But research like this underscores the point that we should not be forcing or coercing vaccination. We also should not have subjected children to years of isolating and alienating lockdowns.
Personally I don't want to risk my life because my neighbour is not vaccinated, but on the other hand no one is preventing my neighbour from relocating to an isolated hut on the top of a mountain and avoid any contact with anyone if he/she does not want to get vaccinated. But as long as my neighbour wants to live in a city then he must comply with the decisions of the majority of people, who, at least in my country, rushed to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
It's the same with politics: sometimes politicians are elected which I don't like, so I can either accept the decision of majority of electors and live with that, or I can move to another place. What I can't do is decide that I refuse to comply with a law because it was enacted by a government that I don't like or didn't vote.
Even at 80 years old the risk of covid at worst is basically no different than wingsuit base jumping hard for a season. Yes of course if you can lower your 5% risk of death by all means the vaccine is worth it. Somewhere between 50 and 80 is a gray area.
It appears that it was indeed suboptimal for people younger and healthier than myself to take it.
It's a complex question that involved a lot of rumsfeldian known unknowns and unknown unknowns at the time and even now.
What I do know is that the certainty was not at the threshold which justified mandatory vaccination.
Why do you feel confident in saying that? Because I still don't.
I feel like it's still unknown to me how many lives or hours off work, or side-effects were avoided by the mandated vaccines, or were not.
And similarly, I feel it is still unknown how many lives, or hours off work, or side-effects were caused by the mandated vaccines, or were not.
Personally, I can't say if the threshold for mandatory vaccination was met or not until I know these things unequivocally.
What I could get behind, is an unrelated moral argument that would simply claim that free personal choice always trumps collectivism. But this would hold even if say COVID was super deadly to everyone and the vaccine prevented it, it would still hold that in the end it is each person's choice to get vaccinated or not, even if not doing so can contribute to the spread to others or their own death from the virus.
If instead we say there is a threshold at which indivualism has to yield to collectivism, I'm not sure I know where to put that threshold, or if the one that was decided for vaccination was wrong.
Maybe it was suboptimal for them, but isn't the point that when you vaccine yourself, you're not just protecting yourself, but other people? Isn't limiting the active population that's infected a way of protecting both those who are immunocompromised, but in general, lowering the probability of everyone of exposure? Even if you're protected by vaccine as an old/obese person, would you feel safe walking around in a large population of young people with raging infections?
"What I do know is that the certainty was not at the threshold which justified mandatory vaccination."
2 million people are dead. That's more than the Spanish Flu of 1918, Polio, and Smallpox outbreaks in the US combined. It's equal to the total number of flu deaths over the last 40 years combined.
And you don't think public health officials had reason to want mandatory vaccination? I thank the gods those that came before my generation had the wherewithal to ignore this kind of logic and use widespread vaccination to eradicate Smallpox from the earth.
I was born in 1971, a year after they stopped mandatory vaccinations. My wife is not from the US, and she has the smallpox "scar" from her vaccination. If the remaining samples were to get out of the lab, I have my doubts as to whether or not the world will respond the same way it did 60 years ago.
There is no precedent for a relatively novel technology being injected into everybody in a blind panic before a great deal of testing has been performed.
It was a huge gamble. It could have gone much worse than it did.
By the time most people started getting it, the phase iii trials had been going for 11 months.
If there any any significant acute effects, they would have been found.
One can speculate about long term effects but one can also speculate on long term effects of natural COVID infection.
When Polio hit the US, the Salk vaccine was enthusiastically shipped out despite no long term tests either.
It’s amazing to me that people who talk in terms of risk minimization seem to simultaneously latch onto “natural” and “alternative” cures.
Natural immunity is bandied about as if there’s no risks involved and with claims or durability which are unproven.
But so could have Covid, that's why I say this can only be said in hindsight.
