Comment by ekianjo

4 hours ago

> seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease

not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.

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ekianjo

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majormajor  3 hours ago

> not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.

And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first.

For instance, here is the enrollment page for a double-blind study from 2020 for those between 18-55: https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-st...

This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)"

If you look at case rates, hospitalization load, and death rates for summer/fall/winter 2020 pre-vaccine, and compare to the load on the system in summer-2021 and later when people were far more social and active, the economy was starting to recover, then the efficacy of the vaccine was pretty obvious in letting people get out of lockdown without killing hugely more people and overwhelming the healthcare system. And it was tested pre-rollout in double-blind fashion and rolled out in a phased way to the most needy groups first, with monitoring and study of those groups.

What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?

  • dionian  3 hours ago

    we could let people choose whether to participate, with informed consent. instead of getting them fired for not participating in the experiment.

    • raddan  2 hours ago

      Did you even follow the link provided? It leads directly to an informed consent page for the study, which was voluntary. You're probably thinking about what happened _after_ these studies found the vaccine to be safe and effective. If you're a doctor or a nurse, you work in a special environment, and if you are turning down a safe and effective vaccine, you are putting your patients at risk. It means that you are unqualified for your job, so yes, you should be fired.

      In the US at least, most people are employed "at will" [1], which means that you can be fired for reasons far less egregious than actually putting your patients at risk. Most of the libertarian types here cheer firings for lots of reasons, but for some reason being fired for actually being a health risk is not one of those things. That just makes no sense.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment