They have been.. — frank

Your source...

The US will share up to 60 million doses of its AstraZeneca vaccine with other countries as they become available

The question was over how many the US actually have shared, not how many they promised to.

Well, none of the VOCs have come from the US thus far. — Isaac


I think that's just accidental. — frank

So you think abandoning less developed economies in a drive to get ever higher vaccination rates in the US is a good policy because you 'guess' the US might yield a new variant?

We do more replication of the virus than anyone else, so we're the danger to the world. — frank

Well, none of the VOCs have come from the US thus far.

Look at where the cases are rising most, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#weekly_table, It's not the US.

US stands at 106 doses per person, India (with about the same number of cases) has managed just 39. Places like Botswana, which have nearly double the per capita cases than the US have just 16, and with COVAX being stingily thrown the scraps and drug companies deliberately throttling new developments, it doesn't look like they're going to get much more... But hey, I'm sure it's all the fault of those damn anti-vaxxers somehow...mustn't let any actual complexity or nuance spoil the nice little Disney movie they'll make of this next year...I'm picturing Chris Hemsworth as Pfizer CEO, tirelessly making money saving lives by stockpiling vaccines in the countries that can afford to pay for them need them most... such a shame Alan Rickman is no longer with us to play the evil anti-vax leader...so difficult to cast a good villain these days...

I don't see the argument being affected by much of anything. It's bad enough now in my state that I just hope I'm wrong. — Cheshire

Wrong about what? I don't see how this statement follows at all from anything I've said.

Has bacon eating simply escalated to unheard levels? How do you account for this anomaly of happenstance? — Cheshire

Covid-19 obviously, why would you think it had anything to do with bacon? Where, in what I've written, did I suggest I thought the recent rise in hospitalisation had anything to do with bacon? Honestly, you can't expect to have an intelligent discussion by just skimming the first and last words and throwing together a response, you have to read. The point I made is that the total number of hospitalisations is made largely from other preventable lifestyle choices. If you've over-packed you suitcase, it's not compulsory to take out the last thing you put in, you can take out anything, it will have the same effect. The covid pandemic has over-burdened our health services, that doesn't somehow mean that the only way to reduce that burden has to be via reducing covid cases. Literally any reduction in hospitalisation form any source will free up the same space. Health services are not overburdened with covid cases that's the media misrepresenting the facts to sell stories. Health services are overburdened with patients, many of whom have covid infections. A reduction in any of those patients will ease the pressure on services brought about by the pandemic. There are specific cases (such as intubation) where demand is for particular equipment and so easing that demand would require easing of cases using that equipment, but it's still not unique to covid, any such case will have an identical effect.

So the question still stands - at this time of crisis for the health services where we desperately need to reduce the burden of services, what is the moral imperative that it must be the unvaccinated who must bear that burden (and do what they'd rather not do) when absolutely anyone using the health service to support a riskier lifestyle choice could have the same effect?

No, generally it's frowned upon to deny people life saving care. — Cheshire

Then what's your point? What point are you trying to make with

As long as anti-vaxer's also refuse the hospital it shouldn't be a problem. — Cheshire

...?

I doubt that's a static figure. — Cheshire

I'm sure it isn't. It would need to fluctuate over a thousand-fold to affect the argument.

The people at the hospitals seemed concerned. — Cheshire

Why on earth wouldn't they be concerned. They're seeing thousands of extra people needing hospital treatment. I'd be concerned.

Didn't say they should do anything. I said it wouldn't be a problem if they did. — Cheshire

So it would be a problem if they didn't? So is it a problem if the overweight, or smokers, or reckless drivers, or alchoholics, or bacon-eaters... don't refuse hospital treatment?

Don't over run your medical system. As long as anti-vaxer's also refuse the hospital it shouldn't be a problem. — Cheshire

I've already covered this, the whole of covid hospitalisation are about one fiftieth of those caused by obesity alone. The unvaccinated represent about half of those.

For anyone below middle age, your chances of hospitalisation are around 9-10 in 100,000 (source https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2020.0982). Your chances of needing hospital services just from being overweight are about 50 times that (source https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/statistics-on-obesity-physical-activity-and-diet/england-2020/part-1-obesity-related-hospital-admissions-copy). So, the vaccine's effectiveness is irrelevant here 1/10,000 risk of hospitalisation is already not something we normally have a moral imperative to avoid in the first place so any reduction carries no normative weight. — Isaac

So explain to me why they should refuse hospital treatment and not the overweight, or smokers, or reckless drivers, or alchoholics, or bacon-eaters...

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2027

the rich world is refusing to share vaccines with poorer countries speedily or equitably. Whereas 60% of the population in the UK is fully vaccinated, in Uganda it is only 1%.6 The 50 least wealthy nations, home to 20% of the world’s population, have received just 2% of all vaccine doses.8 The rich world should be ashamed.

WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called global vaccine inequity “grotesque,” a recipe for seeding viral variants capable of escaping vaccines, and a “moral outrage.”

Some vaccine-rich countries are now destroying excess, unused doses.18 And some have imposed export bans and restrictions to protect their stockpiles. Ironically, vaccine companies prevent poorer countries from insisting on similar measures.

This moral scandal, enabled by corporate and political permission of mass death, is tantamount to a crime against humanity. Yet we too are complicit by our silence. Why are workers and shareholders at vaccine companies not speaking out? Where are the academics clamouring to make the “fruits of the scientific enterprise” available to all? Where are the lawyers demanding global justice and corporate accountability? Which leaders of rich nations are pressuring vaccine companies to make their people safe by making the world safe? Where is the grassroots mobilisation of scientists and health workers to fight for fair access to vaccines?

