[cromwellian]

"It appears that it was indeed suboptimal for people younger and healthier than myself to take it."

Maybe it was suboptimal for them, but isn't the point that when you vaccine yourself, you're not just protecting yourself, but other people? Isn't limiting the active population that's infected a way of protecting both those who are immunocompromised, but in general, lowering the probability of everyone of exposure? Even if you're protected by vaccine as an old/obese person, would you feel safe walking around in a large population of young people with raging infections?

"What I do know is that the certainty was not at the threshold which justified mandatory vaccination."

2 million people are dead. That's more than the Spanish Flu of 1918, Polio, and Smallpox outbreaks in the US combined. It's equal to the total number of flu deaths over the last 40 years combined.

And you don't think public health officials had reason to want mandatory vaccination? I thank the gods those that came before my generation had the wherewithal to ignore this kind of logic and use widespread vaccination to eradicate Smallpox from the earth.

I was born in 1971, a year after they stopped mandatory vaccinations. My wife is not from the US, and she has the smallpox "scar" from her vaccination. If the remaining samples were to get out of the lab, I have my doubts as to whether or not the world will respond the same way it did 60 years ago.

[wikitopian]

Your argument could perhaps hold water if it were centered on the Johnson & Johnson formulation.

There is no precedent for a relatively novel technology being injected into everybody in a blind panic before a great deal of testing has been performed.

It was a huge gamble. It could have gone much worse than it did.

[cromwellian]

Before a great deal of testing? It went through multiple clinical phases, including a phase iii trials with over 40,000 people from April 2020 to November 2020.

By the time most people started getting it, the phase iii trials had been going for 11 months.

If there any any significant acute effects, they would have been found.

One can speculate about long term effects but one can also speculate on long term effects of natural COVID infection.

When Polio hit the US, the Salk vaccine was enthusiastically shipped out despite no long term tests either.

It’s amazing to me that people who talk in terms of risk minimization seem to simultaneously latch onto “natural” and “alternative” cures.

Natural immunity is bandied about as if there’s no risks involved and with claims or durability which are unproven.

[didibus]

> It was a huge gamble. It could have gone much worse than it did

But so could have Covid, that's why I say this can only be said in hindsight.

Also, the smallpox vaccine was pretty novel at the time when it was mass distributed, that was the first vaccine ever to be mass distributed. You'd have only similar trials as for COVID at the time, small sample, limited time frame, etc. You couldn't have argued it any more/less safer than the mRNA ones back then.

[wikitopian]

You do not have the right to impose your optimistic opinion about vaccines on others.

And I'll do my part to see to it that you don't have the power.

Importantly, threatening coercion increases resistance to vaccination, causing people to throw out the well tested with the optional and experimental.

[didibus]

I don't think medical interventions should be forced on people, even if they need it. I'm for personal autonomy and choice. That said, I also like truth and accuracy and well reasoned thoughts, and it's definitely true that Covid could have been much worse, that the vaccine might have no measurable side effects whatsoever long term, and that forcing it on people did save additional lives that wouldn't have otherwise. Today's posted research paper actually tells us very little more on those topics, except that we need more research on LNP's possible lingering immune effects in humans and see the extent of it and if it even replicates in humans.

Acknowledging this doesn't mean you have to support using force or coercion on people, it just means being intelligent and honest about reality, facts, what we do know, and what we don't know.

That's what I'm here to do. Some people want to claim we now know for a fact that mandated vaccines did nothing and harmed people, this simply isn't true, we don't know that for a fact one bit, we just don't really know, that's all it is. If you claim you know, you don't, you simply believe it strongly without real justification to match the strength of your belief, aka an irrational belief. If you had that justification, it would easily convince others and we would not still all be arguing about it, but the data isn't there, the understanding of the mechanisms involved isn't there. Not yet.

It should be possible to separate the two topics. Do we want as a society which strongly favors individual rights, that we can push mandates in the name of the collective even if it means coercing individuals to do things they don't want to do?

And similarly discuss, if we wanted to save lives, lower the medical cost, and limit the spread or negative impact of Covid overall on society, is it better for a maximum number of people to be vaccinated or is it not?

Unless you're saying that coercion is only justified on individuals if the benefit to society are well known, probable, and sizable enough to some "threshold".

And I'm also happy to discuss this, even to agree with it, in hindsight, the benefits of the vaccines weren't as big as we thought when they first came around, people hoped it would end COVID, eradicate it like vaccines did for smallpox, and that hasn't happened yet. So maybe it didn't meet the threshold, but at the time it wasn't clear that it didn't, because I still remember that we didn't know how bad Covid was going to get, or how well the vaccines would help to fight against it. Thus, I still stand that, assuming this premise, that the right thing is to coerce if there is due cause that doing so will really be to the benefit of all, then at the time it could very well have played out to be the case. Why didn't we eventually stop the mandates sooner afterwards I can't say, but I'm also not sure this is the premise people assumed, I think many people assumed simply saving the most lives mattered more than a few people's resistance to wanting to take a jab in the arm. Is that just? Well it's a debate we're all still having.

[wikitopian]

> Unless you're saying that coercion is only justified on individuals if the benefit to society are well known, probable, and sizable enough to some "threshold".

This point seems too obvious to me to even warrant defending. Obviously, there must be an especially high bar to be met before we chase people down, hold them down, and inject chemicals into them.

[didibus]

Well, you could argue there are no apt thresholds at which this is ever justified. That the individual always trump the collective, so individual autonomy and personal choice should never be compromised, even if it could benefit the collective to do so.

And similarly you could say the reverse, the collective should always take priority, and in all cases where even minor benefits are to be found, the collective matters most.