McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis
npr.org
npr.org
Well... have you seen the news lately?
Opioids are just the most obvious and egregious example of how the system is abusively hostile.
Hunter Biden pardoned, Trump’s convictions not resulting in punishment, high ranking executives getting bonuses for layoffs, etc…
My bad. I see you were disagreeing with the poster sarcastically.
Became a full blown addict after getting prescribed for the subsequent back injury.
She lost everything, disappeared, became a homeless addict drifting from DC to Baltimore to NYC and back, until she died of an overdose of heroin in a parking lot of a 7-11 in DC in December 2015. Her story and the impact on me and my 4 siblings is a drop in an ocean of suffering these smug assholes inflicted on this country.
This slap on the wrist is an insult to all of us, especially us Appalachians, who saw this starting in the 90s and got ignored because “hillbillies are genetically prone to addiction” as Purdue told the FDA.
How do companies like McKinsey get away with this?
Money. Any other questions?
He's also not old money or especially supportive of old money; he's just some script kiddy who scammed his way to the top on the back of the kind of confidence that tends to only come when you're built like an NFL lineman but can also read documentation. The seethe is easy to understand.
Joe Biden just pardoned his son from crimes that would have gotten you and me in jail already.
Similarly, your Clintons, Bushs, Blairs, Bidens, Trumps, none of them or their friends and family will ever see a day in jail no matter their crimes. That's influence money alone can't buy. Those are the 1% of the 1%. They can kill or pardon people, start and end wars without answering to anyone.
Kim Dotcom is a nobody compared or those guys.
The only crime there is evidence he committed is never prosecuted against regular people, so it's the exact opposite of what you claim.
It was a witch hunt from the start.
It's like asking why money didn't work for Bernie Madoff but it has worked for Jake Paul and other crypto scammers. Bernie stole from the rich.
Because of judiciary, regulatory and congressional capture, of course. This means you it's gotten away with unless someone like Luigi martyrs themselves.
> Today’s resolution marks the first time a management consulting firm has been held criminally responsible for advice resulting in the commission of a crime by a client and reflects the Justice Department’s ongoing efforts to hold actors accountable for their roles in the opioid crisis. The resolution is also the largest civil recovery for such conduct.
> Additionally, a former McKinsey senior partner who worked on Purdue matters has been charged with obstruction of justice in federal court in Abingdon, Virginia. Martin E. Elling, 60, a U.S. citizen currently residing in Bangkok, Thailand, has been charged with one count of knowingly destroying records, documents and tangible objects with the intent to impede, obstruct and influence the investigation and proper administration of a matter within the jurisdiction of the Justice Department. Elling has agreed to plead guilty and is expected to appear in federal court in Abingdon to enter his plea and for sentencing at later dates.
…
> Elling faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine up to $250,000 for the obstruction of justice charge
All I ask is that the leadership of McKinsey be treated to that same standard. Let their golden parachutes be literal.
The broader cultural impact of them (and of the war guilt) imposed on Germany landed fairly well, though. Unfortunately, it is possible that it might have landed less well if the punishments actually fit the crimes.
Observe and contrast it to Japan's take on its war guilt, and its less-than-enthusiastic attitude towards taking responsibility.
Yeah, Martin Elling made 2 million in political donations over the years: https://www.businessinsider.com/mckinsey-company-oxycontin-d...
> During the past two decades, Elling has spread nearly $2 million among dozens of federal-level political committees, almost all Democratic. The political committees of President Joe Biden and dozens of US Senate and House candidates have benefited from Elling's contributions.
Viewed in isolation, the atrocities committed by these men deserve punishment. But in the bigger picture, the function these trials serve is for the institution in charge to be able to say "see? We do hold ourselves accountable" even though the vast majority of war crimes went uninvestigated and unpunished.
More heads, and more important heads, should roll. Not just that of one fall guy. Tens of thousands of deaths every year, and even more lives ruined. But we all know what side the US government is on, so I'm not holding my breath.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings
I keep reading people who say, over and over again, that the war on drugs is a failure and that it's a mistake to try criminally prosecute suppliers and send them to prison. People will always find a way to get the drugs if they want them, we're told.
