Not if they're coming from a country with a risk of yellow fever.
You're really setting up very narrow condition in which someone might not need a certain vaccine. I'm saying that there's a history in which vaccines and immunizations have been required. If Japan had a yellow fever epidemic, Bangladesh would most certainly require it, just like they do if a Japanese person is coming from a country that does have such an epidemic. That's the precedence.
Saying they require a covid vaccine from a country with a covid epidemic is them applying existing restrictions. And currently, people arriving from most countries are dealing with an epidemic. 5 years ago Bangladesh authorities would deny people for not having yellow fever immunizations. They're within their rights to do the same for covid.
Down below is someone commenting that they had to get a yellow fever vaccine to visit Kenya.
Maybe you're not visiting these countries. But frankly, nobody cares. Millions are. And they're being checked for proof of vaccines and have been for a long time.
I have absolutely no clue why you're continuously focusing exclusively on Japan to avoid the fact that vaccine/immunization mandates have global precedents and they've existed forever at this point.
Japan might not mandate a certain vaccine. But if you're going to Bangladesh, Bangladesh does not in fact care about Japanese law.
For an example of how badly this works out, look up the UK guy who tried playing the sovereign citizen card in Singapore and pretending the law regarding disease spread doesn't apply to him. Spoilers: it did.
Requiring immunization is a cost-saving measure for countries accepting travelers. The last thing a poor country needs is richer people coming in, getting sick, and ending up hospitalized all while infecting other people.
And the system has hundreds of years, if not millennia, of history. Before immunization was available, quarantines were mandatory even for people without visible illnesses around the world. It's only in 2020 that the idea of this become controversial and some people acted like it was unprecedented through exposure to echo chambers.
Try applying for a visa to some countries and yes, they will ask. Some countries deny visas to first world royalty for disease history. China denied people with HIV for a long time. Some African countries require vaccinations for some diseases. Some places require vaccinations for people coming from poorer countries.
The angle you're coming from seems to be be that Americans, etc should be treated specially and not be checked. Go to the wrong country with that expectation and reality will hit you hard.
> I have never once seen a Japanese traveler required to produce any medical paperwork along with their passport (and I have flown a lot between both countries).
That's because a significant number of countries that require vaccines also require something called a "visa."
Visas have many years of history, and they're generally obtained beforehand. When applying for visas, you submit various documentation, pay a fee, and it makes your entry process much easier. When traveling first world to first world, visa checks for travel are generally waived. Going first world to anywhere not-first world, or in the opposite direction, usually requires some degree of a visa process.
Absolutely wrong. Here's a list of countries and their various vaccine requirements for entry. Despite what you think, there's a lot of them and these requirements predate covid.
Obtaining a passport is completely irrelevant. Countries deny people with valid passports from entering all the time. For example, if they don't have the proper vaccines.
With travel at least, countries have the right to deny people for any reason whatsoever. Many already mandate various vaccines for entry (even for diseases not transmissible between humans), require a certain amount of money in your bank account, deny you for travel history to other certain areas, etc. A covid vaccine mandate for travel is far from radical.
One problem is that people are self-treating with it. Eyeballing measurements of medicine bought at a farm supply store and sticking it in your child's mouth isn't good.
Furthermore, enabling random unproven treatments is on the same level as saying we should stand by and support homeopathic treatments as a valid alternative to vaccines during a pandemic. We don't let people choose between a tetanus shot or a cup of green tea and olive oil when they step on a rusty nail. It doesn't make sense to let them choose between worm meds and a vaccine when it comes to covid.
> People move up from those starter jobs, they don't stay there forever.
The domain of “starter jobs” is rapidly expanding. It used to just be fry cooks at burger chains as well as newspaper boys, and before that we had farmhands, but now everything is a “starter job” that barely pays enough for rent if it does at all.
Basically the entirety of retail is a starter job. Even retail management barely pays enough to live. Delivery jobs are starter jobs. Customer support jobs are starter jobs. Work at a retirement home? Starter job. Many repair jobs are starter jobs. And plenty more.
You’ll see people 30, 40, 50 years old working these jobs. Still struggling.
