We've already seen issues in recent weeks with the blood clots issue, where the initial breathless media coverage gives way to "the regulators took a look and it seems fine, it's about the normal level of them, and the pause probably killed many more than the clots ever did".
Lay people - including reporters - are really bad at teasing apart normal "how the sausage is made" from "there's an actual issue here", especially with anti-vax propagandists ready to leap on anything with even a hint of confusion.
It sounds like they're not getting the type of collaboration they want from AZ, so they've raised the stakes.
Exactly this. Journalists and laypeople are specialists in making mountain out of molehills
But it's said when specialists also do that (with the suspension of the vaccine when the thing it is preventing has a 1000x chance of causing the same problem)
In all likelihood the AstraZeneca vaccine is perfectly fine. But we should have this conversation in public. If people "come to the wrong conclusions," that's fine. It's the price we pay for an open society.
Yes, let's, but let's also factor in "how many people die if we pause vaccinations for several weeks and it turns out not to have been an issue".
1. If there's a serious issue with the vaccine and we kept it quiet, the consequences would be catastrophic. Not only in terms of public health but also in terms of public trust. Even a small chance of this outcome far, far outweighs the number of people who will die due to people wrongly deciding not to get the AZ vaccine.
2. We have a moral obligation to have conversations in public that involve the safety of injecting substances into people. Regardless of "cost benefit analysis," people simply have a right to be privy to these conversations. It's better for things to go worse and respect this right than for things to go better and not respect it.
I think that is a perfectly acceptable trade-off given the the long-term goal of eliminating polio entirely. I also think it's totally ok to ask people to bravely face a risk to help others (a fairly small one in this case). I even think it can be ok to ask minors, and parents, to take on those risks in some circumstances, and I think polio elimination is one of them. But it's a trade-off that must be done openly, with consent.
The issue in question is about efficacy, not some unexpected dangerous drug interaction or side effect.
Somewhat lower than expected efficacy wouldn't be "catastrophic".
When you play this utilitarian game, you can kick the consequences can down the road forever, which is why it's better to think of these arguments in more immediate terms.
Absolutely! That's why I said it has to include:
> "how many people die if we pause vaccinations for several weeks and it turns out not to have been an issue"
as a consideration.
When I say immediate, I'm talking about this:
> 2. We have a moral obligation to have conversations in public that involve the safety of injecting substances into people. Regardless of "cost benefit analysis," people simply have a right to be privy to these conversations. It's better for things to go worse and respect this right than for things to go better and not respect it.
I would rather have more people die in an open society than less people die in a closed one.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7007e1.htm
Don't get mad at Fauci over a personal lack of information.
> The findings of these simulations should neither be generalized to the effectiveness of all medical procedure masks or cloths masks nor interpreted as being representative of the effectiveness of these masks when worn in real-world settings.
I think complaints are justified when CDC officials turn around and do exactly what their report says not to do: interpret the findings as being representative of real-world settings. A year in and with trillions spent, our evidentiary standard should be higher.
Turning this sort of CYA language that's standard in medical research into a scary gotcha is exactly the sort of propaganda the anti-vax folks engage in all the time.
I'm very comfortable with a tentative recommendation based on the lab data for a non-dangerous intervention. If we get observational data a year from now confirming it, even better.
Israel's data thus far looks promising (https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-israel-va...), but they're being careful because they don't yet know for certain.
Again, "I don't know the answer" isn't the same as "there is no answer".
No thanks. Your attitude is a significant part of our current political dysfunction. Public servants have been replaced by self-promoters and technocrats who share nothing except contempt for the man on the street.