But then I see the same people turn around that McKinsey is responsible for millions of deaths from the opioid crisis, and the execs involved should be held criminally responsible.
It's hard to reconcile the calls for criminal prosecution against McKinsey execs with the argument that drugs should be legalized and that we shouldn't go after other suppliers of drugs.
I see the claim made often, it even commonly pops up on HN. The claim is that the War on Drugs is a failure, because any prohibition efforts are doomed. Laws against a substance merely push it into the criminal sector and don't actually disrupt the supply. So the only outcome is that we get more crime and suffering, but the amount of people using the drug doesn't change.
We saw a similarly argument often used when marijuana legalization was being discussed - legalization wouldn't actually impact the number of people who used the drugs, because prohibition laws don't stop people from acquiring a substance. Naturally, the validity of marijuana legalization goes well beyond it's impact on the number of users, but there were many claims that it wouldn't impact the number of users.
Of course, one can make the argument that the War on Drugs is a good thing but that it's implementation has often been wrong (for instance, that there should be more effort made on going after suppliers rather than users). But it's very common to see people claim that any attempts at prohibition are doomed to failure and cause more harm with little to no benefit.
Edit: To give an example, here's a HN discussion where most of the people are in favor of fully legalizing all drugs:
humans will do drugs. you have to start there. no matter what you try and “prohibit” this is your ground zero. from here you can decide which policy has the greatest chance of “success” once you define what success means to you.
People get these mixed up and use them interchangeably but they're very different. There will (and should) never be heroin shops that look like Apple stores like there are for weed.
Decrim can be for production, distribution and possession but people generally use it to mean possession. That means that possession of amounts for personal use are not a criminal matter, which makes sense if we see it as an addiction that needs to be treated. In that scenario, production and distribution can be (and often are) illegal.
There are other nuances in how to handle decriminalization in terms of social services offered and how to disrupt demand.
Life long customer.
That’s BS. OxyContin addicts tend to experience withdrawal symptoms before the recommended 12 hours is up, they also develop tolerance, so they end up requiring larger and larger dosage with increasing frequency. You’re not going to sustainably live a long, happy and productive life even if you have a cheap, steady, relatively clean supply of it.
Both would be heavily regulated if they were new prescription medications.
Ignoring everything else, do you really fail to see how bribing doctor to lie to people about the nature of highly addictive drugs is different from a consensual transaction between two adults?
Patients typically have to trust a doctor; the definition of consent in those circumstances is very strict, side effects have to be declared etc etc. Any abuse of that consent, like in this case, must be treated like a crime.
Whereas when it comes to individuals deciding on their own to experience something, it's all about personal responsibility.
> Whereas when it comes to individuals deciding on their own to experience something, it's all about personal responsibility.
The problem with this framing (and some of the other comments have used this framing as well) is acting as if other drugs would not have the same issues as opioids. But if anything, the opioid epidemic has shown the opposite to be the case - people irresponsibly push drugs onto people even when access is limited to a group like doctors who are supposed to be well educated and discerning.
> blue collar crime
Elites never face personal consequences beyond fines, maybe expect when they defraud investors.
If you want to kill people and get away with it, just form a corporation and have your CxO and SVP staff make decisions that kill people.
Note this only works for indirect deaths. If you form a corporation and then order a hit on someone, that's still illegal and you'll still go to jail. If you form a corporation, build a coal power plant that follows all regulations, and the particulate pollution sends a few hundred people to their early deaths that's fine.
As long as housing and mental health remains an open issue, personally I'd rather have them consume stuff made by an actual pharmaceutical company at pharmaceutical grade instead of completely unregulated dark market stuff that can have absolutely wild (and deadly!) swings in dosage, even from the same batch.
I'm probably casting a wide net since my sample size is large, and I'm sure there are great consultants at these places who have spent more than a few months on something, and could do good work in tech or hardware. But so far for me it's something like 1/70.
Maybe I'm just that asshole interviewer.
Do they give money out at these lunches??
Some people have argued on HN that the consultants are cya and political support for things the management class allready know they want. That seem about right.
That is the most valuable job in virtually every profitable industries including tech.
I know that I have only so much brain power to spend a day. I can work longer, but at best you're going to get more grind, not quality.
