The correct question is does the potential benefit outweigh the potential harm? For adults over the age of 40, the vaccine was a no-brainer. For very young children — where the risk was always very low — the question was more complicated.
The European Medicines Agency was even more cautious than the FDA in approving the Pfizer vaccine for 5-11 year olds. I haven’t been following the story recently so I don’t which European countries, if any, have approved the vaccines for children under the age of 5.
"ex post completely safe" is your head just completely in the sand about all the myocarditis that has been inflicted?
Arguably, having a ton of unvaccinated kids going to school and swapping the virus back and forth constantly and then infecting their families could have been a big contributor to how long this pandemic lasted. If you’ve ever met kids, you know school is basically a series of viral infections constantly.
Not to mention the stress it caused to the schools and childcare and thus to the families because exposure notices were so constant, forcing kids home constantly.
Vaccinated kids did this too. "The pandemic," to the extent one ever really existed, was ended by Omicron being so infectious that even the "careful" ones were forced to face Covid and see that it wasn't really that bad, and that all their assiduous efforts to avoid infection were largely for nought anyway.
I got my first infection from my kids attending school during the Delta wave. We were fine (although I didn't just sit at home and do nothing which was what the treatment advice amounted to at the time). Much like school shooting drills, the stress that was caused by exposure notices, testing, and the like was all a problem of the overreaction in response to the underlying phenomenon, and not the phenomenon itself. Certainly none of it could have been reduced by a higher rate of vaccination, since the vaccines were thoroughly ineffective against transmission at that point.
> Are you disputing that Covid itself was known to cause myocarditis at an even greater rate than any vaccine was said to?
I do dispute this, yes, given that a huge Israeli population study found no increased risk of myocarditis in Covid-recovered subjects in 2020 pre vaccines. I also dispute that the comparison would matter at all even if it were true, because the risks of myocarditis from the shots and from the virus are cumulative, not mutually exclusive, since the shots do not prevent Covid.
There is not some tidy choice to be made between mutually exclusive outcomes of "myo risk from the shots" and "myo risk from the virus." In every case where someone has developed heart issues after both vaccination and infection (including in a friend of mine who had 3 shots of Moderna), their doctors will invariably attribute it to the virus, and usually won't even report it as a potential side effect of the vaccine, so they seem to have zero confidence at all in vaccination's ability to reduce myocarditis risk from COVID infections.
I would dispute that in the context of young adolescents and children, as I do not think that is known at all. Global covid 19 myocarditis risk in the year after taking the vaccine is 0.02% and vaccine myocarditis risk for adolescents is 0.01%. If myocarditis risk is at all similar to other severe covid symptoms, then it is likely from these stats that there is higher myocarditis risk from the vaccine for young people than from the possibility of being infected with covid and getting myocarditis.
That said, not all myocarditis is created equal and my understanding is vaccine associated myocarditis is generally milder.
Was the adolescent paralyzed by the drug or paralyzed while the drug trial was running?
Any illness, injury, or death during a trial, regardless of cause, is reported in the study results.
I think the mistake being made was the FDA and vaccine companies trying to placate lunatics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix
"At the end of March 2011, an MPA press release stated: 'Results from a Swedish registry based cohort study indicate a 4-fold increased risk of narcolepsy in children and adolescents below the age of 20 vaccinated with Pandemrix, compared to children of the same age that were not vaccinated.' The same study found no increased risk in adults who were vaccinated with Pandemrix"
The Covid vaccine was not just another generic influenza vaccine, it was the first-ever approved mRNA vaccine. It works in a completely novel way and although side effects in children were unlikely, there was simply not enough data to rule it out completely.
This neglects the second order effects of who the children might infect, which imo is the real justification for covid vaccination of children who are not immune compromised.
The FDA's "torpor" is easily overcome when incentives are aligned in that direction.
There's also the movie "Dark Waters" about DuPont and Teflon if you want to trust your government even less.