[flagged]
But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations.
It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
Except that we knew by May 2020 (possibly even earlier) that the data showed that the young and otherwise healthy were at extraordinarily low risk from Covid.
I still recall a conversation with child#2 after one of his school friends was at home quarantining after testing positive for Covid.
I asked my son if he knew if his friend was feeling better...
"Daddy, he's not poorly, he's just got Covid".
The main benefit of vaccines is that they reduce the transmission of disease. This aspect saves more lives than individual protection.
"Citation needed"...
Covid vaccination did not reliably or durably block SARS-CoV-2 transmission, especially after Omicron and as immunity waned.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39971395/
The overall VE [Vaccine Effectiveness] of the complete primary series against infection with any SARS-CoV-2 variant was 70.7%. VE was lower for Omicron, at 26.1%, than for pre-Omicron strains, at 77.0%. Over time, VE against infection by any variant decreased from 68.9% to 38.9% after 6 months.Low effectiveness still agrees with the point made above about reducing chances of spread and transmission.
A reduction is still a reduction, even if is not a 100% total and full stop.
The advice I was given from our family doctor was that having had an utterly mild case of (actual) Covid, as I had (two separate times!), during the pandemic, was significantly better in protecting against both future infection - and subsequent transmission - than any protection I could have gained by vaccination.
YMMV. I suspect this is down to those who have had mild Covid pre-vaccination and those who have not.
Some of us didn't even know we had had Covid until afterwards, others think the vaccine saved them from an untimely death/hospitalisation.
Remember that you caught Covid twice, because your body’s immune system was still not strong enough to make you asymptomatic the second time. You likely caught Covid several times but several of those times you were asymptomatic.
It’s incorrect to say that catching the virus gives you “better” protection than a vaccine. The vaccine teaches your immune system how to react to the virus without the damage and long-term effects caused by actually having the virus. This makes future infections much less severe and you are less likely to spread the virus to others when you catch it.
Worth restating because of all the misinformation out there: a vaccine will not prevent you from catching a virus, it cannot do that. It trains your immune system to fight the virus so that when you catch it your immune system can fight it immediately and symptoms are much less severe (ideally asymptomatic, but that is not guaranteed), so that you have less chance of passing it on.
An expert in the field would appear to disagree:
Dr F: "the best vaccination is to get infected"
https://www.c-span.org/clip/washington-journal/user-clip-pre...
(00:50)
> however there were several strains and getting boosters to maximise resistance was important
Our family doctor said the opposite: "your antibody count is so high [from recent infection] there is no point you having a vaccine/booster".
<shrug> I listened to Dr F (2004) and to our family doctor. YMMV.
Yes you will have antibodies from being exposed to one strain of flu. You won’t for the next strain.
Catching COVID carried a far greater risk because although symptoms can be mild in many cases it can kill vulnerable people and it spreads incredibly quickly. At the peak of the pandemic, hospitals were being overrun by people sick with the virus, which affected everyone’s access to care. Vaccines helped prevent the spread of new strains to vulnerable people and reduced pressure on the hospitals.
It think the guidance was more nuanced for teens, but for kids it was very clear.
The vaxmaxxer vs. antivaxxer - like most culture wars - is a US phenomenon.
Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.
At the latest by May 2020, we knew that Covid risk was extremely stratified by age and underlying health conditions.
To be very clear: this does not mean the virus was harmless to everyone else, but treating the population as if risk were evenly distributed was bad analysis, and policy built on that assumption was deeply flawed.
What I would have wanted was a more honest debate about how to protect the old, the frail, and those with major risk factors while also minimising the social, educational, economic, and indirect medical harms caused by restrictions. Yes, that is hard! Policy is supposed to deal with hard problems, not pretend that trade-offs disappear because they are uncomfortable.
Instead, much of the public discussion collapsed into a useless binary: "lock down harder and longer" versus "let it rip". With hindsight, both look far too crude for the actual problem we faced.
It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.
If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well.
And what I said is in a global context.
It was and remains statistically correct to vaccinate young people.
I’m not even arguing the government shouldn’t pull the lever, I just want people to be held accountable for the lives lost as a result, and for the families to be treated with compassion.
That is a conclusion you can have, but you're speaking like its the official correct conclusion, which isn't really true.
The reason the trolly problem is so popular is because there isn't an agreed upon answer and different people come to different conclusions about it. Some people would agree that by pulling the lever you become morally responsible in a way you aren't if you take no action. Other people think you are morally culpable either way.
People repeat this but there is no validation of this.
Sure, children and young adults mostly weren't at risk of dying. It is not at all clear that there are not bad side effects from getting an active Covid infection. We're still crunching the data.
We're just now beginning the process of correlating virii and bad latent effects many years later. HPV -> Cervical Cancer. Epsetin-Barr -> MS. And, of course the one we have known about for a while: Chicken Pox -> Shingles.
And imagine if you lost a son or daughter due to not doing this.
You are making a choice either way. If the opposite choice was made there are different consequences. Its not like you can opt out of consequences by not choosing.