But it turns out that the real unvaxxed are blacks and Latinos. And Ph.D.s. That's right, the single group with the greatest degree of vax avoidance is people who hold PhDs. — fishfry

Your link is dodgy. The Carnegie study direct from the preprint server is here https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v1.full-text

Selfish bastards.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/world-has-entered-stage-vaccine-apartheid-who-head-2021-05-17/

Spain’s donation to four countries in Latin America – its first via COVAX – reflects how even rich countries with a lot of vaccines are donating a minimum. Spain, which has injected 57 million doses into its own residents, shipped 654,000 the first week in August. The delivery totals 3% of the 22.5 million doses Spain has promised, eventually, to COVAX. — https://www.independent.co.uk/news/britain-charity-canada-africa-european-union-b1902578.html

Governments, if they are sensible enough to follow expert advice will always follow what is perceived by their own political advisers to be the best expert advice, that is what the expert consensus is understood to consist in at any given time. — Janus

But governments demonstrably are not sensible enough. So what do we do? The governments of the US, UK, France Germany and Israel for a start are rolling out booster programmes despite every health and vaccine authority on the world telling them not to. Why would they do that? - The hysteria generated by social media. Tell everyone you've got a panacea, then try to restrict distribution. Sure recipe for a riot. The government's hands are tied on this really, and now millions more will die as a result.

Governments hyped the numbers to start with (and still are) just to get people to take the action they needed to, then they overplay the vaccine efficacy, just to get the necessary take up. I get why they did both and I don't even disagree strongly with what they did, but it has consequences further down the line. Consequences we're feeling now as supplies of vaccines run low and Western countries are using up vital doses leaving developing countries to act a breeding grounds for new variants.

Similarly, I think clandestine decision-making might be supportable now for the reasons you give, but it will come back to bite us later as trust in governments and scientists is eroded, just at a time when we need that trust to be as high as possible. It's a very risky strategy.

If a sector of the populace rejects the official line in an emergency, this can only serve to undermine the strategies that have been adopted to address the crisis. — Janus

Yes. I agree. This is one of the moral questions I think this crisis raises. If your community want to pursue a solution which requires your compliance, to what extent are you morally obliged to comply, even if you think it harmful? To comply would be to cause harm to others (in your view), avoiding which seems like the essence of acting morally; but to not comply means that a solution the majority agree with cannot be enacted - you're essentially abusing your power to have your way against the majority view. Not an easy dilemma.

don't hold with morally condemning anyone who chooses not to be vaccinated — Janus

Our countries are well over 50% vaccinated, but with under 20% of our vaccine stock left. Countries in the developing world are lower than 10% vaccinated, not even enough to cover the vulnerable, and struggle to even get a share of the limited stocks available. Again - really interesting altering of the ethical landscape this crisis has produced. What we're seeing is the powerful making a grab for limited stocks of something to save their own skin at the expense of others more vulnerable. Normally this would be ethically frowned upon, today it's morally mandated. How did that happen?

Imagine this was food. There's a limited supply, people are starving. Rich people, who've already eaten and can probably handle a few days without a meal, are scooping up all the remaining food leaving others, who can't so easily handle the privation, to starve. In what world does that become even morally permissible, let alone morally promoted?

It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out, but I would hazard a guess that the majority of people support the unvaccinated being subject to such restrictions. . — Janus

Yes, I get that feeling too. I'm dumbfounded at the ease with which people accept the idea of a government mechanism being in place to, in any sense, legally require (or impose) the purchase of a privately produced, profit-making product. Prior to this, would you have trusted your government to work closely with the tobacco industry to produce a 'healthy' cigarette and not be unduly influenced by the industry's lobbying power? Would you have trusted your government to invest all their climate change funding into a scheme devised by the major energy companies and not be even a little suspicious that it might serve their interests a little more than ours? The pharmaceutical companies have the largest lobbying budget of any industry - four times larger than even their next nearest contender, and that's before the quarter of a billion they added to it just as this crisis broke. Do you think it's reasonable to assume that all that money has, just on this one occasion, had no effect whatsoever on policy?

I was just acknowledging not everyone needed stacks of evidence in order to make an assessment. — Cheshire

Indeed. But you acknowledged it by making a unsupportable claim, in other words, you used a rhetorical tool to give some force to that acknowledgement. A well-known and perfectly legitimate device...or a 'lie' depending, of course, on whose side you're on.

Why do you demand some special degree of verification apart from what's publicly available. — Cheshire

I don't believe the data supporting your claims is publicly available. I don't believe it's privately available. I have my doubts about it being transcendently available too...

The objection was to the lie you offered concerning 100% support. — Cheshire

Struggling to distinguish rhetoric from claim doesn't surprise me from you. I'll offer a guide since the territory is clearly unfamiliar; claims are the propositions followed by an indication of the source - a citation, a quote, a mention of the origin... something like that.

As to the inference, are you suggesting that it's untrue that media posts treat vaccine safety as a binomial function, statements like "the vaccine is completely/totally safe" don't occur? Similarly do you think you could readily supply pro-vaccine media posts with expressions such as "the vaccine is not completely safe, but..."? No. The sources I'm referencing are quite homogeneous in their polemic interpretation of 'safety'.

The truth is the rest of the public had the same reservations and put themselves at risk for something greater than themselves. — Cheshire

Ah, so you do know the difference between rhetoric and claim. Or are you prepared to stand by this statement as the proven truth about 'the rest of the public's motives?

