On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.
She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.
Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.
But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.
Then she cried.
“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”
That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.
In an actually decent society so long as it’s not offensive it shouldn’t matter what is on your face. Why does this stop you from getting a job? That’s the issue right there. Then again in my ideal society at least capitalism and private businesses wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Chances are you are a hypocrite here anyway even if you don’t realise it but ignoring that for now. Legalising even relatively dangerous things like opioids is necessary because ultimately people will do it anyway. By making it illegal or you are changing it where they get it from (clean, well regulated supply causing less damage vs buying stuff from criminal gangs), what effects it has on society (criminal gangs and lots of convicts), and how much you can actually help people.
People are going to hate this but I am not convinced about forcing treatment on people. Maybe if they have a recognized mental illness that makes them demonstrably irrational then I can understand it. I think COVID demonstrated that the concept of vaccine induced hurd immunity doesn’t always hold up as even after mass vaccinations in countries where the vast majority got the vaccine you still see infections and sometimes deaths. It’s better as an individual to have the vaccine, but as for benefiting other people? Seems pretty marginal now to be honest. I say this as someone who used to believe the whole concept of hurd immunity through vaccines. Maybe if we had more effective vaccines for covid…
Seatbelts aren’t a bodily autonomy issue, no one is entitled to a car or to drive. To think otherwise is terrible Americanism. Driving is a privilege not a right. Get it through your damn head!
I partially agree on the drugs point. It shouldn’t be forbidden, but users of said drugs should be regarded as patients in need of medical care, forcibly if needed. There comes a point where these types of drug users can no longer care or decide for themselves, long before somebody must make the decision to steer them away from that end point. What is that based on? The hundreds of homeless drug users that are using in front of kids that i see every day. Somebody has to force their hands before it gets to that point.
And on forced medical treatment and vaccines it shows that you too don’t understand how vaccines work. No, vaccines don’t give 100% protection but it’s like wearing a bullet proof vest and get shot at. You still get injured but a shit load less than without. Some people get shot and still die (Bullets hitting US vests were allowed to push up to 2 inches into the chest, which CAN be lethal). Same with vaccines. You have to start thinking in %. Instead of 90% getting sick, now only 5% gets sick and instead of millions dying, only hundreds die.
The issue with vaccines is though that you need herd immunity. You need at least 90% vaccinated, better 95. Add in people that cannot be vaccinated (immuno compromised, people who are already very I’ll from something else, etc) and you have basically no space for healthy individuals to refuse vaccinations. If they do, vaccines will work less well.
See Covid for this, where loads of anti social illiterate fuckers, fueled by conspiracy nonsense form the internet, decided they knew better than doctors and medical professionals. We didn’t get enough people vaccinated, Covid went on, mutated, requiring more vaccines, which too were ignored and now Covid is here to stay. The good thing is that it severity has lowered to mostly being like the flu, but it is still out there and still kills (small amounts of) people. It didn’t have to go that far had we forced people to take the jab. Vaccines is not about freedom, it’s about responsibility. I don’t want to risk slowly dying while gasping for air just because you want to have the freedom to believe in conspiracy theories.
This " but muh freedom, I love conspiracies!" behavior is the reason that measles are back with a vengeance, and polio, FUCKING POLIO, is rearing it’s head again after being almost eradicated… It’s tiring and sad to see how self destructive we can be.
When your actions make you a (possibly lethal) danger to yourself or to others, you should be forcibly treated, absolutely.
I know what hurd immunity is and I said as much. Maybe try reading before you jump to conclusions.
Hurd immunity works really well for things like smallpox or measles because you have vaccines that prevent transmission effectively (not just symptoms, actual transmission and infection), and they don’t mutate very quickly so as to overcome the vaccines. It never worked perfectly against influenza because of antigenic shift meaning the virus mutates faster than you can make new vaccines to treat it. There are also too many varieties for a single vaccine to treat. HIV is the same problem on steroids, that’s partly why there are no vaccines for it. COVID vaccines face the same issue. This doesn’t mean that the vaccines are useless, or that they don’t help reduce hospitalisation - I never claimed this at all. Rather it means that by themselves they won’t eliminate the disease in their current state.
You specifically talk about hitting 90% of people vaccinated in order to create hurd immunity. That’s exactly what we have in the UK, yet still we see infections and deaths.
What makes you think I don’t understand vaccines? I probably understand them better than you do. Be honest did you know what antigenic shift was before I brought it up? Do you know what the difference between a killer CF8+ T cell and a CD4+ helper T cell is and what roles they play in the adaptive immune response? What’s the difference between a complement protein and an antibody?
I am not claiming vaccines do nothing. I myself have had three of them. What I am saying is this:
a) you can’t ethically force any treatment including a vaccine on someone outside of very specific circumstances like a mental health crisis
b) that the effectiveness of COVID vaccines were oversold to the public
c) that said overselling combined with other lies, exaggerations, bad policy and bad research created public distrust that has set back vaccine advocy and science advocacy for a decade or more
d) labelling anyone who has any concerns at all about COVID policy or vaccines as anti-vaxxer or anti-science only hurts advocacy, encourages misinformation, and discourages critical thinking
e) that we need more than just vaccines to fix COVID. That’s why we have other treatments and prophylactics like antiviral medicine. This is already used against other diseases like Influenza and HIV that show resistance to vaccination via antigenic shift.
Like it’s actually no wonder we have antivaxxers after everything your average pro vaccine person has done, on top of all the government scaremongering, hypocrisy and plain incompetence shown in the pandemic. If you want an example of what that looks like look no further than the UK, where I live. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate
The way you’re name dropping suggests you have a Wikipedia level knowledge of these things. The way you talk about Covid and how it was handled suggests you have a Facebook conspiracy theory level knowledge of the events that transpired.
Yes, ooohhh, a lot of mistakes were made. Yes, some government officials were huge irresponsible assholes.
None of that changes the fact that vaccines are not only important, they are vital in ensuring people won’t have to suffer from preventable illnesses. We NEED vaccines, like it or not.
What we as human beings also must do is start listening again to the experts, not to companies, not to politicians with their own agendas, and especially not to Facebook posts and YouTube or TikTok videos of self subscribed “lone wolf scientists”
Also COVID started mutating before the vaccines were even approved. YOU don’t understand vaccines or COVID. Not to mention you couldn’t even get a vaccine in time in some countries because of vaccines companies, copyright, and capitalism more broadly.
Because capital got injected like crazy (and improved technology) pharmaceutical companies managed to create a vaccine in record time. Claiming that capitalism caused delays is beyond short sighted.
Covid, like all life, mutates all the time, though few mutations make it big. Covid did manage to slowly mutatie due to the amount of people getting sick which was mainly caused by idiot politicians (hello Trump!) That didn’t wanted to isolate, or thought that Covid was a scam or something.
I do understand the basics of vaccines and Covid, because i read medical journals. It doesn’t matter though, because more importantly, I listen to the experts and I don’t read Facebook conspiracy posts or the “lone wolf’s doctors who know better than all experts who says that they want to enslave you!!”
If everyone had listened to the experts, Covid would have caused a lot less casualties, especially in the US where the orange retard caused so much death and suffering that he might as well get a nice place ect to hitler in hell.