I keep wondering if these consultants could accomplish as much in fewer hours if they weren't so intent on being the one who puts in so many hours.
I know almost nothing about what they do so I'm just guessing. But I find it hard to square so much effort with results that don't seem to merit it.
It is easier to work longer hours when a hotel takes care of everything for you, but if you’re bragging about how little sleep you get you’re just teetering on the edge of burnout and American Psycho neuroticism.
What they really mean by 100 hours per week or whatever is that they respond to emails or chat on slack at all hours.
And while that's "working" in a way, it doesn't mean doing deep focused work for anything close to that number of hours. It just means they're on call, or else that work is their social life and they spend their free time chatting/hanging out with coworkers.
You can see this on social media with people who claim to work 100 hours and yet they clearly spend hours per day on twitter/instagram, go to the gym every day, go to parties, go on dates, travel, etc. The numbers obviously don't add up. I'd bet a lot of these people actually work less than the typical 9 to 5 engineer. It's more about being part of a sub-culture than anything else.
People who have actually worked crazy hours doing focused work like engineering for periods of time know that it's not sustainable long term. Your body and mind start failing you in various ways. Creativity and problem solving take a nose dive. You can do it for awhile but it becomes counter-productive before long.
They described it as up or out where you really have to grind long hours and the career is in sales and management not as a consultant really.
The sales and management part only really comes in after you’ve passed the team manager level which is fairly advanced.
That is an interesting comment. I think you are right. Probably more of a baseline competency but extraordinary 'soft skills'?
I meant team manager as included in 'sales'. Where I've worked as consultant (warm body, not a real consultant) team managers were essentially sales people.
And luck, tbh. It’s not too different from a typical org except career velocity is fairly fast and does not depend on vacancies opening up above you.
Flanges up well after "Ready. Fire. Aim!"
I don't think strategy advice is worth much unless it's coming from people who stuck around and lived with the consequences (i.e, tested their ideas against reality).
I disagree with this, but I definitely understand your argument. I just don't see how someone who oscillates back and forth from various clients, even if they're all in the same industry, can get enough deep background to be able to coherently make recommendations about business strategy.
Still is though right? Just now you have enough experience to be wise enough to know what is important.
https://www.trialguides.com/products/from-good-hands-to-boxi...
Here's the thing: these firms are set up as partnerships meaning each of the partners (but really the senior partners) has their own little world enabled by their equity and voting power. They each have their own spin on the "values," risk tolerance, communication style, "followers," etc.
Trying to paint the entire firm with the same brush is naive. Like anything else, there are good and there are bad
Plenty of good smart people at each of these firms just trying to do good work and "make it." Then you have the sociopaths willing to trade lives for their own gain who have the benefit of hiding behind brand equity and human shields (aka the other partners)
I don’t care what your values are - if you work for McKinsey you are a piece of shit simple as
Unlike in a tech company where the whole company is building a product, consulting companies are thousands of teams doing projects in a small isolated bubble.
What generates that? How much of it is consulting?
Let's assume 2,000 working hours per year, 80% utilization at $150/hr, and 40,000 employees (worldwide) — that's $9.6B.
- Executives want to do cross-functional changes. (E.g., introduce new ERP software)
- External ruthless assessment of head count and subsequent slashing.
- Body leasing. (quasi-employees that are not on the books as employees)
Mostly in medium-sized and larger orgs where there’s too much cruft.
"We can't figure out who to blame because responsibility is so diffuse, so let's make everyone 100% responsible" makes as much sense as "we can't figure out who the murderers are so let's lock up anyone who vaguely looks like a gangster"[1].
More to the point, it's unclear whether this actually applies in this case. At the very least, you can confine responsibility to the consulting engagements they did with opioid producers. The value McKinsey & Company provides in their management consulting engagements might be questionable, but it's a stretch to claim their engagements with some random fortune 500 (non-pharma) company contributed to the opioid crisis, or need to be punished.
When you look at pentagon leaders and afg/iraq or Wall St CEOs and 2008 gfc or the Pope and the peado army or linux kernel maintainers and serious security bugs found everyday the commonality is Complexity.
No one is fit the more complex things gets. So even though we get Tahrir Square once in a while, decade later we still have Generals in charge.
