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Comment by irq-1 | Hacker News Reader

> Just tell people the risks of side effects, and if they are ok with that risk then the manufacturer is off the hook.

If a for-profit corporation includes a warning in a EULA they're off the hook?? That's definitely not the principle we should use to evaluate new drugs.

If the company decided to take it off the market, when there are always lawsuits about new drugs, what should we do? Should we liberate the drug from the company and let others sell it? The system we have now lets Medical Doctors decide when a drug should be approved, and when it should be on the market.

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You're mixing up a few things here. Every drug has a list of side effects. They are known, that's what your doctor tells you, and then you make an informed decision whether you want to take the drug or not.

It's not Medical Doctors that decided to withdraw approval and then removed it from the market. The approval was all fine. What was not fine was the public perception. Because the anti-vax campaign was very effective. Too many people started to think it's too fishy, so out of caution didn't want the shot anymore, so it became unprofitable to keep it on the market, so the manufacturer pulled it. (A bit surprising they didn't sell the IP or license it cheaply to somebody more adventurous..)

That's how your life can get impacted if the anti-vax lobby gets too strong, and that's what scares me. They can mess up their own health as much as they like, but once my life gets worse because of it, I have a problem.

If the product causes provable harm then company should be prosecuted criminally by the state to determine if the testing done was sufficeint and there was no faul play.

But letting random people sue manufacturer because they have some symptoms at later point in time than the time they took the vaccine is just recipie for what already happened on case of Lyme vaccine. Everybody looses except for lawyers and people loose the most.

You're suggesting a fundamental change to the legal system in the US. The idea that we would depend on the Government pursuing criminal charges... that's scary to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort

Criminal charges in the US are pursued by the Government. The idea of private citizens deciding whether to press charges is widely misunderstood; District/US Attorneys can take a victim's wishes into consideration when deciding to charge a defendant (it may be difficult to win a case when the primary/only witness is uncooperative or conversely even if someone has been the victim of a crime the DA may not pursue a case because they feel they are unlikely to get a conviction) but the decision entirely lies with the Government.

Now, as you linked. Civil Tort's are entirely within the realm of private "citizens" (companies count as people too) to bring forth on their own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charge

I do not want to have to ask doctors permission to get the medicine I need. Make them like lawyers where they are advisors only. If that has a side effect of letting companies off from some liability, then I will accept that trade off.

> I do not want to have to ask doctors permission to get the medicine I need.

That's how it works in most countries, but not the US. Here we have a government regulatory agency (the CDC) to protect people from the ill effects of the free market. I like it that way.

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