Demanding respect for a heightened phobia under the guise of reasonable and plainly emotionally charged discourse is the only conspiracy that is observable. — Cheshire

In what way would that be a conspiracy? I mean, good effort at anacoluthia, but falls a little short.

Good article on this in the guardian today, for the vanishing few who actually give more of a shit about sorting this pandemic out than they do about lazy virtue signalling.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/15/vaccine-hesitancy-broken-relationship-state-conspiracy-theorists

You're assuming the public get their information from official sources like the FDA, WHO, or CDC. I'm not here accusing the official public health institutions of suppression (though there is a case to be made). I'm talking (in this whole thread) about the ethics and pragmatism of individual moralising. The majority of the public get their information through WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter. News outlets next. The number who get it direct from the institutions is small.

The point I'm making here is about the actions of individuals. The manner in which we treat others in our community, you know, basic ethics. What I (and the majority of medical ethicists) am saying is that the treatment of dissenting views from qualified experts by ordinary citizens (via social media, even forums like this) is detrimental to the resolution of the pandemic. It condenses opposition to vaccination, actually lends support to conspiracy theory, and causes difficulty changing policy in a dynamic situation.

So regarding...

there really is nothing to debate, is there? — Janus

Reacting in the way we see here, and on social media, to reasonable people presenting well-supported dissenting opinion is dangerously unhelpful. Depends if you want to debate that...

The other issue is that quashing debate about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines has a knock on effect depending on the types of strategy used. If you look at the sort of hyperglycaemic rant typical of the pro-vaccination YouTube/Facebook/Twitter post we get, such as , for example. This kind of rhetoric is seriously at risk of killing thousands more and prolonging the crisis, by making remaining unvaccinated into a moral proscription. It's exactly the problem we see being played out now with the WHO warning...

I understand the concern of all governments to protect their people from the Delta variant. But we cannot accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it — Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus - WHO

Far from the naive moralising of "If more people had been vaccinated we wouldn't have the Delta variant", it's actually the case that if fewer people had been vaccinated (in Western countries) and the vaccines instead went to the vulnerable in the developing world, we might not have the delta variant.

Overly simplistic messages in a complex situation inevitably backfire.

Depends on what you mean by "conflict of interest". — Janus

I mean something like being paid by the industry benefitting from your results, having a personal relationship with test subjects, beneficiaries, or funders... The usual stuff that goes into COI statements (or should do). It's often possible to dig a bit deeper than the COI, which I think is sometimes a good idea, if a lone scientist is saying something whacky... Standard stuff, not a controversial idea.

How do you think the public would react if public debates about the merely conjectured future safety of the vaccines were played out? — Janus

Well, that's the subject matter of the medical ethics papers I cited. It's not as simple as you seem to think. If, instead of being honest about the safety, the public are told it's 100% safe and anyone suggesting otherwise is a lunatic, a large minority are just going to find that super suspicious. Does that really strike you as so odd? A massive multinational corporation stands to make billions out of a product and meanwhile we're told it's totally 100% safe and anyone saying otherwise needs to shut up right now. Can you really not see how that's going to go down with the exact demographic that currently need to be persuaded?

And it's not limited to covid, which, despite the crisis level, will pass. The suspicion is now going to fall more heavily on things like polio, MMR, hepatitis... All of which save millions of lives.

It's an unbelievable misjudgment of human nature to think you can persuade anyone to take a vaccine by saying "shut up, you're totally wrong, you idiot. Now, roll up your sleeve" , I mean, who on earth thinks that would work and what rock did they spend their childhood under?

Overall, nobody's safe until we're all safe — unenlightened

Should be the WHO strapline!

in the meantime, Johnny Foreigner has a variant and I need a booster to go on holiday. — unenlightened

Yes, that's about the size of it. Partly it's good old fashioned selfishness, but partly it's the result of filtering a serious fucking crisis through a corporate advertising campaign like Facebook and Twitter with all the subtlety and nuance of a swastika. You see, these arse-saving xenophobes are the good guys. They must be, they're getting the vaccine.

It's heartbreaking to see all the effort, work and good intentions of all those who did try and nation-build being completely destroyed by barborous terrorism — Wayfarer

Really - the effort? Like ripping the fucking place to pieces out of a paranoid fear of communism?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/09/how-the-heroin-trade-explains-the-us-uk-failure-in-afghanistan

Nice little story for anyone still convinced their governments have their best interests at heart with vaccine promotion...

Large-scale boosting in one rich country would send a signal around the world that boosters are needed everywhere. This will suck many vaccine doses out of the system, and many more people will die — Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, and Seth Berkley, the chief executive of Gavi, the vaccine alliance

A Covid booster jab will probably be required to protect a small number of the most vulnerable people, but a mass rollout may not be needed — Prof Adam Finn - Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation

The evidence is evolving. It’s moving. We don’t have a full set of evidence around whether this is needed or not — Dr Katherine O’Brien, the WHO’s vaccines chief - on boosters

I understand the concern of all governments to protect their people from the Delta variant. But we cannot accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it — Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus - WHO

If we accept boosters in the U.S. while the rest of the world remains unvaccinated, and if we authorize them based on inevitable improved laboratory titers without clinical outcomes, we run the risk of creating a medical industrial perpetual motion machine.
We will continue to breed new variants outside of our nation, which will lead to calls for yet more boosters, and we will continue to get new boosters without any evidence they are necessary (i.e., lower severe COVID-19 outcomes). Our arms will ache, our hearts will hurt, our wallets will be empty, and so too will our brains, as we will have abandoned all principles of evidence-based medicine. — Vinay Prasad - Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California

...meanwhile the US, the UK, Germany France and Israel all start their rollout of boosters.

