It should also be noted that Denmark has a relatively low infection rate, which is probably why politicians has decided not to interfere in the decision.
Public health issues are further complicated by what messages are thought to result in the best population behavior. There are articles in medical journals discussing the issue of people refusing to take the less strong vaccine, it is an entire topic of research in itself how to communicate with the public. It is not out of the question to strategically spread somewhat false messaging, like "all the vaccines are the same!" when obviously they are not.
Finally, this kind of thing is always going to involve value judgements that don't have an objective answer. How different is death of a 20 year old vs death of an 80 year old? How do you compare side effects like partial paralysis vs permanent lung damage? They are apples to oranges problems. But in cases where we have to act cohesively as a population, a judgement has to be made by someone. Plus in general I think medicine tends to not trust people to make their own well thought out decisions, for better or worse.
Most human have a "religion" template in them and they fill in that with some prevailing common belief. In the past it used to the religion containing gods, now it's environment, the virus etc. (Though with the environment/virus as with traditional religion, there are always elements of truth mixed in)
Are we really going to allow ourselves to slide into such naivete, especially after we have suffered through a year-long global orgy of corruption and violence at the hands of these same politicians?
I wonder what science the Biden administration used to determine it really should sell all those weapons to the UAE. [0]
What was the science behind the West's decision - also led by Biden - to continue bombing civilian infrastructure in Yemen? [1]
Politicians use science as a rallying cry, not as an actual philosophical fundamental. We would be a lot better off if they even tried to practice people-ruling while utilizing the "hard science," but we must all come to the realization that they are simply science-adjacent. None of the ghouls in elected office - in any country on the planet - have any idea how to incorporate "science," into the act of ruling over others. But perhaps the more important question is: why should we even value such an incorporation, if it were valid?
Scientists study the natural world, observe it, and document it for others to observe on their own. Politicians - if we were to be very charitable - move other peoples' money around & redistribute it. There is only a small overlap in these concentric circles and it's probably too large as it is. The mandate of the politician is largely illogical, and for this reason trying to conflate it with science is not just sophomoric and ridiculous - it's incredibly dangerous.
[0] https://news.antiwar.com/2021/04/13/biden-to-proceed-with-tr...
Are people already forgetting how masks were actively disrecommended by 'professionals' at the start of the pandemic while plenty here and in other places were similarly saying that masks are obviously good?
In a nutshell, they did recommend not to wear masks for a short time during the beginning of the pandemic but at least the experts I've heard always provided the right justification - to prevent shortage.
You are downplaying it - they were actively taking a stance against them in the US and June was already quite late into the pandemic.
The WHO themselves were advising people NOT to wear a mask and that it might be even more dangerous to wear one than not to wear it months into the pandemic.. They also only revised this in June.
However, many people fail to correctly interpret official statements, especially those made by WHO at the time. You only ever officially recommend something in evidence-based medicine if there is evidence of its beneficial effects, never out of a gut feeling. They should have said "we are using masks because we believe they work but we're short of them and so you shouldn't buy them" and instead said "there is no evidence that wearing masks is beneficial and it could even be dangerous" to prevent shortage. The WHO's statement lacked transparency but if they had stated that everybody should wear masks in March 2020, the effects would have been disastrous for health authorities all over the world. National health authorities did the very same at the time, and I used to point out that a "King's Lie" like this, no matter how noble the motives, will likely backfire - as evidenced by your statements.
Still, if you listened closely, no expert I know of has ever said in any interview that masks don't help. That's all I wanted to point out.
Either way - my point was that people here can and do often outperform 'decisions made by experts', no matter the reason why that's the case.
> The WHO's statement lacked transparency but if they had stated that everybody should wear masks in March 2020, the effects would have been disastrous for health authorities all over the world
Even if that's what was happening, the way they did it - saying they are ineffective rather than, say vaguely saying they dont advise them - has fueled an anti-mask movement still alive today. It's very hard to believe that it was a good decision overall on top of being straight-up wrong.
Oh it did eh? Weird because that same "irrational" government is responsible for getting us vaccinated before almost any other country. The so called rational EU seems to be having a lot of issues right now.
Maybe lay off the Trump propaganda and look at how the US handled the vaccine rollout correctly. I've been vaccinated for over a month and my family has been as well. None of my EU friends have even been scheduled yet. Our economy is opening back up and yours is not, maybe ignoring what we did isn't such a great idea?
To protect yourself. The revised and current advice is to wear masks to protect the others and avoid propagating the virus. Why does everyone complaining about the masks thing miss that?
And as others have already said, the lack of PPE across the world would have made recommending masks for everyone highly irresponsible.
This might just be availability bias, but most of the people I see complaining about mask use also respond badly to other calls to lessen their negative impact on their family/neighbors/tribe/comrades/countrymen/fellow humans.
This was a mistake. If authorities were going to be lying about masks anyway, the message should have been that they protect the wearer. People care more about themselves than they do about strangers.
Who said they ( as if all authorities across the world are a singular entity) are lying about it?
Dr. Fauci is a wrong expert? I love how when the narrative doesn't fit then suddenly the expert becomes the 'wrong-expert' even though the entire time everyone gets beat over the head with lIsteN to scIeNce & eXperts.
You're just subjectively choosing which people you agree with like anyone else but telling yourself they're the correct experts so you know the supposedly undeniable truth.
We are talking about science, I thought. Phrases like "obviously good," really are not in the scientific spirit.
Professionals also said that double-masking is even more obviously, obviously good. But that obvious obviousness was, quite obviously, wrong. [0]
[0] https://dossier.substack.com/p/the-cdcs-double-mask-mannequi...
But we do give them the power to ban medicines and that's where actual trouble can start.