Scaling has become easy but scaling without unintended costs and consequences the past few decades have shown is complex.
How should society collectively administer punishment to a large complex network of individuals with varying degrees of power and involvement? Reparations and the Nuremberg Trials / Tokyo Trial come to mind for WWII Axis powers. 500k deaths from opiods (taken from top comment) is comparable to the casualties from WWII, within a soberingly low amount of significant digits. Japan was occupied and could not have a military for some time.
Curious if there are other ideas of how to tackle punishment of businesses (not Luigi'ing it).
People want simple and quick solutions. And they dont like answers they dont want to hear. Specifically about what behavior is rewarded and incentivized. As Veblen pointed out a hundred years ago, the flaw with Marx is not that there are exploiters and the exploited, its that there is the Leisure class and everyone else who given a choice wants that lifestyle.
The entire media and edu system promote consumption, wealth and status accumulation 24x7. When you are constantly hit with these signals punishing a few people here and there is just for show.
Start at the top. Move down. Heavy is the head, as they say.
When the big bucks go to the very top for a successful year, the penalty should also go to the very top when shit hits the fan. When the CEO/CIO/COO's bonuses are on the hook, I suspect you will suddenly see a great urgency/importance being assigned to doing things correctly and greater penalty being levied down the ranks for doing things wrongly.
These people had too much carrot, time to balance it out with some stick.
Are you saying that is not happening now?
Please explain your previous statement you posted on that topic, which I asked you to explain but you failed to answer, because I really want to understand how the twisted minds of people like you work, and how you justify such extreme cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy, blatant racism, and cold blooded profiteering murderers, including Brian Thompson, Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, and George Zimmerman?
Daily Show Accuses Right of Hypocrisy With Montage of Pundits Condemning CEO Killer and Celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse:
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/daily-show-accuses-right-of-hypo...
The Daily Show posted a video of right-wing pundits condemning the praise of the CEO shooter, and juxtaposed it with footage of Kyle Rittenhouse being praised.
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York last week has controversially been celebrated by some who are frustrated with the state of the health insurance industry in the country. That praise has been met with harsh criticism from both Republicans and Democrats.
On Wednesday, The Daily Show published a montage of Fox News pundits criticizing those who are praising accused shooter Luigi Mangione. Directly next to montage, however, was footage of Rittenhouse being introduced at a Turning Point USA event — giving the impression that the pundits are actually calling out the praise for the 21-year-old who killed two protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020.
“Fox News talking about Luigi Mangione, but make the footage Kyle Rittenhouse,” the tweet said.
The video began with Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk saying on stage, “Let’s get loud for Kyle Rittenhouse.” Seconds later, a clip of Sean Hannity talking about Mangione’s praise was shown.
“Murder, assassination, vigilantism,” Hannity said. “It’s wrong; it’s evil; it’s despicable… [He] was no hero… Cheering for the murder of an unarmed man beyond sick.”
While the Hannity clip played, the scene at the Turning Point event was jubilant as the crowd cheered for Rittenhouse’s arrival.
“For anyone that sympathizes and empathizes with a murderer,” Fox News contributor Nicole Parker said, “that is completely upside-down in our American society. There are people that need to re-evaluate their inner soul and their moral compass. There is nothing acceptable to me about that.”
Then, one of Kirk’s colleagues began chanting, “Kyle, Kyle, Kyle,” on the Turning Point stage.
“To sympathize with them,” Parker continued, “is just disgusting.”
The only way I think we could hope to stem the tide of this level of corruption is through education. I believe it's really in the ruling classes interest to keep as people as dumb as possible though, so I don't think it will happen.
Not sure what else the alternatives could be. Societal collapse?
Much better for it to be a part of the system. Jail for criminal executives.
> According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations." DOJ officials said Elling has agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of obstruction of justice for destroying those company records.
You might've been too busy trying to force "inculpating."
This is some mental gymnastics.
It was pay a fine or go to jail, but at best, the parent's comment was still wrong.
They could figure out how to divvy up their 65 life sentences.
Why do they get to pay their way out of this?
> According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling [2] "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations."
Corporate laptops are backed up, with backups offsite. I find it hard to believe that the only copy was on his laptop.
