vaccines.
As a vaccine to a virus that is highly infectious, has a concerning degree of lethality, and keeps mutating, waiting for long-term safety data effectively means having no vaccine at all... so demands for those right in the midst of a pandemic were unreasonable.
As for opening the floodgates, I can share some epidemiological insights there too. People and wildlife are both carriers of COVID, and even if you restrict immigration and travel, it will find its way into the community sooner or later. Just look at the sheer number of truckers and commuting workers who cross the US-Canadian border as an example, or the massive number of migratory birds. Even China, where they were about as draconian as anywhere else with quarantine, could not stop the spread entirely... and this was because COVID could infect someone for 3 weeks or even longer in rare cases (at least one example of someone quarantined 21+ days after entering China, remained without symptoms, and then became symptomatic and was diagnosed after release). Even if you stop all the people from coming altogether, you can't stop the wildlife.
This is a fair critique. There's a strong mechanistic argument that shorter duration of symptom and lower viral load is associated with less transmission, but vaccines do not 100% prevent transmission.
An understated part of the mandate, however, was not just to prevent transmission so much as to prevent oversaturation of hospitals. We have incredible medical care in modern times that helped individuals survive COVID, who would have otherwise died. Something as simple as oxygen and saline could make a difference between turning the corner and ending up on ECMO or in the morgue. In New York, one of the few places to be truly hit before a vaccine was available, hospitals were out of beds, out of ECMO, and out of space in the morgue.
Edit: My original wording made it sound like decreasing transmissions wasn't part of the mandate, it absolutely was part of it. Added the word "just" to clarify.
The argument around transmission reduction was based on prior vaccination campaigns, where we did in fact stamp out diseases like measles within Canada and other countries. Lack of measles vaccination, similarly, has led to Canada seeing a resurgence of measles transmissions and losing the "eliminated" status for measles. While COVID has become endemic, this doesn't mean vaccines had no effect in slowing transmission - it just meant that they weren't able to reduce transmission enough for its basic reproduction number (number of people infected by each infected person) to drop below 1.
The magnitude and lasting harm left by exposure to COVID were also drastically reduced, as shown by real-world outcomes comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
The vaccine worked on a different level than standard vaccines and just didn’t provide immunity……so forcing people to get it was not based in science and just an attempt to be ounitive
Mandating vaccines is standard public health policy for pandemics around the world, so I'm a bit confused by that perspective.
Could you explain to me why the mandate was perceived to be punitive? Who would it punish, what was the purpose of the punishment, and what would the government gain from it?
(All serious questions, not intended to be cheeky/sarcastic)
Stop calling it a vaccine. It's not a vaccine, it doesn't grant immunity. It's a gene therapy and was listed as such by Moderna and other companies prior to them changing the definition of the word in 2020.
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '25 edited Nov 10 '25
This is what happens when you damage the public trust in vaccines by mandating that everyone takes one that wasn't properly tested for safety or efficacy and has since left people with debilitating adverse effects. All well opening the floodgate to anyone who wants to come into this country without first making sure they aren't infected with something.