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| ▲ | thisisit 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | LMYahooTFY an hour ago | parent [-] | | Perhaps "vaccine skeptics" say this because the Covid vaccines are not covered under VICP. They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others. My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career. "Tyranny of the minority" doesn't remotely apply here. No one has the authority to sacrifice one group of citizens to save another group of citizens. | | |
| ▲ | thisisit an hour ago | parent [-] | | > They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others. This is trying to play both sides. Appeal to emotion without having a rational thought process. Something bad happening is unfortunate and life changing. Then turning around and saying hundred grand isn’t life changing money for people. What exactly is your remedy here - should people be not asked to provide proof for the harm and paid 10s of millions for every case? People have been asked proof for lesser things and paid even lesser for much bigger harm. > My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing. At least I wouldn’t expect to see on HN but here we are. | | |
| ▲ | BoingBoomTschak an hour ago | parent [-] | | >Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing. The Norwegian country-wide study is evidence enough. |
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| ▲ | Waterluvian 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | cryptoegorophy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I wonder if this is some kind of prisoners dilemma for society and individual choice. | |
| ▲ | zmgsabst 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Lots of societies who started with some killing “for the common good” ended in atrocities. The statistics on men under 25 are still horrific and suggest this was in fact the latter category: atrocity masquerading behind that euphemism. | | |
| ▲ | InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you apply that same standard to other things, like cars? Do you feel allowing people to drive is also society "killing for the common good"? After more than eight billion doses of the vaccine, about twenty deaths were causally linked to the vaccine. Five times as many people die every day from traffic in the US alone, many of them children. What about gun ownership? How many people does that "kill for the common good"? And by that measure, isn't not vaccinating people an even bigger atrocity? Aren't you also arguing to kill people "for the common good" by not mandating vaccination? | | |
| ▲ | LMYahooTFY an hour ago | parent [-] | | Cars and gun ownership were not mandated by the government. | | |
| ▲ | InsideOutSanta an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yes, they are. I'm mandated by the government to live in a country that has cars and gun ownership. | | |
| ▲ | defrost an hour ago | parent [-] | | Your government refuses to let you leave the country? That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun? | | |
| ▲ | InsideOutSanta an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Your government refuses to let you leave the country? This argument also applies to you: by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country. > That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun? The problem isn't me owning a car and gun, the problem is obviously everybody else. I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | First up, for clarity, I have no issues with COVID vaccines and how they were used in Australia - the very few cases of myocarditis were mild and resulted in no deaths. Second up, I'm confused by your use of "mandate" and how your government mandates you to remain in that country. > by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country. Not by my logic, nor that of Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey , Alonzo Church or others. > I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car. You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury. | | |
| ▲ | InsideOutSanta 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > how your government mandates you to remain in that country I never said that. I said that government inaction is also a mandate; look at the context for my comment. If you're arguing that leaving the country makes government action (or inaction) acceptable, then by your own logic, all government action (or inaction) is acceptable, which supports my point: vaccine mandates are fine, because by your own logic, if you disagree with them, you can leave the country. > You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury. You're missing the point I'm making, which is that not driving a car does not mean I won't get run over by other people, which is the actual point I brought up. To be honest, I'm not quite sure why you're responding to me, since you don't seem to be arguing against anything I actually said? |
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| ▲ | cedws 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | fwipsy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies, isn't that morally equivalent to "forcing" a vaccine on someone, who then dies? Your argument seems to be "people who choose to put others at risk, should be prevented from doing so." This seems like a much stronger argument in favor of requiring unvaccinated people to stay home rather than putting others at risk? 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? | | |
| ▲ | LMYahooTFY an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | No, it's not morally equivalent, as one of these is very obviously unintentional and a result of simply living one's normal life, and the other is neither of those things. It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure. | |
| ▲ | auggierose an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I wish there was a vaccine against opinions like yours. Yes, I would make it mandatory. | |
| ▲ | BoingBoomTschak an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies Why wasn't that other person vaccinated? | |
| ▲ | Markoff an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Except COVID "vaccines" did not prevent infecting yourself or someone else, are there still people believing this nonsense? This "vaccine" at best protects you if you are old at risk and it's not good even at doing that comparable with those flu "vaccines". |
