261–270 of 532 posts
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This was very uncommon. It was also unrelated to mRNA vaccines, it was the AstroZeneca vaccine vaxzevria, and it was based on an adenovirus.
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IIRC the vaccines were provably linked to the death of young people who had blood clots they shouldn't have had. The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because…
For the record, this comment is not arguing against vaccines or their veracity, there seems to have been confusion about that. I am specifically arguing against vaccine mandates.
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
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But the trolley problem doesn't make sense here. The statistically correct thing to do, in nearly all cases for nearly all people, both for themselves and for their community (separately!), was to get vaccinated.
It does though. A government mandate is the same as pulling the lever, it’s trading who lives and who dies. Even if more people survive as result, just like in the original trolley problem, the one who pulls the lever becomes responsible for the exchange. I’m not even arguing the government shouldn’t pull the lever, I just want people to be held accountable for the lives lost as a result, and for the families to be t…
Serious question in good faith: what was the deal with the “calamari” (clots?) the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?
IIRC the vaccines were provably linked to the death of young people who had blood clots they shouldn't have had. The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because…
Since there was basically a soft mandate for it, especially on top of some of the usual official red tape being cut, the manufacturers really wouldn't be the appropriate party to hold responsibility. That'd be the government.
There are credible doctors and scientists who have a different view: https://maloneinstitute.org/reference-project
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There is a process in place that’s meant to capture a certain number of potential problems. I didn’t make that process. The people who are making drugs safe designed the process. There is never zero risk of a treatment behaving badly, of course but when a drug gets fast tracked and doesn’t go through the regular approval process, it just hasn’t been proven to be safe by the regular standard of what experts deem safe.…
Operation Warpspeed addressed that by running a very large stage 3 trial. One reason that isn't normally done is the high cost of such a large trial.
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> All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) Where exactly is this?
Apparently they live in a nursing home in 2020 still, because no one else is dying of covid anymore. Especially not young or healthy people within the last few years.
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Healthy children and young adults were at very little risk from COVID though. Seatbelts are a safety measure that applies almost uniformly across age groups.
Yes, they were at low risk. They were actually at far lower risk of harm from the vaccines. It was and remains statistically correct to vaccinate young people.
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So what is the logic here? If the only entity that you can get information from is an entity that is known to lie, you can trust this entity? It is not that we know for a fact that X is not safe. It is that we have no reason to believe that the powers that can ensure that, does not have an incentive to do it, and a large financial incentive to NOT do it and instead grease a lot of palms and get it mandated. This is p…
I think your own logic supports the opposite from your conclusions? I'm saying that every developed country's medical bodies support that these vaccines are safe. Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines? That they will be too cautious because they are afraid of approving something that turns out to be unsafe, or the opposite t…
It is a question of how aligned the individual's incentives and the incentives of the medical body in question. And often it is extremely misaligned. So that is what is I mean when I said there is "no incentive".
So what do I mean by that?
When such an organization recommend X, it just mean that if everyone follows that recommendation, the population wide metric, that can be immediately measured or that is often measured will show good beneficial result.
So here if people follow the recommendation two things can happen
1. The number of covid deaths will drop. This is something that will show up immediately, because everyone was focused on daily death toll.
2. A substantial number of people will have adverse effects. This is something that can be managed (in terms of public opinion)
So the incentive of the organization end up being favorable to the recommendation despite the very good chance of point 2 happening. With financial incentives, this is just more pronounced...
> What are you referring to?
Any group of human beings.
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A tiny fraction of infants react to infant vaccinations. But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations. It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
At the latest by May 2020, we knew that Covid risk was extremely stratified by age and underlying health conditions.
To be very clear: this does not mean the virus was harmless to everyone else, but treating the population as if risk were evenly distributed was bad analysis, and policy built on that assumption was deeply flawed.
What I would have wanted was a more honest debate about how to protect the old, the frail, and those with major risk factors while also minimising the social, educational, economic, and indirect medical harms caused by restrictions. Yes, that is hard! Policy is supposed to deal with hard problems, not pretend that trade-offs disappear because they are uncomfortable.
Instead, much of the public discussion collapsed into a useless binary: "lock down harder and longer" versus "let it rip". With hindsight, both look far too crude for the actual problem we faced.