Which is a shame because there’s things we could do to change vaccine rates among these groups. For example find alternatives to aborted fetal stem cells for testing and research (or worse, ingredients).
I have a close friend who runs clinical trials for a biotech company. This is her area of expertise. She has had entire trials cancelled when 1 person has died from the drug. So the tact they are taking with AZ and J&J is a lot more lenient than normal. Not that I disagree with it, but understand that there are drugs that have been cancelled for less than what these drugs are exhibiting.
The risk of randomly dying from a fall in a given year appears to be on the order of 120 per million. The most likely way to fall and die if you are in decent health is probably from a ladder.
Therefore I feel like owning a ladder is probably (conservatively) on the order of five times as dangerous as getting the vaccine every year.
Also, Covid killed on the order of 1600 people per million in the US in the past year. I just don't understand what risk-reward calculation people think they are doing.
The risk calculations you are attempting to make have important variables that are undefinable.
I don't think I was saying that they wouldn't.
My estimate was based on pessimistically assuming there is a new issue every year. That could be because of a new vaccine or because of delayed issues uncovered with the existing ones.
Covid also doesn't have long term studies determining its safety. On the contrary, it seems like some people have serious consequences that don't go away, even though they survive.
People keep repeating that the death rate for younger people is very low, as though death is the only bad thing that can happen.
Furthermore, it sounds plausible to me that as people get vaccinated, before reaching "herd immunity", the virus is going to be forced to evolve to get nastier and infect younger people more severely. So maybe millions of people being vaccinated is actually increasing the urgency. There have been some reports supporting this theory, that severe cases in young people are rapidly increasing coincident with most of the elderly getting their shots.
So in that population of people that distrust the news, there will be crazies that will never take the vaccine and there will be varying levels of reasonable people who decide to wait on taking the vaccine while weighing their own personal risk level with the risk of taking a quickly developed vaccine with no long term studies behind it. The longer we wait, the more of these people will decide taking the vaccine is less risky than getting covid as more studies come out, especially once the FDA promotes it from emergency approval to full authorization (which requires 6 months of data). Some of these people will of course wait longer than full authorization, they may want to wait a year or longer depending on how must they mistrust the news, its unfortunate but its going to take decades for these people to regain trust in the main stream news and the crazies I don't think will ever trust the news again.
Here's an example that used to be farther removed from today's social touchstones: Premarin. Premarin is manufactured by keeping mares continuously pregnant in stalls for the continuous collection of their urine. Should you be free to protest those methods by avoiding the product? Should a pharmacist be free to avoid stocking those products entirely if it conflicts with their ethics?
Before she passed away, my grandma boycotted premarin for those reasons. That was decades ago, before transitioning became more common. Now it's more of a hot button topic, since premarin is one of the commonly prescribed drugs for transitioning women in addition to post-menopausal women. Should a pharmacist still be allowed to avoid stocking those products?
Depending on how licensing is done, it may not be unreasonable to expect people to make the decision about whether they want to work in a profession with state requirements for service before they enter the profession.
Of course it's messier if the requirements change after they have invested the time to become licensed, but it isn't that different, they shouldn't enter the regulated profession if they want autonomy.
Individual practitioners within their field should have some level of autonomy, especially when it comes to ethics. I'm not willing to yank that away from someone just because their ethics disagree with mine. Same thing with consumers.
Some of the reasons for avoiding GMO foods are absolutely bonkers in my opinion, but I still believe in the right of consumers to make their own choices. How would the pharma landscape change if prescription drugs were obligated to carry a label that they were developed and tested with human fetal tissue or cell cultures?
(this examines the obligations and loss of autonomy more than the ethical disagreement, but there's literally no remedy for someone that believes antilock brakes are unethical, we'd tell them to pound sand. The analogy would be better if that person existed, but I think it still works okay.)