Following the fucking science, my arse...

The WHO, the world's leading epidemiologists, their own fucking advisory board, the very organisation set up to advise on vaccines, and the university which invented the bloody vaccine all tell them not to roll out boosters...they roll out boosters.

In completely unrelated news...

Moderna, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have already inked more than $72bn (£52bn) in sales for this year alone, in deals for supplying follow-up shots and also the initial two doses for those being inoculated for the first time in less wealthy countries.

Analysts polled by data group Refinitiv have forecast revenue of more than $6.6bn for the Pfizer/BioNTech shot and $7.6bn for Moderna in 2023, mostly from booster sales. They expect the annual market to settle at about $5bn or higher eventually, with additional drugmakers competing for those sales. — https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/13/drug-firms-billions-dollars-covid-booster-jabs-sales-biontech-moderna-pfizer-drugs-flu

How is what constitutes good science to be assessed by the layperson, though, if not by using the majority consensus as the yardstick in any field? — Janus

Relevant qualification, publication in a respected peer reviewed journal, and lack of obvious conflict of interest. Does that seem complicated to you, it seems quite obvious and simple to me - what am I missing?

The majority consensus seems to be that the vaccines are for the most part safe and effective. — Janus

I'd agree for adults. For children (and on the matter of boosters) I wouldn't even agree that it's a clear majority, but let's assume is is for the sake of argument (even if only a narrow one)...

It is understandable that governments and authorities operate on the assumption that, in an emergency situation, public debate with dissenters from this consensus, would only confuse the populace and lead to an increase in "vaccine hesitancy", which could only worsen the situation — Janus

Well no. It might have been reasonable had the government taken no advice at all on the matter. That would certainly be an attractive theory. The problem is, the government has been advised, and it's been advised that this is unlikely to be the case.

https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2021/01/26/medethics-2020-107076, https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/26/what-does-public-health-really-mean-lessons-from-covid-19/, https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/93803, https://jme.bmj.com/content/47/5/296, https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2021/03/08/medethics-2020-106805

...I could go on, but citations seem to be of limited use here. I'm not claiming the psychologists and behavioural scientists are all of a mind here - there's dissent! - but the majority are arguing that a refusal to discuss the serious issues actually promotes vaccine hesitancy. It just makes the government and their institutions sound clandestine, authoritarian and conspiratorial, which are the three main triggers for not trusting them. But of course, why should we trust what the majority of scientists are telling us...!

Some small risk is acknowledged but people are being asked to accept that personal risk for the sake of the common good. Given the situation; given the damage extended lock-downs will inevitably do to economies, with the increased suffering, illness and death that would inevitably entail, it does not seem to be an unreasonable request.. — Janus

No indeed. it's a perfectly reasonable request. It's often the way the debate is framed, which is baffling. It's like it's being framed using a theory of mind we should all have discarded by the age of about three. We have different minds, yes? So in the minds of the people refusing the vaccine, it is not serving the common good. So the weigh-up is irrelevant. The people who believe it's for the common good have already taken the vaccine, those remaining (generally) don't believe it's for the common good, so they're unlikely to be persuaded by an argument like that. They believe it's for the benefit of the pharmaceuticals (or China, or occasionally the lizardmen from the centre of the earth!) and that their governments are lying to them about both the risks and the benefits.

The question is - what is now the best course of action to take to convince these people that the governments are telling the truth, and that the vaccine is in their community's best interests, not the interests of some global cabal? Is it to shut down debate, call everyone who disagrees a lunatic/idiot/sociopath and continue to filter additions to the £52 billion to the pharmaceutical companies have already made in direct contravention of the WHO advice? Do you really think that's going to convince the hesitant?

Yes, but without infection transmission is impossible.If the vaccine reduced infection and transmission each by 50%, overall likelihood of the subject transmitting the virus is reduced to 25% versus baseline. Even if the protective effect was merely 30% in each of these, this would equate to roughly 50% less transmission, which given its exponential can vastly change outcomes of a pandemic. — hypericin

Yes. So vaccination is one way of reducing transmission. I'm not sure who you think is denying that.

Protection against ICU admission is a separate issue, and demonstrably robust with the vaccine: — hypericin

True again. So the vaccine is one way to reduce ICU admission too. Again I can't see where you might be getting the impression that anyone's denying that.

Of course you completely ignored the actual argument...

A moral case for taking the vaccine would have to show that it reduces the need for the use of health services and/or the rate of transmission relative to other strategies, and to a greater extent that other lifestyle choices we already consider morally irrelevant. — Isaac

... If you don't understand my arguments, that's fine, you can ask for them to be clarified, but it's pointless discussing if you're just going to ignore them.

Do you really believe that a tremendous amount of death, suffering, and economic loss would not be prevented if everyone was vaccinated? — hypericin

Yes. Not everyone needs to be vaccinated to avoid that

Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their caretakers. — Martin Kulldorff - professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School

Before you reply, since this thread has taken such an odd course thus far - I'm not picking on you for any reason other than you happen to be the one I'm replying to at the moment - just take a moment to think. I've just quoted a professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School (one of the top medical schools in the world). I've previously cited papers from immunologists and epidemiologists from the world's top medical journals in support of my position. Do you think you replying with whatever it is you 'reckon' that you've picked up from the newspapers is going to constitute a compelling counter argument?

the vaccine arrives on the table condemned, because it hasn't already existed and hasn't been produced by some imaginary artisan small batch vaccine operation. — Cheshire

Condemned? I think you're confusing 'condemned' with 'reluctant to inject the entire future generation of the human race without a little more data'.

