No, actually the complaint was that a central authority could, under the pretext of some obscure rule, forbid you access to certain or public services. The same concept applies here, whether it's open source or not.
The "central authority" already do forbid you from accessing certain or public services for the same rules - only you need to provide the relevant paper documents. This is effectively the paperless version thereof.
You may personally disagree with the concept of proof of vaccination, but thats completely aside from the technical discussion we are having here.
You mean just like a centrally fabricated ID card that's used for entering an airport, making certain purchases, verifying ID for a CC purchase, entering the country, etc?
Just a year ago, saying that the governments will require you to produce a "vaccination passport" to enter a restaurant was laughed at as a crazy conspiracy theory, and currently, the difference between a "crazy conspiracy theory" and "reality" is about 6-12 months.
If you are talking about private services, then there are many examples where papers are needed:
• buying alcohol (ID)
• entering a nightclub (ID)
• taking a plane (ID)
• opening a bank account (SSN/ITIN)
• renting a car (driver's license)
• buying a gun (proof of residence)
Most countries, for example, require vaccination for contagious diseases for a variety of public functions like attending school. The need to validate vaccination status for functions like boarding airplanes or attending large stadium events is just common sense, as certain populations are refusing vaccination for mostly irrational reasons.
These digital credentials allow people to conveniently provide this documentation in a reliable way.
It's not irrational for people to be cautious about a new treatment for which there's absolutely no data about long-term safety (can't know the 2-3 year effects of something that's only been around one year), which has bypassed normal treatment approval processes (the covid vaccines only have FDA emergency use authorisation, and have not yet passed the requirements for full FDA approval, requirements which are strict for a reason), for which some previous attempts have failed significantly (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22536382/), to prevent a disease that for many people has less than a 1/100,000 to 1/1,000,000 fatality rate (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.17.20097410v...), ten to a hundred times less dangerous than giving birth.
And you're seriously downplaying the risks of COVID-19 here, of course it is relatively harmless for very young people. But it is seriously dangerous for a large part of the population that is older.
It's not only "very young" people. Did you look at the link I provided? For people 20-30, it's around one in a hundred thousand. For people 30-50, it's around one in ten thousand (similar to giving birth). When someone's making a rational decision, it's with regard to their individual risk; the risk of covid to an eighty-year-old is irrelevant to a twenty-year-old deciding whether to take the vaccine, especially given the vaccine doesn't prevent them infecting others if they get it (see this data from the Singapore government: https://covid.viz.sg/ ).
>for vaccines they generally appear reasonably close to the date of the vaccination.
The MRNA vaccines are quite different from normal dead/live virus vaccines and have never been used at scale.
Their closer relative, the viral vector vaccines (like J&J’s), have been. You’re right about calculating risk, but when’s the last time a vaccine in normal, longer term stage three trials resulted in a higher fatality rate than COVID (for any age group)? The link for the SARS vaccine candidate was a failure that was caught in a mouse model, which unsurprisingly they also did with the new vaccines before the human trials started. To echo the parent comment, these were immediate side effects on challenge (which would likely been caught in stage 2 trials even if they only happened in humans and not in animal models).
If we want to go with unusual reactions that only show up over time, what about the chance that whatever long term side effect you’re imagining from the vaccines instead happens for people who have been infected with COVID 5 years from now? Once you decide to make decisions based on rare and novel events with unquantifiable risks, you’ll find they show up absolutely everywhere if you’re being intellectually honest.
> given the vaccine doesn't prevent them infecting others if they get it (see this data from the Singapore government
That data’s N is a little low, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. The vast majority of vaccinated people in that dataset did not go on to infect others, and none of them were epicenters for super-spreader events. Eyeballing it, it’s consistent with a sterilizing immunity in excess of 80%. If the vaccines turn out to be that effective at preventing transmission, that’s an excellent outcome (it is higher than most vaccines).
