Saturday, December 18, 2021

Comparisons

Supposedly, the average prison term for first degree murder is 22.4 years. I had also seen recently that one would need to isolate 10,000 unvaccinated people to save one life from Covid*. 

Effectively, 10,000 person years of house arrest comes to the level of punishment given to 446 murders to save one life. 

 * The report indicates that to prevent one case of Covid, you need to exclude at least 1,000 individuals and since the death rate per infection is someplace around 2%--the 10,000 figure I used is likely an underestimate by a factor of 5.

But, let's pretend for the sake of argument, that instead of the 1/4 of 1 % of the US population which had died was much larger and that it wasn't primarily confined to the oldest and sickliest fraction of the population.  Would that make it reasonable for the authorities to force everyone to become vaccinated?

What about an alternate situation?  Birthrates have been falling for decades.  

To my way of thinking, we ought to consciously mold our society such that we are at least maintaining our population, on the basis of the concept of sustainability.  But let's say that doesn't happen:

There is an ethos to forcing vaccinations to protect society, wouldn't this same ethos be equally applied to forcing citizens to reproduce if there were an acute shortage of new people being born?

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