Can you please help me see how this is a philosophical topic? If so, to which category in TPF does it belong? — Alkis Piskas

Applied ethics.

Basically it's about making every decision collectively...or having the ordinary system where somebody in the organization decides by him or herself certain questions. — ssu

I wasn't asking what it was 'about' I was asking whether you had any evidence that it was difficult.

Of course you utterly fail to recognize that somebody who is 20 years old has his whole work career in front of him. Not so with someone that will retire in few years. — ssu

I'm talking about safety nets, what does having their career ahead of then have to do with safety nets?

Statistics show quite well that it's the oldest segment of the workforce who faces PERMANENTLY losing their jobs doesn't reach your mind. — ssu

Again, what does permanence have to do with safety nets? The young suffer higher levels of unemployment that the old. Whether the smaller number of unemployed old are likely to remain that way is irrelevant to a discussion about which group bears the brunt of bankrupt businesses.

when you need to cut back the workforce, which would you as an employer start if two persons are qualified: the one who has a lower salary and far more work years ahead of him or the one that has a higher wage and will have to be replaced sooner? — ssu

Again, the burden of unemployment is bourne mostly by the young. You speculating about the motives of employers doesn't change that. My comment was about the safety net different age groups have. Even if older people were more likely to be made redundant it doesn't change the fact that they have a more substantial safety net.

It takes the average person 43 days to find, interview for and start a new job. With 1 in 5 workers age 40+ reporting not getting at least one job due to age discrimination, it’s no wonder it takes older employees longer to find a job.

So? Again, what has this got to do with the burden of unemployment (still bourne mostly by the young even in America https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm), and what has it got to do with the safety net these age groups have?

One-half of the unemployed aged 60 to 64 were long-term unemployed.

The duration of unemployment has nothing to do with the financial cushioning to withstand it. It's good that these people are unemployed. With the young still bearing the majority of the unemployment in general and not having the savings to support themselves, more of the older generation should be taking long term unemployment and giving their jobs to the young.

when we take into account that many Americans don't have savings and the country doesn't have a welfare safety net, then hope you understand who is in more peril when a economic slump comes around: the 20 year old or the 50 year old worker that get laid off. — ssu

I've just demonstrated that. It's the 20 year old. On average, they'll have one tenth of the savings and are more likely to be unemployed at any given time. I appreciate the efforts with evidence and all, but it's still the 20 year old. Less money, less housing security, more likely to be unemployed. The fact that, if a 50 year old is laid off they'll be more likely to suffer extended single periods of unemployment doesn't alter the overall picture.

efforts to capitalize the pandemic are being masked by emphasizing to place the blame on the currently unvaccinated. — baker

Yes. Evidence of this here on this site, where Coronavirus posts have focused almost exclusively on the moral culpability of the unvaccinated, with barely a mention of any culpability on the part of the gigantic multinational corporations risking thousands of lives to protect their profits. Rather, these are the white knights to whom we should all submit in our ignorance.

There is also a dangerous simplificationism going on where the experimental covid vaccines are being advertised and praised as if they'd be in the category of classical effective and relatively safe vaccines, trying to borrow the glory of those classical vaccines. — baker

Indeed. Xavier Symons writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics makes the same point

There are important ethical differences between a potential COVID-19 vaccine and existing vaccines, such as the MMR vaccine. Given the current speed of the clinical trials process for COVID-19 vaccine research, as well as the likelihood that any approved vaccine would be rushed into mass production, a COVID-19 vaccine will have much more limited safety and efficacy data available than is the case for existing vaccines. This, in addition to the widespread politicisation of vaccine research, means that citizens can reasonably be much less certain that a COVID-19 vaccine will be safe and effective than they would be about other vaccines. — Xavier Symons

Actually, yes. If everything would have to be decided that way. — ssu

Do you have any evidence of this difficulty, or are you just guessing?

they likely are the youngest people in the workforce and hence have their work career well in front of them. Actually those who really need a safety net are people who are far less to end up with a new job. Those are people with narrow work experience and close to retirement. — ssu

Again, do you have any evidence, or are you just guessing? In the UK, 50 year olds have, on average, 10 times the savings of a 20 yr old; they're three times more likely to own their own house; and since both get the same unemployment benefit, the 50 yr old is significantly better off. And 16-24 year olds are more likely to be unemployed than any other age group. https://www.statista.com/statistics/974421/unemployment-rate-uk-by-age/

One of the advantages of actually looking up the data rather than just guessing is that you don't end up talking shite.

If you then say, "Nope, from now on the leaders and managers are just "team members" along with everybody else and everybody together has to make the decisions", what do you think will happen? So... you vote? Or do you have to have a consensus? On what matters? Just for starters, when is someone in the workforce capable doing a decision on his or on her own? — ssu

Are you implying that those are difficult to answer? That the need to make a few decisions first is sufficient to prohibit worker-ownership or democratic governance? I should image most large corporations are quite accustomed to making a few tricky decisions.

There are far more lousy or mediocre enterprises than those that go bust. And likely in any organization the lowest paid is the young trainee or intern. Perhaps he or she isn't at the age of 20 or less isn't in the same position in the job market as an over 50 year old with only specific and narrow job qualification and experience. — ssu

I have no idea how this is related to what I said.