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| ▲ | koonsolo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In Belgium, the polio vaccine is mandatory, and rightly so. I'm willing to bet that in the next 20 years, some kid in the western world will suffer the consequences of polio, because of the anti-vax lunatics. | | |
| ▲ | cedws 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The polio vaccine is much older and as far as I could find has never had a death attributed to it. COVID vaccines are newer, and their safety profile was not fully understood when they were rolled out. |
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| ▲ | goatlover 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If the pandemic had been deadlier and even more infectious like measles or smallpox were, would you still be against mandates? Surely there is a scenario like airborne Ebola or 28 days Later Rage virus that would justify mandates. | |
| ▲ | ActorNightly an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would also be against vaccine mandate if we also had a law where if I could prove you infected me, that would count as assault with a deadly weapon, and all the other laws that determine what I could do when someone assaults me with a deadly weapon would apply. |
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| ▲ | wbl 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not "the vaccines" only adenovirus vector based ones and the vaccines were dropped from use pretty quickly once the safety signal was detected. | | |
| ▲ | jansan 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Let's not forget that Norway was heavily criticized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and several international health experts for its decision to permanently drop the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. |
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| ▲ | KiwiJohnno an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | auggierose an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Young people are actually right then in never ever taking any vaccine recommended by public policy ever again. If taking a vaccine is against your personal interest, and nevertheless public policy, that is the consequence. It is one thing to make a judgement error in the heat of a crisis, it is quite another one to deny afterwards what a huge fuckup it has been. | |
| ▲ | Markoff an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. that's all nice and dandy except COVID "vaccines" (remember, they had to change vaccine definition for this very reason) did NOT STOP the spread, they were at best protecting some old people, it was completely pointless for young healthy people to risk their lives by taking them I remember how the vaccine narration/propaganda went - it will protect you from getting infection, it will protect you from symptoms, it will protect you from getting sick, it will protect you from serious symptoms, it will protect you from hospitalization, it will protect you from death, so now basically all they can claim it will protect you from going to hell and you can go to heaven if you use them > Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare. so were COVID deaths in people under 50 unless you have some health condition, extremely rare for people under 20-30, yet they pushed down the throat "vaccinesd" to everyone, not just risk groups, which is why vaccine mandates/passes hurt proper useful vaccines for decades ahead | | |
| ▲ | teamonkey 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Vaccines have always been about preventing the spread of the disease and “the definition of vaccines” has not changed. This is easy to prove. Simply find a high school biology textbook printed before Covid. | |
| ▲ | watwut 17 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I remeber that time too. In fact, vaccines slowed spread and also made symptoms easier on those who caught it anyway. And that is exactly what was promissed to me. You are just full of it, that is it. |
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| ▲ | tbrownaw 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | throwaway5752 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This was very uncommon. It was also unrelated to mRNA vaccines, it was the AstroZeneca vaccine vaxzevria, and it was based on an adenovirus. | | |
| ▲ | cedws 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | Sabinus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | idontwantthis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's a false trade off because without vaccines, the kids that would have died from vaccines are still in danger! | | |
| ▲ | logifail 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > the kids that would have died from vaccines are still in danger Except that we knew by May 2020 (possibly even earlier) that the data showed that the young and otherwise healthy were at extraordinarily low risk from Covid. I still recall a conversation with child#2 after one of his school friends was at home quarantining after testing positive for Covid. I asked my son if he knew if his friend was feeling better... "Daddy, he's not poorly, he's just got Covid". | | |
| ▲ | teamonkey an hour ago | parent [-] | | Kids spread the virus, whether they’re at risk of dying or not. Vaccines reduce the chance of them spreading it by reducing the symptoms and the time that they they’re infectious. The main benefit of vaccines is that they reduce the transmission of disease. This aspect saves more lives than individual protection. | | |
| ▲ | logifail 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Vaccines reduce the chance of them spreading it [..] "Citation needed"... Covid vaccination did not reliably or durably block SARS-CoV-2 transmission, especially after Omicron and as immunity waned. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39971395/ The overall VE [Vaccine Effectiveness] of the complete primary series against infection with any SARS-CoV-2 variant was 70.7%. VE was lower for Omicron, at 26.1%, than for pre-Omicron strains, at 77.0%. Over time, VE against infection by any variant decreased from 68.9% to 38.9% after 6 months.
