I'm not aware of an experimental vaccine being forced on anyone, can you provide an example?
Back when all vaccines were operating under an EUA and were experimental, there were zero vaccine mandates.
After a vaccine was fully approved and shown to be unequivocally safe and effective, it was then no longer experimental. Mandating vaccines that are shown to be effective and safe is as old as the USA is as a country, and this is no outlier.
You have to come up with a definition of “experimental” that suits you, and “emergency authorization” doesn’t sound like very well tested and understood.
People don’t understand risks very well nor can they compare risks very well and that has been demonstrated over and over again.
Covid vs vaccine risks vary quite a lot depending on what kind of person you are.
If you are quite old or have significant health problems, it is pretty easy to demonstrate with high confidence that the vaccine risk is way smaller than the Covid risk (many orders of magnitude).
If you are very young (say a healthy teenager) the Covid risk is very low and the uncertainties of the vaccine risks start to compete where it is much harder to have confidence that for a population vaccinating is a better idea. People also can have different appetites for risk and different appetites for the good of the individual vs the good of the many.
The problems with vaccination are many people pretend they are perfect or evil who are either knowingly distorting the truth or repeating lies or dogma. Also many people desire authoritarian solutions for everyone to agree with them.
What is actually needed are attempts to accurately represent risks and unknowns, and comparisons of those risks and unknowns which update over time as the unknowns get smaller. There also needs to be the ability to acknowledge that a crossover point may exist where on one side one decision may be better than on the other.
People though are being used to turn any contentious issue into political dogma and opportunities to signal morality.
The situation is not as simple as you and many people make it.
I think you may have misread my comment. I agree that "emergency authorization" constitutes "experimental". My point is that there is now a vaccine that is no longer experimental, i.e. is as fully FDA approved as any other, and the mandates in place were put there after that approval.
To the rest of your comment, when dealing with a contagious disease which spreads throughout society, I think that the people participating in a society should be able to set prerequisites for participating in that society. One person's rights end where another's begin, and with contagious diseases, a given person's low risk of death does not prevent them from spreading it to someone with much higher risk.
Presently the uncertainty margins are higher for this than other things in the past and other things available. Different standards of uncertainty seem to be used for this, and that’s not necessarily bad considering the scale of the problem being addressed. BUT the uncertainty is not being appropriately represented by the people acting as information authorities.
This is exactly what I’m saying with a different emphasis.
Some societies will want to lean more towards conformity and collective good, other societies will want to lean more on individual choice and individual good. In America there’s a tendency to split into 50:50 camps between each (and each camp seems to alternate between individual freedom and conformity depending on the topic)
Why is it that the way one camp thinks needs to dominate the other? How do you decide between individual choice and authoritarianism?
I.e. Abortions? Individual choice. Vaccines? Authoritarianism. (Reverse for opposite political allegiance)
There isn’t just one political philosophy for all societies and there seems to be pretty big disagreements (and self contradictions) all around. Most people though act like their opinions are the only possible opinions, and have no respect for different ideas and little concept of the actual issues at hand.
I think these examples are really interesting, because on both political sides, the exact same values are being applied, to a different set of definitions.
In both cases, the "authoritarian" option is supported by for the topic that a group believes impacts more than one person, and the "individual choice" option supported by the group that believes that topic affects only one person.
A person who believes that a society should protect its vulnerable from contagious disease, while also believing that lie begins at conception, is likely to support the "authoritarian" option for both topics.
There is not a lot of “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” or in general supporting freedom to do things one doesn’t like.
Nothing developed 15 months ago can be shown to be "unequivocally safe". No matter what your position on COVID vaccines, its simply a matter of fact that there's no way to know the long term effects of something that hasn't been around for long.
But that's a fair point, "unequivocally" is a strong word. Would you be okay with "safe and unequivocally effective"?
Unless, the vaccine causes a "reprogramming" of the immune system, like some viruses do.
Have you considered this vector in your analysis?
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-educa...
A Conditional Marketing Authorization is not an Emergency Use Authorization. The European Medicines Agency even explain this.
Please provide a citation for this claim. My reading of the EMA page for Conditional Marketing Authorization states: "Its use is also intended for a public health emergency (e.g. a pandemic). _For these medicines, less comprehensive pharmaceutical and non-clinical data may also be accepted_".
The fact that less comprehensive farmaceutical data is accepted for CMA leads me to believe they are experimental.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_... (this is from the EC, not as I remembered the EMA)
It explains amongst other things that a Conditional Marketing Authorisation (CMA) is a real, controlled and robust, authorisation of the vaccine; this is unlike the Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA), which is really an authorisation of the use of an unauthorised vaccine.
A CMA requires data on safety and efficacy, showing the benefits outweigh the risks. An EUA has no such requirement.
Most working people now need one to work or they face termination as loss of livelihood
Stop pretending it's not required. We're not all trust finders.
Comirnaty (Pfizer-BioNTech) is fully approved for those 16 and over, and has been since late August.
AFAIK, any different liability profile between an EUA and approved product is moot in the case of COVID vaccines, because they are out of both normal liability regimes and standard vaccine liability regimes and covered by the PREP Act pandemic countermeasures regime which does not make a distinction.
I never claimed it wasn't required, just that what was required was not experimental.
Independently of that, I think there is good reason to doubt the quality of data gathered during this “open beta” of a phase 3 trial. Two people I know are suffering long lasting adverse reactions after being vaccinated. In both cases the doctors do not want to explore the possibility that the effects were caused by the vaccine.
It’s not hard to imagine that this is a pretty common situation. Doctors have had their licenses revoked for questioning the safety of the vaccines.
Isn’t it obvious this taints the data? If doctors feel the need to stop-crime when they see adverse reactions in order to be able to continue in their profession?