You might be interested to read https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/capitalist-competition-covid-19-vaccine-rollout

Hierarchic organizations have managers and leaders and they usually bare the brunt of the decision making as...they are the managers and leaders. — ssu

What kind of self-immunised, circular twaddle is this? "Leaders lead because they're leaders". Your point?

Whatever the organisation, the lowest paid bear the cost of decisions made because they're the ones with the least safety net if things go wrong.

The point about the way corporations are structured is that it's workers and communities which experience the cost of bad decisions, yet they have little to no say in those decisions.

If what you say about the studies done to determine the safety of the vaccines in the under 25s is true then that is cause for concern and I would be worried too if I had children in that age group. Well, I am concerned anyway, I wouldn't want to see young people as a group harmed by the vaccines, but of course I would be more worried if I had kids myself. — Janus

Not sure if I cited this already, but there's a blog in the BMJ recently on the issue you might be interested in - https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/05/07/covid-vaccines-for-children-should-not-get-emergency-use-authorization/ and a discussion in the Journal of Medical Ethics about it here - https://jme.bmj.com/content/47/8/565

In an emergency situation, which I think this arguably is, there does seem to be an imperative to suppress the voices of dissenters just for the pragmatic reason that they create unwarranted fears in many impressionable people, which serves to undermine the program. — Janus

It's possible, yes. But for an alternative view point on the effect of suppressing dissenting voices - https://documents.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/99rsppp.html . I think there's a danger, as Vinay Prasad put it that

The CDC director calls this "following the science," but it is not. It is following the TV pundits. — Vinay Prasad - Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California

If dissenting voices are to be suppressed, they should be suppressed on the basis of good science, not on the basis of their agreement with institutions, especially government ones.

See this for example. According to my anti-Covid vaccines friend there is a league of thousands of doctors in the US, who believe the vaccines are killing and injuring many more people than the official figures show. But this all seems to be hyperbolic speculation (or should I have said speculative hyperbole?) as far as I, the non-expert, can tell. — Janus

Yeah, I think that's the point we've reached. It seems reasonable to read of the usual dismissal of quackery we get from sciencebasedmedicine.org (I quite like it a lot of the time), until we read this line "he’s rehashing the same dubious arguments made by Peter Doshi in January to claim that the actual efficacy of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines is much lower than the clinical trials found".. Pete Doshi...an associate professor of pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland and editor of the British Medical Journal. How is David Gorski (an oncologist specialising in breast cancer) in a position to claim that Pete Doshi (an epidemiologist and editor of the world's foremost medical journal) is making 'dubious' arguments?

I mean there's no doubt in my mind that McCullough is exaggerating in order to promote his own personal 'cure' - same old story. What's insidious is the way the article is used to subtly (or not so subtly) attempt to throw any dissenting opinion under the same bus.

Find some whacko saying something is bad - et voilà - proof that it's good. It just doesn't work like that (or at least it shouldn't).

The other wierd issue here is that the people who would accuse a doctor like McCullough of deception to promote a product are the same ones dismissing the influence of the pharmaceutical companies' commercial interests as mad conspiracy theory. Either doctors are willing to risk lives to promote products or they are not, and with more power comes more ability to do exactly that.

The issues involved in more informed disagreements over safety, whether they have a more or less equal balance of advocates on either side or relatively few on the dissenting side, are beyond the capabilities of non-experts, that is those who are not epidemiologists, virologists or immunologists, to critically assess, and that seems to be a big problem. — Janus

Yes. As I said earlier in this thread, there's only a handful of people actually involved in this who know the facts first hand, a few hundred at most. The rest - governments and agencies included - are choosing who to trust. I feel like that used to be recognised in the sciences (though maybe I'm being nostalgic), these days it seems we're asked to believe the chosen ones have the Truth™ and the rest are sociopaths or lunatics.

I expect a higher level of wariness from those responsible for public health. If even a single expert (well-recognised, in the correct field) says there's a problem, then the course of action is uncertain. Hesitancy at least, certainly not legally mandating the chosen course and banning discussion of the alternative as has been mooted in this case.

When it is said to be safe this means to the best of our knowledge. — Fooloso4

I've literally quoted the medical dictionary on what it means and you still persist as if you were some font of knowledge...

Does that mean that when you say:

Nothing is without risk. — Isaac


that is not helpful? — Fooloso4

Depends on the context. If someone is citing 'risk' as a reason for avoiding something, or lack of 'risk' as a reason for doing something, then yes, it is useful to point out that nothing is without risk.

When discussing communicable disease we have to consider what level of risk the community ought to accept. More and more in both the private and public sector the answer is that the risk of the vaccine is lower than the risk of an unvaccinated community. — Fooloso4

That's not an answer. If the question is 'how much risk ought the community accept?' the answer can't be to compare two risks to see which is the higher. That's the answer to the question 'which risk is higher?', not the question 'what level of risk ought we accept?'

I did not say it ought to be taken. I said I was surprised to here he was waiting. — Fooloso4

I see. So why were you surprised? A substantial number of people are waiting for full approval before taking the vaccine, why would it surprise you to find 180 was one of them?

If it did not significantly increase chances of a good outcome it would not be regarded as effective. — Fooloso4

Of course it would. Most drugs are effective only in certain circumstances, or dependent on the risk/benefit calculation. Not to mention the stunning naivety in suggesting that because the FDA say it's effective it must therefore be effective...