My worry about the anti-plastic bag push is we're going to rush head first into even less sustainable solutions.
With many people not wanting to carry a bag at all times and global demand rising, we're bound to see more Indonesian rainforests being clear-cut for cheap paper, and "reusable" bags with energy and resource-intensive production methods being used once or twice before being tossed in the garbage or ending up on the side of the road.
With bans on plastic bags should come regulations on actual sustainable substitutes. Require locally made paper with verified sustainable wood/recycled pulp or something similar, or we'll be facing another crisis 10 years from now.
Yes, the vaccinated still get covid. But they're not being hospitalized in significant numbers. The issue is hospitalization. Hospitals have indeed been overwhelmed[1] and considerable numbers of people have been dying at home, many in their 20s and 30s, with covid because hospitals simply can't take them in. Natural immunity comes as a result of being infected, which brings a huge risk of hospitalization and death.
As mentioned elsewhere, pushing natural immunity as the solution is as dumb as chicken pox parties that misinformed people of previous decades used to have. It was unnecessarily dangerous. Yes, people who push that should be pushed out of the discussion. Give them an inch and they'll eat away your country from the inside out. There's a reason the US is such a massive disaster with tremendous deaths and growing (but primarily in select states, and primarily states that have opposition to vaccines for political reasons), while other countries that embraced vaccines are finally getting things under control.
Just a few weeks ago, Japan was approaching national collapse of its medical system. Vaccines have thankfully managed to catch up to and exceed the US vaccination rate and things are starting to get back under control.
The reason things are getting better is because nobody is waiting for 100 million people to get infected. Everyone, even past infectees, is getting vaccinated as a community effort.
> I'd have been genuinely scared to death about the ozone layer being depleted or acid rain making the planet unlivable by now, yet here we are.
It's retroactively very extreme sounding, but that's because governments collectively acted to enact environmental regulations. The ozone really was on its way to just vanishing and still isn't fully recovered.
The difference is that governments are full of people who don't realize that active efforts prevented disaster scenarios, and they're paid to say the bad things that are happening aren't happening. What was a slow moving disaster is now accelerating and people are still pretending humans can magically fix everything they knowingly fucked up.
> Instead of us focusing on how we can improve our hospital systems for future pandemics, we vilify the unvaccinated for political points.
Because globally, yes, they are the cause.
Even in countries where hospitals don't run close to max capacity at all times in order to maximize profits, hospitals have been filling up with unvaccinated patients. Japanese hospitals in major cities haven't been able to take in new patients, and those waves of patients are unvaccinated.
Although in Japan's case, the problem is there simply aren't enough vaccines here to meet demand. America's problem is there's an overabundance of vaccines but people are going out of their way to get sick, choosing to overwhelm hospitals, and then dying as an act of rebellion for facebook political points.
Mocking deaths came about people antivax people have been actively lying (take animal meds and herbal supplements to be immune) and threatening (just look at the endless mounds of videos of people screaming about it being the end of the world because they have to wear a mask, and governors threatening schools that require masks) while mocking people who get vaccinated because "haha you're all going to die from the vax! Just give it two weeks and I'll be right!"
Everyone got fed up with those people and the gaslighting they've attempted.
They're domesticated versions of wild animals that existed long before humans.
And if you let a pig out of its pen, it'll very quickly return to its instinctual lifestyle and absolutely thrive virtually anywhere. Wild pigs have no problem attacking people and even eating them.
Pigs exist just for humans as much as coyotes do. Which is to say, they don't.
You're really setting up very narrow condition in which someone might not need a certain vaccine. I'm saying that there's a history in which vaccines and immunizations have been required. If Japan had a yellow fever epidemic, Bangladesh would most certainly require it, just like they do if a Japanese person is coming from a country that does have such an epidemic. That's the precedence.
Saying they require a covid vaccine from a country with a covid epidemic is them applying existing restrictions. And currently, people arriving from most countries are dealing with an epidemic. 5 years ago Bangladesh authorities would deny people for not having yellow fever immunizations. They're within their rights to do the same for covid.