From the tweet [2], which has a screenshot of an email presumably sent by Martin Elling, he looks to be directing everyone to start deleting criminal evidence.
> McKinsey's payment, which includes $2 million paid to the Virginia Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, settles federal civil and criminal charges against the firm and includes a "deferred prosecution" agreement. Under the civil settlement, McKinsey is not admitting liability. A copy of the deferred prosecution agreement was not publicly available at the time of publication.
Given the opioid deaths in 2022 alone, McKinsey should be dissolved and the responsible parties serving jail time.
Can someone explain how this [3] is presented as a win, when only money has changed hands. They paid a fee for aiding in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Does this ruling now shield them from any criminal repercussions at the state level?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-...
[2] https://x.com/CoruscaKhaya/status/1676330070472814593
Here is the original document referenced in the tweet,
https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/opioids/docs/#id=zhlp...
[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
*edit, found this
https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... which outlines at which times various McKinsey employees directed people to delete evidence.
Not defending anyone and maybe McKinsey is different but I have never had a corporate laptop with built-in backup. I am always left to figure that out on my own.
https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/wp-content/uploads/20...
Specifically
https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/opioids/docs/#id=skbm...
In an email
from: Jeff Smith
to: Amir Golan
cc: Arnab Ghatak
But Martin Elling (very much his senior) can only get a maximum of 1 year [2] as per the plea deal.
> A former senior partner at McKinsey, Martin Elling, has also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for destroying records related to McKinsey's work for Purdue, according to court papers. He is scheduled to enter his plea on Jan. 10.
[1] https://www.globalindiantimes.com/p/mckinsey-opioid-122024
[2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/consulting-firm-mckinsey-pay-6...
During a project, the live documents were on the teams laptops (local encryption). Only key deliverables were uploaded to servers, mostly at the end of the project.
Lots of cruft (client emails, unedited data, etc) stayed behind in people’s laptops.
Your laptop was stolen? No worries, under 24 hrs you get a new one in your hotel with roughly whenever you left off…
PS McK was handing out 3G - 4G PCMIA cards forever (almost 20 y ago), you were only most of the time…
"More than 645,000 people(opens new window) in the United States have died from overdoses involving opioids since the epidemic began"
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/connect2health/foc...
Maybe a small aside..but it’s very interesting how we as a society took very little learnings from the Crack epidemic during the early years of the Opioid Crisis. It is frustrating how people would rather bury their heads into the sand and reaffirm existing biases vs interrogating the contributing factors.
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinse...
You could have other forms of accountability sure: freedom, life, and so on. For several reasons, we have settled on money as the preferred form unless the responsible party has a good chance of harming others in future.
Try to design an alternative though, go and actually give it a try. And you are immediately going to find several historical anecdotes where your idea had gone horribly wrong.
Sorry, but in which universe? The people who're responsible for harming millions almost always get away with a fine that can be brushed away as the cost of doing business, and they almost always reoffend precisely because they never have to face justice.
Meanwhile the working class people who haven't harmed anyone regularly get arrested and go to jail for nonviolent offences. If I made $50k a year and killed 1,000 people by poisoning their water supply, do you think I could escape arrest by paying a $1000 fine? Would you feel like that's an appropriate level of accountability if I knew that my actions were killing those people?
In this one. I'm just describing what the situation is, not whether it is a good system. How else would you get events like this one?
I agree, and it's already the case if it can be determined and enforced.
Do you see the issues in trying to enforce it in a heavy handed manner though?
Bad advice could have been thrown out by management, but instead, was accepted, and executed on.
Shouldn't the blame rest on Purdue directors and the board?
For years, the government and court systems have been unable to punish these private corporations. At best, give them a slap on the wrist with these fines. People are tired of this bs. It's no surprise a large majority of the public didn't give 2 shits about a nobody health insurance CEO getting gunned down in the streets but rather unified around the idea of our shitty healthcare system.
with a trunk of a big ol' live oak tree
He hurt me this morning with the bright sun light
I'm gonna sue Jack Daniels for what he did to my face last night!
Most immoral company on the planet smh
Wtf? We live in the dumbest possible universe of all possible universes.
Right hand. There are these opioids have been around for decades and somehow they reached this huge level of damage. Largely the same cultures of people involved.