Paracetamol - https://www.evidentlycochrane.net/paracetamol-widely-used-ineffective/
Cancer drugs - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2589085
Anti-depressants - https://www.research.ox.ac.uk/article/2016-06-08-most-antidepressant-drugs-ineffective-for-children-and-teens-study-finds

All FDA approved as safe and effective, serious questions over the effectiveness of all of them... It's almost as if the world's largest and most powerful lobbying group ever might have had some influence over the matter... surely not though, I expect they spend four times as much on lobbying than any other industry just for the fun of it, not because it works!

At first it was thought that there was not much risk for younger people but that is no longer the true. — Fooloso4

'True'? So now you have the hotline to what is actually 'true', not just expert opinion, not even consensus anymore, we went past that barrier quickly, now it's what's actually True. So Stephen Baral is actually lying (not just presenting a different opinion) when he said

the likelihood of severe outcomes or death associated with covid-19 infection is very low for children — Stephen Baral

In any case, as with any vaccine that is considered safe that does not mean that it would be helpful for everyone. — Fooloso4

No, exactly. So each individual should be able to make up their own (informed) mind about whether it's suitable for them, yes?

Well if the whole country was vaccinated, 100% of those infected would be vaccinated. Further, children, who are ineligible, and young adults, who get vaccinated in lower numbers, make up a significant part of the unvaccinated population. Their natural immunity partially removes them from the pool of potential viral hosts. — hypericin

All true. I'm not seeing any relevance to the claim that the unvaccinated infectious are clogging up hospitals, or that the vaccinated infectious are 'rare', which were the two claims I used that statistic to counter.

what really matters is (difference in infection rate) x (difference in transmission rate). So even modest protection in both factors can multiply to make a significant difference. — hypericin

I agree with the combination, but not the way you've put it. Infection is morally irrelevant without transmission (which you already account for in the second term). The two morally relevant factors are need for health services (not the same as infection, clearly) and transmission. A moral case for taking the vaccine would have to show that it reduces the need for the use of health services and/or the rate of transmission relative to other strategies, and to a greater extent that other lifestyle choices we already consider morally irrelevant.

For example, we don't morally compel people not to skydive, or box, or compete in motor-sports. We don't morally compel them to exercise, avoid red meat, eat fruits and vegetables... We basically accept that some people will risk burdening the health services to a greater extent that others, so long as that extent is not huge we don't create any moral imperative. Freedom and diversity are more important considerations for us than the community burden those choices carry.

For anyone below middle age, your chances of hospitalisation are around 9-10 in 100,000 (source https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2020.0982). Your chances of needing hospital services just from being overweight are about 50 times that (source https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/statistics-on-obesity-physical-activity-and-diet/england-2020/part-1-obesity-related-hospital-admissions-copy). So, the vaccine's effectiveness is irrelevant here 1/10,000 risk of hospitalisation is already not something we normally have a moral imperative to avoid in the first place so any reduction carries no normative weight.

As for transmission - as I've said, we've no evidence yet for a reduction in transmission compared to other strategies so it's unknown.

It is the evaluation that changes. The danger was there all along, it was simply unknown. — Fooloso4

Yes. And as I've cited, that's the definition of 'safety' used in the industry. Safety is the degree to which we know what the dangers are. If a medicine will cause thrombosis in patients over 80 it will be recalled or not prescribed to them. The extent to which a medicine is 'safe' is the degree of certainty that it won't. They can't say with 100% certainty that it won't, but the more checks that are done, the more certain they can be that it won't, the 'safer' that medicine is said to be.

To be clear, if 'safe' is a property of the vaccine, not our knowledge of it, then the FDA are lying. They don't know whether it's 'safe' do they, it might not be. We're in a much stronger position accepting that 'safe' is about their knowledge of it, otherwise everything can be declared 'might not be safe'. I really don't think that will help.

Such an increase in our understanding may occur years from now rather than between now and its approval. Where do you draw the line? — Fooloso4

Good question. I can't see an argument that experts in vaccines are in any way more qualified than anyone else to answer that question. Yet that is the question being treated here as if they had. People are being told that they morally ought to accept the consensus of vaccine experts opinion on what level of risk they ought to take.

Note, we're not talking about what level of risk there is. That is something the experts do indeed have expertise in. We're talking about what level of risk people ought to accept.

You did, but you said so in defense of your claim that it doesn't make sense to say that the vaccine is safe and effective: — Fooloso4

I meant that your use of that proposition in your argument didn't make sense, as I've already explained. If you state an unrelated, or irrelevant fact as proof, I'd say "that doesn't make sense". It's not disagreeing with the fact, it's saying that it's use in that place is nonsensical. Your use of the fact that the vaccine had been declared 'safe and effective' to argue that it ought to be taken was nonsensical because the person concerned had already said that they'd prefer to wait until it was proven more safe, a greater degree of certainty about the dangers.

Can you explain how the vaccine is effective but does not significantly increase chances of a good outcome? How do you reconcile these conflicting claims? — Fooloso4

Because efficacy is not binomial either. Something can be more or less efficacious and still be labelled 'efficacious'. The argument I've presented from the immunology experts is that whilst the vaccine is a good risk/benefit balance for adults and vulnerable children, it is not a good risk/benefit balance for younger adults and children where they have no pre-existing vulnerability.

That is a question but not the one that was raised. — Fooloso4

In my view it is exactly the one which was raised. Someone was told that they ought to take the vaccine because it had passed a certain threshold of safety and efficacy. But there's no scientist who can determine what risk we ought to be willing to take, no scientist who can tell us who we ought to trust.