And it's understandable. If every time a Japansese person stole something you heard about it sooner or later your intuition would be convinced that they're all a bunch of thieves. If you heard about every bicycle accident you'd be scared to ever ride. US cops do hear about it every time one of their number is killed and we can see the resulting paranoia with which they treat the public. And the people at health regulatory agencies get fed a constant stream of medical mishaps.
To counteract this bias any organization really needs to make explicit cost benefit analyses with real numbers if they're going to make sensible decisions. We force highway safety and toxicology regulators to do this. We really ought to have the medical regulator do it as well but for some reason we don't.
-Risk of death from side effects in <65 patients is estimated at 3x higher than the international consensus, based on local observations. Unknown why this is the case, but seems unlikely to just be a statistical anomaly.
- >65 population is largely vaccinated already
-Vaccines from other manufacturers are expected to be available for everyone shortly
-Covid is under control and new cases are few. Risk of dying from infection in a given month is extremely low. When risk of death from vaccine is estimated at the order of 1 in 50.000, (ballpark figure based on memory), the vaccination risk outweighs Covid risk by far. Would be a tough call if other vaccines wouldn't be available, but they will be. It's not a long delay.
-Given the above, it's crucial to make sound ethical decisions to maintain public's trust in vaccinations and health authorities. This is not the last time we need to trust health authorities with our wellbeing.
In closing, summarized very briefly: there is a lot of orthodoxy regarding vaccination strategy in the community of science-interested folks. It's very fascinating to watch part of this consensus being challenged with good scientific arguments.
Because they may see that clotting worries would harm public trust in vaccines, delaying or preventing us from getting to herd immunity.
Because they may see the number of people tested for blood clots, indicating the number is much higher than 1 in a million.
Because they may see that trading a week of paused administration at this point is a reasonable price to pay to ensure we get to herd immunity.
mRNA vaccines are apparently better and don't seem to have serious side effects, so only using those is correct if it doesn't delay immunity too long.
According to the article, this might cause a 4 weeks delay: currently Denmark has around 2 deaths per day, thus possibly causing 60 additional deaths, which would match a vaccine death rate of 1/100000.
Denmark has a 6 million population, and it seems AstraZeneca kills around 1/1000000 so it seems COVID is only 10x more lethal than the vaccine in the general population.
However death rates for COVID are much higher in the elderly while vaccine clot rates are much higher in young people, so the AstraZeneca vaccine might be more lethal in present day Denmark for young people.
Even among elderly people they can eliminate their COVID risk by isolating but they would be forced to take the vaccine risk if the government only offers the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Finally any vaccine deaths can be more easily attributed to the person who made the decision to continue using the vaccine thon COVID deaths.
[0]: https://www.sst.dk/-/media/Udgivelser/2021/Corona/Vaccinatio...
[1]: 1/40000 chance of serious complication with a around 20-40% chance of death, source: [0].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem#Example_with_C...
(a) The reasoning is often either not communicated, or is poorly communicated.
(b) It takes away a risk/benefit decision from people that are mostly capable of making on their own. Don't want to take the risk of a rare side effect? Wait for an mRNA vaccine. Think the risk of COVID for your particular scenario is higher? Let me accept the risk.
There isn't a way that a single model of the scenario produces the 'correct' or 'safest' decision for everyone. Also, there is no good reason that a person of sound reasoning cannot make this decision for themselves.
The decision was made by politicians who only consider public reaction. Public reaction which is decidedly uninformed, and without all data in front of them.
I wish you were right. What you say should have been the case. All over the world though, we see the true nature of high-level decisions.
Sundhedsstyrelsen (the Danish Health Authority) makes that recommendation to not use it, not the government. Some parties are discussing giving a choice of AZ, but Sundhedsstyrelsen has then said that _that_ is a decision outside of their realm. But the recommendation is made outside of the government and parliament.
1. Professionals might have data we don't have - maybe they've used up their stock of AZ but have plenty of other vaccines.
2. They might be making more nuanced calculations. For example, if they've already vaccinated all their high-risk groups, the risk-to-reward trade off for younger groups might be worse.
3. Alternately, they might be being more conservative than you and I. I'm expecting the end of vaccine roll-outs to mean lockdowns and masks end permanently and the entire economy comes out of hibernation, which is a big pay-off. But between the vaccine's less-than-100% success rate, the risk of new variants, people who can't be vaccinated, international travel and so on, they might feel my benefits are too speculative to have a place in their calculations.
4. Healthcare ethics can be a complicated matter, and they've probably spent longer agonising about it than we have. After all, you and I are talking about pulling a hypothetical lever - they're the ones who'll actually be pulling it and cleaning up the splattered blood.
5. They might be particularly worried about the vaccine-hesitant, feeling hesitancy is a bigger risk than the deaths caused by vaccine rollouts taking a few months longer. They might feel the best way to reassure the vaccine-hesitant is to be demonstrably extra-vigilant, rather than providing reassurance that might sound like denial or cover-up.
6. Public health comms has to be inclusive of even the dumbest people in the population. Nuanced, complex messages might get lost in the mix. With this, the message is "WE NOT GIVE YOU BAD VACCINE. YOU GET VACCINE WE GIVE YOU GOOD VACCINE." - very simple!
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it" - Feynman.
What you have here is the European "precautionary principle" in action. Whatever you do, don't get blamed for anything - whether you make any forward progress or not.
At 60 you have a 1 in 100 chance of being dead in the next year anyway. A 1 in a million extra risk on top of that is a rounding error.
The zero extra risk option is no longer available.
I've had the AZ jab. It's perfectly fine and does the job. And those downvoting this post are saying that I should be dead instead.
Which then raises the question, why did these professionals make a decision so different than the "obvious" opinion here?