Also, the smallpox vaccine was pretty novel at the time when it was mass distributed, that was the first vaccine ever to be mass distributed. You'd have only similar trials as for COVID at the time, small sample, limited time frame, etc. You couldn't have argued it any more/less safer than the mRNA ones back then.
And I'll do my part to see to it that you don't have the power.
Importantly, threatening coercion increases resistance to vaccination, causing people to throw out the well tested with the optional and experimental.
Acknowledging this doesn't mean you have to support using force or coercion on people, it just means being intelligent and honest about reality, facts, what we do know, and what we don't know.
That's what I'm here to do. Some people want to claim we now know for a fact that mandated vaccines did nothing and harmed people, this simply isn't true, we don't know that for a fact one bit, we just don't really know, that's all it is. If you claim you know, you don't, you simply believe it strongly without real justification to match the strength of your belief, aka an irrational belief. If you had that justification, it would easily convince others and we would not still all be arguing about it, but the data isn't there, the understanding of the mechanisms involved isn't there. Not yet.
It should be possible to separate the two topics. Do we want as a society which strongly favors individual rights, that we can push mandates in the name of the collective even if it means coercing individuals to do things they don't want to do?
And similarly discuss, if we wanted to save lives, lower the medical cost, and limit the spread or negative impact of Covid overall on society, is it better for a maximum number of people to be vaccinated or is it not?
Unless you're saying that coercion is only justified on individuals if the benefit to society are well known, probable, and sizable enough to some "threshold".
And I'm also happy to discuss this, even to agree with it, in hindsight, the benefits of the vaccines weren't as big as we thought when they first came around, people hoped it would end COVID, eradicate it like vaccines did for smallpox, and that hasn't happened yet. So maybe it didn't meet the threshold, but at the time it wasn't clear that it didn't, because I still remember that we didn't know how bad Covid was going to get, or how well the vaccines would help to fight against it. Thus, I still stand that, assuming this premise, that the right thing is to coerce if there is due cause that doing so will really be to the benefit of all, then at the time it could very well have played out to be the case. Why didn't we eventually stop the mandates sooner afterwards I can't say, but I'm also not sure this is the premise people assumed, I think many people assumed simply saving the most lives mattered more than a few people's resistance to wanting to take a jab in the arm. Is that just? Well it's a debate we're all still having.
This point seems too obvious to me to even warrant defending. Obviously, there must be an especially high bar to be met before we chase people down, hold them down, and inject chemicals into them.
And similarly you could say the reverse, the collective should always take priority, and in all cases where even minor benefits are to be found, the collective matters most.
When I took it as a 30 year old in very good health, I did so to protect my parents, my older coworkers, my friends that are immunocompromised, and to hope to avoid a bad time and possible long Covid symptoms. I'd already known two people who had died from COVID, one my age by obese, and one elderly. I wasn't worried of dying from COVID myself, but I still didn't want to get it, and I was worried of long term effects, still am on that.
Even now, I don't think anyone can claim a unanimous decision was better or worse, even in hindsight. The positive second order effects of vaccination are not clearly quantified, the negative effects of Covid long term are not clearly quantified, and the negative effects of the various vaccines are not clearly quantified.
The reason we're even all arguing about it is because it's very ambiguous knowing which is best, vaccination or not. If it was obvious one was a better decision we wouldn't be having all these debates of opinion.
Some people have a collectivist leaning, others an individualist leaning (and this can depend on a per-issue basis even within the same individual).
Some people think the morally correct goal is to save as many lives as possible in the short term, while others think individual autonomy and personal choice is more important. Some are in the middle, putting the threshold slightly lower or higher in either direction.
You and me simply lean more towards favoring personal autonomy and choice, at least on this issue apparently.
Luckily, our societies have evolved diplomatic methods to solve these conflicts of values, through the democratic process and pre-agreed on laws. Instead of going to useless war or leaning on force, we put the elected officials in charge of the decision on the effective policies, and each one looked at the tradeoffs, looked at their constituency, looked at the limited data available, and made a decision.