Especially please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents like "Vaccination is a moral obligation". They're highly repetitive and don't lead any place interesting.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I don't know why this evoked such a negative response. I will just cool off posting comments on HN for a while.
Or perhaps you prioritise the group above the individual in all cases and think e.g. the Nuremberg Code is worthless historical artifact?
You may mean to say for you vaccination is a moral obligation which if this is the case you are a moral relativist [1] and therefore your moral obligation does not necessarily apply to others.
Many moons ago, when I lived in a community where most residents were of the all-organic-no-vax types, I convinced the powers that be that vaccination was a moral obligation for the (mostly young) community due to the effects of infecting young and old and the resulting deaths.
Everyone got a flu vaccine that year. I was not very popular after that ;(
When people are not on stable scientific ground, they invoke morality. That's what priests and politicians do, not scientists.
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No? Newton? Pascal? Lemaitre? Wheeler?
If I get on a Boeing aircraft, I am indeed engaging in an act of faith: that it was built properly, maintained well, and all the rest.
When that faith is violated, say by the control systems having the RANDOMLY_FALL_OUT_OF_THE_SKY flag set to “true”, then society engages in faith-restoring rituals: grounds the aircraft, leads an inquiry, does a recall, that sort of thing.
What you are seeing here is what happens when a large chunk of the population has lost faith in, and thus no longer trusts, its institutions.
I've long had that opinion - it is faith, in my mind. It's very logical faith, but faith nonetheless. Not in science exactly, but in the morals, honesty and competency in the results of those performing the science. It's faith that if i was to become an expert in the field, i'd be able to recreate their exact results and deem them correct.
Is this unsound in your mind? I'm fairly anti-religious but i have no problem describing my belief in science based outcomes as faith. It doesn't feel reductive, it feels honest - to me. It takes a leap of.. something, if not faith, to trust the results of results of humans. Some science is bad, some is good, but often you lack the expertise to determine which is which. So you logically go with the common assertions and proceed from there. I do think it's logical, but i don't think that precludes it from also being faith.
How would you phrase / reason through it?
However, we have to weigh the residual risks against the risk of death from Covid
But then this made me wonder if there was a paragraph I missed:
Vaccination is a moral obligation
I think it's a mistake to think the weighing process you endorse in the first quote will land everyone with the moral obligation you endorse in the second.
Only if the mechanism of its action contributes to herd immunity. If it provides symptom abatement without lowering infection and transmission, then vaccination of those not at risk can prove counterproductive due to asymptomatic spread.
The effects of the virus at play are irrelevant... long term, short term, sniffles, death. None of that matters to the topic of moral obligation. Only contagion matters, so let's take two opposing mechanistic scenarios:
1 - Reduced infectiousness (what we expect)
Person A getting the vaccine reduces the chance they will spread it to Person B if exposed and/or infected.
2 - Reduced symptoms (counterintuitive)
Person A getting the vaccine still gets infected and can infect Person B, but no longer has symptoms such as fever. In this situation, Person A actually becomes problematic to the un-vaccinated Person B, since it's not obvious to either individual that Person A is infectious.
In the first scenario, your vaccination potentially helps others. In the second, your vaccination potentially hurts others. The mechanism of action can change altruism into unintended harm. This is why the mechanism of vaccination is so important from social perspective.
No, I'm sorry, but hospital ICUs near me are 90+% full again and we're returning to a strict lockdown. Given a hypothetical vaccine which reduces symptoms but transmission, the vaccine still reduces the hospitalization rate, so your un-vaccinated person B will have a better chance at treatment. Your situation #2 presumes that people with mild symptoms will be inclined to stay home -- in my experience, this is not the case.
Source?
I've seen it reported that this may actually be dubious. [1]
We do not know. Since we do not know, we need to play it safe. If we are wrong, nothing will happen. If we are right, we have avoided long term damage.
It's really hard to draw meaningful conclusions when COVID has completely changed all kinds of factors in healthcare ranging from people being stuck at home and eating poorly to opting not to visit the doctor because of overburdened hospitals and fear of infection. I'd like to see some studies a year from now before forming a strong opinion.
> Comparison groups are also important to understand the scale of a problem. To put it bluntly: it’s not very informative to describe people as COVID “long-haulers” if, sixty days after being diagnosed with an illness that is sweeping the world in a devastating pandemic, they report anxiety, fatigue, insomnia, headache etc., without a comparison group!
It may be that the vaccines will be incapable of giving us herd immunity, but they may allow us to keep the R number below 1 with much less extreme social distancing and lockdown procedures.
Without the vaccines, the only way to get rid of this pandemic is through severe economy-damaging lockdowns and liberty-encroaching contact tracing and quarantining. If we can achieve the same thing with vaccines plus just having to wear a mask when near other people, then I would say that vaccination would still be a moral obligation, even though we haven't achieved herd immunity.
