[cedws]

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 saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.

[Waterluvian]

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]

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]

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]

Cars and gun ownership were not mandated by the government.

[InsideOutSanta]

Yes, they are. I'm mandated by the government to live in a country that has cars and gun ownership.

[defrost]

Your government refuses to let you leave the country?

That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?

[Sammi]

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]

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.

[cryptoegorophy]

I wonder if this is some kind of prisoners dilemma for society and individual choice.

[thisisit]

> 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]

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]

> 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]

>Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing.

The Norwegian country-wide study is evidence enough.

[croon]

The Norwegian study landed on 4.5 cases per 100k from vaccinations [0].

Unvaccinated occurance was 200 per 100k [1].

[0] https://www.oslo-universitetssykehus.no/en/departments/hjert...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262150/

[tuesdaynight]

It's so sad to see that you are the first one with any kind of source in your comment. The rest are only saying scary stuff and you are supposed to argue with that. They are saying stuff like "my friend died because of the jab" and you come with studies links, which can sound unfriendly. And we are on HN, for fuck's sake.

[trimethylpurine]

In [1] "those who are not vaccinated" is a tiny subset of society that is actually composed of those who are infected, and also symptomatic, and also not vaccinated.

A large portion of society can't be counted because they are asymptomatic. How do you find them to count them? In fact that's nearly everyone. And for those people the vaccine increases their risk by 4/100,000. (More harm than good.)

Let me know if I've misunderstood.

[rho138]

Link?

[fragmede]

> The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few

-Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

[trimethylpurine]

The CARES act grants immunity for the set of vaccines associated with COVID.

[KiwiJohnno]

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]

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]

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.

[auggierose]

> I'd say a preeminently foolish bet by the time the vaccine was actually available.

A preeminently foolish bet is to use a vaccine where you don't know anything about medium or longterm effects, for something that doesn't really affect you. If you know anything about science, you know that.

[Markoff]

> 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]

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.

[picofarad]

Vaccine the word came from vacca for "cow", and cowpox virus being weakened and injected to prevent cowpox.

MRNA is not weakened virus, it's a spike protein in this case.

Or so that's the argument.

[teamonkey]

Cowpox was used to vaccinate against smallpox. Cowpox is a less severe infection that stimulates the same immune response as smallpox, but it’s not the same virus.

Inoculation is where a weakened pathogen is introduced to create immune resistance against that same pathogen (see inoculation parties).

[watwut]

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.

[msandford]

Prior to COVID I seem to remember that the point of a vaccine was so that you didn't get the disease at all. That's where the herd immunity argument comes from. If 85-90% of the herd has immunity (immunity meaning you can't catch it at all) then even the people who can't get the vaccine are protected because the susceptible are too spread out for the infection to spread.

Do you see how this absolutely requires not just a lowered infection rate with lowered severity of infection? You need a less than ~10% chance of infection in the vaccinated/otherwise immune for the math to work. If the chances of infection after vaccination are still 80% then there is still a large reservoir of potential carriers and you don't have herd immunity.

For most of history what people expected out of a vaccine was immunity from infection not still getting infected but with less severity.

[watwut]

Yes some diseases were eradicated that way. Not all of them and we keep vaccinating.

Herd immunity means the disease wont cause epidemic, if it comes from elsewhere. It does not mean that no single person will get the disease if he encounters it.

Notably, flu vaccine did not stopped flu entirely, is the most common yearly vaccine and I really never seen anyone claim it 100% stops flu.

[picofarad]

Oh, you made a category error, I think. Flu has variants and they sometimes "predict" which variant to prepare for incorrectly, but as far as I am aware the flu vaccine is very effective against the correct strain.

[wbl]

Not "the vaccines" only adenovirus vector based ones and the vaccines were dropped from use pretty quickly once the safety signal was detected.

[jansan]

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.

[cedws]

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]

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]

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]

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?

[BoingBoomTschak]

> If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies

Why wasn't that other person vaccinated?

[koonsolo]

Some people can't take vaccines because of allergic reactions. Other people have weakened immune systems and so the effect of vaccines is low.

For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish people that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish people was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.

[Markoff]

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".

[thiht]

Not sure why you're using quotes, it IS a legitimate vaccine. Care to elaborate?

[electrotype]

The definition of the word "vaccine" was literally changed during the pandemic so the mRNA injections could fit in : https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year-20...

Some people don't agree they should be called "vaccine", in the traditional sense.

[jasonvorhe]

It's gene therapy. Straight from the mouth of a member of the board of directors of Bayer: https://rumble.com/v210gyq-executive-big-pharma-bayer-stefan...?

[goatlover]

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]

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.

[koonsolo]

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]

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.

[koonsolo]

Therefore the COVID vaccines were also not mandatory.

[jasonvorhe]

Unless you wanted to keep your job in the medical field or education or had to do lots of travel.

[koonsolo]

If I remember correctly, it was a pandemic. So yes, everybody contributed, either by getting vaccinated or staying home, your choice.

[throwaway5752]

This was very uncommon. It was also unrelated to mRNA vaccines, it was the AstroZeneca vaccine vaxzevria, and it was based on an adenovirus.

[voxl]

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_]

A nice lottery simulator which had me stop playing the lottery

https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator

[appplication]

Oh fun, I won the $330m jackpot after 3.5m tickets, the lesson is apparently lost on me :)

[natureiskino]

>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]

> 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.

[picofarad]

Why do people keep saying 22? There's more than 22 videos of people suddenly falling to the ground after the vaccine mandates.

Does no one remember? I can't be the only one...

[bawolff]

I said the age of the youngest person i could find who died of the vaccine was 22 (and hence not a child), not that there was 22 people.

> falling to the ground

Someone fainting at the sight of a needle (or the injection), is not something i, or most people, would consider a dangerous side effect.

[genewitch]

i didn't say "immediately after a vaccine" i said "after the vaccine mandate", people doing press conferences, football, dancing, whatever would just fall down.

I misread what you said, as well.

[mrmuagi]

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]

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.

[picofarad]

> pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks.

I am unsure what fallacy this is, but it is pretty offensive.

[cogman10]

> 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]

I think the point being made here is that the risk decision should be up to the recipient of the treatment.

[cogman10]

It always is. Nobody was forced to take the vaccine and when these first rolled out there was a brochure of potential side effects.

[trimethylpurine]

For many, they could choose to lose their jobs and let their families go hungry, tantamount to being forced.

[cogman10]

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]

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).

[tbrownaw]

> 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.