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| ▲ | defrost 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Leaving aside the linked study is looking at vaccine effectiveness WRT infection rather than transmission, ... Low effectiveness still agrees with the point made above about reducing chances of spread and transmission. A reduction is still a reduction, even if is not a 100% total and full stop. | | |
| ▲ | logifail 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > A reduction is still a reduction, even if is not a 100% total and full stop The advice I was given from our family doctor was that having had an utterly mild case of (actual) Covid, as I had (two separate times!), during the pandemic, was significantly better in protecting against both future infection - and subsequent transmission - than any protection I could have gained by vaccination. YMMV. I suspect this is down to those who have had mild Covid pre-vaccination and those who have not. Some of us didn't even know we had had Covid until afterwards, others think the vaccine saved them from an untimely death/hospitalisation. |
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| ▲ | blub an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Covid vaccine was not recommended in Germany and other EU countries for children. The risk of the vaccine was higher than the benefit for them. It think the guidance was more nuanced for teens, but for kids it was very clear. The vaxmaxxer vs. antivaxxer - like most culture wars - is a US phenomenon. | |
| ▲ | logifail 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It's a trade off but it's one that must be made 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. | |
| ▲ | zoul 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole. | | |
| ▲ | Sabinus 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, they did the best for their child. They had no way of knowing their child would react before they gave the vaccine. The harms and risks of illness prevented by vaccination are far greater than the harms and the risks of adverse reaction. Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO. |
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| ▲ | qsera 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > it's a trade off but it's one that must be made. It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive. | | |
| ▲ | Sabinus 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well regulated markets are extremely productive. If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well. | | |
| ▲ | qsera 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am not even in US. And what I said is in a global context. |
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| ▲ | nxc18 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Seatbelts and airbags sometimes kill people, too. Sometimes people die in unlucky ways. | | |
| ▲ | cedws 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | estearum 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ta8903 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Should we really be using words like "correct" for something like this? It's just a tradeoff, you could say it's a better solution optimizing for fewer dead people, but it is in no way a morally superior solution. You could just as easily argue that not vaccinating at all and letting COVID spread would be a better solution for a nation since COVID overwhelmingly killed old and unhealthy people who are otherwise a drag on the economy. | |
| ▲ | cedws 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, but the crux of my original point was not about absolute number of lives saved or lost. It was about the trolley problem and mandates. | | |
| ▲ | estearum 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | cedws 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 treated with compassion. | | |
| ▲ | bawolff 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > just like in the original trolley problem, the one who pulls the lever becomes responsible for the exchange. That is a conclusion you can have, but you're speaking like its the official correct conclusion, which isn't really true. The reason the trolly problem is so popular is because there isn't an agreed upon answer and different people come to different conclusions about it. Some people would agree that by pulling the lever you become morally responsible in a way you aren't if you take no action. Other people think you are morally culpable either way. | |
| ▲ | estearum 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ah I see, I missed that way up the thread you were scoping this to vaccine mandates. | |
| ▲ | InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The one who decides not to pull the lever is just as responsible, and killed a lot more people. |
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| ▲ | airstrike 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Healthy individuals spread the disease to others, ultimately killing more people than the infinitesimal odds from getting vaccinated at the height of the pandemic | |
| ▲ | bsder 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Healthy children and young adults were at very little risk from COVID though. People repeat this but there is no validation of this. Sure, children and young adults mostly weren't at risk of dying. It is not at all clear that there are not bad side effects from getting an active Covid infection. We're still crunching the data. We're just now beginning the process of correlating virii and bad latent effects many years later. HPV -> Cervical Cancer. Epsetin-Barr -> MS. And, of course the one we have known about for a while: Chicken Pox -> Shingles. |
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| ▲ | renw0rp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My cousin died in 2021 at the age of 28 after AstraZeneca vaccine. Quite unfortunate, they starter increasing the age group of people receiving that vaccine literally days after he got it. His parents obviously are obviously still struggling with it and will never really accept it. | |
| ▲ | InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't have to imagine, I lost relatives to people who didn't get vaccinated. A lot of people did. Probably literally billions. | |
| ▲ | bawolff 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Imagine if you had lost a son or daughter due to this And imagine if you lost a son or daughter due to not doing this. You are making a choice either way. If the opposite choice was made there are different consequences. Its not like you can opt out of consequences by not choosing. |
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| ▲ | voxl 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | natureiskino 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person. I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID. Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits. | | |
| ▲ | bawolff 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > the risk for healthy young people was minuscule Arguably so was the risk from the vaccine. About 17400 people under 20 died of covid. According to this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875435/ all the people who died from side effects of the covid vaccine were over 22 (its possible that is not exhaustive, but i can't seem to find any examples of confirmed deaths related to the vaccine for children. If there are any i think its likely the number is in the single digits). So even if the risk of death from covid in kids is small, its still probably at least 1000 times higher than the risk from the vaccine, and possibly much higher. > something that had the potential of side effects Literally everything has potential side effects. Clean drinking water? Has side effects (e.g. less vitamin b12 from poop). All choices have consequences. |
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| ▲ | andrei_says_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A nice lottery simulator which had me stop playing the lottery https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator | | |
| ▲ | appplication 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh fun, I won the $330m jackpot after 3.5m tickets, the lesson is apparently lost on me :) |
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| ▲ | mrmuagi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 2% chance of death? A quick google shows it to be around 0.16%, and the deaths seem to be allocated to people who are older or just have other comorbities. I think the scientists in retrospect just didnt want hospitals to get full honestly, since they dont have the capacity for it as it is — atleast here in Canada. | | |
| ▲ | elp an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | For comparison the death rate from the vaccine is around 0.0001%. Yes they didn't want the hospitals to get full. That's when the younger healthy people who would have recovered can't get the medical care they need to survive. You had to have spent covid in a pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks. | |
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