Aside from the stupidity of the first half, is the last sentence to be taken to mean that everyone under 70 will be dragged forcibly out of their homes and exposed involuntarily? If not, how else are we to understand that only a narrow group will have the “option” of “quarantine”?
> Pass legislation to make Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin available over the counter like they are in many foreign countries.
That’s stupid. Why would we make things worse by implicitly endorsing ineffective treatments? We’ve actually come a long way in effective medical interventions for COVID; making those more readily available (though OTC isn’t the right route, even there) makes sense.
> But no, we get ignore all the proof and hide in your homes until everyone can be vaccinated.
Almost nowhere has a policy that could even hyperbolicly be described by any sane person as “hide in your homes”, most places are gradually (some radically, even recklessly) reopening (and many adopting the first part of your first recommendation.) Even the many of the most restrictive places have generally reopened or are on short timetable to, despite retaining mask mandates and distancing/capacity restrictions for many activities.
Oh, like Brazil does?! It's working so well over there, is it not.
If you don't have malaria, lupus, lice, worms or similar, those medications do NOTHING. It's a virus.
Vitamin D is effective if you are deficient. If you have normal levels that too does NOTHING.
Indeed it is a virus, and they are used for Malaria. If using the combination of Hydroxychloroquine, Zinc and Azythromicin early in disease progression actually works then... who cares? I mean really. It could work on placebo for all I care. People are dying, you think they will refuse a proven treatment that happens to be a anti-malarial versus an anti-viral?
Regarding people being deficient in Vitamin D, that's uh... literally everyone. I think the only people with normal levels are native tribes that still live outdoors. Check out any study of vitamin D in chronically ill people and see how many have normal levels. These are the same people most susceptible to dying from COVID. Isn't being Vitamin D deficient the most indicative metric of COVID morbidity?
> Isn't being Vitamin D deficient the most indicative metric of COVID morbidity
It is one metric. Depends on how deficient you are too.
We KNOW containment measures work (Ebola, SARS).
If you expose more people to a virus, you risk making the pandemic much worse. Or deadly. Viruses mutate. Every new person exposed is a potential laboratory.
Of course containment measures work -- for keeping 80 year olds (and few other people) alive for a little bit longer at the expense of everyone else.
It's a tremendous breakthrough, I'd say. But rather than focus on the tech, I'd rather see a rethinking of our governmental approach to issues concerning public health and how approval processes are set up. I'd rather focus on how we incentivize breakthroughs on issues that are most important, rather than developing another medicine that's 1% better at treating acne, for example. And I'd rather see cultural changes around adopting already existing technologies -- less than half of folks take flu shots!
I'd argue that getting flu shot numbers way up would be more of a breakthrough than any benefits from mRNA, as incredible as it is. Not that we have to choose one or the other. I'm just saying I'd like these other issues to get more prominence.
On the flip-side, while COVID can cause serious illness (and death), with a survival rate north of 99%, there's virtually no risk of societal collapse if we do nothing (OTOH, our response to it has been far more de-stabilizing).
It's also why I'm incensed that vaccine production is ramping up both too slowly, and will top out at too low a number. It can't take six months to vaccinate the first world, and eighteen to vaccinate the developing world against a variant.
If anyone think that’s impossible, such a phenomenon is happening right now in Africa with Polio. Wild Polio is declared to be eradicated. A vaccine derived strain is keeping the outbreak alive.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/25/9058847...
I get that sentiment. There's a question of alignment of incentives.
Covid19 vaccinations are likely to be a thing for many years to come, and there are a number of entities that will be able to produce those future vaccinations. If one of the big vaccine providers produces something that's demonstrably less safe than the others, then the odds of them getting more money for future vaccines goes down.
It's far from a perfect system, and there are a lot of holes, but in this case, things line up pretty well.
In short, you can be confident that these companies are primarily focused on long-term profit, which often aligns with good short and long term outcomes for its customers.
Collectivist ideals like "vaccinate everyone for the greater good!" does not trump my personal sovereignty and never will. I do not consent.
Oh, I'm with you on this, but I think it's only a matter of time before things get very uncomfortable.
Well put
In fact, instead of taking that vaccine shouldn't you give it to a school teacher or hospital worker in a country that doesn't yet have the vaccine?
This 'moral obligation' nonsense sounds good at face value but really doesn't hold up in practice.
Is there residual risk that there were will be some unintended side-effect when billions of doses are administered? Yes, of course. There is no way to prove a vaccine is safe for everyone in all conditions, (see: Popper's falsification and the demarcation problem). Same goes for any other pharma formulation, food stuff or procedure. However, we have to weigh the residual risks against the risk of death from Covid and its variants and risk of long term damage to me or those around me who might be unwittingly in a higher risk category.
Vaccination is a moral obligation and even if I would rather not, decency and civic duty to our fellow humans dictates that I must. And so should you.