| > required for a vaccine to reach public acceptance. This leads to frightening considerations. The reason FDA testing is so stringent is that trying to explain statistics along with a myriad of other fields, that are at this point likely too complex and exhaustive for any one human to fully comprehend even if they spent their entire lifetime learning, to the "public" for them to truly make an informed decision is a futile effort. A vaccine is no doubt a great thing and much needed. Two things bother me very greatly about it: 1) A lot of testing was skipped. This will be injected into tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of people long before we even know the long term side effects. If by some very low chance this introduces an inheritable change, and if by an even lower chance that inheritable change leads to genetic collapse in 10-20 generations - just to be very clear, this is extremely unlikely - we have opened the window to humanity's end. 2) A far more realistic ethical concern is what happens to states (god forbid if the fed does it) who legally require this (unconstitutionally, of course, since most modern laws already are and nobody seems to have an issue with this) like New York who've already had a number of terrifying assembly bills for something similar, if this backfires and causes permanent harm to people? The human body is incredibly complex. A doctor's oath includes "above all, do no harm", and most of the people that will be vaccinated have a 90%+ survival chance. Granted, the above is a very myopic view that completely ignores large scale economics - so please bare with me and use your medicine/ethics hat for it. Is this the right thing to do in the long run? As a country, the US has proven track record of making stupid decisions in tough times (911 -> PATRIOT, etc). |
Indeed, extremely unlikely. Have you considered that writing this comment could also trigger the "end of humanity" by some as-of-yet unknown and unforeseen butterfly effect? Extremely unlikely, but still. Better consider it.