The parent is talking about pre-covid, no one wanted pay the upfront cost to bring mRNA out of the lab.

It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.

> Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.

There is remedy against vaccine harm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compen...

This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.

Society is the trolley problem. The balancing act between individual and collective rights is the lever being thrown every time we pass a law or make a regulation.

I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.

Yes, I think you are correct in reducing the argument to its basic factors. Yep, its fucked up.

However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.

If you are going to hold one group responsible for vaccine-related deaths of mandated vaccines, you must also hold the group who refused the vaccine responsible for any deaths of other people who were infected as a result of their vaccine refusal.

Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare. COVID deaths from preventable spread were also real, and much more common. Public policy had to weigh both, not pretend either side of the risk didn’t exist.

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.

Not "the vaccines" only adenovirus vector based ones and the vaccines were dropped from use pretty quickly once the safety signal was detected.

> Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.

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.

This was very uncommon. It was also unrelated to mRNA vaccines, it was the AstroZeneca vaccine vaxzevria, and it was based on an adenovirus.

Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person. At that point its a matter of risk assessment for yourself. Take a 2% chance of dying, a slightly higher chance of reduced quality of life (long COVID), or take a lottery-winning chance of dying to this blood clot. It is appropriate to do the math correctly to decide if this makes sense, but to claim that scientists and advocates did not do this personal risk assessment math and merely went off the benefits of herd immunity is a lie and anti-vaccine propaganda.

Dismissing people like this is part of what fuels the antivax movement. Vaccines are generally effective, but they're not perfect and have side effects, and failing to acknowledge that when someone is asking in in good faith polarizes people and makes it look like someone's trying to hide something.

Sounds like a oppurtunity for health educatation. 99%+ of people dont know they can look in the USPI for this data. However, it isnt the best and most up to date, which the regulator and FDA would have and are unlikely to share.

What’s the saying?

You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place.

Point taken, but it isn't just a matter of individuals, it is a popular movement that has captured a significant part of role of regulators. The research is still valuable, but its lack of influence is not a problem that is safe to dismiss.

Unfortunately a large number of the "kooks" are GenX and younger.

I think you'll find there's a rational distrust in big pharma

Nobody's used state power to mandate peptides and social media censorship to reports of adverse effects.

As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.

The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.

“I won’t put chemicals from big pharma in my body!”

Proceeds to raw dog a bunch of “research chemicals” cause some roided up bro talked about it on a podcast…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo

They’re not vaccines though.

> They were never meant to prevent people from getting COVID.

"COVID-19 vaccination will help keep you from getting COVID-19" - https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/97780/

You see, this kind of lying and gaslighting is exactly what feeds the distrust in the government and scientific establishment in general public. No number of studies is going to reverse that any time soon.

> They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized

No. They didn’t. They said it.

You were the Phase3 trial. You can probably debate the ethicality, the decisions made, but do not pretend they had 5 year data before deploying to the entire world.

Facts matter.

The comparison of cardiovascular safety with vs without the vaccine is not even close:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/covid-19-vaccinati...

(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)

I want to empathize with you, plenty of medical professionals used really reductive and inaccurate language that should be rightfully criticized. stopping people from getting covid being one of those things

none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of

they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust

The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms

I believe Thailand did actively monitor some kids and found about 1 in 35 childhood COVID vaccinations.

> They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.

They shouldn’t believe it no matter who says it. The entire concept of “social distancing” was completely made up and had no science behind it. It belongs in the same bucket of nonsense as “mask up between bites.”

> unfalsifiable distrust

Well, I think it’s pretty clear for starters that politicians lie (and yes this holds for both left and right; although indeed some presidents more than others), and that this isn’t helping trust.

What a depressing response.

If the “do their own research” people don’t manage to kill their kids and family through complete and utter idiocy, those kids and family will 99.99999% of the time continue their idiocy.

We should hope they manage to end their idiocy lineage.

> people would rather let their children die.

I see that your are yourself in a position you didn't reason you into.

Trump did tell people to get them? It was his opposition saying they wouldn’t trust a vaccine pushed out by Trump. You’ve basically rewritten history.

I dont think people's motivations are to kill their children, but the opposite. I think this is the starting point for developing cognitive empathy and an accurate model.

Again, trust is a huge factor here.

Vaccines were very effective against the first variant, and got less effective with later ones. People forget about the timeline. Article mentions the delta variant at which time vaccines were still very effective IIRC. There were some breakthrough cases as the article mentions but that's to be expected with anything short of 100% efficacy.

> In the case of COVID, the effectiveness of vaccines was quite exaggerated at first[0]. [0]: https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...

One's model of "statement made by the POTUS" should be more like 'statement made by mildly likeable (to some segment of the population) boomer dad who probably doesn't know what he is talking about.' It'd be a different thing if a public health official said something like this (and I don't know if they did, but I certainly wasn't left with the impression that it was impossible for me to get vaccinated and still get covid).

The Covid vaccines were and continue to be VERY effective at preventing you from winding up on ECMO.

Yes, you may still get Covid, but you don't die from drowning in your own body fluids anymore.

Of course, this only attends if you got the damn vaccine. All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) were anti-vaxxers. But, hey, we know that reality has a well-known liberal bias.

I've heard that one before.

My understanding is that vaccine research and production is almost never profitable and depends on government support. Either grants, guaranteed purchases, or both.

Nope. Not this administration at all.

Trump 1 was a very different administration.

And Trump himself has publicly backed off what was probably his one major achievement after receiving pushback from his supporters.

The biggest single success from Trump’s first term is the thing his base hates to the point that they booed him over it.

It's literally not the same administration. Also yeah he wants private companies to stop "wild" profits while he grifts the nation with crypto, hosting UFC on white house? You have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to think the current administration gives a single f about unchecked profits or the people's general wellbeing.

Not many people know that Trump had a hand in starting the pandemic.

Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...

Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...

Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.

So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?

It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.

And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-t...

I'm honestly surprised they didn't put a flat-earther in charge of NASA.

What toll?

Right now, we'd be better off if we even had politicians who could manage an actual debate. Seems like we can't get anything other than mudslinging and strongarming right now.

We would be a hell of a lot better off with career politicians than the current batch of grifters and ex-Fox News chuckleheads.

By late 2020, when they got approved, the vaccines were not scientifically proven safe for mainstream use. No other mRNA vaccine had been through all the trial stages, and certainly not those COVID ones.

Could the vaccines have side effects that became visible after 6 months? Yes and we couldn’t have known that they didn’t.

Could the vaccines have side effects on people with rare conditions? Sure, and we couldn’t have known that either.

My point is that in 2020, the decision to approve the vaccines and pretty much force everyone to get it was a risk tradeoff. It was way more risky to let the disease continue spreading and mutate than it was to release the vaccines. mrna vaccines had been in trials and there was no reason to believe they could have been harmful. But the reality is that we just didn’t know. Biology is complex enough that you can’t just assume everything will be fine without proper testing. And what we deem proper testing is a process that these drugs hadn’t gone through.

I happily got vaxed in early 2021, and did it again 4 times , so I was willing to trust the tradeoff.

But ignoring that it was a tradeoff and hiding behind a sign that says “science” is just taking people for dummies.

What does being "pro-vax" mean?

That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?

yes but no other mRNA vaccines had completed the various trial phases and got approved.

And we shouldn’t assume that all mRna vaccines are the same. The rna sequence that’s used potentially can matter as well.

Bruh??

Both economies have massive drug industries and China in particular has advanced manufacturing processes for decades. I suspect they made an economic/risk decision and will be reviewing it in the light of mRNA production lead time.

We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.