Then why not temporarily suspend vaccinations only for those under 40? Or let people have a choice in determining whether the risk is worth it for them.
>Or let people have a choice in determining whether the risk is worth it for them.
Are there any countries where the vaccine is mandatory? That choice already exists doesn't it?
On the other hand, getting a potentially faulty vaccine would seem to mostly only be a risk to the individual, although I suppose there is some risk of overwhelming hospitals still.
Please just stay home for a few more months so this shit can finally fucking end. It’s already been a year.
Edit: an important factor, too, is that understanding the potential risks of the AZ vaccine is hard, and the average person may not expected to fully understand them. Right now, it seems like even the authorities don’t understand them.
I'm not sure what your point is with the apparent difficulty of understanding the risks of a new vaccine. Are you saying "it's hard, so just trust what the authorities tell you"?
To be clear, we’re talking about the risk of the AZ vaccine specifically. It seems like there might be something specifically wrong with it. Ceding approval authority to bodies like the FDA is how medicine is regulated all over the world. That’s how literal snake oil is blocked from sale. Among other things, it prevents desperate patients from making uninformed, dangerous, and expensive treatment decisions. The average person really isn’t equipped to read a medical study and adequately interpret the results. This information isn’t even at the maturity level of a study, and the risk is that people hurt themselves and undermine the confidence in this vaccine and others.
As for your comments on regulation - yes, that is correct, which is why I was surprised when I got so much flak for pointing out that, at least in the UK, regulatory shortcuts were taken to rush the approval of Covid vaccines.
There were shortcuts taken in all countries to get the vaccines out. In the US, there is no FDA approved COVID vaccine. Every “approved” vaccine is actually under an emergency use authorization.
FWIW, the LCD of most relevant studies show that maybe banning large gatherings is useful, whereas all other measures we've invented in the meantime have dubious efficacy at best - and extremely high costs.
There are plenty of places in the world that didn't implement the "fight COVID at any cost" policies and they're doing just fine. Trust me on that, I live in one of them.