It's my belief that we can make judgements about what risk we ought to take and who we ought to trust, but those judgements should be based on reason, not votes. I have presented perfectly adequate reasons for the position I hold, nearly 30 citations to support it. It's not the most popular position, but it's a perfectly well justified one. That ought to matter.

I was quoting Fishfry here. — hypericin

Oh, it didn't appear to be a quote.

This is from a country with a high vaccination rate. — hypericin

So people keep saying. No one has yet explained how that gem of statistical understanding everyone is so proud of is relevant to a claim about the rarity of the vaccinated infectious.

What really matters though is the transmission rate. — hypericin

Indeed. So evidence of a significant difference in transmission rate between strategies (vaccination vs other non-pharmaceutical methods vs both) is what we'd need to establish a moral imperative for a person to choose one over another. Do you have such evidence?

Literally the hospital 5 miles from my house. From a nurse named Karin Heller in the ICU watching young people die from a delta variant begging people to address the situation. — Cheshire

Exactly the kind of anecdotal evidence we've been trying to stop anti-vaxxers from using to spread disinformation.

In the UK at 40% of anything that occurs is likely to some one vaccinated. It is a function the populations vaccination rate — Cheshire

Yes, it is. What difference does that make to a claim that it is the unvaccinated who are clogging hospitals? And yes, things might be different in the US, or they might not. We don't know do we, because you're too lazy to actually look up any evidence for us to discuss.

Letting people make up their own minds does not entail justifying their bad ideas — Cheshire

We haven't established that they're bad ideas yet.

We are not dealing with quantum mechanics. The measurement does not alter what is being measured. The safety of a product and the determination of its safety are not the same. A product does not become safer because it is approved. It is approved because it has been shown to be safe. It is not its safety that changed, it is rather our degree of certainty of its safety that may change. — Fooloso4

Safety –a measure of the probability of an adverse outcome and its severity associated with using a medicine or technology in a given situation — McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine

The context is whether he or others who are concerned for the safety of the vaccine should wait for FDA approval. — Fooloso4

Yes. And the argument is that waiting will increase the safety by decreasing the uncertainty (risk). As I said, safety and efficacy are not binomial, everything is only ever some given level of safety. Some people (like @180 Proof) want to wait for a higher level of safety, a greater degree of certainty. The question is what qualifies the FDA to determine what level of safety people ought to accept?

you require proof the covid vaccine is not an extraordinary case. — Cheshire

Why would I require proof that it's not an extraordinary case?

It is a demand for deductive evidence for the unknown outcome of a probabilistic trial awaiting inductive corroboration. It is a function of the amount of time that has passed; that makes the request impossible to meet. — Cheshire

Yep. Which is why I wouldn't demand that it's met. I'm not demanding anything here. It's other people doing the demanding, I'm happy to just let people make up their own minds.

If you take a Bayesian approach the number of currently healthy vaccinated people increasing at a steady rate should be reasonably compelling. Th number of unhealthy unvaccinated people clogging hospitals in places should also be reasonably compelling. — Cheshire

Why? With an increase in vaccine uptake we'd expect an increase in healthy vaccinated people in all cases (except the vaccine actually being lethal). Increasing numbers of healthy vaccinated people tells us nothing.

Where's your evidence for "The number of unhealthy unvaccinated people clogging hospitals in places ". In the UK 40% of hospitalisations related to covid are among the vaccinated.

Prove to me what happens to me in the future. Can't be done. — Cheshire

No one is asking anyone to prove what will happen in the future. I don't know where you're getting this from.

The degree of certainty of its safety does not make it more safe — Fooloso4

Ludicrous. I advise risk analysts. Safety is entirely measured in terms of certainty. If anyone is 100% certain of a negative effect it is mitigated. The remaining measure of safety is exactly the degree to which we are uncertain about the negative effect. We don't give drug to people where we know they will cause harm, we do so where we're uncertain if they will or not, a risk.

The millions of shots is evidence of safety and efficacy. That is not the same thing as saying this evidence alone is sufficient for the FDA to make its determination. Does this really need to be explained to you? — Fooloso4

It's not you explaining it to me. You suggested that it was evidence of the safety of the vaccine in the context of the FDAs work on safety...

Taking things out of context can change the meaning. — Fooloso4

Yeah right!

Regarding the article you cited,

"a higher percentage of breakthroughs may simply reflect that fully vaccinated people are a bigger chunk of the population," — frank

Yeah. I think that's exactly why we're seeing the higher percentages.

The point was about restriction on movement. In that context it was claimed that the vaccinated infected are rare. They're not. They're about 40% of all infected, if the hospitalisation figures are even close to representative of infection. If breakthroughs are rare, yet comprise 40% of all hospitalisation, then we must conclude that unvaccinated infection is rare also, or we must argue that vaccinated people are more massively likely to be hospitalised post infection.

You requested evidence for a causal relationship between vaccine hesitation and population harm. — Cheshire

Well then I wasn't clear enough. I wanted you to support your claim that...

It is a case where being wrong negatively effects others; made worse by distribution to others that might have otherwise decided correctly. — Cheshire

'It' being the take up of the covid vaccine. Evidence would therefore have to apply to the covid vaccine. As I've said multiple times, I'm a staunch supporter of most vaccination programs. I think they save millions of lives and in most cases anti-vax campaigners are dangerous. That doesn't mean I'm just going to blindly throw my support behind every vaccine going. So to support your claim you need evidence from this vaccine, because our disagreement is entirely and only about this vaccine.