I still think the authoritarian policies used during COVID were a mistake. The level of compartmentalisation needed to look past scandals like this one and still force people to trust big pharma unconditionally is pretty extreme. People should be allowed to make their own mistakes based on their own flawed judgement, rather than the flawed judgement of the likes of McKinsey & Perdue. It is bad enough when everything is voluntary.
So even if we assume that they weight their efforts by importance that isn't particularly impressive for the COVID authoritarianism.
Undoubtedly not all the COVID measures were perfect. Some ineffective measures were imposed, and some effective measures were not imposed. You can hindsight armchair quarterback that all you want, but there’s no question the authority to impose such measures is needed. And somebody (who thank heavens isn’t you or me) has to exercise that authority with only the information available at the time, and the highest possible stakes.
The issue is more that in this case the institutions did act, in a panicky and random fashion that seems to, on balance, not have helped but rather violated a large number of human rights and good principles for no particular gain. The only policies that seemed effective were quarantines, light contact tracing, removing red tape and funding R&D. We can do all those things without unduly coercing anyone, they're pretty minor inconveniences compared to the madness that was actually unleashed.
You left out vaccinations (obviously effective) and mask mandates (somewhat effective but certainly falls under minor inconvenience) — which are pretty standard public health playbook, so I’m assuming those aren’t considered part of the madness.
The lockdowns were pretty crazy, but recall their goal was mostly to avoid the breakdown of the entire health care system pre-vaccination. There wasn’t any precedent for how to do that.
The authoritarian tactics used to impose both of those were ineffective, or at least can't be justified on the evidence. Otherwise all the people trying to justify their brush with their inner Nazi would be able to put up a good argument for what they advocated for.
Both measures failed to stop the spread of COVID, the evidence they had any effect on the number of people who eventually caught it is hard to some up with even as a thought experiment (elsewhere in the thread Retric theorised that the change in viral load would be significant, which is a weak attempt but the best I've seen so far, and also sounds hard to test for). In many cases the vaccines explicit weren't checked for effects on transmission.
Very much a scum rising to the top scenario. We saw the illiberals making a power play during COVID, they're cut from the same cloth as all the other authoritarians. They were even using the old "you're killing us" logic and people making up a you-struck-first narrative is a reasonable precursor to some really terrible things.
> the old "you're killing us" logic
The analogy falls apart when the target is a behavior and not a way to go after any innate qualities that groups of people have.
If you put people in charge who only believe in using one bad tool, they eventually use it on everyone because they don't understand how to do things in a morally reasonable way.
> "the right groups"
It's not about which groups, it's about how the groups are defined that makes the analogy so broken. Attacking in certain ways based on any nationality is worth a Nazi comparison, while attacking based on mundane choices is not in the same category.
> If you put people in charge who only believe in using one bad tool, they eventually use it on everyone because they don't understand how to do things in a morally reasonable way.
Does this describe what happened? What is the "one bad tool"? I hope you don't mean "authoritarianism" because that's a circular argument.
Which ironically suggests a certain authoritarian/bullying streak on the part of the person employing it.
And were never intended to.
Suddenly pain management was viewed as very important by the medical establishment, while mostly paying lip service to all the long term consequences of said actions. After all you can’t actually know how much someone is actually suffering…
So, hypothetically, if a doctor prescribed me opioids I should be allowed to say I don't want to take them? Even if the manufacturers assure me it is safe, effective and they have lots of evidence of the same. Because to me that seems like a logical conclusion. I think that should be a general policy. People should be able to overrule doctors on the subject of how they are treated.
To address the seeming contradiction. Vaccination was never imposed by the healthcare system on patients during COVID, it was required by cruse ships, schools, and yes hospitals for staff etc.
We had a great natural case study in Australia of COVID through a vaccinated population. Everyone caught it over the course of a month, the vaccines did basically nothing to stop the spread. They were pretty much only useful on an individual level which means there was never a requirement for any coercive measures.
This is because of Delta. The original strain was substantially reduced but an order-of-magnitude efficacy jump made that moot. You’re right, however, that we should have focused on masking and air filtration since that was actually effective at preventing spread in close quarters like a school or workplace.
