6 ms·

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 s

• Waterluvian 3mo ago
  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.
  • zmgsabst 3mo ago
    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.
    • Sammi 3mo ago
      No one is "killing" anyone. That is just a gross mischaracterization. Sometimes (like this) we just choose the least bad solution, that's it.
      • zmgsabst 3mo ago
        If you do something to a person and they die after, you killed them. If you can’t admit you’re killing people you absolutely lack the ethics to compel actions for others, as in your case here. COVID vaccines and their mandates absolutely did kill people — and you can believe that is justified, but if you cannot admit the fact, it’s a clear indication you’re not behaving ethically.
    • InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
      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 3mo ago
        Cars and gun ownership were not mandated by the government.
        • InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
          Yes, they are. I'm mandated by the government to live in a country that has cars and gun ownership.
          • defrost 3mo ago
            Your government refuses to let you leave the country? That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?
            • InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
              > 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 3mo ago
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  • cryptoegorophy 3mo ago
    I wonder if this is some kind of prisoners dilemma for society and individual choice.
• throwaway5752 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • nxc18 3mo ago
      Seatbelts and airbags sometimes kill people, too. Sometimes people die in unlucky ways.
      • cedws 3mo ago
        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.
        • airstrike 3mo ago
          Healthy individuals spread the disease to others, ultimately killing more people than the infinitesimal odds from getting vaccinated at the height of the pandemic
        • estearum 3mo ago
          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.
          • cedws 3mo ago
            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.
• wbl 3mo ago
  Not "the vaccines" only adenovirus vector based ones and the vaccines were dropped from use pretty quickly once the safety signal was detected.
  • jansan 3mo ago
    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.
• voxl 3mo ago
  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.
  • andrei_says_ 3mo ago
    A nice lottery simulator which had me stop playing the lottery https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator
    • appplication 3mo ago
      Oh fun, I won the $330m jackpot after 3.5m tickets, the lesson is apparently lost on me :)
  • mrmuagi 3mo ago
    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.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • elp 3mo ago
      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.
• cedws 3mo ago
  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.
  • goatlover 3mo ago
    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.
  • fwipsy 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
      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.
      • fwipsy 3mo ago
        Scientists and the government were also unaware of vaccine side effects. These vaccine injuries and deaths were also unintentional. "Living one's normal life" seems to unreasonably privilege the status quo. I am sure many drunk drivers also felt they were simply living their normal lives, before drunk driving was illegal. The definition of "normal life" changed because it needed to. When there's a global pandemic on, it needs to include vaccinations. "Herd immunity is too multivariate to measure" seems like a very strong claim. Do you have a source for that?
• thisisit 3mo ago
  > 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_Compensation_Program 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 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
      > 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.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• tbrownaw 3mo ago
  > 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.
• KiwiJohnno 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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.
    • greycol 3mo ago
      There was only one category that it made sense to refuse the covid mrna vaccine in hindsight (excluding specific medical conditions), that was if you were over 10 and under 25 AND gave yourself greater than ~1,000 to 1 odds of not catching covid. That's based on the fact that the chance of a young healthy individual having a severe negative outcome from the vaccine was that much less likely than a sever negative reaction from catching covid. So yes in a vacuum you can say that having the mrna covid vaccine when you don't need it is a negative but "don't need' is specifically if you have low odds of catching the disease not low odds of having a bad outcome from the disease. I'd say a preeminently foolish bet by the time the vaccine was actually available. I suppose you could also argue other categories based on higher or lower ages and who gave themselves lower chances of ever catching covid could technically also fall into that group. You could also argue moral reasons not to get the vaccine but I'd say in any situation where you still expected to get healthcare that detracted from the healthcare of others (i.e when the hospitals were at capacity and your treatment could kill another) would be morally bankrupt.
• cogman10 3mo ago
  > but this is pretty fucked up IMO Pretty much every medication can have bad interactions. There is always a "risk/reward" analysis. But also, the vaccines linked to those kids deaths weren't the mRNA vaccines, it was the J&J vaccine which got pulled as a result.
  • trimethylpurine 3mo ago
    I think the point being made here is that the risk decision should be up to the recipient of the treatment.
    • cogman10 3mo ago
      It always is. Nobody was forced to take the vaccine and when these first rolled out there was a brochure of potential side effects.
      • salemh 3mo ago
        [dead]
      • trimethylpurine 3mo ago
        For many, they could choose to lose their jobs and let their families go hungry, tantamount to being forced.
        • cogman10 3mo ago
          The only people that really qualify for this is military service people. Everyone else could take weekly covid tests. The rule to require vaccines more generally was pretty quickly struck down. So you are right. I shouldn't have said "nobody". But also, it's not exactly everyone.
          • trimethylpurine 3mo ago
            I did write "many." And for clarity sake, it's way more people than just the military. Many cities and counties had mandates, including NYC. Everyone in nearly the entire health industry across the country. Many restaurant workers. A bunch of banks and many, many other companies in various industries had mandates just because their leadership was political or used it as a way to reduce labor without penalty. A lot of people were forced. I don't think it's fair to try to minimize that. It's a major point of ongoing political contention and its among the many reasons why many people stopped voting left (including me).