It's basically like saying: "the unit tests have all passed now, the regression tests all pass, so let's roll out the fix straight to prod, because it's urgent and we don't have enough time to do the normal amount of staging environment testing". Sure, probably it's fine. But mistakes happen. In any other context, a 1/100,000 chance of error would be considered incredibly low, a great achievement. But in this case, a 1/100,000 chance of seeing after 2-3 years a failure like happened early on in those previous trials would be an incredible tragedy, if the vaccine was taken by people with less than 1/100,000 chance of being killed by covid.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 makes a better case than I can that "a finite, non-theoretical risk is evident in the medical literature that vaccine candidates composed of the SARS-CoV-2 viral spike and eliciting anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, be they neutralising or not, place vaccinees at higher risk for more severe COVID-19 disease when they encounter circulating viruses"
>If we want to go with unusual reactions that only show up over time, what about the chance that whatever long term side effect you’re imagining from the vaccines instead happens for people who have been infected with COVID 5 years from now? Once you decide to make decisions based on rare and novel events with unquantifiable risks, you’ll find they show up absolutely everywhere if you’re being intellectually honest.
The difference is that covid does not have a big qualitative difference from other respiratory viruses, and no circulating respiratory viruses are known to cause serious long-term symptoms in people who were short-term asymptomatic. Whereas the MRNA treatment is quite a different mechanism from previous vaccines.
Separately, ethically it's generally considered worse if a death results from deliberate human action than from an "act of nature". E.g. nowhere is it morally acceptable to murder somebody just because their organs could be used to save ten people. In this case that means it would be considered morally worse if people were coerced into taking a vaccine that ended up killing them than if, absent the vaccine, they died from natural causes of equivalent risk.
>That data’s N is a little low, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. The vast majority of vaccinated people in that dataset did not go on to infect others, and none of them were epicenters for super-spreader events. Eyeballing it, it’s consistent with a sterilizing immunity in excess of 80%. If the vaccines turn out to be that effective at preventing transmission, that’s an excellent outcome (it is higher than most vaccines).
There's one super-spreader there, a prison cook. I pulled the data from the backing rest API (if you want I could upload the notebook and show you):
pd.Series(vax_links).describe()
count 17.000000
mean 2.705882
std 3.670230
min 1.000000
25% 1.000000
50% 1.000000
75% 2.000000
max 14.000000
dtype: float64
pd.Series(unvax_links).describe()
count 127.000000
mean 2.181102
std 1.965647
min 1.000000
25% 1.000000
50% 2.000000
75% 2.000000
max 15.000000
dtype: float64
So yes, chances are I wouldn't die if I didn't vaccinate, but chances are I would kill my grandma if I caught covid.
The choice isn't between the vaccine or COVID.
FDA approvals are largely based on the ability to provide reliable test cases. You literally have the largest test case known to human history. No amount additional FDA testing is going to make that change.
> to prevent a disease that for many people has less than a 1/100,000 to 1/1,000,000 fatality rate
This figure is meaningless. We have a steady history of "excess deaths" and can predict what annual death rates are on average on a yearly basis. This number jumped significantly even with mask mandates, lockdowns, etc over the last 18 months:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Nine women can't have a baby in one month. A billion test cases for short-term side effects still aren't test cases for long-term side effects.
>This figure is meaningless. We have a steady history of "excess deaths" and can predict what annual death rates are on average on a yearly basis. This number jumped significantly even with mask mandates, lockdowns, etc over the last 18 months:
For making a rational decision, the figure to use is the personal risk to the individual. Using excess deaths is meaningless, because if the vast majority of those deaths were in old and overweight individuals and you're neither, then those numbers are irrelevant to quantifying the risk you face.
Depending on age and condition the risk to an individual can vary from one in ten million to under one in a hundred. In your mind, what is the risk that an individual must face from covid to make it rational to take a novel treatment with no long-term safety data that hasn't passed the standard FDA approval process? In any other context, would people here be so confident that there's a less than one in ten million risk from a novel MRNA treatment?
You're off by several orders of magnitude here. See "current best estimate": https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...