We require young people to get vaccinated as a rule in order to obtain education. Every medical intervention involves risks. So does taking a shower or taking the bus to school. We all have to take risks and some of them are mandated for the good of society.
There were very good indications that the vaccine would prevent spread.
Public policy decisions which cost lives are not unusual and although tragic, are often necessary. For instance should we use the entire yearly budget of a hospital to cure one child, or let that child die in order to fund daily operations? These questions have no 'right' answer and no matter what was decided there is going to be criticism and errors which result in less than optimal or even tragic outcomes.
Looking back in hindsight and using the knowledge we now have, I would say that the biggest errors made during the pandemic by public policymakers (besides disbanding the pandemic team and having a leader who was looking at everything in the lens of a what was personally good for him at that moment) was in messaging.
If we can use this to craft a better way to handle public messaging in the future then perhaps we can avoid a lot of the negative societal effects which we are now dealing with -- specifically lack of trust in scientific institutions, division based on ideology and not evidence, and the spread and enabling of conspiratorial thinking.
We generally don't allow parents to force risky irreversible things onto their children. But also, the view of all citizens as simple children of the State seems...problematic.
Conscription is a good example of a social burden unfairly dispersed and widely objected to — at least in the West. My point is the underpinning of this “one more mandatory intervention is no big deal” view is not based on reality. The State stopped forcing irreversible interventions on adults when eugenics went out of (polite) fashion. The belief compulsory acts are normal and good policy is based on something like a public health bureaucracy fantasy version of economics’ perfectly rational actor models.
You make a very good point, but like in times of invasion where conscription is something I would argue is necessary, in times of other emergency then there is the possibility we must give up some independence of our person and perform compulsory acts. This may not be as obvious as getting a needle jabbed into your arm, but rationing water and food, joining in labor to clear wreckage/debris or rebuild, or taking arms in defense during invasion are all examples of similar situations.
I recognize that it is ill-advised to normalize forced medical intervention and I thank you for pointing out that my initial comment appears to be doing that, and I shall make a point to reflect on this, but I do maintain that during times of crisis the state/society should have the right to compel individuals in ways that are otherwise not acceptable.
The problem with that line of thinking, to me, is we have state apparatuses fully and ever-increasingly capable of manufacturing crises to compel individuals in ways that would otherwise not be acceptable. On top of that, I see a qualitative difference between a compulsion of labor or rations impeding bodily autonomy in a superficial sense, and the compulsion of injections (or lobotomies, or sterilization) which seems to strike a deeper and more serious infringement on bodily integrity. Given those factors, I think it's very crucial that societal decisionmakers err towards preserving individual independence and are not misleadingly guided towards other ends.
I see where you are coming from, but I would caution against such comparisons to lobotomies and eugenics. Those interventions were not in response to a large-scale crisis but were novel methods of solving problems for which there had been no previous solution.
I think my comparisons are more apt because they involve sacrifice and risk, but not incontrovertible harm. People getting the vaccine were mitigating a personal risk which at that time happened to be in line with what was believed to be a societal need (herd immunity) -- a minute chance of an adverse effect, compared to the yet-unknown effects of covid itself was deemed to be acceptable.
Was it a poor decision? Looking back on it, yes. If placed in the same position of a society-disrupting and mass-death causing pandemic with a new vaccine which has all the signs of being able to fast-track herd immunity and save millions of lives, would I be fine with mandatory vaccinations? Probably. Should we be incredibly careful when it comes to doing things like that and putting in place the mechanisms for similar actions? Absolutely.
I do not have children so I have no stake in the matter and I do not feel that Id am sufficiently informed about the particulars at this point to have an opinion.
I happened to stumble across this [0], on the effectiveness of a third covid vaccination for 18-29 year olds, while looking for recent (omicron) studies quantifying how well vaccines keep people out of hospitals, and thought I'd pass it along:
> To prevent one COVID-19 hospitalisation over a 6-month period, we estimate that 31207–42836 young adults aged 18–29 years must receive a third mRNA vaccine. Booster mandates in young adults are expected to cause a net harm: per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation). We also anticipate 1430–4626 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity interfering with daily activities (although typically not requiring hospitalisation). University booster mandates are unethical because they: (1) are not based on an updated (Omicron era) stratified risk-benefit assessment for this age group; (2) may result in a net harm to healthy young adults; (3) are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission; (4) violate the reciprocity principle because serious vaccine-related harms are not reliably compensated due to gaps in vaccine injury schemes; and (5) may result in wider social harms. We consider counterarguments including efforts to increase safety on campus but find these are fraught with limitations and little scientific support.
As an fyi, I also bumped into stats saying that it was something like 5-6 times less likely for vaccinated people to end up in the hospital (although most people who end up in the hospital are elderly), and vaccinations seem to confer only 15% benefit against long covid. I was hoping to find something breaking hopsitalization down by age and comorbidities in addition to vaccination status, but have had no luck so far.
Could you please not fulminate and call names in HN comments? You can make your substantive points without any of that, and it would be in your interest, because comments like this only discredit your viewpoint.
I realize how frustrating it is to hold a minority/contrarian view, but why hand people flaming reasons to dismiss you? All it does is weaken your own position, and you're poisoning the ecosystem by doing it. You can weaken your position if you want to, but it's not ok to poison the ecosystem.
There were very good indications that the vaccine would prevent spread.
Public policy decisions which cost lives are not unusual and although tragic, are often necessary. For instance should we use the entire yearly budget of a hospital to cure one child, or let that child die in order to fund daily operations? These questions have no 'right' answer and no matter what was decided there is going to be criticism and errors which result in less than optimal or even tragic outcomes.
Looking back in hindsight and using the knowledge we now have, I would say that the biggest errors made during the pandemic by public policymakers (besides disbanding the pandemic team and having a leader who was looking at everything in the lens of a what was personally good for him at that moment) was in messaging.
If we can use this to craft a better way to handle public messaging in the future then perhaps we can avoid a lot of the negative societal effects which we are now dealing with -- specifically lack of trust in scientific institutions, division based on ideology and not evidence, and the spread and enabling of conspiratorial thinking.