Seatbelts and airbags sometimes kill people, too. Sometimes people die in unlucky ways.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.