I am from Australia and this is all nonsense.
a) Vaccines are not designed to prevent transmission. They are designed to stop people from getting seriously ill and dying.
b) Vaccines and lockdowns were vital in high-density areas like Victoria and NSW which saw health care systems almost instantly overwhelmed. This was then causing mass deaths for both COVID and non-COVID cases. It was a public health emergency by every definition.
c) COVID was only allowed to spread once enough of the population was vaccinated. And that was because instead of needing to go into hospital people could stay at home for a few days. And even then it has taken years for the system to recover.
> Vaccines are not designed to prevent transmission. They are designed to stop people from getting seriously ill and dying.
Vaccines are commonly designed to prevent transmission. For example it is a critical aspect of the measles vaccine [1]. If a magic wand could've been waved the covid vaccines would've worked that way too, and that is why they were sold to the public as reducing transmission.
> Vaccines and lockdowns were vital in high-density areas like Victoria and NSW...
There are enough counterexamples of people and places where different trade-offs were chosen. e.g. Brisbane. To say they were vital is injecting your own opinion.
c) COVID was only allowed to spread once enough of the population was vaccinated... instead of needing to go into hospital people could stay at home... it has taken years for the system to recover.
The overwhelming majority of people were always just going to need to stay at home for a few days, even pre vaccine. The reason the system has taken so long to recover is due to the suboptimal approach we took where we elongated the period of reduced throughput through the hospital system. The effect here was threefold:
1) The backlog of surgeries needed to be cleared.
2) Many patients had worsened over covid and now required more intense treatment.
3) Preventable disease was not being caught in routine checkups etc.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
When you look at killing thousands of people as a minor consequence you may want to rethink your priorities.
2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now. Factor in that there'd probably be between 40 and 60% uptake of the vaccine just by people being prudent and the authoritarianism was not only a betrayal of the principles our civilisation is supposed to be defending but also ineffective.
And, as the current article showcases, extremely ill-advised.
3) That logic is silly. We don't mandate people do anything special about flus and that'd save far more lives than thousands. Do you consider people who advocate normal life even though influenza exists to be some sort of malign force in society? Even COVID is still killing people. 100s of thousands are still going to die from this thing. But you want to support an abandonment of basic human rights over a few thousand maybe-deaths that can't even be detected? In the extreme, more people have been purposefully murdered to secure basic liberties than that - these aren't the sort of rights that should be casually taken away.
Many hospitalizations and deaths from COVID occurred on subsequent infections.
> 2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now.
False, that’s simply not how infection works.
Part of the difference here is viral load on exposure. Vaccines and masks reduced viral loads in the air, which then gave people’s immune system longer to react. The immune system takes time to ramp up, but so do infections. A larger initial exposure can snowball even in reasonably healthy individuals.
That’s “imposing” and it speaks to the lack of ethics in the healthcare system they joined in coercing medical treatments rather than refusing to perform treatments people were only accepting under duress.
The ethics around vaccination is it saved well over 1 million US lives without direct force, that’s a clear win by any reasonable ethical system. Being unable to be an unvaccinated healthcare worker is little different than requiring people wash hands, or preventing them from walking around shooting patients.
PS: Actual estimates for lives saved is around 3 million with a fair bit of uncertainty and some wiggle room in terms of definitions. Over 1 million is basically incontrovertible, but in a wider context you need to look at the spike in cancer deaths due to an overworked healthcare system and extrapolate not just consider the individuals who get infected.
The vaccines hospitalized at a rate higher than they prevented hospitalizations and the mandates applied to groups who were at virtually no risk.
> The ethics around vaccination is it saved well over 1 million US lives without direct force, that’s a clear win by any reasonable ethical system.
Except that force was used, to restrict the rights of those who didn’t comply with mandates. And numerous atrocities have been conducted by exactly that utilitarian mindset.
You can claim you needed to violate Nuremberg, but the data doesn’t support that and I’ll continue to think you’re morally defective.
False.
> Except that force was used.
Nobody was forcefully vaccinated, and in fact 10’s of millions of Americans never got vaccinated and a vastly larger percentage of them died. The numbers aren’t even vaguely comparable.
The vaccines emptied the hospitals. Literally.
Two weeks after the vaccination (with any of the western trio, or the one China exported), the odds of people being hospitalized felt more than 90% every time somebody measured, everywhere.
The Chinese one was the "bad" one, with the odds falling by not much more than 90%. The other ones were much better.
There was, in fact, many alternatives beyond “isolation”. But thanks to society’s hysterical myopic focus and constant propaganda and suppression of information most people were not allowed to discuss them out loud.
How anybody could continue to believe what society did in response to Covid was not only okay but was the only option is absolutely wild to me. It’s a testament to the massive amount of propaganda cranked out by various governments. Their belief is not just wrong it’s insulting to the people who watched the nonsense unfold.
You don’t have to do anything your doctor says.
During COVID plenty of people chose to not listen to advice about vaccines and did not get vaccinated (and some did die from COVID for their efforts).
No one was ever forced to take a vaccine. Nor were they coerced by the state.
Making hard choices inherently implies options. Vaccines saved well over a million people’s lives at negligible heath impact for the wider population, that’s simply what states are going to do in an epidemic.
You don't have the right to demand that they cater to your requirements.
If you work for the FBI you can quit at any time and work for a different companies with different rules. You can’t work for a company that gets to ignore minimum wage laws.
- love what I do and love the team I am on a my mission.
- have a career at fbi, not a “job” I am willing to change like underwear
- be gs-15 few years away from retirement/pension/…
you can technically say this is a “free” country and all that but it is just semantics
A career extends beyond a job means that you can transition to something related outside the FBI. If there some aspect of a job you dislike then quit.
bottom line though, the then government (which is soon to be now government) went full ballistic on us during COVID times and vaccine mandates affected many lives
When you volunteer to work for someone you’re agreeing to do what they want or quit, that’s by definition a choice. When many private employers had the same requirements complaining about overreach by the government is misplaced, it’s at most overreach by employers.
So yea 98% says a lot about how toothless this all was.
I do not believe you.
I think it’s interesting how many people deny that — almost as if you know what was done is morally repugnant.
It’s entirely possible to engage in net-negative behaviors because you fixate on a singular goal — a human version of the “paperclip optimizer”: we became “COVID optimizers” and produced suboptimal results.
Ethics and morals are time-honed heuristics to avoid those failures. “Freedom” is the heuristic that distributed risk assessment and planning out perform centralized versions — and we forgot that in our panic.
It is fortunate that the COVID-19 pandemic did not rise to that level. Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight.
Or some other catastrophe that threatens us. My point is that natural things do not care for artificial concepts such as “freedoms” and “rights” and “morality”.
But they were and you’re inventing a false dichotomy whereby we had to engage in totalitarianism contrary to evidence of COVID’s deadliness or some hypothetical infinite bad might have happened.
That’s nothing but bullshit, from somebody who was wrong.
We knew within two weeks of most major shutdowns that Covid wasn’t even close to as bad as predicted by the Imperial College. Society decided to completely ignore that data and instead doubled down on its hysteria for more than three years.
Good thing we aren’t viruses and have intelligence and the ability to step back and think through our actions.
There is more to life than exactly one specific myopic focus on a virus. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to believe that the only problem humans can solve for is an exactly one single virus to the exclusion of literally everything else. Massive, massive amounts of privilege to think that way, in fact.
Without a liability exemption, no company would manufacture vaccines, the government would need to step in as a manufacturer. With the liability exemption law, the private sector makes the vaccines while the government assumes the liability, which is a pretty good solution in my opinion.
> In the United States, low profit margins and an increase in vaccine-related lawsuits led many manufacturers to stop producing the DPT vaccine by the early 1980s.[4][unreliable source?] By 1985, vaccine manufacturers had difficulty obtaining liability insurance.[10] The price of the DPT vaccine skyrocketed as a result, leading providers to curtail purchases, thus limiting availability. Only one company was still manufacturing pertussis vaccine in the US by the end of 1985.[10] Because of this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) in 1986, establishing a federal no-fault system to compensate victims of injury caused by mandated vaccines.[11][12]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_I...
a) Nobody has ever said that pharmaceutical companies should be blindly trusted.
b) The companies only have an exemption for COVID and similar emergencies and only when the damages are not caused by wilful misconduct. The idea being that getting the vaccines out sooner would save more lives than any side effects.